While obtaining a patent on the drug itself might be tricky—Merck had patented MDMA over a hundred years ago in 1912 after it found it to be a potentially useful intermediary in the production of a styptic product—Doblin pointed out that “it might be possible to receive use patents for MDMA”, citing the example of “a New York physician”, who had received a use patent for ibogaine that same year. (Doblin was referring to Howard Lotsof, who sought to develop ibogaine for addictions after finding its utility in managing his own heroin addiction.)
Almost prophetically, given today’s entactogen drug discovery activity, Doblin also highlighted that “there are several new compounds that could be patented that deserve experimentation”, explaining that Orphan Pharmaceuticals, if formed, would “explore various possible chemical modifications of the basic MDMA molecule, and to seek to determine which substance to put through the lengthy testing process.” In fact, this would be the first line item on the prospective company’s research agenda, he said.
That ibogaine IP, however, turned out to be a warning signal for Doblin. Lotsof had filed for patents covering the use of ibogaine in the treatment of substance use disorders via his newly-formed company, NDA International. Shortly thereafter, however, the nascent ibogaine drug development scene was apparently thwarted by litigation between various parties.
Worried by these developments, Doblin engaged Lotsof’s patent attorneys to review the MDMA IP landscape, scoping out whether MDMA use patents existed. “I decided to hire a patent attorney to try and insure [sic] that MDMA’s potential medical use would not be bottled up by anyone else’s use patent”, he recalled in a Winter 1992-93 issue of the MAPS Newsletter, adding that “[i]t could be a major setback if MAPS funded MDMA research and secured approval for its medical use only to have someone else control it through an inexpensively obtained use patent”. (Lykos’ patent certainly wouldn’t be inexpensively obtained, it’s worth noting!)
This was the crux of the organisation’s ‘anti-patent strategy’, under Doblin, which saw large swathes of protocols, data, and methodologies deposited into the public domain—a practice unthinkable to mainstream pharma companies—and reliance on non-patent forms of exclusivity to recoup the costs of bringing a drug to market.
While Doblin had anticipated contemporary debates and dynamics around psychedelic patents, and was cognisant of the potentially deleterious effects that IP disputes had had on ibogaine’s early drug development push, he could not have anticipated the quantity and character of patent-related activity that has unfolded in the past half-decade.
Indeed, writing in an op-ed for Psychedelic Alpha in January 2023 he said precisely that: “At the time of the creation of MAPS PBC, I did not anticipate the rise of hundreds of for-profit psychedelic pharmaceutical companies that would follow our research playbook.”
“They also follow the traditional pharma playbook,” he continued, “patenting everything from novel methods of manufacturing psychedelic drug products, to new molecules that may or may not offer advantages over the psychedelics already in the public domain.”
In hindsight, might Doblin have been implicitly painting Lykos as one of those companies following the ‘traditional pharma playbook’, given the present patent was filed just a month prior?