HEALING THROUGH MDMA

Marcela Ot'alora G. says she doesn't believe in "making drama out of
trauma."

But the private Lafayette woman finds herself becoming increasingly
public as she works to enlighten people about the positive outcomes
possible with MDMA.

It's an unlikely mission for a woman whose first experience with MDMA
landed her in a psychiatric hospital. Yet later experiences with the
same drug helped to dissolve the submerged trauma that had haunted her
for years.

At age 25, she already had attempted suicide twice. She had been raped
eight years earlier but had managed to suppress memories of that
violence - until she took MDMA with a friend in March 1984. Then the
memories erupted.

"If you've had trauma in your personal life, it will come up," she says.
"It was very frightening. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. My
friend took me because I was so suicidal."

At the hospital, she was given conventional drugs without good result.
Still suicidally depressed, she left the hospital and was encouraged to
try MDMA again with knowledgeable people.

"That was the beginning of my healing process," she recalls. "It was a
long process, but it was definitely the beginning. I don't believe you
take it (the drug) and everything is solved. You can bridge the gaps you
have. You know the work you have to do. It gives you a very clear
vision."

Marcela and her family - a daughter, a partner and his daughter - have
just returned from Spain, where she worked on an MDMA study under way at
the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

The double-blind scientific study, using placebos and varied MDMA doses,
is testing the effectiveness of MDMA in psychotherapy with female
victims of sexual assault who have developed chronic Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder.

"The women we've worked with in Spain got incredible insights from just
taking MDMA that one time," Marcela says. "The setting is very
important. These women have a goal of exactly what they want to
accomplish."

Her work there was done as part of an internship with the Naropa
Institute in Boulder, where she is to graduate in May with a master's
degree in transpersonal psychology.

Her thesis is a proposal to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to
launch a similar study here for PTSD sufferers, from war veterans to
rape victims.

Once focused on her life as an artist and teacher, Marcela now wants to
help others who have suffered trauma - a change sparked by a drug that
once devastated her but that she credits for her ultimate healing.