MDMA, Personality and Human Nature:

MDMA, Personality and Human Nature:  The Power to Transform People
By Bruce Eisner

Ecstasy: The MDMA Story (Ronin Publishing, Berkeley, 1989, 1993), a book I wrote more than fifteen years ago, was the first comprehensive overview of the compound which all of the contributors to this volume are examining. The book was published in 1989 but most of it was actually written five years before in 1984, when MDMA had not yet been proscribed by the government and could be used freely.

The book is enthusiastic about the promise of MDMA not only for in the variety of potential uses I described in it which included its possible uses in psychotherapy, personal growth, and creativity facilitation but also as a compound which could actually help humans to become better as a species.

In the span of a decade and a half since the book was written, the story of MDMA has had a chance to unfold. Because I wrote a book about the substance, I personally had a opportunity to learn a great deal in public lectures and through correspondence with those of you who read the book and I would like to reflect here on my current perspective on the subject of MDMA’s potential both as a tool to change human nature and also to change people.

Personal Perspectives
I first took MDMA twenty-two years ago. My account of that experience shared with the late Nina Graboi is included as the preface in my book. The setting for Nina and me to take our first MDMA sessions was a park in a beautiful part of San Diego, La Jolla. Nina -- author of One Foot in the Future -- was a remarkable Austrian woman whom I had met the year previously in Santa Cruz after she heard of the work of our Psychedelic Education Center there. The experience took place on a warm spring Easter Sunday and so is titled “Ecstatic Easter.”

During the last part of the account, I tell about how Nina and I watched marines and their families play in the park on their Easter outings and the unusual experience of empathy that I had for them. In the next paragraph, I note that what I had experienced included a meditative calm: “No regrets from the past, and no anticipation of future events marred the present moment.”

Those two experiences - empathy and meditative calm – are what I characterize as the two main poles of the positive kinds of experiences people have on MDMA report clustering around. In my book, I describe the experiences of the first kind in the chapter, “What is an Empathogen,” and experiences of the second kind in the next chapter, “The Uses of an Entactogen.”

Empathogen, a label coined by Ralph Metzner PhD., was one attempt at naming the class of compounds to which MDMA belongs to differentiate it from MDMA, and points to the substance’s unique ability to promote an experience in which people can put themselves in another person’s place and begin to understand them as if they were the other person – that is an experience of empathy. It also points to the propensity for MDMA to promote interpersonal openness.

“Entactogen” was a term first used by David Nichols of Purdue University and literally means “to get in touch with the within.” This inner sense of peacefulness as well as acceptance of the present moment and the individual’s place in it was one of the most noteworthy characteristics of MDMA’s very targeted set of experiential characteristics.

That kind of meditative calm unfortunately was not the way that I experienced the world most of the time. I was a young nerdish fellow growing up in a typically neurotic middle class household in the ’fifties and early ‘sixties in the suburbs of LA. The scene, to be more specific was the San Fernando Valley – where the Valley Girl’s language was actually spiced with the stereotypical “like gag me with a spoon, man.”

I had taken LSD ten years ten years before my first MDMA experience and had opened up for the first time in more than an intellectual way to experiencing the wonders of the universe. MDMA had an oddly grounding effect on me. That is, LSD showed me the realms of transpersonal consciousness with its esoteric wonders but MDMA took me back to the world and to the people who live there. I had been striving for some kind of abstract enlightenment but MDMA pointed out through its unfolding experience that enlightenment was in the present moment -- which it was right here-and-now.

From my background, it must become apparent that I believe that psychoactive compounds are an important tool for humans to explore and utilize. This is because I was raised with a solid scientific education and have a great deal of faith that somehow we humans will use our technology in positive ways, to realize our dreams of a better world, a world where we can live together in peace and in which we treat each other with the respect that we each deserve. And so pharmaceutical compounds which offered to facilitate some of these kinds of transformations in people appealed to the side of me, which wanted a scientific solution to our problems, rather than some kind of faith-based religious or spiritual method.

