When Therapy Didn’t Work, I Turned to an Illegal Drug

I ’d known Abby for over twenty years. We always had a lot to talk about, with overlapping interests and a similar world view. She had a soothing energy and a keen sense of humour. Over the years, the occasional comment or dark joke made me wonder if we shared the same kind of damage, but I never probed. One day, we sat across from each other in a pub booth in Paddington, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. She ordered a glass of champagne for us both and we picked at some food. After some small talk, she asked me, “How are you?” There was something about her tone, the genuine concern in her voice, and her gaze, which fell across me like a light blanket. I resisted the urge to downplay everything that had happened over the past year and simply said, “I’ve decided not to see my mother anymore.” “Oh my god,” she said, “you’re allowed to do that? How amazing!” Over lunch, I gave Abby the whistle-stop tour of my family history and what had led to my decision to sever all contact with my mother. She listened and nodded. She thankfully didn’t engage in the usual “but she’s your mother,” “you need to forgive her for you,” or, even worse, “life’s too short” platitudes that I feared would follow my confession. As a daughter, deciding to cut your mother out of your life seems like an unthinkable act of betrayal, almost anti-feminist. Abby responded not with pop psychology about forgiveness and the importance of family but with stories of her own. I had spent thirty years in and out of therapy, trying to come to terms with violence and abuse during my childhood and then, later on, a stillbirth and numerous miscarriages. Conventional therapies had helped me understand what had happened to me on an intellectual level, but there was something missing. I was still struggling. After all this time and effort and money, shouldn’t I be further along? And then Abby told me about Julia and her experience with MDMA. She’d met Julia through a friend at a party. Julia was a healer with decades of experience using plant-based medicines, whose practice over the past few years had been centred around MDMA. Abby had travelled to see Julia in her home in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales for a session, which took all day and was clearly revelatory. The story intrigued me. Abby wasn’t a drug taker in any recreational sense. She was sensible and grounded and evidence based in everything she did. So the fact that she’d had this profound experience on MDMA with an underground practitioner made me take it seriously. In books like Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal, the use of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin is discussed at length as having great potential in addressing unresolved trauma. Abby was convinced I would find Julia and MDMA useful. She offered to introduce me via Signal. MDMA was an illegal drug, and what Julia was doing was also illegal. And yet none of that deterred me. I thought it was worth exploring.

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A few days later, I found myself exchanging emails with Julia on Proton. Before she agreed to meet for a chat online, she gave me a lot of background information about the process and sent me a lengthy questionnaire to fill out. I didn’t clock it at the time, but I realize now that she was trying to work out if I was the right fit for the therapy. Was I ready? She sent me numerous pages explaining how the process worked. Namely, that the drug floods the amygdala with a wave of serotonin. This subdues your fight-or-flight response, allowing you to explore your past experiences without the usual reactivity. Julia’s papers emphasized the process rather than the drug, because she wasn’t selling me MDMA like a dealer in a nightclub; she was involving me in a process with an important lead-up and an even more important integration process afterward. In the weeks before the first session, she and I spoke a few times to explore what I wanted to achieve. There were other kinds of prep work too. I would need to load up on vitamin C and magnesium. No recreational drug taking or alcohol for a few weeks prior. In the two days before the session, I should take an amino acid called L-tryptophan that converts to serotonin, to offset the dip that occurs a few days after. A light breakfast on the day, no caffeine or other stimulants. The session would run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. or possibly longer—an extraordinarily long period to be high with a stranger, or so I thought. I would take one capsule of the drug at the start, and then she would offer me a second dose after a few hours. Then, in the week after, more L-tryptophan, B and C vitamins, and magnesium. Melatonin or a sleep aid if needed. And lots of self-care. Good food, gentle exercise, time in nature, creative pursuits, and so on. “Perhaps do not schedule anything demanding soon afterwards, and surround yourself with gentle company,” Julia’s notes suggested. Like a good girl, I went to the vitamin shop, booked a massage, and took a few days’ leave from work. As I read back through Julia’s information, what strikes me is that she didn’t overpromise. The drug was a facilitator of a process that would not “cure” me. What I brought into it, the work I was prepared to do before and after, that’s what mattered. The questionnaire she asked me to fill out was remarkably detailed, more than you might complete for a medical professional. Several pages outlining my mental and physical health information, family history, current employment, and living arrangements. If I was taking any medication for anything. After that, I was to write a “Letter to Self,” which would help me articulate what I wanted from the process. I could share it with her or not. Why was I choosing to do this work now? What were the outcomes I wanted to see with the support of this work? What would the change I was looking for look like? Feel like? That “Letter to Self” sits on my desktop. I read it from time to time. In it, I was remarkably open about how I wasn’t coping, how I was stuck. I wrote that I was committed to a new approach to healing but that I was finding it hard