Es könnte das nächste Blockbuster-Medikament sein. Es gibt nur einen Teil, über den niemand sprechen möchte.

Every time Elizabeth Lamphere looked at her 6-year-old daughter, all she saw was her late fiancé. Ian had died in an avalanche while skiing in the Colorado backcountry when Madelyn was just a baby. Seeing pieces of Ian in her daughter’s face could trigger “the most acute pain I’ve ever been in,” Lamphere told Slate. Caring for Madelyn was all but impossible. Lamphere was diagnosed with PTSD by a psychiatrist who also enrolled her in a clinical trial for MDMA. Miraculously, the MDMA seemed to cure her.

Psychedelics, from MDMA to psilocybin to LSD, hold incredible therapeutic promise—many hope that the next billion-dollar blockbuster drug will be a psychedelic. But there’s just one rather large problem: A psychedelic has yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. You can’t just go to a doctor and get a prescription for MDMA and have it covered by your insurance. For the FDA to approve a drug like MDMA, researchers have to show that it *really* *works*. And right now? No one really knows that psychedelics work!

Jane C. Hu holds a Ph.D. in psychology and has been covering psychedelics for five years as a journalist. Today, in a sweeping feature for Slate, she presents a shocking idea: Perhaps the magic of psychedelics is actually just the placebo effect. And maybe, just maybe, that’s not a bad thing. Lamphere’s spectacular recovery? She had actually been given a sugar pill.

Hu takes the reader through a wild ride of experiments, history, and neuroscience, inviting us to consider the incredible medicinal power of “nothing,” and whether the FDA can be convinced that this strange—possibly sham—kind of treatment holds value after all.  You can read Slate’s in-depth feature here: [https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/fda-ptsd-drug-research-psychedelics.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=psychedelics_jane&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social–psychedelics_jane](https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/fda-ptsd-drug-research-psychedelics.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_content=psychedelics_jane&utm_campaign=&tpcc=reddit-social–psychedelics_jane)