Research: Magic mushrooms cause 'spiritual' experiences

[enquirewithin]

• 05:01 11 July 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Roxanne Khamsi

“Magic” mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient. About one-third of volunteers in the carefully controlled new study had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin, with half of them describing their encounter as the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes.
However, psilocybin use has been associated with side effects such as severe paranoia, nervousness and unwanted flashbacks and so experts warn against experimentation. “Once you’ve started down the path, you might not like where it ends,” comments Herbert Kleber, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, US. “These are powerful agents that are just as likely to do harm as to do good.”
Psilocybin is found in mushrooms such as the liberty cap (Psilocybe semilanceata and about 186 other species. Hippies embraced the compound during the 1960s, after its mind-altering potential was touted by Timothy Leary, then a researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But as its use grew, US lawmakers took action. It is now generally illegal to sell or possess psilocybin drugs in the US.
Demonised compound

But Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and his colleagues believe there is a need to revisit the biological effects of psilocybin, which have been virtually ignored by the scientific community for about 40 years. “It so traumatised our society that we’ve demonised this compound,” he says.
Griffiths's team recruited 36 healthy volunteers who had not experimented with the drug before. They were informed that they would receive a hallucinogen but did not know in which of two or three sessions they would receive it. Each session was separated by two months.
They either received a substantial dose – about 30 milligrams – of psilocybin or a similar dose of an "active" placebo, Ritalin. The latter has a stimulating effect but is not known as a hallucinogen. An inactive placebo would be easy to identify by the volunteers when compared to psilocybin, which could bias the experiences they reported.
The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin – far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin.
More than one-third of the volunteers said that their encounter with psilocybin was the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes – no person given Ritalin said the same. Experts say the study is the most rigorous study of psilocybin’s potential to elicit spiritual feelings because it is the first to use an active control.
Spiritual shortcut

However, more than 20% of the participants described their psilocybin sessions as dominated by negative feelings such as anxiety. And while psilocybin appears to mimic the brain signalling-chemical serotonin, its precise action on mind function remains elusive.
Griffiths says that in the future psilocybin might have a therapeutic use, perhaps helping people who have just learned they have cancer come to terms with the news. But he is quick to add that “the therapeutic application is very speculative”.
“My guess is that there will be people saying ‘You’re looking for a spiritual shortcut’” says Griffiths. He stresses that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: “There’s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.”
Journal reference: Psychopharmacology (DOI: 10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn9522.html

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Interesting find.
	Excellent find and good source material. Thanks

[enquirewithin]

In July 1914, one man's psychedelic lunch forever changed the way most of us look at mushrooms
IN JULY 1914, one man's lunch forever changed the way most of us looked at mushrooms. Mr W, as he is known, went mushrooming in Maine, then tucked into his pickings with his niece. After the meal, they started to feel strange. Time seemed to slow down. "We became very hilarious, with an irresistible impulse to laugh and joke immoderately," Mr W recounted. They then experienced vivid hallucinations.
Mr W's experiences were so noteworthy that they were reported in the journal Science. This was something of a turning point, according to historian Andy Letcher, whose new book Shroom explores the cultural history of the magic mushroom. Previously, mushrooms had been classed as edible or poisonous. Now a third category was recognised: hallucinogenic.
What proportion of mushrooms fit into this category? Of the thousands of different species, around 200 are hallucinogenic.

[psyche]

Nice one. Pretty objective but I don't know where is this based on: “These are powerful agents that are just as likely to do harm as to do good.” The spiritual shortcut? That's all another story and I believe it has numerous threads in some spirituality section.

[tre2005be]

taken from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060711/...TdmBHNlYwM3NTM-

NEW YORK - People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks — all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s.
Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
Such comments "just seemed unbelievable," said Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the study's lead author.
But don't try this at home, he warned. "Absolutely don't."
Almost a third of the research participants found the drug experience frightening even in the very controlled setting. That suggests people experimenting with the illicit drug on their own could be harmed, Griffiths said.
Viewed by some as a landmark, the study is one of the few rigorous looks in the past 40 years at a hallucinogen's effects. The researchers suggest the drug someday may help drug addicts kick their habit or aid terminally ill patients struggling with anxiety and depression.
It may also provide a way to study what happens in the brain during intense spiritual experiences, the scientists said.
Funded in part by the federal government, the research was published online Tuesday by the journal Psychopharmacology.
Psilocybin has been used for centuries in religious practices, and its ability to produce a mystical experience is no surprise. But the new work demonstrates it more clearly than before, Griffiths said.
Even two months after taking the drug, pronounced SILL-oh-SY-bin, most of the volunteers said the experience had changed them in beneficial ways, such as making them more compassionate, loving, optimistic and patient. Family members and friends said they noticed a difference, too.
Charles Schuster, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the work a landmark.
"I believe this is one of the most rigorously well-controlled studies ever done" to evaluate psilocybin or similar substances for their potential to increase self-awareness and a sense of spirituality, he said. He did not participate in the research.
Psilocybin, like LSD or mescaline, is one of a class of drugs called hallucinogens or psychedelics. While they have been studied by scientists in the past, research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of the drugs during the 1960s, Griffiths said. Some work resumed in the 1990s.
"We've lost 40 years of (potential) research experience with this whole class of compounds," he said. Now, with modern-day scientific methods, "I think it's time to pick up this research field."
The study volunteers had an average age of 46, had never used hallucinogens, and participated to some degree in religious or spiritual activities like prayer, meditation, discussion groups or religious services. Each tried psilocybin during one visit to the lab and the stimulant methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) on one or two other visits. Only six of the volunteers knew when they were getting psilocybin.
Each visit lasted eight hours. The volunteers lay on a couch in a living-room-like setting, wearing an eye mask and listening to classical music. They were encouraged to focus their attention inward.
Psilocybin's effects lasted for up to six hours, Griffiths said. Twenty-two of the 36 volunteers reported having a "complete" mystical experience, compared to four of those getting methylphenidate.

That experience included such things as a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love. People say "they can't possibly put it into words," Griffiths said.
Two months later, 24 of the participants filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their reaction to psilocybin one of the five top most meaningful experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with another 40 percent ranking it in the top five. About 80 percent said that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either "moderately" or "very much."

[tre2005be]

no one else think its strange that they start doing tests to see how useful mushrooms are, after they started banning them everywhere?

