Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.

Today's sponsors:

• ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love?

Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself.

The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer.

Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is?

Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."

Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?

Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K.

Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in.

Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night.

Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you?

Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing.

Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society?

Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s.

I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation.

Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing.

Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that."

Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from?

Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street–bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns.

So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.

Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes.

Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?

Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this.

A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".

So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof: MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together.

Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics.

Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito.

Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that?

Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results.

Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context?

Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through.

Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.

Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way.

So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before.

Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that.

Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so.

So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government.

Gillespie: Right. So then what happened?

Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time.

Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug.

Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre.

So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned?

Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters.

After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years

Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?

Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government.

So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now.

Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?

Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.

Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death.

Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.

Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.

Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s.

Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?

Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.

Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?

Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly.

Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff. What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?

Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard.

Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling.

Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?

Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.

Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.

Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with.

Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this.

Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on.

I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."

Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.

Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people.

Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?

Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.

Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.

Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?

Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.