Since I listened to Cover Story recently, it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this on the front page. I’m curious to hear from you and others who listened to the podcast about your impressions, because something felt really off to me about it.
I feel this way because of how the presenters initially introduced themselves as very pro-psychedelic, then over the course of the series made what seemed to be increasingly negative and misleading statements to lead listeners to the conclusion that all psychedelics research is garbage (because everyone involved is either an abuser or motivated by greed) and that these drugs are just too dangerous to be legalised or used in therapy (because they are too disinhibiting or because they break people). They started with ‘psychedelics are great and I love them and they really helped me in my life’ and ended with almost an entire episode of ‘I tell anyone who is interested not to do it’.
The serious and legitimate problems that they detailed are very worthy of investigation and remediation, but they also all seemed, to me, to be failures of: (1) individual practitioners who engaged in unethical/illegal behaviour; (2) study runners who didn’t know, or didn’t care, or even believed that these unethical behaviours were actually fine; (3) the drug war, which stopped reputable groups with stronger ethical standards from performing studies and created space for an underground movement led by sociopaths; and (4) the medical research apparatus itself which is too uncritical and accepting of garbage study designs and data.
Some other “problems” they raised just struck me as odd, like the claim that results couldn’t be legitimate because they were combined from multiple trial sites, or that MDMA-assisted therapy is uniquely bad because it is ‘like doing open heart surgery and then walking away’.
Regarding multiple trial sites: I’m not a medical researcher, but I’ve seen this many times when looking up trials on clinicaltrials.gov. So, either (1) it’s not actually a problem, or (2) they didn’t clearly explain why this study’s multi-site design was uniquely bad, or (3) it’s a problem not unique to the MDMA-assisted therapy trial and should’ve been framed as an industry-wide problem instead but wasn’t.
Regarding the ‘open heart surgery’ analogy: Limiting the number of follow-up sessions was clearly a terrible study design and never should have been allowed, and the practitioners who refused to help should almost certainly be—at a minimum—barred from practice, but basically all forms of therapy have similar risks[0], so it seemed misleading at best for them to frame it as some consequence unique to MDMA-assisted therapy. There was even an article here on HN in 2020 about risks associated with meditation and mindfulness[1].
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219072/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185710