Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal by Tom Shroder

Author:Tom Shroder [Shroder, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

32.

RICK

(FULL FLOWER OF DEPRESSION)

Many in the ARUPA-Esalen-psychedelic research axis saw the DEA’s defiant dismissal of the judge’s recommendations as a final judgment on MDMA psychotherapy, leaving them with just two options: go underground or give up.

But Rick saw the defeat at the hands of the regulatory system as more of a speed bump than a brick wall. If they couldn’t win in the courts, they could win in the lab.

Those who didn’t share Rick’s optimism could be forgiven. As Judge Young himself pointed out in his ruling, “Because MDMA cannot be patented, no pharmaceutical company has had the financial incentive to carry out the extensive animal and clinical tests required by the FDA.”

Bringing even a plain vanilla drug through the multiple phases of clinical trials took years or even decades and cost millions of dollars. It was a process even pharmaceutical conglomerates hesitated to embark upon without a near-certain promise of fabulous profits once the drug won approval. The idea that a thirty-three-year-old college student with no corporate affiliation, no infrastructure, no scientific credentials, and no capital could usher an unpatentable, severely stigmatized Schedule I drug through the FDA maze was, plainly, ludicrous.

But not to Rick. He ginned up another nonprofit organization and got to work.

He gave his new organization a mouthful of a name to make it sound as serious and boring as a name containing the word psychedelic could possibly sound. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, chartered in 1986, had no illustrious board of directors, as had the Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories. Instead, Rick elected himself, an acquaintance with whom he used to trip at Grateful Dead concerts, and an ex-girlfriend he’d had a “beautiful” breakup with one night under the influence of MDA.

Rick’s new co–board members would be unlikely to force him into exile, as the last group had done. As Rick put it, “These were people that agreed with whatever I wanted and would let me do it.”

What he wanted was codified in the MAPS vision statement: “a world where psychedelics and marijuana are safely and legally available for beneficial uses, and where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of their risks and benefits.”

Rick hadn’t forgotten that the quick studies the ARUPA group had done of MDMA’s clinical safety and effectiveness had been picked apart in the hearings as sloppy science. He also knew that even the huge volume of research done on LSD and other psychedelics in the fifties and sixties didn’t meet the exacting methodological standards required to persuade the FDA of anything.

But he wasn’t starting from nothing. He had the animal studies he’d paid for through his original nonprofit, and he had no doubt those studies would meet with FDA approval; some had been conducted by the National Center for Toxicological Research, the FDA’s own research wing. They involved administering large amounts of MDMA to rats and dogs daily for twenty-eight days, then killing the animals and conducting exhaustive autopsies to assess the effect of the heavy dosing.

Rick had insisted on being present in the autopsy room as four or five dogs at a time were dissected on metal tables.

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