It was the most peaceful, joyous, incredible, life changing experience I've ever had in
my life. There were scary parts, foreboding parts … I always knew there was beautiful
and joy and peace on the other side of it. It was freeing, it was really freeing.
This is Alana. She’s describing what she felt after she took a dose of this stuff — psilocybin.
It’s a naturally occurring psychedelic compound, the kind you find in magic mushrooms.
But she wasn’t tripping in a dorm room or at Woodstock — it actually wasn’t recreational
at all. If anything became unreal or I was feeling
nervous or not in touch with reality, I would squeeze his hand and he would squeeze mine
back just to reassure me that I was okay and everything was alright.
It was part of a controlled medical test to see if psychedelics could be useful in helping
people quit cigarettes. Alana had been smoking for 37 years before her session with psilocybin,
and she hasn’t had a cigarette since.
Research on psychedelics for medical use is preliminary. Most studies suffer from really small
sample sizes. That’s partly because the federal government lists LSD and psilocybin
as Schedule 1 drugs. So researchers face extra red tape, and funding is really hard to come by.
Vox writer German Lopez reviewed dozens of studies that have been done. He found that
psychedelics show promise for treating addiction, OCD, anxiety, and in some cases, depression.
One small study of 15 smokers found that 80 percent were able to abstain from smoking
for six months after a psilocybin treatment. In a pilot study of 12 advanced cancer patients
suffering from end-of-life anxiety, participants who took psilocybin generally showed lower
scores on a test of depression. And smaller study suggested psilocybin treatment
could also help people with alcohol dependence cut back on their drinking days.
We don’t have all the answers as to what exactly these treatments are doing in the
brain. But they seem to work by providing a meaningful, even mystical experience that
leads to lasting changes in a patient's life.
The issues that I talked about, or thought about, or went into during my experience
were transformative in the sense that I got to look at them through a different lens.
I know this sounds weird, I feel like I have
more connections in my brain that I couldn't access before
That feeling that Alana is describing is actually pretty spot-on.
When you take LSD
your brain looks something like this.
You can actually see a higher degree of connectivity between various parts of the brain, it’s
not limited to the visual cortex.
This communication inside the brain helps explain visual hallucinations
— and the researchers argue that it could also explain why psychedelics can help people
overcome serious mental issues. They wrote that you can think of psychiatric
disorders as the brain being “entrenched in pathology.” Harmful patterns become automated
and hard to change, and that’s what can make things like anxiety, addiction and depression
very hard to treat.
That’s Albert Garcia-Romeu, he’s a Johns
Hopkins researcher who worked on studies of of psilocybin and smoking addiction, like the
one that Alana's involved with.
He says that when participants take psychedelics,
One of the big remaining questions here is how long these benefits actually last after just
the one-time treatment. A review of research on LSD-assisted psychotherapy
and alcoholism found no statistically significant benefits after 12 months.
And a recent study on psilocybin and depression found that benefits significantly dropped
off after three months.
And of course are some big risks to using psychedelic drugs.
It’s hard to predict a patient’s reaction and some might actually endanger themselves.
Those predisposed to psychotic conditions are especially at risk for having a traumatic
experience while on the drug. It’s difficult to draw solid conclusions
from the existing studies. But there’s more than enough promise here
to merit further research and further funding for that research.
As Matthew Johnson of Johns Hopkins said, "These are among the most debilitating and
costly disorders known to humankind.” For some people, no existing treatments help.
But psychedelics might.
One thing you might still be wondering is why so much of this research is so new, when we've known
when we've known about psychedelics for thousands of years.
Well since these drugs are so old, they can't be patented, which means that pharmaceutical companies
don't really have any incentive to fund any research into them.
So that really leaves it up to governments and private contributors to fund all these studies.
And there actually was a lot of research done into these drugs in the 50s and 60s, but there was a big enough
backlash to the abuse of psychedelics in that period, especially around events like Woodstock,
that funding really dried up, and research stopped.
And that's why it's only now that we see this research happening, with private, not government contributions.