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Feature: American Nightmare -- Will Foster and Justice, Oklahoma Style | Stop the Drug War (DRCNet)
Is this really necessary? Do we as a human race want to condemn people for using a plant? Cannabis is a completely natural form of medicine that no pharmaceutical company can control, thereby greed and money cannot be attached to it. The amount of money spent here is appalling. We need to educate ourselves with facts and information, not fear, lies, and lack of knowledge so that we can better understand and treat people. This is only one of the many people that have to go through this.
Think of all the money that is being spent on hurting these people for no other reason than prejudice, ignorance, and fear. Add the cost of incarceration all together and it would probably be enough to provide healthcare or other things more important for thousands, if not millions, of people. Here is more information from a website called MAPS dedicated to extinguishing the fear, lies, and lack of knowledge. These plants and drugs have a major therapeutic use that has just now begun to be explored because they have been demonized for so long.
MAPS’ First MDMA/PTSD Therapist Training Seminar
From June 25 to July 1, therapists and researchers from seven countries (US, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, Jordan) convened in Austria for a one-week MDMA/PTSD therapist training seminar. This seminar was MAPS’ first attempt to provide some formal educational sessions to therapists working, or considering working, on MAPS-sponsored MDMA/PTSD clinical trials. MAPS has identified the training of co-therapist teams as the fundamental challenge in conducting our current Phase 2 studies and possible future Phase 3 studies, for which we would need to train about 20-30 new co-therapist teams.
The seminar began with introductions, then moved into the presentation of results from our US, Swiss and Israeli studies, followed by a description of the core elements of our treatment manual, the watching of videotapes of therapeutic sessions from our US, Swiss and Israeli studies, and group discussions of a range of topics. The third day of the conference was devoted entirely to holotropic breathwork sessions, to enable people to experience the therapeutic potential of a non-ordinary state of consciousness. The schedule of the seminar is available on the MAPS website.
In attendance were, Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Annie Mithoefer, BSN, from our US Study; Dr. Ingrid Pacey and Andrew Feldmar, PhD, from our Canadian study; Dr. Sergio Marchevsky and Dr. Tali Nachoni from our Israeli study; Dr. Peter Oehen and Verena Widmer, RN, from our Swiss study; Jose Carlos Bueso, PhD, and Gema Guarch from Spain; Dr. Fady Hannah-Shmouni from Jordan; June May Ruse PsyD, principal author of our MDMA/PTSD treatment manual; psychologist Marcela Otalora Gomez from Boulder, Colorado, who worked as a co-therapist on our initial Spain MDMA/PTSD study; Dr. Torsten Passie, MDMA research expert from Germany; and the MAPS staff, including President Rick Doblin, PhD, Director of Operations Valerie Mojeiko, Research and Information Specialist Ilsa Jerome, PhD, Director of Communications and Marketing Randolph Hencken, MA, and Accountant, IT and Chef Josh Sonstroem. A photo of these new pioneers in psychedelic psychotherapy is on our website.
Two days were dedicated to reviewing videotapes of MDMA sessions from the US, Swiss, and Israeli studies. Every few minutes the tapes were stopped for fruitful discussions about how the therapists handled the situation in the video. There was an incredible range of comments about how the therapists and patients interacted, and numerous suggestions were made about alternative means of counseling a patient in similar circumstances. This provided for lively dialogue about the wide range of responses that a therapist could offer at any given moment. These discussions were very exciting to hear -- but also presented us with a new challenge as we confronted the need to retool our treatment manual in order to create a consistent methodology.
The treatment manual is designed to give guidance to people who may or may not have ever provided MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Since there is so much individual variation in therapist style, and it’s difficult to understand the implications of therapist style to clinical outcomes, it’s a daunting task to try to narrow down the most effective key elements of the therapeutic method. However, we still believe that our therapist manual offers great guidance. We also know more than ever that there is a lot of revising to do. We wish to refine the method and operationalize a checklist that independent raters viewing videotapes of therapeutic sessions could use to quantify therapist adherence to the method.
In addition to viewing the videotapes, we had good discussions about different approaches to treating PTSD, the current state of and future revisions to the treatment manual, and the challenges of working in different cultural contexts. One entire session was devoted to the cultural challenges we will face when we begin our study in Jordan. For instance, we learned from Fady Hannah-Shmouni that some of the techniques used by our European and North American therapists, such as having male/female co-therapist teams, and touching and making physical contact with patients during therapy, may be inappropriate with some patients in Jordan.
One of the important outcomes of the training program was a decision to add a measure of functionality to all of our future protocols. Our primary outcome measure is the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), which measures symptoms of PTSD. We now realize the value of including a measure of functionality that would quantify changes, such as what we saw in the US pilot study -- three patients who had been unable to work for years returned to work after their treatment.
At the retreat, Michael Mithoefer, Torsten Passie, and Rick Doblin had productive discussions about the protocol design for our upcoming study in US veterans with PTSD from the Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars. Ilsa Jerome and Rick are including new ideas from those discussions into the development of that study protocol, which we are planning to submit to FDA within the next two months.
