MDMA – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Even some Republicans, a group that has traditionally opposed drug law liberalization, are starting to spread. Last month, citing high suicide rates among war veterans, former Texas governor Rick Perry urged his state lawmakers to endorse a democracy-sponsored bill to create a psilocybin study for patients with PTSD.

“We’ve had 50 years of government propaganda about these substances, and thanks to research and a grassroots movement, that narrative is changing,” said Kevin Matthews, a psilocybin attorney who led the successful Denver election.

Decades in the wild

Long before Nancy Reagan warned the nation to simply say no to drugs and President Richard Nixon declared Timothy Leary the “Most Dangerous Man in America,” researchers like William A. Richards used psychedelics to help alcoholics get dry and help cancer patients with to finish the end. Fear of life.

The drugs were legal, and Dr. Richards, then a psychologist at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, was among many scientists studying the therapeutic abilities of entheogens, the class of psychoactive substances that humans have used for millennia. Even years later, according to Dr. Richards and other researchers, many early volunteers called the psychedelic sessions the most important and meaningful experiences of their lives.

But when the drugs left the laboratory and were adopted by the counterculture movement in the 1960s, the country’s political establishment reacted with alarm. By the time the Drug Enforcement Administration issued its urgency ban on MDMA in 1985, funding for psychedelic research had largely disappeared.

“We learned so much and then it all came to an end,” said Dr. Richards, 80, and now a researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

These days, the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, founded two years ago with private funds totaling 17 million US dollars, is investigating psilocybin for smoking cessation and the treatment of depression related to Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other spiritual research with the involvement of religious clergy.

However, in the early 1980s, MDMA fled the clinic to the dance floor, where it became known as ecstasy. In 1985 the Drug Enforcement Administration criminalized MDMA as a List I substance, defined as “currently unaccepted medical use and high potential for abuse”.

Some mental health workers continued to administer MDMA-based therapies underground, but most stopped. The number of scientists completing studies with MDMA also decreased. Some people, including Dr. Doblin, who formed his association in 1986 to focus on developing MDMA and other psychedelics into FDA-approved drugs, continued to be heavily involved in MDMA research. It took nearly two decades to overcome alarmist claims about Ecstasy’s dangers, including the fact that it had eaten holes in users’ brains, to finally get approval to start college. Animal and human studies confirm that MDMA does not cause neurotoxic effects at the doses used in clinical studies.

Ecstasy or molly, on the other hand, can be adulterated with other potentially dangerous substances, and users can take doses far higher than is safe. According to a database maintained by the Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration up to this year, MDMA accounted for 1.8 percent of all visits to the US emergency room in 2011. In Europe, MDMA was responsible for 8 percent of drug-related emergency visits to 16 major hospitals in 10 countries from 2013 to 2014.

Scientists still do not fully understand the source of MDMA’s therapeutic effects. The substance binds to proteins that regulate serotonin, a neurotransmitter that can, among other things, improve mood. Antidepressants like Prozac bind to the same proteins and block their reabsorption of serotonin. However, MDMA continues this process and causes the proteins to pump serotonin into synapses and strengthen their chemical signal.

MDMA also increases levels of oxytocin, dopamine, and other chemical messengers and creates feelings of empathy, trust, and compassion.

The primary therapeutic effect, however, may be due to the apparent ability to reopen what neuroscientists refer to as “critical phase”, the window in childhood when the brain has the superior ability to create and recreate new memories to save. A mouse study published in Nature in 2019 found that MDMA may restore the adult brain to this earlier state of malleability.

An estimated 7 percent of the US population will suffer from PTSD at some point in their life, and up to 13 percent of combat veterans will have the disease. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spent $ 17 billion on disability payments for over one million veterans with PTSD.