[tre2005be]

no one else think its strange that they start doing all these test on the benefits of mushrooms, after they start banning them everywhere?

[Alfa]

Magic Mushrooms have a far better chance of being the spearpoint of legalisation. Most research until now shows magic mushrooms to be relatively safe. Pointing out the benefits is one aspect of public pressure in this regard.

Can anyone dig up this study?

Edit: I have received the documents and have uploaded them to the file archive:
Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance

Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance - commentaries by distinguished professors

Press release: Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance
The content is marvelous. If you have the chance to pass this on to your press contacts, please do so now.

[hh339]

Newsday.com
BY JAMIE TALAN
July 11, 2006

Some find meaning in meditation, others through religion, but for some middle-aged volunteers in a Johns Hopkins study, their life-altering sacred experience arrived in a dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called sacred mushrooms indigenous to Mexico.

In what some are calling a 'landmark' study on the effects of hallucinogens, Roland Griffiths and colleagues brought 36 adult volunteers into the laboratory where they experienced their first psychedelic high. Two-thirds said it was among the most profound events in their lives, said Griffiths, whose findings appear in the journal Psychopharmacology. The positive effects appeared to last for as long as a year.

Griffiths and colleagues took out ads looking for adults with no history of mental illness or psychedelic drug use. After performing extensive psychiatric interviews, they chose 36 volunteers, average age 46, all of whom underwent eight hours of preparation. They took the drug in a relaxed setting for another eight hours with two monitors present. They were given either psilocybin, an amphetamine compound or a placebo. The monitors were unaware of what the volunteer had taken.

Afterward, the volunteers completed a battery of tests. Two-thirds who'd taken psilocybin recounted a profound spiritual experience. 'These are successful, dynamic people with plenty of life experience,' Griffiths said. 'We didn't expect this.'

But Griffiths said a third of the volunteers experienced terrible fear and anxiety on psilocybin. 'These drugs should not be used recreationally,' Griffiths said. 'These are potentially dangerous drugs, and we can't predict who will have fear, anxiety and paranoia. You can imagine that in different circumstances, someone might panic and do something dangerous.'

However, the negative effects, at least in the calm study setting, didn't last beyond the session, whereas positive ones persisted. 'They felt that they learned something true and deeply important,' Griffiths said. Family and co-workers interviewed said they saw profound changes.

'As a scientist, I have to go where the data is,' said Dr. Herbert Kleber of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in Manhattan. 'On the other hand, I worry about saying things that can have a Pied Piper effect.' Kleber was one of four scientists asked to write accompanying editorials in the journal.

Kleber referred to the 1960s when scientists such as Harvard's Timothy Leary swallowed their own research drugs. Leary, who was fired because of his controversial research, invited a generation to 'turn on, tune in and drop out.'

Forty years later, Griffiths decided that 'classical hallucinogens have been in the deep freeze for too long. Our understanding of neuroscience, our ability to measure subtle psychological effects of spiritual experience, has proceeded along, and yet there are a whole class of compounds we know nothing about.'

http://www.topix.net/content/trb/106...85700175611157

[Alfa]

Abstract

Rationale Although psilocybin has been used for centuries for religious purposes, little is known scientifically about its acute and persisting effects.

Objectives This double-blind study evaluated the acute and longer-term psychological effects of a high dose of psilocybin relative to a comparison compound administered under comfortable, supportive conditions.

Materials and methods The participants were hallucinogen-naïve adults reporting regular participation in religious or spiritual activities. Two or three sessions were conducted at 2-month intervals. Thirty volunteers received orally administered psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) and methylphenidate hydrochloride (40 mg/70 kg) in counterbalanced order. To obscure the study design, six additional volunteers received methylphenidate in the first two sessions and unblinded psilocybin in a third session. The 8-h sessions were conducted individually. Volunteers were encouraged to close their eyes and direct their attention inward. Study monitors rated volunteers’ behavior during sessions. Volunteers completed questionnaires assessing drug effects and mystical experience immediately after and 2 months after sessions. Community observers rated changes in the volunteer’s attitudes and behavior.

Results Psilocybin produced a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At 2 months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.

Conclusions When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences. The ability to occasion such experiences prospectively will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences.

[Omelet]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...ectID=10390814


Neuroscientists find God in mushrooms

Wednesday July 12, 2006
By Jeremy Laurance

LONDON - A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claimed yesterday.
Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his 1960s hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory.
They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".
And they argue that the potential of the hallucinogenic drugs, ignored for decades because of their links with illicit drug use in the 1960s, must be explored to develop new treatments for depression, drug addiction and the treatment of intolerable pain.
Anticipating criticism from church leaders, they say they are not interested in the "Does God exist?" debate. "This work can't and won't go there."
Interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs is growing around the world. In the UK, the Royal College of Psychiatrists debated their use at a conference in March for the first time for 30 years. A conference held in Basel, Switzerland, last January, reviewed the growing psychedelic psychiatry movement.
The drug psilocybin is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, which grow wild in Wales and were openly sold in London markets until a change in the law last year.
For the Johns Hopkins study, 30 middle-aged volunteers who had religious or spiritual interests attended two eight-hour drug sessions, two months apart, receiving psilocybin in one session and a non-hallucinogenic stimulant - Ritalin - in the other. They were not told which drug was which.
One-third described the experience with psilocybin as the most spiritually significant of their lifetime and two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful experiences.
In more than 60 per cent of cases the experience qualified as a "full mystical experience" based on established psychological scales, the researchers say. Some likened it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.
The effects lasted for at least two months. Eight out of 10 of the volunteers reported moderately or greatly increased wellbeing or life satisfaction. Relatives, friends and colleagues confirmed the changes.
The study is one of the first in the new discipline of "neurotheology" -the neurology of religious experience. The researchers, who report their findings in the online journal Psychopharmacology, say that, though unorthodox, their aim is to explore the possible benefits of drugs like psilocybin.
Professor Roland Griffiths, of the department of neuroscience and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, said: "As a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time. I had a healthy scepticism going into this. [But] under defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what's called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person.
"It is an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people."
A third of the volunteers became frightened during the drug sessions with some reporting feelings of paranoia.
The researchers say psilocybin is not toxic or addictive, unlike alcohol and cocaine, but that volunteers must be accompanied throughout the experience by people who can help them through it.
The study is hailed as a landmark by former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Charles Schuster, in a commentary published alongside the research.
In a second commentary, Huston Smith, America's leading authority on comparative religion, writes that mystical experience "is as old as humankind" and attempts to induce it using psychoactive plants were made in some ancient cultures, such as classical Greece, and in some contemporary small-scale cultures.
"But this is the first scientific demonstration in 40 years, and the most rigorous ever, that profound mystical states can be produced safely in the laboratory. The potential is great."
- INDEPENDENT

