MDMA a cure for white supremacism - but no miracle

A white supremacist took MDMA for a study, and it snapped him out of his beliefs: 'Why am I doing this?'' (Insider, June 16, 2023)

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It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-one. I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer." (...) Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone. He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else." (...) Rare as they might be, stories such as these are worth examining for the implications they give about MDMA's potential ability to "influence a person's values and priorities", as de Wit and several co-authors wrote in a case study they published about Brendan in 2021 in the journal Biological Psychiatry. If "extremist views [are] fueled by fear, anger and cognitive biases", the researchers posed, "might these be targets of pharmacological intervention"? (...) According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things. But Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs. How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist (BBC, June 15, 2023)

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A white supremecist took the psychoactive drug MDMA as part of a scientific study and reported a massive change of heart in his beliefs. Cenk Uygur, Mark Thompson and Jayar Jackson discusses on The Young Turks. Drug Has Shocking Effect On White Supremacist (The Young Turks on YouTube, June 17, 2023 - 7:43 min.)

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