Today, Explained - Ecstasy Therapy: Penicillin for the soul

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

In 1980s Berkeley, an eccentric chemist and his wife, a self-taught therapist, experimented with MDMA. Their work would kickstart a decades-long campaign to mainstream psychedelics as a therapeutic tool — one that’s coming to a head this month, with a decision due from the FDA. This episode was reported and produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Lissa Soep and Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. It’s the first in a series supported with a grant from the Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Halima Shah, one of our reporters and producers here on the show. Halima, the country's thinking about who the next president will be, what the next government will look like. But you're here to tell us about something that our current government might do this month in August. Yeah, I'm here thinking about what the next big drug might be. MDMA, the drug that most people might know as ecstasy or molly, is actually under consideration by the FDA as a potential therapeutic drug. And this drug, unbeknownst to most probably, has been on quite a journey to get here. It has. And today we're going to take a journey from the 1970s all the way to today, where this drug goes from this kind of reflective, introspective drug

to this demon drug of the dance floor, all the way to something that could potentially treat some of the toughest cases of PTSD. FDA, MDMA, maybe a little DEA, PTSD, coming up on Today Explained. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement,

and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Explained. Halima, before we get too deep into the history of MDMA and various therapeutic treatments that may exist, we should remind people that this drug is, and for a very long time has been, illegal. It's true. It has been illegal my entire life.

And it turns out it's been illegal my entire life. Yes. It's something that the DEA has classified as a very bad drug since 1985. Basically, the agency has a way of classifying drugs from one to five. And the lower the number, the more the DEA has a problem with it. So schedule five will have cough syrup and anti-diarrheal drugs, and schedule one will have heroin and MDMA. But the thing is, is that recent science suggests MDMA has lower abuse potential than previously thought. So today, there's these really promising and controversial trials that suggest MDMA plus therapy can treat PTSD, which is a really big deal because 6% of Americans will have it at some point,

and some of them will improve with the treatments we've had for decades. Others will not. So there are people with treatment-resistant PTSD who are hoping that this month the FDA approves MDMA-assisted therapy. But that might not happen because an independent advisory committee told the FDA that this therapy isn't ready to go public yet. Although I did feel there was some effectiveness here, I don't feel like the risks, the missing data, the gaps, the unknowns outweigh that benefit. So now MDMA-assisted therapy, which was expected to be one of the first psychedelic therapies to emerge out of the underground, is at this kind of make-or- break point. And as I started looking into the clinical trials and the FDA decision, I became fascinated by how old this idea of MDMA in therapy is and how long people have been pushing for it. How old is it? Well, technically MDMA was created over 100 years ago by a German drug maker, but it sort of went dormant.

The story really gets going in the U.S. in the 1970s in Northern California. So you think you know how the mind works. It just is a lot to be found. You have to find out by influencing, changing, disturbing. There's a chemist named Alexander, a.k.a. Sasha Shulgin. He's respected in his field. He creates a successful pesticide for Dow Chemical. He did expert witness work for the DEA.

But the thing that put him outside of the mainstream, besides his Hawaiian shirts and sandals, was his passion for psychoactive compounds, which he said he synthesized hundreds of. My curiosity was if such a simple molecule can allow me this type of openness, this so-called psychedelic experience, what modifications that molecule will modify, improve, change, redirect that type of introspection.

By 1976, Sasha manages to synthesize MDMA. And he tests it on himself. 25 milligrams, no effect. 40, no effect. 60 milligrams, no effect. 81 milligrams, I got a plus one. 53 minutes, smooth shift into a light intoxication. Very scientific about taking drugs for fun. For science. Sorry, for science.

Well, he wasn't the only one doing this in a science-y way. He'd take the stuff he made in his lab to a research group of about eight people and they'd trip on it together. And then they'd record their observations. And these people were scientists, therapists, friends, who all kind of had their own way of looking at psychedelics, including one woman in the group who was very interested in Jungian psychology. Her name was Anne. Basically, I see psychedelics as spiritual tools, which is not quite the way Sasha sees them. She eventually married Sasha Shulgin, and they were bonded by their mutual but differing interests in psychedelics. Anne and others who were into psychotherapy believed that the stuff her husband tinkered with in his

lab could be like penicillin for the soul. Penicillin for the soul? They are very good tools for anyone who's on any kind of spiritual journey, whatever that means. And it means different things to different people. And psychotherapy can be a part of that. I mean, people who go into psychotherapy are on a spiritual quest, whether they call it that or not. Did it go anywhere or was it just some, you know, Bay Area kids getting high? Well, these were grownups. Anne and Sasha were both in their middle age when they met. And they've both died now, but they have left a legacy behind. And I wanted to understand how their experimentation

really set the stage for the world that we're in now. So I went to California to a place called Shulgin Farm. We're really taking a hike. Okay. Going up the side of the hill. Did you find any leftover MDMA from the 70s? I did not, but I did find a woman named Wendy Tucker. Oh.

I'm Ann Shulgin's daughter. Wendy is Sasha's stepdaughter. She was in high school when her mom first started seeing him. She was really blossoming. And she came and spent more time out here with Sasha over those couple of years that they were first together. And I could just see the change in her. It was like this expansion. When her mother lived with Sasha, Wendy often visited. And she still visits because she's trying to turn this farm into a living museum. To preserve everything from the tree the Shulgens tripped under to the house that they had dinners in.

The back door heads out to the cactus garden out here. And these are San Pedro. San Pedro, a.k.a. drug cactus. You can extract mescaline from this stuff, which Sasha did. This path leads to the lab. Wendy says it's an active lab, still used today by a friend. This was Sasha's lab for years and years and years. So you can hear something's running in here.

What is that smell? That's the smell of chemistry. Yeah, it used to be even more pungent in here, I gotta say. It was like a nail polish remover in garlic. Yum. There was a Fanta-colored liquid that was just spinning in a glass funnel. And as the fumes hit me, so did something else. This is a chemist's kitchen, where the ingredients were things that either grew in his backyard or were on a shelf a few feet away.

Here, things that we know as drugs are still chemical compounds with effects that are waiting to be understood. And you could taste them and find out what those effects are at your own risk. As you can see, it used to be a tool shed and a little basement to a house. It used to be an open fireplace here. And I find it pretty poetic that Sasha's lab was a converted tool shed because as a chemist, he saw himself as a tool maker. I'm looking for tools that can be used for studying the mind. And other people then will use the tools in finding out the aspects of the mental process and how it ties to the brain. And after synthesizing MDMA here in the tool shed, that's exactly who Sasha shared it with.

About 20 miles from Shulgin Farm in Berkeley, I met one of the people who used MDMA in his practice back in the 80s. His name is Phil Wolfson. He's a physician and a friend of the Shulgins. By the time I got into it, there were quite a few hundred practitioners using MDMA along with other psychedelics. I reached out to a lot of different experts about this early MDMA era. And one historian I spoke to suggested the number of MDMA therapists was closer to two dozen. But it's hard to verify because this wasn't happening very openly. Because MDMA was in a regulatory gray zone. It was not an FDA-approved prescription drug,

and it also was not scheduled as a controlled substance by the DEA. What it was was promising to a small but influential circle of countercultural scientists and therapists. And the Shulgens were really at the center of that circle. Sasha was the chemist and Anne's development was around being kind of the wise woman for people and people would call her up and ask her advice. Phil Wolfson said she would run therapy groups with him and he also offered MDMA-assisted therapy on his own. There's one

couple that he told me about that he still remembers, a husband and wife from Ohio. They were a very dysfunctional couple. They'd been in a long-term marriage. They had four boys, and the woman was very unhappy in the marriage. And the man was fairly indifferent as a human being. Sounds like a description of many men. Well, the thing about MDMA is that it makes you feel open and empathetic. So for a psychedelic therapist,

that's great stuff if your client is too indifferent to notice problems in his marriage. What happens with certain people with MDMA who are not easily intimate is that they get close with MDMA and it wears off. And then they have a panic about the closeness that they felt. But the couple came and persisted and I saw them for a long period of time. Phil Wolfson's memories of this time are pretty hazy. And he actually told me that the woman in this couple died.

