A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  MTA is a designer drug, in that its creator, Dr. David Nichols, designed it specifically to function like MDMA. But Dr. Nichols never intended for MTA to be used as a street drug. He synthesized it to test it as an antidepressant on rats.

  His early research with MTA was promising. He published a paper on his findings, and noted that the chemical seemed to function “like MDMA.” My source with the online drug market spoke of Dr. Nichols reverently. In fact, Dr. Nichols is sort of famous in the designer drug industry. Chemists in Denmark were paying close attention to the work that came out of Nichols’s lab. They read about MTA, replicated it, and started selling it in large quantities. Dr. Nichols told me:

  What we didn’t know at the time is that MTA is a serotonin releaser but it inhibits the enzyme that breaks serotonin down. So after MTA serotonin levels can build over time.

  Serotonin is a natural brain transmitter that signifies happiness. But your brain can handle only so much of it at once. Too much serotonin building up in the body can cause the deadly serotonin syndrome. At least five people have died after taking MTA. As Dr. Nichols explained to me:

  My understanding is they’d take one, and not much happened because it doesn’t cause euphoria like MDMA. So they’d take a couple more to get an effect and all of a sudden they’d get this massive release of serotonin.

  Dr. Nichols got into medicinal chemistry to help advance the frontiers of human knowledge and improve the state of medicine. It’s a terribly unfair irony that some of his work led to the loss of human lives. As the fallout from MTA, known as “flatliners” on the street, grew larger and larger, he became aware, for the first time, that he was being watched by other, less ethical chemists. When I spoke with him he told me:

  There was one site I saw called Honest Chemical Company . . . they have all sorts of illegal chemicals on their site that say “not for human consumption.” There was an interview with a chemist in Belgium years ago, he was one of these distributors, he was asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” . . . and he said, “Dave Nichols’s lab is particularly interesting.”

  Dr. Nichols was “pretty annoyed” at that. He has a major problem with the unethical chemists who shotgun potentially dangerous, completely untested drugs out to a largely ignorant consumer base. But Dr. Nichols lays the lion’s share of the blame on the ongoing state of drug prohibition. If safer, more heavily studied drugs like MDMA weren’t so illegal, there wouldn’t be a market for all of the weird little research chemicals he and his colleagues meant for legitimate scientific study.

  Speaking of his colleagues, no chapter on designer drugs would be complete without mention of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a former Dow chemist who helped popularize MDMA. He also invented more than 230 new designer drugs, and tested their effects on himself, his wife, and their friends. Shulgin’s experiences—and guides to re-creating his work—are published in the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL.

  Shulgin and Nichols were/are both advocates for the responsible use of hallucinogens in legitimate research. That research has been stymied for years as a result of the recreational drug industry and the DEA. But, recently, things have started to open up, and a bright new future may be on the horizon for the wayward chemical children of these scientists.

  The Therapeutic Future of Designer Drugs

  MDMA, 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, known as ecstasy, molly, and whatever dumb name people have started calling it this week, has one of the most tragic backstories of all drug-kind. It was first synthesized in 1912 by scientists at Merck looking to develop a chemical intermediary that might act as an anticoagulant. It’s unclear when, exactly, MDMA was first tested on humans. But by 1970, it had made its way into pills seized in US drug busts.

  Alexander Shulgin was the first human officially to test MDMA and report on its effects in a scientific manner. He cooked up a batch and tried it in 1976, describing ecstasy’s effects for the first time and inadvertently kick-starting the drug’s popularity. His inaugural trip report is restrained and rather tame.

  I felt that I could talk about deep or personal subjects with special clarity, and I experienced some of the feeling one has after the second martini, that one is discoursing brilliantly and with particularly acute analytical powers.