LSD had provided the first such catalyst. My early experiences with LSD knocked me from the conveyor belt of social conformity and took me spinning through worlds of abstractions, which left me a bit out of touch with every day life. MDMA showed me that these abstractions of “Nirvana,” “Samadhi,” “the Kingdom of God,” “the Clear Light of the Void,” etc., were reflected in the flowers I see on a walk, in the course of my work, and in the eyes of everyone I came into contact with.

I had taken MDMA the year I graduated with my bachelors degree from U.C. Santa Cruz in psychology, 1979. I had already steered myself toward a reconciliation with a culture that I had rebelled against in the ‘sixties, having returned to school after taking quite seriously the bumper-sticker admonition of Timothy Leary to “Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out.”

My most intense experiments with MDMA were conducted privately with groups of friends from this time up until MDMA was made illegal. I was fortunate to have the privilege of conducting these experiments free of the repressive strictures which government permission casts upon studies of mind-changing compounds.

While a graduate student at U.C. Santa Barbara and later while a Ph.D. student and candidate at Saybrook Institute San Francisco, I was constantly reading, thinking and writing about human personality and consciousness. I conducted research and taught research methodologies, but at the same time, my friend Timothy Leary coached me in what he called the “Existential-Transactional Approach” to psychological research. “Bruce,” he told me, “you can learn more about people by studying them on the dance floor or on the beach or at a football stadium than you ever will by studying them in a laboratory.” Taking Tim’s advice seriously, I studied people in their “natural settings,” if you will, taking MDMA.

And as a young psychology student, I was excited by what I observed in people who used the compound. MDMA sessions were especially noteworthy and different than with any other psychoactive drug including MDA, in that often people opened up to each other in a very dramatic fashion. They developed what they felt to be profound empathy and were able to see each other through the eyes of others and develop a sense of compassion. From my point of view as a psychologist, it was a truly remarkable phenomenon; and for me as a social activist, it had implications on the fate of the planet.

My friends and I were very enthusiastic about the possibilities that MDMA might have the power to help people to transform themselves and as a species, to empower people toward becoming kinder to one another. We felt that we might have found a compound that might change human nature.

Psychopharmacology and Human Nature
Now this was not the first time in our recent history that this had occurred. I already have told you that I joined the ‘sixties psychedelic movement. It was inspired by a similar notion about LSD.

Timothy Leary, writing in a letter from prison called “Seeds of the Sixties” which was reprinted in his Changing My Mind Among Others: Lifetime Writings Selected and Introduced by the Author (Prentiss Hall, 1982):

In January 1960 I accepted an invitation to come to Harvard to initiate new programs in what was then called Behavior Change. I was convinced that the drastic limitations on human intellectual and emotional function were caused by inflexible states of mind, static and conditioned neural circuits, which created and preserved malfunctional states of perceived reality. In the then-Zeitgeist of Salk, Fleming, Pauling, I believed that the right chemical used correctly was the cure. The “ailment” I had selected as curable was human nature.

To simplify, I believe that man did not know how to use his head, that the static, repetitive normal mind was the source itself of “dis-ease” and that the task was to discover the neuro-chemical for “changing” mind. Our initial experiment at Harvard suggested the LSD might be such a drug.

In the early 1960’s, we tested these hypotheses in a series of controlled experiments: the setting or expectation for philosophic exploration and self-discovery was supportive, secure, and respectable. There was not one casualty or “bad trip.” Our subjects would routinely experience meta-mind intensities and were encouraged to contemplate the implications of these new signals.

Although MDMA is clearly a different and less all-encompassing experience than LSD is, it too inspired the idea in those of us who were experimenting with it when still legal, that we had stumbled on a possible “cure for human nature.” And certainly we also thought that it might be a cure for a lot of less pandemic disorders as well – everything from the fear of death to depression to relationships gone sour were targets for our new magic bullet.

