In 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to legalise MDMA for therapeutic purposes. Rebecca Huntley’s Sassafras: A Memoir of Love, Loss and MDMA Therapy is a timely account of one woman’s life-changing experience of MDMA therapy on the eve of legalisation. Moving between memories of a difficult childhood and accounts of the transformative therapy sessions, the book highlights both the value and the limitations of memoir for understanding the current “psychedelic renaissance”.
A life-changing treatment for unaddressed trauma
Sassafras is named after a tree native to North America, the root of which can be used to make methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). While today’s MDMA is produced synthetically, the book’s title is an important reminder that psychedelic therapy has its roots in centuries-old Indigenous healing practices. But the tale told here is very much a Western one. Huntley was raised in 1970s Adelaide and Sydney, the daughter of an ambitious and increasingly absent academic father and an emotionally distant and manipulative mother. There are some distressing early moments: her father throwing the family kitten against the wall; her mother tricking Huntley into seeing a “shrink” who turns out to be abusive. By her early 20s, Huntley is “on a mission to ‘fix myself’”, ending up with a therapist who says her family was so dysfunctional she’ll probably have to spend the rest of her life in therapy.
For a while Huntley seems to prove the therapist wrong. She gets a PhD and a job, writes a book, marries, and has a baby. Then comes a series of miscarriages and other misfortunes. Huntley finds a new therapist, but her emotional turmoil persists. At age 50, by now a divorced mother of three young girls, a series of encounters with old friends puts Huntley on a new route. She reads up on childhood trauma, concluding that “all my admirable, strange and destructive behaviour [is] a stress response to unaddressed trauma”. She stops talking to her mother, and she gets in touch with “Julia”, an underground MDMA therapist.
Huntley had never used MDMA before. Like any good researcher, she prepares herself for her first session by reading about the drug’s effects and what to expect. During the first session, the impact is almost instantaneous. She not only remembers; she feels differently about her memories. Huntley’s descriptions capture the profoundly embodied nature of MDMA therapy. She discovers love and empathy where previously she had experienced only anger and loss. The rage and fear don’t disappear overnight, but by the end of the third session, Huntley is seeing her family, her life and herself in a new light.
MDMA: magic potion and potential poison
Although her experience of MDMA therapy is a clear success story, Huntley is careful to warn the reader that it’s not a miracle cure. It’s not the drug doing the work, she insists – it’s the therapist and patient working together. The “Author’s Note” to this effect may be there to satisfy the publisher’s lawyers. But the caution points to a wider tension in discussions about psychedelic therapy. Huntley’s claim that without all the professional expertise “MDMA is just a drug” contradicts her admission that a single MDMA session attained results she’d never experienced in talk therapy alone.
MDMA appears in the book as both magic potion and potential poison. Huntley was convinced of the value of MDMA therapy because she was introduced by someone who “wasn’t a drug taker in any recreational sense … was sensible and grounded and evidence based in everything she did”. Yet her understanding of drugs and addiction betray popular prejudices that have been challenged by scientific evidence. In response to the changes of perception experienced during her first session, Huntley reflects: “I understood how someone could be addicted to a drug”. This is misleading. MDMA is rarely associated with chronic dependent use, though of course recreational use carries risks related to dosage, interactions with other drugs, and so on.
From individual benefits to radical collective uses
Psychedelic therapy is increasingly recognised as beneficial where other treatments – like talk therapy and pharmaceutical drugs – have failed. But the high price tag for MDMA therapy, even after legalisation, is a significant barrier to expansion of the treatment in Australia. Huntley is aware that her access to the drug is a result of her substantial privileges. Early in the memoir, she confesses her fear that “this is going to end up like a ‘wah-wha-white-girl-story’, indulgent and self-pitying”. In fact, the childhood stories are convincing and sometimes moving portrayals of the dysfunctional hell of her patriarchal nuclear family. It’s the later chapters, with lengthy descriptions of trying to find a “forever home” for herself and her daughters after the divorce, waiting for money from her stingy mother or dead father’s estate, that grate. I wanted to hear less about the author’s middle-class housing dramas, and more about what we might do collectively to ensure that MDMA therapy is made more widely available – or how psychedelic drugs might be used to address wider social and political problems.
There are hints of these themes. In her third and final session with Julia, Huntley finds herself on the farm where her mother’s ancestors – poor Italian migrants – worked, and from where her great-grandfather was arrested and interred as an “enemy alien” during the Second World War, putting her family’s tribulations in a longer history of colonialism, migration and war.
In the concluding chapter, “Inheritance”, Huntley briefly wonders whether the benefits of MDMA could be extended beyond individual therapy to “play a part in addressing complex social problems”. She says the drug helped her not only to face childhood trauma, but also “deepened my commitment to acting on climate change”. In fact, one of Huntley’s previous books is about emotions and climate change. I longed to hear more on this, for Sassafras to go beyond the obligatory nod to the expense and elitism of MDMA therapy, to consider more deeply how the sense of connection developed through therapy can respond to “issues of intergenerational trauma in the context of colonialism, slavery, homophobia” – in other words, to go “beyond the medicalised and self-help approaches” to imagine more radical collective uses of MDMA and other psychedelics.
