The U.S. Food and Drug Administration now has approved the first study of MDMA use on people suffering PTSD, 16 years after the Drug Enforcement Agency criminalized Ecstasy as a Schedule I drug, like heroin and marijuana.

Until the DEA clampdown in 1984, MDMA was used primarily by psychiatrists and psychotherapists on their patients, mostly to good effect. But despite pleas for research into the drug's potential therapeutic benefits, this is the first study that allowed use of the drug on actual patients.

The new study still needs approval from the research review board at The Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Assuming it proceeds, researchers will administer MDMA twice to 12 assault survivors and placebos to eight, with all receiving 16 hours of therapy over three months. The hypothesis is that MDMA reduces fear and anxiety so a person can experience a catharsis by revisiting the cause of trauma.

Alas, many users of Ecstasy today are young people buying illicit, tainted versions of the drug. The pharmacological component of pure MDMA has a far different effect, physically and psychologically, than does the dangerous street drug often purchased by youth.

Yet public perception has focused on young people at raves abusing who-knows-what substances in risky environments, sometimes suffering hyperthermia and water intoxication. The public remains fairly oblivious to the positive therapeutic effects that psychiatrists and other therapists have recorded.

The South Carolina study has the potential to change not only public perception, but also worldwide research. In Israel, for example, researchers have refrained from proceeding with a PTSD study for survivors of war and terrorism until seeing whether the FDA would approve the study here. We salute the FDA for allowing researchers to pursue the enormous potentials of a drug that has been often misunderstood and mischaracterized. If the study shows that MDMA can help sufferers of PTSD, its benefits to society could be enormous.