A Crying Shame

Ever since the publication of Acid Test, the story of a small group of researchers who have risked their careers to prove that the early promise of using psychedelic drug therapies to promote mental health was no illusion, I've been getting heartbreaking messages from people who desperately need that treatment but can't safely and legally obtain it. The most optimistic estimate for when, at the current rate of research, these therapies will be legally available is 7 years. Unfortunately, nothing in this process--inhibited at every turn by a half-century old cultural bias against these drugs--has proceeded at the optimistic pace. My own guess is it will take twice that long. Which is too long.

Here's a message I got from Nicholas Blackston, a Marine war vet at the heart of Acid Test who was driven close to suicide by PTSD before he was lucky enough to get in the small clinical study testing MDMA-assisted therapy:

"I just got off the phone with a friend who fought Ramadi with me. He's suffering pretty bad, his family life has been torn apart, his kids won't speak with him, and is wife is the only thing that's barely holding them together. I think he said she's the one that actually saw my publicity online and suggested he call me. He's messed up on all the pills that the VA gives him and said he's been jumping around from job to job because he can't hold it together or save any money. Basically he said that he was at the end of his rope and can't wait for MDMA assisted psychotherapy to become legal; he feels like he doesn't have that much time left, so his buddy where he lives is hooking him up with some MDMA. I of course cautioned him about impurities in street MDMA and the dangers of do-it-yourself therapy outside of the clinical setting but I mean these guys feel like they have no other option besides a bullet to the head... I just wish that they could receive it the way I did and it kills me that they don't have the time to wait for it become a legal treatment. When I was trying to give him hope about holding on until it becomes legal, I could hear it in his voice and it made me realize that even if I am speaking out and spreading hope with my story, to the ones that it really matters, the veterans, it's just not sinking in and they don't have the time to wait till 2021.... They'll all be dead by then Tom!"

And here's another message I received today:

"I heard you and Nicholas Blackston speak in New York; I can't stop thinking about his moving testimony and how frustrated he is for his suffering friends who don't have access to the treatment he received.

My daughter was addicted to painkillers for 6 years before we realized it (when I discovered a bottle of Methadone in her car) - which led to 5 additional years of seeing an "addiction specialist" who basically kept her addicted - this time to Suboxone - with no exit strategy in sight. What a nightmare it was.

I was addicted as well - to the internet- desperately searching for a solution. Long story short, in March of 2012 we got on a plane to Costa Rica where she was given Iboga by an African Shaman. 9 days later we returned and she was completely detoxed. Has not touched a drug in 2 1/2 years - nor a cigarette (she was smoking 3 packs a day).

I went to Costa Rica solely on my own instinct without anyone to advise me, without knowing a soul who had done anything like this. Complete leap of faith on my part. I boarded that plane in a combined state of terror and hope."

Her ambivalence was well founded. Although she felt only gratitude that her daughter was healed, others who took that leap of faith found widely varying circumstances. One client complained in a review, "The shaman barely even talked to us and we were all left alone most of the time. When I asked to talk to the shaman back home they wanted to charge exhorbitant amount, and did not care I received no healing."

Desperate people take desperate measures, and there are always unscrupulus people who are eager to take advantage of that desperation.

The real answer is to put more resources into the painstaking and carefully controlled clinical trials now ongoing for a variety of psychedelic drugs across a range of afflictions. Especially in the case of PTSD and addiction, alternatives to the best -- and not good enough -- therapies now available are desperately needed. Given the inestimable cost to our society of unchecked addictions -- to drugs, alcohol and tobacco -- and the estimated half million vets returning from war with debilitating, life-threatening PTSD, the government, and in particular he Department of Defense, should be actively supporting and facilitating this research instead of treating it as some kind of '60s flashback.