On a chilly spring morning in 2017, Boris Heifets took the podium to talk about MDMA in an Oakland, California, hotel ballroom packed with scientists, therapists, patients, and activists. If he noticed the occasional whiffs of incense and patchouli oil coming from the halls of the Psychedelic Science meeting, he didn't let on. After all, anyone studying the therapeutic benefits of the drug that sparked an underground dance revolution 30 years ago knows that ravers, Burners, and old hippies flock to this meeting. It's the world's largest gathering on psychoactive substances.
Ecstasy enthusiasts and university professors alike heard several research teams report that MDMA helped patients recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other disabling psychiatric conditions after conventional treatments had failed. Meeting rooms buzzed with excited chatter about the prospect of MDMA getting approved as a prescription therapy for PTSD. That could come as early as 2021 if it proves safe and effective in large clinical studies that are just getting underway. For many advocates of this work, regulatory approval can't arrive too soon.
But Heifets, a Stanford neuroanesthesiologist, had come to lay out an even grander role for the drug federal officials banned in 1985 in a futile effort to quash the burgeoning rave scene. Psychiatric treatments lag decades behind the rest of medicine, even though serious mental disorders carry just as much risk of disability and death as cardiovascular disease, Heifets explained. Psychiatrists desperately need more targeted therapies to give their patients the same kind of rapid, enduring relief that stents and bypass surgery provide for heart patients. He thought they'd benefit from thinking like surgeons. "I don't want to suggest that we can cure psychiatric disease in 30 minutes in the operating room," Heifets said. But we can harness powerful drugs like MDMA that act like a surgeon's knife to alter consciousness and exorcise psychological demons.
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https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18628271/mdma-molly-ecstasy-drug-ptsd-therapy-mental-health?
