Exactly a century after ecstasy was first patented, Health Canada has approved the drug’s import for the first Canadian study using the illegal substance in trauma survivors’ therapy.
The decision to allow two Vancouver therapists to import nine grams of MDMA from a laboratory in Switzerland — one of only two such permitted facilities worldwide — will kickstart the first experiment with the euphoria-and-empathy-producing drug in B.C. on Jan. 1, according to a Health Canada email obtained by the National Post, dated Nov. 23.
“I don’t know if we’ll have to wait until the MDMA is actually in our hands, but we’ve got a whole list of people who want to come to do it,” Dr. Ingrid Pacey, one of the researchers, told the Post. “There’s a part of me that still doesn’t quite believe it. When the MDMA arrives from Switzerland … when it finally lands on Canadian soil, then I’ll be certain.”
The B.C. study follows U.S. research by Medical University of South Carolina psychiatry professor Michael Mithoefer and wife Ann Mithoefer, a nurse. In the Journal of Psychopharmacology, they reported that more than 83% of several PTSD patients treated with MDMA and therapy had completely recovered, “without evidence of harm.” A follow-up study published last month found that the patients still had virtually no symptoms two years later.
“What the MDMA does, because of the physiological effects, it means you are in a present, fearless state — able to look at those events without being re-traumatized, and healing in the present what was the trauma of the past,” Dr. Pacey said.
