UC Berkeley

This dissertation ethnographically follows the efforts of researchers to develop MDMA (Ecstasy) as a prescription pharmaceutical. In the 1970’s MDMA became popular among psychedelic therapists as a legal alternative to banned substances like LSD and psilocybin. However, legal MDMA-assisted therapy came to a halt in 1985 when the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)—reacting to recreational use of MDMA in nightclubs—classified the drug as a Schedule 1 substance—which has no therapeutic application. In the decades following, activists, therapists and researchers have organized clinical trials with MDMA in order to contest the scheduling. The dissertation is based upon in depth ethnographic fieldwork with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which has sponsored an international clinical trial program on MDMA-assisted therapy. If successful, these studies will provide the basis for the organization to petition the Food and Drug Administration to approve a novel pharmaceutical treatment.

This dissertation examines the ways that various practices of experimentation grant robustness to the chemical, the body, and even experience. The shift to epistemological practice that characterizes this work as a whole is an effort to avoid the constructivist bind by focusing not on what MDMA is or is not, or what it does or does not do, or when it is or is not agentive, but rather how it is apprehended. At several junctures, I argue that the chemical cannot speak for its own identity, but rather requires documentary, regulatory and experimental structures to guarantee it. The focus on practice in my dissertation allows MDMA’s status to remain fraught and allows central tensions to manifest—such as the distinction between MDMA and Ecstasy, which is central to MAPS clinical trial program. I argue that understanding the political work of these trials requires close attention to the minute practices of experimentation at work in clinical research.