What a long, strange trip it’s been. After decades of vilification, MDMA, a psychedelic substance also known as ecstasy or molly, is on the brink of gaining Food and Drug Administration approval as a psychotherapy-assisted treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Expected by 2023, FDA approval of MDMA could have life-changing implications for the millions of people — veterans, sexual abuse survivors, first responders, victims of violent crime and others, who suffer from PTSD.
In addition, federal approval of MDMA treatments could signal that approval for treatments using other psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms), which has been shown to relieve hard-to-treat conditions like depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addiction, may not be far behind.
Ten years ago, funding for psychedelic research was extremely hard to come by. But the landscape has changed dramatically since 2017, when the FDA designated MDMA a “breakthrough therapy” for PTSD, putting it on a fast track to approval. That was the same year that tech and social entrepreneur Joe Green and social justice advocate Graham Boyd established the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC). The collaborative raises money for scientists and organizations working on clinical trials for psychedelics and works to ensure that people who can benefit from psychedelics have access to the drugs.
“Joe and I saw that there’s just this tremendous potential of philanthropic funding in this field and that there were both [opportunities] and barriers,” said Boyd, an attorney who specializes in political efforts to reform drug laws and end mass incarceration.
“The opportunity here is that kind of rare combination of something that has incredibly high-leverage impact. The barrier is that [psychedelic research] is totally under-resourced because of the stigma attached to it. If we can overcome the misunderstandings and stigma, we can get people [to fund it].”
Finding an opening
When they started the collaborative, Green and Boyd wanted the organization to have a singular focus.
“Our initial theory of change was: If we can get one psychedelic substance approved by the FDA, then a whole lot of other things will follow from that. A lot of other dominoes will fall,” Boyd said.
After some research, he and Green determined that an effort to secure FDA approval for MDMA therapy by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) “was farthest along and most likely to succeed.” Boyd added, “There were several others in play already at that time. But MAPS was the only one that was already moving into the final stage of FDA clinical trials — phase three, as it’s referred to. So we really went all-in on trying to supercharge that effort.”
After engaging Rick Doblin, MAPS’ founder and executive director, in exploratory conversations, Boyd and Green retained outside consultants to assess the workings of the organization and to see what was needed to reach the goal of FDA approval.
“We ended up agreeing that MAPS needed a lot more money,” Boyd said. “I think at the time, MAPS’ position was that they could get FDA approval for $5 million. And our view informed by this expertise was, no, it was more like $30 million, and there were a lot of activities that needed to happen and, sort of, risk mitigation that needed to happen. Ultimately, the MAPS leadership completely agreed with all of that.”
Together with MAPS, PSFC initiated a $30 million capstone campaign that began around the start of the pandemic. The campaign met its fundraising goal just six months later.
Who’s in the collaborative?
Boyd was reluctant to share the names of PSFC donors with the exception of David Bronner, CEO of the natural soap company Dr. Bronner’s and a board member of PSFC. However, other sources such as the Wall Street Journal reported that the 2,500 donors to PSFC’s capstone campaign included numerous Wall Street and Silicon Valley movers and shakers and their philanthropic vehicles, such as the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation ($5 million), the Bob and Renee Parsons Foundation ($2 million), Joby Pritzker ($3 million), Steve and Genevieve Jurvetson ($2.6 million), and Blake Mycoskie ($1 million). Podcast host and author Tim Ferriss gave $1 million to the campaign and helped to publicize it on his podcast. David Bronner was reported to have given $1 million to the campaign.
Since its founding, Boyd said, PSFC “has mobilized or granted a total of $47.5 million through direct grants and charitable fundraising partnerships.”
Donations to PSFC come from individuals, family foundations and other private foundations. Since PSFC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Boyd said the collaborative “does not receive or make impact investments or for-profit investments. Boyd said there isn’t a typical grant amount, with gifts ranging from $5,000 to over $3 million. PSFC is not currently accepting unsolicited applications for charitable funding.