The Chinese philosophers were the earliest of human thinkers to discuss the issues of human nature. While the great Chinese philosopher Confucius preferred to not discuss such issues, two of his 4th and 3rd century BC disciples, Mencius and Hsün-tzu, did much to clarify these issues. Mencius asserted that the “original face of man” -- which was their sexist lingo for “human nature” -- was basically good and that it could be developed not only by study, as Confucius had taught, but also by a process of inner self-cultivation. Hsün-tzu, took the opposite stance, asserting that the original nature of man was evil. Still another group of Chinese philosophers, in the tradition of Chinese Taoism, asserted that human nature was neither good nor bad but was “like uncarved wood” – ready to be shaped by life’s experiences.

Moving forward five thousand years, Arthur Koestler, the noted German philosopher and psychological theorist speculated that human’s might have a built-in “paranoid streak” because of the way that our nervous systems evolved. At the core of our brain is the “fight or flight” mechanism of the limbic system, which was sometimes called the “reptile brain” because our reptilian ancestors contributed it. On top of that, we have a mammalian or “monkey” brain, which has such typical mammalian concerns as territoriality and dominance hierarchies.

Koestler noted that on the frontiers of mental development, the frontal lobes, we find something which is unique to our species and which encompasses typically human notions such as compassion, empathy and consciousness. But he saw a dilemma to all of this. With so many steersman taking turns, there is always confusion about: ‘who is running the ship? Sometimes the reptile is in control, other times a monkey and still others the human at the helm. What Koestler noted was that in many cases, basic fear mechanisms, which comprise the vestigial evolutionary circuitry, cause humans to act “paranoid” rather than with those more lofty traits we like to think of as being human.

When we discuss human nature, we are not talking about personality or temperament, which are about individual differences, but more a kind of species-wide temperament and a collective personality. The notion of human nature suggests that each species has its own nature and this nature influences how that species will play its part in evolution. Because humans among all species have developed such enormous influence upon the ecosystem of the planet, human nature becomes important not just for the future of human beings but for the very life on our planet. Humans have already made changes in the environment that have led to the extinction of almost half of all living species and continue to have the power to destroy our entire planet and take all life with it.

So the ability to change human nature in some way, as to point us in the direction of peace within our own species and also in the direction of increased respect of the planet’s ecosystem, has been a notion that many idealistic individuals have found attractive.

Of course, such concepts must remain for the time being simply ideas that we might want to remain aware of and begin to examine. While there are tests that purport to measure human personality and even human temperament, there are no equivalent tests to measure human nature. LSD or MDMA cannot be administered to the entire species so even if we had such tests, we could not measure what MDMA could do to them from a scientific perspective. The discussion of such matters must remain within the province of informed speculation.

While noting this, we should also be aware that in some ways, the psychedelic movement was a kind of uncontrolled “LSD social experiment.” When LSD research and LSD politics were in their heyday – from 1960 until 1966 when compound was civilized, many of its proponents in the “psychedelic movement” attempted to spread LSD out beyond the walls of academia and into the larger population as a method of affecting human nature.

Now, four decades later, we can look back at these times and say that in many ways, the psychedelic movement did transform global culture. Of course it is impossible to point to causes and effects but it is interesting to note that when the movement began there were threats of world-wide destruction by the Cold War and nuclear arms race. But by 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the threat of nuclear war now seems much further from us than it was then.

And while the population explosion problem continues to threaten the ecology of the planet, the consciousness of this threat and attempts to make technological development more ecologically wise is much greater. Some of this may be due to seeds planted by the psychedelic movement back then.

Influence on Personality and Temperament
It can also help our thinking about the effects of mind-changing chemicals on human nature to look at the complexities involved in understanding their effects on individual personality.

In modern psychology, questions about human personality have been looked at in relationship to the degree to which in-born temperament “hard-wired” genetic tendencies influence how we behave in relationship to the influence of our individual development and social learning. This is often called “the nature vs. nurture” debate.

