Agony and Ecstasy

The December 18th issue of The Economist features an interesting article written by Craig Ward. In it, he describes a movement to alter the legal ban of the drug ecstasy (MDMA). There is, apparently, a significant amount of anecdotal and experiential evidence showing that MDMA can be used by psychotherapists to help treat their patients who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. According to Ward:

...in the 1980s MDMA, which at the time was still unregulated, escaped its semi-underground psychotherapeutic milieu and began to be taken by young people for the sheer fun of it. In a panic, America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), unaware of the therapeutic MDMA network, made an emergency classification in 1985 that placed MDMA in Schedule I—the most restrictive category for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use”...Although 500,000 doses of MDMA had by this point been used in therapeutic settings, the compound was thereafter banned worldwide.

Rescheduling MDMA as schedule II would allow psychotherapist (under close DEA supervision) to resume legally using the drug for treating their patients. This article is a great follow-up to the Newsweek article that was assigned for reading in anatomy class.