Psychedelic drugs that have been considered recreational for decadesand classified as drugs of abuse by the FDAare showing major promise as potential solutions for hard-to-treat disorders and illnesses (see this goop piece on ibogaine and addiction, as well as this one on ayahuasca). Usually associated with the street names ecstasy or molly (although its not actually the same), the drug MDMA is in new clinical trials to treat PTSD and anxiety; other possible therapeutic applications are being explored, too.

Emily Williams, M.D. is a resident psychiatrist at UCSF and trained MDMA-assisted psychotherapist working with MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), a non-profit pharmaceutical research organization leading the way on MDMA research. In Williams current work, she has patients take MDMA while undergoing tailored psychotherapy sessions. MDMA is thought to enhance the efficacy of psychotherapy by reducing the fear response, and strengthening the sense of the trust between patient and therapist. MDMA seems to bring about an internal awareness that even painful feelings that arise are important to the therapeutic process, says Williams. Many people describe the experience of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as years of therapy in one day.

Below, Williams tells us how MDMA might change the future of various therapy modalities, as well as how we think about psychedelics.

Q

Can you explain what MDMA is?

A

MDMA is not the same as ecstasy or molly, which may contain MDMA, but frequently also contain unknown and/or dangerous adulterants. (Its important to note that in clinical research trials, the MDMA used is created in a strictly regulated lab setting and monitored by both the FDA and DEA.)

In technical terms, MDMA (3, 4-methelynedioxymethamphetamine) is a monoamine releaser and re-uptake inhibitor that affects serotonin, prolactin, and oxytocin. This means that it causes an increase in serotonin and other neurotransmitters in the body, and also allows for increased serotonin activity at certain receptors in the brain.

MDMA was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck in an effort to develop a compound to stop abnormal bleeding. It wasnt thought to have a medical benefit until it was rediscovered by Alexander Shulgin, Ph.D. in Northern California in 1976 and spread by psychiatrists and psychologists who reported seeing benefits to its use as an adjunct to psychotherapy in individuals and couples.

Q

What does MDMA-assisted psychotherapy entail, and who is it meant for?

A

Clinical trials have primarily investigated MDMA as treatment for PTSD, but there have also been studies on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for social anxiety in autistic adults, anxiety related to life-threatening illness, as well as in couples therapy. (As mentioned above, in the late 1970s and early 80s, before MDMA was reclassified as a drug of abuse, it was used with anecdotal success in individual and couples therapy.)

In MAPS clinical research trials, a course of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy begins with a series of psychotherapy sessions, sans drugs, to establish the therapeutic relationship and safe space for processing.

This preparatory phase is followed by a series of MDMA psychotherapy sessions: Each one lasts about six to eight hours and consists of the patient orally ingesting MDMA and resting in a comfortable position with eyes closed or wearing an eye mask, while listening to music thats initially relaxing and then emotionally evocative. Throughout these experimental MDMA sessions, periods of patient introspection alternate organically with periods of conversation with the therapists, largely determined by the desire of the patient.

The MDMA sessions are followed by integration sessions (no drugs involved) that last about 90 minutes, where the patient and therapist talk about insights gained during the experimental sessions, and how they relate to the trauma or other issues that were brought up during the preparatory phases.

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Q

Can you tell us about the results so far?

A

The combined results from the PTSD studies are very promising: After just two sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, 52.7% of 74 study participants no longer met criteria for PTSD, versus 22.6% of the placebo group. Among all study participants who received active dose MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, 67.4% of 86 participants no longer met criteria for PTSD at the twelve-month follow up. This shows that not only is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy effective for treating PTSD, its benefits are long-lasting. No other psychiatric medications or therapies currently available are comparable.

Q

Whats the treatment like for the patient?

A

The MDMA experience itself has been described as having an enhanced mood, heightened sense of openness, sense of closeness with others, and increased connection with ones intuition or what we refer to as inner healing intelligence. A large majority of patients in the clinical trials have reported that their course of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy was profound and life-changing. Many describe it as years of therapy in one day.

Q

Would MDMA be effective on its own, without the therapy session, or does it work because of the interaction of the two?

A

MDMAs effectiveness is reliant on the accompanying psychotherapy. It is thought that MDMA increases trust and strengthens the therapeutic alliance (the relationship between patient and therapist)that relationship is actually the number-one factor determining the efficacy of psychotherapy. MDMA is thought to catalyze the healing process, which is further supported by highly trained MDMA therapists. MDMA seems to bring about an internal awareness that even painful feelings that arise are important to the therapeutic process. The MDMA and psychotherapy complement each other to foster a clearer perspective, helping the patient understand that the trauma is an event from the past, and to see the support and safety that exists for them in the present moment.

This process also relies on concepts of set and setting: Set is the intention of the patient, the preparations they have made, as well as their mental and physical characteristics. The setting is the physical/interpersonal environment that can contribute to a persons altered state of consciousness. The psychotherapeutic frame of MDMA-assisted therapy is so important; the preparatory process works towards establishing an optimal set and setting for the MDMA experience.

It is also important to stress that there are medical risks associated with MDMA use, including hyperthermia, cardiac complications, as well as a potentially fatal complication called Serotonin Syndrome, so close supervision by a physician is critical.

Q

How is MDMA/psychotherapy treatment thought to decrease the fear response in patients?

A

MDMA can reduce a patients perceived threat to their emotional integrity; it can also decrease defensiveness without blocking access to memories, or preventing a deep and genuine experience of emotion. Eliminating your conditioned fear responses can lead to more open, comfortable communication about past traumatic events and give you greater access to information about those events. Some studies show a decrease in communication between the amygdala (the fear-processing area of the brain) and hippocampus (memory storage) with MDMA compared to a placebo, however the actual mechanism of action remains unknown, which is why further research is crucial in this growing field.

Q

Could MDMA be used for other applications/to treat other conditions?

A

MDMA-psychotherapy has the potential to be used to supplement more traditional therapy modalities, such as psychodynamic or cognitive behavioral therapies, as a way to explore personal growth and overall wellbeing.

Q

Besides MDMA, which psychedelic drugs do you think are most promising in terms of potential therapeutic applications?

A

There are a number of different psychedelics being studied currently for a variety of disorders, ranging from depression to addiction and tobacco cessation. At this moment, I would say that psilocybin (the active compound in psychedelic magic mushrooms) is also very promising in terms of becoming legalized for clinical use. The Amazonian brew, ayahuasca is also showing benefit in some recent research studies for a variety of disorders, including trauma and depression.

Q

MAPS work is all privately funded; do you see federal funding (or FDA approval) on the horizon?

A

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is undertaking a roughly $25-million effort to make MDMA into an FDA-approved prescription medication by 2021; its currently the only organization in the world thats funding clinical trials on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Were closer than ever before to seeing federal research funding awards to projects focusing on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. We are experiencing a societal, cultural shift in how psychedelics are perceived and I hope that as more people express interest, the funding will follow.

Q

How did MAPS get started, and how did you become involved with the organization?

A

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization focused on pharmaceutical research. It was founded in 1986 by Rick Doblin, Ph.D. in an effort to preserve the therapeutic use of MDMA after it was identified by the US DEA as a drug of abuse. Doblin realized that to legitimize psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, wed have to prove its efficacy via clinical trials. Nearly a decade later the first FDA-approved, double-blind, placebo-controlled US Phase I dose-response safety study of MDMA was published; it was sponsored by MAPS. MAPS is now beginning the first Phase 3 multi-site clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD, one of the last steps towards MDMA becoming an FDA-approved medication.

I first became connected with MAPS when I was in medical school in Charleston, South Carolina, which also happened to be the site of one of the original MDMA-assisted psychotherapy studies in the US. Over the last several years, I have trained as an MDMA-assisted psychotherapist with MAPS in parallel with my psychiatry residency, and I will be a therapist and team co-leader on our clinical PTSD trial. Im also working on an MDMA psychotherapy study for anxiety related to life-threatening illness.

Emily Williams, M.D., is a resident psychiatrist at UCSF where she is conducting an analysis of the effects of MDMA on therapeutic alliance, as well as serving as co-investigator on a clinical trial for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. She is a mentor for the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and works as the independent clinical rater for a MAPS-funded study on MDMA for end-of-life anxiety. In addition to her clinical and research work, she serves as a supervisor for the Zendo Project, which provides psychedelic harm reduction for events and festivals.

The views expressed in this article intend to highlight alternative studies and induce conversation. They are the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of goop, and are for informational purposes only, even if and to the extent that this article features the advice of physicians and medical practitioners. This article is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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How MDMA & Other Psychedelics Could Change Therapy | Goop

Scientific journals almost always limit themselves to reporting the results of highly technicexperiments. Magazines for a general audience often treat scientific findings clumsily as metaphors. I have wondered whether wed be served by a third type of publication, which would solicit conjectures that the author is not equipped to test, or otherwise fails to test, but that might inspire some one else.

For example, what if this publication contained conjectures like Fermats famous marginalia (his last theorem), scribbled in a book in 1637 but only proven in 1994? Of course, most conjectures have not been as fruitful as Fermats, not to say correct. We tend to forget that the process of discovery, taken as a whole, is often messy. Unlike Fermats, most conjectures are wrong, so the challenge is not only proving the few, but generating the many and then considering them.

I am told that at Google, its a firing offense to shoot down any idea before its had an opportunity to be explored, even played with, and perhaps to inspire still other ideas.

When at Columbia University the physicist Wolfgang Pauli presented his non-linear field theory of elementary particles, worked out with Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr was in the audience. Asked for his groups opinion, Bohr replied, as reported by Freeman Dyson, We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Of course far from all ideas that seem crazy turn out to be correct, but ideas that challenge a prevailing paradigm often seem crazy. What if there were a publication that contained not reports of careful experiments, after peer review, as scientific journals do, but unproven conjectures? As at Google, now one of the most valuable corporations in the world, perhaps even an idea that turns out to be wrong would be useful in suggesting a further idea.

Thanks to the recorder on my cell phone, I can offer on example. Sitting alone in a diner booth, I overheard the following conversation

A: What if our brains are always generating the imagery associated with classic psychedelics? What if ordinary reality is produced by relegating this wild imagery to the unconscious?

B: That feels ridiculous, even (unintelligible). Everyone knows that psychedelics work by amplifying what we call ordinarilyconsciousness, or distorting or playing with it, by activating new circuits in the brain.

A. Well, just play along for a while. Its widely recognized that an optimal psychedelic session does not involve the operation of heavy machinery, or exposure to other dangers.

B: or irrevocable life decisions. I know, but how does that prove your point?

A: Well, imagine that in evolutionary history, this wild imagery developed, as we know that the ability to dream developed, and the ability to speculate (to imagine things that arent but might be). In the case of wild imagery, this ability might impose an evolutionary disadvantage, and would be either selected against or somehow suppressed.

B: But you speculate that we all still have this psychedelic flow?.

A: Yes, and that we developed the ability automatically to keep it out of consciousness, just as we learn that dreams arent real and we learn to keep secret fantasies that are socially and maybe personally unacceptable.

B: So, in the case of this constant stream of psychedelic imagery, we somehow block it from consciousness?

A: Yes, in order to deal with immediate demands of life.

B: And psychedelics do what?

A: In this conjecture, they deactivate the part of the brain that ordinarily keeps this imagery out of consciousness.

B: They temporarily block the mental blocker favored by evolution?

A: Yes. We know the brain is highly selective with regard to socially unacceptable fantasies, and to what Jung called the shadow, or impulses that are contrary to our identity and that we may project onto others.

B: Well, the vision of a constant flow of psychedelic imagery would cast the war on drugs in a new light.

A: As the ideas of Freud and Jung and other psychologists in the last century taught us the brain is up to more tricks than people normally acknowledged.

B: Okay, lets explore some implications.

A: I appreciate your taking this seriously, at least for a while, or at least pretending to do so.

B: Okay, what you are saying is that psilocybin or another classic psychedelic doesn't create the wild imagery; it reveals the imagery?

A: Yes, and this includes a conjecture about evolutionary history. Somehow the wildness began to get started in the connections of all those neurons, but it was disadvantageous for ordinary life. An emergent part of the brain that kept the flow out of consciousness was selected for. Here we are.

B: But I gather that magnetic resonance imaging has shown a brain activation after the ingestion of psychedelics.

A: That is not inconsistent with the conjecture. When the restraint is deactivated by the drug, then new connections could occur.

B: So this conjecture posits a brain structure that ordinarily keeps an ongoing psychedelic flow out of consciousness?

A: Yes, and as you suggest, an inherent psychedelic flow in every human, a flow that he or she is ordinarily unaware of.

B: That is a mischievous idea, almost a scandalous idea.

A: So if this conjecture were correct, psychedelics feel dangerous not because they induce fantasies, but because they uncover something that is naturally occurring.

At this point the waitress came by with my change, and noticing the time, I had to leave. But if I ever hear of a website devoted to conjectures, I will try to find these guys. They looked normal, at least for graduate students. Chances are, they are mistaken, but who knows?

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Crazy Enough to be Correct - HuffPost

In the 1960s, intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley were fascinated by the effects of LSD, but today most professors are far too worried about respectability and tenure to investigate psychedelics themselves. Which is somewhat ironic, given that the field of Western philosophy has a huge debt to psychedelics, according to Peter Sjstedt-H, a philosophy doctoral candidate at University of Exeter who has written a book on the philosophical significance of drugs. In fact, one of Platos most-cited theories may have been a direct result of hallucinogenics.

In Platos Phaedo, the philosopher says he was inspired by the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient religious ceremony where participants took kykeon. Its widely believed (thought cannot be definitively proven) that kykeon was a psychoactive substance, which would explain the visions that participants experienced during the ceremony. Sjstedt-H notes that Plato references the Mysteries and seeing that his body is but a shell, which one can escape through these experiences, before he introduces his landmark notion of substance dualism: Namely, the idea that body and soul are distinct.

Under psychedelic experience, you can completely lose the link between you, yourself as a body; and you, yourself as the person that you think you are, including your memories, says Sjstedt-H. Theres this loss to the self, and the self is often associated with the body, so I can certainly see why a psychedelic experience would incline one towards a more dualistic view of the world.

If the Mysteries did indeed involve psychedelics, Sjstedt-H says we can credit them with inspiring some of the greatest and most influential thoughts in history.

[Alfred North] Whitehead famously said, Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. If Plato was inspired by psychedelics, then the whole of the Western canon is unwittingly inspired by these experiences, Sjstedt-H adds.

More than 2000 years later, Sjstedt-H believes that its absolutely essential to understand psychedelic experiences in order to develop a thorough philosophy of how the mind functions. You havent fully explained the mind until youve explained all facets of it, he says.

Psychedelics create a peak type of mind, a peak type of experience and, as such, theyre a valuable consideration in certain philosophical mysteries, like understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind. Research has shown that parts of the brain are less active during psychedelic experiences, which is the inverse of what one might expect for a period of heightened consciousness. This finding highlights the complexities of explaining how the mind and brain relate, which is one of the great philosophical challenges, known as the hard problem of consciousness.

But even among non-philosophers, Sjstedt-H believes that a lifetime without trying psychedelics is unnecessarily narrow. Experientially, it would be a pity to live ones life without having experienced the potentials of the human mind, he says. Its a bit like living in the same country all ones life and not going on holiday, not seeing the rest of the world. Its a loss. By having this experience, one experiences more reality because the mind is part of reality.

He adds that psychedelics can open your mind to new beliefs, increase appreciation for nature, and lead to completely new feelings. As well as being intellectually stimulating, Sjstedt-H says that psychedelics can be a sublime aesthetic experience.

Despite the potential benefits, Sjstedt-H does not believe that everyone should take psychedelics. Nor does he insist, as was common in the 60s, that doing so would lead to world peace. When I told Sjstedt-H that I was too afraid of my own mind to risk exploring its suppressed depths, he agreed that was a valid concern. Bad trips are a serious risk, and more troubling for some than others. Those who are religious (and so would be more profoundly affected by visions of devils, for example), are especially anxious, or have suffered serious traumas, could well find psychedelics to be harmful rather than enlightening.

We have no clear idea of how psychedelics produce their effect; but its thought that changes in brain activity create an altered state of consciousness. For those who are able to have a positive experience on psychedelics, Sjstedt-H says taking the drugs can be as profound as reading Nietzsche. Both the philosopher and the substance lead to questioning ones cultural values and societal rules, he notes.

