» Rick Doblin on MDMA for PTSD
I went to a talk by Rick Doblin, the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who has bachelor’s in psychology and a PhD in public policy. MAPS’s main project is the use of MDMA combined with talk therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in a small number of sessions.
Doblin had some interesting things to say about strategy. He pictures a progression in treatment groups from the most politically valuable to the least:
- Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, police and firefighters
- Sexual assault victims
- Terminal cancer patients
- Couples therapy (the original therapeutic use of MDMA)
- Individuals doing self-therapy for emotional issues or spiritual enlightenment (this will effectively require full legalization)
Doblin thinks MDMA is cognitively simpler than hallucinogens and therefore easier to use in therapy. The idea is to get it accepted by the therapeutic community and then introduce other psychedelics. And then once drugs have a history of safe therapeutic use we can start talking about legalization.
The DrugMonkey blog had a lot of criticism of the lack of rigor in MAPS’ initial exploratory testing. Now that they’re seeking US Food & Drug Administration approval, their experimental design has been beefed up:
- MAPS has developed a specific talk therapy protocol to be used with the MDMA. Therapy sessions are recorded and then scored by observers for adherence to the protocol.
- They’re comparing between patients who randomly receive one of three different doses: 25 mg, 75 mg and 120 mg. And then giving low-dose patients the opportunity to repeat the intervention with a higher dose.
The problem with giving therapeutic psychedelics to the terminally ill is that they don’t have the time to recover from the (inevitable, in large populations) nightmare trips.
I’m not an MDMA guy though, so maybe E has a low enough incidence of bad tripping for that not to be a concern?
Jack
14 Sep 11 at 4:22 pm
[...] Rick Doblin, Gabor Maté spoke about using ayahuasca to treat addictions. Maté is the closest thing to a [...]
Gabor Mate on Ayahuasca for Addictions at MentalPolyphonics
15 Sep 11 at 7:36 am
[...] This leads into Rick’s quest first to obtain regulatory approval to produce pure DMT, to get permission to test it on human subjects, and to design the experimental protocols in use through the rest of the book. The dose response study, for example, involved a double-blind series of doses determined relative to body weight, not absolute drug mass. [...]
The Spirit Molecule at MentalPolyphonics
15 Sep 11 at 10:37 am
Doblin was talking about using psychedelics to deal with the existential angst of patients who have months to think about the fact that they are dying, not giving them to people with their last breath. And yes, MDMA isn’t as intellectually complex as hallucinogens – the purpose would be to get people talking about their death, not enlightened about it.
Jared
15 Sep 11 at 11:56 am
Aldous Huxley went out on a deathbed dose of Sandoz LSD-25
Yeah: fair enough. It’s just worth thinking about the possibility that someone has a terrifying experience, crashes into depression, and dies before getting better. Bad karma, man.
Jack
15 Sep 11 at 3:29 pm
Gabor Mate comes off as badass as a you’d expect a Downtown East-side doctor to be – I bet he doesn’t care about karma.
Jared
16 Sep 11 at 3:28 pm