Psychology has vacillated in a style, which makes it seem quite “trendy” for a discipline that calls itself a science. In the early days of psychology in the last part of the nineteenth century, psychology sided with ethnology, the belief that most behavior is based on in-born instinct. In the 1920’s John Watson championed the opposite belief which he called “behaviorism” and which contradicted the earlier view. It went so far as to suggest that humans might be like “Tabla Rasa” or blank slates upon which society and conditioning write the entire script of life.

Behaviorism ruled psychology for many years to the point where psychology was defined as the “science of behavior.” But in recent years, with many psychological studies demonstrating the importance of genetic factors in personality and behavior, the “nature vs. nurture” debate has swung for many psychologists back the other way toward the importance of in-born personality traits.

This new conventional wisdom in psychology is influenced greatly by the return of ethnology with a new name -- sociobiology. Works such as those by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology xxx) suggest that much of what we thought was social learning is actually “hard-wired” into our nervous systems and that much less is the product of social learning.

The importance of the relative weight of nature vs. nurture to the equation of who we are is immediately relevant to any program or technique which aims to make changes in our long-term personality, thinking and behavior. Although earlier studies of psychotherapy put the effectiveness into question, more recent studies employing more efficient forms of therapy have shown that people can change through learning with the aid of an individual or therapy group. As well as on psychedelic explorations, by learning on mind-changing compounds.

Studies of LSD and Personality Shed Some Light
As there have been no formal or informal studies which have looked at the question of MDMA’s impact on human personality, it is useful to again look at the earlier LSD literature to get our bearings. The research of the late William McGlothlin with LSD and human personality gives us some hints.

McGlothlin and Arnold (1971) reported that many people who had been administered LSD under medical supervision reported 10-15 years later lasting attitude and behavior changes which they considered beneficial.

The authors attempted to obtain experimental evidence as to the verifiability of these claims by the experimental administration of high doses of LSD to human subjects in what they termed “neutral settings” and to which they referred to as “random samples of the population” and studied them longitudinally over several years. Their well-controlled administration of LSD would often produce experiences which demonstrated large short-term changes in personality measures. Over time, however, the personalities of most of their subjects would migrate back to become much like their pre-LSD measures. Their conclusions were that although people subjectively believed that LSD had changed them dramatically, often the effects on their objectively measured personalities were minimal.

There were some exceptions to this finding. Here is what he says: “When the user is impressionable, e.g. the adolescent, or is predisposed to seek a new belief system and especially when he continues to live and identify with a group committed to a particular philosophy, the hallucinogens can be a potent means of facilitating the rapid modification of beliefs and values. Whether such changes are beneficial or harmful depends upon the frame of reference.”

Now the differences between LSD and MDMA are significant so we cannot be absolutely certain that the same results would hold. Because MDMA is not as all-encompassing an experience as LSD, users often suggest that it does not produce large shifts in personality on a global dimension, but makes targeted changes in a few categories such as openness and empathy in the interpersonal area and serenity and personal acceptance on an intrapersonal dimension. Furthmore, because the state-of-consciousness is less profoundly different than “normal waking” consciousness, the experience is more easily remembered and learned. With these factors in mind, those who note these differences suggest MDMA might lead to less immediately dramatic but more persistent changes in people’s personality and behavior than LSD.

But I don’t think that we can discount the implications of the LSD studies. Just as in LSD studies, many MDMA users attribute long-term beneficial results of the drugs. In many cases, I would suspect that if psychometric test measurements of personality were conducted, we would find minimal persistence in personality long term. But it is probably true that in both cases, changes in personality produced by the chemically induced experiences would be influenced by subsequent socialization.