Arguably, taking psychedelics can also enhance the experience of reading philosophy; Sjstedt-H points to the psychologist and philosopher William James, who claimed to only fully understand Hegel after taking nitrous oxide. (Though drugs havent improved Sjstedt-Hs own reading of Hegel.)

Though other philosophers are interested in hearing about his work and experiences with psychedelics, Sjstedt-H acknowledges that few are prepared to try the drugs, at least for now. Many are worried about the psychological risks, put off by their illegality, or simply dont want to mess with their brains.

But Sjstedt-H hopes that growing acceptance of the drugs will allow for a study of how psychedelics could shape the opinions and outlooks of great contemporary thinkers. They were good enough for Plato, after all.

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The foundation of Western philosophy is probably rooted in psychedelics - Quartz

At 6.30am on Thursday 29 October 2009, Friederike Meckel Fischers doorbell rang. There were ten policemen outside. They searched the house, put handcuffs on Friederike a diminutive woman in her 60s and her husband, and took them to a remand prison. The couple had their photographs and fingerprints taken and were put in separate cells in isolation. After a few hours, Friederike, a psychotherapist, was taken for questioning.

The officer read back to her the promise of secrecy she had each client make at the start of her group therapy sessions. Then I knew I was really in trouble, she says.

I promise not to divulge the location or names of the people present or the medication. I promise not to harm myself or others in any way during or after this experience. I promise that I will come out of this experience healthier and wiser. I take personal responsibility for what I do here.

The Swiss police had been tipped off by a former client whose husband had left her after they had attended therapy. She held Friederike responsible.

What got Friederike in trouble were her unorthodox therapy methods. Alongside separate sessions of conventional talk therapy, she offered a catalyst, a tool to help her clients reconnect with their feelings, with people around them, and with difficult experiences in their lives. That catalyst was LSD. In many of her sessions, they would also use another substance: MDMA, or ecstasy.

Friederike was accused of putting her clients in danger, dealing drugs for profit, and endangering society with intrinsically dangerous drugs. Such psychedelic therapy is on the fringes of both psychiatry and society. Yet LSD and MDMA began life as medicines for therapy, and new trials are testing whether they could be again.

In 1943, Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, was trying to develop drugs to constrict blood vessels when he accidentally ingested a small quantity of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. The effects shook him. As he writes in his book LSD, My Problem Child:

Objects as well as the shape of my associates in the laboratory appeared to undergo optical changes Light was so intense as to be unpleasant. I drew the curtains and immediately fell into a peculiar state of drunkenness, characterised by an exaggerated imagination. With my eyes closed, fantastic pictures of extraordinary plasticity and intensive colour seemed to surge towards me. After two hours, this state gradually subsided and I was able to eat dinner with a good appetite.

Intrigued, he decided to take the drug a second time in the presence of colleagues, an experiment to determine whether it was indeed the cause. The faces of his colleagues soon appeared like grotesque coloured masks, he writes:

I lost all control of time: space and time became more and more disorganised and I was overcome with fears that I was going crazy. The worst part of it was that I was clearly aware of my condition though I was incapable of stopping it.

Occasionally I felt as being outside my body. I thought I had died. My ego was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa.

"I observed and registered clearly that my alter ego was moving around the room, moaning.

But he seemed particularly struck by what he felt the next morning: Breakfast tasted delicious and was an extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shone now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity that persisted for the entire day.

Hofmann felt it was of great significance that he could remember the experience in detail. He believed the drug could hold tremendous value to psychiatry. The Sandoz labs, after ensuring it was non-toxic to rats, mice and humans, soon started offering it for scientific and medical use.

One of the first to start using the drug was Ronald Sandison. The British psychiatrist visited Sandoz in 1952 and, impressed by Hofmanns research, left with 100 vials of what was by then called Delysid. Sandison immediately began giving it to patients at Powick Hospital in Worcestershire who were failing to make progress in traditional psychotherapy. After three years, the hospital bosses were so pleased with the results that they built a new LSD clinic. Patients would arrive in the morning, take their LSD, then lie down in private rooms. Each had a record player and a blackboard for drawing on, and nurses or registrars would check on them regularly. At 4pm the patients would convene and discuss their experiences, then a driver would take them home, sometimes while they were still under the influence of the drug.

Around the same time, another British psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, working in Canada, experimented with using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. He reported that the drug, in combination with supportive psychiatry, achieved abstinence rates of 4045 per cent far higher than any other treatment at the time or since. Elsewhere, studies of people with terminal cancer showed that LSD therapy could relieve severe pain, improve quality of life and alleviate the fear of death.

In the USA, the CIA tried giving LSD to unsuspecting members of the public to see if it would make them give up secrets. Meanwhile at Harvard University, Timothy Leary encouraged by, among others, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg gave it to artists and writers, who would then describe their experiences. When rumours spread that he was giving drugs to students, law-enforcement officials started investigating and the university warned students against taking the drug. Leary took the opportunity to preach about the drugs power as an aid to spiritual development, and was soon sacked from Harvard, which further fuelled his and the drugs notoriety. The scandal had caught the eye of the press and soon the whole country had heard of LSD.

By 1962, Sandoz was cutting back on its distribution of LSD, the result of restrictions on experimental drug use brought on by an altogether different drug scandal: birth defects linked to the morning-sickness drug thalidomide. Paradoxically, the restrictions coincided with an increase in LSDs availability the formula was not difficult or expensive to obtain, and those who were determined to could synthesise it with moderate difficulty and in great amounts.

Still, moral panic about its effects on young minds was rife. The authorities were also worried about LSDs association with the counterculture movement and the spread of anti-authoritarian views. Calls for a nationwide ban soon followed, and many psychiatrists stopped using LSD as its negative reputation grew.

One of many stories in the press told of Stephen Kessler, who murdered his mother-in-law and claimed afterwards that he didnt remember what hed done as he was flying on LSD. In the trial, it emerged that he had taken LSD a month earlier, and at the time of the murder was intoxicated only with alcohol and sleeping pills, but millions believed that LSD had turned him into a killer. Another report told of college students who went blind after staring at the sun on LSD.

Two US Senate subcommittees held in 1966 heard from doctors who claimed that LSD caused psychosis and the loss of all cultural values, as well as from LSD supporters such as Leary and Senator Robert Kennedy, whose wife Ethel was said to have undergone LSD therapy. Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly, said Kennedy, challenging the Food and Drug Administration for shutting down LSD research programmes.

Possession of LSD was made illegal in the UK in 1966 and in the USA in 1968. Experimental use by researchers was still possible with licences, but with the stigma attached to the drugs legal status, these became extremely hard to get. Research ground to a halt, but illegal recreational use carried on.

At the age of 40, after 21 years of marriage, Friederike Meckel Fischer fell in love with another man. Sadly, as she soon discovered, he was using her to get out of his own marriage. I had a pain within myself with this man having left me, with my husband whom I couldnt connect to, she says. It was just like I was out of myself.

Her solution was to become a psychotherapist. She says she never thought of going into therapy herself, which in 1980s West Germany was reserved for only the most serious conditions. Besides which, her upbringing taught her to do things herself rather than seek help from others.

Friederike was at the time working as an occupational physician. She recognised that many of the problems she saw in her patients were rooted in problems with their bosses, colleagues or families. I came to the conclusion that everything they were having trouble with was connected to relationship issues, she says.

A former professor of hers recommended she try a technique called holotropic breathwork. Developed by Stanislav Grof, one of the pioneers of LSD psychotherapy, this is a way to induce altered states of consciousness through accelerated and deeper breathing, like hyperventilation. Grof had developed holotropic breathwork in response to bans on LSD use around the world.

Over three years, travelling back and forth to the USA on holidays, Friederike underwent training with Grof as a holotropic breathwork facilitator. At the end of it, Grof encouraged her to try psychedelics.

In the last seminar, a colleague gave her two little blue pills as a gift. When she got back to Germany, Friederike shared one of the blue pills with her friend Konrad, who later became her husband. She says she felt herself lifted by a wave and thrown onto a white beach, able to access parts of her psyche that were off-limits before. The first experience was breathtaking for me, she says. I only thought: Thats it. I can see things. And I started feeling. That was, for me, unbelievable.

The pills were MDMA, a drug which had entered the spotlight in 1976 when American chemist Alexander Sasha Shulgin rediscovered it 62 years after it was patented by Merck and then forgotten. In a story echoing that of LSDs origins, upon taking it, Shulgin noted feelings of pure euphoria and solid inner strength, and felt he could talk about deep or personal subjects with special clarity. He introduced it to his friend Leo Zeff, a retired psychotherapist who had worked with LSD and believed the obligation to help patients took priority over the law. Zeff had continued to work with LSD secretly after its prohibition. MDMAs potential brought Zeff out of retirement. He travelled around the USA and Europe to instruct therapists on MDMA therapy. He called it Adam because it put the patient in a primordial state of innocence, but at the same time, it had acquired another name in nightclubs: ecstasy.

MDMA was made illegal in the UK by a 1977 ruling that put the entire chemical family in the most tightly controlled category: class A. In the USA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), set up by Richard Nixon in 1973, declared a temporary ban in 1985. At a hearing to decide its permanent status, the judge recommended that it should be placed in schedule three, which would allow use by therapists. But the DEA overruled the judges decision and put MDMA in schedule one, the most restrictive category. Under American influence, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs gave MDMA a similar classification under international law (though an expert committee formed by the World Health Organization argued that such severe restrictions were not warranted).

Schedule one substances are permitted to be used in research under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances. In Britain and the USA, researchers and their institutions must apply for special licences, but these are expensive to obtain, and finding manufacturers who will supply controlled drugs is difficult.

But in Switzerland, which at the time was not a signatory to the convention, a small group of psychiatrists persuaded the government to permit the use of LSD and MDMA in therapy. From 1985 until the mid-1990s, licensed therapists were permitted to give the drugs to any patients, to train other therapists in using the drugs, and to take them themselves, with little oversight.

Believing that MDMA might help her gain a deeper understanding of her own problems, Friederike applied for a place on a psycholytic therapy course in Switzerland. In 1992, she and Konrad were accepted into a training group run by a licensed therapist named Samuel Widmer.

The course took place on weekends every three months at Widmers house in Solothurn, a town west of Zurich. Central to the training was taking the substances a number of times, 12 altogether, to get to know their effects and go through a process of self-exploration. Friederike says the drug experiences showed her how her whole life had been coloured by the loss of her father at the age of 5 and the hardship of growing up in postwar West Germany.

I can detect relations, interconnections between things that I couldnt see before, she says of her experiences with MDMA.

I could look at difficult experiences in my life without getting right away thrown into them again. I could for example see a traumatic experience but not connect to the horrible feeling of the moment.

"I knew it was a horrible thing, and I could feel that I have had fear but I didnt feel the fear.

People on psychedelic highs often speak of profound, spiritual experiences. Back in the 1960s, Walter Pahnke, a student of Timothy Leary, conducted a notorious experiment at Boston Universitys Marsh Chapel showing that psychedelics could induce these.

He gave ten volunteers a large dose of psilocybin the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and ten an active placebo, nicotinic acid, which caused a tingling sensation but no mental effects. Eight of the psilocybin group had spiritual experiences, compared with one of the placebo group. In later studies, researchers have identified core characteristics of such experiences, including ineffability, the inability to put it into words; paradoxicality, the belief that contradictory things are true at the same time; and feeling more connected to other people or things.

When the experience can be really useful is when they feel a connection even with someone who has caused them hurt, and an understanding of what may have caused them to behave in the way they did, says Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at Imperial College London. I think the power to achieve those kinds of realisations really speaks to the incredible value of psychedelics and captures why they can be so effective and valuable in therapy. I think that can only really happen when defences dissolve away. Defences get in the way of those realisations.

He compares the feeling of connection with things beyond oneself to the overview effect felt by astronauts when they look back on the Earth. All of a sudden they think, How silly of me and people in general to have conflict and silly little hang-ups that we think are massive and important. When youre up in space looking down on the entirety of the Earth, it puts it into perspective. I think a similar kind of overview is engendered by psychedelics.

Carhart-Harris is conducting the first clinical trial to study psilocybin as a treatment for depression. He is one of a few researchers across the world who are pushing ahead with research on psychedelic therapy. Twelve people have taken part in his study so far.

They begin with a brain scan, and a long preparation session with the psychiatrists. On the therapy day, they arrive at 9am, complete a questionnaire, and have tests to make sure they havent taken other drugs. The therapy room has been decorated with drapes, ornaments, coloured glowing lights, electric candles, and an aromatiser. A PhD student, who is also a musician, has prepared a playlist, which the patient can listen to either through headphones or from high-quality speakers in the room. They spend most of the session lying on a bed, exploring their thoughts. Two psychiatrists sit with them, and interact when the patient wants to talk. The patients have two therapy sessions: one with a low dose, then one with a high dose. Afterwards, they have a follow-up session to help them integrate their experiences and cultivate healthier ways of thinking.

I meet Kirk, one of the participants, two months after his high-dose session. Kirk had been depressed, particularly since his mothers death three years ago. He experienced entrenched thought patterns, like going round and round on a racetrack of negative thoughts, he says. I wasnt as motivated, I wasnt doing as much, I wasnt exercising any more, I wasnt as social, I was having anxiety quite a bit. It just deteriorated. I got to the point where I felt pretty hopeless. It didnt match really what was going on in my life. I had a lot of good things going on in my life. Im employed, Ive got a job, Ive got family, but really it was like a quagmire that you sink into.

At the peak of the drug experience, Kirk was deeply affected by the music. He surrendered himself to it and felt overcome with awe. When the music was sad, he would think of his mother, who had been ill for many years before her death. I used to go to the hospital and see her, and a lot of the time shed be asleep, so I wouldnt wake her up; Id just sit on the bed. And shed be aware I was there and wake up. It was a very loving feeling. Quite intensely I went through that moment. I think that was quite good in a way. I think it helped to let go.

During the therapy sessions, there were moments of anxiety as the drugs effects started to take hold, when Kirk felt cold and became preoccupied with his breathing. But he was reassured by the therapists, and the discomfort passed. He saw bright colours, like being at the funfair, and felt vibrations permeate his body. At one point, he saw the Hindu elephant god Ganesh look in at him, as if checking on a child.

Although the experience had been affecting, he noticed little improvement in his mood in the first ten days afterwards. Then, while out shopping with friends on a Sunday morning, he felt an upheaval. I feel like theres space around me. It felt like when my mum was still alive, when I first met my partner, and everything was kind of OK, and it was so noticeable because I hadnt had it in a while.

There have been ups and downs since, but overall, he feels much more optimistic. I havent got that negativity any more. Im being more social; Im doing stuff. That kind of heaviness, that suppressed feeling has gone, which is amazing, really. Its lifted a heavy cloak off me.

Another participant, Michael, had been battling depression for 30 years, and tried almost every treatment available. Before taking part in the trial, he had practically given up hope. Since the day of his first dose of psilocybin, he has felt completely different. I couldnt believe how much it had changed so quickly, he says.

My approach to life, my attitude, my way of looking at the world, just everything, within a day.

One of the most valuable parts of the experience helped him to overcome a deep-rooted fear of death. I felt like I was being shown what happens after that, like an afterlife, he says. Im not a religious person and Id be hard pushed to say I was anything near spiritual either, but I felt like Id experienced some of that, and experienced the feeling of an afterlife, like a preview almost, and I felt totally calm, totally relaxed, totally at peace. So that when that time comes for me, I will have no fear of it at all.

During her training with Samuel Widmer, Friederike also worked in an addiction clinic. The insights from her drug experiences gave her new empathy. All of a sudden I could understand my clients in the clinic with their alcohol addiction, she says. They were coping differently than I did. They had almost the same problems or symptoms I had, only I hadnt started drinking. But only a few of them were able to open up about how those experiences made them feel. She wondered: could an MDMA experience help them release those emotions?

MDMA is a tamer relative of the classic psychedelics psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT. They have effects that can be disturbing, like sensory distortions, the dissolution of ones sense of self, and the vivid reliving of frightening memories. MDMAs effects are shorter-lasting, making it easier to handle in a psychotherapy session.

Friederike opened her own private psychedelic therapy practice in Zurich in 1997. During the next few years, she began hosting weekend group therapy sessions with psychedelics in her home, inviting clients who had failed to make progress in conventional talking therapy.