[Alfa]

Now the story is on reuters, which is the first step. Hopefully media will add it from there. Here is the story they wrote:

"Magic" mushrooms blow many minds

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "Magic mushrooms," used by Native Americans and hippies to alter consciousness, appear to have similar mystical effects on many people, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

More than 60 percent of volunteers given capsules of psilocybin derived from mushrooms said they had a "full mystical experience." "Many of the volunteers in our study reported, in one way or another, a direct, personal experience of the 'beyond,'" said Roland Griffiths, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry and behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who led the study.

A third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes. Many likened it to the birth of their first child or the death of a parent. And the effects lingered.

Two months after getting the drug, 79 percent of the volunteers said they felt a moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction, according to the report published in the journal Psychopharmacology.
Griffiths said the drug might be used to treat addiction as well as severe pain or depression. Griffiths and colleagues tested 36 healthy, educated volunteers who all reported they had active spiritual lives, the idea being that spiritual people would be less troubled by the drug's effects.

Griffiths said he did not want to be accused of working like Timothy Leary, the former Harvard University psychologist best known for his 1960s experiments with LSD, another mind-altering drug.

NOT TURNING ON AND TUNING IN
"We are conducting rigorous, systematic research with psilocybin under carefully monitored conditions, a route which Dr. Leary abandoned in the early 1960s," Griffiths said. "Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia," he added.

"Under unmonitored conditions, it's not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior."
Psilocybin, which is nontoxic and not addictive, acts like a message-carrying chemical called serotonin on brain cells. Serotonin is linked with mood.
To ensure that people did not imagine their experiences, each volunteer got either psilocybin or methylphenidate, a stimulant best known for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Psilocybin is taken from several species of mushrooms native to the Americas. Under U.S. law it is a Schedule I hallucinogenic substance, on a par with drugs such as heroin. But its use in medical experiments is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and one team led by Dr. Charles Grob at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California is testing the drug on patients with end-stage cancer.

"Our specific aim is to learn whether this psychoactive drug, psilocybin, might be effective in reducing anxiety, depression and physical pain, and therefore improving your quality of life," the researchers say on their Web site.
Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who says he has experimented with LSD himself, said the experiment might lead to a way to find the "locus of religion" and the biological basis of consciousness in the brain.

But Griffiths said such study would be purely scientific. "We're not entering into 'Does God exist or not exist.' This work can't and won't go there," he said.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...1-ArticlePage3

[Hyperreal]

A study published in the journal Psychopharmacology by researchers from one of the USA's most prominent research universities, Johns Hopkins, concluded that -
psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences. The ability to occasion such experiences prospectively will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences.

Google News gives an encouraging round-up of media coverage of the study. Here are some highlights from the world media:

Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in "sacred mushrooms" can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries. - The Hindu News Update, India

The active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms produces a spiritual experience that can have lasting positive effects, a trial has shown. - ABC online, Australia

Reuters, The Daily Mail, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes among others give similar positive accounts. Of course, this isn't news to any of us here, but it's nice to see this sort of thing in the mainstream media.

The study is available online here

[fatal]

Originally Posted by hh339

They were given either psilocybin, an amphetamine compound or a placebo. The monitors were unaware of what the volunteer had taken.

anyone know what the amphetamine they used was? curiosity...

:

[Alfa]

The study and related documents can be found in the file archive. If I remember correctly it was Ritalin.

[Bajeda]

Soulfood?
A new study came out this week about the effects of psilocybin, the substance that's in certain hallucinogenic mushrooms. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine study focused on how many people have had deeply spiritual experiences while under the influence. One of the last major psilocybin studies was in 1962, when 20 seminary students took the substance (or a placebo), and were studied during a Good Friday sermon. Barbara talks with Reverend Mike Young, a participant in the "Good Friday Marsh Chapel" experiment, and Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and the lead author of the new study.

Listen



Drug's Mystical Properties Confirmed
36 Area Adults Took Psilocybin in Study; Many Called Experience Spiritual
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 11, 2006; A08


