On Aug. 9, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally delivered a ruling that a small but passionate group of doctors and patients were eagerly awaiting. At long last, the FDA determined whether MDMA, the drug known to recreational users (at raves, at Burning Man, and in pursuit of mind-altering self-medication) as molly, could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To the majority of PTSD sufferers in clinical trials, and to their doctors, this was a no-brainer. In a seemingly slam-dunk Phase III trial, more than two-thirds of patients who took MDMA no longer met diagnostic thresholds for PTSD after six months of treatment. In short, this was not just the first promising new treatment to come along in decades—it was, arguably, a wonder drug.
The FDA was unmoved. In what the pro-psychedelic author Michael Pollan called an “earthquake” decision, the FDA ruled that MDMA “could not be approved based on data submitted to date.” The FDA requested a new Phase III trial to further study the safety and efficacy of the drug—at significant expense to Lykos Therapeutics, the company trying to bring MDMA to the medical market.
To supporters of MDMA treatment, something worrisome is afoot. They fear the FDA’s decision was not about science, or at least not purely about science. Rather, they feel that MDMA approval was thwarted by the incendiary claim, made by critics of the treatment, that the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an advocacy organization that favors MDMA usage and which is closely connected to Lykos, is a “therapy cult.” In short, those rooting for FDA approval believe that a promising treatment for people suffering from PTSD was derailed by a slur, one that plays on old antipathies toward new religious movements—antipathies that are irrelevant to the case at hand. Molly is not a cult, they say, but simply a very useful drug.
The story starts off complicated and only grows more so. The accusations that have slowed (or perhaps thwarted) MDMA’s approval were levied by a small group of advocates who actually have backgrounds in the push to legalize psychedelics. On June 11, 2024, Neșe Devenot, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins University writing program, published a Substack essay called “MAPS Is an MDMA Therapy Cult.” From 2011 to 2017, Devenot was herself a volunteer with MAPS, a non-profit based in California that advocates for and sponsors psychedelic and marijuana research. But Devenot told me she was bullied out of the field of psychedelic research by a MAPS employee; she now pursues what she calls “critical psychedelic studies,” through a nonprofit advocacy group called Psymposia.
In her long post, Devenot made wide-ranging accusations against MAPS. The core of her argument is that MAPS secretly promulgates an “undisclosed protocol” for MDMA therapists—those who oversee treatment of PTSD patients and sit in the room with them while they are under the influence—and that this secret protocol differs substantially from Lykos’s published protocol for therapists, shared with the FDA. This “undisclosed protocol,” she says, is quasi-religious in nature, grounded in metaphysical theories of the self and the nature of trauma. Furthermore, she argues that MAPS takes advantage of the suggestibility-enhancing properties of MDMA to indoctrinate professional therapists and medical researchers into using ritual-like “directive therapy” approaches, which she compares to demonic exorcisms.
Meanwhile, for proponents of MDMA treatment, the accusations made by Devenot—who, by her own admission, alerted relevant FDA decision-makers to her theories—are scare tactics, reminiscent of past moral panics. They point to the relationship between overstated anti-cult vigilantism and the war on drugs—lingering, discredited moral crusades dating back to the Reagan era.
“I think some of the reason that the ‘therapy cult’ language resonated with people who aren’t experts in the field is a suspicion of these compounds,” says Jay Michaelson, a rabbi and religious studies scholar at Emory University’s Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality (and a contributor to Arc). To even call a movement a “cult,” Michaelson suggests, can be to engage in a kind of smear of beliefs or practices that the mainstream considers unusual. “In religious studies, people haven’t used the word ‘cult’ in twenty or thirty years,” he says. “It isn’t helpful analytically, and it can be stigmatizing and offensive.”
To supporters of MDMA treatment, something worrisome is afoot. The FDA’s decision, they fear, was not about science, or at least not purely about science.
The FDA has not made public the thinking behind its decision on MDMA, and Lykos has not released the FDA’s full letter denying approval. It’s therefore hard to know what was behind the decision. Taken at face value, trial data suggest a major breakthrough. But Devenot and her allies allege shoddy trial design, and they say that trial participants were coached to report positive results. Additionally, three studies associated with the trial were recently retracted by the journal Psychopharmacology due to “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct.”