Since the 1950s, psychiatrists have recognised the importance of context in determining what sort of experience the LSD taker would have. They have emphasised the importance of set the users mindset, their beliefs, expectations, and experience and setting the physical milieu where the drug is taken, the sounds and features of the environment and the other people present.

A supportive setting and an experienced therapist can lower the risk of a bad trip, but frightening experiences still happen. According to Friederike, they are part of the therapeutic experience. If a client is able to go through or lets himself be led through and work through, the bad trip turns into the most important step on the way to himself, she says. But without a correct setting, without a therapist who knows what hes doing and without the commitment of the client, we end up in a bad trip.

Her clients would come to her house on a Friday evening, talk about their recent issues and discuss what they wanted to achieve in the drug session. On Saturday morning, they would sit in a circle on mats, make the promise of secrecy, and each take a personal dose of MDMA agreed with Friederike in advance. Friederike would start with silence, then play music, and speak to the clients individually or as a group to work through their issues. Sometimes she would ask other members of the group to assume the role of a clients family members, and have them discuss problems in their relationship. In the afternoon they would do the same with LSD, which would often let the participants feel as though they were reliving traumatic memories. Friederike would guide them through the experience, and help them understand it in a new way. On Sunday, they would discuss the experiences of the previous day and how to integrate them into their lives.

Friederikes practice, however, was illegal. Therapeutic licences to use the drugs had been withdrawn by the Swiss government around 1993, following the death of a patient in France under the effect of ibogaine, another psychotropic drug. (It was later determined that she died from an undiagnosed heart condition.)

The early LSD researchers had no way to look at what it was doing inside the brain. Now we have brain scans. Robin Carhart-Harris has carried out such studies with psilocybin, LSD and MDMA. He tells me there are two basic principles of how the classic psychedelics work. The first is disintegration: the parts that make up different networks in the brain become less cohesive. The second is desegregation: the systems that specialise for particular functions as the brain develops become, in his words, less different from each other.

These effects go some way to explaining how psychedelics could be therapeutically useful. Certain disorders, such as depression and addiction, are associated with characteristic patterns of brain activity that are difficult to break out of. The brain kind of enters these patterns, pathological patterns, and the patterns can become entrenched. The brain easily gravitates into these patterns and gets stuck in them. They are like whirlpools, and the mind gets sucked into these whirlpools and gets stuck.

Psychedelics dissolve patterns and organisation, introducing a kind of chaos, says Carhart-Harris. On the one hand, chaos can be seen as a bad thing, linked with things like psychosis, a kind of storm in the mind, as he puts it. But you could also view that chaos as having therapeutic value. The storm could come and wash away some of the pathological patterns and entrenched patterns that have formed and underlie the disorder. Psychedelics seem to have the potential through this effect on the brain to dissolve or disintegrate pathologically entrenched patterns of brain activity.

The therapeutic potential suggested by Carhart-Harriss brain scan studies persuaded the UKs Medical Research Council to fund the psilocybin trial for depression. Its too early to evaluate its success, but the results so far have been encouraging. Some patients are in remission now months after having had their treatment, Carhart-Harris says. Previously their depressions were very severe, so I think those cases can be considered transformations. Im not sure if there are any other treatments out there that really have that potential to transform a patients situation after just two treatment sessions.

In the wake of MDMAs prohibition, American psychologist Rick Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to support research aiming to re-establish psychedelics place in medicine. When Swiss psychiatrist Peter Oehen heard they were funding a study on using MDMA to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he jumped on a plane to meet Doblin in Boston.

Like Friederike, Oehen trained in psychedelic therapy while it was legal in Switzerland in the early 1990s. Doblin agreed to support a small study with 12 patients at Oehens private practice in Biberist, a small town about half an hour by train from the Swiss capital, Bern.

Oehen thinks that MDMAs mood-elevating, fear-reducing and pro-social effects make it a promising tool to facilitate psychotherapy for PTSD. Many of these traumatised people have been traumatised by some kind of interpersonal violence and have lost their ability to connect, are distrustful, are aloof, says Oehen. This helps them regain trust. It helps build a sound and trustful therapeutic relationship. It also puts the patient in a state of mind where they can face their traumatic memories without becoming distressed, he says, helping to start reprocess the trauma in a different way.

When MAPSs first PTSD study in the USA was published in 2011, the results were eye-opening. After two psychotherapy sessions with MDMA, 10 out of 12 participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD. The benefits were still apparent when the patients were followed up three to four years after the therapy.

Oehens results were less dramatic, but all of the patients who had MDMA-assisted therapy felt some improvement. Im still in touch with almost half of the people, he says. I can see still people getting better after years going on in the process and resolving their problems. We saw this at long-term follow-up, that symptoms get better after time, because the experiences enable them to get better in a different way to normal psychotherapy. These effects being more open, being more calm, more willing to face difficult issues this goes on.

In people with PTSD, the amygdala, a primitive part of the brain that orchestrates fear responses, is overactive. The prefrontal cortex, a more sophisticated part of the brain that allows rational thoughts to override fear, is underactive. Brain-imaging studies with healthy volunteers have shown that MDMA has the opposite effects boosting the prefrontal cortex response and shrinking the amygdala response.

Ben Sessa, a psychiatrist working around Bristol in the UK, is preparing to carry out a study at Cardiff University testing whether people with PTSD respond to MDMA in the same way. He believes that early negative experiences lie at the root not just of PTSD but of many other psychiatric disorders too, and that psychedelics give patients the ability to reprocess those memories.

Ive been doing psychiatry for almost 20 years now and every single one of my patients has a history of trauma, he says. Maltreatment of children is the cause of mental illness, in my opinion. Once a persons personality has been formed in childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood, its very difficult to encourage a patient to think otherwise. What psychedelics do, more than any other treatment, he says, is offer an opportunity to press the reset button and give the patient a new experience of a personal narrative.

Sessa is planning a separate study to test MDMA as a treatment for alcohol dependency syndrome picking up the trail of Humphrey Osmonds LSD research 60 years ago.

He believes psychiatry would look very different today if research with psychedelics had proceeded unencumbered since the 1950s. Psychiatrists have since turned to antidepressants, mood stabilisers and antipsychotics. These drugs, he says, help to manage a patients condition, but arent curative, and also carry dangerous side-effects.

Weve become so used to psychiatry being a palliative care field of medicine, Sessa says. That were with you for life. You come to us in your early 20s with severe anxiety disorder; Ill still be looking after you in your 70s.

Weve become used to that. And I think were selling our patients short.

Will psychedelic drugs ever be ruled legal medicines again? MAPS are supporting trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD in the USA, Australia, Canada and Israel, and they hope they will have enough evidence to convince regulators to approve it by 2021. Meanwhile, trials using psilocybin to treat anxiety in people with cancer have been taking place at Johns Hopkins University and New York University since 2007.

Few psychiatrists I asked about the legal use of psychedelics in therapy would give their opinions. One of the few who did, Falk Kiefer, Medical Director at the Department of Addictive Behaviour and Addiction Medicine at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, says he is sceptical about the drugs ability to change patients behaviour. Psychedelic treatment might result in gaining new insights, seeing the world in a different way. Thats fine, but if it does not result in learning new strategies to deal with your real world, the clinical outcome will be limited.

Carhart-Harris says the only way to change peoples minds is for the science to be so good that funders and regulators cant ignore it. The idea is that we can present data that really becomes irrefutable, so that those authorities that have reservations, we can start changing their perspective and bring them around to taking this seriously.

After 13 days under arrest, Friederike was released. She appeared in court in July 2010, accused of violating the narcotics law and endangering her clients, the latter of which could mean up to 20 years imprisonment. A number of neuroscientists and psychotherapists testified in her defence, arguing that one portion of LSD is not a dangerous substance and has no significant harmful effects when taken in a controlled setting (MDMA was not included in the prosecutions case).

The judge accepted that Friederike had given her clients drugs as part of a therapeutic framework, with careful consideration for their health and welfare, and ruled her guilty of handing out LSD but not guilty of endangering people. For the narcotics offence, she was fined 2,000 Swiss francs and given a 16-month suspended sentence with two years probation.

I have been blessed by a very understanding lawyer and an intelligent judge, she says. She even considers the woman who reported her to the police a blessing, since the case has allowed her to talk openly about her work with psychedelics. She gives occasional lectures at psychedelic conferences, and has written a book about her experience, which she hopes will guide other therapists in how to work with the substances safely.

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LSD as therapy: How scientists are reclaiming psychedelics ...

Mike McQuade

The world is in the throes of a mental-health crisis, as depression and dementia afflict spiralling numbers of people.

In March 2017, the World Health Organization declared that depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide. More than 300 million people are living with it, an increase of more than 18 per cent between 2005 and 2015. But help is at hand - if we can reach out and grasp it.

A group of drugs long considered taboo is poised to transform the way we treat mental health. Recent research suggests that psychedelics - once regarded as a relic of the hippy-dippy 60s - could prove powerful tools not only to treat, but also potentially cure, many mental health problems regarded as chronic.

Psychedelics do something that our current go-to psychiatric drugs cannot: transform hardwired neural patterns to reroute the very architecture of the brain, sometimes in a single dose. Roland Griffiths, a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has likened psychedelics' ability to bring about neural rerouting as akin to a "surgical intervention".

Take psilocybin, better known as magic mushrooms. A single dose of the drug can do "in 30 seconds what it takes antidepressants three to four weeks to do", according to David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.

A study published in the Journal of Psycho-pharmacology on people with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness suggested that LSD-assisted psychotherapy was successful in almost 70 per cent of subjects, with the positive effects lasting more than a year and causing no lasting adverse reactions.

Given the overwhelmingly positive results of these and other trials, one would think the clinical use of psychedelics would represent a sea change in our approach to mental-health treatment. But, sadly, outdated societal prejudice against psychedelics is proving a formidable handicap, hampering research and keeping many in need from reaping the benefits.

Strict anti-drug legislation that still criminalises the use of such substances has pushed psychedelic-assisted treatments underground: unless you are among the lucky few accepted into a clinical trial, your only options are to find an unlicensed practitioner, attempt to do it yourself illegally or travel to places where the compounds are legal.

Growing numbers of people are doing just that, and in recent months, there has been flurry of articles on the topic which have stoked curiosity about the potential of psychedelics. In April of this year, the Psychedelic Science Conference in California was attended by more than 3,000 people who travelled from across the globe to learn about recent advances. Although it's heartening that more people are finding relief, ad hoc experimentation is not the way to go. We must bring this research into the mainstream, guarantee adequate funding and shield well-intentioned facilitators from criminal prosecution.

I should know. I was once the victim of a violent robbery, which left me shattered. Out of desperation I turned to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. It helped saved my life.

Mental-health practices around the world are in desperate need of an overhaul, and psychedelics could be just the hack we need to achieve such fundamental - and indispensable - change. I believe mental health to be a human right, and as such it is nothing short of our duty to follow, and fund, the science.

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Psychedelic drugs saved my life. So why aren't they prescribed? - Wired.co.uk

Magic mushrooms cant cure cancer, but they can alleviate the anxiety and existential dread that come along with the disease.

At least, thats the apparent conclusion from a pair of studies published in late 2016, wherein participants who had been diagnosed with both cancer and clinical depression or anxiety were administered psilocybin mushrooms within a controlled, living room-esque environment.

The psychological effects of psilocybin were not only positive, but enduring. Most participants ranked the experience among the most meaningful of their lives, and six months after taking the dose, 65 percent had almost fully recovered from their depression, and 57 percent from their anxiety. In contrast, antidepressants have been observed to help only 40 percent of terminal cancer patients in past studiesmaking them about as effective as a placebo.

However, as with other psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin remains a Schedule I drug, deemed by the federal government to have a high potential for abuse and no medical value whatsoever. Yet that hasnt stopped researchers from administering more than 2,000 doses of the much-touted magic mushrooms in clinical settings since the early 90s, during which time no participants have reported any lasting medical or psychiatric issues.

Instead, most studies seem to confirm what recreational users have suspected for some time nowthat psychedelic drugs can help us, at least if taken under the right circumstances, and with this new wave of advanced psychedelic research, were beginning to understand why.

Both mushrooms and LSD, or acid, can reliably inspire religious or otherwise transcendental experiences in users, often resulting in a detachment from worldly concerns and a loss of self-identity called ego death. Another 2016 study suggests LSD accomplishes this by increasing global connectivity in the brain, thus removing perceived boundaries between ones inner and outer world.

Additional studies provide evidence for the drugs effectiveness in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcoholism and other addictions, though the effects dont typically last more than six months after dosing. Perhaps more impressive are the findings that psilocybin can actually alter peoples personalitiesusually thought to be set in stone during adulthoodby making them more open, a trait associated with broad-mindedness and creativity.

Theres a sacredness or a reverence to [the] experience, noted Roland Griffiths, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who authored one of the studies. Although the effects of the drugs are gone by the end of the day, the memories of these experiences and the attributions made to them endure.

Indeed, the lasting effects of psilocybin and LSD, as observed in Griffiths study and others, can help anyone, not just those struggling with cancer or clinical depression. Neither drug has much potential for addiction, and the only significant associated risks are from accidents or anxiety attacks, which can be particularly damaging for users with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Researchers screened participants for such risk factors and provided a safe, encouraging environment for their trips.

Thanks to an increased understanding of these controversial hallucinogens and a groundswell movement of pro-psychedelic advocacy groups, it isnt farfetched to imagine a future where mental health patients can drop acid or mushrooms outside of a research setting, perhaps under the supervision of a doctor or other trained professional.

It will no doubt take time for government policy to catch up with these illuminating findings, meaning legal psychedelics will still take yearsor even decadesto hit shelves. But if the research keeps progressing, how long can we ignore the science? Under this administration, that may remain to be seen.

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THE FUTURE OF PSYCHEDELICS: Are LSD and Mushrooms The New Prozac? - Dope Magazine

At some point, humankind will look back and figure out what to make of our heavy usage of psychedelics at music festivals. Despite the fact that mega-events provide probably the worst atmosphere for astral introspection, many peoples first mushroom or acid trips still happen at mobbed festivals or maybe the hardest trip theyll ever trip will take place at one. Hello, 21-year-old me at Reggae on the River. (I am not ashamed.)

The ritual of ingestion is often articulated in traditional cultures by a shaman or a guide well-read in the ways of certain substances. But in contrast with ayahuasca ceremonies, at Coachella or Burning Man psychedelic use is presided over by musicians on a stage set thousands of people away or by a friend who is just as dehydrated and medicated as you are or no one, when a overpowering wave of crowd splinters a crew.

Lacking a safe container to trip in, psychedelic complications are bound to happen in the haphazard setting of festival madness. Psychedelic users who become violent or otherwise unresponsive to official suggestion via a difficult trip can wind up at the hospital or worse, jail. Neither place is likely to alleviate the paranoia or fear theyre experiencing.

Drug research and education organization MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies) stepped into this disconnect when it raised the first incarnation of its Zendo Project at Burning Man in 2012. The on-site counseling program complimented MAPS larger mission to advocate for the therapeutic uses of psychedelics. The groups work often focuses on the way that drugs can be used to open up healing emotional pathways, such as a 2016 study that looked at the effects of MDMA on people suffering from PTSD.

The term psychedelic means mind manifesting, which means that our conscious mind becomes aware of subconscious things, says Sara Gael, MAPS director of harm reduction and Zendo Project organizer who has been involved since the year the program came to life and is a firm believer in the benefits associated with responsible usage of the drugs. Thats what therapy is about, exploring the subconscious and the aspects of self that society has taught us to repress.

In the uncertainty of festival chaos, worries about personal sanity or safety can complicate a psychedelic trip, rendering it all but impossible to stay open to the painful realizations that psychedelics can trigger. The Zendos infrastructure responds to this construct; volunteers erect a tent where triggered festival attendees can rehydrate, lie down, and/or snack, in addition to connecting with trained souls ready to sit with them through any threatening visions or panic-inducing paranoias.

Some of the more challenging cases we experience are people who are really frightened, who might then become aggressive, or try to run away, or feel really lost or paranoid, says Gael. Those are some of the more difficult situations to work with because were trying to keep that person physically safe. Thats why we work in collaboration with medical and security.

