Summary: Narratively profiles MAPS Founder Rick Doblin, Ph.D., and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study participant Rachel Hope, highlighting how MDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy shows potential in the treatment of PTSD. “It took 50 years to mature to the point where we can look at these things directly and see these aren’t tools of social destruction,” explains Doblin. “We have an opportunity now that we haven’t had in 50 years: to integrate psychedelics into our culture. We desperately need it.” “I was cured of post-traumatic stress in three eight-hour MDMA sessions,” explains Hope. “It was literally like being born again.”
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Rachel Hope’s PTSD almost killed her.
After multiple severe traumas – including an abusive childhood, abduction by a pedophile, and getting hit by a truck – Hope’s early adulthood was, perhaps unsurprisingly, plagued with night terrors and panic attacks. She was in denial that anything was wrong, determined to not let her trauma define her. This worked for a while; she managed to run a successful real estate development company and start a family.
But without treatment she just got worse. She developed bleeding ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, paranoia, and a hyper-sensitive startle reflex that kept her jumping and screaming at the slightest provocation, making it impossible to sleep. Her hair started falling out, and she couldn’t keep food down. She was in and out of hospitals, completely emaciated, bleeding from infected sores all over her body that she would compulsively pick at.
“I was dying,” she says. And there was little hope she’d ever get better. Hope remembers her therapist telling her: “You have serious PTSD. It’s not treatable. You can mask the symptoms with drugs, but this is something we don’t know how to treat.”
She went on a pharmacy’s worth of drugs: Klonopin to help her sleep, Xanax to take the edge off the panic attacks, creams to heal her scabs, a pill for the ulcers, another pill for the nausea. Each medication treated a different symptom, but none addressed the cause. She says she was just biding her time, trying to raise her son to an age when he would be O.K. if she died. “Then I would let go.” When she thought about suicide, it wasn’t out of self-hatred, but a desire for a “mercy killing.”
She hired an assistant to carry out her daily tasks, because she couldn’t manage on her own – couldn’t leave the house at all. Her assistant intervened, saying he would only continue if she tried to get some help – real help, beyond the medication that was just barely keeping her alive. He dropped off a big stack of clinical trial protocols, and told her to pick one and apply.
One stood out: Phase II of a trial being conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to test the efficacy of MDMA (commonly known as the street drug Ecstasy) to treat PTSD.
She was skeptical at first, as someone who never self-medicated with recreational drugs. “I have a hard time keeping aware of what is reality in itself,” she says. “I don’t want to fuck with my consciousness. So I was a teetotaler.”
But she also had nothing left to lose. She figured that she was going to die anyway, and by participating in the trial, at the very least she might be a helpful guinea pig. She fit every one of the study’s many strict parameters (at least 18 years old with no dual diagnosis – meaning no additional psychiatric issues besides PTSD – and no history of self-medicating or drug abuse).
“I was pretty much the perfect person to determine whether it was safe to study real people,” she says with a wry laugh. “Phase II was the rat phase – I was the lab rat.”
She was accepted into the study in 2005, and went in for her first treatment: one dose of MDMA and an eight-hour session with two therapists.
A video of one of her sessions shows Hope dressed in a pink sweatshirt, reclining against several pillows, with a blanket over her. She speaks in a breathy voice to the therapist, explaining that her fears are finally out in the open, saying, “Oh, thank you so much” with tears in her eyes.
“In the middle I said ‘I have no idea why anyone would call this Ecstasy or do this as a party-drug. This is fucking hard,’” she remembers. “Because it expands your awareness. With MDMA in a psychotherapy session I felt safe enough to address those things I’d been hiding for so long, and also fucking shocked to hear my voice say what actually went on. I was also scared that I was gonna come out of that session a raw-hamburger-meat, deconstructed person, but that was not what happened.”
The MDMA allowed her to access the memories that were plaguing her, without them overwhelming her. She could see her trauma clearly for the first time, and could articulate everything that had happened to her – something she had never done before. Once she was able to talk through all of her traumas with the help of MDMA and a therapist, suddenly they didn’t have so much power over her.
After just that first session, she says, her symptoms were reduced by 80 percent. The bleeding ulcers healed, the IBS went away, she stopped picking at her skin, and was even able to sleep through the night. The panic attacks stopped and didn’t come back. She had a second session two months later, then a third after a couple of years, and now says she’s completely cured.
