MAPS & MDMA Therapy Legalization
Something smells fishy
Mainstream media is finally starting to catch on about the issues with the MAPS trials to legalize MDMA, largely because of testimony submitted to the FDA, which is reviewing the research.
Here’s an NPR article a friend sent me last week detailing some of the criticisms: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/13/1250580932/ecstasy-mdma-ptsd-fda-approval.
Here’s a rundown of the serious and, in my view, valid criticisms of these trials to date:
- Several participants were SERIOUSLY harmed during the trials. (See below for a more detailed explanation or here: https://www.thecut.com/tags/power-trip/ )
- MAPS set up the studies with the intent to later profit from patenting its form of MDMA therapy. When Rick Doblin announced the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was disbanding in January and that he now headed a for-profit corporation called Lykos Theraputics, this criticism seemed to have been verified. Doblin and Lykos are now trying to brand themselves as a good guy’s for-profit psychedelics company, the anti-dote to what’s happened with pharmaceutical companies and opiates, but given their track record, it’s hard to believe they really care about access, harm reduction or reciprocity. Lykos applied for exclusive rights to MDMA therapy for PTSD for at least five years. Billions of dollars are at stake. The Microdose recently summarized a Business Insider story about problems within Lykos here:
- The scientific methods and procedures used in the trials were shady. A number of study participants and researchers have now admitted they went into the trials with implicit bias, a common problem in psychedelic research in part created by the inflations of psychedelics advocates. Additionally, the PTSD questionnaire used by researchers to assess whether MDMA treatment was successful is known in the mental health field to be deeply flawed. Participants whose treatment results were reported as positive in the studies later experienced extreme psychological distress, including suicidal ideation, which they attempted to report to the therapist and researchers. MAPS is downplaying all of this, and is still claiming patients who became suicidal after the trial as treatment victories because they scored well on the PTSD questionnaire.
- The studies assessed short-term MDMA treatment—three administrations of the drug at controlled and moderate doses. They did little to assess whether long-term use of MDMA or micro dosing or really any of the ways most people actually use MDMA are safe. In fact, studies show that long-term use of MDMA can have serious consequences for the heart, even at micro dosing levels. Additionally, earlier studies that evaluated the effectiveness of peyote and Native American Church practices for their effectiveness against addiction and depression are not similar or comparable to the MAPS studies because those studies looked at NAC participants, who almost always conduct ceremonies in groups, over their lifetimes, not during a few months and after only three administrations of a substance. Almost every indigenous practice I’m familiar with that includes psychedelics differs from MAPS’ model radically because 1. they are lifelong practices and 2. they are group practices. I don’t personally believe the MAPS clinical model works.
- There is a great deal of silencing and gaslighting in the psychedelic scene when it comes to criticism like this because, advocates claim, it will ruin attempts at legalization. I believe it’s the shady practices of people like Doblin that are actually ruining the attempts, not the critics.
Information about problems with the MAPS trials has been in circulation for quite some time. The Cut’s podcast Power Trip, hosted by one of my psychedelic heroes, Lily Kay Ross, first reported many of the issues when it came out in 2022. Several episodes detail the psychological distress of participants who suffered boundary violations by their therapists, which were not as insignificant as MAPs would have you believe. If you can stomach it, check out this video from the trial: https://www.thecut.com/2022/03/you-wont-feel-high-after-watching-this-video.html. I can barely watch it because it makes me sick. The creepy male “therapist” was unlicensed and his wife has since lost her license, but this sort of behavior is common accepted practice in the scene. Power Trip puts the trials in the larger context of the psychedelic therapy scene in which many people have been trained by a handful of corrupt practitioners with spurious methods. When I first listened to this podcast it destroyed me because the methods described reminded me a great deal of how my teacher ran his groups, and what I had gone through. If you’re serious about working in psychedelics, I think you should be serious enough to listen to the entire podcast and deeply consider the issues it raises. Many organizations now charging thousands of dollars for psychedelic therapy facilitation training trace their lineages back to people who were/are corrupt.
Other researchers have independently verified much of Power Trip’s anecdotal evidence. For example, this essay by two British researchers explores how the neuroplasticity psychedelics provoke can lead to suicidality:
Personally, I’ve found that people who work seriously with medicines like peyote or Ayahuasca will honestly tell you—even if the secular scientific language set doesn’t consider their wisdom valid—that the psycho-spiritual transformations people undergo via plant medicine can lead to radically de-centering forms of cognition. Plant medicine changes your life; you can’t just do it three times and expect to be healed. It’s a life-long Journey, a ride you can’t get off once you’re on, and too many people like Rick Doblin make it seem easy, no different than popping a pill for a headache.
Psychedelics radically altered my view of death, and when I lost the support of my teacher’s groups, I became suicidal. I believe the likelihood of adverse mental health effects from psychedelics is increased if connections to spirituality are denied, if access to plant medicine isn’t prolonged and possibly life-long, and if forms of manipulation are present in ceremonies, especially the sort of sexual manipulation I’ve encountered with more than one famous medicine man and that occurred during the MAPS trials.
An old man on the Rez once told me you can’t trust anyone who charges for medicine.
Don’t be naïve!