Today, the Zendo Project has helped 2,900 people at large events, teaming up with security and medical festival staff so that attendees receive the best treatment for their particular situation. Given the projects success, it is pleasant to imagine a larger diversity of gatherings in which Zendo-like harm reduction efforts were present. Currently, the program is limited to Burning Man and its regional events from South Africa to San Diego, in addition to the other transformational endeavors (Lightning in a Bottle, Costa Rican yoga and spirituality fest Envision.)

The Zendo Project is looking to expand, and is currently in the middle of a fundraising drive. And MAPS just publishedThe Manual of Psychedelic Support, a thick tome available for free download.

The manual outlines the logistics behind setting up a Zendo Project-like space, not to mention the inclusion of a fascinating history of harm reduction in modern Western festival culture (the original Woodstock festivals Hog Farmers, founded by Wavy Gravy, are considered pioneers in the area) and the Zendo Projects guiding principles for interactions with those on tough trips: creating a safe space, sitting not guiding, talking through and not down, and difficult is not the same as bad, in Gaels summarization.

Gael is quick to note that the core principles can even be self-applied, if you can remember them should you enter into a difficult trip yourself. When asked for a couple quick pointers for those finding themselves on shaky psychedelic ground, she ventured: What is coming up, try to turn into it rather than away from it, because what we resist, persists. Try to find a safe space away from noise with people that you trust. Find someone who is able to sit with you even if theyre not formally trained, who is not freaking out. Trying to connect with your breath and body, connecting with nature can be really helpful, finding a tree.

She adds that if youre still feeling shaken up even after youve become sober, MAPS has published a list of therapists who are educated in psychedelic integration, or the practice of connecting the dots between psychedelias half-processed self realizations.

It is clear that modern day Western society takes psychedelics under much different circumstances than the cultures that previously utilized the substances. The ritual of loading ones car up with friends and alcohol en route to Electric Daisy Carnival has little in common with the temazcals and sacrament of a Navajo peyote ceremony.

MAPS makes it clear that as part of a harm reduction strategy, the Zendo Project simply responds to the reality that this is the current situation, says Gael. And that despite policy, [psychedelic usage] is going to continue. After nearly 50 years of practice, however, new forms of psychedelic guidance in certain modern day sites of cultural ritual are being developed a nascent safety net for the psychedelic voyagers of today.

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Expanding consciousness - 48 Hills

Academic compulsion and peer-pressure adding to the woes

Psychedelic drugs are not the only cause of concern, high school students and youngsters are addicted to things like cough syrups, glue and whiteners. Recently the governments focus has only been on drug peddlers and celebrities but, the real focus should begin at home and schools.

I have patients as young as seven-years-old, who are addicted to medications like cough syrup or stationary items. This is due to the complete lack of parental guidance, opines Dr Namita Singh, neuropsychologist at Apollo Hospitals.

Further, she said that if the child is prescribed a medication for a time, h/she continues to use the medicine even after that. Excessive use of such medications can lead to failure of vital organs, like the liver, she warns.

The schooling system is also to be blamed, she argues. Because of the hectic curriculum children are constantly under pressure and they opt for immediate relief from it.

I even tried to contact some schools to conduct an awareness session for high school students about sexual education and usage of drugs but, they didnt seem interested in this.

Educational institutions are only concerned about their syllabus but, they are hugely lacking in extracurricular activities like sports, dancing or anything creative for that matter, she adds.

Speaking about the psychological conditions of students she shares, A 13-year-old kid was recently brought to me by his mother because of his erratic behaviour and loss of appetite. His mother complained that he was always irritated and physically aggressive with his brother.

High pressure from schools drives children crazy. This is no way to live a life; at least parents should understand and allow their children to participate in other creative activities, she opines.

She also says that many parents are still unaware about their childrens addictions and weaknesses, and even if they do know about it, they are unwilling to bring their kid to a psychologist.

If education doesnt begin at home then these psychological conditions will haunt the individual in their adulthood as well. Many software employees are also facing these behavioural issues at an early age.

To get away from their day-to-day deadlines and work pressures they divulge into alcohol, smoking and drugs, opines the doctor.

By: Tera Sneha Reddy

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For children, it's beyond psychedelics - The Hans India - The Hans India

What is the value of awe and mystic experience? For starters, it reduces the me that wants things done for it, or at least offers temporary relief from this grasping me. Mystic experience, whatever links it occasions, offers a kind of holiday from ordinary reality. In this expansive space, the world can be felt as less self-centered, and more inter-connected. In many spiritual traditions, this shift is called awakening, or at least the start of it. Awakening is not an entertainment (lets get high) but a jewel (lets get real).

We have Aldous Huxley to thank for one of the first post-war accounts of a day transformed by a psychedelic (it was mescaline). Borrowing from William Blake, he called his book The Doors of Perception (1954). What he described was things seen in a state of awe. Many other great writers have explored the phenomenon of mystical experience occasioned by what a friend of mine calls mindful molecules, and some of their work will be listed near the end of this piece, reports subsequent to Huxleys.

These writers were interested in classic psychedelics not to alleviate or cure a health condition or reduce anxiety, much less to create a colorful internal light show, but rather to induce a state of awe Why?

They all refer to the ability of classis psychedelics to occasion mystical experience (or in a cautious phrase in a report about psilocybin, mystical-type experience). Professor Ralph Hood had not yet developed his mysticism scale in time for Wassons 1954 account of a psilocybin mushroom ceremony near Oaxaca, but the first word about the experience in Wassons account was, awestruck.

One interpretation of an experience of awe could be to reinforce a religious allegiance, whether, for example, Buddhist. Christian, Hindu, or Islamic. In each off these traditions, an allegiance has been strengthened by a mystic experience with or without the use of a mindful molecule. In this article, however, rather than get involved in theology, I want to stay with the experience occasioned by a classic psychedelic, prior to any interpretation of it.

We can all agree that the experience is radically different than ordinary reality, causing a habitual tendency to call it sacred and to assume it descends upon us from, or connects us with, another realm. However, Occams Razor suggests that were making a giant assumption if we assert that something very different from ordinary reality is necessarily transcendental. It might be, but it might equally represent access to a function of the human brain that is ordinarily absent or hidden.

As a rhetorical strategy, the claim of access to a realm in the bailiwick of spiritual leaders has some advantages. In the U.S. our idea of religious freedom might extend to the use of classic psychedelics. So far, this argument has succeeded only in the case of the Native American Church, which legally uses peyote in its ceremonies for hundreds of thousands of worshippers from one race,, and of a couple of offshoots of syncretic Brazilian churches (offshoots both located in the U.S. West).

Our courts seem to respect antiquity of practice. The native Americans have been doing their peyote ritual for a long time, and the Brazilian churches are linked to ancient shamanic practices involving ayahuasca in the Amazon basin. According to The Road to Eleusis, many of the ideas of Western civilization arose from people initiated through an annual ceremony that appears to have featured a group envisioning induced by a psychedelic agent in the kykeon and that continued for as long as two thousand years. A pause since the fourth century does not alter the antiquity of the practice.

According to the Road to Eleusis, the mysteries could be resumed now and offer benefits to our culture, as they did to the culture of ancient Greece and to initiates from the Roman empire. In a word, they could become again a part of normal life.

Now for the bibliographic note:

Appreciation for awe has appeared in a string of writings after Huxley on spiritual uses of psychedelics. Examples include:

At the time of the writings cited, Wasson was a New York banker and a mycologist; Watts, a British clergyman transposed to California; Smith, a philosopher of religion and former professor at various universities including MIT; Forte, a teacher and an editor; Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz in Basel and the discoverer of LSD; Ruck, a classicist at Boston University;; Doblin, the founder of MAPS; Badiner, a student of Buddhism and an editor; Griffiths, a professor at Johns Hopkins.

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What Has Awe Done for Me Lately? - HuffPost

No three strung-together letters in the English language are more loaded than L-S-D. Say them out loud to elicit images of strung out hippies waving their hands around and making things out of flowers, or of an innocent youths mind snapping under the weight of acid. Or just really bad art.

Psychedelics have a brand problem, but early studies suggest drugs like LSD and MDMA could treat disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder. Operative word being could . Bad branding means bad funding, so while those preliminary studies are promising, theyre also relatively rare.

Which is why today an organization called Fundamental is launching a crowdfunding campaign to finance an ambitious series of studiesdesigned under the watchful eye of the FDA, mind youinto how psychedelics might treat a range of psychological disorders. So should you be inclined, you can kick in cash to fund what is shaping up to be a bold and bizarre new frontier in medical research.

Fundamental came from the brain of Rodrigo Nio, a real estate developer in New York who in 2011 was diagnosed with melanoma. Following two surgeries, Niounderstandably terrified of deathtraveled to the Peruvian jungle to try ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic famed both for its violent upheaval of the human digestive system and its tendency to take users on intense spiritual journeys. (Not exactly the most data-driven beginning to a psychedelic science campaign, but there it is.)

Right after my first sessionmy ceremony, they call itI was completely off my fear of dying, Nio says. Completely gone, you know. And then I had to know if what had happened to me was placebo effect caused by the hallucinations, or if in fact I had been physiologically cured.

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Problem is, you cant just call up the federal government and ask for some money, pretty please, to test a schedule 1 drug on people. And good luck getting pharmaceutical companies interested in natural drugs they cant slap a patent on. The issue is that [psychedelics] don't make money, and because they don't make money traditional capital sources have no interest in them, says Nio. And so Nio founded Fundamental to take psychedelics research to the people.

It works like this: Anyone can donate money through the fund-raising website CrowdRise, specifying what kind of psychedelics research they want to fund. This money lands in a fund operated by a grantmaking organization called Charities Aid Foundation America that then vets which researchers it doles out the money to. Nio's aiming for $2 million initially, with the possibility of additional campaigns in the future.

One of the first beneficiaries of the fund will be Amanda Feilding, a legendary figure in the psychedelics movement and, as it happens, a full-blown countess with the most proper British accent you ever did hear. The UN made a terrible mistake, she says, when in 1961 it passed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, essentially Just Say No to Drugs in treaty form. "What we've been trying to do for the last 20 years," Feilding says, "is provide governments and the UN with the scientific evidence so that they can amend or withdraw the conventions prohibiting these substances or lower them from schedule 1 to schedule 3 or 4 so that doctors can prescribe them and research can be done." To do that, though, she's relied on donations from individuals or grants from other institutions.

The money she receives through crowdfunding will go toward studying LSD microdosing, which you've no doubt heard of by now , with (deep breath) neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt at Imperial College London. In it, they'll have subjects complete certain tasks while in an fMRI to image their brains. Everyone from Silicon Valley techies to creative-industry types love the idea that in low doses the drug could heighten alertness and creativity without the pesky hallucinations. Science will sort that out, but in a study published last year, Feilding and partners gave the world the first look at how LSD affects the brain (itself financed in part with crowdfunding). Meaning researchers are taking the first steps toward understanding how LSD and other psychedelics impact the mind.

Another beneficiary of the crowdfunded cash will be Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies . Over the last three decades, MAPS has raised some $40 million for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. But it's not enoughphase three of Doblin's study into using MDMA to treat PTSD will set the group back $25 million ($10 million of which they've pulled in from two overachieving donors). And they're not expecting much help from the governmentthough they did once get a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado to study PTSD with marijuana.

This isn't MAPS's first tango with crowdfunding, either. It has used Indiegogo to fund a psychedelic harm reduction program at Burning Man, and again for a study that tested MDMA on traumatized veterans. But those campaigns were asking for total commitments of tens of thousands of dollars, not millions.

With its cut of this new, larger round of crowdfunding, MAPS plans to bring sufferers into a clinic for three sessions of supervised dosing, after which the patient stays for the night. This is combined with 12 hour-and-a-half-long psychotherapy sessions. In a similar study published by the group in 2013, researchers found that doses of MDMA helped participants improve their PTSD symptoms long-term .

Contrary to what you might expect for a schedule 1 drug, the issues with MDMA research, Doblin says, arent regulation but funding and training therapists in a novel form of treatment. (To train for this, the FDA is allowing MAPS's therapists to try MDMA themselves.) MDMA is widely available for research purposes, and indeed the stigma of psychedelics is fading. Whats really changed over the last 10 years has been the willingness of major researchers at major institutions to get involved, says Doblin. Psychedelics are no longer fringenone other than Johns Hopkins is in on the game now . So the real issues now are not regulatory.

Money. They need money, because drugs are expensive and rigorous scientific studies are complicated, no matter what plane of reality you occupy.

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Scientists Want You to Give Them Money to Study ...

David Luke, a University of Greenwich psychology lecturer and researcher of high weirdness, has a new book out with the compelling title of Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience. Based on the blurb, it sounds like an absolute trip:

A psychonautic scientific trip to the weirdest outposts of the psychedelic terrain, inhaling anything and everything relevant from psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology, anthropology, neuroscience, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, biochemistry, religious studies, cultural history, shamanism and the occult along the way.

Staring the strange straight in the third eye this eclectic collection of otherworldly entheogenic research delivers a comprehensive and yet ragtaglledy scientific exploration of synaesthesia, extra-dimensional percepts, inter-species communication, eco-consciousness, mediumship, possession, entity encounters, near-death and out-of-body experiences, psi, alien abduction experiences and lycanthropy. Essentially, its everything you ever wanted to know about weird psychedelic experiences, but were too afraid to ask

"Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience" (via Daily Grail)

Im making the final(ish*) stop of my Walkaway tour at Defcon this weekend in Las Vegas, giving a speech on Saturday in Track 2 at 10AM called $BIGNUM steps forward, $TRUMPNUM steps back: how can we tell if were winning?, followed by a book-signing at the No Starch Press table in the exhibitors hall.

In Paper Girls, the celebrated comics creator Brian K Vaughan (Saga, Y: The Last Man, etc) teams up with Cliff Chiang to tell a story thats like an all-girl Stranger Things, with time-travel.

To call Shopsins a Greenwich Village institution was to understate something profound and important and weird and funny: Shopsins (first a grocery store, later a restaurant) was a kind of secret reservoir of the odd and wonderful and informal world that New York City once represented, in the pre-Trumpian days of Sesame Street and Times Square sleaze: Tamara Shopsin grew up in Shopsins, and Arbitrary Stupid Goal is her new, no-muss memoir, is at once charming and sorrowing, a magnificent time-capsule containing the soul of a drowned city.

Between election hacks, ransomware, and Devils Ivy, the cybersecurity space is booming as malware and hackers become more sophisticated. If youre interested in pursuing a career in ethical hacking, or just want to secure your own devices,The Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundleis a great resource.In this bundle, youll learn the fundamental skills of ethical hacking, prepare []

The TREBLAB X11 Earphones are versatile, offer great sound, and are currently $32.99 in the Boing Boing Store.These Bluetooth earbuds are a great workout companion. Theyre totally sweat proof and their ear-fins keep them snugly in place during high activity something that Apples AirPods can only do if you were blessed with precisely the []

Whether youre a seasoned entertainment industry veteran or a student working on your first spec script, having the right tool for the job will make a huge difference in your focus and productivity.Final Draft 10 is far and away the worlds best screenwriting software, used extensively by professional film and TV writers at top production []

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New book about psychedelics and weird human experiences - Boing Boing

The official U.S. response to classic psychedelics has been primarily a defense of existing normality. The response was aroused, for example, by the drop out kicker in Tim Learys famous motto (turn on, tune in, drop out). It was shaped by perceived links to social disarray caused by claims of equality from blacks, women, people dismissed as shiftless, and foreigners who resented intervention (such as in Vietnam).

My own introduction to the drug issue came from a college student when I was a teaching assistant at Stanford in a course on personality theory. It was back in the late 1960s. I was told this pill is really great, this student reported being assured at a frat party. Swallow it and get ready for a really good time. He didn't even ask what the pill was said to be, much less seek data on what it actually contained. He just swallowed. LSD was soon made illegal. (As we will see below, this was far from an ideal set and setting.)

When U.S. research on psychedelics was allowed to resume, decades later, it was largely for projects that explored medicinal uses, which aim to restore a person toyou guessed itnormality. Has most of society been afraid not only of party drugs, but also of the experience of awe? Awe is regarded as okay for the occasional mystic, who may even be elevated to sainthood (for example, Francis of Assisi, after whom the current Pope chose to be named), but it arouses suspicion when people talk to birds. Thats weird.

Nobody wants vast criminal syndicates, users do not want the risk of impure drugs (with dangerous molecules sometimes being sold as Ecstasy), nobody wants their children thrown in prison for smoking pot while good burghers drive their cars to a bar to get plastered, nobody wants to pay higher taxes to keep non-violent young people locked up, and researchers do not want prohibitions on research about amazing substances, even if they were not widely used. But anything in defense of normality.