Devenot, for her part, believes she had an impact on the FDA’s decision, both by helping make harms experienced by patients visible to the FDA committees and by contributing the “therapy cult” lens. But she pushes back on the idea that she and her allies are responsible for the failure or delay of MDMA medicalization. “I do not think that a small group of concerned citizens and patient advocates is able to wreck something of this scale, if everything else is fine,” she says.
Did the anti-MDMA critics slow down a rushed process, forcing the government to use greater care before approving drugs that can be used in potentially harmful ways? Or are they cynical fearmongers, playing up retrograde prejudices against drugs and the counterculture to stymie a real therapy that would help people who are really suffering? This looks like a debate over public policy, but it’s just as much a debate about the nature of knowledge, and the language we use to describe our medical and spiritual practices. One person’s cult may be another person’s doctor’s office.
“This isn’t sensationalizing,” Devenot begins her Substack essay. “This isn’t clickbait. This is a careful, precise analysis.” Then she gets to the point in her own boldface text: “The MAPS/Lykos clinical trials reveal more about the efficacy of MDMA for cult indoctrination than they do about treating PTSD.”
But where does this idea of “cult indoctrination” come from? A glance at her footnotes reveals that Devenot roots her analysis in the quasi-academic theories of the late-twentieth-century Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a controversial organization beloved by some, detested by others. In the 1980s, CAN’s “deprogrammers” were accused of using kidnapping and false imprisonment to reverse cases of what they called brainwashing. CAN was heralded by many—often the parents of children the group helped “rescue”—but they were eventually driven into bankruptcy, in part by lawsuits brought by members of the Church of Scientology, with whom CAN had long clashed.
Devenot claims that MAPS, while not a traditional cult, is cult-like, a “therapy cult” that recruits new therapist-members in part via MDMA-assisted indoctrination and then forces its protocols on unsuspecting patients. Her first footnote, to support her definition of a therapy cult, points to an article by Margaret Thaler Singer, a CAN board member and perhaps the leading proponent of the ’80s-era cult “brainwashing” theory. After a losing struggle with the American Psychological Association over whether or not “brainwashing” can or does happen—experts generally landed on “no”—Singer was sometimes barred from providing expert testimony in court trials. For example, in 1988, one appeals court declined to sustain a trial court’s decision to admit Singer’s testimony, saying the plaintiff “failed to provide any evidence that Dr. Singer’s theory that techniques of thought reform may be effective in the absence of physical threats or coercion, has a significant following in the scientific community, let alone general acceptance.” Another appeals court ruling, in a case in which Singer provided expert testimony, went further, describing her “brainwashing theory” as “no more than an attempt to premise tort liability on religious practices the [plaintiffs] find objectionable…. Such a result is simply inconsistent with the First Amendment.”
Although she says she’s no religious studies scholar, Devenot knows enough to avoid terms like “brainwashing” and “mind control.” But she returns repeatedly to Singer in her footnotes and prosecutes a case that MAPS has used MDMA’s “suggestibility-enhancing properties”—it’s a popular party drug in part because it makes one feel good and open to new things—to lead donors, patient-victims, and even researchers into a secret belief system. Variations on the word “indoctrinate” appear in the Substack post ten times, and variations on “suggestible” twelve.
This looks like a debate over public policy, but it’s just as much a debate about the nature of knowledge, and the language we use to describe our medical and spiritual practices.
Perhaps Devenot’s most explosive accusation is that MAPS somehow brainwashed its Phase III researchers. She points out that some researchers were invited by Lykos to come in before the trials for their own private sessions, in which they could legally take MDMA and undergo the associated therapy protocol, to gain familiarity with the process. Devenot alleges (without providing evidence) that Lykos/MAPS turned these private sessions into “a vehicle for indoctrinating them into this way of doing things.”
Trial researchers are understandably appalled at the insinuation that their capacity for independent thought was somehow permanently undermined by MAPS mind control. “Phase III MDMA researchers are diverse groups that include high-level university researchers and other experienced practitioners, and my experience of this group is that we have diverse opinions about psychedelic research,” says Jamie Beachy, who, like Michaelson, is affiliated with the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and trained with MAPS as a therapist and worked on the Phase III trial site in Boulder, Col. “We don’t always agree with each other, there’s certainly no cult leader, and there’s no unified ideology. Calling us a ‘therapy cult’ implies devotion to a unified view maintained through coercion or intimidation, but I never experienced anything like that.”