“Yes, I had post-traumatic stress, yes I have my memories; they are not going away,” she asserts. “Do I have a disorder? No. Does it hijack my life and make my life impossible to live in a normal way? No. Does it hold me back? No.
“It was literally like being born again.”
The only thing left, she says, that still feels like one of her old symptoms, is anger. But her anger is focused now, directed at pharmaceutical companies and government regulators – anger that this treatment exists but is not widely available.
An estimated 7.8 percent of Americans suffer from PTSD, with approximately 5.2 million people experiencing symptoms during the course of a given year. As Hope’s therapist warned her when she was diagnosed, the treatments currently on the market merely mask symptoms of PTSD, if that. Nothing treated the root cause – until she joined the MAPS study.
“I was cured of post-traumatic stress in three eight-hour MDMA sessions,” she says, as if she still can’t quite believe it herself.
One man has been fighting for 45 years to make this cure available to everyone.
* * *
The clinical trial that saved Rachel Hope’s life was the result of a half-century of work by Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS. Since he was 18, Doblin has hoped to open a psychedelic clinic, and estimates it’ll still take about another decade before he gets there.
“Maybe by the time I’m 70 I’ll be able to start my career,” he jokes.
Doblin works out of a home office in the attic of his house in the suburbs of Boston. The slanted ceiling is painted sky blue, with fluffy clouds; a window across from his desk looks out onto the real sky and treetops. The desk is piled high with stacks of books, paperwork for the FDA trial, research articles – and a green plastic bong. Doblin has a bald spot and unruly, curly gray hair on the sides of his head, framing a face with the knowing smile of someone who has done a lot of psychedelics, and kept their wits. Barefoot, he sits at his desk to tell the story of his life’s work, periodically jumping up to find some relevant documents – a book that influenced
his early research, his framed PhD from Harvard, which is leaning against a wall near the floor.
It all started, he explains, with his deeply held objections to the Vietnam War, and the questions that it raised about what he calls “the psychological underpinnings of how people could demonize and dehumanize.” In 1972, Doblin was in the last round of the lottery for the draft, and he decided to be a resister by never signing up. He was prepared to go to jail for his beliefs, despite his father’s warnings that he would never be able to become a doctor or a lawyer with a criminal record. But the police never came, he got away with not going to war, and went instead to the New College of Florida, a liberal arts college that had an unofficial tradition of all-night parties with psychedelics at an Olympic-sized swimming pool where everyone – students and faculty included – was naked.
Growing up, Doblin believed the propaganda of the era around psychedelics: they would make you go crazy forever, or that you’d die jumping off a roof because the drugs made you believe you could fly. But he says, in the environment of the hippie-college nudist pool parties, he decided to give it a try. And it changed his life.
“My LSD trips were very difficult,” he says. He was experimenting not just for fun, but with focused intent to do the deep internal work to make himself a “sharper instrument” for the kind of change he wanted to see in the world. He manufactured sensory-deprivation settings for his trips, like lying in a dark room with gloves on, or floating in a bathtub, to try to get further into his subconscious mind.
“The LSD brought a sense of the power of emotions, but it was a challenge, because I wasn’t good with emotions; I was insecure and shy,” he says. He tripped several times, but always reached a point where he couldn’t delve any deeper, where a part of him was holding back.
He says this made him feel like a failure. During one trip he started to believe these mental blocks were causing his brain to overheat and melt. (He thought the post-nasal drip he experienced was bits of melted brain.) Eventually, he went to the school counselor for guidance navigating his trips – because that’s the kind of place the New College of Florida was – and the counselor presented him with an unpublished manuscript copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof, still one of the seminal texts on LSD research. After reading Grof’s work, and experimenting with LSD and mescaline even more, Doblin came to the conclusion that psychedelics addressed all of the issues that preoccupied him as a draft resister. He’d been circling the idea for a few years now that human beings were emotionally and spiritually lagging behind while making rapid advances in technology. We’d invented the atom bomb, and were paranoid enough to use it. He believed that humanity was on a dangerous trajectory of self-destruction, guided by our tendency to think of others as the enemy, rather than thinking of ourselves as one big unit.