Just as in LSD sessions, MDMA sessions are often conducted in isolation from the “outside world,” and people often become quite open and direct with their emotions. The exception here of course is the “rave scene” in which temporary social settings are created which are confluent with the MDMA experience. In either case, when those who have taken MDMA later return to more defensive and passive-aggressive sorts of behaviors, it is likely that these behaviors are reinforced by society

The new ways of relating would surely be more enduring if the individual woke up the next day and started living in a world where people’s behaviors were consciously inculcated with these changed values. The realization of the importance of continued social reinforcement on MDMA and LSD users is what influenced me to start Island Foundation in 1990. Island Foundation, named for Aldous Huxley’s last novel Island is a 501 c 3 educational non-profit which looks at designing a new cultural style including values and ideas much more confluent with psychedelic and entactogenic experience.

MDMA: The Power to Transform People
While LSD studies of global personality change did not demonstrate long-term lasting effects in people when given with no preexisting purpose or direction, there is a vast body of literature as to proven uses for LSD when used as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Proven uses for the drug include its effectiveness in treating alcoholism and heroin addiction, severe neurotic conditions, and trauma surrounding terminal illness.

Among the earliest adopters of MDMA were psychiatrists, psychologists and lay group leaders who experimented with the use of MDMA as a method of helping people with a number of specific life challenges including traumatic stress disorders, problems in relationships, depression, anxiety and even learning to confront eminent death for individuals with a terminal disease. Other lay groups of people used MDMA with the intention of dealing with personal difficulties in less formal leaderless groups and in individual personal explorations.

In those days before MDMA was crimilized, many began using it because they hoped for the usefulness and effectiveness of MDMA for these approaches. However, because of the quasi-legal status of MDMA at that time, no government-sanctioned studies were carried out. So most of the reports from back then are anecdotal in nature. These included one more formal study by George Greer and Requa Tolbert titled “Subjective Reports of the Effects of MDMA in a Clinical Setting.” The study which included 29 subjects with diagnosed psychological disorders indicated that the subjects reported that they felt as if their conditions improved.

Because these early researchers had the impression that MDMA was a useful tool for psychotherapy, when the DEA announced that MDMA would be placed into the DEA’s schedule at the highest level of risk, a number of researchers were willing to stand up before the scrutiny of the DEA to testify that MDMA should not be placed in Schedule I. Because MDMA had been of benefit to patients, these researchers hoped that MDMA would be placed into Schedule III, which would have made it much easier to research. The early researchers pleas were rejected by the DEA, which staunchly resisted all efforts to keep MDMA in a lower schedule. These events are thoroughly documented in my book, which was written during those few months when the U.S. government first “discovered” what they considered the MDMA threat until it was criminalized.

It is clear in retrospect that the DEA’s successful resistance to allowing MDMA to be placed into Schedule III, even when their own Administrative Law judge made that a recommendation to do so had predicable consequences. Instead of the drug remaining in the hands mainly of researchers, it pushed MDMA into the streets – relegating it to the same fate that every other drug so criminalized has suffered.

The harsh laws enacted in 1985 effectively froze research that was being conducted informally before MDMA’s criminalization and placed enormous barriers to formal research of any drug placed in Schedule I. Only one research project has been approved in the U.S. in fifteen years and that one is hung up in red tape.

It is clear that while “tough” drug laws might seem a good idea on paper, in that they aim to protect people against exposure to health risks, in practice they lead to almost the exact opposite results that are intended. In the year 2000, fifteen years after it was criminalized, MDMA remains the latest drug fad among recreational drug users. Because of its criminalization, the greatest threat to the health and safety of its users is not the substance itself but the fact that most of the material that is represented as MDMA is actually other chemicals whose combinations are far more dangerous than MDMA could be at its worst.

Furthermore, because the government pours all its monies into disinformation campaigns, those who look to use MDMA must do so with very little real information available to them. The only information being disseminated about MDMA which takes into consideration that people might actually take the drug comes from Dance Safe, the aforementioned MAPS, and Ecstasy.org. And of course the editor of this book, Dr. Julie Holland, has published important medical information that has contributed to our knowledge of harm reduction strategies with respect to MDMA.

