A Terrible Tragedy

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Richard Rockefeller wasn’t just a famous name, he was a wonderful man, a physician who devoted himself to victims of the world’s many traumas and for 21 years was chairman of the United States Advisory Board of Doctors Without Borders. I got to know Richard personally while reporting my book Acid Test. Just last week he wrote me a wonderful blurb for the book jacket, kind, thoughtful and generous. Richard was a tireless supporter of the promising clinical research which is proving that MDMA assisted therapy is of potentially tremendous benefit to people with trauma-induced psychological disorders for whom conventional therapy has been woefully inadequate. This morning, Friday the 13th, Richard took off in his small plane from an airport in New York. Something went wrong. The plane never reached cruising altitude and almost immediately went down. He was the only one in the plane, and died on impact. There was so much he was looking forward to now that responsible investigations of the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy were beginning to win acceptance in mainstream culture. He’d already done so much to make that happen. His loss is great, but what he contributed to the world should not be forgotten.