Draft:Phil Wolfson

Phil Wolfson MD, (born 1943), is a pioneer in the use of the medical ketamine as an alternative to conventional psychotherapy, especially in the application of clinical ketamine assisted psychotherapy. A graduate of Brandeis University, and New York University School of Medicine, Wolfson is a noted psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychedelic therapy pioneer, writer, entrepreneur, and social activist. He has authored two books, one of which being the seminal work: The Ketamine Papers, as well as numerous articles on psychedelic medicine and psychotherapy. His authorship began in 1986, fusing both research and clinical perspectives.

Wolfson graduated from Brandeis University in 1964 and went on to study at the New York University School of Medicine, receiving his medical doctorate in 1968. He was licensed to practice medicine in New York, California and Washington, DC. Wolfson began practicing psychotherapy in 1966, psychiatry in 1972 and has since become a keen researcher and advocate of the nature of mind, spirit and mental health. This unwavering focus on consciousness, community, social justice, and the spirit has been the hallmark of his presence in the psychedelic world for the entirety of his career.

General life and career
Wolfson’s focus on social justice in medicine was sparked by his opposition to the war in Vietnam when he became a leading figure in the New York Medical Committee to End the War and the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

Wolfson’s advocacy for the welfare of people and social justice in medicine included his leadership in the development of the Student Health Programs which promoted education and novel programs in community medicine and equalization of access to health care - with nursing, dental, and medical student organizations forming at many schools nationwide.

At NYU School of Medicine, Wolfson collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Dickinson W. Richards, and his Hartford Foundation, to organize the first formal lecture series on Community Medicine. This series emphasized the racism, sexism, and classist nature of healthcare, and was supported by the New York Academy of Medicine.

Completing his tour of duty in the USPHS (U.S. Public Health Service), Wolfson began working as a psychiatrist in the DC area in 1971, attending programs at the Washington School of Psychiatry, including three years of group therapy training. He went on to work as a psychiatrist for four years at the Woodburn Mental Health Center in Annandale, Virginia, ending in 1977.

In 1977, Wolfson moved to San Francisco and started working as a psychiatrist first in Richmond and then as Director of I Ward in the Contra Costa County Hospital Mental Health System. He played a leadership role in the building of a progressive multiracial collective there. I Ward, as a unit of the county hospital, treated first psychotic break patients with low, or no-dose medication in a family process inpatient program. It was one of a handful of demonstration programs in the Bay Area (Diabasis, Soteria, Emanon) that sought to heal severe mental illness through process work, rather than suppression.

It was also during this time, that Wolfson participated in the family therapy and systems movement that was democratizing and energizing psychotherapy to humanize the treatment of mental illness. Wolfson participated in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, that embraced social, anti-repressive, and cultural aspects of human lives with regards to psychotherapy.

Starting in 1988, Wolfson entered private practice and the psychiatric staff of Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California. This was also when Wolfson began teaching at UCSF Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, and was on faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Wolfson’s loss of his son, Noah, at age sixteen, due to a four year struggle with leukemia, deepened his understanding of loss, grief, and mental illness. His book, Noe-a Father/son Song of Love, Life, Sickness, and Death, (published in 2011) documented his experience with loss that would shape his subsequent work in helping others deal with prolonged illness, its impact on family, grief and the effects of profound loss.

Career and research
Beginning in the 1983, Wolfson closely collaborated with Alexander Shulgin, the foremost American psychopharmacologist, and author to research the potential of psychedelic psychotherapy largely based on work with MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) assisted psychedelic psychotherapy. Wolfson published the first paper on MDMA and family treatment with psychosis. The 1986 paper: Meeting at the Edge with Adam: A Man for all Seasons, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 18(4), October-December 1986, 319-328.

Working with couples suffering from conditions such as depression or trauma, they led a dedicated group of psychotherapists and psychiatrists with the support and hosting of Richard Price, co-owner of the Esalen Institute and the psychologist Leo Zeff, among many. ARUPA, the Association for the Responsible Use of Psychedelic Agents formed to further psychedelic research, and clinical development and was primarily focused on MDMA work. This was an informal and ever-expanding group which came together to explore the potential forms of therapy these medicines could provide. NO REFERENCE AVAILABLE When the DEA put these substances into Schedule I, making them illegal and unavailable for clinical or research work, Wolfson and his colleagues mounted a campaign to keep MDMA legal. The DEA overruled their own Administrative Law Judge, who had found that the medical utility of MDMA would have enabled continued exploration of viable treatments.

This legal outcome plus the Analog Drug Bill, made further open exploration and research of alternative substances impossible and illegal. After exhaustive clinical studies, the indication of MDMA's utility in the treatment of PTSD is finally moving towards an FDA approval for clinical use.

Wolfson has written extensively on the merging of psychedelic medicines, spiritual practice, and consciousness work.

Research into the Medical Benefits of Ketamine

Wolfson’s first exposure to the power of the ketamine molecule took place in 1990, but it was a decade later that his full exploration of ketamine’s potential as a psychotherapeutic medicine began. In 2014, he opened a clinic in Marin County, California, dedicated to the application of ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP). This practice has been elaborated in numerous publications including the groundbreaking The Ketamine Papers in 2016 with Glenn Hartelius.

In 1993, Wolfson was a founding member of the Heffter Research Institute with its focus on basic research with psychedelic medicines, especially psilocybin. In this oeuvre, Wolfson has continually emphasized the necessity for practitioners of ketamine and alternative medicines to know these powerful substances personally before administering them to patients. Similarly, he emphasized the importance of doing so within the embrace of psychotherapies that are being methodologically developed for these medicines.

