It was 1986, at the height of the war on drugs, when a young lobbyist, psychonaut, and MDMA evangelist, Rick Doblin, founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in San Jose, California. The organization was created with the intention of making a legal, not-for-profit medicine of MDMA, which had been controversially banned the year before to “avoid imminent hazard to the public safety.”

It was a lofty, perhaps even revolutionary, ambition: bring a drug that sparks empathic feelings of love and openness to the mainstream, even as it was being attacked by the authorities. (An archived Department of Justice webpage lists trumped-up risks of taking the “hug drug,” including “involuntary teeth clenching,” hyperthermia, and kidney failure.) Fast forward to 2024, and MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients is on the brink of approval in the United States and could be green-lighted in August. Official blessing for further medical conditions will surely beckon. Perhaps MDMA — a precursor to an antihemorrhagic created in 1914 whose psychedelic effects were discovered in 1976 before rave culture took it global — may even be legalized for recreational purposes one day.

But the dazzling, even miraculous, achievement has come with an eleventh-hour cost of compromise.