Virginia Wright (Interview Archive)

This is A Psychology of the Future, an online summit put together by Erik Lenderman, who hosts conversations with people working across self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. In this session, Erik welcomes Virginia Wright, who holds an M.B.A. and brings a fundraising background to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS. Her work there supports psychedelic research for medical and scientific purposes, including a project to develop MDMA, the compound often called ecstasy, into a prescription treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Virginia opens by explaining that she joined MAPS roughly three years ago, arriving with no prior exposure to psychedelic research or therapy. She offers to walk listeners through the subject the way she had to learn it herself: some history of how the movement developed, a closer look at the projects MAPS is currently funding and sponsoring, and her own sense of where psychedelics and psychotherapy might be headed.

Research is only one part of what the organization does. MAPS also publishes books on psychedelic therapy and research, all of which live on the group's website. Virginia stresses that nearly everything she plans to discuss is public: the studies, the protocols, the records of each new project. That kind of openness is rare in the field. As she frames it, the point is to get these medicines to the people who need them rather than to guard the work as proprietary. Anything she references can be found at maps.org.

She also describes a harm reduction program that sends volunteers into festivals where people may be using psychedelics. Burning Man is one example. There the group sets up what they call Zendos, safe spaces grounded in the still young theory and practice of psychedelic therapy. It gives people a supported place to move through a difficult experience, built on the same principles guiding the clinical work.

From there, Virginia turns to the fuller picture she promised: the story of how the movement reached this point, the specifics of the current trials, and her reading of what the future holds for these substances in a therapeutic setting.