In 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg offered a remedy for America’s broken soul: If everyone tried LSD, he said, we would discover “some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.”
Psychedelics, in other words, could save America.
More than half a century later, the nation’s psychedelic movement finds itself with a new figurehead: Rick Doblin. As the founder of the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Doblin has spent decades pushing for the liberalization of access to psychedelics—drugs he believes can cure the world of trauma and usher in a new golden age. His goal, he says, is to create “a world of net-zero trauma by 2070.”
Doblin is about to have a new, powerful ally in his quest. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the man charged by Donald Trump with “Making America Healthy Again”—is a big believer in the power of psychedelics. He endorsed legalizing them during his presidential campaign. Kennedy sees psychedelic drugs as one of the tools of healing that Big Pharma has tried to keep away from the public—part of a broader alternative medicine agenda. In a recent post on X, the nominee for the nation’s top health post published a list of drugs and therapies he plans to liberate from FDA “suppression.” The first item was psychedelics.
America, it seems, is about to get trippy. Or is it?
Out at the front of the fight for psychedelic access is one drug: MDMA. To many, MDMA is a rave drug, a stimulant and psychedelic popular for its euphoric dance-floor high. It has been banned by the federal government since 1985.
In recent years, however, evidence has emerged that MDMA can dramatically reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And in response, a growing chorus of scientists, new age gurus, veterans organizations, and senior Republicans is now calling for its medical legalization.
That chorus has been backed up by Doblin and MAPS, which have worked to move MDMA through the FDA’s process for bringing new drugs to market. Doblin saw MDMA as “breaking a barrier”: psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms), ayahuasca, and ketamine were next. As he put it: “The future is psychedelic.”
The culmination of this campaign came last December, when MAPS’s for-profit pharmaceutical arm, Lykos Therapeutics, officially applied to the FDA to market MDMA for PTSD. Lykos’s application represented decades of work by MAPS— important not just for PTSD sufferers, but for the entire psychedelic renaissance. Their case seemed bulletproof: Multiple gold-standard studies showed remarkable improvements in PTSD patients treated with MDMA.
Which is why almost everyone—supporters, opponents, the media—was shocked when, in August, the FDA rejected Lykos’s proposal, demanding another long, expensive study before MDMA could be brought to market. Outrage followed. “People will keep dying,” one veterans group claimed. RFK Jr. signaled his discontent, blaming the denial on greedy pharma companies.
Almost overnight, the psychedelic revolution turned to a whimper. Lykos slashed 75 percent of its staff and three major studies were retracted. Psychedelic start-ups are now being acquired for a fraction of their former value. Then, on Election Day, voters in Massachusetts rejected the opportunity to become the country’s third state—after Oregon and Colorado—to legalize psychedelics. In a statement after the denial, Lykos said it “will work diligently” to address the FDA’s concerns and try to “resolve scientific disagreements."
It’s an open question if the psychedelic comedown can be reversed, and who’s to blame for it.
Jonathan Lubecky is a former Marine Corps sergeant who believes MDMA, administered during a Lykos study, cured the PTSD he suffered after almost a decade serving in Iraq. But he blames psychedelic true believers—not the FDA—for depriving fellow veterans of effective medication. For many of those who tried to push MDMA through, Lubecky says, helping veterans was just a pretext. The real goal wasn’t healing, but expanding the same old pro-drug counterculture.
“Psychedelic culture is what killed psychedelic medicine,” Lubecky, 47, told me. “It was more about getting high and partying in the woods and ending the drug war than it ever was about helping anyone.”
Few have done more to cultivate this culture than Doblin. He thinks everyone should be taking psychedelics—not just vets with PTSD. He’d like to see them fully legalized, in order to achieve “mass mental health and spiritualized humanity.”
Such free-spirited thinking suffuses MAPS’s DNA. “It’s very much a kind of festival culture,” said Jules Evans, a prominent psychedelics commentator and director of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an initiative that helps people recovering from bad trips. “It’s very much a Burning Man culture. It’s quite a polyamorous culture. It's just a kind of countercultural place and vibe.”
The organization’s employee handbook, for instance, outlines its commitment to “smokable tasks”—work that employees should consider doing stoned. Betty Aldworth, MAPS’s communications director, told me that MAPS’s drug and alcohol policy states that substances can be taken only “to the extent such drug impairs the employee’s ability to safely perform his or her job duties.”
Other MAPS educational material on “bad trips” suggests that even psychotic breakdowns can have therapeutic value and be considered “sacred.” When I asked the organization about this several months ago, the page was swiftly updated with a note claiming it “should not be interpreted as representative of MAPS’s views or positions.”
Such unconventional behavior is exactly the sort of thing that has made some psychedelic advocates critical of MAPS. When I spoke with Neşe Devenot, who used to volunteer at MAPS as a graduate student, the Johns Hopkins researcher described the group as a “therapy cult”—a claim contested by Aldworth.
In Devenot’s view, MAPS’s therapy model—which was used in the Lykos trials—encourages therapists to see distress as part of healing. “For some people that might be helpful,” Devenot said. “But I have spoken to others who push themselves into these traumatic enactments and only end up more traumatized than they were before.”
While the exact reasons for the FDA’s rejection have yet to be published, it seems that MAPS’s and Lykos’s strangeness may have played a role. A key moment in its failure came in June, at a meeting of the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, a panel of experts that reviews drug applications. After hearing presentations from Lykos and its critics, the panel agreed that MDMA had been proven neither effective nor safe for PTSD treatment.
One of the committee members, consumer advocate Kim Witczak, said she came into the meeting excited about MDMA, but developed concerns. Some issues were technical, including instances of “functional unblinding,” where participants could tell whether they’d received MDMA or a placebo. That raises questions about whether the drug’s real effects are attributable to the placebo effect—a problem other psychedelic research has tried to get around by using smaller doses of the treatment as an “active placebo.”
