In Sydney, Australia, Rebecca Huntley had been seeking psychiatric care on-and-off for thirty years when she heard from an otherwise straight-edged friend about her experience going through MDMA-assisted therapy. At the time, MDMA, also known as the party drug ecstasy, had been outlawed in Australia since 1987, despite research suggesting the drug can treat mental illness. But Rebecca’s friend connected her with an underground therapist providing this service to a select clientele. After a rigorous vetting process, their first session took place at Rebecca’s house, a quiet place surrounded by trees.

“I felt like I needed something other than what I was doing,” she told Salon. “I was grinding my gears in terms of my mental health; I was pretty angry all the time. So I thought I’d give it a go.”

“It’s like you’ve jumped forward in light-speed to an accelerated point in your mental health journey,” Rebecca added. “For me, particularly the first session released an enormous amount of pain and grief and sadness that I had been spending years trying to push to the periphery of my consciousness. And the next day, after the drug was pretty much out of my system, I woke up feeling like I'd woken up in a different kind of body, a calmer body, a body that was more grounded.”

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After that it was a six month process, including two more trips with MDMA and follow-up integration sessions to make sense of the experience. Rebecca wrote a book, “Sassafras,” about her journey.

“It's up there with giving birth to my three children in terms of genuinely life-changing experiences,” she said.

In 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to legalize both MDMA and psilocybin-assisted psychiatric therapy, strictly under very specific conditions: MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psilocybin (the drug in “magic” mushrooms) for treatment-resistant depression.

"I woke up feeling like I'd woken up in a different kind of body, a calmer body, a body that was more grounded."

In the United States, the psychedelic renaissance was led by the charismatic Rick Doblin and his Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), whose groundbreaking clinical studies appeared to show astounding results in treating PTSD with MDMA. The drug can spur patients away from inhibition and anxiety, which can be useful for therapists trying to get someone to open up. Doblin believed psychedelics could change the world, and openly admitted that just like medical marijuana, psychedelic therapy was a backdoor to legalization.

Over a decade ago, MAPS spun their pharmaceutical development arm into a subsidiary known as MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, later renaming it Lykos Therapeutics. But last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected........

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