A Refugee’s Solution to Treating Trauma for the Global Migrant Crisis: MDMA Therapy
Written June, 2022
In late May, our team at Tabula Rasa Ventures had the historic opportunity to host the first-ever Medical Psychedelics House of Davos. Our venue was meant to educate world leaders on the power of psychedelic therapeutics, breakthroughs in psychedelic research, and the complex ecosystem of stakeholders in this unique space including policy makers, health regulators, entrepreneurs, investors, Indigenous community members, activists, and patients. We spoke with John Kerry, Robert Smith, Deepak Chopra, and other leaders about the potential of psychedelics to help treat our global mental health crisis.
About a week before we arrived I was contacted by several groups working on the ground in Ukraine. Among those that reached out were a scientific research organization, several individuals working with the refugee population, and a few doctors looking to help reduce trauma for refugees. They all found me separately within days of one another. They had discovered that I would be bringing psychedelics education to Davos and believed I could speak to the region’s desperate need for access to psychedelic-assisted therapy. I myself came to the United States with my family as a refugee from Ukraine in 1993. To now have the opportunity to help those in need who are in the exact same position as I was felt enormously rewarding and serendipitous.
On the evening of Thursday, May 25th, I drove with our team through an idyllic Alpine valley lined with edelweiss and wildflowers, the Swiss sun disappearing behind the high mountains above and around the humble city. We were on our way to the World Economic Forum (WEF), one of the most secure places on the planet. The building was a fortress built to protect the likes of George Soros, Bill Gates, Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, and every other powerful world leader you can imagine. Multiple metal detectors, background checks by security staff, and snipers on rooftops marked our journey. Military and tactical police units lined the streets.
The WEF annual gathering in this small ski town in eastern Switzerland brings together 95% of the world’s wealth and the leaders of most nation states to discuss the biggest challenges facing humanity today, and attempt to find solutions.
We had entered Davos’s security zone to speak at the House of Ukraine on the topic of Tech for Peace, technology solutions that could help alleviate the refugee crisis in Ukraine. This issue is central to my own story. I was brought to the United States as a refugee from the Crimea, the formerly Ukrainian territory that Russia invaded in 2018, in the early 1990s with my own family. I grew up in a refugee community in upstate New York with other families much like our own. The experience of now being able to speak about the topic of refugee aid on one of the largest stages on the globe felt like a powerful way to honor my ancestors’ struggles to find both home and healing in diaspora.
At the House of Ukraine, I suggested that the most important thing we could do for refugees is figure out how to quickly eliminate or reduce trauma. One solution is providing Ukrainian refugees with top quality therapeutic care and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
Over the last few years global publications have been reporting on the breakthroughs of psychedelic assisted therapy. There have been hundreds of studies showing the efficacy of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and psychedelic assisted therapy in general for mental health ailments. In a recent large-scale trial conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the foremost organization on researching psychedelic medicines, patients with severe PTSD were treated with 3 sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy. One year after the sessions concluded, 67% of the participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis. [*]
Psychedelic therapeutics have proven effective for other mental health ailments as well. In a 2020 study for depression, four weeks after a psilocybin treatment, 71% of people who took the psilocybin had a more than 50% reduction in symptoms. Over half of the participants had entered remission. [*] In a Johns Hopkins psilocybin study for smoking cessation, there was an 80% success rate 6 months after the treatment. Verenicline on the other hand, widely accepted to be the most effective drug for those looking to quit smoking, has a 35% success rate. [*] [*]
Due to the undeniable evidence and the progress psychedelics have made in clinical trials, MDMA is likely to pass Phase III clinical trials and be available to patients as soon as the end of 2023.
When we first arrived to Davos the WEF was so concerned that our facilities may be used to distribute illicit substances that they sent secret police to watch our venue for the first few nights. After having our team of the world’s foremost experts on psychedelic medicine talk their ear off about the research, they finally understood that we were here for something much bigger than a drug deal. Our goal was to begin building a relationship of trust with the WEF and this was an important first step.
There is a belief by many new psychonauts, those new to psychedelic experiences, that dosing our politicians would be the most effective way to change the world. If we can help these individuals process trauma and inspire feelings of “peace” and “love”, then shouldn’t they be more effective in resolving all our world’s problems?
Unfortunately, our largest challenges are extremely nuanced and complex. Taxing the rich in one nation state just shifts the world’s wealthy to another country. Mandating vaccines to combat a global pandemic is effective in some jurisdictions and causes nationwide protests in others.
