Independence Day Special: This Is Your Country on Drugs

A NEW CLASS OF CRIMINAL

When I first met and married Dr. Alexander Shulgin, known to everyone as
"Sasha," he was still publishing his discoveries about psychedelics in
scientific journals.

I had spent about three years working as a lay therapist, which means I had
no proper credentials, no formal training and no reason to believe I wasn't
nuts. During my first year of self-training, I sat with a few friends, a
psychiatrist, a person who worked in state government, and then with a
couple of patients I inherited from the psychiatrist. We administered MDMA
at the usual psychotherapeutic dose of 120 milligrams, often with a
supplement of 40 or 50 milligrams at the one-and-a-half-hour point. (In a
few special sessions, we used another drug Sasha invented, a psychedelic -
which MDMA is not - called 2-CB, which has a clean, uncluttered effect on
the emotions.)

I learned a lot. Every new person was a new universe, and I had to listen
carefully - with both mind and heart - and be prepared to make mistakes.
And I had to learn that, when I did make those mistakes, it was vital that
I admit them to myself and to the patient as soon as I realized I'd been wrong.

In other words, I learned a lot of humility.

All this time, MDMA was legal.

Or, to be exact, it was not yet illegal. It was being used by a great
number of psychologists and psychiatrists, all across the country and in
Europe. But since it was an experimental form of psychotherapy, completely
unrecognized and certainly unapproved by the medical and psychological
establishment, most of us didn't really know what other therapists - lay or
professional - were doing.

Gradually word was getting around, and at social events some of us were
beginning to compare notes about the best ways of using this magical
insight drug.

The second and third years of my work as a lay therapist were different. I
met, worked with and then became co-therapist with an extraordinarily
skillful hypnotherapist. It was the most exciting work I've ever done. It
was also exhausting. Sessions would last a minimum of six hours, and if
there was a need for extended work because something important was trying
to break through, we would keep going until the breakthrough was
accomplished. I learned to limit these sessions to twice weekly because of
the amount of energy it took to concentrate on one person for six or more
hours with no more than bathroom breaks and perhaps a quick bite to eat,
remaining completely receptive and keeping one's intuition active and all
one's antennae wiggling efficiently.

In the 1980s, the legal departments of the scientific journals in which
Sasha had been publishing his research got cold feet and his work with them
came to an end. But we decided that this knowledge still had to be made
available, especially to the scientific community. If we couldn't count on
the cooperation of the journals while this new hysteria called the War on
Drugs was obscuring common sense, we would have to get the information out
in a book. We began working together on PIhkAL (Phenethylamines I Have
Known and Loved): A Chemical Love Story.

There were no journal articles published on the use of MDMA in therapy.
When the government decided to hold hearings on the possibility of
scheduling MDMA, all the therapists who had been using the drug had been
postponing writing about it, waiting for the time when they thought there
might be more receptivity in the professional societies. Of course, as we
now know, this was a tragic mistake.

If there had been just a few good papers submitted to the most respected
journals, we would have been able to use those papers as proof that MDMA
had "medical utility," which would have kept it from being slammed into
Schedule I, where the DEA categorizes drugs with "high abuse potential and
no recognized medical use."

In 1985, MDMA was made illegal.

I wasn't the only person who cried. This is a drug that for some clients
could save months of time and expense in psychotherapy, a drug that allows
insight into the parts of oneself that are unacceptable, unlovable and
unbearable while at the same time - in some way we still don't understand -
making it possible to see and acknowledge all these aspects of one's soul
without self-rejection, self-hatred and self-loathing. This drug, I felt
then and still feel now, could be the answer to Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD), especially in the case of war veterans.

Research on the use of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD is just now beginning
in Israel and Spain. This is research that should have been conducted 20
years ago.

When Sasha and I began writing our books, I gave up doing the therapy
sessions - not just because MDMA had become illegal, but because I knew I
wouldn't be able to give the best of myself to either work if I tried to do
both. Now, having stopped doing this kind of therapy for well over 10
years, I can lecture in public and write openly about it, while fully
trained and credentialed therapists who continued using MDMA underground
can say nothing without risking a charge of committing a felony.

A strange, new class of criminals: psychotherapists who refuse to give up
using a compound that helps rescue strained marriages, traumatized victims
of assault and rape, war veterans who cannot come to terms with the hellish
memories that haunt them, and people in search of expanding their spiritual
world.

I detest the use of the term Ecstasy for MDMA, as does Sasha. Not only has
Ecstasy come to be associated with raves, street sales of questionable
product, and lurid disaster tales on television and in the press, but the
stuff sold as Ecstasy is not always MDMA - there are, apparently, many
people willing to risk the lives of eager young adults by selling them
truly dangerous drugs under the name of Ecstasy. Also, the highest and best
use of MDMA is in therapy and for personal insight, which is somewhat
discouraged by noise and strenuous physical activity.

But considering that most large raves are held not far from big cities, and
that the young people growing up in those cities learn very quickly to be
suspicious of strangers, the use of MDMA at a rave is not entirely negative.

Under those circumstances, sophisticated, street-wise young adults can let
their guards down and for a few wonderful moments have a sense of euphoria
and participation with people they've never met before.

And euphoria is good for you.

Sasha is looking for tools with which to attempt an understanding of the
human mind. (Not brain, but mind.) My search is a bit different.
Psychedelics and visionary plants are, for me, tools for spiritual growth -
however you might understand that word, spiritual.

My true aim in life is simple: I want to get as close as I can to
understanding not just the human mind, but the mind of God - and I want to
be able to live with what I find. I believe that every human being wants
exactly the same thing, only most of us don't manage to articulate the wish
to ourselves.

We don't realize that that's what we're all trying to do. Psychedelics are
my way, but they are certainly only one of a multitude of ways, all
deserving of respect.

Next Article: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1192/a06.html