Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Gets Ecstasy Treatment

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted February 11, 2008.

"We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need," said House Committee on Veterans' Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called "Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs," held in December 2007. "Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off."

Filner's choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that's a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a "rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions," to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.

Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine -- otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy -- to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the '80s and '90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications -- that is, illegality -- and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.

"We're looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere," he explained by phone.

So far, MAPS has gone a long way to helping legitimize MDMA treatment for PTSD, as well as anxiety in cancer patients and more. The organization is supporting and funding Dr. Michael Mithoefer's double-blind sessions and protocol on MDMA/PTSD, initially approved by the FDA in 2001 and due to conclude this June, as well as co-sponsoring a pilot MDMA/PTSD study with the Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy and coordinating research at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital into MDMA's ability to aid the suffering of terminal cancer patients.

In short, MAPS is putting its money where your mouth is, in hopes of saving your brain and heart. And their help can't come fast enough, given hundreds of thousands of troops have already returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan to face everything from a possible economic recession to homelessness, homicide and suicide, with hundreds of thousands on the way behind them. According to some estimates, America can expect a minimum of 300,000 cases of PTSD, at a cost of over $600 billion, rivaling the cost of the wars themselves. And that's just the military wing of PTSD's vast network, which leans all too heavily on those who have suffered horrific experiences such as rape, violence, abuse and more. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a deadly assassin when it comes to the humanity's overall mental health, and its costs are extensive and lasting. This is why some physicians and professionals are keeping an eye on MDMA treatment, which so far has proven to be almost uniformly successful in helping patients work through their crippling traumas with the help of ecstasy's cathartic yet calming influence.

"I've seen each and every one of these patients, and, just as a clinical psychologist, it is impressive to see the degree of treatment response these folks have had," explained testing expert Mark Wagner, a clinical psychologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, to the Washington Post after serving as an independent evaluator of Mithoefer's work. "I didn't see a single individual who thought: 'Oh, yeah, this is great fun. I'm going to try to go out and use this for recreational use.' All of them took this very seriously and therapeutically."

Indeed, out of all of the MDMA research underway, it seems to be Mithoefer's work, conducted in a warmly lit cottage in South Carolina with his wife and registered nurse Annie, that seems best positioned to aid MDMA's American crossover from a Schedule I danger to a FDA-approved wonder drug. But that's just the beginning of a long, bureaucratically tangled road to redemption. "Michael's study is the furthest along," added Doblin, "and after June, we'll do the data analysis and submit our findings to the FDA. After that, we will work with the FDA to come up with ideas about phase three studies, and that's when we have to spend the millions of dollars and treat hundreds of patients."

See more stories tagged with: ptsd, ecstasy, mdma

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

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