Ecstasy drug therapy - TechKnow

it is a video that is extremely personal our fears are dancing between us run a woman's private pain examined for scientific research so healing instead of holding a spa she's on one of America's most popular party drugs forget what you've heard about Molly X or MDMA it makes you feel euphoric happiness love what you're about to see is the intersection of therapy and science and a journey to find the truth about MDMA this is techno a show about innovations that can change lives the science of fighting a wildfire we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity we were doing it in a unique way this is a show about science by scientists tonight techno investigates Molly hey guys welcome to techno I'm Phil Torres MDMA moly ex call it what you want this drug is offering some intriguing and even surprising potential in both the military institutional perspective and medical scientific and that's why I'm joined by Technos Lindsay Moran and Cara Santa Maria who can explain it from neuroscience perspective now I've seen Molly as a club drug but as a therapeutic drug the military once used this as what they imagined could be a truth serum and now there's evidence that suggests that it could help PTSD sufferers and you know scientists have long been intrigued by the sort of empathic benefits of MDMA but now for the first time there's an FDA backed study so that they can see if these results are scientifically quantifiable this serene treatment room nestled in the woods of South Carolina couldn't be further than the pulsing lights and booming music at this Electronic Music Festival at festivals and nightclubs the illegal drug Molly or ecstasy is part of the culture called Mali or X on the street MDMA is really methylenedioxypyrovalerone when taken MDMA acts on the brain by causing neurons to release more serotonin this also causes the neurotransmitter dopamine as well as hormones like oxytocin to be released all leading to a heightened feeling of trust and compassion this is why MDMA is often called and an pathogen a Hollywood club goer explains I think people like taking MDMA because it makes you feel euphoric it makes you feel like you're in SIA t is released feelings of happiness and you can't talk about MDMA without talking about love and that's essentially why people take it and although this clinical setting is a world away patient Rachel Hope just took the illegal drug MDMA I was very anti-drugs a teetotaler I had seen what drug use had done to people in the 70s I blamed a lot of the things that had happened to me on people's drug and alcohol abuse Rachel spoke with techno from her new home in Berlin she's hopeful she's put her difficult past behind Rachel says as a child she was severely neglected and by age six she'd been sexually abused in the 90s she was diagnosed with PTSD although back then she says they called her condition acute anxiety I spent up to six weeks at a time hospitalized ER in clinics specializing in trauma no matter what anybody did or gave me and how motivated I was it was highly compliant I finally told this therapist I said I'm doing everything you told me to do I'm doing everything right why am I getting worse it was hysterical and he said because we have no cure for PTSD still for more than 16 years she tried conventional therapy in 2005 Rachael applied for and became part of a revolutionary study she was one of 23 patients to undergo mdma-assisted therapy she was initially a bit hesitant I also believe like most people that this medication puts holes in your brain and it's it you know it can't possibly do anything Technos Lindsay Moran travelled to South Carolina to meet with dr. Michael MIT Hoffer the psychiatrist who led the MDMA study the clips you're about to see may look like a standard therapy session but Rachel Hope had just been given 125 milligrams of pure MDMA Rachel gave tech no special permission to view these never-before-seen clips she also gave the MIT hoppers permission to discuss her therapy session but maybe being willing to let go of trying to understand for a few minutes in this videotape session rachel shares what she says was a difficult relationship with her mother why didn't you want anybody else to have me either with the MDMA I was able to connect with these really primal and scary helpless feelings of what it was really like to have the mother who brought me to life truly not love me or want me what was wrong I was painful and hard and I felt all these feelings of being a helpless little child just wishing hoping what so that this person would love me and going what is wrong with me I mean you can go into some of these wounds with hypnotherapy but it's not going to change you the way MDMA allows you to go into the depth of the experience of a pre verbal precognitive wound treating PTSD virtually always involves visiting the trauma in a therapeutic setting and if they're not emotionally engaged enough then the therapy doesn't work so we think that MDMA seems to have this interesting combination of helping decrease fear and defensiveness at the same time so people are not numb from their emotions but they're not overwhelmed by them either but just now when I was talking with you I was feeling connected to you and then there was this little like a flare of fear that went up and then I decided I manic dhari I don't want to do it but then fear from me yeah but then the medicines like just go check it out you know you don't have to pick it up you just look good for a minute what would be something to be afraid of there be there yeah it wouldn't be enough did I did you would expect more is gonna be my fears that I couldn't be enough I couldn't match your mind and your thoughts and yeah very similar you keep have you see how we can both our fears are dancing between us yeah they're making art mm-hmm they're out in the open running around right holding us down so much why is that such a significant moment in the beginning she says I feel connected with you which we were talking about the way MDMA helps with the therapeutic connection but it wasn't this that everything was fine and she wasn't feeling anything else because then very quickly she was able to recognize consciously have clarity about the fact that other