So I can't ask her what she thought of all of this. But in her therapist's opinion, things went really well. They eventually got divorced, which was good. And they each went their separate ways, found other partners, and she became a remarkable supporter of MDMA work and our work. There's a shift for the woman in this couple. The quote-unquote work of changing her marriage becomes the work of changing therapy with psychedelics. And it's all happening in an era when people felt like psychiatry needed a breakthrough. The medicines we're talking about

are promote love and kindness stuff. Not in every case, but psychiatry has always been suppressive and repressive. And now we're expansive, and we have been for a long time. This sounds so lovey-dovey, but not everyone's loving MDMA, right? Right. There's stories of incredible success, but there's also accounts of abuse from this early era.

There was a psychiatrist and a therapist who were both considered pioneers of this, and they lost their licenses after patients sued them for abusive sexual behavior in MDMA sessions. But MDMA's days, I think, were always numbered because it came on the scene after President Nixon declared a war on drugs. And what the drug war had already done by that point was make another psychedelic, which had therapeutic potential and became a recreational drug, illegal. That psychedelic was LSD. And the Shulgens were very aware of that, and they didn't want the same for MDMA.

So they wanted the drug to stay therapeutic. But obviously, that did not work out. The DEA comes for MDMA when we return on Today Explained. Thank you. digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older,

it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents, and they are ready with a battle-tested playbook.

The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times, and they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Today explained back with Halima Shah. Halima, up until this point, we've been talking about MDMA and therapy, kind of these experimental sessions that people are having in the 70s. But of course, that's not how most people know this drug. They know it as ecstasy.

They know it as X. They know it from popular culture. They know it from raves. When did people start to use this drug for fun? By the early 80s, it's obvious that MDMA isn't just a therapy drug. It's a club drug. And the journalist Rachel Neuer has written about these clandestine labs that start making MDMA and how the drug gets to the dance floor. She writes that you could order a beer and ecstasy at the Stark Club in Dallas. Wow. And that is pretty much how it gets on the DEA's radar.

The agency wants to ban this stuff that young club goers are using. And Ann Shulgin catches wind of this and decides to take matters into her own hands. So this is a letter that Ann Shulgin wrote to President Reagan, July 25, 1984. And back at Shulgin Farm, where there's photos of Anne and Sasha decorating the walls of the house, Wendy read her mom's words to me. Dear Mr. President, I am writing to you privately and urgently in the hope that the information

I have received from a single source who could well be misinformed is valid. Anne is like, this stuff is great for therapy. It dissolves barriers to communication and it creates empathy. It seems to allow contact with what might be called the God space within. And she's like, look, if the DEA makes this a Schedule I drug, we can't even use it in therapy. So why not make it a Schedule III drug, which is less restrictive, you can still crack down on the shady stuff in those clandestine labs. While allowing the informed and medically or psychologically trained people to continue using it in therapy. And then she builds up to this case about the Cold War, that a group of dissident psychonauts and spiritual leaders had shared the recipe for MDMA with like-minded people in the Soviet Union. MDMA might become the avenue for communication between the intelligent, concerned people of both countries in the effort to prevent nuclear war and the destruction of

the human experiment on Earth. Can we assume that's never happened? Based on the way the world is going right now, it's either happened and hasn't worked or it hasn't happened. So Anne's writing Reagan being like, Ron, baby, this thing's going to bring about world peace. You don't want to make it schedule one. Meanwhile, what's the DEA saying in his ear?

Oh, the DEA hates this. Well, guess what? We've got another drug. It is synthetic, and it makes you love everybody. This is an episode of The Phil Donahue Show from April 25th, 1985. It features a very frustrated DEA agent. But what we've seen in the last couple of years is an escalation of the availability. What are you concerned about? A lot of young kids bouncing around? Precisely. The other thing is when we apprehend these people, they can be dealt with. At the present time, it's not against the law. So you can't apprehend them? But you really want to, don't you? I think it's important.

Just one month later, that same DEA agent, Gene Hayslip, speaks at a press conference. This morning, the Drug Enforcement Administration is announcing its intention to place the drug known as MDMA, or by the street name, Ecstasy, under emergency controls in Schedule 1. The DEA says this is a health risk and effectively bans the drug. And research becomes very, very difficult to do. Wow. So this is a big moment for the trajectory of MDMA.

