1 of 3 Image of a US extremist demonstration Photo: Getty Images/Via BBC Image of a US extremist demonstration Photo: Getty Images/Via BBC
In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago in the US, conducted an experiment to see if the drug MDMA made social relationships more enjoyable in healthy volunteers.
The day passed like any other Tuesday until her research assistant, Mike Bremmer, appeared in the doorway of the professor’s office with a worried look on his face.
The final participant in the doubleblind test was a man named Brendan. After the exam, he filled out a standard questionnaire.
But oddly enough, at the bottom of the form, Brendan wrote in large letters: “This experience helped me resolve a personal issue that was nagging at me. google my name Now I know what I have to do.”
Bremmer and de Wit were concerned when they read this encrypted message on the form.
“We really need to explore that,” de Wit said. That’s when they googled Brendan’s name and had a disturbing revelation.
Up until just two months before the study, Brendan was the leader of the Midwest faction of Identity Evropa — a wellknown white supremacist group that changed its name to the American Identity Movement in 2019.
Two months earlier, activists from Chicago AntiFascist Action uncovered Brendan’s identity, which cost him his job.
2 of 3 Brendan participated in the famous Unite the Right parade in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 Photo: Getty Images/Via BBC Brendan participated in the famous Unite the Right parade in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 Photo: Getty Images /Via BBC
De Wit was very concerned. She realized she’d just drugged a disgraced white supremacist, and that apparently inspired him to do who knows what.
“Ask him what he means by ‘Now I know what to do,'” she instructed Bremmer. “If he intends to grab an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene.”
However, what Brendan had in mind ended up being the opposite of the criminal impulse the teacher had envisioned. He made it clear to Bremmer that he realized he had to make love.
“Love is the most important thing,” he told the bewildered research associate. “Without love, nothing matters.”
When de Wit told me this story about two years later, she still found it hard to believe.
“Isn’t it amazing? “That’s what everyone says about this drug, it makes people feel love,” she commented. “To believe that a drug can change someone’s beliefs and thoughts without any expectations that’s extraordinary.”
For the past few years, I’ve been researching the scientific studies and medical potential of MDMA 3,4methylenedioxymethamphetamine for a book called I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World.
I learned how this once demonized drug is now reemerging as a therapeutic tool—a use that was being explored as early as the 1970s and 1980s, before it was criminalized.
If approved, it and other psychedelicsbased treatments could transform the mental health landscape and find widespread clinical use in the United States and abroad to treat trauma and potentially other conditions, including substance use disorders, depression, and eating disorders.
But can MDMA also change people’s beliefs?
Apparently, MDMA alone is unable to magically rid people of prejudice, bigotry, or hatred. However, some researchers wonder if it could be an effective tool to help people who are in some ways already ready to reconsider their ideologies in favor of a new perspective.
MDMA cannot correct the social factors that lead to prejudice and separation, but individually it can make a difference. And in certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people pierce through the veil of discrimination and fear that separates so many people.
‘Connection’
When de Wit told me Brendan’s story, I wanted to hear more about what happened that day from him directly. So I visited him in December 2021.
Brendan asked not to use his last name as he is trying to move on from his past.
As I rode the elevator to her apartment in a luxury building overlooking Lake Michigan, I felt a pang of nervousness. I wasn’t sure what kind of person I would find and, halfjokingly, I even texted two friends telling them where to look for me if I went missing.
What I wasn’t expecting was the ordinary look of the 31yearold who walked to the door: blue check buttoned shirt, neatly trimmed hair and a friendly smile.
After politely hanging up my coat, he explained that when he was a white supremacist leader, the intention was precisely to give the impression of an ordinary person.
“I really wanted it to be for men who make good money, who are educated and comfortable in a community like that,” he says. “I wanted to normalize that.”
Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family.
He had liberal leanings in high school but fell into white supremacism at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. There he joined a fraternity made up mostly of conservative Republican men, began reading antiSemitic conspiracy books, and fell into a wormhole of racist and sexist content on the internet.
Brendan was enthralled by Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric during his presidential campaign.
“His speeches claiming Mexicans are rapists, his fixation with the border wall and deporting everyone, banning Muslims — I really didn’t understand white supremacy until Trump ran for president,” says Brendan.
