Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs
by Sam Kornell, miller-mccune.com
May 5th 2011
Mike is hunched over a pile of soggy wood chips at the bottom of a glade in
Golden Gate Park. It’s a clear winter afternoon and sunlight filters through
the eucalyptus trees, landing on grass still damp from a recent storm. Mike
sifts through the wood chips, slowly and deliberately examining the soil
beneath. Two paper bags fill a pocket of his Patagonia fleece jacket.
Mike is a 28-year-old engineer at a prominent software company in San
Francisco. He is soft-spoken and self-possessed; on weekends he drives his
Subaru Forester to his time-share in Tahoe to ski. He donates to public radio,
and he has made himself into an aficionado of the city’s Indian restaurants. He
is, or seems, like a well-adjusted member of society.
But what he is doing — sifting through wood chips in a damp, obscure corner of
the 1,000-acre park that bisects the western portion of San Francisco — is a
felony. He is searching for psilocybin, the psychedelic mushrooms that grow
wild in San Francisco and neighboring Marin County from fall to spring. If he
finds any, he tells me, he’ll stuff them in the bags, put the bags in his
backpack and backstreet home on his bike.
Not long ago, Mike agreed to take me on one of his mushroom hunts, and as he
scoured the ground, he explained his affinity for psilocybin. We were in the
lower section of Golden Gate Park near its terminus at Ocean Beach, and aside
from an occasional jogger, the park seemed empty, a forest in the middle of one
of the world’s most famous cities.
Mike told me doesn’t do mushrooms very often-maybe once or twice a year-but
when he does, it’s because he wants to explore a problem in his life that has
been troubling him. “When I take them, it may be because I have a decision to
make, or maybe I suspect that my outlook toward something is not as healthy or
as loving as I would like it to be,” he said. “Psilocybin allows me to see
things with a fresh point of view. When I’m on them, [I'm] not as burdened by
cynicism or other self-protective layers in my psychology.”
Is Mike delusional about the power of mushrooms to refresh his worldview?
In the last decade, research into the effects of psychedelic drugs on
consciousness has become a growing field of study in American academia.
Psychologists at UCLA, Johns Hopkins Medical School and NYU, among other
places, have published research showing that psychedelics can promote happiness
in ordinary people, as well as alleviate depression and anxiety among the
terminally ill. The positive effects of taking psilocybin Mike described are
similar to many of the case descriptions contained in these studies (though no
doubt none of the researchers involved would endorse his actions).
In the fall Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA
School of Medicine, published a study in the leading journal Archives of
General Psychiatry finding that people with terminal stage-IV cancer reported
feeling dramatically less anxiety after taking a small, measured dose of
psilocybin during a carefully administered experiment. Grob and his team
checked in with their subjects after three months, and then again after six
months; in each case, the subjects reported more benefits as time went on.
“Many of the subjects told us that it helped them come to terms with the fact
that they were going to die,” Grob said. “It gave them the strength to confront
directly what was going on. They told us that their experience helped them to
live in the moment, to take each day as it came in the time they had remaining,
as opposed to feeling immobilized because of their predicament.”
Grob distinguished between psilocybin and standard issue antidepressants, which
he said tend to dampen or suppress psychological problems without necessarily
curing them. “The response rates among people with terminal cancer to
conventional medications that target symptoms of anxiety and depression are not
that impressive,” he said. “Psilocybin is an entirely different mechanism. It
has the potential to facilitate what’s been called a psycho-spiritual epiphany.
“And it’s important to emphasize that psilocybin may only need to be
administered once within the context of ongoing psychotherapy, whereas
conventional medications are generally used daily for weeks, months, even
years.”
Grob’s research supports an earlier study conducted by researchers at Johns
Hopkins that found that 60 percent of subjects who took psilocybin in a
controlled experiment later called the experience one of the five most
personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.
William Richards, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
who worked on the Hopkins study, explained that psychedelics were
sensationalized in the public mind during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Before
that, their effect on consciousness was considered a legitimate field of
scientific inquiry, including work on acknowledged public scourges like
schizophrenia or alcoholism.