Michaelson rejects the idea that MAPS should be viewed as a religious movement at all, even a less problematic one. “Even that’s a mischaracterization for me,” he says. “I’ve met a lot of these people. These are scientists.”
Indeed, Devenot’s essay neglects to make a case for MAPS as a community that demands reverence for a leader, controls its adherents’ lives, or makes it difficult to leave the group—criteria often used to assess problematic religious movements. Instead, her “cult” diagnosis rests primarily on a supposed secret ideology and use of MDMA for indoctrination.
Despite the use of the mostly discredited brainwashing theory, the impact of Devenot’s essay cannot be entirely dismissed as out-of-date moral panic. Though she could perhaps be understood as a MAPS apostate—in a typical CAN-era model, an ex-member, now making a complete break and telling lurid tales of total loss of mental autonomy—Devenot’s stated motivation for advocacy is actually quite contemporary in substance. She’s concerned about patients who may not be able to give or withdraw consent while on MDMA, and who may be embarking on a therapy protocol that involves “undisclosed” elements, especially of therapist touch: therapists in the Phase III trial were permitted to offer gentle, supportive touch for their patients, who wore eyeshades and headphones. Devenot herself identifies as a victim of sexual assault within the psychedelic community, and her nonprofit group, Psymposia, led the way, via a podcast it co-produced with New York magazine, in breaking the story of an alleged sexual assault of a patient by a therapist in Phase II of the FDA’s trial of MDMA.
“I’m not writing this for people in religious studies wanting to protect religious movements,” Devenot says of her Substack. “I’m writing this for people who have been harmed, who are trying to understand why it was so difficult to get people to hear them.”
If we set aside the “cult” smear and its intellectual lineage, there is much that is intriguing in Devenot’s case that MAPS’s version of MDMA therapy is far from ideal for patient safety. This argument hinges on the distinction between “directive” and “non-directive” psychotherapy protocols. The latter category can be conceived in the classic image of the therapist who never offers advice, only asks, “And how does that make you feel?” Directive approaches, by contrast, involve guidance along a pathway for healing.
The story Devenot tells is that Lykos publicly presented its therapy protocol to the FDA as non-directive and anodyne, while secretly promulgating the “undisclosed protocol,” which she characterizes as not only directive but also based on fringe psychological theories. “It was described in a way that mainstream clinicians would see and not be alarmed by,” Devenot says.
For instance, various MAPS-aligned figures, like founder and president Rick Doblin and senior medical director Michael Mithoefer, have acknowledged indebtedness to the thought of underground Bay Area therapist Stanislov Grof (b. 1931), who has posited that the human psyche is made up of distinct parts, including an “inner healing intelligence.” Devenot bases much of her theory of MAPS’s “undisclosed protocol” on a 2023 book in the Grofian tradition called Integral Psychedelic Therapy, written by a number of co-authors, some of whom have MAPS affiliations, and blurbed by both Doblin and Mithoefer.
And what of this “inner healing intelligence”? In contemporary use, Beachy says, “The concept of ‘inner healing intelligence’ was decoupled from Grof’s theories and, in practice, is simply an affirmation of the innate capacity for a person to heal and grow after experiencing trauma, similar to how the body will naturally heal under the right conditions.”
But Devenot sees something more sinister at play. “If you read the literature in the field, that’s what the majority of people think the inner healing intelligence is referring to, just a self-confidence and being able to get through difficult things and towards healing intrinsically,” she says. “But the actual idea is a Grofian concept that’s more akin to childbirth or exorcism.”
Devenot claims that MAPS, while not a traditional cult, is cult-like, a “therapy cult” that recruits new therapist-members in part via MDMA-assisted indoctrination and then forces its protocols on unsuspecting patients.
According to the “undisclosed protocol” that Devenot alleges, MAPS’s therapists use MDMA and holotropic (rapid and controlled) breathwork to summon forth this inner intelligence. “The ego defenses that usually separate people’s sense of self from the outside world and usually hold their past traumas at bay start to soften, like a cervix softens during childbirth,” Devenot says. “And when that is sufficiently open, this natural process starts to unfold, which is the inner healing intelligence. The traumatic memories or imprints from past experiences, a chain of them linking back earlier in childhood start to emerge, like a birth process—often through traumatic reenactments.”