  This is just one of 179 different drug experiences Dr. Shulgin and his wife describe in their book PiHKAL, or Phenethylamines i Have Known And Loved. It doesn’t particularly stand out from the others. But, for whatever reason, MDMA took off like a damn rocket, growing popular enough to earn the government’s wrath and becoming permanently banned in 1985, at the height of the “Just Say No” era of drug legislation. If all the world had lost was a party drug, this wouldn’t be such a sad story. But a growing body of evidence suggests that MDMA is much, much more than that.

  The first clinical trials involving MDMA started coming out in the early 2000s; by 2002, nearly three hundred subjects had been administered MDMA in a variety of studies on MDMA’s efficacy in several areas. The studies were conducted in locations from San Francisco to Switzerland and established MDMA as a remarkably safe drug to administer in a clinical setting. Yet resistance to larger-scale testing of the drug was fierce. Dr. Michael Mithoefer received FDA approval to conduct the first study on the efficacy of MDMA as a PTSD treatment in 2001 at the Medical University of South Carolina. But Dr. Mithoefer also needed the approval of an institutional review board, or IRB, to conduct the research at his university. That proved more difficult.

  It became clear . . . [that] there were too many political obstacles to them even reviewing it. It was too controversial for them to want to have it at the university.

  So Dr. Mithoefer and his team waited three months to get a new FDA approval to conduct the study in the private office he and his wife, a psychiatric nurse, shared. Then they got another approval from a freestanding IRB:

  And then the next thing was to go to the DEA.

  And then, just as the Mithoefers seemed to have jumped every hurdle, the IRB rescinded its approval.

  At first they didn’t give a reason. As it turned out it was because of an article by George Ricuarte.

  Dr. Ricuarte’s super-fun-titled article “Severe Dopaminergic Neurotoxicity in Primates after a Common Recreational Dose Regimen of MDMA” was published in 2002. The article suggested that based on studies using spider monkeys, ecstasy might cause severe damage to the brain’s dopamine receptors, potentially culminating in an onset of early Parkinson’s disease for countless hapless ravers. Dr. Ricuarte’s study was a critical factor in the proposal of the 2003 RAVE (Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act, which would have allowed law enforcement agencies to hold club owners responsible for drugs done on their premises. Some people, including this author, might argue that naming a law after raves should disqualify one from naming or making laws, but whatever.

  George Ricuarte’s article was formally retracted in 2003, when it was found that the actual neurotoxic damage done in his study was thanks to methamphetamine. Michael Mithoefer found this rather frustrating; he’d brought up concerns about the study being “screwy” more than a year earlier. But they were casually dismissed, because Dr. Ricuarte was a highly funded drug abuse researcher, until Science printed the retraction. Mithoefer’s study regained its IRB approval, but it was a total of two and a half years before the DEA gave the final sign-off on his research. As Dr. Mithoefer recalled during an interview I conducted:

  There were a couple delays because they “lost” the application and that kind of thing through bureaucratic problems, concern about getting an “outside panel” to review it to see if they thought it was a good idea. We always had cordial communications with them . . . so there was no sense of hostility, but there was a sense of inertia and, perhaps, maybe hoping we would go away.

  Dr. Mithoefer and his wife didn’t go away. Their initial study, involving twenty patients split between an active (MDMA-receiving) tw
elve and a placebo-receiving eight, was finally published in 2010. Both groups received psychotherapy before, after, and during their placebo and real-drug sessions. All the patients were PTSD sufferers who previously had been administered drugs and therapy for their disorder but had received little to no relief of their symptoms. The results of that first study were astonishing: 83 percent of patients who received MDMA showed a significant reduction in symptoms. Only 25 percent of the control group saw the same. A follow-up study showed that the vast majority of patients continued to see benefits from their therapy more than three years later.

  MDMA’s phase-one clinical trial was a wild success, so the Mithoefers were able to gain funding and approval for a second phase of study. Although the PTSD sufferers in the phase-one study were mostly victims of crimes and sexual violence, the subjects in the phase-two study were primarily veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had been hard to find volunteers for the phase-one studies, but the second study had the opposite problem.

