Mercer Family Grants $1M to MAPS for PTSD Research with MDMA | Hacker News Reader

Mercer Family Grants $1M to MAPS for PTSD Research with MDMA

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Love all the support this kind of research is getting. Crossing my fingers it reaches approved treatment status within the next decade.

With FDA-approved "breakthrough" status, the treatment could be approved as early as 2021.

Also, for the more business-oriented crowd here, the business model for MAPS is really interesting. There's a MAPS benefit corporation that plans to manufacture and sell regulated MDMA when MDMA-assisted therapy becomes legal. Their plan is to use all the profits from that b-corp to fund more research done by the main MAPS non-profit.

I saw a talk by the director, Rick Doblin, where he said that fundraising was taking most of their time which made doing the actual research difficult. Their plan to make a sustainable benefit that directly funds the research is a super interesting idea and I hope it works out. The world needs more examples of sustainable organizations doing work that really benefits human happiness.

Good for them. A bold move. (And yet another scientific cause, I might add, victim to a stultifying and hidebound FDA.)

It seems we are getting into a second, more mature wave of investigation into psychedelics. There is a lot of potential here. It's not the cure-all that many thought in the 60s, but these substances are very powerful and can facilitate meaningful change in people's lives, when used properly.

My intuition is that they work best when they are of a larger, more holistic effort to improve oneself and get a better perspective on life. I think this is why the studies that used guided sessions with preparation in the weeks before are so effective. As we study and understand this more, we can really start to realize the potential.

Congrats to MAPS.

And congrats to all the other folks who believed in MAPS and the therapeutic use of MDMA long before this point to get through the arduous Stage 1 and Stage 2 trials.

Interesting donation considering the families die hard allegiance to the Alt-Right/Trump. Seems to conflict with the current WH's stance on drugs.

Wouldn't be surprised if someone they know has PTSD. There's an overwhelming trend with those types to make exceptions for their own while vilifying everyone else.

See also: my teen's abortion is the only acceptable abortion, my gay daughter is one of the good ones, my drug addict son isn't a criminal like the rest of them, etc

Case in point: Dick Cheney changing his position on gay marriage because his daughter is a lesbian.

His position never changed. Source?

Despite popular opinion on other forums, it is faster to search the web than to post a falsehood in order to provoke someone else to do it for you.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dick+Cheney+support+gay+marriage&i...

I swore there was an XKCD that was directly related here, but I can only find the "wrong on the internet" one: https://www.xkcd.com/386/

Cunningham’s law goes back to USENET, and was clever in a pre-Lycos internet. There is actually a reference to that xkcd comic in this article.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Did he previously do much to oppose it?

His statements going back to at least 2000 make his position less politically convenient than, uh, quite a few other politicians:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/us/2000-campaign-republica...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/high-profile-politicians-chan...

Doesn't do much to offset the rest of his record.

Gary Johnson made hay in 2016 about the fact that it took Hillary Clinton longer to change her position than Dick Cheney. I feel pretty confident that he wasn’t always in favor of it when he was in Congress or working in the Ford Administration (after all, even the Human Rights Campaign was opposed to campaigning for marriage equality in the nineties [1]).

But I take your point, and I don’t understand why it is so surprising that politicians could hold a la carte views on social issues, something which I feel used to be much more common and allowable in our culture (see also Barry Goldwater’s support for gays openly serving in the military in the late 80s, a policy that wouldn’t be implemented until 2011, which to the original point he credited to a gay grandson).

[1] http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/04/16/jo-beckers-troubli...

Speculating, but the motives are likely profit.

Sessions is anti drugs because there is money to be made in private prisons, where as other parts of the administration is friendly with pharmaceutical industries in order make profit. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/13/alex-azar-hhs-secr...

I'm not judging correctness of this as policy, but rather the motivation.

There's roughly 6x to 10x more money to be made in government prisons than in private prisons. Sessions is a big government fan, as are most politicians in DC. That government prison complex money goes into the pockets of lobbyists, millions of voters and contributors (including powerful unions), that are employed in/by the government system.

Currently ~85%-90% of all prisoners are held in government prisons and jails.

There are at least a million people employed in government law enforcement, whose jobs are solely supported by the government's drug war and the government prison complex. Sessions, like Trump, is a very big supporter of law enforcement employees.

Sessions is doing it to support those million plus government employees who have been overwhelmingly supportive of the Trump Administration and the pro drug war side. Those million unnecessary government employees represent a hundred billion dollars per year in pockets getting lined between pay and benefits over time. The scale of that puts the private prison complex to shame.

Agree completely. People are very quick to ascribe the problems associated with the prison industrial complex to the privatization of prisons, but that's only a part of it.

Sessions has an ideology (digression: based on his history, I wouldn't be surprised if it was rooted in racism [1]). But politicians, even the most ideological, have been shown to be very easy to sway: be it for money, or power, or something else. In his case, there is absolutely no incentive (financial, political support, or otherwise) to change: his party's base either partially agrees with him, or benefits from the policy stance, exactly like you said. And that is why we get borderline absurd quotes like "good people don't smoke marijuana" (2016) [2].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trum...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/18/trump...

I think you are too quick to ascribe “money” as the only motivation to Jeff Sessions. That guy has been ranting about how marijuana will turn children into demons for the last 30-40 years. He just has a blinding hate for “the kind of people” who smoke marijuana - I do not think that it’s as complicated for him as extracting profit from private prisons.

> Sessions is anti drugs because there is money to be made in private prisons

I hadn't thought about that angle before, and it may very well be likely that he has a vested interest in supporting CoreCivic[1], and the like. But it's worth noting that Jeff Sessions is a racist and drug laws disproportionately affect minorities: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5850830/war-on-drugs-racist-min...

[1] CoreCivic used to be called CCA and they operate private prisons. Also, did some digging and yes he does, but only through mutual funds: https://www.snopes.com/jeff-sessions-private-prisons/

Oh shit, do you mean that just maybe, maybe, that a more nuanced view of politics is more likely to be correct?

Conservatives aren't a monolith, they come in many flavors. And comeon, this is great news! Just be happy and hope that we can persuade Sessions to rethink some things.

They are a pharma company and MDMA is a drug (and not a plant like Weed), why is their plan to support research for MDMA a big deal?

Rebekah Mercer is a Republican, but what source says she is Alt-Right? Plenty of normal Republicans have discussed MDMA as a treatment for PTSD.

C'mon. She's the patron of Breitbart News, called the "platform of the alt-right" by its editor. The head of Newsmax called her "first lady of the alt-right".[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/0...

She's mad at the party leadership and was a Mitt Romney supporter. I want to know what she has personally said that makes her alt-right. A lot of non-Alt-Right people worked at Breitbart, heck Ben Shapiro worked there.

This is the definition of Alt-Right. Alternative Right Wing.

No. I'm not alt-right but pretty unhappy with the current leadership of the GOP. Alt-Right is defined by folks like Vox Day and the continued lumping of everyone in with them is not helping.

It was the first thing I thought of as well. I feel like there are ulterior motives behind the grant award. Will be watching closely.

I think I got PTSD from reading Mercer Family's sponsored Breitbart news and Milo Yiannopoulos.

I've recently been reading Dark Money by Jane Mayer and the family is discussed quite a bit. I'm surprised they're supporters of MAPS.

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