MDMA approved to treat post-traumatic stress in active-duty US soldiers | US military

A new doctrine may soon take hold in America’s war on drugs: psychedelic drugs for active-duty soldiers suffering from PTSD.

In two studies funded by the Department of Defense (DoD), 186 service members suffering from PTSD will likely undergo multiple sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy next year.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness Sean O’Keefe is following the research closely, a January letter said, and a new group of Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs (VA) therapists is scheduled to begin training in psychedelic-assisted therapy next week before soldiers enlist.

It is hoped that guided sessions with the euphoric drug could, perhaps counterintuitively, help soldiers fight for their country longer – and that once they leave the military, they will not be crippled by traumatic stress.

“Helping people process their trauma, whatever it may be, is probably better than not,” said Rick Doblin, founding president of the advocacy group Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), which helped bring MDMA-assisted therapy to the brink of federal approval.

“There is something noble about being willing to sacrifice for others. I don’t feel morally conflicted working with active duty soldiers.”

Funding for the new studies was approved by former President Joe Biden as part of the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2023, which included provisions requiring the research to go to Republican Congressman Morgan Luttrell. “Our men and women in uniform deserve every tool available to heal and stay in the fight,” the veteran Navy Seal who personally underwent psychedelic therapy said at the time. “This is just the beginning.”

On April 18, Luttrell stood alongside Donald Trump as he signed an executive order aimed at accelerating research into psychedelics and expanding access, primarily to veterans. “The epidemic of veteran suicides is a national tragedy,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Since 9/11, we have lost 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield.”

During World War II, the U.S. Army treated soldiers suffering from PTSD with barbiturates that induced deep sleep for up to 48 hours and allowed many to return to the battlefield days later – but it soon became clear that this did not provide lasting trauma relief.

MDMA and other psychedelics like psilocybin appear much more effective at treating mental health issues, but there are growing concerns about their potential use to enhance combat readiness.

Dennis McKenna, an ethnobotanist and author, warned of the potential human consequences of a person traumatized during war, recovered through psychedelic therapy, and then returning to the front.

“It would be completely cynical and cruel of the government to send them back into combat,” McKenna said. “It is an abuse of psychedelics to use them to rebuild people so they can become more efficient killing machines.”

Doblin also recognized the potential dangers. “What we’re seeing is that people are a little more likely to relapse. [into a PTSD response] after treatment if they return to a stressful situation,” he said.

In Ukraine, Maps trained 55 therapists to run MDMA-assisted therapy sessions for soldiers, amid concerns about troop shortages and the scale of untreated PTSD within the country’s military. Doblin said he supports “helping Ukrainians who choose to potentially sacrifice their lives to fight the Russians.”

MDMA-assisted therapy is not yet authorized in Ukraine, but hundreds of soldiers have already undergone legal therapy with ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, to treat PTSD symptoms and allow a return to the front lines in what is seen as an existential war for Ukraine’s future.

In the United States, the two randomized, placebo-controlled studies of MDMA for soldiers could begin recruiting volunteers later this year before likely administering the dose next year. Department of Defense grants of $4.9 million each to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Emory University, which works with the University of Texas Health Science Center, were confirmed in February of last year.

At Walter Reed, 91 service members, guards and reservists suffering from PTSD will receive three separate doses of MDMA over 10 months and will not be deployed during the study. It is unclear how much time they will have once the search is complete before they can potentially return to an assignment. If the treatment proves promising, it could be adopted within the military as standard therapy.

Soldiers’ access to psychedelic therapy should begin well before they become traumatized, Doblin said. “As part of boot camp, which is physical training, we should do emotional training,” he said, “and give them MDMA sessions to address any issues they may have had to make them less likely, if they are traumatized in the future, to develop PTSD.”

Soldiers could have transformative experiences that make them question their military service, said psychologist Rachel Yehuda, director of the Parsons Research Center for Psychedelic Healing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who has trained 250 therapists in MDMA-assisted therapy in recent years, many of them from the VA and DoD.

“But it could go the other way and reaffirm the meaning of the mission,” she added. “In an active duty setting, treating someone while trauma is in progress is different than treating someone afterward.”

These studies will be the first to formally investigate the effects of psychedelics on soldiers. Starting in the late 1950s, the U.S. Army administered LSD to soldiers at a classified military installation in Maryland to evaluate whether the psychedelic drug could incapacitate enemy troops. “In the military, if you don’t do something, you’ll be ostracized,” a soldier who was given LSD in 1958 told the New Yorker. “I think they gave us the option to leave at first, but you didn’t really have a choice once you got there.”

In Israel, a study of MDMA-assisted group therapy for victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack may also begin administering doses to patients later this year. With 168 participants, it will be the largest clinical trial involving psychedelics to date in the country, and will include Israeli army veterans and potentially serving soldiers.

“We would like this to be a model for working on collective trauma that we can replicate, not only in Israel, for Israelis, but around the world,” psychologist Keren Tzarfaty, co-founder of Maps Israel, who is leading the research, said in January.

There will be consternation, however, that psychedelics can help soldiers effectively erase the moral wounds resulting from the commission of war crimes. But Doblin said those concerns are based on a misunderstanding of the effects of MDMA therapy.

“Often people become more sensitive to the emotional consequences of what they have done,” he said. “If they’re not treated at all…I think they’re more dangerous as a soldier that way.”