Psilocybin, the active ingredient of "magic mushrooms," expands the mind. After a thousand years of use, that's now scientifically official.
The chemical promoted a mystical experience in two-thirds of people who took it for the first time, according to a new study. One-third rated a session with psilocybin as the "single most spiritually significant" experience of their lives. Another third put it in the top five.
The study, published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology, is the first randomized, controlled trial of a substance used for centuries in Mexico and Central America to produce mystical insights. Almost no research on a psychedelic drug in human subjects has been done in this country since the 1960s. It confirms what both shamans and hippies have long said -- taking psilocybin is a scary, reality-bending and occasionally life-changing experience.
The researchers say they hope the experiment opens a door to the study of a class of compounds that alter human perception and erode the boundaries of self -- at least in some users. They hope it will provide new insight into how the brain works and what neurochemical events underlie moments of mystical rapture.
If the generally positive effects of the drug are confirmed by other studies, the research is likely to raise the question of whether people should be allowed access to psilocybin for self-improvement or recreation.
Rigorous study of these substances has been shunned since the 1960s, although it is not legally prohibited. Research on them was a casualty of the muddled mix of science and advocacy by people like Timothy Leary, the LSD guru and former Harvard psychologist once called the "most dangerous man in America" by President Richard M. Nixon.
"Our study has shown we can conduct a study of this type safely, and that the effects produced are really quite interesting," said Roland R. Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who ran the experiment. "There is a clear neuroscience agenda to understand those effects, and clear clinical applications that could be pursued."
Other brain researchers hailed the experiment as much for the fact that it was done at all as for its findings.
"These are some of the most potent compounds we know of that can change consciousness," said David E. Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University who has studied the effects of psychedelics on rats and cultured cells. "It's kind of peculiar they have just been kind of sitting on the shelf for 40 years. There is no other class of biologically active substances I am aware of that have been ignored like that."
The study, which involved 36 middle-aged adults from the Baltimore-Washington area, was conducted over five years. The subjects were chosen from 135 people who answered newspaper ads. All said they were members of a religious organization, practiced meditation or took part in other spiritual activity.
The study was designed to minimize the effects of anticipation and group enthusiasm, which might color a person's response. It also sought to examine the delayed, as well as immediate, effects of the drug.
The volunteers were randomly assigned to take either 30 milligrams of psilocybin (chemically synthesized, not extracted from mushrooms) or 40 milligrams of methylphenidate, the stimulant sold as Ritalin. The sessions lasted eight hours in a room where a person could listen to music, relax on a couch with eyeshades or talk with two monitors always in attendance. Each subject then took the other drug in a different session two months later.
Of the 36 people, 22 had a "complete" mystical experience as judged by several question-based scales used for rating such experiences. Two-thirds judged it to be among their top five life experiences, equal to the birth of a first child or death of a parent. Two months after a session, the people who had taken psilocybin reported small but significant positive changes in behavior and attitudes compared with those who had taken Ritalin.
One-third of the subjects, however, said they experienced "strong or extreme" fear at some point in the hours after they took the hallucinogen. Four people said the entire session was dominated by anxiety or psychological struggle.
Nichols thinks that last finding should give people pause.
"I think these drugs are potentially very dangerous," he said. "I would be very disappointed if in any sense these results were used to encourage recreational use of these compounds. I wouldn't want to take responsibility for anyone under unmonitored conditions coming up with those feelings."
Alan Leshner, who headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse for seven years and now leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was both wary and excited about psilocybin's reported effects.
"If it is ultimately shown to be benign but enriches people's lives, who could object to that? But I don't have that level of confidence at this point, given the paucity of research on it," he said.
A scholar of mysticism, G. William Barnard of Southern Methodist University, suspects that most mystical traditions would not object to the idea that a chemical could allow a person to tune into a preexisting state of consciousness, usually ignored, just as fasting, prayer, yoga and other activities can. But there is less enthusiasm for the idea that this kind of research will unlock the mechanism of mystical insight.
"Most people I suspect would say that the neurochemistry is not the full cause of these experiences," he said.






http://weekendamerica.publicradio.or..._20060715.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...071001304.html

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good find

[Bajeda]

And why this experiment may never happen again:

http://www.nida.nih.gov/about/welcom...ocybin706.html

Message from the Director


Statement by NIDA Director Nora D. Volkow, M.D., in response to a study published in the Journal Psychopharmacology on July 11, 2006. Study authors: R.R. Griffiths, et al. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

As the nation's preeminent drug abuse research organization, NIDA's mission is to support research and provide information on the addictive and adverse health consequences of drugs of abuse. Therefore, NIDA discourages the use of hallucinogens, in order to promote the continuing downward trend in use of this class of drugs.
Although there is no evidence that psilocybin is addictive, its adverse effects are well known. Similar to the more commonly known hallucinogen LSD, psilocybin acts on serotonin receptors in the brain to profoundly distort a person's perceptions of reality. Psilocybin can trigger psychosis in susceptible individuals and cause other deleterious psychological effects, such as paranoia and extreme anxiety.
A recent study entitled "Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance" evaluated the subjective effects of psilocybin after acute administration and the recall of these subjective effects 2 months after its administration. While the investigators receiving the grant supporting this research did not initially propose to evaluate the effects of psilocybin, grantees maintain the scientific independence necessary to follow up on new areas of research.
Sincerely,
Nora D. Volkow, M.D.
Director

[Forthesevenlakes]

Originally Posted by Bajeda

Therefore, NIDA discourages the use of hallucinogens, in order to promote the continuing downward trend in use of this class of drugs.

This does not sit well with swim. hallucinogens are among the safer drugs available to man, and are non-addictive, at least, not physically addictive. If NIDA really wanted to look after the public health, they'd be encouraging more research like this, instead of decrying hallucinogen use and championing its downfall...while more physically addictive drugs are replacing them as drugs to experiment with.

[Bajeda]

That is why swim is NOT a big fan of the NIDA. They supported the Ricaurte studies and just about every other piece of bad propagandist research that has come out since, uhh, the NIDA was founded?

I just love how their entire mission is to provide "information on the addictive and adverse health consequences of drugs" ONLY. Of course there are no benefits!!

[Forthesevenlakes]

seriously. there should be reports of the positive factors too, although then it wouldnt really be the national institute of drug ABUSE, but just a national institute of drugs. which is a cause swim could get behind.

[RJeez]

Are the lasting effects a physical thing on the brain,or an acceleration of the psycholgical state,ie.an accelerated(and lasting)"revealing" of the unconscious,or the source of the hallucinations?

[Heretic.Ape.]

A nice overview of some of the nice research that's been going on
h.a.