The big question is whether were ever going to find a way to integrate awe into lives that are otherwise normal, to tolerate a regime under which people can, if they want, suspend ordinary reality in a safe and beneficial way. At least since 1954, when Aldous Huxleys Doors of Perception gave us that brilliant writers account of his trip on a classic psychedelic, explorers have tried to bridge the gap between their direct experience and the views of the majority who werent burdened by personal encounters with awe but who, with the help of the media, knew what they believed.

Huxleys spirit was put in a religious context by Huston Smith, who spoke of cleansing those Blakeian doors.

More recently, people who feel that a therapeutic trip has been one of the most important experiences of their lifetime or have found mega benefits in micro-dosing have adopted various rhetorical strategies to try to communicate their discovery. Im reminded of this attempt, which has now continued for a half century or so, by two recent books, The Psychedelic Renaissance (2012) by Ben Sessa, and A Really Good Day (2017) by Ayelet Waldman.

An English physician and researcher, Sessa adopts the strategy of identifying with his profession and searching for ways that classic psychedelics (and MDMA) can help psychiatrists reduce unnecessary suffering. At the same time, he wonders aloud why, after scorning hippies, he has adopted many of their values and insights. Then he returns to the sobriety of his status in society, his caseload, and research based on double-blind evidence.

Waldman adopts a different strategy. Professionally, she is a writer. She is also a mother of four. She suffers from depression and anxiety. She had heard that taking a tenth of a normal dose of LSD might help. She followed a protocol described by Jim Fadiman, who began researching psychedelics as a graduate student when LSD-25 was still legal. This accounts for Waldmans subtitle: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.

Assured of a supply for a month of three-day cycles, Waldman supposedly wonders whether even a micro-dose will kill her or, if not, drive her crazy, with ghastly flashbacks. Despite having been a volunteer for the Drug Policy Alliance, which works against the war on drugs, and in spite of teaching a law school course in the area, Waldman says she started her personal experiment with fear-based stories widely held in our society, inculcated by the misinformation our government has propagated for decades. She then educates her readers with the quite different facts.

So these are the first two rhetorical strategies: identify with your audience (I thought so, too, but boy, was I mistaken) or identify with a valued profession (Im a doctor, I just want to find medicines that work).

One way to make drugs almost acceptable is to present them as potential medicines, under the control of a highly regarded corps of professionals. Can they treat PTSD, as in the studies of MDMA as an adjunct to therapy, studies conducted by the Mithoefers? Can they ease end-of-life fear, as in the project run by Charles Grob? Can they deal with addiction to alcohol and other legal drugs open to abuse?

Another strategy is to argue that, under the Constitution, liberty includes the right to alter, at least temporarily, ones own consciousness: you may not have the freedom to encourage or guide others, but an individual in our society does retain the power to decide what to put in his or her own body, especially if its been shown to be safer than substances sold and imbibed freely.

We have Jim Fadiman to thank not only for Ayelet Waldmans experiment but also for other effects of his own book, The Psychedelic Explorers Guide: Safe, Therapeutic and Sacred Journeys (2011). In contrast to my student reporting on unknown drugs handed around at a frat party, Fadiman describes how to do it right. Experienced people advise: (a) ingest a psychedelic only if you are mentally balanced, (b) get pure substances, (c) take a correct dose, (d) form a positive intention for the trip (and then be willing to let go of it), (e) find and stay in a welcoming non-clinical setting, (f) have an experienced and non-intrusive guide, (g) lie down or find a comfortable chair, (h) listen to music instead of operating machinery or communicating with people outside the room. Of course, prohibition makes it difficult to get pure substances, and current law would make any guide an accessory.

Another rhetorical strategy was inherent in the 1960s project on psychedelics and creativity led by Professor Willis Harman. This project gave a classic psychedelic to professionals who were working with resistant challenges in their fields. It discovered benefits before the project was cut off when the government decided to make LSD illegal. That was in 1968 (the same year Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, Bobby Kennedy won the California primary and was then assassinated, and Richard Nixon nabbed the Presidency).

If creativity is not enough to win approval, how about a hypothesis about evolution of the species, that it was psilocybin that helped convert primates into archaic humans? Along with many other speculations in the course of his career, Terence McKenna explored this possibility around 1992. What was his motive? If we could import into straight society, almost as a Trojan horse, the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are the catalyst that called forth humanness out of animal nature, if we could entertain this as a possibility, he said, it would alter societys efforts to control and eradicate these substances.

In contrast to proposing bold but unprovable theories, recent researchers looked at neurological data, gathered in large part by methods not yet available when classic psychedelics became widespread in the U.S. For example, Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College in London used magnetic resonance imagining to map effects in the brain.

Data about spiritual experience was reported in research led by Professor Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, as expressed in the classic paper, Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences The investigators focused not on an illness that was to be alleviated but rather on an enhancement of ordinary life.

To summarize the rhetorical strategies cited here:

There are other rhetorical strategies, but these are enough to illustrate the persistence and ingenuity of people who are still seeking, after a half century of prohibition, to bridge the gap between firm beliefs of the general public and data developed, against official resistance, by research both here and abroad.

When fear is aroused, as in the war on terror, good public policy is swept aside and we tend not to look at facts.

In the case of psychedelics, what will work? We are encouraged to be patient, as was Martin Luther King, Jr., by white colleagues at the time of the Montgomery demonstrations. In response, King asked whether the time since the Civil War was long enough to wait.

The prohibition against psychedelics has lasted about half a century. Critics of the fear-response decry the losses: the healing that has been lost, the abuse of liberty, the loss of research, of creativity, of experiences of awe.

One of the U.S. organizations that has worked persistently and ingeniously during most of this period of prohibition has been the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), founded by Rick Doblin, a graduate of Harvards Kennedy School. MAPS has held conferences on psychedelic science, sponsored research here and abroad, published a newsletter, and tried to educate the political establishment.

Other leading organizations include the Heffter Research Institute, which gathered key academics in this field, Amanda Feildings Beckley Foundation in the U.K., Bob Jesses Council for Spiritual Practices, the archives at Purdue University (Psychoactive Substances Research Collection), and the Vaults of Erowid.

On the model of cannabis, perhaps it would be helpful to establish medical uses, then move on to what is called recreational use, a term that refers to all uses not controlled solely by physicians but freely available to the public. The term recreational is prejudicial like the term drugs, which fails to distinguish between classic psychedelics and addictive or otherwise harmful drugs, such as heroin.

For example, there is nothing recreational about the experience of awe or of wonder. The term trivializes what can happen. Drugs are taken not only to get high or cure a health condition, but also to take a holiday from the confines of ordinary reality, as in studying a textbook, buying a house, raising children, serving as a professional, and so forth. What if, instead of an ill-conceived and unworkable prohibition, we focused our ingenuity on making the opportunity for good trips part of a normal life?

One pioneer who sketched this possibility was Gordon Wasson, a U.S. banker who made a famous trip to a tribal area of Mexico and experienced a psilocybin mushroom ceremony with a local shaman, and wrote about it in Life magazine (in1957, a few years after Huxleys book). What was his first reaction after the mushroom took effect? I felt awestruck.

Later he co-authored a book, The Road to Eleusis (1978), working with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who synthesized and then, in 1943, discovered the mental effects of LSD, and with a professor of classics named Carl Ruck. They proposed that the ancient ceremony at Eleusis included a psychedelic. (No one knows for sure because the participants were sworn to secrecy.) The point is, the ritual was not counter-cultural but part of the culture, not for everybody, but not considered a challenge to the dominant way of life.

Perhaps our culture will accept the value of psychedelics through demonstrations of their usefulness in alleviating suffering, through medical applications. But it was observers such as Wasson who understood that their most extraordinary value was experiencing awe and that this opportunity could become part of a normal life.

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Psychedelics and Normality - HuffPost

The word psychedelic roughly translates to mind revealing. It is derived from the Greek words psyche and deloun. It is a term used to refer to any phenomena that alters a mans state of consciousness, cognition or perception. The psychedelics we reference in this article are psychedelic drugs/ substances.

A psychedelic drug is a hallucinogenic substance whose primary action is to alter cognition and perception, typically as a serotonin receptor agonist, causing thought and visual/auditory changes and heightened state of consciousness. Major psychedelic drugs include LSD, mescaline (peyotes active ingredient), DMT and hallucinogenic mushrooms.

PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE

Psychedelics tend to qualitatively alter the ordinary conscious experience. Whereas stimulants cause energized feelings and opioids produce a relaxed euphoric state, the psychedelic experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such as trance, meditation, yoga, religious ecstasy, dreaming and even near-death experiences.

THERAPEUTIC BENEFITS

The effects are usually hallucinations, vivid images, intense sounds and often greater self-awareness. Those are the hallmark effects associated with the worlds four most popular psychedelic drugs. Most psychedelic drugs fall into one of the three families of chemical compounds: tryptamines, phenethylamines, or lysergamides.

Psychedelics were wrongly classified with addictive drugs such as crack cocaine, crystal meth etc. It was banned and is only just being considered for previously ignored benefits it might possess. The benefits are below:

TREATING MENTAL DISORDERS/ TRAUMA

Psychedelics have shown promise in the treatment of mood and mental disorders such as self-destructive behavior, substance addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. etc. The experience of a trip can help individuals suffering from traumas to confront their painful pasts, self-destructive behavior and fears without closing up or drawing back into their shells emotionally. The trip often leaves people in a meditative state where they can be more objective about these fears MDMA because of the complex interaction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Theyre not emotionally numb. There are clinical trials for the controlled use of psychedelics in the treatment of these disorders.

HELP WITH ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION

Psychedelics have been suggested as a therapy tool to treat depression, anxiety as well as aid with self-improvement and discovery. In fact, many studies have discovered psychedelics, in one way or another, have the potential to treat depression and anxiety due to their effect on moods. It can change the mood of depressed patients and the effects can last for a long time even when the trip is over.

HEIGHTENED CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS

Brain imaging studies have shown that psychedelics have profound effects on neural activity. Brain function is less constrained while under the influence, which means individuals feel emotions more intensely. And the networks in the brain are far more connected, which allows for a higher state of consciousness and introspection. Ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms can all take users through a wild mind-bending ride that can open up your senses and deepen your connection to the spirit world.

INCREASED CREATIVITY

Research has shown that psychedelics cause a stronger communication between the parts of the brain that are normally disconnected from each other. Scientists reviewing fMRI brain scans of people under the influence discovered that psychedelics can trigger a different connectivity pattern in the brain thats only present in a hallucinogenic state. In this condition, the brains functioning with less constraint and more intercommunication occurs. This is very similar to the observed pattern when the brain comes up with ideas and creative thoughts. Even famous Americans have linked their use of psychedelics to major creative breakthroughs. Steve Jobs, Tim Ferriss, Oliver Sacks to name a few. There are psychedelic films, literature, art works etc. that prove this point.

GET HIGH LITERALLY

When under the influence, the brain is more flexible and allows people to break out of views and rigid mindsets. Participants in a study a few years back reported prolonged positive changes in attitude and mood, feelings that lasted for at least 14 months. In follow-up research, scientists determined that many of the volunteers from both studies had undergone a change in personality, something that is supposed to remain relatively fixed after 30. Participants had become more open-minded, tolerant and interested in fantasy and imagination. In another study, participants said they felt more optimistic, open-minded and intellectually curious. Beyond the studies, there is a small community of people who are using LSD to self-medicate through micro-dosing or consuming tiny portions of the drug. Theres no scientific rigor to their work. But in articles and on Internet message boards, these users claim to have experienced some success in using LSD to improve focus, concentration, memory, and creativity, helped them work harder and smarter.

While these benefits have been found, much more are still being considered. However, scientist warns that the use should be for therapeutic purposes only. Though there is no confirmed addiction to psychedelics, Scientist still caution that its use should be controlled and in micro-doses.

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Reasons to Consider Trying Psychedelics - FoxWeekly

If you go

What: Psychedelic Shine: Extended-State DMT with Dr. Andrew Gallimore and

Breathwork

When: 2 to 9:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Shine Restaurant and Gathering Place, 2027 13th St., Boulder

Cost: $20 to $55 (various packages)

More info: medicinalmindfulness.org/psychedelic-shine

The world may owe psychedelics a little credit.

George Harrison, citing LSD as a necessary experimentation for the Beatles in the '60s, told Rolling Stone, "It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours."

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA molecule structure, was allegedly on LSD when he lightbulbed the idea of the helix structure.

And Steve Jobs kept it no secret that he experimented with LSD in college. Apple's late-cofounder told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that "taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life."

Coming to Boulder from Japan on Sunday, neurobiologist Dr. Andrew Gallimore will discuss how the psychedelic drug, DMT, can be used as a tool for exploring alien worlds.

DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, for the science types) is a molecule naturally produced in various plants, animals and humans. The well-known version of DMT, ayahuasca, is a tropical Amazonian vine, known for its hallucinogenic properties and is often made into a tea, which is experiencing a boom in the United States with ceremonies from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley. (Marc Maron recently said on a "WTF" podcast that DMT is so trendy right now. His guest Susan Sarandon agreed, explaining her trip on ayahuasca.)

Medicinal Mindfulness, a consciousness company in Boulder, is hosting the Psychedelic Shine event that also features live music and breathwork exercises (to help achieve deep healing from anxiety or trauma) from 2 to 9 p.m. Sunday at Shine Restaurant and Gathering Place, 2027 13th St., Boulder.

But back to that mind-altering mecca.

"I see DMT as a tool for accessing alternate realities and establishing stable communication with intelligent beings not of this world, not even of this universe," Gallimore said via email from a conference in Belgium. "The verification that such intelligences exist and that we could communicate with them would, in my opinion, the most profound discovery in the history of mankind."

Dr. Andrew Gallimore explains the brain on DMT

The world you experience, whether during normal waking life, dreaming or at the peak of a DMT trip, is built from information generated by the brain. This world is a model and should not be taken as the definitive absolute reality. The brain has evolved to build a world for you to live in, a world that is a useful model, but "truth" has nothing to do with it. It is a mistake to assume that the normal waking world is the "real thing" and any alternative worlds are mere hallucinations or false perceptions. The waking consensus world is a functional model, a simulacrum in which to survive and reproduce.

When you drift into the dream world at night, your brain builds your world in almost exactly the same way as it does during waking. The only difference is that, during waking, the information used to build the world is modulated by a relatively small amount of information from the senses.

The world is merely constrained by sensory information, but not built from it your world is always built from information generated by your brain. When a psychedelic drug, such as LSD, enters the brain, it interacts with specific receptor proteins in the cortex. This changes the patterns of information generated by the brain and, since your world is built from this information, your world changes. The world shifts from being stable and predicable, to unstable, unpredictable and novel. However, DMT has a much more profound effect on the brain and seems to activate a complete reality switch the information generated by the brain no longer manifests as the world we are familiar with, but an entirely new world of astonishing complexity and strangeness: a hyperdimensional alien reality replete with hyperintelligent entities.

Why DMT, the most common natural hallucinogen in the world, has this special ability to flick the reality switch in this way is open to speculation. I speculate in one of my papers that DMT might have been implanted as a message about the nature of our reality by an advanced intelligence a message that can only be decoded once humans reach a degree of cognitive sophistication to identify and isolate DMT from the plants in which it occurs. But this is highly speculative and not necessarily something I believe.

Gallimore, based in Japan at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, explained that the world we experience whether it's waking life, dreaming or at the peak of a DMT trip is built from information generated by the brain. In short, some psychedelics, such as LSD, interact with receptor proteins in the cortex, changing the patterns of information generated by the brain, he said. DMT, on the other hand, has a much more profound effect on the brain.

"(It) seems to activate a complete reality switch," said Gallimore. "The information generated by the brain no longer manifests as the world we are familiar with, but an entirely new world of astonishing complexity and strangeness: a hyperdimensional alien reality replete with hyperintelligent entities."

Is it a big drug party at Shine on Sunday, then?

No. There will be no consumption of any drugs, Medicinal Mindfulness Executive Director Daniel McQueen said. This is the 10th Psychedelic Shine (the February event at the Boulder Theater gathered 500), and this particular one is "going to be a wild one," said McQueen, a spirituality and life coach.

