“Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole mind yet?”: Positive Possibilities for Psychedelics
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Medical/Psychotherapeutic use
Medical and psychotherapeutic psychedelic research is back! Though one researcher calls this time a golden age in psychedelic research, it would be more realistic to say that a tiny tip of the camel’s nose has been allowed under the tent. Outside the tent, a large community of researchers is eager to begin work delayed for decades. Scientific conferences honoring the work of Albert Hoffman in synthesizing LSD and other psychedelics brought more than two thousand people from thirty-seven countries to Basel, Switzerland in 2006 and 2008. Two hundred journalists from all over the world covered the presentations—a remarkable turnout for a substance that has been illegal for so long.
While some current research being done now is a repeat of work done before everything closed down, new areas of research reveal how psychedelics help alleviate medical conditions that have not been amenable to conventional treatment. It’s notable that this time around there has as yet been no outcry to stop the work. The reactions might be different if an appropriate dose of a psychedelic given every six weeks was found to be an effective antidepressant. If that occurred, there could be stiff opposition from the established suppliers of antidepressant drugs. By taking on more difficult syndromes, the researchers have skirted such opposition. In fact, they have been well supported by their medical colleagues. One example is the work being done with cluster headaches. First claimed by illegal users whose communications with one another became public, the healing effects are now being evaluated in a Harvard-run study. It remains to be seen if what is already fairly well proved can make it through the double-blind pharmaceutical hurdle to peer-reviewed publication and, more importantly, finally become available in normal clinical practice.
Another promising study is giving psilocybin to high anxiety, late-stage cancer patients. Results show that a single session in a safe and supportive setting, allowing the sacred to be experienced should it occur, benefits both the patient and the patient’s family. Another, more controversial treatment—once allowed inside the United States but since pushed out to other countries—uses iboga, an African psychedelic plant, to break the cycle of heroin addiction. Given the poor track record of conventional treatments and the high cost of addiction, untreated and treated alike, this area should be getting more attention and support in the future. In fact, several recovered addicts found it to be so valuable that they now treat their brethren illegally in inner city environments without medical support.
Inexplicably, what is yet to resume is psychedelic therapy to overcome alcohol addiction, far and away the most fully researched, tested, and proven effective therapy of the pre-prohibition era. Virtually nothing has been written about it in recent years, even in underground circles. It remains an inexplicably ignored sector of what is otherwise the current renaissance of medical research into psychedelics.
A number of other countries, including Germany, Switzerland and Israel, are allowing or supporting psychedelic projects primarily involving use of MDMA to help people overcome the chronically debilitating effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD, demand for a treatment with a higher cure rate is intensifying. That Vietnam vets, decades after that conflict, are still in treatment makes it all the more likely that eventually MDMA-based therapy programs will be offered to veterans. Perhaps, as with cluster headaches, the first reports with be from vets self- medicating and helping one another, as is already happening with marijuana. The VA hospital system is underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded, however, and without external pressure will be unlikely to soon be able to institute any major improvements on its own.
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