But Witczak also worried that the enthusiasm of researchers and subjects—almost half of whom had previously tried MDMA—had tainted the research. Witczak’s concerns mirrored those of a major report released before the meeting by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), an independent nonprofit that evaluates new drugs. “We heard from various people that feelings around psychedelics lead the community to engage with them more like a religious movement than like pharmaceutical products,” the report noted. Such exuberance could lead to participants overstating benefits and understating risks.
In response, Lykos did not address these concerns, instead arguing that ICER, in their report, discounted the need for an effective treatment for PTSD. Aldworth, the MAPS communications director, noted that “MDMA is generally considered to be among the least mystical of the psychedelics.”
But the criticisms of the trials didn’t stop there. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported on three Lykos trial participants who said MDMA made them more suicidal, but did not report their feelings for fear of sabotaging a “miracle cure.” Lykos said that the unreported incidents “shouldn’t undermine the overall study results.” But three of 42 participants becoming suicidal raises serious questions about MDMA’s side-effect profile.
Then there are allegations of sexual misconduct. In 2022, video footage from an earlier phase of Lykos’s research surfaced showing married therapists Richard Yensen and Donna Dryer administering therapy to Meaghan Buisson, a subject in the study. In the video, they pin Buisson down, hold her wrists, stroke her face, and even climb into bed with her. After the study, Buisson moved to Yensen and Dryer’s area to continue her therapy. Yensen claimed the subsequent sexual relationship was consensual; Buisson later reported him to the police for sexual assault.
MAPS disclosed the incident and barred Yensen and Dryer from “all MAPS-related activities.” But the group’s MDMA-therapy protocol—the one used in Lykos’s trials—recommends therapists sometimes touch patients in a “nurturing” way during sessions—a hugely controversial practice in mainstream psychiatry, because it can create opportunities for abuse. (Aldworth confirmed to me that MAPS endorses the use of touch within the boundaries of its code of ethics.) As of last year, Dryer gave up her therapist’s license amid ongoing legal troubles—including another allegation of misconduct.
Cult-like exuberance, failure to report harmful outcomes, and sexual misconduct are not just bad behavior. They threaten the science undergirding psychedelic therapy. And while psychedelics have been sold as a miracle drug, with big benefits and few harms, recent research has challenged that view—and not just for MDMA.
A recent Cochrane Review—the gold standard for medical literature reviews—rated the quality of evidence on psychedelics to be of “low to very low” certainty. Researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands, Michiel van Elk and Eiko Fried, also surveyed the psychedelic research and found “serious challenges,” including misleading statistics, conflicts of interest, and basic study design failures.
Another recent review found that at least one in 20 trial participants with a preexisting mental disorder—exactly the sort of people who psychedelics are supposed to help—experienced a “serious adverse event,” meaning outcomes like hospitalization, disability, or death.
“At the moment, we cannot conclude anything about the safety or efficacy of psychedelic therapy,” van Elk told me.
Dr. Matthew Johnson, a senior researcher at Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital, has investigated psychedelics for decades. He thinks the FDA should have approved MDMA. But he also sees cult-like behavior as a problem for his field as a whole—not just for MAPS. “Sometimes it can be the most apparently rigorous researchers that nonetheless have this utopian vision,” Johnson said. “And I think that sows the seeds for all kinds of issues.” It’s not hard to see how such a “utopian vision” could cause trial participants to downplay bad experiences and play up good ones—and how that atmosphere could even give cover for sexual assault.
Faced with such uncertainty, why were we so eager about psychedelics? One answer is that we are desperate for something to “fix” us. Talk of “global net-zero trauma” fits into modern society’s emphasis on therapy. And much of the psychedelic movement is repeating the messaging of that culture. It goes something like this: You are fundamentally broken; you need to do the work to fix yourself; and you should buy our products in order to do so. Psychedelic culture is not, as some of its proponents frame it, the opposite of American therapy culture. It is its apotheosis.
Yet this is a cultural criticism of psychedelics—and an argument for treating powerful drugs with more caution—not an argument that psychedelics don’t work. The evidence is quite strong that they do. While their risks mean they aren’t appropriate for everyone, it is hard to hear the stories of those who have been helped by psychedelic therapy and not conclude that some people need it.
Take Lubecky, the Marine. Before taking MDMA, he described his PTSD as a “living nightmare.” Today, he makes regular trips to Ukraine as a frontline noncombatant providing medical aid. That’s part of why he’s “so pissed at the psychedelic movement,” as he put it to me: because he believes that vets like him have been denied a powerful tool by a movement more concerned with getting high than with helping people.
For people like Lubecky, psychedelics weren’t magic—they were medicine. And like any medicine, they can help people who are sick, hurt people who are well, and probably shouldn’t be taken without a doctor’s supervision. If we really want psychedelics to help people, then the most important thing is for psychedelics to become boring. Utopian visions of world healing need to be replaced with rigorous clinical trials and protocols, careful examination by the FDA, and strict controls on distribution for drugs that have been approved.
Lykos almost got there, but was foiled by its cultural peccadillos. Now they’re trying to clean up their act. Both Doblin and the CEO of Lykos resigned, and have been replaced with pharma insiders who have projected seriousness about working with the FDA. Other psychedelic start-ups are moving forward—hopefully wary of making Lykos’s mistakes.
Here, then, lies the lesson for RFK Jr. If he really wants to Make America Trippy Again, and get psychedelics to the people who would benefit from them, he’d do well to ignore the true believers.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on X @CharlesFLehman and read his piece, “Americans Just Said No to Drugs.”
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