Fantastic piece that confirms all my suspicions about the MAPS / Lykos nexus..+ the added doses of too much cash too quickly and the increasingly messianic tone of Doblin.
Olivia Goldhill Investigative Reporter at STAT writes
I’ll stop writing about MDMA so much when there stops being so much news.
Last week was a rollercoaster of excitement, accusations, misunderstandings, detailed data analysis, and, ultimately, a massive letdown for Lykos when the FDA advisory committee voted against approval MDMA as treatment for PTSD.
I’ve already written on the details of that conversation. Now, here’s the inside story of how Lykos research went awry.
In this piece, two former Lykos employees go on the record to say they agree with the advisory committee decision—an extraordinary sign of internal concerns over research integrity.
I also spoke with more than half a dozen former employees from both Lykos and MAPS (the wider non-profit organization that originally created Lykos as a subsidiary.) Together, they told a story of the immense influence of MAPS’s activism, and the charismatic power of founder Rick Doblin, who’s been working towards MDMA legalization for four decades. Only that level of evangelism, which pushed MDMA to the forefront of psychedelic research, proved an obstacle as researchers tried to created and present credible science.
The fervor around psychedelics came under scrutiny at the advisory committee meeting, as did failings to properly address past abuses.
Lykos tried to separate itself from MAPS and present a more respectable front. But I spoke with former employees who told of inappropriate access to data and questionable research tactics that bordered on potential trial misconduct. (These behaviors seemed to reflect incompetence more than a malicious desire to distort results, they said.) Lykos, meanwhile, said accusations were unfounded, and the company stands by the rigor of their studies, and all complaints were properly investigated.
One last thing – one of the biggest complaints raised by the FDA was that Lykos failed to collect data on positive experiences that could be used to inform addiction potential. At the meeting, Lykos execs said they simply misunderstood instructions. But former employees say Lykos knew they needed to collect this data all along… read the articlefor details on why they failed to do so.
Read the full piece at
