Ask MAPS FAQ

MAPS is not currently conducting trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Several trials are being conducted by other research bodies, and some of those are being supported through MAPS’ research initiatives.

If you are seeking trials that investigate MDMA- or psychedelic-assisted therapy, please visit:

• Clinicaltrials.gov, which lists nearly all clinical trials in the U.S. and 200 countries
• Psychedelic.Support’s article “How to Join a Psychedelic Clinical Trial” for more information. 

Additionally, here is some information on emerging research on treatments for PTSD from 

• The National Institute of Mental Health, 
• Mayo Clinic, and 
• The U.S. Veterans Affairs (VA) 

Absolutely not. There is no known cure for PTSD and no reported clinical study has shown 89% of participants no longer having a PTSD diagnosis after MDMA-assisted therapy.

In MAPP1, 88% of participants had a “clinically significant reduction in symptom severity” as defined in our statistical analysis plan as a 10 point drop in CAPS which was reported in publications and media. We also report the 67% loss of diagnosis in MAPP1 in publications and media.

No, MAPS is focused on conducting clinical trials for MDMA-assisted therapy. To seek out volunteer opportunities for psilocybin research, please visit ClinicalTrials.gov.  

If you want to educate yourself about psilocybin research, please scroll down to the psilocybin tab below.

Please visit lykospbc.com/education/ to learn more about US-based therapist education. For information about MAPS’ Global Therapist Education program, click here.

Thank you for your interest in employment at MAPS!  Please visit our Careers page to review any open positions at MAPS or Lykos Therapeutics respectively.

After you read the full job description, any follow-up questions can be directed to jobs@maps.org or jobs@mapsbcorp.com respectively.

If you’d like to get involved in other ways, MAPS and Zendo Project offer volunteer opportunities for events, webinars, psychedelic harm reduction, and more. Please fill out the volunteer application form for more information on how to get engaged with the MAPS community. 

You can view current internship opportunities at MAPS, as well as the current research-related positions at MAPS Public Benefit Corporation (MAPS PBC).

Please check back regularly for new postings, and sign up for the Email Newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for announcements about new positions.

Thank you for your interest!

To submit a media request, please review maps.org/newsroom and complete this quick form. If you are on a tight deadline, please submit the form then call 831-429-MDMA (6362) x 303; your message will be addressed as quickly as possible M-F 8am-6pm Pacific. 

Please understand that we receive a large number of media requests and are simply not able to accommodate all of them. We will, however, do our best to provide a response to every inquiry as soon as we can. If you are able to include your questions in the form, it is more likely that we can respond.  

The first step to inviting MAPS’ presence at your event is by filling out maps.org/eventform. Once you submit the form, someone from our events team will get in contact with you directly.

Please note: Promotional requests require no less than 2 weeks notice. All other requests require more time to arrange and should be submitted with at least 4 weeks notice.

Please submit your request for promotional support at maps.org/request.

Please note: MAPS appreciates the opportunity to learn more about our community and their projects, though we are unable to respond to all requests due to the high volume of inquiries, which occasionally contain content that does not align with our mission or propose expedited timelines that affect our ability to sustainably address our organization’s current priorities. 

Recurring donors may modify their recurring gift by through the payment processor portal.

We appreciate your interest in being included on the Psychedelic Integration List.

Maintenance of the Psychedelic Integration List is on hiatus due to shifting priorities. All received applications are still pending until further notice.

In the meantime, we recommend Psychedelic.Support as an alternative platform to promote your integration services further.

We’d like to direct you to Psychedelic Support to seek psychedelic integration services.

Psychedelic Support curates evidence-based educational courses on psychedelic science and a directory of licensed mental health providers. Their network of therapists, counselors, holistic doctors, MDs, and integration consultants offer online and in-person services for transformational preparation, psychedelic/plant medicine integration, psychological and physical health, and personal growth. Please note that these licensed professionals do not directly provide psychedelic therapy.

MAPS has taken a novel and multi-pronged approach to its mission of developing and supporting medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.

Medicalization describes the lengthy process of studying currently-illegal substances to determine if they hold benefit for specific conditions, then conducting clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy, then finally submitting a New Drug Application to the FDA. This is MAPS’ primary approach, but not its only one. 

Legalization affirmatively permits and regulates certain actions in a jurisdiction. Criminal sanctions may or may not be maintained by a legalizing jurisdiction for certain actions; other actions may be regulated or require licensing. Medicalization, over-the-counter oversight, state medical use, and state adult use are just some examples of legalization frameworks used for substances commonly ingested by people. 