Can Science Validate the Psychedelic Experience? Section: Healing & Transformation A PORTAL TO HEAVEN OPENED UP LAST SUMMER WHEN a study by a psychiatric team at preeminent Johns Hopkins School of Medicine revealed that psilocybin, the all-natural ingredient that packs the magic in magic mushrooms, can "occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.
Published in Psychopharmacology, the results of the double-blind study led by psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths were blindingly persuasive and unambiguous. A whopping 79 percent of the thirty mentally healthy, well-educated, hallucinogen-naïve, religiously or spiritually active adult volunteers, reported that their psilocybin sessions were one of the five most important events of their lives, right up there with the birth of their first child. Thirty percent said it was the single most significant event ever. What's more, after two months, most reported lasting positive effects on their sense of well-being and life outlook--confirmed by significant others.
While some reported experiencing strong anxiety and a few would decline to repeat the experiment, the potent breadth of the psychedelic's positive effect on the majority constitutes a home run on almost anyone's scorecard. In a society that fancies itself foremost as faithful, an encounter with divinity would seem to have optimal value. We're not talking about a nice buzz or an amelioration of the jitters; we're talking godhead, unitive ecstasis.
Granted, the sovereign, enlightened individual doesn't really need science to validate what he intuitively--or experientially -- already knows. In that sense, scoffed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, the Griffiths findings can be tossed onto "the pile of the science of the No Duh." One might well ask, "Since when is science equipped to quantify spirituality, anyway?" Doesn't more flow out of an entheogen-induced devekut--Kahbalist mystic union with God--than can possibly be caught in the clinical chalice? To tend The Garden and ingest its ennobling fruit, do we really need to wait idly for an approving nod from secular authority, be it Big Brother Science or his more imposing sibling, Government?
The Hopkins results highlight the struggle between our culture's twin idolatries, science and religion, both of which render themselves incomplete and exclusionary by their certitude. "Science without religion is lame" Einstein observed, and "religion without science is blind." But there's good news: the science applied by the new psychedelic re searchers at Hopkins and elsewhere is both more rigorous and more humane -- even capable, in fact, of working in league with religion. The mystical models that arise will deliver unprecedented insight into the mysterium tremendum and the subjective phenomena of the religious experience.
William Richards, the Hopkins study's chief monitor and a veteran of LSD research for treating the terminally ill at Spring Grove Hospital, Maryland some two generations ago, asserts that the study's protocol and psychometric instruments are far ahead of where they were back in the golden age of psychedelic research, an appraisal echoed by notable physicians, including former National Institute on Drug Abuse director Charles Schuster and Herbert Kleber, deputy director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy under the first President Bush.
"It was as good a job as science can do today," Richards says. "It almost makes me believe more in science than I did before." The very first session, decades alter his last work in the field, was profoundly mystical for him. "Just to be able to do it.… I felt awe and privilege myself:' Richards believes we're finally in the "early dawn of psychology's recognition and understanding of the spiritual experience."
The prime mover behind all this progressive science is Robert Jesse, a former vice president of Oracle for whom life-changing entheogenic events inspired him to found the Council for Spiritual Practices (www.csp.org) in 1994 to develop "approaches to primary religious experience:' Working stealthily under the media radar, Jesse navigated the bureaucracy and moved the study to fruition, a strategy that kept it from being blackballed. Jesse once told me his aim isn't to legalize psychedelics but to demonstrate their value. Mission accomplished at Johns Hopkins.
Bolstering the new science with the requisite judiciary buttress for the pursuit of spirituality through chemistry is yet another ray of light that pierces our Drug War benightedness. Early last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the Bush administration's attempt to block the ingestion of the hallucinogenic Amazonian brew ayahuasca by a branch of União do Vegetal (UDV), a Brazilian religious order that insists the hoasca tea brings members closer to God. In the opinion written by new Chief Justice John Roberts, the court affirmed that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the church's taste in tea. Sounding a distinct note for reason, he observed that federal law already allows peyote use by Native Americans, and that Congress ought to be "striking sensible balances between religious liberty and competing prior governmental interests." And there's an ecclesiastical catch: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals defended the UDV's case for religious freedom, prompting psychedelic researcher and UCLA professor Charles Grob, an expert witness at the hearing, to notice that "religious rights can apparently trump the Drug War."
There's a real movement afoot. The field of psychedelic research is opening up, blossoming worldwide. The landmark study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder victims unresponsive to other treatment, launched at the University of South Carolina in 2004, has been showing "tremendous results," according to Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (www.maps.org), its sponsor. Privy to the extant data, Doblin noted that a telltale sign that subjects in the double-blind study had received MDMA rather than the placebo was their query of the monitor "And how are you doing?" once the drug kicked in.
A similar MAPS-funded study will begin soon in Israel. The Israeli Ministry of Health had been waiting for U.S. federal approval for the South Carolina study before launching its own MDMA work, to treat casualties of war and terrorism, under the direction of former IDF chief psychiatrist Moshe Kotler. The final condition, now satisfied, was express written support by the Israeli Anti-Drug Authority. Comparable MAPS-sponsored MDMA studies in Switzerland and Spain await approval.
MAPS is also hoping to start research at Harvard into LSD and psilocybin as treatments for cluster headaches, a horrifically painful affliction thus far resistant to lasting relief. A Neurology article by prospective monitors Andrew Sewell and John Halpern reports strong anecdotal evidence that unauthorized use of either of the two drugs--even in sub-psychoactive doses--has halted both shorter episodes and months-long cycles of these headaches.
Arising from the supplications of an underground population of law-breaking self-medicators, this research proposal demonstrates the moral authority of grassroots, people-driven science and how an overlooked, even factious interest group (www.clusterbusters.org) can force action and keep science honest.
"The psychedelic renaissance will have really begun in earnest and completely when we have LSD underway for both physiological and psychotherapeutic studies, particularly the latter," says Doblin, who expects imminent approval for a MAPS-funded Swiss study of the psychotherapeutic use of LSD to ease anxiety in cancer patients. Still other psychedelic studies are in the pipeline, at different stages of the bureaucratic maze, including psilocybin research at NYU, and a not yet publicized LSD study to investigate brain function.
Psychedelic therapy has shown enormous potential to decouple minds from various kinds of captivity. Ketamine has been used successfully In St. Petersburg, Russia, to separate heroin addicts from their abusive habits. At the Iboga Therapy House (www.ibogatherapyhouse.net) in Vancouver, Canada, MAPS will conduct an investigation of ibogaine, a trance-inducing African tree bark, as a treatment for opiate dependence. Acute relief of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, after treatment with psilocybin, is described in a Journal of Clinical Psychiatry report on a University of Arizona, Tucson, study funded by MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute (www.hefter.org).