Devenot is particularly concerned that therapists operating with this protocol will, either as enthusiastic true believers or cynical abusers, engage in reenactments that involve overly-affectionate touch—she says Grofian therapists are encouraged to hold and “re-parent” MDMA patients—or harrowing returns to disturbing scenes from the client’s past. Devenot sees evidence of such practice in the inappropriate touching caught on camera in the Phase II alleged sexual assault case.
“Therapists are taught that they can intuitively read or attune to the ‘non-dual relational field’ linking them to the participant, in order to know what that inner healing intelligence is trying to express,” she says. “Oftentimes that involves struggling with or stepping into the role of the perpetrator to reenact traumatic memories.” Devenot even claims she heard from a patient of an ayahuasca therapist associated with MAPS; the patient said they underwent a sort of nonconsensual demonic exorcism, based on a Grofian theory of “unattached burdens,” or parts of the self that come from outside and function as parasites.
It seems that Devenot is taking underground Bay Area psychedelic therapy at its freakiest and imputing it wholesale onto a therapy being studied in an FDA trial that used, at most, a highly sanitized version of the tradition, with significant, if perhaps imperfect, guardrails for patient safety. (For the study, two therapists were in the room with MDMA trial patients, and sessions were videotaped—all of which, to be fair, did not prevent the inappropriate spooning caught on tape in the 2015 assault accusation mentioned above.)
Ironically, Davenot’s argument, based on distrust of therapy protocols in which practitioners intuit the needs of patients, relies on her own intuition: she says that, trained as a close reader, she can see how words and phrases from the ho-hum FDA therapy protocol, and wilder ideas from the Bay Area underground, occasionally voiced by MAPS-related figures, “fit over each other.”
Still, the story Devenot tells, however overstated, is important for anyone interested in questions of religious freedom. Should psychotherapy models like Freud’s, Carl Jung’s, or Grof’s, which may involve unprovable metaphysical concepts and ritualized encounters, be thought of as religions? What if practitioners also use mind-altering substances in these rites? If indigenous groups are given legal latitude for such religious rites based on longstanding tradition, should the same latitude be extended to non-indigenous devotees of certain psychotherapy models, or to the general public? Finally, if scientific testing can discern that such rites have healing power, how might we go about stripping them of their “directive” religious agendas and medicalizing them?
These are the sorts of questions that MAPS was founded to address, and that effort is in serious crisis. After the debacle of the FDA trial and the denouncements of Devenot and her allies, Lykos cut 75 percent of its workforce, and MAPS reduced staff by 33 percent. MAPS founder Rick Doblin, who caught heat in the cult debate for having once predicted the “spiritualization of humanity” through MDMA, left the board of Lykos this past August.
Scholars doing serious work at the nexus of religious studies and psychedelics are also concerned that their work has been overtaken by what Michaelson calls “this kind of wild conspiracy theory.” “I take Psymposia at their words that they’re mostly motivated by wanting to minimize harm, and seeing that there have been instances of harm in this field,” he says. “The instances of harm are serious, but do not, without more evidence, impugn an entire system, organization, or culture. We’d need a lot more quantitative evidence to see that this is pervasive. If I see that evidence, I’ll change my tune immediately, but they haven’t brought it to bear.”
Patients with PTSD might be the biggest losers in the FDA’s ruling, with no sense of how or when this potentially revolutionary treatment will be available to them. Devenot, for her part, sees this as the lesser of two evil outcomes for such patients. Even if the Grofian ideas she denounces were fully sanitized in a medicalized rollout, she says, the approach would still be flawed, both because it is fundamentally “directive” and relies too much on practitioner intuition.
“If this were to have been approved, and I’m right about the problems, the harms would have scaled,” she says. “Afterwards, there could have been a swing back in the other direction, like happened with opiates, and it could have been harder to even access it.”
Devenot’s concerns about a swing back in the other direction, with an attendant crackdown, are a bit mystifying, given MDMA’s current illegality outside of medical testing. Right now, practically nobody can access molly for therapeutic purposes. As America makes its way out of the long shadow of the War on Drugs, we must think hard about how to balance the risk of harms like those feared by Devenot against the ongoing negatives of prohibition—both the loss of opportunities for healing and the risks of seeking psychedelic drugs and therapies on the black market. After all, there will be no shortage of veterans in our country’s future, and no end to the traumas from which they must recover.