Legal Ecstasy in Five Years?

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Legal Ecstasy in Five Years?

by Kristen Philipkoski "]www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41457,00.html

2:00 a.m. Feb. 5, 2001 PST

Ecstasy, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), will be available for use with psychotherapy in as little as five years according to one expert.

It's a goal that people like Sue Stevens are working toward by telling the world about their experiences. At the State of Ecstasy Conference in San Francisco on Friday, Stevens shared a passionate and moving account of how taking MDMA helped her and her husband cope with his terminal cancer.

Stevens said she gained years of quality life with her dying husband by using MDMA. This was her first public speech, but she has been written up in various publications including Time magazine and appeared on 48 hours and MTV, hoping to convince the mainstream that MDMA is a valuable psychotherapy tool, not just a party drug.

"In one night with six hours worth of an MDMA therapeutic session, we managed to cure every emotional problem we had that was associated with the cancer," Stevens said.

When her husband Shane was diagnosed with liver cancer when he was 22 years old, the couple began to fight visciously on a daily basis. They didn't consider that the disease and their fear of his imminent death might be causing their problems, but a close friend suggested that could be the case and pointed them in the direction of MDMA therapy.

"The cancer was the problem. We couldn't open up to each other. He did everything in his power to avoid making me cry, and I did everything in my power to avoid making him angry," which she says put them at arm's-length and made them miserable.

While taking MDMA guided by a therapist, Stevens said she and her husband spent six hours confronting every fear they had and listened to each other more closely than never before.

"After this one night I can honestly say we never got into another fight," she said.

Stevens pleaded with the researchers present never to give up trying to bring MDMA through clinical trials and get FDA approval. They clearly had no thoughts of quitting the fight.

MDMA can move through U. S. Food and Drug Administration approval in five years on a budget as small as $4 million, said Rick Doblin, a psychedelics researcher and founder and director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

MDMA works with psychotherapy, can get FDA approval on the cheap, and can be regulated -- all of which will pave the way for the drug's broader legalization, he said.

Doblin mourned the fact that since MDMA was made a Schedule 1 drug by the Drug Enforcement Agency 15 years ago, only one clinical trial using the drug was approved by the FDA from 1992 to until 1999, when one more study was approved to look at the drug's effects on the psyche of terminal cancer patients.

"The loss will take at least five more years to get MDMA through clinical trials, and the benefits will be substantially dwarfed by the lost benefits not achieved in that period of time," he said.

Nevertheless, he believes the FDA will do the right thing and approve the drug for use in psychotherapy.

If researchers can show good data, the FDA will approve it, said Katherine Bonson, a pharmacologist with the Controlled Substances staff at the FDA.

She didn't address MDMA specifically but referred instead to "Drug X."

"The government isn't as opposed to the drug as you may think. You give us data that makes it look like a good drug and we'll approve that drug," Bonson said.

That's exactly what Doblin and his colleagues hope to do.

Even if the FDA approves a drug, the Drug Enforcement Agency or even Congress can always step in the way, but researchers hope their data will be compelling enough to stick.

An MDMA therapy program has begun in Madrid, Spain, addressing post-traumatic stress disorder.

Marcela Ot'alora is a therapist with the program, and reported that although the program is in its very early stages, preliminary results are positive.

"I will never forget the look on one of my client's faces when she realized so humbly that she had been in love with her pain, and that's why she held onto it," Ot'alora said at the conference.

She said she hopes that soon MDMA therapy will also be available in the United States.

"The government's job is not to take away but to provide therapeutic resources and as much information as possible," she said.

Call it touchy-feely, but those in the audience who had experience with MDMA -- and odds are that number was high -- clearly empathized.

Emanuel Sferios, founder of DanceSafe, a nonprofit organization that promotes health and safety at raves and in nightclubs, asked for a show of hands of those in the audience who had never used an illicit drug. Not a single hand went up.

Empathy, coincidentally, is MDMA's defining therapeutic effect, advocates say. The drug releases serotonin and dopamine, causing feelings of empathy and pleasure.

Hardcore scientific research on the physical effects of MDMA is hard to come by, mainly because it's illegal and studies require government approval. The most prominent researchers in the field presented their results.

The big argument is whether MDMA is "neurotoxic," i.e., whether it permanently damages serotonin brain cells and can cause permanent brain dysfunction.

Some researchers, like Dr. Charles Grob doubt that it does. Grob is the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA School of Medicine, and the only researcher to date to have performed an FDA-approved clinical trial on MDMA.

Others, like George Ricaurte, believe MDMA is too dangerous to give to humans under any circumstances. Ricaurte works in the department of neurobiology at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, and has published research showing monkeys still showed damaged serotonin axons seven years after they were given MDMA.

While Grob is waiting to begin his next study, other researchers are proceeding with animal studies.

The body's apparent inability to regulate its temperature while under the effects of MDMA according to many press reports in the past several years has sent many "ravers" to the emergency room with symptoms of dehydration and hypothermia.

So Jessica Malberg at Harvard University gave MDMA to rats and studied them for the same symptoms.

Since simply handling a rat can change its body temperature and invalidate the study, Malberg and her colleagues devised a temperature-controlled box out of a dorm room refrigerator.

Next, they built an AM radio device about the size of a jelly bean, and implanted it in the rats. The radio signal beamed the temperature of the rat to the researchers.

As expected, the researchers found that in cold temperatures, the rats' body temperatures decreased significantly under the effects of MDMA, and in warm temperatures it went up.

Ultimately, many of the conference attendees hope for broad legalization of MDMA.

"I hope it will be like the Berlin wall, and it will come down in a big crash and it will be a whole new world," said an elderly man at the conference.

Doblin of MAPS agreed.

"People should be able to decide on their own to take these risks," he said.

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