"There could come a day when MDMA is associated less with feeling good than with trying to get better.... In the late nineteen-nineties, a psychiatrist named Charles Grob published a study showing that MDMA could be safely administered in a medical setting. His researchers administered the drug at a hospital to volunteers.... The only person who had a problem with the tests, he reported, was the head nurse. She was annoyed that her nurses were neglecting their duties, instead choosing to spend time with the study participants. 'The subjects were so empathetic and interested in the lives of the nurses,' Grob wrote, that the nurses gravitated to them, eager to talk. One of the peculiarities of MDMA is that it turns its users into listeners.... [T]he sexiness associated with MDMA might not be one of its intrinsic properties; instead, the drug might work more broadly to deepen our interest in others. Therapy is a social pursuit: a good therapist provides not just insight and tools but a relationship in which it’s possible to change. When someone takes MDMA in the presence of a therapist, they might feel more supported and secure in this bond, and more able to dredge up painful feelings or hard memories without being overwhelmed by fear or shame...."
And, reading this, let me add, look out for the transformation of anything that you've thought of as sexual into something that isn't sexual at all.
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hmm? dosing up a hospital with MDMA, and seeing what happens..
I'm Pretty Sure i SAW that movie. It was produced by Bob Chinn and called "Candy Stripers" i think
look out for the transformation of anything that you've thought of as sexual into something that isn't sexual at all.
let me add, look out for the transformation of anything that you've thought of as sexual into something that isn't sexual at all.
We are animals, hard wired to reproduce.........Everything IS sexual. Denying that is ignoring the science.
Ketamine for a kick out of depression. MDMA for empathy. Pot to make the workday bearable. Magic schrooms for self enlightenment. LSD to change your mental address from here to infinity. Russian roulette for the grand finale. Bring it on.
Everything is being "medicalized."
You eat too much, packed on a few pounds? Now, you're suffering from obesity. ICD-10 International Classification of Disease, version 10 E66.0
Got yourself hooked on heroin? Substance use disorder. F11.20
Not very bright? Mild cognitive impairment of uncertain or unknown etiology. G31.84
Your kid is a brat? Oppositional defiance disorder. F91.3
Your income is exceeded by your outgo? Extreme poverty Z59.5
Just a coincidence that the government has gradually insinuated itself into every aspect of American healthcare over the past 60 years. It would be an unfounded conspiracy theory to believe that it's all part of some grand plan, wouldn't it?
I've tried MDMA--Ecstasy--a few times--three times, maybe four times, tops--in non-clinical surroundings. It was great fun! It made me feel giddy and euphoric, and disoriented in a manner similar to being tipsy (rather than drunk). Similar to but less intense and disorienting than LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, each of which I've also tried a handful of times. I was never a user of marijuana as I could not abide the burning and choking from inhaling the smoke and I was 31 or 32 before I ever tried any psychedelics. (In my high school years it was common for me to be the one person in a car of teens who was not smoking pot.)
I was inspired to try psychedelics by my reading of THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a wild and wooly literary jape, a massive and hilarious tale: "a satirical, postmodern, science fiction–influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati. The narrative often switches between third- and first-person perspectives in a nonlinear narrative. It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture, numerology, and Discordianism." (As described by Wikipedia.)
It was all about rearranging one's mental perspective in order to see the world anew, and, Hey! I wanted to try me some of that!
I never used any of these substances more than a few times each, due to lack of easy access of purchase (and, in the case of mushrooms, because of the horrible taste of ingesting it).
“look out for the transformation of anything that you've thought of as sexual into something that isn't sexual at all. “
As Michael Jackson said “it’s not sexual, it’s beautiful!”
MDMA has shown to be incredibly effective for treatment of PTSD in clinical trials.
They promised that marijuana was going to be a cure-all for any number of ailments, and that's all evaporated. I assume that this is just the same playbook.
I am not and never have been a drug "user". Not remotely. But I have tried every recreational drug, short of the injectables, just to see what they were all about. Some were unimpressive, some were good. But MDMA was in a class by itself - called simply wonderful.
A beautiful warm, contemplative, evocative, perspicacious, affectionate drug effect (impossible to clearly describe, really). But sex and sexiness? I never realized in the event that that was supposed to be part of the deal. It never occurred to anyone I was doing it with that it was a sex drug, anyway - and that's maybe a good thing, maybe a great loss. Of course we were always sitting calmly in a quiet living room, not gyrating with other bodies at a rave, so there's that.
I reluctantly quit after four or five times, realizing from the profound grip it had had on my mind that in the long run this drug was probably not a real good thing for my brain. But, truth be told, I would still love to drop some "Doctor Ma" now and then.
It is very easy to understand the result of the nurse experiment cited in the OP. And how MDMA is useful in PTSD. And certainly how it could play a valuable role in psychotherapy in general. The research has been quite adequately done, so yeah, "medicalize" it.
"They promised that marijuana was going to be a cure-all for any number of ailments, and that's all evaporated."
Did they? Has its efficacy as a supposed "cure-all" actually evaporated?
The problem is that some people too often are pigs. If they like something, they want it all the time. Marijuana ingested now and then in prudent amounts might in fact be the "cure-all" you say it was hailed as, Just as with anything else, from spirits to exercise to food, that which may be delightful or healthful taken in prudent degree can be unhealthy or even seriously deleterious to health and frame of mind taken in gluttonous amounts.
ndspinelli: I went to New College when Rick Dublin and Tim Leary were founding MAPS (well, Rick was), and handing out MDMA like candy. Doblin and certain suspect faculty were doing "research" that consisted of handing out (then-not-yet-illegal) MDMA at dance parties and then leaving out damp three-question "surveys" about the drug's efficacy in solving trauma and other problems. Give the right answers, get another peanut.
It was all bullshit drug seeking then, and it's all drug seeking bullshit now. If you bother to read those PTSD/MDMA studies, they have absurdly small and self-selected study cohorts, relatively little followup, and many of the most vocally "cured" are longtime drug addicts.
You can't do a real double blind study to test MDMA and PTSD. MAPS has been trying to use other people's suffering for decades (rape victims, traumatized soldiers) just to legalize the drug. In the process, they have left behind a trail of addicted and mentally destroyed victims.
Now they hang with the Deep State. Still a fan?
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