  Over six hundred veterans called us from around the country without us having to advertise. We . . . were flooded with so many requests and calls. It was very sad, because we could only take a few of them.

  Two of those few were Tony Macie and Nicholas Blackston, veterans of the Iraq War who both walked away from their combat experience with life-crippling levels of PTSD. I spoke to both men, and Mr. Blackston was able to point to a single incident that was responsible for the lion’s share of his suffering:

  They shot an RPG at my Humvee. It hit right in front of me. The driver . . . a piece of metal hit his femoral artery. I was the machine gunner . . . my ammo cans got hit and they blew up, so I took pieces of shrapnel from my own ammo . . . we were all laughing before, then all of a sudden I’m in this black void.

  Nicholas’s driver, a very close friend as well as a comrade, died in the attack. Both Nicholas and Tony saw soul-crushing things during their time in Iraq and developed PTSD bad enough that it precluded them from living anything close to a normal life. MDMA, combined with therapeutic sessions with the Mithoefers, helped both veterans heal, where conventional medication and therapy had failed. Tony Macie described his first dose of MDMA as “profound,” and recalled the moment he realized it was kicking in:

  [Dr. Mithoefer] was like, “How are you feeling?” And [he] kept asking about my anxiety level, what was it on a scale of one to five.

  “Zero?”

  “No, between one and five.”

  [I] was adamant. “No, it’s a zero.”

  The great benefit Nicholas Blackston reported with MDMA is that it made him feel comfortable talking about his combat experiences to professional therapists for the first time.

  You’re so unbelievably comfortable with them and you just want to talk about things. With PTSD . . . you feel like you can’t relate to anybody. Once you just let it all out . . . there’s a lot of therapy in that. Within four hours you’re getting like four years of therapy.

  If you’ve had any experience with MDMA you can probably see why it works so well. Ecstasy floods your brain with oxytocin, the same chemical your brain starts mass producing the instant you have a baby. Huge doses of ecstasy can induce incapacitating hallucinations, but therapeutic doses leave you feeling almost sober. The MDMA doesn’t fuck you up as much as it makes you unable to feel anxious. Paranoia is replaced with trust and empathy. And recent imaging studies have shown that MDMA calms a brain area called the amygdala that is activated by fear. Of course this stuff helps with PTSD.

  Before undergoing MDMA therapy, Mr. Blackston felt dissociated from his emotions. And now, “I got my emotions back,” he says. He described dealing with his PTSD before as “like trying to clean your room with the light off and getting frustrated whenever you bump your head.” Blackston added, “MDMA turned on this light inside of my head.”

  Mr. Macie explained to me that

  for me MDMA dissolved my ego, it made me feel like, “Holy fuck, all these things I experienced were not good or bad, either way.” I just accepted it. . . . It dissolved my whole ego . . . my whole train of thought, and I realized what happened was what happened. I didn’t deny what happened. I accepted what happened.

  For his part, Dr. Mithoefer says that MDMA

  tends to make people much more aware and able and willing to express what their deeper unconscious processes are. It gives you a view of what’s going on in a much deeper way, and it allows people to face those things directly and has the potential to be very therapeutic, beyond what many people have been able to do without it. It doesn’t mean people can’t do deep healing without it. But for a lot of people it does catalyze a therapeutic process.

  He adds that ecstasy was not a “magic bullet.” The subjects of his studies didn’t benefit from dropping a few tabs and rolling their balls off alone. And it wasn’t a fun process. “We had three people say, ‘I don’t know why they call this ecstasy.’ MDMA didn’t make it a cakewalk. It was still painful therapy.”

  Painful, but almost unbelievably effective, and Dr. Mithoefer’s research has helped open a door to . . .