"It's the most controversial topic we've explored so far and we expect to fill the place," said McQueen. Medicinal Mindfulness will be filming a documentary for Gaia TV, a streaming service based out of Louisville with programing that focuses on mind, body and spirit.

McQueen called the event part "grassroots consciousness experience," and will be speaking about his research proposal. With a master's degree in transpersonal counseling psychology from Naropa, he said in his practice he works with cannabis as a tool to initiate healing transformations.

"I haven't experienced anything more effective in healing," he said. "We work with medicines in an intentional way by going into unconscious behavior to help with revealing, healing and inspiring the person."

McQueen said he has also studied the effects of MDMA (ecstasy, molly) on post-traumatic stress disorder patients in approved research settings.

"Psychedelics allow us to look at something deep within, whether it's a problem or struggle or a pattern we are unconscious about that's not healthy," he said. "A combination of the medicine and solid psychotherapy allows the person to review traumatic material without being re-traumatized by the events."

McQueen explained that psychedelics, which are reported to increase empathy and euphoria in users, can help the patient look at their problems in a compassionate and non-judgemental way.

"Once you come out of the experience after the healing, many patients find it difficult to revert back to living the way they did before because the conscious mind knows it wasn't having a positive impact," he said. "We call it integrating the lessons and understandings of how to move forward with life."

McQueen said, like any therapy, the journey is an ongoing one. He said the practice helped him to heal from his own past trauma and to step into the person he truly is now. Along the way, he said he has seen many other transformations.

If DMT is so extraordinary and a naturally-occurring, nonetheless, psychedelic substance, how can the world play without legal access since it's classified as a Schedule I drug?

"We're seeing a renaissance of psychedelic research since the several decade-long hiatus because of prohibition," said Gallimore. "Now we're seeing an increasing number of research programmes (sic) looking at the mechanisms of psychedelic drug action in the brain, as well as exploring therapeutic uses. However, I don't see any time in the near future when DMT will be freely available for the purpose of communicating with extradimensional intelligences. That's just too far out. But one day perhaps."

Gallimore wouldn't divulge his DMT channel of choice, but said he has been to extra-dimensional realities "a number of times."

Is it like spaceships and purple beings with buggy eyes?

"For me the place is always similar, one of extreme complexity and with a technological ambience, as if this place has been there for countless trillions of years before our universe popped into existence," Gallimore said. "The power and intelligence of the beings that reside therein is overwhelming, the point we might expect an intelligence to reach after trillions of years of evolution."

McQueen and Gallimore said they encounter skeptics many of whom have never taken DMT before.

"To gain a deep understanding of what we do, someone should try it to experience it in context, read about it and learn about the clinical support for what we do," said McQueen.

"It's just a hallucination" is the usual response. Many think it's a recreational substance only for use at parties or raves.

But there's a simple answer for the skeptics.

"I always say the only true convincer is a small glass pipe and somewhere comfortable to lie down for 20 minutes," said Gallimore.

Have a nice trip.

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When Clark Martin tripped on magic mushrooms for the first time, he was flanked by two researchers in a small room at New York University.

An avid sailor, Martin said the first few hours of the experience reminded him of a time he'd been knocked off his boat by a powerful wave and lost track of the vessel.

"It was like falling off the boat in the open ocean, looking back, and the boat is gone. Then the water disappears. Then you disappear," he said.

But the panic was temporary. Over the next few hours, Martin felt overwhelmed by an enduring sense of tranquility and a feeling of oneness with his surroundings.

"The whole 'you' thing just kinda drops out into a more timeless, more formless presence," Martin told Business Insider in January.

That shrinking of the sense of self has been linked with long-lasting shifts in perspective changes that appear to be related to a reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety. That's according to clinical trials of magic mushrooms' active ingredient, psilocybin, in cancer patients at Johns Hopkins and New York University. Martin was one of those patients.

David Nutt, the director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London, told Business Insider in January that a key characteristic of mental illnesses like anxiety, depression, and addiction is overly strengthened connections in some brain circuits specifically those involved in the sense of self.

"In the depressed brain, in the addicted brain, in the obsessed brain, it gets locked into a pattern of thinking or processing that's driven by the frontal, the control center," Nutt said.

Brain scan studies and several clinical trials suggest that psychedelic drugs tamp down on the activity in these circuits, potentially providing relief that may last a few weeks, several months, or even years. For this reason, preliminary research on psychedelics suggests they could one day be used to help treat mental illnesses.

"Psychedelics disrupt that process so people can escape," Nutt said. "At least for the duration of the trip, they can escape about the ruminations about depression or alcohol or obsessions. And then they do not necessarily go back."

Researchers say the drugs' apparent ability to induce powerful, positive changes in personality could offer a way to address the foundations of mental illness, unlike current antidepressant medications that simply treat the symptoms.

"Psychedelic therapy ... offers an opportunity to dig down and get to the heart of the problems that drive long-term mental illness in a much more effective way than our current model, which is take daily medications to mask symptoms," psychiatrist Ben Sessa said at a recent conference in London on the science of psychedelics.

The drugs are not a treatment in and of themselves, Sessa said. Rather, they are a tool that can be used in conjunction with therapy to help people address underlying issues.

"It's using the drugs to enhance that relationship between the therapist and the patient," he said.

Julie Holland, a psychiatrist who is currently serving as the medical monitor for a study of MDMA and psychotherapy in veterans with PTSD, said at the conference that she sees the use of psychedelics alongside therapy as a powerful way to address issues that patients may never deal with on existing anti-depressant medications.

Those medications, Holland said, "are sort of sweeping symptoms under the rug. Psychedelic psychotherapy takes the rug out back and beats the hell out of it and vacuums the floor and puts the rug back down."

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Despite its popularity, recreational drug use remains stigmatised. Thus, it can be difficult to find reliable information, and if you do end up on a bad trip, specialised help and emergency rooms at festivals are not only few and far between, but users might also feel discouraged from seeking help for fear of being reported to the authorities.

The Czech Psychedelic Society is working to change that. Their PsyCare initiative is a cozy and safe tent, where users can get information about drugs, as well as be helped through a bad experience. Qualified volunteers accompany the visitors for hours, making sure they feel comfortable PsyCare is thus an important program of on-site harm reduction. You can support the crowdfunding campaign here.

Anna Azarova: In your experience, is drug consumption common at the festivals you work at? Svatava Bardynov: Yes, definitely. The international experience is that roughly 1% of festivalgoers visit PsyCare tents. But at a festival where we worked last month, we had more than 20 out of 100-300 guests around 20%.

Festivals are required to have on-site paramedics at all time, and many people dont see the point of harm reduction or drug sitting tents. How is your work with PsyCare any different? The biggest difference, Id say, is that we dont judge people for taking drugs: we know that its very common to take them, especially recreationally. When people have a bad trip, they can have difficult psychedelic experiences, and the paramedics cant really help them properly, because, as we see it, their needs are more psychological, and they often see it differently. But we can approach it from this point of view as well.

So if someone is, lets say, on acid and isnt feeling very well, and goes to the ambulance, they really dont know what to do. Sometimes they give them diazepam or some other benzodiazepines. Thats often not very helpful: you can calm people down a bit, but at the same time, the psychological aspect of the trip is prevented from ending on its own terms.

Some people have stayed with us for 6 hours, and our volunteers are with them throughout the whole time.

The way we see it, is that in this state people need a safe environment and education. The volunteers working with us are all experienced with psychedelics; and we all work as psychiatrists or social workers with drug users, so we know both the counselling and the preventative sides of the work. We can really help them to go through the psychedelic experience in comfort and safety to do what they need, be it crying or screaming, or simply just lying down, or even closing their eyes if they want to but often talking, or being close to others is very helpful in itself. We can stay with them and support them for hours some people have stayed with us for 6 hours, and our volunteers are with them throughout the whole time. With psychedelics, it is very important to finish the trip so there is no unresolved residual issues. If you prevent the psychedelic high from resolving on its own, you risk having psychiatric issues, such as flashbacks, in the future. In a way, PsyCare is focusing on prevention to avoid those issues. Paramedics are not prepared to do this work.

What are you snorting tonight? Meow meow? Yeah, sure.

What is it about the festival environment that can trigger a bad trip? Does it happen often? Its difficult to say how often it happens, and there are many factors that can influence the experience, whether it be a bad trip or not. Some people are more sensitive to psychedelics, and of course it also depends on the dose. And, thirdly, your experience: most people who have a bad trip are first-time users.

Festivals can be a risky environment for taking psychedelics, especially if youre inexperienced.

Furthermore, festival settings can be quite overwhelming: you have to remember not to lose your wallet or phone, your friends are coming and going, its chaotic, and the music is often very loud. And of course, there are also other drugs, which visitors combine with the psychedelics the combination with alcohol is especially risky. After the psychedelic experience, you should also be able to take some time off to rest which can be difficult with everything around you being chaotic. I wouldnt say that its all crazy at festivals, but it can be risky, especially if youre inexperienced.

Apart from helping people through their bad trips, is there anything you are currently unable to do, but would want to? The biggest limit in PsyCare work is that the whole process is improvised. When people come to our tent, theyre already under the influence, and it can be hard to make agreements with them, for example that they dont take any other drugs.

Apart from that, it would be great to be able to provide drug testing, but at the moment we cant: it is very expensive, and we dont receive any funding.

Machon: Prohibiting a Little Weed? What Damage It Did!

The Czech Republic has the reputation of being one of the most liberal states in Europe concerning drugs. Is the legislation on psychedelics different from more widespread drugs, such as marijuana or MDMA? Psychedelics are considered to be hard drugs in the Czech Republic, and are illegal. Even though we have a lot of mushrooms growing in every forest, if you pick them and run into a police officer, you can get into a lot of trouble. On the other hand, drug use is very wide-spread in the Czech Republic: we are among the biggest consumers of cannabis, MDMA, and methamphetamine in Europe.

Under this legislation, to what extent is harm reduction work possible? What is also impossible, but should be possible? Its mostly alright we are allowed to do our work. But now it is mainly a question of money: it would be great if we could raise enough to pay at least the coordinators, if not all the volunteers.

It would be great if we could provide drug testing, but (since we work here on voluntary basis) it is a lot of work to write and apply for governmental grants; and the chances of receiving money for this kind of project is incredibly low. Ideally, we would be able raise enough money independently to use for both the testing and the PsyCare projects.

Currently, there are no organisations doing drug tests in the country. There used to be some a couple of years ago, until theNational Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction forbade independent organisations from doing it. Through this organisation, the government could exert pressure on the NGOs so that they could receive no funding at all if they engaged in drug testing so they stopped.

But if we would be able to stay completely independent from the state, we could start offering it again.

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Do You Take Drugs at Festivals? This Initiative is Working on Keeping You Safe - PoliticalCritique.org

Marijuana has been hard to classify, historically. It doesnt fall neatly into any of the other categories, be they stimulants, depressants, opioids, or what-have-you. As a result, its be dropped into a slot all its own. At a recent psychedelics conference in London, New York psychologist Julie Holland suggested a recategorization for cannabis, as a hallucinogen.

Her reasoning, it can cause "dehabituation," or the ability to see an issue from a completely new perspective. According to Holland, "The thing that I'm interested in with cannabis is how it does this thing where everything old is new again." Such an experience is very therapeutic. Consider being able to suddenly see a traumatic memory differently, and to frame it in a healthier way.

Currently, not much is known about marijuanas effect on the brain. Some research shows that chronic use can increase the risk of psychosis. Psychosis however, is defined in a very specific way. Its considered either becoming overly paranoid or experiencing hallucinations.

Marijuanas inducement of dehabituation may be useful for clinical purposes. Getty Images.

Some research suggests that chronic marijuana use doesnt cause psychotic disorders, but may be a catalyst to an episode thats already developing. In other words, its those who suffer from mental illness who gravitate toward chronic marijuana use, perhaps to self-soothe. But theyre also barreling toward an episode.

So how would dehabituation work therapeutically? In this case, a therapist would have a patient use marijuana and then take them on a guided trance, in such a way as to install a healthier viewpoint in them. Could such a thing be done?

Some fear marijuana use alongside psychological treatment could trigger a mood disorder such as anxiety or depression. But a well-regarded study recently upended such claims. It may cause problems in the developing brain however, particularly in those between adolescence and age 25. There are conflicting views. If it were cleared, cannabis therapy would have to be performed only on those over a certain age.

Marijuanas psychoactive ingredient, delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), can cause neural noise. This is experiencing a stream of random, unrelated thoughts, or even a hallucination. The person feels the effect of neurons becoming overactive inside their brain. These electrical disturbances, in marijuanas case, calm down quickly. Over the course of some minutes, the patient enters an altered state, losing touch with reality and then returns. Most psychedelics meanwhile, last for hours.

Chronic marijuana use may be detrimental to those under age 25. Getty Images.

According to Dr. Holland, "In psychiatry it seems that cannabis is grossly underused and understudied." Most marijuana studies have looked at it as a way of alleviating the side effects of say cancer treatment or severe epileptic disorders, offering pain relief, dampening Parkinsons, and mitigating the symptoms of other serious illnesses. Few have looked at it for mental health treatment. Some of those studies do show that it may be helpful for treating PTSD, anxiety, or depression.

Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence shows that psychedelics can be useful in overcoming psychological disorders. Research has found that LSD can help addicts and alcoholics overcome addiction. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was shown to helpcancer patients overcome depression and anxiety.Meanwhile, MDMA has successfully treated PTSD.

As a result of these and other findings, medical research on psychedelics has increased in the last 15 years or so. Even so in the US, marijuana and most hallucinogens are considered schedule 1 narcotics under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Therefore, research on such drugs has been limited. Gaining approval from multiple federal agencies is required, to study either one, which can take years. Even so, interest in using both marijuana and hallucinogens for therapeutic purposes is growing.

Marijuana and psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, may interact differently within the brain, discouraging reclassification. Studies using the brain scans of patients on psychedelics show that their brains make new connections with disparate parts. Different regions may interact with the visual cortex for example, allowing those on acid to smell colors or visualize music. No such equivalent has been witnessed in marijuana users.

Chronic use of marijuana effects the orbitofrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. The first has to do with decision-making and information processing, while the second and third are both part of the brains reward circuit. The amygdala is also the center for our emotions.

Psilocybin mushrooms. Getty Images.

Could neural noise and the experience of dehabituation, no matter how brief, lead to marijuanas reclassification? Probably not. It would be of little value, since theyre both are at the same classification level. Would there be any other advantages in seeing marijuana reclassified?

Not really. What a growing number of researchers, policy makers, and journalists are saying, is that there needs to be a change in the classification of both marijuana and hallucinogens in the US, on the federal level. These drugs arent deadly, have no long-lasting side effects, and arent physically addictive.

A rescheduling would allow for more research, so we can better understand how they affect human health, and if these drugs can be leveraged effectively for clinical purposes, with minimal side effects. Despite obstacles, Holland and colleagues are working on a study which will assess whether or not marijuana helps reduce PTSD symptoms. Veterans have been claiming it does since the Vietnam War era.

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Should We Reclassify Marijuana as a Hallucinogen? - Big Think

Reason.com"The experiences I've had with psychedelic drugs, namely psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD, but particularly MDMA, have been personally transformative for me," says Mike Riggs, a reporter for Reason and the author of a blockbuster new story about how medical and psychiatric researchers are using psychedelics to help their patients. "Not frequent use, but kind of taking these drugs and then having really intense, in-depth, long conversations with intelligent people about how to get better, just how to get better as a person, as a human being, how to be a better neighbor, how to be a better friend."

It was that experience that led Riggs to study groups such as The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and its founder, Rick Doblin. "Doblin is a totally fascinating guy," Riggs tells me in the newest Reason Podcast. "He started MAPS in 1986. His journey of studying and advocating for the use of psychedelic drugs in therapeutic settings began in the late 1960s or early '70s. He was kind of a guy who, for a long time starting when he was in college all the way to the mid-'80s, he was a guy who's like, 'We can get this to where it needs to be in terms of legitimacy simply by talking about it and simply by doing it.' And so in the 1960s and 1970s, there's some underground psychedelic therapy work in which psychiatrists who either participated in the research in the 1950s with LSD continued secretly. And then going into the 1970s when MDMA was kind of rediscovered by this chemist named Sasha Shulgin. MDMA wasn't illegal. It hadn't been banned. So psychiatrists were able to use it as kind of a research chemical."

