[3 articles]
Trippy treatment eases anxiety in study
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/04/26/1400141/trippy-treatment-eases-anxiety.html
Long tarnished by hippie hype, hallucinogenic drugs may help
alleviate conditions related to stress.
By Malcolm Ritter
Apr. 26, 2010
NEW YORK -- The big white pill was brought to her in an earthenware chalice.
She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited.
And then it came.
"The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome," she recalled.
Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open
up to admit "this most incredible luminescence that made everything
even more beautiful."
Tears trickled down her face as she saw "how beautiful the world
could actually be."
That's how Nicky Edlich, 67, began her first trip on a psychedelic
drug last year.
She says it has greatly helped her psychotherapeutic treatment for
anxiety from her advanced ovarian cancer.
And for researchers, it was another small step toward showing that
hallucinogenic drugs, famous but condemned in the 1960s, can one day
help doctors treat conditions like cancer anxiety and post-traumatic
stress disorder.
The New York University study Edlich participated in is among a
handful now going on in the United States and elsewhere with drugs
like LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) and psilocybin, the main ingredient of
"magic mushrooms." The work follows lines of research choked off four
decades ago by the war on drugs.
The research is still preliminary.
"There is now more psychedelic research taking place in the world
than at any time in the last 40 years," said Rick Doblin, executive
director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies, which pays for some of the work. "We're at the end of the
beginning of the renaissance."
But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with
government officials still leery and drug companies not interested in
the compounds they can't patent.
"There's still a lot of resistance to it," said David Nichols, a
Purdue University professor of medicinal chemistry and president of
the Heffter Institute, which is supporting the NYU study. "The whole
hippie thing in the '60s" and media coverage at the time "has kind of
left a bad taste in the mouth of the public at large.
Lasting experience
Edlich, whose cancer forced her to retire from teaching French at a
private school, had plenty of reason to seek help through the NYU
project. Several recurrences of her ovarian cancer had provoked fears
about suffering and dying and how her death would affect her family.
She felt "profound sadness that my life was going to be cut short."
And she faced existential questions: Why live? What does it all mean?
How can I go on?
"These things were in my head and I wanted them to take a back seat
to living in the moment," she said. So when she heard NYU researchers
speak about the project at her cancer support group, she was interested.
Psilocybin has been shown to invoke powerful spiritual experiences
during the four to six hours it affects the brain. A study published
in 2008, in fact, found that even 14 months after healthy volunteers
had taken a single dose, most said they were still feeling and
behaving better because of the experience. They also said the drug
had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences
they'd ever had.
Experts emphasize people shouldn't try psilocybin on their own
because it can be harmful, sometimes causing bouts of anxiety and paranoia.
--------
Hallucinogens offer medical benefits
http://jackcentral.com/opinion/2010/04/hallucinogens-offer-medical-benefits/
by Courtney Bellio
April 22, 2010
Your perception of reality changes in an instant as you drift away
into the depths of your own mind. The hallucinogenic substances you
just ingested are hard at work transforming the familiar into
something unknown. And all the while, you're curing your clinical depression.
Scientists are exploring the potential of psychedelic drugs in
treating mental disorders such as depression, anxiety,
obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Studies thus far have provided promising results, and there are plans
to continue the research. The only problem? People can't seem to get
over their preconceived notions about hallucinogens.
While psychedelics have been used for centuries, they became
synonymous with the hippies of the 1960s who advertised the
substances using slogans such as "turn on, tune in, drop out."
Although legitimate research about the positive impacts of
hallucinogens was being done at the time, society focused only on the
abuse, and the substances became
taboo, not to mention illegal.
Now that we are once again exploring the science of psychedelics,
people seem to focus only on the illegality of the substances rather
than the potential. There is plenty of fear associated with the
exploration of psychedelics. What exactly is it that people fear? I'm
not entirely certain. Possibly another radical hippie uprising?
No one is advocating the recreational use of LSD, mushrooms or any
other psychedelic drug, but we shouldn't rule out medical use just
because past events showed us the ugly side of hallucinogens. There
will always be people who abuse their resources, no matter the
substance. Prescription medicine abuse has risen in recent years, but
that doesn't stop doctors from writing prescriptions to people who need them.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately
one in four adults suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder.
If these drugs can offer a deeper understanding of the brain and the
diseases that ail it, then the idea is worth exploring. Subjects who
participated in studies involving psychedelics reported lasting
positive effects. For people who are clinically depressed, a new
perspective may be just what they need.
The use of hallucinogens to treat mental disorders is no different
than the use of medical marijuana to treat chronic pain. Though it is
illegal in most states, people have begun to accept marijuana as a
legitimate medical aid. As long as the drugs are used responsibly, I
see no reason why hallucinogens can't serve a medical purpose.
