Your Chemical Romance

Dominic Sisti, who teaches medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, notes a widely shared view among bioethicists: Certain drugs and pharmaceuticals can and should be used in therapy contexts. MDMA especially “can help reform the bonds that maybe were under stress, or broken through years of challenges or difficulties in a relationship. Or it can provide insight that maybe the relationship is over,” he told me. “Those are things that often take weeks, months, years of therapy to get to, but MDMA sort of catalyzes that.”

Sisti also agreed with Savulescu and Earp’s identification of “gray” marriages with kids as having the most to gain from chemical intervention. Still, he said that some in the bioethics field object to the “love drugs” idea—mainly due to religious or quasi-religious beliefs about love and marriage. “The most common argument [against it] is that you’re sullying something that’s divine,” he said, “that it’s a spark given by God, or preternatural in some way that we shouldn’t be screwing around with.”