One interesting therapeutic potential that you are conducting, one of your
studies, is the use of psilocybin in the treatment of nicotine dependence which
seems kind of counterintuitive. Could you talk a little bit about that study?
>> Yes, yes. So back in the 1950s and 60s there, were several studies done
primarily with LSD and treatment of alcoholism. And those studies were done in
a way that is very difficult to interpret the validity of their results,
according to our own.
>> Their methodology?
>> Partly methodology, partly how they handle the data. So, given the experience
we had with patients at Johns Hopkins we thought we would put together an
intervention to look at addictions. We picked cigarette smoking, because we
though it was a interesting form of addiction. In some ways, it's a pure
addition. It's, it's unencumbered by the kind of social and physiological
consequences you have with severe alcoholism, for instance. Or, or heroine
addiction or cocaine addiction. Yet it's, it's the most pernicious form of
addiction that we have worldwide. And people who are dependent on tobacco, you
can ask them. It's, it's not an easy drug to, to quit. So we've, we've mounted
a, a pilot study. We've enrolled about 15 people to date, and the results look
very promising. We don't have a control group, but the results we're seeing to
date is that the great majority of our people are entirely abstinence from
cigarette smoking. So, how does this work? What? How does it, one single
session or, in this case, two or three sessions with psilocybin get people to
quit smoking? Well, it's embedded, this psilocybin session is embedded in the
context of a cognitive behavioral therapy for cigarette smoking cessation. So
prior to the psilocybin session, people learn about cognitive behavioral
approaches for smoking, they end up charting the number of cigarettes they
take, they rate their urges, their cravings, they note the situation under
which they smoke, they look at the reflexive and kind of habitual pattern in
which they reach for a cigarette. So we're introducing a level of mindfulness
into their cigarette smoking that then when combined with this psilocybin
session. And for reasons we don't fully understand, it really result in people
being able to walk away from their addiction. What people will very often
report is a transformed relationship to smoking. Before the psilocybin session
smoking it held a saliency for them that was much larger than their ability to
cope with. They were addicted, they knew they were addicted, they couldn't stop
their cravings, they were hooked. And with the expansive form of consciousness
that can come about with psilocybin, and when the intentionality is brought
into the session to really deeply look and heal people walk away from that
session with this renewed sense of self efficacy. Realizing that their, their
autonomous beings that they can watch moods and cravings and habitual patterns
come up into their field of consciousness but they can choose not to act on it.
So, it's not a magic bullet. It doesn't take away the cravings. It doesn't take
away the habitual tendency to maybe want a cigarette. But they can reframe it
in a way that, for many of them, seems really quite magical. It's, like, oh,
you know? It's, it's like Dorothy and the, and her shoes in the Wizard of Oz.
She didn't know she had been wearing them the whole time.
>> Right, right.
>> And, and it's that sense of efficacy that people come away with. We think,
mechanistically, it might have to do with increased enhancement of executive
function. That's kind of a catchphrase for a how we can organize our cognitions
and behaviors, you know, if in real time. So, that's what we have today. We're
ready to initiate a control clinical trial. It's a very interesting area.
>> It is.
>> And it won't be restricted of course, ultimately to nicotine. There's no reason
this couldn't be an approach for any addictive disorder, but more than that
Probably any form of radical behavior change. So there, there are real
fascinating implications here.
>> And these are small clinical trials being conducted around the United States?
>> Well, right now, all we have is this one pilot trial, and it's an uncontrolled
pilot trial at Johns Hopkins. But the results are, are so promising, that they
really call for a controlled clinical trial, and what I suspect is that once we
go ahead and report this kind of work, there'll be other, probably academic
sites will come in and start doing more research. But we actually need to do
the research, because these compounds have been so demonized, culturally, and
within the medical and the treatment community. The first impulse is, this
doesn't make any sense. It sounds crazy.
>> Right, right. Well, thank you so much, Roland Griffiths, for your time today.
>> Yeah.
>> We really appreciate it.