Purple Haze Rave? –
August 31, 2020 – As anyone who has been to Shakedown Street knows, the drug cocktail of LSD and MDMA is referred to as “candyflipping.” But for JR Rahn, the founder and co-CEO of psychedelic drug development startup Mind Medicine Inc., the combination, along with therapy, could become an FDA-approved treatment for certain mental illnesses one day.
“What we don’t want is people think they can take this every weekend. This is medicine, it should be treated as such,” says Rahn. “We are not developing this so people have a better rave.”
Rahn believes that “classic psychedelics,” like psilocybin and LSD, will be the first-generation medicines based on hallucinogenic compounds. The next generation, he says, will be combination therapies like LSD and MDMA.
Mind Medicine, which is based in New York City, will launch the first-ever clinical trial on LSD and MDMA in January 2021 to determine if the drug combination is safe for human use. Dr. Matthias Liechti, one of the world’s leaders in psychopharmacology research, will conduct the Phase 1 study with 24 healthy volunteers in his lab at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland. The study will be double-blind, and placebo controlled.
