America Goes Psychedelic, Again

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Psychedelic drugs have been illegal for 50 years, but they’re trickling back into the mainstream because they show promise in helping treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health challenges.

We begin the hour with reporter Jonathan A. Davis visiting Psychedelic Science 2023, the largest-ever conference on psychedelic drugs. It’s put on by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization dedicated to legalizing MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly) and other psychedelic drugs. Research shows that MDMA-assisted therapy can help treat depression and PTSD, and it’s moving toward approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Psychedelics were studied in the 1950s and ’60s as mental health treatments, but the war on drugs put a stop to research. Now, these drugs are gaining bipartisan support from politicians looking for solutions to the mental health crisis among veterans.

Then Reveal’s Michael I Schiller visits a group of veterans who are not waiting for psychedelic-assisted therapy to be approved by the federal government. They’ve joined a church founded by an Iraq War veteran who uses psychedelics as religious sacraments. Schiller accompanies them on a retreat in rural Texas, where they share the depths of their post-traumatic stress and the relief they’ve felt after psychedelic treatments. He also explores the risks involved in taking these drugs.

We close with an intimate audio diary from a woman in Oakland, California, who’s going through therapy with the one psychedelic drug that can be legally prescribed currently in the U.S.: ketamine. Ketamine started out as an anesthetic, but researchers found it can help with treatment-resistant depression when used in tandem with talk therapy. Ketamine can be dangerous if abused, but it also has helped people find relief from mental health issues. This story was produced by Davis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal, a Michael Schiller,
0:07.0	sitting in for Alexan.
0:09.6	This past June, on a sunny afternoon in Denver, thousands of people fill the Colorado Convention
0:14.7	Center's main theater.
0:16.6	There are no empty seats in the house.
0:19.4	Two guys named Rick are on stage and they couldn't look more different from one another.
0:24.8	The first Rick to step up to the mic is Rick Doblin.
0:27.9	He's dressed in an all-white suit that's glowing under the glare of the spotlight.
0:32.0	Amazing.
0:33.0	The future is psychedelic.
0:36.0	Welcome to the psychedelic twenties.
0:38.9	Rick Doblin has spent more than three decades trying to get psychedelic drugs legalized.
0:43.8	The organization he leads, the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies, or
0:49.2	maps for short, has organized this conference.
0:52.4	When I think about this conference with over 12,000 registered people, with opening talks
1:00.1	by the governor of Colorado and over 500 other speakers, I can only wonder, am I tripping?
1:10.1	I think not.
1:12.5	It's not that I'm tripping.
1:14.0	It's that culture is tipping.
1:17.0	When he says the culture is tipping, he's talking about what's happening with psychedelic
1:21.2	drugs, which have been illegal for decades and are now beginning to go mainstream.
1:26.5	Which brings us to Rick number two, Rick Perry.
	...

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