Acid tests
economist.com | Jun 23rd 2011
THE psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of
course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before
the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a
treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD), with promising results.
Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University, was one of the best-known
workers in the field, but it was also he who was widely blamed for discrediting
it, by his unconventional research methods and his lax handling of drugs. Now,
the details of Leary’s research will be made public, with the recent purchase
of his papers by the New York Public Library. These papers will be interesting
not only culturally, but also scientifically, as they reflect what happened
between the early medical promise of hallucinogens and their subsequent
blacklisting by authorities around the world.
American researchers began experimenting with LSD in 1949, at first using it to
simulate mental illness. Once its psychedelic effects were realised, they then
tried it in psychotherapy and as a treatment for alcoholism, for which it
became known at the time as a miracle cure.
By 1965 over 1,000 papers had been published describing positive results for
LSD therapy. It, and its close chemical relative psilocybin, isolated from
hallucinogenic mushrooms, were reported as having potential for treating
anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, bereavement and even sexual dysfunction.
Unfortunately, most of the studies that came to these conclusions were flawed:
many results were anecdotal, and control groups were not established to take
account of the placebo effect.
Still, the field was ripe for further study. But alongside growing public fear
of LSD, Leary’s leadership had become a liability. He was seen less and less as
a disinterested researcher, and more and more as a propagandist. In 1962, amid
wide publicity, the Harvard Psilocybin Project was shut down. Leary took his
research to an estate in upstate New York, where he also hosted a stream of
drug parties. Eventually both LSD and psilocybin were proscribed.
Which was a pity because, like many other drugs the authorities have taken
against as a result of their recreational uses, hallucinogens have medical
applications as well. But time heals all wounds and now, cautiously, study of
the medical use of hallucinogens is returning.
Psilocybin has shown promise in treating forms of OCD that are resistant to
other therapies, in relieving cluster headaches (a common form of chronic
headache) and in alleviating the anxiety experienced by terminally ill cancer
patients. The first clinical study of LSD in over 35 years, also on terminally
ill patients, is expected to finish this summer. Peter Gasser, the Swiss doctor
leading the experiment, says that a combination of LSD and psychotherapy
reduced anxiety levels of all 12 participants in the study, though the
statistical significance of the data has yet to be analysed.
Research into LSD is not confined to medicine. Franz Vollenweider, of the
Heffter Research Institute in Zurich, for example, is scanning people’s brains
to try to understand how hallucinogenic drugs cause changes in consciousness.
And biotechnology may lead to a new generation of hallucinogenic drugs. Edwin
Wintermute and his colleagues at Harvard have engineered yeast cells to carry
out two of six steps in the pathway needed to make lysergic acid, the precursor
of LSD. They hope to add the other four shortly. Once the pathway has been
created, it can be tweaked. That might result in LSD-like drugs that are better
than the original.
Even if that does not happen, making lysergic acid in yeast is still a good
idea. The chemical is used as the starting point for other drugs, including
nicergoline, a treatment for senile dementia. The current process for
manufacturing it is a rather messy one involving ergot, a parasite of rye.
It may, of course, be that LSD has no clinical uses. Even when no stigma
attaches to the drugs involved, most clinical trials end in failure. But it is
worth seeing whether LSD might fulfil its early promise. And if the publication
of Leary’s archive speeds that process up by exorcising a ghost that still
haunts LSD research, then the New York Public Library will have done the world
a service.
Original Page: http://www.economist.com/node/18864332
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