and time consuming and lonely. That I was looking for insight and compassion in equal measure. I must have said all the right things, because Julia agreed to a first meeting. We talked through the process in detail on Zoom one afternoon, reiterating that she would offer me a second dose of MDMA after a few hours. “It’s up to you if you want the second dose or not,” she told me. “Has anyone ever refused?” I asked out of interest. “Rarely,” she told me. “I don’t work with people in the midst of crisis,” she added. The process was far more efficacious when the immediate crisis had passed and when the nervous system was not in “arrest mode.” The fact that I was in secure employment, secure accommodation, accessing consistent therapy, surrounded by friends, and in good health all made me a good candidate. We ended the meeting by confirming a time and a place for session one. She would be visiting Sydney in a few weeks and would come to me. F inally, the moment of reckoning. I swallowed the first capsule and laid back against the couch pillows, my legs outstretched. I was facing away from the TV mounted on the wall, staring toward the front door. Through the glass pane between the door and the wall I could see cobwebs, previously unnoticed by me, in the corner where the door meets the roof. It took a great deal of restraint not to jump up, grab a feather duster, and sweep them away. I took a deep breath. One track ended and a similar one started up, more rhythmic drumming but with voices this time. I closed my eyes. Maybe the drug won’t work on me. Maybe I’ll just have a forced nap. That would be nice enough. I felt tired. I broke the silence but didn’t open my eyes. “I’m not sure I have anything to say at the moment. I’m worried you might be bored.” Julia reminded me she wasn’t necessarily there to ask me questions like my therapist. She was there to guide and respond to whatever emerged. Apparently, some people are silent throughout the whole session, lying still as tears stream from their eyes. Others start talking and don’t stop. I can’t recall whether it was during the third song or the fourth when it happened. Julia’s notes say I took the drug at 10.46, and by 11.01 I said I was “feeling it.” It started like the familiar feeling from a joint or a strong painkiller, that comforting tug toward the ground, away from pain and tension. And then it quickly became something else. Have you ever laid down on the beach where the waves crawl across the sand—and let them slowly drag you into the ocean until you are no longer on the shore but floating on the surface? It was like that, only instead of floating on cold water, I was held by a warm body of emotion and memory. And then I submerged and was slowly dragged by a riptide that should have frightened me but didn’t. A riptide that moved me from memory to memory to memory in unexpected ways. At first, it dragged me into a memory I’ve recalled a few times a week since my daughter Stella was born. But the MDMA made me remember—made me feel—this memory differently from the way I usually do. Stella is a twin, the first one out of the womb and the only child the hospital staff gave me to hold after I had my C-section. Her sister, Sadie, wasn’t breathing, and so she went straight from my body into an incubator and then into an ambulance, sent to the only available neonatal intensive care unit ward on the other side of town. I was full to the brim with the drugs from the epidural when they put Stella on my chest to hold. It was a moment I usually describe as pure happiness. I’d thrashed my way through blood, pain, needles, and piles of money to get to that moment. This was the first memory that the MDMA riptide pulled me toward, but the feeling I experienced through the drug was not pure happiness but something else. The absence of terror. I had, in fact, been terrified every second of that long, hard pregnancy. Terrified that the babies would die. That my tired, overwhelmed, unloved body would kill them. I had successfully suppressed those feelings, not just while I was pregnant with the twins but ever since. The MDMA made me understand that, made me feel that moment differently. I sat in the memory refashioned by the drug. Eyes closed, all awareness of my surroundings melted away. I couldn’t feel the couch underneath me or the temperature of the air around me. I only barely registered the soundscape of Julia’s music, when one song shifted into the next. What I could feel was the light weight of my daughter on the left side of my chest, above the heart. I sat in that memory for seconds, minutes, maybe more. It was impossible to judge at the time. Then, gently, the riptide pulled me away, toward something that could not be described as a memory at all, unless you believe babies have memories that can be stored and recalled. I walked into a sparse, dark room with one window and a crib in the centre. It was as if I had gotten up from the bed with Stella and walked into this second scene alone. The crib was wooden, empty except for a mattress and a baby. The baby was me. I was neither happy nor sad. Just still, silent. My mother was standing in the corner of the room, looking like I’ve seen her in family photos as a young woman, slender with long dark brown hair parted in the middle, wearing a 1970s-style dress. She was staring at the baby, not with love or malice but impassivity. Still, silent, like the baby. I walked over to the crib, picked myself up and left the room. I lay down again on the hospital bed, restored Stella to her original place on my left side, and put the baby, me as I was in 1972, on the right side. The drug wasn’t yet strong enough to stop me from an inner snort at the cliché. Embracing my inner child. Trying to make up for the traumas of my childhood through my own actions as a mother. This drug was good. I would never have let myself conjure up something this banal. Looking back at this moment, it’s the impassive face of my mother that I return to. How familiar the expression was. The same face when I came to her for help at any crisis in my life. You need help. Part of me wants to help you. But I’m not going to help you. Lying on the hospital bed with the two babies, I wondered, What next? Where should I go now? Some