Decriminalization removes some or all criminal penalties for an activity from the law of the jurisdiction. It is often used to describe situations in which some governments still decide to implement civil penalties (which would not be considered full decrim) or mandatory education/treatment as alternative (which then technically still is not full decrim because while helpful for very few, still punishment for most). 

 It may still allow for penalties such as fines, mandatory education, or (in the worst cases) forced treatment. Remember, a single jurisdiction is probably subject to multiple layers of law which may be quite different from one another (i.e. a U.S. city is governed by city, county, state and federal controlled substances laws).

Lowest Law Enforcement Priority policies maintain most prohibition laws but declare that law enforcement must deprioritize the enforcement of those laws. These policies are useful in U.S. cities where state or Federal law controls city law, and most of the city-wide psychedelic decriminalization measures adopted since 2019 fall into this category.

MAPS sponsors and guides the conduct of research, including clinical trials to develop psychedelics and marijuana into regulatorily approved medicines. MAPS has also supported holistic drug policy reform since its inception in 1986. As the pace of both psychedelic research and reform efforts in areas of social justice, criminalization, drug policy, and psychedelic regulation hasten, we recommend reading our 2019 Statement: Considerations for the Regulation and Decriminalization of Psychedelic Substances for more on these topics.

Although MAPS is a public charity with limited ability to engage in political action, MAPS has worked toward ending the War on Drugs since our founding in 1986 including through supporting decriminalization of the personal possession and use of drugs. We work with fellow advocates to educate lawmakers, community members, and the public about sensible approaches to drug policy. We have responded to inquiries from legislators and advocates about a dozen bills across the United States; most recently, we have advised on California’s Senate Bill 519, the broadest psychedelic drug policy reform a state legislature has ever seriously considered.

MAPS-sponsored clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD is just one legalization approach for a single criminalized substance with an identifiable history of human use. As a general policy, MAPS is supportive of compassion over criminalization for people who use drugs, psychedelic or otherwise. Specific policy proposals are evaluated in context to determine our ability to support them. MAPS’ capacity for supporting implementation is greater than its capacity for supporting campaigns, both because of its status as a public charity as well as the small size of our team. For this reason, we focus on building coalition and resources with community organizations to make tangible policy changes in high-impact jurisdictions.

In short, threshold limits are a complicated and nuanced policy area and are more or less useful depending on how the law is written, the context in which laws are being enforced, and every individual drug user’s circumstances. For that reason, MAPS believes decriminalization without threshold limits is a good starting place and the next best option is a set of threshold limits that will provide decriminalization for the vast majority of people.

The downside of threshold limits is that they can lead to arrests for people possessing above the permissible amount of a drug. However, not having limits does not mean that people can possess unlimited amounts. Without specified limits, there is an unknown line (an implicit threshold limit) above which law enforcement, prosecutors, and/or courts could determine that the behavior was no longer “personal use and possession” and instead prosecute said possession as distribution, intent to distribute, or manufacturing. Without limits, people who grow, use, and share these substances would be left guessing about how law enforcement might classify them rather than having those numbers clarified in the law.

MAPS was founded in 1986 a non-profit organization governed by its board of directors, bylaws, mission, and principles. MAPS is qualified as exempt from federal income tax as a public charity under Sections 501(c)(3) and 501(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code. Since our founding, MAPS donors have given more than $110 million in support of psychedelic research, medical marijuana research, education, and advocacy. MAPS has earned the Guidestar Platinum Seal of Transparency.

Founded in 2014, MAPS Public Benefit Corporation (MAPS PBC) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of MAPS. MAPS PBC catalyzes healing and well-being through psychedelic drug development, therapist training programs, and sales of prescription psychedelics while prioritizing public benefit above profit. MAPS PBC does not have private investors, so any proceeds from this work will be reinvested in research, education, advocacy, and therapy access for historically marginalized people.