The tale Riggs tells isn't one of wanton hedonism or Dr. Strange-level trips. Rather, it's one in which doctors and patients are working together against the backdrop of a decades-long war on drugs to figure out new and effective ways to treat PTSD, depression, and other maladies with currently illegal substances. And more amazing, how Doblin and crew are on the verge of changing the way that the government regulates drugs.

Produced by Ian Keyser.

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This is a rush transcriptcheck all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi. I'm Nick Gillespie and this is the Reason podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes, and rate and review us while you're there.

Today, we are talking with Mike Riggs. He's a reporter for Reason. He writes for the magazine, the print magazine. He writes for the website. And he occasionally appears in videos at Reason TV. Mike, thanks so much for talking to us.

Mike Riggs: Yeah. It's my pleasure.

Gillespie: All right. So, you've got a kind of blockbuster story coming out, or out at Reason.com, which is about how after 30, 40 years, 50 years, almost 60 years, psychedelic drugs are being taken seriously by all kinds of medical researchers, psychological researchers, et cetera. Explain, briefly, what the thesis of your story is.

Riggs: The thesis of the story, I would say, is basically that while most people who follow drug policy reform kind of broadly or generally think of it as using ballot initiatives for drugs like marijuana to basically kind of legalize through mobilizing the citizenry that there's an entire alternative path that's being pursued by psychedelic researchers. People who are studying the medical applications for LSD, psilocybine, MDMA, and some other drugs like that. Their path, they have never tried the referendum approach. They've never tried getting legislatures to pass laws to decriminalize or legalize these drugs. The trajectory they chose was instead to go through the FDA. Let's jumped through all the hoops. Let's dot all the I's, cross all the T's, and that's all the trials necessary to have the FDA approve these substances as pharmaceutical drugs. The benefit of this is that it basically removes democratic politics from the drug approval process-

Gillespie: And democratic, small d there, right? I mean, you don't have to-

Riggs: Yeah, yeah.

Gillespie: You don't have to get 50% plus one or two thirds or anything like that. What you are doing is you're going to the gate keeper institution that says, "Here are good drugs that pharmaceutical companies and doctors will create, and doctors will prescribe. You'll pay a co-pay, et cetera." As opposed to basically the model for medical marijuana and recreational marijuana, increasingly.

Riggs: Yeah. And so, the plus side is you don't have to worry about a legislature sabotaging this or having some kind of campaign finance war where it's who can spend the most on advertising. The downside is that it happens much more slowly. California passed it's first medical marijuana law in 1996. We're just shy of 20 years later and marijuana, is across the country, revolutionized. Meanwhile, the process that psychedelic researchers have gone through, started in about 1986. It's now 2017. None of these drugs are yet legal.

Gillespie: What is the status? I mean, the drugs in America are put, since the Nixon years, they're put on different schedules including a schedule one drug, which it's got a high potential for abuse and no known medical use, right?

Riggs: Yeah, that's true.

Gillespie: Where is LSD, psilocybin, Ecstasy or MDMA, and the like? Because what's interesting about these and LSD is obviously, or not obviously, but probably the most famous, but that drug was legal until 1966. Ecstasy was legal until 1986. Are any of these drugs, are they in something other than schedule one?

Riggs: No, they're all in schedule one. But the one exception is ketamine, which I think is on schedule two or schedule three. And that's only because it was used for a very long time as a surgical anesthetic before anybody realized that it had dissociative properties, which dissociation kind of fits under the umbrella or psychedelic side effects, though it's not really a psychedelic drug. But everything else is in schedule one.

Gillespie: Walk us through. What is LSD good for besides just tripping your balls out?

Riggs: The argument, and this argument was made a long time ago, Aldous Huxley in "Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell," wrote about LSD. Albert Hoffman, who was the chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals who studied LSD. Basically, going back to the '40s and '50s and '60s, the argument has been that psychedelic drugs, and the first one that anybody really tried was the LSD, kind of stops you from being who you are for long enough for you to change who you are. As an adjunct to psychotherapy, if you're working with someone who's seeing a lot of people taking LSD and worked with a lot of people who've taken LSD, this is not actually as scary as it sounds. If you're somebody who has a substance use disorder or you're a binge eater or you're depressed or you're anxious or you're-

Gillespie: And an alcoholic, right?

Riggs: Whatever you want to say.

Gillespie: Yeah.

Riggs: Yeah. That was the first one, that was the big one was alcoholics, was the idea that there was something underneath the alcoholism, that there was some sort of psychological issue that if you could just sort of pause a person and say, "Let's start from scratch." Again, there's really no other drug or really any other medical therapy or modality that says, "Let's just make you somebody else."

Gillespie: Right.

Riggs: That's kind of what the psychedelic model is.

Gillespie: And then, what about psilocybin and ecstasy? Why are medical researchers or and what's interesting, you went to the MAPS conference. Rick Doblin, the kind of grand poobah of MAPS. These are not people who are, they're not silly people, they're not superficial people. They're talking about how do individuals use drugs like we all use other training regimens or diet or whatever, meditation, courses in education to better ourselves or to understand ourselves better. That's what these people are about. What about psilocybin and ecstasy? What do those do for people in a therapeutic setting?Riggs: If we can just leave the chemistry aside a little bit because it's kind of complicated for both drugs, but at a basic level, psilocybin and MDMA are both being used in patient populations that are experiencing anxiety related to a traumatic experience. For a lot of the studies with psilocybin, they've been used in patient populations that either have a terminal illness or a life threatening illness. In a lot of cases, that's cancer of some sort.

And then for MDMA, it's a lot of the clinical trials involve people who have PTSD as a result of military service or sexual abuse. The basic idea's that while on these substances the patient is just able to confront difficult concepts, difficult memories, without re-experiencing the panic and anxiety and lockdown that they feel when they re-visit those memories when their sober. This is one of the idea of triggering for people with PTSD is that whenever they're confronted by something that resembles this really traumatic experience, you hear about people coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq who hear a car backfire, a door slammed really loudly, and suddenly they're back in Fallujah.

MDMA allows them to sort of re-visit these really hard memories and talk about them and think about them and create a demarcation, maybe a wall, a compartment, where that memory, they're able to disconnect it from this sort of unintentional feedback loop of emotions where every time that memory is evoked, they then have to experience panic or anxiety or fear. And so they can consider the memory, they can be reminded of that experience without feeling all this other stuff.

Gillespie: Well, talk a little bit about MAPS and Rick Doblin.

Riggs: Yeah, so Doblin is a totally fascinating guy. He started MAPS in 1986. His journey of studying and advocating for the use of psychedelic drugs in therapeutic settings began in the late 1960s or early '70s. He was kind of a guy who, for a long time starting when he was in college all the way to the mid-'80s, he was a guy who's like, "We can get this to where it needs to be in terms of legitimacy simply by talking about it and simply by doing it." And so in the 1960s and 1970s, there's some underground psychedelic therapy work in which psychiatrists who either participated in the research in the 1950s with LSD continued secretly. And then going into the 1970s when MDMA was kind of re-discovered by this chemist named Sasha Shulgin. MDMA wasn't illegal. It hadn't been banned. So psychiatrists were able to use it as kind of a research chemical.

Doblin had met all these people. He'd heard great stories about therapists working with these drugs. He said, "This should be enough. We've got all these M.D.s, a lot of them affiliated with academic institutions. A lot of them have been in practice for a long time. They have great medical records. They haven't been sued out of existence. They haven't had their licenses revoked. This should be enough to get the government to recognize these as therapeutic drugs."

As we know, most every therapeutic drug that also happens to make people feel good, MDMA worked it's way into the recreational community the same way that LSD had and other drugs like that. And so, when the DEA decided to crack down on MDMA in the 1980s, the evidence that all these psychiatrists put forward and that Doblin helped organize and deliver to Washington D.C. really didn't move the needle. The DEA engaged in years long battle with all these therapists throughout the 1980s and by the late 1980s had won the battle. And so, these drugs were added to schedule one.

Gillespie: One of the things that is fascinating about ecstasy or MDMA, excuse me, is and I say this as somebody, I was in college from '81 to '85, ecstasy was free and legal, or it wasn't free, but it was very cheap and it was legal. But it was seen as an anti-social drug because you would have such intense feelings and emotions. You would just stay in a room with yourself and your girlfriend or boyfriend and touch fingerprints. You wouldn't even go outside because you didn't want to. You were exploring yourself. It was a very introspective drug. Once it was banned, it became the ultimate party drug and the rave drug and then everybody ... One of the reasons it was banned is because it turned people dangerously anti-social. After it was banned, it became the rave drug of choice. Kind of fascinating.

How do the phrases set and setting fit into the broader kind of psychedelic research that you've been covering?

Riggs: Yeah. Set and setting is probably the most significant contribution from Timothy Leary to the contemporary movement. Leary, in the 1960s, was a big advocate of LSD. He worked at Harvard and lost his job because he was giving drugs to undergrads. He coined this idea of set and setting, which is set is mindset. So how you're thinking about a drug or what you're going to do on the drug before you do it. And then setting is the physical setting that you're in. Psychedelic therapists still use this language today. Mindset, you want to prepare a patient for the experience that they're going to have when they're on one of these drugs. And then setting is you want to make sure that they feel safe and comfortable and that there's nothing in their immediate physical environment that's going to upset them.

It's also terminology that's used by recreational users. I mean, there are all kinds of forums on the internet from Bluelight to Reddit where users will say to other users, "Hey. I was thinking about using this psychedelic drug at event X, Y, or Z." And then there will be a conversation about whether or not that's a good set or setting based on how the drug affects the mind. It's very interesting. There's a sort of an element of planning and preparation for psychedelic drugs you generally don't see with things like marijuana or cocaine just because the potential for a really bad experience if you're not thinking ahead and you're not being prepared is so much more real for LSD or psilocybin than it is for marijuana.

Gillespie: Well, then, it's also the trip lasts longer. It's like planning a golf outing or a long horseback ride or something where with cocaine you're not talking about minutes. You're talking about, an LSD trip could last anywhere from 4 to 12 to 24 hours.

Riggs: Yeah. LSD lasts an incredibly long time. MDMA is on the shorter side. It's maybe two hours, two and a half hours. Psilocybin's somewhere between. But yeah, these drugs all last much longer than marijuana and certainly much longer than cocaine, which peaks really quickly and then you hit the trough pretty quickly after that.

Gillespie: What did these guys do to win the FDA over to at least considering rescheduling things or to take seriously the idea that these drugs that have been associated for decades now with hippies and youth and out of control kinds, all of that kind of stuff? How did they get the FDAs attention to say, "Okay. You know what? We want to start thinking about this more seriously."

Riggs: Part of it was sheer, dumb luck. In the late 1980s, the FDA created a new unit within itself that was tasked with expediting the investigational new drug application process, which is where a researcher says, "Hey. I have chemical X or Y. I think it could be useful in this setting. I'd like to move my research from animals to humans." Prior to the late 1980s, there were a lot of those applications would come into the FDA and a lot of them have just been put on hold. This group called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff started in the late 1980s to bring some sort of entrepreneurial elements into the FDA, started going through all these old applications and realized that overwhelming amount of applications that had been put on hold were for psychedelic drugs.

Around the time that this division was created, Rick Doblin, again the founder and president of MAPS, met a psychiatrist named Charles Grobe, who still practices today and is a medical school professor in California. Together, they said, "Hey. Let's submit a proposal for FDA to kind of get this process started." So that's what they did. Grobe put together an investigational new drug application with a limited trial for cancer patients suffering anxiety. He and Doblin and some other psychedelic researchers, mostly chemists, flew to Washington D.C. for meetings with all the alphabet agencies, DEA, the drugs [czar's 00:16:09] office, the FDA, Health and Human Services, and basically made their case.

They said, "There's a lot of data out there that wasn't necessarily conducted or gathered through the clinical trial process, but that was gathered by responsible investigators who documented what they were doing showing that we can use this safely in humans. We think we should be allowed to proceed especially if this ends up being a kind of revolutionary new drug for psychiatric disorders." The FDA, after all these meetings with DEA and drug czar's office, the feeling was, "Hey. If this is as tightly controlled, if this process is as by the book as we would request of any pharmaceutical giant, you can go ahead and do it."

So Grobe and Doblin got permission to do so. They raised the money from philanthropists to conduct these studies. That's something else worth noting, that almost none of the psychedelic research is tied to the pharmaceutical industry in any way because all these drugs are off patent. They're all-

Gillespie: Even though all of them, I mean, came out of the, for lack of better term, the legitimate pharmaceutical industry. Right?

Riggs: Yeah, no, that's true. MDMA, LSD were both developed by pharmaceutical companies in the 20th century. Merck developed MDMA right at the turn of the 20th century as a sort of intermediate drug for something else. They never used it in humans. It was never of interest to their clinical team. LSD was kind of the same. But, yeah. The only one that's really got any pharmaceutical company involvement is ketamine, again, because it's not a schedule one, because it was a surgical anesthesia. But, so they just said, "Hey. Let's raise the money. Let's put together these trials."

They kind of bootstrapped it for a little while. I got to talk to a woman at MAPS who defected, for lack of a better word, from Novartis, which is a pharmaceutical giant to go work at MAPS. She talks about how for over a decade, nearly two decades, MAPS did all of their paperwork like an Excel spreadsheet and by hand. They were sort of documented all this way using photocopies and stuff like that. She kind of upgraded them to the more modern pharmaceutical style electronic and digital databases and that kind of thing. But they just tried to do what any other drug researcher working with a budget 100 times larger than their own would do.

Gillespie: Is there interest in pharmaceutical companies to start purveying newer versions, newer and better versions, time release versions? All of that kind of stuff of these drugs.

Riggs: For ketamine, there is right now, again because they know it's legal right now. If you're able to come up with a newer or better version of ketamine, you're time window for getting that approved is much shorter than for any of these other drugs.

I think that once one of these psychedelic drugs is moved from schedule one to schedule two or schedule three, something like MDMA, either you will see some pharmaceutical interest particularly when you get what's called post-market data in. A drug is moved to prescription status. And then for years afterward, you're able to collect a totally different type of data because you've gone from your clinical trial sample size, which will be a couple hundred people, to five years after it gets the pharmaceutical status you could have had 10 thousand people use the drugs, you could have had 50 thousand.

And so once we know what is most desirable about MDMA in this clinical setting, in this psychiatric setting, and what effects are least desirable, what effects kind of occasionally complicate or sabotage improvement, I suspect that's when you see the pharmaceutical companies saying they would look at that data and say, "Okay. Psychiatrists say that this is the best part of using this drug. This is not a great part. Well, let's make a drug that only has these ideal qualities and none of the bad ones."

Gillespie: Timothy Leary gave out psilocybin in his Good Friday experiments, along with Richard Alpert later, Ram Dass, at Harvard. That was the proximate cause for them getting bounced from Harvard. Leary obviously popularized LSD. He was a big promoter of pot use and stuff. He's kind of the villain, isn't he, in people who do psychedelic research? Talk a little bit about Timothy Leary's kind of ambivalent role or ambiguous role in all of this.

Riggs: He's sort of the guy without whom I'm not sure any of this would be possible, but because of him it hasn't already happened, if that makes sense. If you just look at his credentials, he got his PhD in psychology at UCLA and then he went to Harvard. Had he done everything by the book, had he not fallen in love with LSD, which LSD changed Timothy Leary's life. I mean, it transformed him as a human being and as a thinker. Had it not done all that. Had it remained purely academic for him, I suspect that this research would have never stopped and that maybe some of these drugs would be legal already for medical uses. But at the same time, I don't know if you ever get the national awareness that LSD developed without him.

He's a cautionary tale for contemporary researchers. They recognize that the credentials were necessary, that Leary being at Harvard, for a while, was very helpful, which is why so many of the researchers today, they are at Stanford. They're at UCLA. They're at Imperial College London. They're at Johns Hopkins University. They're at NYU. They're at Brown. I mean, they're just, they're all over the place. Being in those positions of authority and power and respect are really important.

The tricky thing is sort of always maintaining this wall, this firewall between the personal affection that most of these researchers, I won't say all of them because I haven't spoken to all of them, but many of the researchers recognize on a personal level that these drugs are very beneficial for most of the people who use them, even people who use them outside of a psychiatric setting. But in terms of what they say publicly, what they say in their research, they are very consistent and disciplined about saying, "Regardless of what we know anecdotally about these drugs, what we know is wise to recommend is that they only be used under supervision after they've been approved by the FDA." That's because of Leary.

