An Interview with Dr. Julie Holland on MDMA and Psychedelic Therapy
My curiosity about all of this got the better of me, so I started phoning the people quoted in a magazine article I'd read. I reached the writers themselves and had long conversations with them. The internet didn't exist yet, so these were all telephone calls. I spoke with Rick Doblin, with Lester Grinspoon, with George Greer, who had already done much of the early work with couples and with individuals. These were the practitioners running MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, and they were trying to keep doing that work even as the drug was being placed on Schedule I.
The therapists using the substance were deeply frustrated, because the scheduling meant an end to what they were doing. I was just starting out, a psychiatrist-to-be who already knew the direction my career would take, and my sympathies landed squarely with the people on the losing side of the fight. I wanted the therapists who were pushing back against the government for the right to use these tools to win.
I kept in contact with that whole group of clinicians and researchers over the years. Eventually I edited a book on MDMA and handed out the chapters to the very people I'd spent years talking to. The person synthesizing the MDMA for the studies, for example, got the chemistry chapter. That was 2001. So I've been on the edges of this for a long time, supporting the research into MDMA-assisted therapy.
In recent years my role has become more hands-on. I serve as a medical monitor, which means I help confirm the studies are run safely. I'm the medical monitor for the MDMA PTSD trials in South Carolina and for the ones in Boulder, Colorado.
Erik: That's wonderful. For anyone who knows little about MDMA, or is encountering it for the first time, could you describe what it does and what it offers?
Dr. Holland: I'd start by separating ecstasy from MDMA, because they aren't the same thing. Walk into a club or a rave or an electronic dance music event, buy a pill or a bit of white powder, and you might be hoping for MDMA, but what you actually get could be almost anything. Now, if it genuinely is pure MDMA, you're taking an unknown amount of a known compound. Since it behaves somewhat like methamphetamine, in the family of Speed, the experience resembles taking an ADD medication: sharper focus, a pull toward talking, interacting, connecting with the people around you. There's that quick, energized sociability, an eagerness about whatever is in front of you, a surplus of good energy pointed at something, and a desire to share it and connect with others over it.