feelings were coming up including fear and she was able and willing to express that rather than try to move away from it but establishing trust between doctor and patient is essential I realized that I had so many guards up in relationship to women I had a very hard time making binding lasting like sister friendships so I wanted to work on that with Annie myth over Rachel says she saw almost instant improvement after the mdma-assisted therapy although it's key to remember she as well as all the test patients did undergo extensive post sessions to process the emotions the MDMA dug up it's not just what happens during the MDMA effect a process it's an experience that continues to unfold so it's important to have proper support to help people integrate and continue to benefit from the experience in july 2010 dr. MIT Hoffer published the findings from this first phase of his study in the Journal of psychopharmacology a positive clinical response occurred in 83% of those patients given MDMA that's in comparison to the 25% found in placebo patients so we often have the sense well maybe a couple years worth of therapy just happened today so there's something about the MDMA that seems to help a lot happen in a short period of time today Rachel insists she is completely recovered from PTSD and is living a healthy life with no long-term side effects how is that possible it makes sense that if people can have a deep enough experience of coming to terms with trauma you can argue whether it's secure or in durable remission but in any case she doesn't have the symptoms that would qualify for the diagnosis of PTSD anymore the MIT offers received enough funding to enter a second phase testing this time a test group of War veterans with PTSD participated the results from this study will be submitted to the FDA their long-term goal is to study whether MDMA should be reclassified by the FDA so it becomes legal for medicinal uses I think it the rational thing to do is learn everything we can about the possible risks and benefits and act accordingly not to put it in a separate category just because it's been used recreationally the drug was given orally to the men in the hospital ward at 11:15 and they immediately embossed arriving at the exercise area ten minutes later at 11:40 the first effect the drugs make their appearance the men no longer take cover they relax and begin to giggle this British Army experiment was filmed in 1964 the effects of psychedelics on humans has been tested officially and unofficially for at least six decades the purpose of locked their era of urgency and many men are laughing the US Army conducted their own chemical warfare testing using soldiers as test subjects during the same period the American government was trying to determine if LSD could act as a truth serum perhaps most troubling was a covert operation cooked up by my former outfit the CIA codenamed MKULTRA according to agency documents officially Declassified in 2001 from the 1950s until at least 1964 the agency was secretly dosing inmates and also using prostitutes to lure John's whom they could then unknowingly drugged they then observe their behavior in what was essentially a government sanctioned mind-control study well the US government was attempting to use psychedelics for their benefit secretly scientists were also using them on the academic side Technos Cara Santa Maria met with dr. Charles Gro a pioneer in the therapeutic use of MDMA and other psychoactive drugs she visited his high-security lab at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center in a safe that's bolted to the ground behind one locked door and then behind this other one here researchers at Harbor UCLA Medical Center keep their MDMA under lock and key literally Grove says that as controversial as the drug is today it wasn't initially viewed as an illegal street drug research for psychedelic compounds in the 50s and early mid 60s early the cutting edge of psychiatric research there was great excitement and enthusiasm about the range of effects of these drugs how they might facilitate our understanding of not the brain unfortunately by the mid late 60s it was associated became associated with a politically active counterculture recreational use of psychedelics was on the rise so were overdoses and deaths associated with them so dr. Grove says that pressure against psychedelic research began to build there was a great deal of cultural upheaval and by and large primarily for political reasons all research by nearly 70s was repressed for years MDMA had flown beneath government regulators radar in 1984 the DEA began investigating whether it should be classified as a schedule 1 drug meaning it has no medical use and high abuse potential a year later under the Controlled Substances Act MDMA was added to the schedule 1 list dr. Alicia Danforth a psychologist and researcher who study psychedelics explains the impact research has been hindered because MDMA was put on Schedule one and putting it in the most prohibitive class of controlled substances and a lot of research that could have taken place since it was scheduled in the mid 80s has been postponed so there are some things that we know about MDMA but there's a lot more to learn by 1986 a growing number of psychedelic researchers had begun to lobby and even sue the federal government the multidisciplinary Association of psychedelic studies or maps was born Rick Doblin self-proclaimed hippy turned advocate researcher and fundraiser began his mission it became apparent to me that the only way back into legal use of MDMA would be through the FDA would be to medicalize MDMA through scientific research launching maps into a thirty-year struggle with federal regulators that's resulted in small but privately funded MDMA studies across the world it's Friday night in Hollywood the dance clubs along Hollywood Boulevard are starting to fill up with partiers Molly is part of the scene a team of volunteers from a nonprofit called dance safe has hit the streets - as members of the harm reduction movement they're on a mission that they think is very important so you use this term harm reduction what does that really mean well harm reduction is acknowledging the fact that despite zero-tolerance drug policies people are