But he believed LSD could fix all of that. He compares the mental shift that takes place on LSD to the cultural shift precipitated by Galileo. “It used to be the Earth was the center of the universe,” he explains, just like each of us sees our own ego, our own self, as the center of our world. “Then we learned no, the Earth revolves around the sun. The Earth is not the center, and neither is any of us.”
“If you can help people go beyond the limited ways we identify ourselves – this religion, this gender, this nationality, this race,” Doblin says, “you’ll see we’re all in it together.”
He believed psychedelics offered a path toward more communal understanding and compassion, a way to stop people from demonizing each other and getting caught up in their own competitive egos – on personal and geopolitical levels. Doblin decided that LSD had the potential, basically, to cure the world’s deepest ills.
Convinced that he’d stumbled on a way to save humanity from itself, Doblin dropped out of school with the goal of dedicating his life to organizing the psychedelic community, to try to protect people’s access to what he believed were life-saving, crucial tools for personal development. “I dropped out in order to build myself up emotionally, to reach a certain kind of balance between emotions, spirituality, and intellectual development,” he says. “And get grounded and ready to figure out how to do this.”
His conviction was reinforced over and over by his own acid trips – one where he thought an atom bomb had been dropped a few miles from his house, and he was able to experience the elation of accepting the end of the world – and prophetic dreams, like one where he was brought back in time by an A Christmas-Carol-esque apparition that told him he had survived World War II so that Doblin could discover psychedelics and become a psychedelic therapist.
But there was one problem: psychedelics were associated with the counterculture of the ’60s, recently criminalized, and thoroughly demonized.
Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman recently made waves by admitting in an interview with Harper’s that what we know today as the War on Drugs began for political reasons. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” he said. “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Doblin has this quote memorized, and says it only confirmed what he and his colleagues have known for decades: drugs were not the enemy of the people, but of the powers that be.
* * *
Before the war on drugs, psychedelics were one of the hottest topics in psychological research. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1943. A few years later, the first experimental psychiatric use for LSD was to mimic psychosis, allowing doctors to explore the possibility of biochemical causes for psychosis and schizophrenia. It was then famously used in the 1953 CIA-backed experiment known as MK-ULTRA, tested as a possible “truth serum” that could potentially get captured enemy combatants to spill strategic secrets. The field took a sharp left turn after some dubious studies that included dosing people with LSD without their knowledge. This led to serious emotional trauma, and the suicide of an Army biochemist.
In the mid-50s, psychedelic research turned to therapeutic uses, with two paradigms emerging. The first was psycholytic therapy, in which patients were given low doses of LSD, often in tandem with psychoanalysis, over several therapy sessions, with the goal of making them more receptive to therapy in order to overcome neurosis and adjust their outlooks. The second, psychedelic therapy, was the predecessor to the MDMA-assisted therapy MAPS is currently conducting. Patients were given one large dose of LSD with the goal of one “overwhelming” experience creating rapid change in the psyche. Doblin expresses anger and sadness that this research was halted after being so far along so long ago – that we could be benefitting from generations of psychedelic therapy by now.
By the early ’60s, LSD had become more widespread, with unqualified therapists setting up unlicensed psychedelic practices, and then the recreational p
opularization that came with characters like Timothy Leary.
Then the backlash came, and with the introduction of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 that made LSD illegal, the research dried up, in the mainstream at least. In the ’70s and ’80s there was a network of therapists who risked their licenses by incorporating the recently developed MDMA – a synthetic cousin of LSD and psilocybin – into their practices.
Doblin describes the difference between LSD and MDMA like this: “It’s like you’re looking through a dirty window of your ego: MDMA is like cleaning the window. LSD is like breaking the window. And we need both of those. MDMA doesn’t dissolve the ego because you’re still grounded in your biography and sense of who you are, but it relaxes your insecurities and fears so then you can see through to the bigger picture.”
Doblin estimates roughly half a million doses of MDMA were distributed through these underground therapeutic channels, without the DEA catching on and regulating the drug, “because you do these drugs at home and they don’t cause people to panic and run to the emergency room.” During that time, MDMA was still technically legal, though not approved for therapy.
In addition to the licensed therapists who surreptitiously folded MDMA into their practices, unlicensed novices experimented with MDMA-assisted therapy in less official capacities. Doblin was one of these novices, practicing for the job he hoped to someday bring above board. He also distributed the drug among friends who he thought could benefit from ‘cleaning the window’ of their ego.
In what would turn out to be a pivotal interaction, Doblin agreed to guide a young woman through psychedelic therapy to cope with the suicidal thoughts and anxiety she was suffering because of a rape that had happened eight years earlier. Doblin says it’s clear now that Maria, whose name has been changed here for her privacy, was suffering from PTSD, though it wasn’t diagnosed as such at the time.
The first MDMA session they did made some inroads, Doblin says, into dealing with Maria’s trauma, but there were still parts of it that she was not able to face. So after a few weeks, they decided to do an LSD session, hoping to get at the emotions that were still locked deep in her subconscious. He gave her a substantial dose of LSD. It ended up being more than she could handle. She had visions of being on a foreign planet, being slowly burned by its two suns as she lay helpless on the ground. She was overwhelmed and afraid. “LSD is harder to control than MDMA,” Doblin says.
Not totally sure what to do, or how to help Maria come out of her bad trip, he suggested adding a half-dose of MDMA, and she agreed.
“That ended up being the breakthrough,” he says. After she took the MDMA, she was able to connect the imagery of these two suns with being left out in the sun after she was raped and beaten. “With the MDMA, the imagery from the LSD became her own life, and then turned into processing her own feelings.”
“I started to feel the horror of that day and I started vomiting,” Maria wrote in her account of this session for a 1985 anthology called Through the Gateway of the Heart: Accounts of Experiences with MDMA and other Empathogenic Substances. “Getting sick was more than just a physical illness. I was vomiting from my soul, getting rid of pain, of an evil that had been destroying me. I then felt the need to tell my friend what the rapist had done to me, having always kept it to myself because I thought that by not speaking about it that eventually it would be erased from reality.”
“For eight years, I have kept the most horrible aspects of that day hidden in the back of my mind,” she wrote, “and it was only then that I realized how the little details that I had wanted to ignore were eating at me like a cancer. The memories became very vivid in my mind and the suffering became more intense, but I still wanted to talk about it and I felt that I could deal with the pain, that this was a start to try to defeat the cancer.”
They talked through all of the ways that her trauma had impacted her thinking, and as she examined and articulated it, she was able to let it go. After that session, her PTSD was never as bad as it had been before, and she even went on to work with Doblin in his current research.
“In this remarkable way, the MDMA helped her to sort of review and process a whole lifetime of trauma,” Doblin says. “That was 33 years ago, so we have evidence that the effects are durable.”
After this experience, his commitment to the cause of psychedelics liberation was born all over again.
“It was one of the biggest turning points in my life,” he says. “It really showed me that MDMA can be good for PTSD.”
* * *
That early heyday of MDMA, when it was used therapeutically and recreationally without much regulation, came to an end when someone figured out they could make a bunch of money by distributing the drug at bars. When MDMA was renamed Ecstasy and turned into a club drug, the DEA had to crack down and outlaw it, adding it to the list of Schedule 1 drugs in 1985. But not without a fight from Doblin.
The same year the DEA took notice of MDMA, Doblin and two friends started Earth Metabolic Design Lab, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting people’s right to psychedelic use, affiliated with Buckminster Fuller Institute, which funds scientists, entrepreneurs, and others to develop ideas that solve global challenges across disciplines. While the DEA was in the process of making MDMA officially illegal, Doblin went to Washington, D.C. and filed an official objection on behalf of Earth Metabolic Design Lab, setting in motion a lawsuit that they would make history by winning. The judge ruled in their favor, recommending that MDMA be made a Schedule 3 drug, meaning it would be legal for therapeutic use, just not recreational. When he tells the story of this victory, Doblin roots around in the stacks on his desk and finds a framed, three-decade-old photo of himself, grinning. “This was right after we won,” he says.
The DEA, however, did not head the judge’s recommendation, and proceeded with the full criminalization. Doblin sued again, in Appeals Court, and won again. The legal battle went on for two years, but, he says, “the DEA kept trying to figure out new rationales to keep it illegal and eventually they succeeded.”
Doblin could have given up then, but instead he decided to switch tactics, and formed a new non-profit, MAPS, with the goal of working with the FDA to legitimize psychedelics as medicine. This was when he decided he could be more successful working within the system to legitimize psychedelics, as opposed to pushing against it, a philosophy he’s maintained for the last 30 years.