And so “Dosing Davos”, giving psychedelics to our world leaders, may be wonderful as radical theory, but poor in practice. Most world leaders don’t even have a requirement to see therapists, have mental health screenings, or anything that can ensure psychological resilience for the most powerful people on the planet. If regular physicals are required for our nation’s leaders, why not a comprehensive psychological assessment? Providing therapists for world leaders, and greater access to mental health care is the first step. The psychedelic therapeutics portion can come once a net of safety and trust has been established.
Though, through additional research we are finding that psychedelics may be used to help us through certain geopolitical conflicts.
Research being done with Israelis and Palestinians sitting in psychedelic ceremonies together is paving the way to exploring whether political reconciliation is possible through psychedelic assisted experiences.
Underground work in the Hudson Valley, the psychedelic Mecca of the United States’ Northeast is bringing together members of the Black Lives Matter movement and the NYPD.
There are few conflicts that can not be solved through an increase in healthy communication and empathy. Psychoactive molecules, especially tactogens like MDMA, contain this exact capability. They boost serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine and provide human beings with an increased level of trust and empathy both for themselves and others.
As the Ukraine conflict rages on with 12 million refugees fleeing the country in the past few months, the social and economic costs of supporting this population heal in coming years will continue to grow. The global need for refugee support is also rising. Syrians, Afghans, Chinese Uighurs, and climate refugees will continue to fuel a growing rate of displaced individuals around the globe. The heightened probability that refugees will be exposed to violence, loss, harsh conditions, and resulting traumas, makes the issue of trauma generation within refugee populations an extremely important one to address.
When it comes to vaccines we were able to vaccinate more than 9 million people per day. We need to ask ourselves whether mental health can be treated with the same pace and scale. We can assume that psychological problems take longer to address and treat than a virus, but when looking at the data we find that the month of time necessary to fully vaccinate a patient is comparable to the month of time necessary to go through psychedelic therapy; and the psychedelic therapy tends to last longer than vaccine immunity.
The passing down of trauma through an individual’s epigenetics also provides support for why these therapies are needed now. The epigenome is a string of chemical compounds surrounding our DNA that controls the genome without changing the DNA sequence. With studies on separated twins demonstrating that only 20% of our behaviors and health outcomes are determined by our genes, the epigenome plays a far larger role in affecting who we become and the health of our minds and bodies. With more evidence of the epigenetic consequences on not only those with trauma but their children, grandchildren, and future generations, delaying treatment means signing up to treat more than ten times the people over the next 50 years.
Even if we’re able to reduce the cost of psychedelic therapy to $1000, nearly ten times cheaper than many current treatments, we would still experience a trillion dollar economic loss just assisting the 100 million refugees and their offspring in five decades time.
While we’re still at the beginning of understanding the full consequences of psychedelic treatment, there are paradigm-shifting findings on the ability of psychedelics to positively influence the epigenetics of patients.
As someone who is part of a multi-generational refugee family with every generation in my family since my great-great-grandparents being forced to leave behind their lives to escape violence, poverty, and persecution, those traumas continue to impact the people I love. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and most commonly OCD, are seemingly unavoidable. We have been forced to travel across Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Central Siberia, Eastern Siberia, Germany, Canada, Israel, and the United States over just 100 years. At six years old I could teach you more than a college professor on torture mechanisms employed by Nazi soldiers in the holocaust. Those stories were part of the childhood games I played with my grandparents. They were never meant to be malicious, but at some point the horrors of your ancestral past become the common narrative through which you see yourself, your family, and the world. The pictures I’m shown by our family friends of Ukrainian civilians burned alive by Russian troops will one day be part of the bedtime stories for the grandchildren of this generation’s refugees. Tradition and history passed down both through the language of our “foreign” tongue and the language of our “foreigner” cells.
Access to therapies that can produce results in weeks of time are needed now.
Rescheduling key psychedelic molecules like MDMA, ibogaine, psilocybin, and LSD are the first steps we need to take to build a pathway towards greater research and ultimately healing for those most in need. Without this necessary step we are creating decades of delay in access to dozens of psychedelic treatments that could be the most effective interventions for some of our most pressing health ailments.
A world where governments are able to take in millions of refugees per day and provide not only job support and housing, but the healing of deep trauma, is possible. The research is in its final stages and the infrastructure has been built through the pandemic. Now all it takes is every stakeholder synchronizing one big push. Our geopolitical climate may be too complex for us to stop refugee displacement in our lifetimes, but together we could accomplish a true miracle: the end of trauma being passed down to future generations.