But when the government made them illegal in 1968, research in the U.S. ceased.
As Sgt. Joe Friday said that year in the cop drama Dragnet, “Don’t you con me
with your mind expansion slop.”
Only in the late 1990s did federal regulators begin easing restrictions on
controlled experiments with psychedelics. “It’s experiencing a rebirth after
being pretty much totally dormant for 30 years,” Richards said, attributing the
thaw largely to the exacting methodological character of the initial research
proposals. (Grob, for his part, wondered if the passage of time since the
counterculture excesses of the 1960s might also play a role.)
One of the key findings of Grob’s study is that in the right dosage, psilocybin
can be safely ingested without fear of serious side effects, or as it might
have been termed in the 60s, a bad trip. This may make it easier for scientists
to secure research permits to study psychedelics, I was told by Rick Doblin,
the executive director of the advocacy group MAPS, the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies. It also matters, Doblin pointed out,
since, if a research subject reacted dramatically badly to taking psilocybin or
another psychedelic substance during a controlled experiment, it could derail
future research into the drugs.
But while Doblin is pleased that scientists are once again able to legally
study psychedelics, he said that obtaining funding for such research is still
difficult. No federal agency will direct money toward experiments involving
substances that the Food and Drug Administration classifies as illegal, and the
obvious funding alternative — the pharmaceutical industry — isn’t interested:
Psychedelics cannot be patented and are meant only to be taken in small doses.
“No one’s going to take one psilocybin pill before breakfast and another one
after dinner for 30 years,” Doblin said.
Nonetheless, the studies thus far conducted are leading to wider interest in
psychedelics, even in unlikely places. MAPS is currently helping to fund a
recently commenced Harvard study meant to determine whether MDMA, also known as
ecstasy, could have therapeutic value for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans
suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
Miller-McCune‘s Matt Palmquist examined this in a 2009 cover story) that
focused on two Norwegian scientists’ work.) Asked why the drug’s potential
benefits were apparently underappreciated, Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Krebs
replied, “MDMA and treatment research has been caught up with drug policy.
However, it is common for new treatments to take a couple of decades to be
fully tested and accepted. There is a great deal of interest among clinicians
and scientists in the therapeutic potential of MDMA. It has been a silent story
for 20 years.”
But the volume is turning up: Not long ago, Doblin got an unsolicited call from
a senior psychiatrist at the Defense Department expressing interest in the
study.
Experiments’ involving the administration of MDMA to relieve psychological
stress or trauma are not necessarily hard to understand, especially considering
that MDMA affects serotonin receptors in the brain much like common
antidepressants do.
I asked Grob about the medical benefit of treating cancer patients with
psychedelic substances. He explained that the purpose of administering
psilocybin to terminally ill people is not to cure their disease but rather to
help them come to terms with it. Psilocybin can unearth deeply buried
psychological traumas in such a way that a user can accept what before they
couldn’t face, he said.
By way of illustration, Grob told me that not all of the effects his subjects
experienced during their altered state were directly related to cancer. Many
reported undergoing “profound healing” experiences connected to personal
relationships.
“One woman went through a lot of crying. I thought her tears had to do with her
imminent demise, but that wasn’t it. She had been reliving some early
experiences with her father, with whom she had a very challenging relationship.
She was crying because she had never been able to tell her father that she
loved him while he was still alive, and likewise he had not been able to tell
her that he loved her. She told us that during the course of the altered state
experience she was doing that, and she felt she had been able to heal a great
deal of the conflict that she had carried around with her because of it.”
Mike found no mushrooms on the day I accompanied him – the ground had already
been picked over by others in on Golden Gate Park’s psychedelic secret. He
didn’t seem to mind. “Mushrooms are not something I do very often, and I don’t
do them for ‘fun,’” he said. “It’s a myth that all ‘shrooms do is produce
hallucinations. It’s more than that.”
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Original Page:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/researchers-re-open-their-minds-to-psychedelic-drugs-30921/
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