Doblin wanted to get his PhD in clinical psychology with a focus on psychedelics, but no such programs existed, and no school would admit him to develop the field of study. “That’s when I realized the politics was in the way of the science, so I should switch and study politics,” he says, planning to work on reforming the political system to free the way for the research he really wanted to do. He ended up getting his PhD in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School in 2001, after returning to the New College of Florida to complete his undergraduate degree in psychology in 1988.
He tried to get a job at the FDA, but believes the DEA blocked his hire. “They knew who I was,” he says, “because they don’t get sued very often. And they don’t lose.”
The turning point was an FDA advisory meeting in 1992, where the agency and a group of experts debated whether to reopen the doors to psychedelics research. T
he evening before the meeting, Doblin and Charles Grob, the researcher whose proposed study of MDMA was at the heart of the FDA’s debate, took a walk, collecting their thoughts and preparing to argue their case the next morning. They saw a rainbow rising up from behind a federal building. “Though we value rationality as much as the next person,” he wrote in his detailed account of the meeting for MAPS, “we were sorely tempted to consider it a favorable omen.”
Several of the leading researchers on psychedelics were present at the meeting, including Rick Strassman, whose research using DMT had made great strides toward proving that safe trials with mind-altering drugs were possible, and George Ricaurte, who led the charge against MDMA, arguing that it caused dangerous neurotoxicity. Ricaurte was instrumental in creating the longstanding societal perception of MDMA as deadly (including the urban legend that it creates holes in the brain – a distortion of research that showed that extreme overdoses of the drug can damage serotonin receptors). In recent years, much of Ricaurte’s influential work has been discredited, including a scandal around an expensive and highly publicized study that claimed to prove his theories about neurotoxicity and was later revealed to have used methamphetamine, not MDMA. The journal in which the study was published issued a retraction in 2003. Dr. Ricaurte did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.
When psychedelic-research advocates at the 1992 FDA committee meeting got into the details of the proposed protocol and doses for a particular study that wanted to pursue, they were able to convince even the staunch Ricaurte that there was little risk involved for the subjects. At that point, Doblin was convinced they would be successful. And they were. The FDA decided they would allow for psychedelic trials with human subjects, under strict limits.
It’s been legal for MAPS to do their research since then. But the biggest battle was the cultural one – it took the 25 years since that meeting to start to get society to let go of some of the bias against psychedelics that were set in motion in the late ’60s and ’70s.
* * *
There are several organizations in the U.S. that see MDMA as a dangerous party drug, and dedicate time and resources to keeping it off the streets.
“MDMA actually is quite harmful, we have issues with young people at electronic music festivals,” says Cindy Grant, Executive Director of the Hillsborough County Anti-Drug Alliance (HCADA), a Tampa-based nonprofit that focuses on teen substance abuse prevention, who was not aware that there was research being done into therapeutic uses for MDMA. “Why would you even want to go there when we have so much other medicine out there?”
One of the biggest challenges of Doblin’s work is getting society at large to understand that MDMA is more than a party drug – getting them to break the associations with raves and “Just Say No” commercials. Marijuana is paving the way for de-stigmatization. “It’s just incredible how versatile the cannabis plant is, and it’s also been suppressed against Mexicans, initially, then against hippies, then against blacks,” Doblin says. And now, it’s changing. “People are understanding and seeing the racist aspects of it. And there’s been this recognition of the medical use of marijuana, and the rest of the psychedelics are proving to be incredible tools for science and for therapy.”
He also points out that in the controlled settings of therapy, with patients who have been screened for heart health since MDMA can raise blood pressure, there hasn’t ever been a single death reported, “or anything even close.”
“It took 50 years to mature to the point where we can look at these things directly and see these aren’t tools of social destruction,” he says. “We have an opportunity now that we haven’t had in 50 years: to integrate psychedelics into our culture. We desperately need it.”
