Sarko Gergerian, a Massachusetts police lieutenant, is not your average cop. He’s also a trained MDMA-assisted therapist. His police chief even gave him permission to take a trip with the medicine, also known as ecstasy or molly, during a clinical trial. “It opened my heart and mind,” he told The Daily Beast.

For decades in the U.S., police officers have served as the frontline troops in a militarized war on drugs in which millions were jailed for non-violent offenses. But a small cadre of serving and former police officers, in the U.S. and across the world, are—like Gergerian— finding that when used responsibly and therapeutically, some of the drugs can ease distress and make them happier.

On the sidelines of the United Nations’ annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna on Wednesday, Gergerian sat beside three former senior policemen as part of a panel organized by Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) titled “Why Police Need Access to Psychedelics Urgently”. They pressed authorities around the world to swiftly make available MDMA-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) to their comrades both as a preventive medicine and treatment for PTSD, which is rampant and may affect as many as one-in-two officers. The scale of the mental health crisis in policing means that, in the U.S. and the U.K., officers are more likely to commit suicide than die on duty.

“MDMA can push treatment resistant PTSD into remission,” says Gergerian, who had a postgraduate qualification in mental health counseling before joining the police in 2010 initially as a patrol officer and is speaking in a personal capacity. “Why not create a wellness program for first responders with MDMA-AT built in so cops don’t get to the point where they’re blowing their own heads off with their guns.”

The origin of Gergerian’s training is a story for the ages. He attended a police chiefs’ conference in Florida in 2018 where the psychedelic healing advocate Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) presented clinical data on the effectiveness of the empathogenic stimulant. “I was already a trained psychotherapist and I asked him, ‘How can I help with this?,’” Gergerian recalls. “He answered: ‘Become a psychedelic-assisted therapist,’ And gave me........

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