A Really Good Day(50)

We prepared far in advance for our first MDMA experience. We hired a reliable, mature babysitter to take care of our kids for three days, and arranged for one of their grandmothers to be on call in case of emergency. Both to enhance the experience and to minimize side effects, we followed a protocol of supplements that we found on the Web site of the Erowid Center, a clearinghouse for information on consciousness-altering drugs. We also planned to take an SSRI after the MDMA wore off, something Erowid users recommend in order to restore our depleted serotonin. Though the medical evidence for the utility of this practice is scant, it couldn’t hurt.

After first making sure emergency medical care would be readily accessible in the event of a bad reaction, we drove down the coast to a small hotel on the beach, checked into a spartan though comfortable room, and promptly collapsed on the bed in blissful unconsciousness. By the time we woke up the next morning, we were so deliriously giggly from a night of unaccustomed sleep that for a moment we considered backing out. Who needs chemicals when you can get high on a good night’s rest?

Still, we’d paid for the babysitter and planned so carefully, it seemed like a waste of both time and money not to go forward.*3 We skipped breakfast (per the instructions on Erowid) and went for a hike out onto the cliffs above the beach. When we were precisely a thirty-minute walk from the hotel, we took the pills. My stomach clenched in panic as soon as I swallowed the drug. Forget the research! What if my spinal fluid vanished? I could feel it evaporating already. What if my brain overheated? A fried egg! That’s what a brain on drugs looks like! I knew that for sure, because Nancy Reagan told me so!

“Look at me,” my husband said. He held me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. His pupils were not yet dilated.

“This is good,” he said. “Nothing bad will happen.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

A few deep breaths later, as the fog lifted over the Pacific, we hiked slowly back to the room. We stripped, got into bed, and waited for the best sex of our lives. Whatever myths the Shulgins had sought to dispel, the drug must be called Ecstasy for a reason, right?

Not so much. MDMA certainly enhances the senses. It makes touch feel glorious. The drug first came on with what I can best describe as a wave of warm, sensual tingling. I even got wet. But neither of us experienced the profound sexual arousal we’d anticipated. In fact, nothing about the experience was what we had imagined it would be. We didn’t rock the bed like a wrecking ball. We didn’t trance-dance into a fatally overheated stupor. We didn’t see fairies dancing in the sky, or any other visual hallucinations. The drug is not, as I said, hallucinogenic.

What we did was talk. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we love each other. We talked about what we felt when we first met, how our emotional connection grew and deepened, how we might deepen it still. The best way I can describe it is that we were transported emotionally back to our relationship’s early and most exciting days, to the period of our most intense infatuation, but with all the compassion and depth of familiarity of a decade of companionship. We saw each other clearly, loved each other profoundly, and basked in this reciprocated love.*4

The feeling lasted not for hours or for days, but for months. Actually, the truth is, it lasted forever. We’ve done the drug since, every couple of years, when we feel we need to recharge the batteries of our relationship. Though the experience has never again been quite so intense, it has been a reliable method of connection, of clearing away the detritus of the everyday to get to the heart of the matter. And the heart is love. We love each other so much, even when he is chewing almonds and I have to leave the house.

The empathogenic effects of MDMA have caused a revival of interest in the use of the drug in recent years to combat treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. In particular, it has been a priority of MAPS, which is funding a variety of research studies to determine, it writes, “whether MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can help heal the psychological and emotional damage caused by sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas.”

I spoke with Michael Mithoefer, M.D., who, along with his wife and cotherapist, Annie Mithoefer, is carrying out clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in veterans and first responders with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder that has not resolved with the use of other treatment methods. The protocol of their University of South Carolina studies is similar to those used in the recent wave of psilocybin research. In his earliest studies, Mithoefer and his colleagues first provided each subject with two introductory psychotherapy sessions with trained psychotherapists. Then the subjects underwent two MDMA or placebo-assisted sessions spaced three to five weeks apart, during which they talked through the incidents that had led to their trauma. After only two sessions, PTSD was resolved in 83 percent of the subjects who received MDMA. The results for talk therapy alone? A mere 25 percent. Even more remarkably, the reductions in PTSD symptoms were sustained for the long term, without further treatment. These results are so dramatic that not only has the Department of Defense given its blessing to further research, but there are two Veterans Administration studies now in process.

Mithoefer described to me the effect of the study on one participant, a firefighter and 9/11 first responder who was plagued by PTSD symptoms. Once, in a fit of uncontrollable anger during a session of PTSD therapy using another method, he tore the sink from the wall of the examining room. When asked what the results of the MDMA sessions were on this man, Mithoefer smiled and said, “Well, our sink is still on the wall.” The reduction of the patient’s PTSD symptoms was profound: he continues to report to Mithoefer that they have not returned. A recent meta-analysis by Timothy Amoroso, in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire, comparing MDMA therapy to prolonged exposure therapy in the treatment of PTSD, confirms Mithoefer’s results.*5