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 bollocks
++Universe Beholder++
 
Registered: 09/29/11
Posts: 301
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 Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary
#15557282 - 12/22/11 02:45 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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‘Magic Mushrooms’ Return to Psych Labs 40 Years After LearyDecember 09, 2011, 12:38 PM EST
By Elizabeth Lopatto
(Adds that psilocybin is a controlled substance in the sixth paragraph.)
Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Cancer survivor Lauri Reamer lived in constant dread that her disease would return, until she took a psychedelic drug in a Johns Hopkins University study.
The 48-year mother of three was given psilocybin, the main ingredient in the “magic mushrooms” of the 1960s, as a remedy to ease anxiety. She spent most of her first “trip” crying, then emerged from the next with less anxiety, better sleep and happier relations with family and friends, she recalled.
The experience “really cracked me open,” said Reamer, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore before she was diagnosed with leukemia. “It let me be in life again, instead of this place of fear where I had been living.”
Almost 40 years after Richard Nixon called former Harvard University psychologist Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America for promoting use of hallucinogenic substances, there is a rebirth of interest in their therapeutic benefits. Reamer was enrolled in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins to relieve fear of death in cancer patients, one of a half-dozen similar studies under way at New York University, Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of New Mexico.
The new research, largely driven by the psychiatric community, is also testing psychedelics for use against depression, chronic headaches and addiction as current scientists, much like their 1960s predecessors, seek to understand the “consciousness-expanding” effects of the drugs.
New Generation
“There’s a renaissance of interest,” said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA, who researches psychedelics. “It took some decades for a new generation of scientists to step up, but there was never any doubt these compounds had potential. It was the ‘60s that intruded.”
Psilocybin mushrooms are a schedule I substance in the U.S., which means the government considers them to have a high potential for abuse and no legitimate medical purpose, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. These researchers think that may be incorrect.
Though there are biological components to anxiety and addiction, much of the underlying cause of these problems may involve how people think about the world around them, according to the researchers.
These drugs “diffuse in your brain and some people never see the world the same way again,” said David Nichols, a pharmacologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in a phone interview.
Anti-Smoking Study
The research that includes Reamer is being run by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins. He’s also testing psilocybin to help smokers quit.
On Sept. 29, Griffiths reported in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that use of psilocybin in an earlier study conferred a lasting personality change in some of the 51 participants tested.
Griffiths became interested in the research after starting a meditation practice 17 years ago. He found early reports in the scientific literature of studies tying psychedelics to mystical experiences and other effects on visual perception and brain function, he said in a telephone interview.
“This whole class was declared too dangerous to proceed in the 1970s, and so it was put in a deep freeze,” Griffiths said. “Sometimes I feel like Rip Van Winkle, awakening the potential for research with these compounds.”
Harvard Project
Leary did his research in the 1960s at the Harvard Psilocybin Project, running a series of experiments that gave psilocybin to divinity students to gauge their spiritual experiences and to prisoners to see if it would help keep them out of jail after their release.
That work led to Leary’s dismissal from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus in 1963, and contributed to a rise of experiments among young people as he famously urged them to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
As today’s researchers pick up where those in the 1960s left off, they do so with the benefit of U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved trials, better understanding of the brain’s circuits and chemistry, and funding from private sources, according to Griffiths.
Already, LSD and psilocybin research by psychiatrist John Halpern at Harvard has led to a drug, dubbed BOL-148, being developed by Boston-based startup Entheogen Corp.
Cluster Headaches
The company is studying BOL-148, an LSD derivative, as a treatment for cluster headaches, sometimes called suicide headaches because they’re so painful that sufferers often kill themselves, said Halpern, Entheogen’s co-founder.
“This is an unmet need, and cluster headaches are among the most painful conditions known,” Halpern said in a telephone interview. “If I did schizophrenia research, I’d have 1,000 brilliant colleagues prodding me and tons of funding available. This is kind of like Siberia. It takes a long time to build the trust that you are interested in doing credible work.
“I figure I’m doing my job right when someone accuses me of supporting the drug war and someone else accuses me of sabotaging it,” he said.
Most of the half-dozen studies in this area listed on clinicaltrials.gov are funded by the Heffter Research Institute, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based organization. The institute is named for Arthur Heffter, the scientist who discovered mescaline, a drug made from the peyote cactus.
Fundraising Push
The organization has raised $2.7 million since 1993, when it was first incorporated, and funded 70 studies in research journals since 1999, according to Purdue’s Nichols, who is also a co-founder of the institute.
Nichols was in school in the ‘60s, and psychedelics didn’t quite make it to Cincinnati, where he lived, he said. Listening to the experiences since then of those who used the chemicals, he found they often listed their trips as being among the most meaningful things in their lives.
Reamer, the Johns Hopkins cancer patient, said she experienced “visions of peace and healing.” Still, not everyone should undergo the therapy, she said.
“It didn’t necessarily feel good, but what came out of it was pure joy,” Reamer said. “At the end of the sessions, I was exhausted from the emotional outpouring.”
Similar work with cancer patients is being done by Stephen Ross, a psychiatrist at New York University in Manhattan. He’s testing psilocybin in a nine-month death-anxiety study in which patients receive the drug and psychotherapy. Patients receive therapy for two to four weeks before their first dose of psilocybin.
Calm Room
The patients are dosed in a room designed to calm with art on the walls, classical music and flowers. Patients bring in family photos to help make them feel comfortable, Ross said in an interview.
Patients talk with the therapists about how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing, and near the end of the trip, are asked to write journal entries. Then there are follow-up sessions for the rest of the nine months of the study.
