Psychedelic Therapy Crashed and Burned. MAHA Might Bring It Back

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https://www.wired.com/story/psychedelic-therapy-mdma-maha/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_BigStory_080325&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_content=WIR_BigStory_080325&bxid=67883001cdeb6340250c3d97&cndid=85787720&hasha=c9edd795ab58c731e64cc2832451a46d&hashb=92cd5a4e4f9a554757364e6cc6a52d8ff33f14ec&hashc=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&esrc=bx_multi2nd_science&utm_term=WIR_BigStory

Psychedelic Therapy Crashed and Burned. MAHA Might Bring It Back

Jul 29, 2025

Abuse allegations and infighting helped kill a campaign to legalize MDMA for medical use. Trumpworld is giving the therapy’s advocates hope for a second shot.
This was supposed to be the year of the MDMA revolution.

About this time last year, prescription MDMA looked like a sure thing. After decades of clinical research, political wrangling, and aggressive promotion, the popular underground club drug was set to be tamed and medicalized, with a stamp of approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Then, it wasn’t.

In a stark change of course, the FDA rejected the MDMA therapy it had been considering by a 10-1 vote. The decision derailed psychedelic medicine for the foreseeable future.

Except for one thing—an unexpected lifeline from the Trump administration. In May, the FDA’s new commissioner, surgical oncologist Marty Makary, appeared on cable news to declare MDMA and other Schedule 1 narcotics “a top priority for this FDA and this administration.”

Elsewhere, Mr. MAHA himself, the US Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spoken positively about the psychoactive stems-and-bark tea ayahuasca. Matt Zorn, a lawyer recently appointed to RFK Jr.’s department, had previously fought the US government to allow access to cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms.

Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, has spoken of the benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, claiming that psychedelic mushrooms helped her find love and made her feel like “part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls.”

Psychedelic medicine, as it turns out, slots rather comfortably into the burn-it-all ethos of RFK Jr.’s movement. But as MDMA’s advocates regroup to take advantage of this surge of support, they’re also reckoning with why they failed to win over the FDA—and whether a second attempt could go better.

Could the psychedelic world’s new Trumpworld allies be the ones who finally help it achieve its goal?

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For almost half a century, American psychedelic medicine—and MDMA in particular—has had one indispensable advocate: Rick Doblin. On a cool December morning, I met Doblin at his bright purple craftsman home in the Boston suburbs. Dressed in a well-worn chamois shirt and khakis and with a wiry tangle of hair, he was cheery and avuncular. His look was classic New England and a bit bedraggled, befitting the scion of a wealthy industrialist family turned elder statesman of the counterculture.

Doblin first tried LSD in 1971 as a freshman studying psychology at Florida’s experimental New College. By 1982, he was studying under pioneering psychedelics researcher and therapist Stanislav Grof at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

At the time, many at Esalen were excited about a legal chemical called MDMA, which was said to help people conquer fear and forge profound connections with others. Doblin sampled the drug with a girlfriend and was shocked at how easy it became to talk through their issues.

But then, to Doblin’s chagrin, the US criminalized MDMA, and in 1986 he founded a nonprofit called MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

For the next several years, MAPS was a one-man operation. To advocate for MDMA’s legalization, Doblin collected reports from animal studies on the drug’s toxicity and lined up experts to argue with Drug Enforcement Administration officials on Phil Donahue.

He slipped into Nicaragua during its civil war and provided the drug to clinicians to treat traumatized soldiers and civilians. He even subjected himself to excruciating spinal taps in an attempt to disprove a prevalent belief that MDMA depleted natural stores of serotonin.

Doblin believed early on that it was essential to distance MAPS from the counterculture to gain mainstream credibility. (The organization’s first Psychedelic Science conference in 2010 instituted a “no tie-dye” rule for staff.) He set out to collect clinical evidence on the benefits of MDMA and other prohibited drugs. He then used those results to wage a campaign to change public opinion and ultimately end prohibitions. Between 2005 and 2017, MAPS refined a model for clinicians to administer MDMA to patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, guide their experiences, and provide post-trip emotional support. Its 74-page manual stressed the importance of “inner healing intelligence”—a concept touted by Doblin’s mentor Grof, which holds that the human psyche has an “innate capacity” to heal itself.

During this time, MAPS operated as a charity, taking in over $6.7 million in 2013 to fund its research and advocacy. The organization prided itself on living its values of drug destigmatization; it had a policy where employees could consult with their managers on “smokable tasks” that could be completed under the influence of drugs. (“I personally feel like strategizing and brainstorming goes better when I’m high,” Doblin explains.)

But the cornerstone of Doblin’s plan—establishing MDMA’s efficacy in a clinical trial—required resources of a different magnitude. MAPS needed to raise more than $100 million for research and operational costs. So in 2014 the organization minted a for-profit subsidiary, which came to be known as Lykos Therapeutics.

The article continues at the link above ...

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen: