PTSD treatment may soon include Ecstasy: FDA study yields promising results

Veterans may soon have a legal and effective weapon against post-traumatic stress disorder — the drug MDMA, better known as Ecstasy.

A long-term Ecstasy study by the Food and Drug Administration is nearing completion with all signs pointing toward a green light for MDMA-assisted therapy. Research that started in 2000 is now at Phase 3 trials — the last obstacle to prescription drug approval.

“I didn’t need more than one dose. I got the message,” former Army Specialist Tony Macie told Stars and Stripes on Tuesday of his therapy during Phase 2 trials.

Mr. Macie, now 29, suffers PTSD due to an Iraq deployment in 2007.

“My brain wasn’t able to shut off,” the veteran said of his heightened awareness after his deployment ended. “It was going a million miles a minute. You need it on a deployment, but it’s not normal at home.”

Mr. Macie said the drug, which saturates certain parts of the brain with serotonin, allowed him to feel “at peace” and come to terms with the deaths he saw during war.

The veteran is not alone. Stars and Stripes reported that nearly 66 percent of the 107 participants in the FDA’s Phase 2 trials no longer meet the criteria for being diagnosed with PTSD.

Another 27 veterans in the study considered their MDMA-assisted psychotherapy sessions to be a cure, the newspaper reported.

Public affairs officials at the VA declined to be interviewed for the newspaper’s story, but Dr. John H. Crystal, the clinical neuroscience division director at VA’s National Center for PTSD, did say that MDMA addiction rates should be further studied.

“We believe that the magnitude of the clinical benefit associated with MDMA prescribed for the treatment of PTSD remains to be determined,” Dr. Crystal said.