MDMA was hyped as a promising treatment for PTSD – what went wrong?

“The future is psychedelic,” Rick Doblin, founder of Lykos Therapeutics, declared at a conference on psychedelic drugs last year. Several studies, many of them funded by Lykos, had produced tantalizing signals that combining MDMA with talk therapy could dramatically reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a result, Doblin was one of many advocates touting the drug as the key to revolutionizing mental health care.

But just a year later…