Kanu Caplash was lying on a futon in a medical center in Connecticut, wearing an eye mask and listening to music. But his mind was far away, tunneling down through layer upon layer of his experiences. As part of a study of MDMA, a psychedelic drug also known as molly or ecstasy, Caplash was on an inner journey to try to ease his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

On this particular trip, Caplash, now 22, returned to the locked bathroom door of his childhood home. As a kid, he used to lock himself in to escape the yelling adults outside. But now, he was both outside the locked door, knocking, and inside, as his younger, frightened self.

He started talking to his younger self. “I open the door, and my big version picks up my younger version of myself, and literally carries me out,” he says. “I carried myself out of there and drove away.”

That self-rescue brought Caplash peace. “I got out of there. I’m alive. It’s all right. I’m OK.” For years, Caplash had experienced flashbacks, nightmares and insomnia from childhood trauma. He thought constantly about killing himself, he says. His experiences while on MDMA changed his perspective. “I still have the memory, but that anger and pain is not there anymore.”

Caplash’s transcendent experiences, spurred by three therapy sessions on MDMA, happened in 2018 as part of a research project on PTSD. Along with a handful of other studies, that research suggests that when coupled with psychotherapy, mind-altering drugs bring some people immediate, powerful and durable reliefpeopleThose studies, and the intense media coverage they received, have helped launch psychedelic medicine into the public conversation in the United States, England and elsewhere. Academic groups devoted to studying psychedelics have sprung up at Johns Hopkins, Yale, New York University Langone Health, the University of California, San Francisco and other research institutions. Private investors have ponied up millions of dollars for research on psychedelic drugs. The state of Oregon has started the process of legalizing therapeutic psilocybin, the key chemical in hallucinogenic mushrooms; lawmakers in other states and cities are considering the same move.

A winding path

Psychedelic drugs are not new. Scientists at the pharmaceutical company Merck made MDMA in 1912. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in 1938, and Aldous Huxley popularized the drug in his 1953 book The Doors of Perception. When people talk about the psychedelic renaissance, they often begin with Hofmann and Huxley, says Sutton King, who advocates to include Indigenous voices in discussions about psychedelics and is an Afro-Indigenous member of the Menominee and Oneida Nations of Wisconsin.

But the story of psychedelics starts long before then. Indigenous communities around the world have used psilocybin and other consciousness-changing compounds for healing for thousands of years.

“The traditional Indigenous Nations … have had these connections to these medicines,” says King, who is cofounder and president of the Urban Indigenous Collective, a nonprofit advocacy group in New York City.

Depression drop 

People who received two psilocybin sessions with psychotherapy had fewer symptoms of depression one week after their second dose, at week 5, and at week 8 than people who had not yet received the treatment. Error bars show the variation among individual responses.

Effects of immediate versus delayed psilocybin therapy on depression