Yeah. MDMA is now a public enemy. And Sasha still has a DEA license that allows him to analyze scheduled substances. But the Shulgens have some fearful thoughts about what the drug war will do to their research. I remember both of us lying in bed speculating. We do other things than speculate. We had a vague picture in our minds of masked intruders breaking into the laboratory with baseball bats. To keep their findings from being destroyed or stashed away from the public, Anne and Sasha decide that they want to publish a book,

and they name it P-Call. For phenethylamines I have known and loved. Wow. I know, right? Rolls right off the tug. Phenethylamines are drugs that can have hallucinogenic or stimulant effects, like MDMA. And the book is this thinly veiled memoir that covers everything from the chemistry of psychedelics to the chemistry of the Shulgens. It talks about their childhood and their courtship, and it talks about the sex they had.

No, it's not sex. It's fantastic for making love. And there is a difference. The orgasm is a connection with God. When the Shulgens self-published Picol, they classified it as fiction, as an effort to protect themselves legally. The book was no longer an account or a manual for illegal drugs. It would become a story that featured illegal drugs. The first people we had sent copies to were people we knew in the DEA, the chemists in particular. So we felt that there was a possibility that the DEA would find this so interesting and even perhaps useful in some way, that maybe they wouldn't be too angry with us. It didn't quite work out that way, though.

Especially because after the book came out, Sasha boasted about his DEA license in the press. And I think that probably was a little bit of a slap in the face for them. Wow. Wendy thinks that's why the DEA did, in fact, raid Shulgin Farm in 1994. Classic. They were very polite when they came in their jeans. Not quite masked men with bats,

these were agents who noticed that Sasha Shulgin had chemical samples scattered around the place instead of cataloged and locked up like scheduled substances are supposed to be. I was here that day. We were just walking around the house with them as they were finding things that weren't locked up and pulled out little envelopes from the shelf with samples that people would send him and say,

this is a $10,000 fine, Dr. Shulgin. This is a $10,000 fine, Dr. Shulgin. This is a $10,000 fine, Dr. Shulgin. And the fines came out to $25,000. Wow. And Sasha also relinquished his DEA license. He certainly kept doing chemistry. He wasn't going to stop, but he, yeah, he had to be a lot more private about it.

So in the decades that followed, Sasha kept doing chemistry. DARE programs in schools talked about the dangers of ecstasy. Lawmakers kept on with their drug war. And that included a senator named Joe Biden, who introduced something called the Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy or RAVE Act in 2001. If I were governor of my state or mayor of my town, I would be passing new ordinances relating to stiff criminal penalties for anyone who held a rave. The promoter, the guy who owned the building.

So at this time, the scientific establishment is pretty against this too. Johns Hopkins University, which is now a ground zero for psychedelic research, publishes this really famous study in 2002. And in that study, it says that MDMA is neurotoxic, which means that it's poisonous for the brain. Wait, how does this go from a drug that some nice-sounding people in the Bay Area are tinkering with in the 70s to neurotoxic poison for your brain by the early 2000s to like, we're back at, you know, this is a potential psychotherapy for PTSD or something in 2024. What's that arc? Yeah, well, fun fact about the study is that it was eventually retracted because it turns out that Johns Hopkins injected the test subjects, which were 10 monkeys, with the wrong drug.

What? What did they give the poor monkeys? They gave them speed. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Wow, Johns Hopkins. I know it was embarrassing for them, but the damage is done at this point. I mean, the narrative around MDMA is neurotoxic, is out there. You hear that in the DARE programs in school. But at the same time, there are people

from the Shulgin era who don't buy that narrative. And that's why almost right after the DEA bans it, a psychedelic advocacy group is born. It's called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. And for the last 40 years, it's been advocating to make the drug medicinal, including by running clinical trials. And their advocacy has really taken hold in the last decade after a new era of U.S. wars and an epidemic of veteran suicides. I grew up in the dare era, where you had good drugs and bad drugs. Good drugs gave us the opioid epidemic. Bad drugs cured my PTSD.

And tomorrow, we'll get into how MDMA's reputation goes from bad drug to healing drug, starting with veterans. Okay, cliffhanger. That was Halima Shah. She reports and produces at Today Explained. Her reporting this time around is supported by a grant from the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. Thanks, guys.

And as she mentioned, we've got a few more episodes coming for you. This one was edited by Lissa Soap and Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Rob Byers and first name, Andrea, surname, Kristen's daughter, for anyone who was wondering.

We used clips from two documentaries, one's called Dirty Pictures, and the other's called Better Living Through Chemistry. Find them where you find your docs, find us right here, today explained. you