And there has been quite a shift. Ricaurte, the neurotoxicity expert who led the charge against MDMA and other “amphetamine analogs” for more than 20 years, was one of the last holdouts in the research community to argue that MDMA was unilaterally dangerous. His research was a touchstone of the widespread misconceptions about how dangerous the drug is (including the urban legend that it bores holes in the brain). In 2002, he published a very expensive study backed by Johns Hopkins, which showed that a single dose of MDMA could cause permanent brain damage (the neurotoxicity he’s been studying for decades), but the study was then debunked and retracted, amid much scandal. A New York Times article from 2003, “Research On Ecstasy Is Clouded By Errors,” reported “the consensus among many amphetamine researchers, Dr. Ricaurte included, is that there is no proof thus far that Ecstasy causes permanent human brain damage.”
Psychedelic therapy research is having a moment right now – what PBS called a “medical renaissance” or, in the more technical language of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a “re-emerging therapeutic paradigm.” After years on the fringes, psychedelic research is suddenly everywhere. Ketamine is gaining popularity as an off-label treatment for severe depression, scientists are returningto pick up where LSD research left off decades ago, and outlets like Rolling Stoneand CBS are covering this cultural shift as a therapeutic goldmine.
But medicine is just the entry point for Doblin. He believes in free access to psychedelics for any and everyone who wants them. Biding his time, he believes that getting these drugs approved for therapeutic use is the first step toward wider societal acceptance.
“The ideal is having the freedom to make the choices of how you want to do it,” he adds. “For many people, going to a Grateful Dead or Phish concert and dancing with people is ideal. So I don’t think the spiritual, therapeutic or recreational use of psychedelics is inherently the best – they all have their place.”
Of course, not everyone agrees. Even Rachel Hope, one of Doblin’s biggest cheerleaders, disagrees with some of his end goals of having MDMA widely available both medically and recreationally.
“I get really irritated when people go ‘I just want to look at sparkly lights and dance,’” she says. “What a waste! You could have rewired your brain. You could have challenged every aspect of you, your lower nature that holds you back. Every obstacle to you being the greatest self you could possibly be, the most loving you could possibly be, you could have healed that. But you choose to look at sparkling lights.”
But she also says that she’s decided to do her part of the work – sharing her story, being a public face for the effectiveness of the medicine – and let Doblin do his. Because whether or not she aligns with every aspect, she says, “The work of MAPS I think is sacred work.”
“He’s like the modern-day Buddha,” she says of Doblin. “He should win the Nobel Peace Prize.”
With the completion of Phase II of the clinical trial that saved Hope’s life by completely eliminating her crippling PTSD symptoms, MAPS is now ramping up for Phase III. Ingmar Gorman is one of dozens of therapists currently training to conduct these sessions during Phase III. He explains that in the four years he’s been a therapist (without using MDMA), he’s noticed how much time and energy is spent during therapy helping patients get to a place where they can help themselves, and recognize the roots of whatever issues they may be dealing with.
“It’s just absolutely incredible,&rdq
uo; he says, “when you have someone go into a session and take MDMA and they are saying things about themselves and their history – for example, how they were so obsessed with being in control of their life because they were so afraid of anything related to the trauma or not being able to truly live their life – having the thoughts and awareness that comes with that, the MDMA helps them do it without too much help of the therapist.”
“The therapist plays an essential role in the therapy, for sure,” he adds, “but it’s really incredible how much work the participants are doing on their own.”
MDMA-assisted therapy is what’s known as “self-directed” therapy, where the patient really leads the discussion, and so they’re able to delve into whatever traumas or issues they’ve been unable to face in the past. “They spontaneously or intuitively bring up what they think is most important,” Gorman says – like how Maria wrote that she “felt the need” to tell Doblin what had happened to her during her LSD and MDMA therapy session in 1984, and Doblin followed her lead, discussing each painful memory and revelation as they came to her.
The challenges of Phase III are largely logistical: They need at least 230 participants, and they need to train enough therapists to facilitate treatments for each of those patients. And they need to find locations; Phase III will take place in multiple sites in the United States, Canada, and Israel.
Finding patients, training therapists, and finding locations, all of this takes funding. Doblin estimates they’ll need about $30 million to complete Phase III, of which they have $10 million. But he’s hopeful, pointing out that billionaire Paul Allen donated $25 million to search for extra extraterrestrial life. “All we need is one person like that to say, ‘Let’s see if there’s any domestic intelligence. Let’s see if we can find any intelligence here on Earth,’” Doblin says. “Give me 25 million and we’ll make MDMA a medicine.”
If this next phase is successful, MDMA-assisted therapy could be available by prescription as soon as 2021.
