Virginia Wright on Psychedelic Research (Interview Archive)
Watch the drug ads on TV sometime. They sell you on the product for a few seconds, then spend the rest of the time listing everything that could go wrong. Every drug carries some risk, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But the way through the problem isn't fear. It's compassion paired with science, and that's the approach we take here. I want to spend a little time explaining it.
By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the earlier research started circulating again, and a handful of people decided they'd waited long enough. We already knew from the old studies that these compounds had benefits. We already knew marijuana wasn't the menace it had been painted as. The argument was simple: stop stalling, run the studies, see what's actually there.
Funding was the sticking point. Most drug development money comes from the government or from corporations, and neither had any incentive here. Psychedelics are off patent, so no pharmaceutical company stands to profit from developing them. On top of that, they're scheduled one substances, which is the government's way of saying they have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Put those two facts together and the research money simply wasn't there.
Three organizations looked at that situation and refused to accept it. The benefits, they argued, were too significant to leave on the shelf. MAPS is one of them. Heffter is another. The third, the Beckley Foundation, is based in the United Kingdom. Each of them began raising money from private individuals and funding clinical trials on their own.
Heffter has concentrated mostly on psilocybin, and some of their findings have made the news. They've documented real results with tobacco addiction, helping people quit cigarettes, and they ran a study on obsessive-compulsive disorder. They've also looked at spirituality, which isn't a medical diagnosis in any strict sense, but they've measured things like openness in that context. We study openness too, in our MDMA work.
Beckley leans toward neuroscience and measures brain activity directly. They're the group that found psychedelics actually slow down processing in the frontal cortex. That cuts against the usual assumption. People tend to think these drugs crank up the imagination somehow, but what the brain scans showed is the opposite: the region that organizes incoming information and imposes structure on it gets quieter, dampened. It's a strange and compelling piece of work, and it's ongoing. We collaborate with all three of these groups.