An experimental study that treats PTSD veterans with the drug MDMA could make life after war a lot more livable.
“We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need,” said House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called “Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs,” held in December 2007. “Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off.”
Filner’s choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that’s a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a “rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions,” to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.
Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine—otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy—to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the ‘80s and ‘90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications—that is, illegality—and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.
“We’re looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere,” he explained by phone.
According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an estimated 15-20,000 people are killed by landmines each year. Detecting those mines—without setting them off—is a dilemma that faces many post-conflict regions of the world. But Bart Weetjens may have found a six-pound solution to the problem: the African giant pouched rat. Working for APOPO, a Belgian organization founded to explore the idea, Weetjens has successfully trained rats to locate land mines by smell. The animals have also been trained to identify tuberculosis from samples, a development that may prove equally promising.
Russia tested the world’s most powerful air-delivered vacuum bomb that generates a shockwave similar to a nuclear blast, the armed forces said, as the country moves to reassert its global military power.
The Wiccan pentacle has been added to the list of emblems allowed in national cemeteries and on goverment-issued headstones of fallen soldiers, according to a settlement announced Monday.
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