Unfortunately, many researchers who would be eager to research MDMA with regard to its general effects and its effects in psychotherapy or personal development are left mainly to speculate on what they could do with the compound if they could use it in more thoughtful and directed ways.

How does MDMA work therapeutically?
As a result of publishing my book, I have lectured about MDMA to the public twenty-five times as well as having been interviewed on the radio at least a dozen times. During these public sessions, I have had a chance to speak personally to many people who have told me that they benefited from its use. In a fashion similar to that of this paper, they for the most part never gave a reason why but they are sure that it has been of great significance in their lives.

In the process of writing the book, I reviewed as much as I could of the public record and presented as many different possible theories for MDMA’s efficacy as I could. I also did some theorizing of my own based both on my review of the known literature and on my own experiences and observations.

While I was writing the book, I was struck with one curious omission that I found in examining as much as I could in the public record about the substance. While there are many testimonials for the usefulness of MDMA for a wide range of problems, nobody really gives a reason why MDMA would be of therapeutic use. There was no theory behind the therapy. Furthermore this "theory gap" exists until this present day.

For example, the only sanctioned study in the U.S. to study MDMA by Charles Groeb and associates gives this reason for its investigation of MDMA with terminal cancer patients. His research protocol, published by Rick Doblin’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1995 states:

“Assertions have been made that MDMA can reduce acute and chronic pain experienced by end-stage cancer patients, perhaps that portion of total pain and suffering resulting from emotional, psychological, cognitive, and social variables”

The proposal goes on to suggest that MDMA may also improve the immune system. Because the proposal is for a “pilot study” and these kinds of studies are most often exploratory – looking for theories rather than proving them, a mechanism by which the prescribed compound does any of the things that it is claimed to do.

With this in mind, I wish to conclude this essay by alluding to some of the ways by which MDMA provides experiences useful in therapy and also how these positive effects may persist in people’s lives. I provide these ideas as being tentative and speculative in nature but with the hope that they might provide hypothesis-generating ideas for future researchers.

The ideas are a combination of my own thinking along with ideas taken from The Healing Journey by, Claudio Naranjo MD. That book, published in 1968, described the work that the noted Chilean psychiatrist had done with four psychoactive compounds including two related to MDMA – MDA and MMDA. Naranjo had developed a clear model for why MDMA had been effective in his patients. Some of the ideas were already presented in my book but I have added some new material from essays published since then and from the new thinking since the publication of the second edition.

MDMA Provides Water Wings So That People Can Learn Healthy States of Mind and Behavior
MDMA produces what consciousness theorists have called “model state of consciousness” with characteristics distinctly different than our normal waking consciousness. As I have discussed above, these include such inwardly experienced qualities as a sense of peace, acceptance of one’s fate and of the present moment, and outwardly as interpersonal openness and empathy.

The experience of individuals on MDMA is much more constantly positive than on psychedelics such as LSD. Also, factors such as set and setting, while important become less important in bringing off the characteristic state of ecstatic awareness produced by this psychoactive.

Because the positive experiences of MDMA give the user a glimpse of a better way of being in the world, this by itself can have a beneficial effect on an individual. For example, in the case of a victim of a trauma such as rape, often individuals retain a state of fear, which they continue to live with long after the triggering episode has taken place. If such an individual then takes MDMA and for the first time visits an experiential “place,” a discrete state of consciousness where they feel good, peaceful, having no fear there is a lifting of the trauma..

This trauma-lifting experience is then later remembered. When the MDMA is no longer working, the fact is that for a bit of time, the person has felt what it is like to have solved a problem they previously were quite concerned about, and that they later remember that state of consciousness and can access it again. Like using water wings in order to swim, taking MDMA provides mental water wings, which can aid in a person learning to be free of a traumatic state of mind. Once learned, the experience can be remembered and reassessed. A therapist who assists in the training process can facilitate this.