Ketamine Research Foundation
In 2017, Wolfson founded and became the CEO of the non-profit Ketamine Research Foundation (KRF). The organization is dedicated to training, educating, and researching with ketamine, as the first legally available psychedelic medicine for prescription of a psychoactive and psychedelic psychotherapy. Its subsidiary, the Ketamine Training Center (KTC) has been the leading organization in training practitioners in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) with, as of 2023, over eight hundred practitioners participating in its international trainings. The Ketamine Psychotherapy Associates membership organization continues the educational and collaborative basis for KAP’s development worldwide.

KRF is engaged in an FDA-approved, five site study of KAP entitled: Conscious Dying/Conscious Living, and is a study for those who are aware of having a year or less to live. The study's goal is to humanize practice in hospice and palliative care settings. Additionally, KRF has created a template for training veterans to be co-facilitators for the group treatment of PTSD, which is intended to positively affect the facilitation of treatment for veterans. Having a veteran as a co-leader in groups for veterans suffering with PTSD is a step towards a more successful model for treatment.

Wolfson has recently (2023) published the first ever paper on working with adolescents and ketamine through KRF, and before that the first paper describing KAP practice with 235 patients.

Business affiliations
Wolfson has embarked on several different corporate ventures. The first was in 1988 as Founder and Director of Fiberstars, later Energy Focus, Inc (EFOI) formerly the largest developer and manufacturer of fiberoptic lighting to promote energy efficient lighting solutions. The company went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1994, with Wolfson leaving the Board of Directors in 2011.

Between 1988 and 1993, alongside Alexander Shulgin, he founded and was a director of Neurobiological Technologies, Inc, a biotechnology development corporation, that also went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1994, and was one of the developers of what became the anti-Alzheimer drug, Namenda.

In 1999, Wolfson and Shulgin founded a nutraceutical company, Phytos Inc, to potentially manufacture MDMA, should it have become available legally. The company also aimed to research new plant medicines.

As part of his decades of work, Wolfson authored and was the originator of nine patents for nutraceuticals and ketamine that included an herbal smoking cessation product and for Scutellaria lateraflora-Skullcap - as a high concentration anxiolytic and sedative. Wolfson published a paper describing its scientific study in Alternative Medicine, titled: An investigation into the efficacy of Scutellaria Lateriflora in Healthy Volunteers.

In addition, in 2017, Wolfson submitted a patent that is pending for luteal phase menstrual symptoms of PMS and PMDD (citation U.S. Patent Application No.: 16/464,383), recognizing the unique potential of low dose ketamine for women’s health and well-being. The patent continues under examination with the USPTO and abroad. !n 2019, in awareness of the potential for mass distribution to women in obtaining an FDA indication for this use, Wolfson became the Chairman of the Board and Medical Director of Progressive Therapeutics Inc (PTI). A second patent created by KRF for Postpartum disorders (U.S. Patent Application No.: 62/882,858) was assigned to PTI. Progressive Therapeutics Inc, Wolfson, and the CEO Dawn McCullough are engaged in the development of ketamine-based products for the benefit of women’s well-being and general mental health issues.

Acclaim and publications
In addition to these publications, Wolfson’s work has attracted attention from large-scale media outlets, first in 2018 with Wired Magazine, then the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He's also contributed heavily to Tikkun, a self-proclaimed "prophetic voice for peace, love, environmental sanity, social transformation, and unabashedly utopian aspirations for the world that can be."
 * The Ketamine Papers (Book)
 * Wolfson first experimented with the ketamine molecule in 1990 and understood its potential. However, it was some years of exploration before he felt it ready to be offered in a healing psychotherapy format. His clinical exploration of ketamine began in the early 2000s, was formalized in a dedicated clinic setting in 2014, and led to the publication of The Ketamine Papers with Glenn Hartelius in 2016. The book has received various sources of acclaim and review, one of which, found on The Health Care Blog, states: "Wolfson himself seems to be one of the few psychiatrists offering a distinctly psychotherapeutic psychedelic ketamine protocol."
 * Noe-a father-son song of love, life, illness and death (Book)
 * In 2011, after four years of battling leukemia, Dr. Wolfson’s oldest son Noah passed away. This tragedy became the catalyst for Wolfson’s next book: Noe-a Father-son Song of Love, Life, Illness and Death.
 * The Varieties of Ketamine
 * This summarizes a study from April 2013; “The Varieties of Ketamine Experience”, at the Psychedelic Science 2013 conference. This examines the clinical use of Ketamine with regard to depression, trauma and personal transformation.
 * Psychedelics, Spirituality, Activism and Transformation.
 * In October 2011, the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research published Wolfson's article: “A Longitudinal History of Self-Transformation: Psychedelics, Spirituality, Activism and Transformation.”
 * Suggested Rules for the Road: Conscious Parenting in this Time of Psychoactive Substance Use
 * The principles that work for child rearing in the context of substances in a family, with a discussion about the suggested guidelines.
 * Marijuana: A Review with Emphasis on Medical Marijuana and Use Patterns in the USA
 * A presentation given at a conference in Lima, Peru, about the impacts of America’s War on Drugs on the rest of the world.
 * MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy for Treatment of Anxiety and Other Psychological Distress Related to Life Threatening Illnesses
 * A randomized pilot study which explores the great need for new treatment options to address the psychological distress associated with LTIs. Published in Scientific Reports, 2020.