The case for treating substance abuse with psychedelic therapy dates back to the first studies fifty years ago, asserts Grob, Heffter's director of clinical research and chief of child psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. "The best therapeutic outcomes are with patients who have transpersonal experiences. In these patients you'll see the most significant reduction of anxiety and the most sustained improvement."
Getting religion has its health benefits. As William James once observed, "Religiomania is the best cure for dipsomania [alcoholism]." It was one such breakthrough in a legal LSD session in the 1950s that inspired Alcoholics Anonymous founder William Wilson to propose (unsuccessfully) to AA's board that it use psychedelic therapy to help alcoholics break their bondage to the bottle.
Ponder for a moment the awesome power behind a force so strong that it can tear asunder a drug addict from his slave master, an obsessive compulsive from her involuntary rituals and ideation, and the searing vise of pain from a cluster headache sufferer. Yet psychedelics may also play a gender role, in family or marital counseling.
The 2005 comedy When Do We Eat? (My Big Fat Jewish Seder) starring Michael Lerner (alas, not Tikkun's) and Jack Klugman, depicts what it might be like for the patriarch of a dysfunctional family to undergo an introspective trip on LSD-laced Ecstasy while presiding over the Passover ceremony. Dosed by his dopester son, Lerner is struck by a series of lustrous revelations that lead the family to catharsis and communal forgiveness. The final scene's implication that a drug needn't play such a role might be a cop-out, but it doesn't nullify the fact that psychoactive substances have long held a revered place in religious ceremonies.
While not as rending as addiction busting, such religious communions are hardly trivial. Says Grob, who did biomedical psychiatric research into community ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon, "The intensive moral inventory of a night on ayahuasca is like the longest Yore Kippur you could ever imagine." Grob places the family in a central supportive role in psychedelic therapy. His current study, using psilocybin to treat the anxiety of terminally ill cancer patients (beginning each session with a Native American-inflected ritual calling on the spirits of the four cardinal directions) has yielded highly positive results. He recalls how one sobbing subject (the late Pamela Sakuda) underwent a bout of profound empathy for her husband, soon to lose her. The reunion of the two at the end of the session brought tears to all present. Having treated seven of the twelve in the study design, Grob still needs five more volunteers (www.canceranxietystudy.org).
Some of us require a little nudge to take the leap toward faith. Religion scholar Huston Smith, a self-confessed "flat-footed mystic" who needed entheogens to connect with God, concedes, "religion is not accessible to everyone." The so-called scandal of particularity, the alleged exclusion of the "infidel" from God's embrace, is certainly at work in the socio-cultural realm of competing religions, but it also has genetic implications. Some of us are just better wired physiologically, or better situated environmentally (recall the role of set and setting). Select psychoactive agents could be an equalizer, enabling otherwise mystically barren subjects to undergo a lush transpersonal voyage of discovery.
The new science of neurotheology invites us to ponder the biochemistry of religion and its evolutionary role as a source of meaning and structure in the face of impending death. According to the Time cover story "The God Gene," scientists have pinpointed a variation on a single gene that produces the monoamines that regulate mood, the presence of which determined how well volunteers scored on a self-transcendence test. Neither the variation nor the gene is the sine qua non for a spiritual life, of course, but the finding demonstrates both the value of science in detecting spirit-specific loci in the human biosphere--and the slippery slope of materialist/determinist interpretations of such findings.
So then, how do we construct a science devoted to human need and potential? Science is naturally driven by political culture. It's only right that the tools of science are regulated by our (duly) elected officials. But what happens when the government censors its own scientists, and political or industrial cronyism overrules sound medical policy? Instead of basing climate change policy on the expert testimony of real climatologists, Congress turned to the defamatory fantasies of potboiler novelist Michael Crichton. Witness the FDA's vacuous, contra-scientific pronouncement last year that cannabis has no medical value whatsoever. "Zilch, zero, nada," sneered opioid gobbler Rush Limbaugh, impossibly rubbing it in.
Functionally speaking, science is only as good as its institutions and what makes it into print. When the science is rigorous, as Griffiths' was, it helps build the case for sound medicine and public health policy, which can, if necessary, be hauled out and resurrected after its eclipse by unfavorable political leadership. No, we don't need doctors or Congressmen to tell us that good can come of cannabis or psilocybin ingestion. But a reformed legal framework for the judicious use of psychedelics, as well as extensive scientific inquiry into how they work on the human psyche, would be welcome evolutionary tune-ups for our civilization.
The efflorescence of new psychedelic research is an emerging pattern of stars in the night sky of indiscriminate proscription. Once the dots are connected and reinforced by ongoing inquiry, we'll be well on our way toward a wholesome science marked by rational integrity and a guiding heart that puts spirit and healing above profits and ideology.
~~~~~~~~
By Charles Hayes

Reputation Comments on this post:

great article

[lsh]

I know someone who had a life changing experience from taking LSD for the first time. He took 1 trip and thought it felt just like an E and so thought it couldn't be that strong, so he took another 2.

He come up REALLY strong afterwards and was watching South Park and everything was a million times funnier. Then he started thinking and everything just made sense - what's right and wrong, the way to live his life, the bigger picture, what matters etc.

It was enlightenment basically, but also hilarious. He felt like he could feel how everything worked - his muscles, electricity. He was sure he understood this asian women on a cable channel who was speaking in a foreign accent LOL!

It was because he took the trips on his own and wasn't distracted by friends and all the stuff that entails, so he could get deep and focus on his thoughts etc.

Really good stuff

[Nagognog2]

Those can be among the most valuble excursions.

[trptamene]

Looking for God in All the Wrong Places
How can you have a religion without a church?

Jacob Sullum | June 2007

When he was 21, a prominent drug policy reformer recalls, he climbed a cliff overlooking Mount McKinley National Park after taking LSD. “God came to me and commanded me to acknowledge Him as the ruler of the universe,” he says, “and He was as powerful and as real as any appearance of God is to anybody. I got down on my knees and thanked God for revealing Himself to me. That was a completely authentic, real spiritual experience.”

But it is not the sort of experience that would be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Lacking a formal organization or a recognized religious tradition, individual spiritual seekers cannot gain the status accorded to members of Uniao do Vegetal or the Native American Church. Yet it seems clear that many independent psychedelic users are seeking experiences that are fundamentally similar to those of legally privileged peyote and ayahuasca users.

In an often-cited 1962 experiment, Walter Pahnke, a physician and minister who was working toward a Ph.D. in religion and society from Harvard, investigated the spiritual potential of psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” Pahnke’s academic adviser was the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, who at the time was conducting psilocybin research in which he eschewed standard scientific methods and took the drug along with his subjects, who included graduate students—loose practices that would eventually get him thrown out of the university. Pahnke’s approach was notably more rigorous. He gave either psilocybin or nicotinic acid (a placebo with noticeable physical effects) to 20 Protestant divinity students who were participating in a Good Friday service at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. “All of a sudden,” one of the subjects who took psilocybin later recalled, “I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and all of a sudden I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation.…The meditation was going on all during this time, and [the minister] would say things about Jesus and you would have this overwhelming feeling of Jesus.…It was like you totally penetrated what was being said and it penetrated you.”