MDMA Suspends Psychological Pain and Emotional Armoring And Allows Patients to Look at Themselves
Closely related to the first mechanism is the fact that when someone is having an MDMA experience, their usual defensiveness including what the psychologist Willhelm Reich called “body armoring” is temporarily suspended. Stuck emotions are free to move and the process of healing them can begin.

Besides providing a glimpse of healthy functioning as described above, this experience also gives the person an opportunity to examine him- or herself in this freed-up state of mind.

Much as an anesthetic can allow the surgical exploration of a wound, MDMA may provide relief of pain, which enables for the exploration of feelings and experiences that would ordinarily be too painful for the client to look at.

MDMA Allows the Adult to Play
Perhaps the most important way MDMA works occurred to me while I was writing my essay, “Why We Get High?” It examines the possible evolution theory-based reasons for why the drive to get high evolved, and shows that one of the major benefits of psychoactive compounds was that they allowed adult members of the human species to revisit play when as adults their ability to do so had become dormant.

A Dutch professor, Johan Huizinga, in the '’thirties commented that humans might better have been called Homo Ludens than Homo Sapien. Homo Sapien means thinking man, while Homo Lndens names our species playful man. He argued for the latter term because while every one of the more developed animal species plays, humans play for a much longer proportion of their life span than any other creature with the exception perhaps of the whales and dolphins, which some may argue play their entire life.

Most of uses don’t realize it but play is essential for learning and growth. Play is a highly creative behavior in which we act out our fantasies. By doing so, we learn many of the behaviors which grow more complex and evolve into our "grown up" culture and civilization.

Externally, our relationship with others and the environment changes and becomes more novel and experimental: internally, we can consider our thoughts and emotions in a new light, or from a new and higher level. If this sounds a bit like my earlier description of the MDMA experience, it is because it is.
By allowing us entry into this alternative state of consciousness which is essentially more playful, an MDMA-induced creative play experience may allow us to "deprogram" ourselves, ridding ourselves of habitual acts and stultified ways of seeing things. We try on new behaviors and modes of thought the same way an actor dons a costume and mask. This breaks us free of our earlier programming and allows us to consciously choose to become who we want to be and to think what we will.

Fulfilling MDMA’s Potential
In this wide-ranging essay, I have examined possible ways MDMA may work therapeutically, discussed its possible effects on personality and even commented on its possible curative powers for human nature. This author acknowledges that there are no panaceas in this world and that MDMA is not a cure for all that ails us.

At the same time, it is clear to me in the narrower domain of potential uses of MDMA for helping people to be happier human beings, that there are possibilities that can be explored. I hope that this essay has clarified some of the issues around these issues so that when a truce is finally called in the War on Drug Users, we can allow MDMA’s potential to finally be realized.

 

Comments

[Stacey]

you need to put your information in sectons and put a header on top so if people want to find something quick they can just look at the header and know what to go to instead of reading the whole thing

[Brittany]

I love this perspective of mdma. When an educated person uses their knowledge of psychology and human personality to show the benefits of such a drug, it truly shows another side of it's use. I believe that with certain people, mdma can change a person's life. I have read Ecstacy: The Mdma Story, and it showed me what I already knew about the drug, and it helped to validate my feelings. I enjoyed the essay, and I will continue to read material written by Bruce Eisner. Thank you!

[sam]

please make the following correction:

the article states:

"Mencius asserted that the “original face of man” -- which was their sexist lingo for “human nature..."

this is incorrect. Mencius said "original face of "Ren". "Ren" just means "person" or "human" or human race. Chinese is a genderless language. in order to say "man", the word "Na", which means male, has to be added to "Ren". "Na Ren" means "man". "Ren" just mean human.

[Fascinated student]

Very interesting essay.

[Andy]

This essay is very informative and I thank you for it... Thank You!