TRIPPING INTO MENTAL HEALTH

Last year I wrote in this space about the plight of Andrew Feldmar, a
68-year-old Vancouver psychotherapist, who was banned for life from
visiting the United States when a border agent did a routine Google
search and discovered an obscure journal article in which Feldmar
wrote about a clinical LSD experience he had had decades earlier.

Although he has been unsuccessful in appealing this heavy-handed act
of the Department of Homeland Security, I see Feldmar is not exactly
disavowing banned substances. Last week Feldmar wrote an article in
Britain's The Guardian newspaper headlined Psychedelic drugs could
heal thousands, in which he summarized promising recent efforts to
harness these undeniably powerful substances for medical advancement.

Indeed, Feldmar announced he is partnering with the Florida-based
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies "in what
hopefully will be Canada's first government approved clinical trials
in 40 years, evaluating MDMA- assisted psychotherapy for subjects
with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder."

MDMA is, of course, the drug that has been known on the street as
ecstasy for the past 25 years. Feared and reviled by anti-drug
forces, it has been studied during that time almost exclusively by
government-funded researchers overtly seeking to prove its harmful
qualities. Worldwide, efforts to identify MDMA's potential benefits
have been suppressed.

Although first accidentally synthesized in Germany by the Merck
pharmaceutical company in 1912, it wasn't until the 1970s that the
drug was simultaneously discovered by two seemingly disparate groups:
nightclubbers and psychotherapists. Both noted MDMA's consistent
effect: a pervasive feeling of well-being combined with heightened
emotional bonding with others.

One therapist suggested that street-level dealers must have chosen
the name ecstasy to make it an easier sell. The real and more
accurate name, he said, should be empathy.

As one Newsweek writer effused in 1985, his first dose was like "a
year of therapy in two hours."

Indeed, psychologists at the time produced hundreds of anecdotal
reports that by administering the drug to troubled patients under
controlled therapeutic conditions, chronically negative mental
patterns could be dismantled. Formerly bereft people discovered inner
joy and a reassuring sense of belonging that endured even when the
effects of the drug were ostensibly gone. That, of course, was before
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency stepped in and saw to it that MDMA
was made illegal, casting it into the same category as heroin. All
such studies were henceforth abandoned.

Thanks to MAPS, however, that began to change in 2003 when
psychotherapists lobbied for and won the right to start a
comprehensive new American study on using the drug to treat severely
traumatized individuals, much like the one Feldmar is proposing.

Based in South Carolina, the study results will soon be officially
published. But news accounts have already described some astonishing
outcomes, like the case of Donna Kilgore, a 39-year-old victim of a
violent rape who subsequently sleepwalked through 15 years "like a
corpse." But after one guided session on the drug, Kilgore was
transformed. The next day, she said "was like walking into a crayon
box where everything was clear and bright. I did better in my job, in
my marriage, with my kids. I had a feeling I'd never had before:
hope. I felt I could live instead of exist."

As Feldmar describes the phenomenon, "debilitating effects of shame
have been annulled, heavily defended hearts opened, and stayed open,
and people acquired the ability to enjoy the sacrament of every
living moment without distraction by past regrets or future worries."

To me that sounds like a miraculous Rx. I truly hope that the
Canadian government does not decide to stand in the way of any
breakthrough Feldmar et al might achieve for the millions among us
who dwell in abject misery.

I also concur with Feldmar when he writes, "I hope I will be invited
into the U.S. before I die to teach professionals how to use
psychedelics for the benefit of all."