Three decades after the U.S. government slammed the door on ecstasy, a team of Marin County therapists has gotten permission to use the popular party drug in a study designed to reduce anxiety among people with cancer or other life-threatening disease.
Dr. Philip Wolfson, a San Anselmo psychiatrist and longtime advocate of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, has begun recruiting for 18 people for his research project, which will be conducted over the next year in his cozy hilltop psychotherapy center overlooking Mount Tamalpais.
The goal of the study is to see whether patients suffering from crippling anxiety, fear or depression over a devastating diagnosis can find relative peace from several extended psychotherapy sessions under the influence of ecstasy.
Ecstasy, the street name for the psychoactive drug MDMA, is a radically different kind of medication for the treatment of anxiety. Rather than calming or sedating, a four- or five-hour psychedelic journey with MDMA, Wolfson said, can be “transformationally potent” when used in a safe, comfortable setting with a pair of trained therapists, one man and one woman.
“It’s a substance that supports deep, meaningful and rapidly effective psychotherapy,” he said.
For Wolfson, the MDMA study is deeply personal. Back in the 1980s, he and his then-wife, Alice, worked with a therapist who used to help them deal with the emotional turmoil their family experienced when their teenage son, Noah, was battling leukemia.
Pain of losing a child
Noah died, but the experience inspired Wolfson to devote his life to finding a way to make this kind of therapy available to other families facing the agony of a dying child or other loved one.
Now he has.
Wolfson has gotten permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct the MDMA study and has obtained a license from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to administer the otherwise-illegal drug to patients.
Sandy Walsh, an FDA spokeswoman, said her agency has determined that previous scientific studies of MDMA have shown the drug can be safely used by research subjects under proper medical supervision.
“If a drug works for a disabling condition and can be labeled to be used in a safe way in that population,” she said, “then we think we have an obligation to evaluate the data and do what the data support, such as allow a trial to proceed.”
Others in the federal government are also showing interest in the MDMA study. Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said his agency is following several privately funded studies that are using psychedelic drugs in conjunction with psychotherapy to treat a variety of mental disorders.
“It’s a really interesting and a very powerful new approach,” Insel said. “It’s not just taking MDMA. It’s taking it in the context of a treatment that involves improved insight and increased skills and using this in the broader context of psychotherapy.”
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Originally Posted by presence
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