Brendan joined Identity Evropa to connect with likeminded people.
He took part in the wellknown Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and quickly rose through the ranks of his organization. He first became the coordinator for the state of Illinois and later for the entire American Midwest.
Brendan traveled to Europe and the United States to meet other white supremacist groups with the goal of popularizing the movement. And he probably would have continued in this direction if his identity had not been made public.
A group of antifascist activists published information about the identity of him and more than 100 other people from Identity Evropa. Brendan was immediately expelled from the organization and ostracized by his brothers and friends who did not agree with white supremacy.
In early 2020, Brendan saw an ad on Facebook for some sort of drug test at the University of Chicago. He decided to sign up just to do something and make some money.
On one of the visits he was given a pill. Brendan unknowingly ingested 110mg of MDMA.
At the time, Brendan was “still in denial” after his identity became public, he said. He was riddled with regrets not because of the bigoted views he still held, but because of the mistakes that got him into this situation.
About 30 minutes after taking the pill, Brendan started feeling weird.
“Wait a minute why am I doing this? Why do I think like this?” he began to wonder. “Why did I ever think it was right to jeopardize my relationships with almost everyone in my life?”
At that moment, Bremmer arrived to receive Brendan and begin the experiment. Brendan got on an MRI machine and Bremmer began touching his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how comfortable it looked.
“I realized what made me happier the experience of touch,” Brendan recalls. “I gradually began to evaluate better and better.”
As he savored this pleasant feeling, a single, powerful word came to mind: “connection.”
Suddenly everything was clear: the connection to other people was the only thing that mattered.
“It’s something you really can’t put into words, but it was so profound,” he says. “I didn’t see my relationships with other people as clear boundaries between different entities, but as if we were all one.”
“I realized that I had become fixated on things that didn’t really matter, that it was just too confusing and that I had completely lost focus. I didn’t appreciate the joy that life had to offer,” says Brendan.
That night, Brendan contacted Antifascist Action Chicago and specifically spoke to an activist named “S” who had wormed his way into Identity Evropa incognito until he revealed Brendan’s identity. “S” requested that his name not be disclosed so that he could continue his work as an activist incognito.
Initially, “S” didn’t believe Brendan’s claims that MDMA caused him to prioritize connections with other people. But he was touched when Brendan began taking steps that indicated a serious commitment to change.
Brendan hired a diversity, equality and inclusion consultant to advise him, began therapy, meditated and studied a number of textbooks.
“S” is still in regular contact with Brendan and believes his efforts at change are real.
“We worked together for two years trying to separate him from the harmful and reconnect him through positive reinforcement and ideological education,” S said.
“I think he’s trying to improve and work on himself, and I really think the MDMA experience had an impact on him,” the activist continues. “It was the catalyst for growth, and over time, I think reflection on that experience had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself.”
But Brendan still struggles to connect with the people he desires.
When I visited him, he had just spent Thanksgiving alone. He hasn’t completely abandoned his bigoted ideology either, and isn’t sure if that ever will be possible.
“There are certainly times when I have racist or antiSemitic thoughts,” he says. “But now I can see that this mindset hurts me more than anyone else.”
In search of empathy
Brendan’s experience is unusual, but there is precedent.
In the 1980s, an acquaintance of MDMAassisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and inherited these views.
The pilot had always accepted his intolerant mindset as a normal and accurate reflection of the nature of things. But MDMA “gave him a clear idea that outright racism is wrong and petty,” Greer said.
3 of 3 Image of MDMA dose confiscated in Viracopos Photo: Reproduction/EPTV Image of MDMA dose confiscated in Viracopos Photo: Reproduction/EPTV
As rare as they are, it is worth examining stories like these for the impact they have on MDMA’s potential ability to “affect people’s values and priorities,” according to de Wit and several other authors in of a case study on Brendan to be published in 2021 in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
If “extremist views [são] driven by fear, anger, and cognitive bias,” the researchers asked, could they “be attacked by pharmacological interventions”?
Yet these inspiring stories of seemingly spontaneous change seem to be exceptions to the rule. And from a neurological point of view, it makes sense that this should be the case.