--------
Turn on, tune in, feel better
http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/article424063.ece/Turn-on--tune-in--feel-better
Psychedelic drugs are on the research agenda as treatment for
depression, writes Chris Ayres
May 1, 2010
By Chris Ayres
It could be any sales conference at any hotel in America. The
delegates wear name tags, buffet meals are served and each day's
schedule is packed with workshops and panel discussions. But there
are a few telltale signs that all is not quite as it seems.
For a start, many of the featured speakers have the letters "MD"
after their names and wear unkempt beards and greying ponytails. And
at the concessions stand near the registration table is a man selling
didgeridoos.
In fact, this gathering of 1200 medical professionals, researchers
and students at the Holiday Inn in San Jose, California, couldn't be
farther removed from the average photocopier salesmen's jamboree.
After all, these delegates are here to promote the use of a substance
once considered the antithesis of the American Way of Life: lysergic
acid diethylamide or LSD.
The idea isn't as insane as it sounds. After 40 years of being a
medical research taboo and virtually impossible to use in
government-approved studies, "acid" is making a comeback, with the US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxing the conditions for trials
involving the mind-altering substance. Many doctors are convinced
that the controlled use of LSD and other psychedelics (including
psilocybin found in "magic mushrooms") could hold the key to treating
everything from severe depression to post-combat stress.
"It's unfortunate that people associate LSD with spaced-out hippies
because these medicines go back 50000 years," says Randy Hencken, a
director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychiatric
Studies, which is hosting the conference entitled Psychedelic Science
in the Twenty First Century. "But there has always been an
intellectual curiosity, and now more and more people want to do the
research. We have as many psychedelic studies going on in the US as
we did in the early '70s."
When the mind-altering effects of LSD were discovered by Swiss
chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943 - he infamously attempted to ride home
from the lab on his bicycle after mistakenly ingesting more than 100
times the threshold dose - researchers were convinced it could have
medical applications.
By the '60s, mainstream celebrities, including Cary Grant, were
experimenting with the drug, which was promoted enthusiastically by a
Harvard University lecturer, Timothy Leary, whose slogan was "turn
on, tune in, drop out".
All this came to an end in 1966, when LSD was declared illegal.
Meanwhile, Leary was named "the most dangerous man in America" by
President Richard Nixon and sentenced to 30 years in prison for
possession of half a marijuana joint.
It has taken until today for research involving hallucinogens to
overcome the stigma of the Leary era, when the FDA effectively closed
down academic studies involving such drugs. Now even the renowned
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore has
conducted a government-funded study into hallucinogens.
In the study, the results of which were published in the journal
Psychopharmacology, 36 volunteers were treated with psilocybin. The
participants had an average age of 46, had never used psychedelic
drugs before and were given it in an eight-hour session during which
they lay on a sofa wearing an eye mask and listening to classical
music. Many said it was the single most meaningful or spiritually
significant experience of their lives, comparable to the birth of a
child or the death of a parent.
Nevertheless, a third of the subjects also found the experience
frightening, even in the highly controlled setting, suggesting that
"bad trips" are still a problem.
LSD and psilocybin are not the only drugs back in vogue in medical
research. Studies are also being carried out into how MDMA, known as
Ecstasy, can be used to treat soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"With MDMA, some treatment-resistant patients are able to revisit
their trauma without being overwhelmed by fear," says Dr Michael
Mithoefer, a psychiatrist who conducted a landmark study using the
drug between 2004 and 2008. "It's very encouraging."
In spite of the growing respectability of psychedelic sciences,
funding remains scarce, partly because drugs such as LSD and MDMA are
now "in the public domain" and therefore un-patentable. "There's no
profit motivation," says Hencken.
Yet, as in the '60s, many of LSD's most enthusiastic proponents don't
need research budgets or government approval to conduct personal
experiments. Alex Kryzanekas, 26, is one such person. When he fell
into a deep and seemingly incurable depression after his girlfriend
cheated on him a few years ago, he decided to self-medicate by using
a hallucinogen given to him by a friend.
"It was the greatest epiphany I've had in my life," he recalls. "I
relived the moment of trauma in my head and understood events in my
life, including childhood issues I had with my mother, as I never had
before. I realised I had always been focusing on the negative."
Kryzanekas turned his experience into a research paper and hopes
eventually to qualify as a psychiatrist.
"This conference feels like the arrival of a new generation," he
says, as he sits at the hotel pool preparing for the morning's
seminars. "In future, I would rather doctors prescribe someone a
guided LSD session to treat depression than a 10-month course of Prozac."
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
