Researching Deborah Mash

Mash became fascinated with the human brain while she was an undergraduate student at Florida State University. After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree there, she completed a Ph.D. program at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1986 she joined the faculty of her alma mater, the University of Miami.

In 1994, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States granted Mash an Investigational New Drug license, to permit her to research the addiction-stopping capabilities of ibogaine (an oneirogen that occurs in some plants). A lack of funding and other barriers prevented the research from proceeding. Mash and her colleagues had previously discovered that ibogaine is a prodrug that metabolizes into a psychoactive called 12-hydroxyibogamine (or, noribogaine). In the late 1990s she provided some assistance to Healing Transitions Institute for Addiction, a drug detoxification clinic in Cancún where physicians oversaw patients' ibogaine treatments.

On eight occasions between 2005 and 2009, she served as an expert witness for the defense in wrongful death claims filed against electroshock weapon manufacturer TASER International. Dr. Mash was paid by the company to testify on its behalf, prompting some criticism of a conflict of interest. The company's official position was that the cause of death in Taser fatalities was excited delirium. Excited delirium, a syndrome not recognized by many medical associations including World Health Organization, American Psychiatric Association, and American Medical Association is not included in the International Classification of Diseases or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Dr. Mash performed post-mortem examinations of the brains of people who were allegedly victims of excited delirium, and reported that most of them showed signs of drug abuse—most frequently cocaine or amphetamine.