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After years of struggling with treatments for his worsening cancer, Roy was miserable — anxious, depressed, hopeless. Traditional cancer treatments had left him debilitated, and it was unclear whether they would save his life.
But then Roy secured a spot in a clinical trial to test an exotic drug. The drug was not meant to cure his cancer; it was meant to cure his terror. And it worked. A few hours after taking a little pill, Roy declared to researchers, "Cancer is not important, the important stuff is love." His concerns about his imminent death had suddenly vanished — and the effects lasted for at least months, according to researchers.
It was not a traditional antidepressant, like Zoloft, or anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax, that led Roy to reevaluate his life. It was a drug that has been illegal for decades but is now at the center of a renaissance in research: psilocybin, from hallucinogenic magic mushrooms.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have been studying hallucinogens for decades — as treatment for things like alcoholism and depression, and to stimulate creativity. But support for studies dried up in the 1970s, after the federal government listed many psychedelics as Schedule 1 drugs. But now researchers are giving the drugs another look.
While stories like Roy’s are promising, we’d need hundreds, perhaps thousands, more examples — rigorously tested, preferably in large randomized, controlled experiments — to know the effects claimed in the study are real and unbiased.
But that research is worth doing. Psychedelics show promise in alleviating some of the conditions that have proven hardest to treat — addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, and, in some cases, depression are notorious for their resistance to treatment. Smoking relapse rates, for instance, have been estimated at 60 to 90 percent within one year, even as smoking kills hundreds of thousands each year.
"These are among the most debilitating and costly disorders known to humankind," Matthew Johnson, one of the psychedelics researchers at Johns Hopkins University, said. "We have some things that help, but for some people they’re barely scratching the surface, [and] for some people there’s nothing that helps at all."
Psychedelics may help. But the mechanism through which they appear to help people has left doctors scratching their heads and some scientists deeply uncomfortable with their findings: These drugs appear to use chemical pathways to trigger often deeply spiritual experiences that seemingly lead to tangible, measurable, long-term changes in behavior. That is not, to say the least, how traditional medicines typically function.
There’s still, however, a lot we don't know and are just learning. So to understand what we know so far about psychedelic drugs and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for treating some of the most stubborn psychological conditions, I read more than 50 studies analyzing their safety and efficacy and talked to researchers involved in the work.
(Note: I looked only at the studies and research on classic psychedelics, such as LSD, psilocybin from magic mushrooms, and DMT. These drugs have broadly similar effects, activating certain serotonin receptors in the brain. Although MDMA — also known as ecstasy or "Molly" — also shows promise for some conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder, and is commonly included with psychedelics, its effects and use in therapeutic settings are too different to evaluate it alongside classic psychedelics. So I left it out of this review.)
Here’s what I learned from my look at the research.
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/27/11544250/psychedelic-drugs-lsd-psilocybin-effects
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