The potential for the use of psychedelics to help people with PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — has united lawmakers across the political spectrum, including Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Houston and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering green lighting one company’s treatment that uses MDMA, also known in its street forms as ecstasy or molly.
For folks in Texas who struggle with PTSD, this treatment could potentially open new avenues for recovery.
Cayla Harris, who covers state politics for the San Antonio Express-News, said there is still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the medical use of psychedelics.
“What we do know is that some people with PTSD and other post-traumatic stress conditions have had very quick results when they take this medicine,” she said.
“There are some success stories from taking these psychedelics, where people will feel very angry and have typical symptoms of PTSD and then they’ll take this treatment and then come out completely different people – happier, enjoying their life again. Just having really rapid results that you don’t see typically from other kinds of treatments for PTSD, like talk therapy or antidepressants.”
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Harris said there are some working theories about why this works for some people.
“PTSD rewires the brain,” she said. “From my talks with experts in this field, they believe that these psychedelic treatments encourage neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to kind of correct itself and rewire itself after going through different events or experiencing different stimuli.
So people who are undergoing this treatment, their brain will kind of catch up with them really fast and maybe correct some of the things that went wrong when they went through the trauma that they experienced or just help them find a quicker and easier path to recovery.”
Harris spoke to a Texas veteran named Steve Viola who participated in some experimental treatment in Mexico over the course of three days.
“He received two different types of psychedelics. So the first one was ibogaine, which is a plant, and then MDMA. And so he went there on a Friday, and on that Friday he had his first treatment of the ibogaine,” she said. “It was a very clinical setting. They laid him down, put a blindfold on him, put some headphones in so that he could listen to music. He took the drug and had an experience with it.
Imagine all of the movies that you’ve seen about how these kinds of trips go. And that was basically what he experienced. He said that he was able to go through different moments of his life, reexperience the trauma, and work through the trauma that he hadn’t been able to do in the past.”
Viola then had a day to rest and recover before his second treatment with MDMA.
“He took the MDMA and had a similar, but also very different, experience. He said that that one was completely terrifying for him personally,” Harris said.
“He thought that he was experiencing all the different trauma and pain and feelings that he had ever experienced at once, but that when he woke up, he was a completely different person and felt like a different person.”
Critics say these treatments do not have enough research behind them.
“Psychedelics can have very different impacts on different people. Not everyone has a good trip,” Harris said. “For example, in clinical trials as well, it’s very difficult to have a good placebo for this, and so it’s not entirely clear how accurate or reliable the research is at this point because people who receive the drug in these trials often are very, very aware that they are receiving the drug. And if they’re not, then they’re very, very aware that they’re not.”
Harris said there is also a concern that if the treatment does not get approved, people will start taking psychedelics recreationally, which is not the same as taking them in a supervised, clinical setting.
“There is one company that is currently up for FDA approval for an MDMA treatment,” she said. “There was an expert panel that was advising the FDA on that. And they overwhelmingly said, ‘hey, we don’t have enough research on this. This is not the time to approve this. We need more studies.’ And that happened in early June.
The FDA is not bound by the panel’s recommendation, but their recommendation was to not approve it. The FDA is going to take up this issue in August.”