still going to use drugs so the end goal is to keep people safe alive and really prevent overdose and death having attended hundreds of concerts across the country this summer they know firsthand it's been a deadly festival season in several states high-profile media reports of overdoses and deaths associated with the drugs often mistakenly called Molly or X underline the importance of their work I had a buddy actually died last year because he ate someone told him LSD and it was like some research chemical knock off actually put 30 people don't kill five and that really brought my awareness of this anonymous festival-goers experience is not unique among those who admit to taking Molly or ex independent private testing group erowid has collected data by offering anonymous testing of samples they've been able to track how often Street pills sold as ecstasy or Molly actually have MDMA in them of the almost 3,700 samples submitted so far this year they found just 27 point five percent of the time it was pure MDMA so Dan safe volunteers are armed with information about the dangers of taking unknown substances and they even carry self testing drug kits they will test anyone's drugs on site for free no questions asked they let me try a kit for myself using a sample of a white substance a volunteer found lying on the ground at a rave so the damn safe test kit is really simple to use you're gonna want to take a really tiny amount of the unknown substance and scrape it on to any white porcelain surface now there are four reagents involved to help you really narrow down what your possible substance is so one drop is all it takes and the reaction will occur within five to thirty seconds max it looks like it's kind of an orangish color so it's possibly either methamphetamine or amphetamine the problem with Molly is significant and not just in hollywood cities across the u.s. are seeing a rise in substances called Molly or X on the street in the last year the DEA has also seen a huge spike in synthetic drug imposters posing as Molly tech knows Lindsay Moran has that part of the story we're just outside Washington DC at the DEA special testing and research lab this is where drug seizures and samples from all over the world are sent to be chemically identified gel head is a supervising chemist at the lab every drug exhibit that's submitted to the laboratory is approached as a complete unknown we don't suspect that it's anything until we conduct our analysis and make an actual identification though I don't test thousands of drugs each year she has two materials and they are both white powders and so they're going to both be prepared in the same way most our evidence collected during seizures using the most advanced equipment in the world it's still a challenge identifying the constantly changing chemical compositions found in synthetic imposters and we've determined that it's methalone do you ever test something and lo and behold it's pure MDMA or is it typically not we do analyze and identify pure MDMA we do however also identify it and it's something completely different but DEA spokesman rusty pain is quick to debunk an MDMA myth some people have the perception that MDMA if it's pure isn't dangerous what's the reality there's no such thing as a good batch of drugs versus a bad batch of drugs ask the parents of the dead kids to a certain degree leading mdma-assisted therapy Michael MIT Hoffer agrees his samples are kept in a safe he stresses MDMA should always be given to patients while they're under psychiatric supervision so their physical and mental states can be closely monitored it's important to note this is not take-home medicine people only receive MDMA depending on the protocol about three times a month apart under direct supervision and while the DEA is in charge of enforcing penalties against those who use MDMA or ecstasy outside approved clinical research the agency takes no official stance on it our job is law enforcement we leave the medical and scientific decisions to doctors and researchers and scientists you don't want cops making decisions about what should be medicine what shouldn't be medicine I gotta say this one really fascinates me because it's something that scientists have wanted to study for decades but there is a taboo out there holding them back from it and laws that were holding them back from them completely and I think that this is a really important point to make even though when you're under the influence of a drug like MDMA you feel more open and more connected and and and really empathetic with the people around you it's a fleeting experience in a therapeutic context so this can be used to the therapist advantage it's not about pop a pill you're gonna get better it's really kind of an assistive property to the therapy itself and I think that's the important point to make that with or without the MDMA the therapy is going to happen the MDMA potentially can help it happen a little bit more maybe break down some of those barriers exactly I think it's gonna be a long time before we see something like this as say the go to treatment for people suffering from combat trauma I mean we've covered four techno some other experimental treatments for PTSD like virtual reality and hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment I have to say it'll probably be a while before the VA is willing to delve into this kind of treatment just because of the conceptual taboo well thank you guys for sharing both personal experiences and what you saw during this piece now MDMA is certainly going to keep presenting a challenge for law enforcement and medical researchers so we're gonna keep an eye on this story thanks for watching techno catch you next time dive deep into these stories and go behind the scenes at aljazeera.com slash techno follow our expert contributors on twitter facebook Instagram Google+ and more you

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 26,570

Rating: 4.7046981 out of 5

Keywords: 5133265977001, drug abuse, trauma, us veterans, Al Jazeera English, News, ptsd, nogeoblock, science, al Jazeera, USA, jazeera, TechKnow, ecstasy, Science and Technology, youtube, drug therapy, therapy, Drugs

Id: NdxcO5BSex8

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2016