Research shows that oxytocin one of the main hormones released under the influence of MDMA elicits a “care and defense” response in the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to feed her newborn, for example, also fuels her anger when she perceives a threat to her cub.
In humans, oxytocin also increases our tendency to care for loved ones in our group and strangers who are considered to be in the same group. But it increases hostility towards individuals from rival groups.
In a study published in the journal Science in 2010, men given oxytocin by inhalation were three times more likely to donate money to their teammates in a business game, but they were also more likely to be tough on their opponents punish if they don’t donate enough.
According to another study recently published in the journal Nature by neuroscientist Gül Dölen of Johns Hopkins University in the US, MDMA and other psychedelics (including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine) have therapeutic effects, retriggering a critical phase in the brain.
Critical periods are limited, impressionable windows of time that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are most malleable and ready to learn new things.
But the conclusions of Dölen and his colleagues suggest that without the necessary attitude and preparation, MDMA and other psychedelics are unlikely to reopen critical phases, meaning they have no spontaneous revelatory action to liberate one from intolerant beliefs.
For example, according to a drug activist from Kabul, Afghanistan, whom I interviewed for my book, some Taliban members use MDMA to connect with the divine during their prayer chants. And in the West, it has also been reported that MDMA and other psychedelics have been used by various members of farright authoritarian political movements, including neoNazi groups.
Researchers point out that this suggests that psychedelics are nonspecific, “politically pluripotent” amplifiers of what’s going on in a person’s mind, with no specific leanings “to the conservatismliberalism or authoritarianismegalitarianism axes.”
Increasing scientific evidence suggests that human capacities for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are central features of our nature.
If MDMA, with the right preparation, can get us into that state of consciousness, then the idea of using the drug to make the world a more loving and less hateful place could be more than pipe dream.
Primatologist Frans de Wall of Emory University in the United States wrote: “Empathy is the only weapon in the human repertoire that can free us from the curse of xenophobia.”
“Breaking down barriers between people”
Natalie Ginsberg, director of global impacts at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — a nonprofit group that’s at the forefront of MDMA research — recalls standing in the US capital during what’s known as the Washington Monument “Catharse Festival,” just after the 2016 election. She spoke to Maps founder Rick Doblin at one or two in the morning about the possibility of using MDMA to facilitate dialogue between Republicans and Democrats.
Ginsberg also envisions the drug’s use in workshops aimed at eradicating racism or as a means of bringing people together on opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma.
“I think all psychedelics play a role, but MDMA has a particularly important role because you’re expanding and being present, having an open heart and really being able to listen differently,” says Ginsberg. “It’s really powerful stuff.”
“If you give MDMA to hateful people on both sides of an issue, I don’t think you’re going to do much good,” adds Doblin. “But if you start with openminded people on both sides, I think it could work.”
“You can improve communication, build empathy between groups, and help people see the world from a more balanced perspective without the mistrust caused by fear and anxiety,” he continues.
In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were the authors of a study examining the possibility of using ayahuasca — a herbal psychedelic — in groups of people to break down barriers between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive results. They hope to do a similar study with MDMA in the future.
MDMA will not end wars, bigotry and polarization, nor will it turn antisocial people into social individuals. But there may be a place for this and other psychedelics that help people see others better than their fellow human beings.
“I kind of have the notion that as familiarity with psychedelics increases, maybe there could be group experiences that build community resilience and that are purposely designed to break down the barriers between people so people can look at things from different perspectives.” perspective and thus detribalize our society,” says psychiatrist Franklin King of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the United States.
“But it’s not going to happen on its own,” he continues. “It has to be conscious, and if it happens, it’s likely to take several generations.”
Because of his experience with extremism, Brendan agrees with experts that no drug alone can spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflicts in the United States. “Many of the people who join these movements have used MDMA in the past,” he points out.
But he believes that with the right mindset and framework, MDMA could be useful for people who, like him, are already at least somewhat open to rethinking their ideology.
“He helped me see things differently than any therapy or antiracist literature could have,” says Brendan. “Really, I think it was a revolutionary experience.”
* Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer and the author of the book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, which this report is derived from.
Read the original version of this report on the BBC Future website.