Veterans Lobbied Hard for Psychedelic Therapy, But It May Not Be Enough to Save MDMA Drug

TIME

MDMA-assisted therapy would be an entirely new model of care. Over the course of 12 weeks, this treatment uses outpatient psychotherapy plus three day-long therapy sessions during which patients take MDMA.

Transcript

00:00I know I was on a downward spiral.

00:08I know I was on a self-destruction path, whether it was intentional or just engaging in riskier

00:15and riskier and riskier sports until one of them finally killed me because I didn't care

00:20anymore, because I had nothing to live for, because I couldn't keep a stable life, because

00:27I had PTSD.

00:30And how lucky am I to have gone through all that?

00:32And I have a career.

00:33I have a fiancee.

00:34I have my baby dog, Cider.

00:36I have a house.

00:37Probably one of the most memorable things was we got hit by rockets right before we

00:41were leaving, about a week or two before we left.

00:46And that kind of caught us by surprise.

00:49My best friend calls me.

00:50He's like, hey, I broke both my ankles skiing in Switzerland.

00:52I'm like, yeah, I'll come pick you up at the airport, man.

00:56And I go and I pick him up, and I'm driving him home.

01:02And we're sitting outside his mom's house, and he's sitting in the back of my car.

01:09I think he'd ask me something like, you seem off tonight, like you seem quiet.

01:14And I just told him, like, yeah, I can't take it anymore, like, I don't have it in me.

01:21I think I'm just going to kill myself, like, I can't make relationships work, I can't make

01:26work work, I can't, you know, I had a goal of trying to become a doctor, like, it's just,

01:39I'm broken, like, I'm unlovable, I'm miserable to be around, I can't keep job, like.

01:49And he sat there and argued with me.

01:51Hey, you try talk therapy and that doesn't work, you try cognitive behavioral therapy,

01:56you know, saying what you feel immediately when you feel it, you know, realizing where

02:01you are in center.

02:04I'm like, dude, like, this is like 2019, I believe it's 2019 at the time, and like, I've

02:12been through it all.

02:13I'm like, no, dude, I've been trying for nine years, like, this isn't gonna work, there's

02:17no fix, there's no cure, there's no way out, dude, like, and he's like, what about ecstasy?

02:25I'm like, I don't do drugs, he's like, you're like, no, but like, didn't they do a thing

02:30with that?

02:31And I was like, I'd read like a headline somewhere.

02:33The other thing about the MDMA is you have all this empathy and you're able to just feel

02:41for yourself and realize how awful these things were.

02:47This therapy works, I know it works, I know it's effective.

02:50Think of it this way, when you have surgery for let's say appendicitis, if the surgeon

02:56makes the incision to remove your appendix without any anesthetic, it hurts.

03:02So in this case, the MDMA acts as an emotional anesthetic to allow the psychotherapeutic

03:11therapy to be administered without the individual experiencing excruciating emotional pain.

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