Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials confirmed they are awaiting a $4.9m grant to study MDMA with a focus on troops on active duty. The money will be provided by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
The hallucinogen will be given to active-duty military personnel diagnosed with mild or moderate PTSD. The objective is to study the ways in which the psychological flexibility triggered by the drug aids in the healing of patients.
Another $4.9 million from the DOD will go to a collaborative study conducted by teams at STRONG STAR and Emory University. STRONG STAR, a training and medical consortium, is based at UT San Antonio.
The study to be conducted at Walter Reed will be headed by Major Aaron Wolfgang. Wolfgang currently heads the Inpatient Psychiatry department at Walter Reed and his specialty is PTSD treatment. He will be the lead physician and author of this double-blind placebo clinical trial.
The trial will not be Wolfgang’s first venture into the world of psychedelics. In fact, he co-authored a systematic overview and review of MDMA therapy and their paper was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in January. Their review was the main feature of that edition of the journal. The article focused on the common misconceptions surrounding MDMA as a result of its being associated with other classic hallucinogens, such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD.
The research paper stresses that MDMA isn’t like other psychedelics because it triggers prosocial elements like enhanced self-compassion and trust. At the same time, the psychedelic experience allows individuals to retain their ego function, perceptual lucidity and cognitive function, the review indicates.
Because of these unique attributes of MDMA, there is justification for what has always been regarded as the potential of this psychedelic to provide a breakthrough approach to treating depressive disorders and PTSD.
Wolfgang and his team plan to recruit 91 study subjects who are in active duty within the military. However, these individuals aren’t expected to be redeployed for approximately a year while the study is ongoing. During the trial, the subjects will undergo three sessions in which they receive MDMA in a period of 10 months. Each dose will be given 3-5 weeks apart.
Before the dosing sessions, a trio of preparatory sessions to get the participants ready will be conducted. Once each dosing session is completed, 3 integration sessions will be conducted.
The trial is expected to provide reliable data because its design is different from other such trials; long-term follow-up of the subjects will be conducted and throughout this time, the double-blind nature of the trial will be maintained until the end of the study.
Startups like atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ: ATAI) and other psychedelic industry players will be pleased that federal government departments are getting involved in funding psychedelic studies. The findings of such trials will go a long way towards changing public perceptions about these hallucinogens that were banned and criminalized for decades.
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