MAPS’ resources: 

• Psilocybin Investigator’s Brochures from MAPS (2007)
• MAPS Podcast: Episode 2 – Psilocybin, Addiction, and End of Life – Stephen Ross, M.D. (2017)
• “MAPS Podcast: Episode 17 – Brain Imaging with Psilocybin and MDMA – Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris” (2017)
• “Usona Institute: The Path Toward Psilocybin and Depression Clinical Trials” by Penny Paterson (MAPS Bulletin Spring 2019: Vol. 29, No. 1)
• Psilocybin articles in the MAPS Bulletin  
• Psychedelic Bibliography  
• Videos about psilocybin (YouTube)

Additional resources: 

• Pubmed search results on “psilocybin”
  • Once you click on a paper you are interested in, you can click on the link labeled “DOI” to be directed to the original publication, which is likely to include further links to news stories about the paper.
• Clinicaltrials.gov
  • Search for opportunities to be a participant in psilocybin research
• Usona Institute
  • Investigator’s Brochure (Usona Institute, 2020) 
•  Heffter Research Institute
• John Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research
  • “Psychedelic Treatment with Psilocybin Relieves Major Depression, Study Shows” (Johns Hopkins Medicine Media, 2020).
•  The Imperial College of London 
•  Erowid hosts information on just about every substance.  

MAPS’ resources:

• Ibogaine Therapy Research
  • MAPS has completed two observational studies of the long-term effects of ibogaine treatment on patients undergoing therapy at independent ibogaine treatment centers in Mexico and New Zealand. Data from these studies contribute to the growing scientific literature about ibogaine as a treatment for drug addiction.
• “Expanding Ancestral Knowledge Beyond the Sale of Molecules: Iboga and Ibogaine in the Context of Psychedelic Commercialization” by Ricard Faura, Ph.D., Andrea Langlois, and José Carlos Bouso, Ph.D. (MAPS Bulletin Spring 2020 Vol. 30, No. 1)
• “A Window of Opportunity: Reflections on Ibogaine Treatment for Opiate Addiction” by Thomas Kingsley Brown, Ph.D (MAPS Bulletin Winter 2015 Vol. 25, No. 3)
• “A New Perspective: My Experience with Ibogaine Treatment” by Kevin Franciotti (MAPS Bulletin Winter 2015 Vol. 25, No. 3)
• Rick Doblin, Ph.D. Shares his Ibogaine Experience (Wardyworks, YouTube, 2012).
• Psychedelic Bibliography
• MAPS search results for “ibogaine”

Additional resources:

• Pubmed search results on “Ibogaine”
  • Once you click on a paper you are interested in, you can click on the link labeled “DOI” to be directed to the original publication, which is likely to include further links to news stories about the paper.
• The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines
  • “We provide public education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines and promote a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science.”
• The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS)
  • “ICEERS is dedicated to transforming society’s relationship with psychoactive plants. We do so by engaging with some of the fundamental issues resulting from the globalization of ayahuasca, iboga, and other ethnobotanicals”

MAPS’ resources:

• LSD Research
• LSD-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Related to LIfe-Threatening Illness
• “LSD Neuroscience — David E. Nichols, Ph.D.” (Psychedelic Science 2013, YouTube)
• Psychedelic Bibliography
• MAPS search results for “LSD”

In the store:

• LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science by Albert Hofmann, Ph.D.
• Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD by Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller
• LSD Psychotherapy by Stanislav Grof, M.D.
• The Way of the Psychonaut: Two-Volume Set by Stanislav Grof, M.D.
• Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus by Erika Dyck, Ph.D.

Additional resources:

• Pubmed search results on “LSD-assisted therapy”
  • Once you click on a paper you are interested in, you can click on the link labeled “DOI” to be directed to the original publication, which is likely to include further links to news stories about the paper.
• Clinicaltrials.gov
  • Search for opportunities to be a participant in LSD research
• Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research
• The Beckley Foundation
• Heffter Research Institute
• Erowid holds a plethora of research-based information on just about every substance

MAPS’ resources:

• Ayahuasca Research
• “Classifying Ayahuasca: Experiences in Psychiatric Research with Psychedelics – Brian Anderson” (YouTube, Psychedelic Science 2013)
• Playlist — Psychedelic Science 2017: Plant Medicine Track (YouTube)
• Psychedelic Bibliography
• MAPS search results for “ayahuasca”

In the store:

• Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography & Critical Essays by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Isabel Santana de Rose, and Rafael Guimarães dos Santos (translated by Matthew Meyer)
• The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies editedby Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Alex K. Gearin
• Ayahuasca Reader edited by Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White
• The Fellowship of the River: A Medical Doctor’s Exploration into Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine by Joe Tafur, M.D.

Additional resources:

• Pubmed search results on “ayahuasca”
  • Once you click on a paper you are interested in, you can click on the link labeled “DOI” to be directed to the original publication, which is likely to include further links to news stories about the paper.
• Clinicaltrials.gov
  • Search for opportunities to be a participant in ayahuasca research
• The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines
• The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS)
• Erowid holds a plethora of research-based information on just about every substance