Based on written descriptions, questionnaires, and interviews, Pahnke assessed the extent to which the subjects and the controls had mystical experiences. He used eight criteria: a sense of unity, a transcendence of time and space, a sense of sacredness, a sense the experience is objectively real, a deeply felt positive mood, ineffability, paradoxicality, and transience. He also asked about lingering positive effects. Pahnke reported that “eight out of ten of the experimental subjects experienced at least seven out of the nine categories. None of the control group, when each individual was compared to his matched partner, had a score which was higher.” In every category, the average score of the students who took psilocybin was much higher than the average score of the students who took the placebo.

A quarter century after the Good Friday Experiment, the psychedelic researcher Rick Doblin managed to get seven of the subjects and nine of the controls to fill out questionnaires again. Their scores and the gaps between them were remarkably similar. In the open-ended part of the questionnaire, Doblin reported, “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them resolve career decisions, recognize the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life, deepen their sense of the meaning of Christ, and heighten their sense of joy and beauty.”

While the Good Friday Experiment was conducted in a conventional religious environment, a 2006 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins suggests the setting was not crucial. The researchers recruited 30 subjects who had never used psychedelics but who reported “regular participation in religious or spiritual activities.” The subjects were randomly chosen to receive either psilocybin or Ritalin, a stimulant with a similar duration and effect on mood. During individual eight-hour sessions, they were encouraged to close their eyes, listen to classical music, and “direct their attention inward.” At a second session two months later, the two groups were switched.

While a few of the volunteers had bad trips after taking psilocybin (as did some of the divinity students in Pahnke’s study), questionnaires the subjects filled out indicated that for most it was a very positive experience. Six out of 10 subjects met the criteria for a “complete mystical experience” after taking psilocybin, compared to about one out of 10 after taking Ritalin. Four-fifths said the psilocybin session improved their sense of well-being or life satisfaction “moderately” or “very much,” compared to one-fifth who said the same of the Ritalin session. Two-thirds of the volunteers considered the psilocybin session among the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives, a rating less than one in 10 gave the Ritalin session.

“The Good Friday Experiment was all people together in a recognized church service,” notes Doblin. “The Johns Hopkins study is people [using the] same drug, but not in a religious context, in a scientific context. And yet, my God, they’re having these spiritual experiences on an individual basis without a leader, without a group, without a religion.”

This is scary stuff, if you work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. To avoid a flood of religious freedom claims from a host of do-it-yourself faiths, drug warriors have to restrict the definition of religion so it does not include this sort of spiritual exploration, and the courts are happy to help. “If these two cases came before the same court, I would put my money on the one that looks more like a religion,” says Richard Glen Boire, a senior fellow at the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. “The religious drug cases that might [succeed] are those that look exactly like a [conventional] religion in every way, except the sacrament is not a host but is one of these psychoactives. That’s not the way the law is supposed to be, but that’s the way that it is now.”



from http://www.reason.com/news/show/119722.html

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good article.

[trptamene]

Up to their usual trips again

May 16, 2007

RECENTLY, 36 people who had never taken hallucinogens before gave them a try. The pill they took launched a daylong psychedelic journey, sometimes fantastic, sometimes frightening. When it was over, a few who took the drug said it was the most meaningful experience of their lives, as momentous as the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. Others wished never to repeat it.

The drug they took was psilocybin, the hallucinogenic molecule found in magic mushrooms.

Their tales do not come from an all-night desert trance or a radical festival like Burning Man but from Baltimore, where they participated in an experiment at the Johns Hopkins University Bayview Medical Centre.

The study, which began in 2001, explored the drug's ability to induce a mystical state. Recently published in the journal Psychopharmacology, it was the first federally approved research on psilocybin in humans to be reported in four decades and leads a vanguard of studies that mark a quiet revival of research on psychedelic drugs.

When scientists in the US and Europe first learned of the mushrooms' strange effects in the 1950s, along with those of related hallucinogens such as LSD, research on the topic exploded. More than 100 published reports catalogued the effects of the drugs, some rigorously, others not so.

Most notorious of the researchers was Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University who abandoned standard research conventions from the start and relied instead on testimonials, encouraging his subjects to record their experiences in whatever way they felt appropriate. He also took the drug along with his student subjects and conducted his research in his home, where participants listened to music and looked at art. Harvard took a dim view of this and, in 1963, declined to renew his contract.

By then, hallucinogens had escaped from the laboratory, and Leary and others began promoting their use as paths toward spiritual enlightenment. Legislators swiftly made the drugs illegal following alarming reports of bad trips and people arriving at emergency rooms convinced they had gone mad.

"It was a crazy period where these compounds were irresponsibly promoted for recreational use, and their use was widespread," says Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist who led the study at Hopkins. "We got into what appears to me to be a little bit of cultural hysteria about their risks. They were swept out of the research domain."

Now the inquiry is quietly resuming. US federal agencies have granted a handful of investigators the licences they need to do the work.

Four studies of psilocybin in humans are either in progress or have recently been completed.

The researchers want to learn how to safely induce transcendent states that could help patients make positive changes in their lives or, with lower doses, end intractable pain or halt intrusive thoughts. Advocates hope this is the beginning of a new era of carefully considered exploration of the possible benefits of psychedelic drugs.

Nearly 50 years ago, a Wall Street banker and fungi enthusiast named Gordon Wasson first brought hallucinogenic mushrooms to widespread attention in the US and Europe.

Leary's first experience with them was poolside at a Cuernavaca resort. Like Wasson, he was enchanted. Upon returning to Massachusetts, Leary joined a growing number of researchers who, intrigued by anecdotal accounts of the effects caused by the curious chemicals, began to study their mind-altering properties.

In one famous experiment, Walter Pahnke, a physician and minister working on a PhD with Leary, assembled 20 theology graduate students in the basement of Marsh Chapel at Boston University for a worship service on Good Friday in 1962. The idea was simple: Would psilocybin enhance their spiritual experience, even induce a mystical state? The result was chaos. One participant had a psychotic reaction and needed to be restrained, and those who were disappointed not to receive the drug became bored and disruptive.

