 many adults derive their meaning in life from having children, having families. I don't have children, so it's been very important to find and even impose meaning on my life. I call MDMA the chemical of connection. This medicine encourages you to reach out and figuratively or literally touch another person and deepen that connection. And that's been very meaningful to me. Better Living Through Chemistry was the official slogan of DuPont chemicals for decades. It became the ironic creed-a-core of counterculture hippies in the 1960s, who started to experiment with psychedelic drugs ranging from LSD to mescaline to magic mushrooms. One of those old hippies is Charlie Winninger, a 71-year-old Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and relationship specialist who New York Newsday once dubbed the Love Doctor. Winninger has recently come out of what he calls the chemical closet with his new book Listening to Ecstasy, the transformative power of MDMA, which is both a how-to guide and memoir of how this drug impacted his relationship with his wife Shelley, a retired nurse. In 2000 she was out of a bad marriage, a repressive marriage, and she wanted to spread her wings and fly. And she learned that I was a psychonaut, one who does psychedelics. And this book is largely about our story and how MDMA can really be used as emotional superglue for relationships and added a whole other layer of intimacy and closeness for us. Winninger is at the forefront of a psychedelic renaissance that consciously builds on the lessons of the 1960s to deliver not just more effective therapy, but what he calls serious fun. Fritz Pearl famously said, lose your mind and come to your senses. When I'm high on MDMA, my mind quiets down and I feel my heart. And I feel this sensual aliveness, this chemical affirmation of my spirit. And it's like the sun itself is rising in my heart. It's like taking a chemical helicopter ride above my life. And I can look out at where I've been, where I am in my life, and perhaps to the horizon where I want to go. And then I can come back down and rededicate myself to the way I want to be living. MDMA was first synthesized by pharmaceutical giant Merck back in 1912 and rediscovered decades later in the mid 1960s by Maverick chemist Alexander Shulgin, who liked its ability to increase emotions and empathy among users. Therapists started using it in counseling sessions, but after it gained a reputation as a party and rave drug, it was banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985. Thanks to the decades-long efforts of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or MAPS, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is now at stage three clinical trials for FDA approval. If the experience of marijuana is any indication, medical use could eventually lead to the legalization of MDMA for recreational purposes as well. As befits both a tribal elder and a medical professional, Winninger stresses the intentional use of drugs as a means to an end. In the psychedelic community, there's an emphasis on integrating psychedelic experiences that is learning to turn states into traits, learning to turn the experience of, for example, a good MDMA high to translate that into your life and bring it into your life in a sober way, because we spend most of our time, hopefully, sober. It's taken a long time for the culture to largely forget the polarization and violent polarization that happened in the 60s and early 70s and have that generation gap reduced and have traumas like the Vietnam War become a memory so that psychedelics can now reemerge in using the medical model as a healing force in the time when we need healing very much. As psychedelics become more mainstream and people realize that they can use it to restore the lost heart of their relationship, or they can use it to build upon a good relationship. They can use it to, we call it recreational use, I prefer the term, use. Even as Winninger says that MDMA and other substances can help shrink the gap between generations, he also underscores that people's needs and bodies change with age. Past the age of 35 or 40, the way to keep a happy long-term relationship with these wonderful medicines is to not abuse them, which takes some discipline because the experience can be so good that you want to do it again and again, but I limit it to four or five times a year. That way I can keep it up into my 70s. So we plan these things very carefully and it gives us so much to look forward to in life.