A pharmaceutical company has just announced that they will commence clinical trials of MDMA and LSD combinations to assess their benefits in therapy.
Researchers have been studying the benefits of certain drugs for a few years now, learning about the positive impacts of cannabis on chemotherapy patients as well as LSD, psilocybin, or MDMA for therapy patients.
This week, the pharmaceutical company MindMed that’s dedicated to “developing psychedelic drugs into medicines” announced that later this year they will commence clinical trials combining MDMA and LSD. The lead researcher on the project, Dr. Matthias Liechti, explained that its aim is to “study ways in which the drug can be used as a treatment for mental health issues such as anxiety and attention deficit disorder.”
Because the the empathogenic properties of MDMA can help mitigate the effects of LSD, the combination has the potential to create a “primarily positive acute response during psychedelic assisted therapy” which is “critical because several studies showed that a more positive acute experience is linked to a greater therapeutic long term effect in patients.”
The University of Basel’s Department of Bio-medicine also released a report that found “both MDMA and LSD dose-dependently increased feelings of closeness and trust and impaired identification of negative emotions including fear and sadness.” These benefits are significant for patients with a history of trauma, particularly those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
Although the research has shown promise for the future of trauma therapy, there are significant concerns about the reality-altering side effects. MindMed explained that “the main issue with using LSD to treat medical conditions is that its effects are prominent and they last a long time, anywhere from 12 to 18 hours.”
This combination of MDMA and LSD isn’t exactly a first; “candy-flipping” drug users in the 80s were amongst the first to recognise how the rapture of MDMA could take the edge off LSD. Both drugs are physically safe to combine (not that we’d ever recommend anything illegal) and candy flipping could prove benefit for trauma patients, meaning these clinical trials could produce some life-changing results.