part of my brain was still trying to control what was happening, trying to get through a psychological “to-do list,” the way I plough through tasks at the shopping centre. But as Julia had told me, the process has a wisdom of its own. I could no more guide it consciously than I could force a broken-down trolley through the supermarket aisles. I sat up a little and wiped my eyes. “I think we might take a break now,” Julia said. “I might eat something quickly.” “What time is it?” I asked. “It’s a little past two o’clock.” Jesus. Three hours had passed and it felt like an hour. Julia had spent most of the past two hours kneeling on the floor with her hand on my back as the riptide pulled me here and there. While she grabbed some food, I went to the toilet and drank some more water, and then for the rest of the session, I talked and talked and talked. Julia scribbled notes while I spoke about it all. As evening approached, she started to wind up the session. “I’m sorry,” I said as we were saying our goodbyes. “That was a lot. Too much maybe.” “Not at all,” she said with her reassuring smile. She handed over her handwritten notes and encouraged me to read them later. “There was a lot that came up, but what stood out for me was that moment you remembered with your mother, where she was caring for you when you were sick. You took that feeling and you elevated that. It’s how you can be a mother to your own children.” Julia shouldered her Kevlar backpack and walked off into the dusk. I woke up the next day to find out that Australia was the first place in the world to make MDMA therapy legal. M DMA was a mistake. A mistake in that it was an accidental by-product created by chemists searching for something other than a drug for people dealing with complex trauma. In 1912, the German pharmaceutical company Merck was looking for medicines to control bleeding. In the pursuit of that goal, they discovered methylenedioxymethamphetamine. They patented it in 1914, but it sat on a shelf until the mid-1970s. Except for the US Central Intelligence Agency’s brief flirtation with it as a potential mind-control drug during the Cold War. In 1976, American biochemist Alexander Shulgin was introduced to MDMA by a student he was advising at San Francisco State University. He took it and realized he’d “discovered” a powerful empathogen, a drug that produces feelings of empathy and connectedness. He went on to develop a new method of making the drug and then introduced it to his friend Leo Zeff, a psychologist working in Oakland, California. Zeff started to use small doses as an aid in talk therapy for his clients. Its use grew from there, with an enthusiastic group of psychotherapists using the drug (which was a legal substance at that stage) between 1977 and 1985. Interested scientists started the first important research into how it worked and how it could be used as a therapeutic tool. MDMA’s original name was, in fact, “therapy.” MDMA quickly spread from the therapist’s office to the nightclub and soon became a hugely popular party drug in cities such as Texas and New York. Its name changed from “therapy” to “ecstasy.” And then it spread to the party scene throughout the world. Political and public attention in the US, including a particularly influential episode of the talk show Donahue, led to scrutiny from law enforcement. In 1985, the Drug Enforcement Administration declared an emergency ban on MDMA, placing it on the list of Schedule I drugs, defined as substances with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Other countries around the world followed suit. After a long and focused campaign to reverse this decision, spearheaded by organizations like the US nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MDMA is now on the verge of becoming a legal and legitimate treatment for chronic mental health problems. There are legal psychedelic clinics in Jamaica and Costa Rica. It’s been used to treat patients with severe conditions in Switzerland, Canada, and Israel. Clinical trials are being conducted in numerous jurisdictions around the world, including in certain US states. But Australia is the first jurisdiction to make it available to the public. To the surprise of many in my country and around the world, on February 3, 2023, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Association—TGA—published its decision to authorize the use of MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder that has not responded to treatment. Psychiatrists can prescribe the drug and the mushroom-derived psilocybin to their patients. At the time of writing, this decision remains controversial. There have been allegations that the TGA was lobbied hard, to the point of harassment, by the organization Mind Medicine. Even those hopeful and open to the therapeutic use of MDMA wonder if we have the resources, skills, and understanding of the drug needed to maximize its benefits. In all the media coverage, both positive and negative, about the TGA’s decision to authorize the use of MDMA for PTSD, it’s the drug itself that gets the attention. What all the coverage ignores is that the drug is simply the key to unlocking something far more important: the process. Author’s disclaimer: This piece describes my experiences with MDMA as a therapeutic tool. I was fortunate to find a highly skilled and ethical practitioner who ensured these experiences were healing rather than damaging. I strongly support the ongoing, encouraging research on the role of MDMA for those managing trauma and PTSD. However, I am not a research scientist or medical doctor. Just because my experience was positive does not amount to an argument for the widespread use of MDMA. What was life changing for me might be disastrous for another. This is powerful stuff that demands not only the right setting for its use but comprehensive care and ongoing support for the person taking it. Adapted and excerpted from Sassafras: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and MDMA Therapy by Rebecca Huntley, published by Hachette Australia. Copyright © Rebecca Huntley 2025. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Hachette Australia. The post When Therapy Didn’t Work, I Turned to an Illegal Drug first appeared on The Walrus.