As memories of the excesses of that time have faded, a more tolerant public climate has emerged. In 1989 the US Food and Drug Administration reorganised its division in charge of drug testing, and the officials in charge of psychedelics signaled they would approve well-designed studies that met established criteria for good clinical research. That shift made it possible for researchers to again consider studying hallucinogenic compounds.

Among the first to venture forward was Griffiths of Hopkins. He wanted to see if psilocybin could induce a mystical experience, in a safe environment, with careful experimental controls. It took him two years to get the approval of the FDA, a licence from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the permission of the university committee that oversees human research.

Griffiths and his colleagues ruled out potential participants who had previous mental troubles or even a family member with psychiatric illness.

That screening left them with 36 adult participants who had never used hallucinogens before. All the participants followed some sort of spiritual practice, whether it was participation in organised worship or individual meditation. Curiosity led them to join the experiment: They wished to try psilocybin in a context of self-reflection.

Each subject took the drug in one of two sessions. During the other, they were given methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin, which changed their physiology - their heart rate, for example - in a way similar to psilocybin but possessed no hallucinogenic properties.

Participants spent each daylong session in a room furnished with an oriental carpet, pictures, and a sofa on which they were encouraged to lie down. Their monitors gave them eye masks and earphones with a playlist of classical music and encouraged them to focus inward.

At the end of each session, after the drug wore off, they answered questionnaires designed to assess their spiritual and perceptual experiences.

After taking psilocybin, participants reported intense emotions - grief, joy, anxiety and feelings of transcendence, a reprieve from the normal constraints of space and time. Colours brightened, and some people reported a confusion of senses called synesthesia: musical tones that take on hues, for example. In contrast, the methylphenidate improved self-control and concentration.

But nearly a third of the participants felt fearful after taking psilocybin, and four of the 36 spent their entire session in unpleasant psychological struggles. Two compared the experience to being in a war, and three said they would never wish to repeat the experience, the research team reports.

"It really underscores the risks of using these kinds of compounds in a non-supervised, non-research setting," Griffiths says. Yet two months later, none of the subjects, not even those who reported an unpleasant encounter with the drug, said that the experience had decreased their sense of well-being or satisfaction with life.

Griffiths hopes his work with healthy, well-functioning adults might eventually help those who struggle with addiction. The most effective interventions in use now are 12-step programs. But they rely heavily on a belief in a higher power, and people who lack faith have trouble embracing them.

"It's possible that if you could occasion a single primary transcendent experience of the type that was seen in our study," he says, "that that single experience alone would allow somebody subsequently to engage in a 12-step process with renewed interest, vigour, and excitement in a way that they couldn't otherwise."

Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre, agrees that this line of inquiry is worth pursuing again. Some of the most impressive work in the '60s was done with alcoholics, he says. More support comes from Grob's own work 10 years ago with a church in Brazil. He found that former alcoholics who drank a hallucinogenic herbal brew twice a month as part of a religious ceremony stayed sober.

Grob is in the midst of a study that asks whether psilocybin might ease the anxiety of people who are dying. In an experiment similar in design to Griffiths's, he is giving the drug to patients with end-stage cancer. So far, seven patients have received psilocybin, and Grob has approval to treat five more.

The Harbor-UCLA study follows up on research done by Stanislav Grof and Pahnke, who worked at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Centre, in Baltimore, in the late '60s, the very end of the psychedelic era. They gave the more powerful hallucinogen LSD to patients with terminal cancer. About two-thirds of their subjects got by with less pain medication as a result. They feared death less or not at all, and their anxiety abated, which is known to help ease pain. "Their outcomes were best with people who had what they described as a mystical experience, or a full-on, spiritual, transpersonal epiphany," Grob says.

Because the review board at his institution required a lower dose of psilocybin than he had wanted to use, about half of that used in the Hopkins experiment, his patients' experiences are not as intense. "We're hoping to get approval, when we're done with this group, for a higher dose," says Grob.

Advances in neuroscience over the past four decades have helped pave the path toward acceptance of this revived line of research. "At one time, when people were just exploring consciousness, it was hard to justify," says John Krystal, a psychiatrist at Yale University School of Medicine.

But once researchers had worked out the molecular basis of the drugs, he says, "then a whole new opportunity to study important aspects of the neurobiology of consciousness opened up."

David Nichols, a medicinal chemist at Purdue University who synthesised the psilocybin used in two of the recent studies, agrees: "We know quite a bit more about the brain now than we did then, and human experimental methods are certainly much better."

Psilocybin closely resembles serotonin, a neural signalling molecule or neurotransmitter. Calm, happy states coincide with the release of serotonin in the brain. Psilocybin fits serotonin receptors that are especially abundant in a kind of cell in the cerebral cortex that gathers and sorts signals coming in from other parts of the brain. Psilocybin's effect is to make these cells more likely to register an incoming signal, Nichols says, "potentially amplifying processes that are normally running, but which are not generally apparent in everyday awareness".

Psilocybin could have medical uses if the way it latches on to brain cells remedies an imbalance or malfunction in the serotonin system. In fact, a few patients have found relief from their maladies in magic mushrooms, and those reports of self-medication have led to two recent clinical reports.

The first was spurred by an online discussion group on cluster headaches. The pain from such headaches repeats in regularly timed bouts that typically continue for two to four months, and it strikes quickly, without warning, and rapidly becomes excruciating. Some of the people posting on the site reported relief from LSD or magic mushrooms.

That those drugs would help is not particularly surprising: LSD was initially created as a potential treatment for migraine, and psilocybin is chemically related to sumatriptan, the most commonly prescribed drug for heading off cluster headaches.

When one member of that discussion group contacted psychiatrists at Harvard University's McLean Hospital, Andrew Sewell, then a postdoctoral fellow, and John Halpern, an assistant professor of psychiatry, decided to follow up.

The team found 53 people who had been treating their headaches with psilocybin or LSD and were willing to release their medical records. When they questioned their subjects about their drug use, they found that for many, the drugs could end the paroxysms of pain in the midst of a headache and extend the pain-free period between attacks, something no other treatment could do. "Research on the effects of psilocybin and LSD on cluster headache may be warranted," the researchers conclude in their case reports.

No serious opposition to this new work has yet emerged. The Chronicle contacted more than a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists - including specialists on anxiety and post-traumatic stress - and none expressed concern about this round of research.

Mindful of the past, though, all of the scientists said they did not advocate illegal or indiscriminate use of mushrooms or other hallucinogens. And most said further work should be pursued if the initial results of carefully designed studies showed promise, particularly if they helped patients for whom standard treatments failed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education


from http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-12332,00.html