  The Exciting Future of Psychedelic Medicine

  If the Mithoefers’ research—now in its third phase—continues to bear fruit, Dr. Mithoefer expects MDMA could get its FDA approval as early as 2017. This means a future in which medical professionals can harness the extraordinary potential of MDMA. A lot of very smart people are working hard to make that happen. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) funded Mithoefer’s groundbreaking research, and they continue to push for a future in which we don’t throw out promising medicine just because a lot of nineteen-year-olds like taking too much of it and chewing on glowsticks.

  Dr. David Nichols, creator of the troubled drug MTA, continues to devote his life to improving our understanding of psychedelics. He’s on the board of the Heffter Research Institute, which promotes “research of the highest quality” with drugs most Americans know only from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Nichols actually synthesized the MDMA used in Mithoefer’s research, decades before Mithoefer started it—before MDMA was even illegal.

  Today he’s one of the few people in the world who has a legal pass to cook up chemicals like LSD, DMT, MDMA, and even psilocybin. Getting the legal pass to manufacture schedule 1 drugs is a purposefully pain-in-the-ass process. First, you have to submit your research proposal to the DEA. But the guys in the DEA are cops; they don’t know shit about science. So they send your proposal off to an FDA advisory committee, a step Dr. Nichols described as “completely unnecessary. It’s just done to slow the process up.”

  The FDA committee gets to decide if the research is “legitimate science,” something researchers dealing with other, legal mind-altering chemicals don’t have to do.

  Not too many people do it, because it’s such a hassle.

  Any scientist working with illegal drugs is going to be treated with suspicion by the DEA. Dr. Nichols has published more scientific research than most people have ever read. But the DEA still treats him as though they suspect this whole science thing he’s dedicated most of his life to pursuing is an elaborate cover for his life as an acid dealer.

  I don’t know if the DEA liked me much.

  Dr. Nichol’s research involved dosing rats with LSD on a daily basis, “to keep them trained.” He wasn’t just drugging rats for fun, of course. He was doing it in order to investigate how psychosis starts in the brain. This research was published in 2005 by the journal Psychopharmacology and sported the most unreasonably cumbersome study name to appear in this book: “Distinct Temporal Phases in the Behavioral Pharmacology of LSD: Dopamine D2 Receptor-Mediated Effects in the Rat and Implications for Psychosis.” The study provided evidence that the brain’s dopamine receptors play a role in the onset of psychosis.

  Note how “dosing people with LSD” had nothing to do with the research Dr. Nichols and his team conducted
. The acid was just being used because it stimulated brain pathways in rats they wanted to observe.

  But, to the DEA, the fact that the research involved LSD was cause enough to make Dr. Nichols look shady. He recalled that the agents responsible for inspecting his laboratory had little to no real understanding of what he was allowed to do.

  They asked, “Where’d all this LSD come from?”

  I said, “We made it.”

  “Are you allowed to make it?”

  I said, “Yes I am, if you check the law I am allowed to make it under my research license.”

  “Does the main office in DC know you’re making this?”

  Obviously they did, because his research had been approved by the DEA, and the FDA, before he even started. But the hoops he’d jumped through to get approval to start his research barely mattered once the DEA officers showed up at his door. Agents combed through the fifteen controlled substances stored under his license and asked him to explain why he needed each one.

  “I had to rejustify my protocol.”

  Dr. Nichols found himself explaining complicated science to a group of men with no training or experience in the matter. Essentially, he—and any researchers who want to learn something from LSD, MDMA, etc.—have to

  1. justify their research to a bunch of nonscientists to get it approved; and

  2. randomly rejustify that same research to more nonscientists whenever they happen to drop by to check on things.

  The war on drugs has been a material failure—visit any EDM show for a verification of that fact—but the war on drug research has been remarkably successful. LSD’s banning in 1965 didn’t stop Woodstock from turning into a mud-daubed acid fest, but it did lead to a virtual shutdown in research on the drug. It also led to a tragic suppression of the research that had already been done.