On Sunday, June 28, Michael and Annie Mithoefer and Ingrid Pacey led Holotropic Breathwork sessions for the group (Michael, Annie, Ingrid, and Rick have all completed Holotropic Breathwork training with Dr. Stanislav Grof). This was a great addition to the seminar. Some of our researchers had not had any personal experiences with non-ordinary states of consciousness. Doing the breathwork permitted people to feel what it is like to explore emotions in a non-ordinary state of consciousness.
Canadian videographer Oliver Hockenhull came to the retreat during the last days to do interviews for his upcoming feature-length film, A Perfect Pill: From Neurons to Nirvana, and to create short web interviews for the MAPS website. We will be posting these interviews on the MAPS website over the next few months.
2. Training Protocol Seeks to Administer MDMA to Therapists
On June 22, 2009, we submitted a protocol to FDA seeking permission to administer a single MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session to therapists as part of their training to conduct MAPS' MDMA/PTSD studies. We learned that we could provide much in the way of educational experiences during our therapist training seminar. Nevertheless, we also believe it will benefit therapists administering MDMA to patients to have a personal subjective understanding of MDMA’s effects when administered to them within a therapeutic setting. The only way such an MDMA experience can be legally provided to therapists is through an FDA protocol designed for that purpose. The protocol requires possible participants in the MDMA training sessions to have first successfully completed a MAPS-conducted therapist training program.
There is a precedent from the 1970s for our therapist training protocol. Dr. Albert Kurland's LSD research team at Spring Grove Hospital had FDA permission to administer LSD to help train nurses, attendants and others working with patients in clinical studies, and to mental health professionals (doctors, therapists, counselors, priests, rabbis) to help them better understand patients or congregants who had experienced LSD or other psychedelics. Over 100 people received LSD in those training sessions. We submitted letters to FDA from one of the researchers conducting that training program, Johns Hopkins researcher William Richards, PhD, and from a participant who reported long-term benefits to his therapeutic skills.
This protocol, if approved, will significantly enhance our ability to train therapists to work more effectively on our MDMA/PTSD studies. We should hear from FDA within 30 days of submission.
3. Preliminary Data from US MDMA/PTSD Pilot Study Submitted to FDA
On June 22, 2009, we also submitted to FDA safety and efficacy data from our US MDMA/PTSD pilot study. The safety data was submitted along with our therapist training protocol to enable the FDA to more fully evaluate the risks to therapists potentially volunteering for our training protocol. The efficacy data was submitted to help the FDA understand why we believe the results from our pilot study justify expanding our research into more Phase 2 and eventually Phase 3 studies, for which we will need to train 20-30 more co-therapist teams.
4. MDMA/PTSD Manuscript Submitted to Journal on July 8
On July 8, 2009, after months of extensive data analysis, numerous drafts, and our own informal peer-review process by “friendly” but tough readers, we submitted a manuscript about our US MDMA/ PTSD study to a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. The authors of the manuscript are Dr. Michael Mithoefer, Mark Wagner, PhD, Annie Mithoefer, BSN, Ilsa Jerome, PhD, and Rick Doblin, PhD.
Publishing our data in a peer-reviewed journal is a crucial step in communicating to the scientific and psychotherapeutic communities the exceptional potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with treatment-resistant PTSD. While we hope the paper will be accepted by the first journal we submitted it to, we’re prepared to keep working on the paper until it is accepted for publication and indexed on Medline. Traditional pharmaceutical companies often forgo submitting their data for publication and only submit their data to FDA in order to keep their research secret from their competitors. MAPS differs in that our approach is to be transparent, freely sharing our data with other research groups and the public. For us, the full value of the study itself will not have been obtained until the data is published in a peer-reviewed journal. The data will be available to MAPS members once it is published.
5. Vancouver Observer Article: Healing Severe Trauma with MDMA
The Vancouver Observer, an online publication, published a feature story (permalink) about our planned MDMA/PTSD study. Journalist Brandi Cowen interviewed Principal Investigators Dr. Ingrid Pacey and Andrew Feldmar, PhD, as well as MAPS President Rick Doblin, PhD for the story. The Canadian research project will start as soon as the government grants the research team a license to import MDMA.
Here are some more links that I very much impress upon you as an individual to learn about. I do not know how many of you will do the research for yourselves, but it would benefit you in more ways than you can ever imagine. Remember that knowledge is power, and infinite. The more we know about the plants and drugs we deal with, the better equipped we are to bring other people to a greater understanding. We can stop all the hype and ignorance from the inside out. Please do the research for yourself. It would help to go to websites that are not linked with the DEA or other police affiliations as I have found several of them to be filled with nothing more than scare tactics and lies. We need to be armed with the truth so it can wipe out the fear behind these plants.
Cut and paste these to your search engine, please try to read them all, there is so much to be gained by adding knowledge to your brain instead of fear and lies.
BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Cannabis may prevent osteoporosis
http://www.omaha.com/article/20090809/NEWS01/708099910
There's a monopoly on marijuana growing and research in America - Times-Standard Online
Getting high on religion
Don't Smoke It | Fort Worth Weekly - News, Events, Restaurants, Music
http://psychedelicresearch.org/?p=10
Erowid