Gillespie: One of the many of the fascinating aspects of your story, you discuss your own use, particularly with ecstasy, I guess. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How does that factor into this broader story of psychedelics kind of on the march for psychological well being and kind of realization of human potential for you?

Riggs: Yeah. It's funny. I kind of waffled a little bit on whether or not to include the personal stuff in my story just because as I was researching this one I was reading Albert Hoffman's memoir, "LSD: My Problem Child." One of the things he talks about this explosion of awareness of LSD in the 1960s and then an increase in recreational use. He blames, I don't know if blame's the right word, but he says that this coincides with a lot of writing about LSD in the popular press. There were a couple of memoirs that came out. Word leaked that Cary Grant, the actor, had used LSD and that it transformed him and made him a better actor.

I felt kind of self conscious about that, as well, because the experiences I've had with psychedelic drugs, namely psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD, but particularly MDMA, have been personally transformative for me. I think most of the people who have known me for many years would say that I'm a different person now than I was four or five years ago. Part of that is because I wasn't leading a particularly sustainable life five or six years ago. But part of it for me was that the transition to a more healthful way of being taking better care of my body, trying to be more diligent about building good habits was kind of aided by the use of psychedelic drugs. Not frequent use, but kind of taking these drugs and then having really intense, in depth, long conversations with intelligent people about how to get better, just how to get better as a person, as a human being, how to be a better neighbor, how to be a better friend. That kind of stuff.

The reason that I was ambivalent to include it in the story is that I only know my own story best, I know it's a good one. And I know lots of people who also have positive stories. But there are people who have bad ones. There are people who have problem use with MDMA. It does have an amphetamine component, which activated dopamine receptors and that makes it a drug that you kind of want to take a lot. So there's addiction issues with MDMA. I've met people who used mushrooms and felt really terrible throughout the entire experience and don't ever want to use them again. LSD is kind of, I mean, that is a real commitment to self exploration. The trip lasts a long time. It distorts your perception of reality in a way that nothing else does.

For me, they've been really important and really amazing and really life-affirming. That's just not true for everyone. I tried to, this is also why I find this whole story interesting is this idea of a lot of these psychedelic researchers, they either had this experience themselves or they know someone who has had this experience. And so, what they want to do is kind of Sherpa these drugs from where they are now to a place where if somebody has a bad reaction on them, they're having it in the presence of a trained clinician who can make sure that they don't hurt themselves. As much as I believe in my body, my choice, and not incarcerating people for what they do to their own bodies, I do see a lot to commend in the movement to make sure that these drugs are used in safe settings.

Gillespie: You're writing at Reason is really a lot about human modification or kind of self-directed evolution almost. How do people, they have an idea of what they want to be like and then they pursue that. Talk a bit about, and you yourself over the past few years, you went on a particularly strict diet and workout regimen, you transformed the way that you look. You had always been what used to be called a husky person, now you're kind of-

Riggs: That's true. Yeah.

Gillespie: Rock hard and all that. What is your interest, and for libertarians in particular, what is the interest in this kind of motivational change of what you look like or what you think like?

Riggs: There are lots of sort of just these moments of awareness that happened as I was nearing the age of 30 in which I was kind of like, "Okay. This is a thing I cannot do forever." One of those was smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. I was like, "I cannot do this forever." My father had a double bypass when he was 52 and had been a lifelong smoker. And so I was just kind of all these things were happening. I was like, "Okay. I can't do this forever." And then the other thing that I realized and that has become a fundamental, philosophical belief for me is that the world has very little interest in how long I live or how well I live.

As someone who believes very much in the phenomenon of spontaneous order and that you don't need a central organizer or planner to make sure that life happens. There's nothing in the theory of spontaneous order that says, "The world will not continuously offer you stuff that will kill you." For me, that has been at various times cigarettes. It's been alcohol. It's been food. It's been inactivity. It's been mindless forms of entertainment. There's no drug I've tried, maybe with the exception of nicotine, that I find as addictive as an Xbox game console.

For me, this was kind of just a realization of things. One, that there was no one in the world who was going to keep me from living a unfortunately short life if I so choose and that some part of me, maybe it's genetic, maybe it's just ingrained through repetition, really preferred a lot of behaviors that were going to shorten my lifespan. I don't know how I feel about living forever or even exceeding what's considered a long, healthy natural life. But I don't like the idea of someone saying, "He died young." And so that was that constellation of sentiments is kind of what led me to change things.

Gillespie: Talk a bit about your kind of career arc because I believe, and if I'm not mistaken, you first came to Reason as an intern. What year would that have been?

Riggs: That was 2008.

Gillespie: Yeah. You were there and then you went on to various other journalism outfits. You worked for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Give your interest in kind of self ownership in terms of better living through chemistry in many ways and a wakening sense of exercise and diet and things like that, your interests in policy. What's the grand narrative that Mike Riggs is building for himself?

Riggs: That's tricky. I mean, the initial grand narrative. I was an intern at Reason in 2008. I'd been a student journalist in college and turned at a daily newspaper before I left college. But the narrative for a long time was that good art comes from suffering and that the best way to suffer is to kind of self abuse. I was very much a fan of Hunter Thompson and in pretty much any other heavy drinking, big meal eating, writer from the 20th century. I just thought that that was the best way to get stories, was to do crazy stuff, to get ripped or hammered, to always write with a cigarette between my lips. A lot of stuff like that. That was kind of-

Gillespie: This is, if I can say this is William Blake by way of Jim Morrison what the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Something along those lines.

Riggs: Yeah. I mean, basically, I found that way of seeing art and writing and creation very compelling. I struggled for a very long time with the idea of how can you have a happy, healthy, normal life? How can you be someone who gets eight hours of sleep a day, and is a good family man, and doesn't wake up hungover with bloodshot eyes? How can you be all those things and also someone who makes compelling writing? It wasn't so much that I came to believe that this was not true, as it was that I just found it utterly exhausting.

I went from Reason as an intern to the Washington City paper where my personal brand was kind of the insufferable libertine. I also wrote as a libertarian, but it was mostly [illiteracy 00:33:15]. I was mostly like, "Hey, isn't it fun to be reckless all the time?" And then I went to the Daily Caller, which had not yet launched, but I helped Tucker Carlson launch that and kind of developed a reputation while working there. It's very conservative today, but at the time it was so new that I was able to be someone who was also kind of reckless and wild. That was my "personal brand."

I think eventually I just found it exhausting and also it kind of got on my employers nerves after a while. That kind of eventually led to a revisiting and this desire to tell good stories, tell interesting stories, tell true stories, tell hopeful stories, while also leading a life that was not slowly killing me.

Gillespie: You also worked at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, FAMM. How did that play into your interests or your commitments?

Riggs: Yeah. I joined FAMM from the Atlantic. I felt just one step too far removed from what I have basically, the thing I've written about consistently at every journalism job I've ever had is drug policy. I was feeling kind of mildly frustrated. As a young blogger, I was in the habit of saying things like, "Well, if we just did this, we will fix these problems. If we just did this." After a while I kind of wanted to get a little closer and just get a sense of, "Well, what's keeping us from just doing this? What are the obstacles to just doing that?"

So I went to work for Families Against Mandatory Minimums as the director of communications there and got a front row seat to why it is so difficult to change, probably any law, but definitely the laws around drug sentencing for federal drug offenders. That was just an incredible wake up call. I mean, for one thing, this idea that kind of permeates most drug policy writing is we tend to look at somebody who's been incarcerated due to a drug offense and we say, "Hey, they've got kids. Hey, they've never been convicted of a violent crime before. Hey, they're neighbors don't seem to have a problem with them. Why are we putting them in prison for a long time? This doesn't make sense. They're not really bad people that you want to put in prison for a long time."

Working at FAMM, I came to learn pretty deeply and intimately just how little a defendant character or personality or beliefs or circumstances has to do with how long they're sentenced to prison. I mean, which is one of the biggest objections to mandatory minimums is that when you go, one size fits all. When you say, "X quantity of drugs gets you X sentence regardless of whatever mitigating circumstances you may be able to present to the court." That's why one of the reasons why they're so heinous. I mean, you treat the kingpin who's ordered the deaths of dozens of people and the dad who owns a pizza shop and grows a bunch of weed in his backyard to supplement his income, you look at both of them and say, "Your sentence is based on the quantity of drugs you have."

Gillespie: Are you optimistic about drug policy reform in America?

Riggs: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, at the end of the Obama administration, I would have said yes. I would have said that he did not do enough and that the justice department did not do enough and that I was very frustrated by the opportunities that a seemingly reformed, friendly Congress missed because of partisan bickering. But that I was, for the most part, optimistic that things could only get better. With Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, I don't want to say that all hope is lost, but it is a reminder that whatever policy changes are implemented by way of executive order as opposed to signed, or passed and signed legislation, they are transitory. They don't have to be. Sometimes they aren't. But, for the most part, they're transitory.

I am wondering, I do wonder, what has to change? What has to happen? What does Congress have to look like? Who has to sit in the White House? For those two branches of government to re-visit the cascade of terrible drug laws that they've passed since, well going back to the beginning of the 20th century. But what are the ideal circumstances for that because a republican majority in Congress that seemed to be pro criminal justice reform with a democratic president who was pro criminal justice reform, whatever the allure of some great, bi-partisan bargain is to pundits was not there for them. Now that you have a unified Congress, and a republican President, a republican Congress, whatever allure there is to being able to take full responsibility for implementing some brilliant criminal justice reform. That also doesn't seem to be very compelling.

I do wonder. My optimism is blunted by my curiosity, I guess you could say, about what has to happen for any of this to actually become real.

Gillespie: What is the next story you're working on, Mike?

Riggs: I've got a couple of different ones that I'm thinking about. I will be meeting with my excellent editor, Peter Seederman, to go over them. But I'm looking at a piece about reciprocity, which is the idea that any drug that the European Union approves we should just automatically allow Americans to use as well because it's Europe not Rwanda and so they've got a pretty good drug approval process.

I'm also doing some exploration of the ultimate drug gray market, which is the research chemical market. Most familiar to Americans because of the K2/spice/bath salts epidemic. All of those things were created by academic chemists at universities here in the United States who then published their formulas. And then those things kind of took on a life of their own that became a global phenomenon. That is a piece I'm looking into now is kind of tracing how is that phenomenon born? How does K2 or spice or bath salts, how does that come into existence? Why did it come into existence? And what is the best solution for having people use safer drugs?

Gillespie: I can remember a couple of years ago when K2 or spice was a big thing. There was a great, I forget the newspaper that ran it, but it was a headline that said, "Fake pot as bad as the real thing." It just seemed to kind of sum up a lot of the thinking that goes into the drug war.

Mike Riggs, reporter for Reason. Thank you so much for talking to the Reason podcast. Any last, any message to your fans?

Riggs: Yeah. Be safe.

Gillespie: All right. All right.

Riggs: Be safe. That's always by words of wisdom.

Gillespie: Those are true words of wisdom. Thank you so much, Mike Riggs.

This is the Reason podcast. I am Nick Gillespie for Reason. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there.

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Countdown To (Legalized) Ecstasy! Rick Doblin, MAPS, & the Psychedelic Renaissance [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

More common are studies of the use of psychedelics to treat abuse or addiction to other substances. A 2012 meta-analysis of studies exploring LSDs potential to treat alcoholism looked at six randomized controlled trials. They included more than 500 patients, with follow-up of three to 12 months. The interventions usually involved one dose of LSD, given in a supervised setting, coupled with therapy. Alcohol use and misuse were significantly reduced in the LSD group for six months; differences seemed to disappear by one year. Similar studies using psilocybin have also shown promising results.

There was an open label study meaning theres no placebo or attempt to mask treatment information of three doses of psilocybin as part of a tobacco cessation program. It found that 12 of 15 participants (who had smoked an average of more than 30 years) remained abstinent six months after the program began and 16 weeks after their last treatment. Thats a much higher rate than seen in traditional programs to help people quit smoking.

Other uses might exist as well. Researchers examined the potential for MDMA in the treatment of chronic and treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. At two months after therapy, more than 80 percent of those in the treatment group saw a clinical improvement versus only 25 percent of those in the placebo group. These researchers later followed up with participants in the study, and found that the beneficial effects lasted for at least four years, even with no further treatment with psychedelics. Similar studies have also seen improvements in symptom scores.

As with marijuana, though, studies like these are the exception, not the rule. It is very, very difficult to do research on psychedelic compounds because they, like pot, are classified as Schedule I controlled substances, meaning they have a very high potential for misuse and no accepted uses. Schedule II drugs also have a high potential for abuse, but are considered to have potential benefits. These include OxyContin, fentanyl, Percocet and even opium.

To engage in research in Schedule I drugs, scientists have to get approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration. To obtain a license, research labs must have inspections to prove that they are capable of storing the drugs and protecting them from misuse. In Britain, the added costs of licensing and security can cost a lab about 5,000 a year, or nearly $6,500. Unfortunately, the costs in the United States are not as well documented.

Because of this, much of the research on these drugs is old; a lot of it took place before the United States and other countries categorized these drugs in the 1960s. What research has occurred since has often taken place in countries that are more permissive in their experiments.

Given the potential dangers inherent in these drugs, its important to stress that research would need to be closely monitored. Although the drugs are relatively safe compared with substances like heroin or cocaine, and arent nearly as addicting, they still pose psychological and physical risks.

People with a family or personal history of psychotic or psychiatric disorders should be particularly wary, and perhaps be excluded from trials. Research requires safety monitoring, careful planning and significant support throughout. We need to watch carefully for adverse outcomes, both expected and unexpected. We need to make sure protocols are transparent and reproducible.

We also need to acknowledge that we need more research before anyone attempts to use these drugs as medicine. Theyre typically coupled with professional therapy in studies, and we still arent sure there are benefits.

But it may be time to time to reconsider our current classification of controlled substances. Clearly we must continue to be vigilant about whether drugs pose physical harm to patients. But we could assess drugs using additional measurements, including the potential for dependence; social costs through damaged family and social life; and financial costs through health care, social care and the need for police involvement.

Using these metrics, its hard to argue that alcohol and tobacco should be legal for adults while marijuana and psychedelics should be considered so dangerous theyre hard to study. Likewise, opioids are considered widely acceptable in practice, yet appear to do far more harm.

With the potential to help curb more serious addictions and ease the symptoms of mental illnesses, it seems odd to continue to make it nearly impossible to research the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

Read more:

Can Psychedelics Be Therapy? Allow Research to Find Out - New York Times

Cannabis is currently not classified or typically thought of as a psychedelic, but some mental health professionals say they would like to change that. It has been suggested that psychedelics such as mushrooms could also treat depression, PTSD, alcoholism, and so on. And psychiatrists also now believe that cannabis has some psychedelic properties that could be beneficial in treating various mental disorders. While this is certainly not news to anyone privy to the vast benefits of cannabis medicine, the study put out by these mental health professionals raises some interesting points.

While attending a recent conference in Londonregarding the science of psychedelics, New York psychiatrist Julie Holland suggested that cannabis medicine could be linked to de-habituation an effect that is experienced by psychedelic drug users. This term is used by some mental health professionals to describe the experience a user might have on mushrooms in which they experience life in a child-like state of wonder, and that things that were once mundane and uninteresting end up becoming enthralling and engaging. According to Holland, some cannabis medicine might cause users to feel the same type of effect, which she believes could be a useful tool in treating mental health issues.

The thing that Im interested in with cannabis is how it does this thing where everything old is new again. That can be very helpful in psychiatry, Holland said in an article appearing in Business Insider.

Holland is currently involved in a Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) study with the goal of determining whether cannabis is an effective treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD.

As with every other much-needed study on cannabis, of course the absurd stronghold of the federal government continually refusing to reclassify the medicine away from its current schedule one designation halts any would-be progress that such research would discover. Despite that absurdity, it is great to see mental health professionals such as Holland being open and vocal about her desire to possibly treat disorders with something other than potentially harmful pharmaceuticals. We need more doctors, nurses, science and medical educators and mental health professionals like Holland to have the courage to come forward and say enough is enough: Cannabis is indeed effective medicine, whether the powers that be like that fact or not.

What are your thoughts on the possible psychedelic properties of cannabis medicine? Do you think there is any merit to these statements? Let us know in the comments.

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Psychiatrists Say Cannabis Medicine Has Psychedelic Properties - The Marijuana Times