How to Do Drugs the Right Way |
Another drug story! Regular readers of this newsletter might recall my general distaste for the genre, too often indulged by fake-cool writers who think doing drugs gives them something to write about. (It doesn’t, and we feel sorry for them.) To be honest, I assumed this piece would be more of the same. So what if the FDA rejected prescription MDMA? So what if you won’t be able to do legal psychedelics naked in your guru’s living room anytime soon?
By the end of the first section, though? I was, like a junkie, hooked. John Semley’s storytelling here is sharp: First he tells you MDMA therapy failed. Then he tells you it might have a second life, thanks to, of all people, Republicans. Republicans! The party of “Just say no”! Yet further proof that political platforms are shiftier than magic staircases.
From there, John backs up, expertly recounting how we got here, who the competing players and interests are, what hidden factors might be at play. It’s twisty fun, even as real livelihoods are on the line. If I’m reading John correctly, the villains here are the people who got the FDA to just say no. Unless they aren’t?
Look what happened to weed: Post-legalization, it lost its, shall we say, potency. Could something similar happen to MDMA? Of the people I know who swear by its powers, the stablest and happiest among them would never dream of doing it at a doctor’s office. To be of real value, they say, psychedelics must be done randomly, rarely, and outside the law—in nature, among friends. |
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Corporate Greed and Dubious Investors |
Story originally published in February 2019 |
The battle to win FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy comes years after what John Semley and many others refer to as “the psychedelic revolution.” The movement kicked off in the late 2010s when word began to spread about the psychological benefits of psychedelic substances. Perhaps unsurprisingly, today’s attempts to legitimize MDMA mirror the history of the pharma industry’s broader involvement with psychedelics, a tale that starts as early as 1947. That story was recounted in 2019 by science writer Troy Farah, who took readers inside efforts to legalize the use of magic mushrooms for depression and PTSD. It seems that just as MDMA therapy has received staunch criticism from inside the psychedelic community, companies touting psilocybin cures were denounced for corporate greed and financial ties to dubious investors.
To me, the biggest takeaway from both features is that, for all their potential drawbacks, psychedelics do help people. As one source in Troy’s article said, “We talk to people all the time who say ‘Mushrooms have saved my life, mushrooms saved my marriage, mushrooms have broken me out of my depression, mushrooms are the only thing that works for my cluster headaches.” After the slowing of psilocybin’s momentum and the challenges to MDMA therapy approval, when, or even how, do you think these treatments might go mainstream? Comment below the article or send an email to samantha_spengler@wired.com.
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By extending the scope of a key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a unifying theory of mathematics. |
A new Department of Energy report “fundamentally misrepresents” climate research and leaves out key context, multiple scientists cited in the report tell WIRED. |
I tried the new Alexa+ across three Echo Show devices in my house. The experience was pretty solid for early-access software. |
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A few weeks ago, this newsletter shared a couple of articles about the promise of AI-aided drug development. I noted that the effort is still in its infancy, and asked readers what they imagined the future of “AI drugs” might be. One reader wrote about internal organ cancers that are often not discovered until stage 3 or 4, such as pancreatic cancer. She hopes that AI can help speed up detection of these cancers, since their symptoms are so often dismissed by patients or their doctors. “So much progress has been made with treating heart disease and the early detection and successful treatment of breast cancer, but so little has been achieved in early detection of pancreatic, gall bladder, bile duct, and liver cancers. Surely there are early-warning signs in the digestive tract or the blood that should be red flags that a cancer is growing.”
Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line. |
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