How do you feel about the movement of substances you synthesized, such as MDMA, from academic, scientific research circles to a wider drug culture?
I'm not surprised it happened. I'm saddened that it's no longer available in the medical community, because it was a fantastic tool in the practice of medicine. MAPS has finally gotten approval for new MDMA research after a couple years of paperwork manipulation. Rick Doblin has been very persistent and diligent working to get that approved.
What do you hope will come out of that study?
I think, eventually, the realization that nothing much is gained and a lot is lost by laws restricting research. Something is Schedule I because it has no accepted medical utility, but [it] only has no accepted medical utility because you can't do research on it because it's Schedule I. It's a loop without a break, and I think that out of this may come some way of breaking that self-sustaining loop.
What do you think about the government- and corporate- approved alternatives—drugs like Paxil, Prozac, Ambien and that whole field?
The direction in pharmaceutical research is to bring back to normal people who are diagnosed as being not quite where they should be—as if this were the ultimate goal, to be normal. I believe a lot in researching how to take a person and expand him into areas that are not immediately apparent—not to make a sick person well, but to let a well person see what he is.
