I loaded a Beretta nine millimeter.
I put it to my temple and I pulled the trigger and
the greatest peace that I felt was when that hammer
fell because I knew it was gonna be over.
It was only a microsecond but when you spend day in and
day out suffering, a microsecond of peace is an eternity.
Since I'm sitting here you obviously
know that the gun didn't go off.
That happened twice.
Different ammunition.
I tried to overdose once and twice
I tried to slit my wrists.
In America, around 22
military veterans kill themselves every day.
John served in Iraq during the second Gulf War.
His experiences left him with
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
The mental suffering has been so great
that he was suicidal for eight years.
One of the things we never realized was that a lot
of us would be asked to give our life for our
country, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan but far,
far from the battlefield at home, alone in the dark.
Combat takes an emotional toll.
Not only the things you see, not only the things you do.
But the base I was on got mortared
thousands of times in a year.
There's guys on my base that never went outside
the wire, that are suffering from extreme PTSD just
from the constant fear of raining bombs.
An estimated eight million
Americans suffer with PTSD and war veterans
are only a fraction of this number.
It's a public health disaster costing
billions of dollars to treat.
There are treatments available but the drugs
prescribed are only successful in 20% of cases.
For those who don't respond to the available
treatment, there may be an alternative, MDMA,
the active ingredient in the party drug ecstasy
is being touted as a miracle cure for PTSD.
The FDA has labeled MDMA a breakthrough treatment
and tests of the drug show that it's highly effective.
In a recent study, over 60% of patients no longer met
the clinical criteria for PTSD after the MDMA treatment.
For John, conventional treatments hadn't worked.
He saw the trial as his last hope.
I'd never taken any psychedelics, I'd never taken MDMA.
I kind of thought it was gonna be like The Matrix
where instantly things were gonna get magical.
Is it like gradual rise and gradual fall?
Hopefully, it's waves where you start to notice something.
Sometimes people report a lot of thoughts.
And then it kicked in after about 30, 40 minutes.
No anxiety.
Geometric patterns.
And I remember thinking to myself, I completely
get why people take this now.
For John, the treatment was a revelation.
It was probably the greatest therapeutic experience
I have ever had in my entire life.
What are you experiencing?
It disconnects the amygdala, that fear response
in the brain, that fight or flight and you can
talk about the trauma without having a panic attack.
Thinking a lot about.
In Iraq?
He lost his leg.
Part of him getting hurt was my fault.
The MDMA puts the brain in a place where the therapy can
work and people always ask describe it, describe it.
The best description I have come up with is,
it's like doing therapy while being hugged by everyone who
loves you in a bathtub full of puppies licking your face.
MDMA was used in psychotherapy
in the 1970s but became popular as a party drug
in the 1980s and was made illegal.
It wasn't until the early 2000s that the drug began
scientific testing in America to treat PTSD.
Testing is now at the final stage of FDA approval
where around 300 subjects will participate.
If this is successful,
then the drug could become a medicine.
Rick Doblin has been at the forefront
of this research since the 1980s.
And one of the veterans that was
in our study was John Lubecky.
He served 12 years.
We give MDMA only three times, one month apart,
with 12 90 minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions
and each of the sessions last eight hours.
The current treatments for PTSD flattened out people's
emotions and they are requiring people to take these drugs
every day for months or years or a lifetime basically.
An estimated 20% of former military
personnel suffer with PTSD in America alone.
The Department of Veteran's Affairs
spends about $400 million annually on treating
PTSD and other mental health conditions.
When you take MDMA, it floods the brain
with hormones and neurotransmitters that evoke
feelings of trust and wellbeing.
Researchers say this allows patients
to reexamine traumatic memories.
Of all the bad shit in Iraq,
the worst thing was coming home.
Like any drug, MDMA has side
effects and there's a moderate risk of addiction
but it is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.
A small nonprofit is funding the trial as MDMA is not
patentable so big pharmaceutical companies have steered
clear of the treatment as it will not make them money.
For sufferers of PTSD, this new
treatment could be a lifesaver.
If hadn't have gone through this,
I'd be in Arlington cemetery.
I have a stepson and if it weren't for this treatment,
he probably would have been handed the flag off my casket
and somebody would have had to explain to him why.
Especially knowing that treatments are available.
They made it so that my stepson will get the flag off my
casket when he's old and gray and I'm old and gray and after
I've watched him fall in love and graduate high school,
college, get married, bounce a grandchild on my knee.
Those are the things that this treatment provides for
veterans and everyone rather than a life cut short.