Many donors in the psychedelic space are younger people just learning about philanthropy. “There is a generation of essentially new philanthropists, of people who are younger, who have made their money recently and who really don’t have any experience or very little experience at being substantial philanthropists,” Boyd said. “I think that this new generation of philanthropists, in many cases, are looking to do something different than their forebears did. This is a new field where they get to be leaders.”
Boyd believes PSFC is a good place to learn about philanthropy. “That’s part of the magic sauce that PSFC is creating — a place where philanthropists can join together, find community with each other and learn quite a lot. We bring in a huge number of leaders of organizations in the field, scientists in the field, and we consolidate and organize information. Ultimately, we serve in some ways as a field catalyst in that we are looking at the field as a whole and providing an analysis of what are the pieces that are most important to move first, and who are the actors who are best equipped to do that.”
“This is regulated use”
Currently, PSFC is focusing its energies in two directions. The first is delivery of care to patients with PTSD who need access to MDMA treatment. “We came to realize how complex this field is and all the different things that need to happen,” Boyd said. “Beyond just getting FDA approval for one drug, the next most obvious thing that needs to happen is delivery of care.”
MAPS has begun to consider its post-approval strategy for getting MDMA to the patients who need it. Its goals include training clinicians to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, advocating for flexible regulatory controls and establishing a patient assistance program so that individuals can access MDMA treatment regardless of economic status.
PSFC will be supporting these efforts. “We’ve partnered with MAPS to help figure that out — fundraising needs and the hires they need to make,” Boyd said. “They have made tremendous progress to the point now that I think we have largely said, ‘good job, you guys have this.’ There’s still a lot of money that needs to be raised, but in terms of a plan, they’ve hired [Michael Mullette as their COO], who ran the North American division of Moderna.”
In addition to post-approval delivery of care, PSFC is also working to support the Oregon Psilocybin Therapy Services Initiative, Oregon Bill 109, which was passed in November of 2020. The initiative intends to make psilocybin-assisted therapy available to a wide range of patients in Oregon, including those with end-of-life crises.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of research [showing] that psychedelics are important, not just when there’s a diagnosed mental illness [such as PTSD],” Boyd said. “The most obvious case is in people who’ve gotten a cancer diagnosis and they’re told they have a year to live. There’s a sort of crisis of identity, almost a spiritual crisis that many people find themselves in when death is coming soon. Johns Hopkins, NYU and others have done clinical trials of people who are in distress over a terminal illness. A psilocybin experience gives them perspective about that, their lives become much better.”
Boyd said the Oregon Psilocybin Therapy Services Initiative is being implemented now. He estimates that within six months, people in the state “will be able to go to a trained, licensed psychedelic guide, licensed by the state of Oregon for a whole range of use cases, including depression or anxiety, but also this broader sort of end-of-life care.”
But Boyd wants to be clear. PSFC isn’t advocating for the recreational use of psychedelics. “This is regulated use,” he said. “Where I live in California, you can go to the cannabis store and if you’re an adult, buy cannabis and do whatever you want to with it. That is not going to be what happens in Oregon. You won’t be able to go to a store to buy mushrooms in Oregon. It’s a totally different system.”
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Given the stigma associated with the use of psychedelics, not to mention the legal issues, it’s no wonder the space PSFC operates in is such a green field for philanthropy. At the same time, the collaborative’s early successes and high degree of uptake from funders reflect one of philanthropy’s strengths — funding untested, unexplored opportunities. As we’ve discussed before, it can be the collaborative format itself that gives interested funders the confidence to dip their toes in (or sometimes more than that, judging from all those million-dollar donations).
If federal approval does go through, that funding may end up making a real difference for PTSD sufferers, not to mention the wide range of mental health patients who could benefit from psychedelic treatments.
Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this piece, we referred to Michael Mullette as MAPS’ CEO. Mullette is the COO of the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.