The FDA is expected to decide this week whether to approve an MDMA, or psychedelic, therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects about 7 percent of veterans. Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) supports the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs — and thinks the FDA should get on board. He says he’s been interested in veteran mental health since 2003, when as a retired Marine Corps general, he decided to look into how members of the Individual Ready Reserve were doing in their off-duty lives. "These fine young marines had served their time and left active duty, and they were kind of out there in the darkness," he said. "That’s when I started to really take a look at what can we do to cut the suicide rate." He is among a group of federal legislators who have put pressure on the FDA to approve MDMA therapy for PTSD, despite concerns raised by an agency advisory committee in June. He sat down with Ruth to talk about veterans’ experiences and why he thinks MDMA can help. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You’ve been advocating for a variety of approaches to mental health. In addition to MDMA therapy, there’s mental health therapy like prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD. PE has an over 70 percent success rate but has high dropout rates. Why chase approval for psychedelic therapy instead of bolstering existing therapies? My interactions with veterans and some others who have told their stories of one [medication] cocktail after another. "Here, take this pill [and then when it] doesn’t work, take that pill. If that pill doesn’t work, take two of these." The body can only handle so much input before it begins to, I believe, to not accept any input that will allow for a long-term solution. So maybe I’m a little biased that I haven’t seen the breakthrough therapies that we need. What was your sense of the FDA advisory committee’s recommendation on MDMA for PTSD? They’re acting like a normal advisory panel [that] doesn’t want to assume risk. I'm not antibureaucracy, don’t get me wrong, but a good bureaucracy takes input, turns it around and gives output. But a bureaucracy has to be prodded. Congressmen [Lou] Correa [D-Calif.] and [Jimmy] Panetta [D-Calif.] and [Morgan] Luttrell [R-Texas] and I … we’re trying to create a situation in Congress to let the bureaucracies know it’s OK to assume some logical risk. We’re going to put some funding behind this effort, but we’ve got literally lives at stake here. MDMA therapy may be very expensive because in part it requires long hours from psychotherapists. How will the VA pay for this? When I was a flight instructor and somebody put a cost on a human life: What does it cost if you train a pilot in the Navy or Marine Corps, and what does it cost if they die? You can’t look at it that way. You have to look at what is the benefit. I’m on the budget committee as well, and chairman of the oversight improper payment task force, so I could give you hundreds of billions of dollars right away that we could remove that are either wasteful, fraudulent or unnecessary government spending. It’s not all about adding, it’s about also reducing in areas. What if the FDA rejects the application for MDMA therapy? The VA is going to continue to move forward with some of the research it’s been doing; they’re not going to stop. We will find another way to approach this. It’s not going to stop, because we have lives on the line every day.
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