LET'S GET REAL ABOUT DOUBLE-EDGED DRUGS USE

FIGURE the logic here. If you've been abused as a child or you've been
raped, you could be suffering PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder.

The good news: there might be a medicine that could help you get over
it. The bad news: it's illegal to take the medicine.

In fact, it's even illegal for scientists to do studies on it, to prove the
claims that it does actually help people with PTSD.

The drug is MDMA, better known as ecstasy.

Ecstasy was being used by psychiatrists to treat PTSD back in the 1980s,
before it was made illegal, and those psychiatrists claimed they were
having some success with it.

The drug was useful because of its ability to allow people to open up their
emotions. This is often a difficult thing for PTSD sufferers to do because
a flood of bad emotions comes rushing in.

These make it hard for them to talk about their abuse and if they don't
talk about it during therapy they can't learn to deal with it and get over it.

But what psychiatrists found in the 1970s and 80s is that if victims take
an ecstasy tablet, they are more able to talk freely. Then it became
illegal and the therapy was banned.

The ban is even more absurd, given that PTSD sufferers are often given
drugs for their condition anyway - legal antidepressants. The
antidepressants work by boosting the sufferers' happy brain chemical,
serotonin.

That's just the way ecstasy works. Yet if ecstasy were given instead,
patients might actually be exposed to less mind-altering drugs.

That's because legal antidepressants have to be taken for months or even
years. Some people end up taking them for life.

Yet ecstasy taken just twice seems to be all PTSD victims need to open up
to their therapists and deal with their problems.

So the law may actually be forcing people to have far more
serotonin-increasing drugs in their systems than they would have if they
took ecstasy.

Ecstasy is not the only drug that holds medical promise. Some scientists
think the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, could help
people with obsessive compulsive disorder.

This is a condition that leaves some so obsessed with last-minute checking
they can't even leave the house.

A lot of research was done in the 1960s showing that LSD could be useful
for treating drug addiction. LSD itself is not addictive.

American psychiatrist John Halpern thinks the hallucinogenic cactus,
peytote, could also be a useful medicine. Its active ingredient is
mescaline and he thinks it could be helpful for treating alcoholism.

But once again it is difficult to further investigate these claims because
the drugs are illegal today.

Surely there is some way we can keep the drugs illicit for social use but
allow them to be investigated as medicines.