“Sometimes they look like they’re asleep for hours,” said Ross, who is also director of substance abuse at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. “Then they get up and tell us they’ve had an encounter with a transcendental force, or that they were in a beautiful dome with white light coming down, or that they were part of an artistic picture.”
To synthesize psilocybin, Ross contacted Organix Inc., a Woburn, Massachusetts-based closely held company. The compound, which cost $12,000 to make, is stored in a 10,000 pound safe in the NYU School of Dentistry, where the studies are conducted.
Resurgence Credited
Nichols credits the resurgence of work in hallucinogens in part to Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who works with DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a Colombian drug made from vines and shrubs commonly used for religious and healing purposes.
In 1994, Strassman published a paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry on the effects of DMT on the body’s heart and endocrine system, and another on the drug’s subjective effects.
Since Strassman’s initial work, the volume of psychedelic research has gradually increased, Nichols said.
--Editors: Angela Zimm, Reg Gale.
To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in New York at elopatto@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net.
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what is it that inspires us beyond
these temporal passions?
convictions.. they crumble beneath the question
Stavesacre "Handful of words"
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PsilocybinMike
T.F.Y.Q.A
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 Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: bollocks]
#15557402 - 12/22/11 03:12 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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I'd like to try some lab grade synthetic psilocybin in my life time.
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baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZBTAYm3rw
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bollocks
++Universe Beholder++
Registered: 09/29/11
Posts: 301
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: PsilocybinMike]
#15557414 - 12/22/11 03:15 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Amen to that brother!
Sign me up for some testing
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what is it that inspires us beyond
these temporal passions?
convictions.. they crumble beneath the question
Stavesacre "Handful of words"
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Mushie23
Strictly Entheogens
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Loc: Northwest Washington Stat...
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: PsilocybinMike]
#15557508 - 12/22/11 03:34 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Quote:
PsilocybinMike said:
I'd like to try some lab grade synthetic psilocybin in my life time.
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Eat Mushrooms----plug into life and nature.
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Soluminia
The mind is god
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: Mushie23]
#15557823 - 12/22/11 04:32 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Quote:
Mushie23 said:
Quote:
PsilocybinMike said:
I'd like to try some lab grade synthetic psilocybin in my life time.
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 GIFSoup
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limestoneman
Avatar Thief
Registered: 04/09/11
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: Soluminia]
#15558102 - 12/22/11 05:31 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Damn you Leary! 
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 cateyes
Registered: 12/16/03
Posts: 2,753
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: limestoneman]
#15558165 - 12/22/11 05:40 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Quote:
limestoneman said:
Damn you Leary!
 
Kensho 
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jim617
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: cateyes]
#15559157 - 12/22/11 08:30 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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MrFunGuy: "I figured if I put a 15lb cinder block on top of the pot lid that it would cook @15 psi." []
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limestoneman
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: jim617]
#15559189 - 12/22/11 08:36 PM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Quote:
jim617 said:
heres some more info...
Observations HomeAboutContact Psilocybin found to ease end-of-life anxiety in small study of patients with fatal cancer
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/09/08/psilocybin-found-to-ease-end-of-life-anxiety-in-small-study-of-patients-with-fatal-cancer/
Your ghetto pressure cooker had me rolling for about two minutes.
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HybridprX
Biodegrader of coir
Registered: 01/29/08
Posts: 1,511
Loc: In a labyrinth
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: limestoneman]
#15560363 - 12/23/11 05:09 AM (5 months, 1 day ago) |
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Psilocybin cures depression and anxiety.
I had to accept death in one trip and afterwards I was free of anxiety and suicidal thoughts/depression. I thought I was going to die and accepted it. I cant remember to much after that but I woke up the next morning thankful to be alive.
They really need to pull their heads out of their asses and start up clinical testing of psilocybin for people with chemical imbalances.
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The sky's a brick wall, the grounds a juggernaut. Each day they get a bit closer, between them, i am caught.
I stare in amazement, I can't believe this is where I live
Every breath I take, I feel my lungs seal. This breeze feels more like shards of glass, I'm more scar than skin.
FSRC and FSRE are both accepting donations! Send them your spare prints!!!
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jim617
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: HybridprX]
#15560726 - 12/23/11 08:03 AM (5 months, 22 hours ago) |
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I cant have this spiritual experience because I almost always have a bad trip. as soon as I feel the trip coming I start to get anxiety. I know its all in my head. I need to let go, I always fight the trip.
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MrFunGuy: "I figured if I put a 15lb cinder block on top of the pot lid that it would cook @15 psi."[]
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Mushie23
Strictly Entheogens
Registered: 11/19/10
Posts: 547
Loc: Northwest Washington Stat...
Last seen: 22 hours, 32 minutes
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: jim617]
#15560997 - 12/23/11 09:23 AM (5 months, 21 hours ago) |
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Quote:
jim617 said:
I cant have this spiritual experience because I almost always have a bad trip. as soon as I feel the trip coming I start to get anxiety. I know its all in my head. I need to let go, I always fight the trip.
Sounds like you figured out the problem...next time, give into the higher power and let them take over...don't fight em, you'll never win if you do that.
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Eat Mushrooms----plug into life and nature.
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hazednote
Stranger
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Re: Magic Mushrooms return to psych labs 40 years after Leary [Re: bollocks]
#15889706 - 03/02/12 08:59 AM (2 months, 23 days ago) |
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Very interesting...I think this psychiatric push for scientific research will help against the stigma of psychedelic drugs.
This pretty much proves my theories that there's been a renaissance of interest. Awesome!
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