By Sam Wong

Microdosing, the practice of regularly taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs to improve mood and performance, has been taking off over the past few years. But the fact that these drugs are illegal makes it difficult to research their effects and possible health consequences. There are no rigorous clinical trials to see whether microdosing works (see Microdosers say tiny hits of LSD make your work and life better).

Instead, all we have are anecdotes from people like Janet Lai Chang, a digital marketer based in San Francisco. She will present her experience of microdosing at the Quantified Self conference in Amsterdam from 17to 18 June.

I started in February 2016. I wanted to understand how my brain works and how it might work differently with the influence of psilocybin [the active ingredient in magic mushrooms].

I had been struggling with a lot of social anxiety. It was really preventing me from advancing professionally. I was invited to give a talk at Harvard University and a TedX talk in California. I didnt feel ready. I felt all this anxiety. I procrastinated until the last minute and then didnt do it. It was one of my biggest regrets.

At first I was taking 0.2 grams of mushrooms every day, with a day or two off at the weekend. In August, Ihad a month off. From October to April, it was a few times a week.

I was less anxious, less depressed, more open, more extroverted. I was more present in the moment. Its harder to get into the flow of the focused solo work that Im normally really good at. But its good for the social aspect.

I have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder left over from childhood abuse. Pretty much the only other negative thing was being more aware of negative emotions I had. I have a repressed anger response, according to my therapist. When I was microdosing I felt like I could really feel it; I felt the anger.

Occasionally, but Ive stopped the experiment. I dont want to be dependent on a substance to enable me to achieve certain desirable states of productivity.

I think everyone would benefit fromhaving at least one kind of experience with psychedelics. Thedosage really depends on the individual and what theyre looking toget out of it.

This article appeared in print under the headline Leading the high life

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What it's like to take psychedelics in small doses at breakfast - New Scientist

book By Kimberly Winston | June 13, 2017

BERKELEY, Calif. (RNS) In his new book, Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, award-winning author and former religion reporter Don Lattinlooks at how therapy sessions with psychedelic drugsare helping heal the psychological and spiritual woes of cancer patients, alcoholics, war veterans and the seriously depressed.

As Lattin details in the book, there are sometimes positive spiritual and religious changes for those who take these drugs under clinical supervision a key component of the treatment.During sessions to treat addictive behavior, post-traumatic stress disorderand depression, some patients report everything from a greater oneness with the universe to visions of Jesus on the cross.

Lattin, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,is about to embark on a summer book tour that will take him from the Telluride Mushroom Festival in the Rocky Mountains to a psychedelic consciousness convention in London. He sat down with RNS to discuss the changing attitudes toward these drugs psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca (a psychoactive tea brewed from two Amazonian plants), MDMA (ecstasy) and more and how they can bring religious and spiritual insight to some.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Members of an ayahuasca church taking psychedelic tea as a sacrament in Brazil. Photo courtesy ofTom Hill

Well, the first difference between recreational use and the clinical trials now underway into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is a difference of legality. Taking these drugs for fun is illegal, not to mention dangerous because when you buy psychedelics on the street you are never sure what you are getting. The clinical trials are legal approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The purity and the dose are clearly established. Many people in my book are trying to overcome some serious psychological problem, or they are people in ayahuasca churches who are seriously trying to commune with God. Both are in it for the long term and will tell you this was not always a fun or easy experience. But it was cathartic. It was healing. This is not the way most people take psychedelics many thousands of people take MDMA (ecstasy) every weekend and most have a good time. The difference here is the intention healing or insight and that those who take these medicines or sacraments are being guided through the experience and get help to integrate whatever insights they have into their real lives.

Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy by Don Lattin. Image courtesy of Synergetic Press

There is some truth to that critique. Someone in my book calls the psychedelic experience gratuitous grace. In a recreational drug context, it is too easy, and it becomes too easy to just dismiss it as some weird experience. But people in some of the clinical trials I write about say what they experienced in a couple of sessions with a therapist and psychedelics was like 10years of normal therapy. It can take less time. But psychedelics are not a magic bullet. They can show you another way to be. They can be an opening, that is all. The goal of a lot of this work, whether it is therapeutic or spiritual, is to help people make some lasting changes in their lives. They (researchers and spiritual guides) are trying to take psychedelics more seriously than one does at a party or a concert or a festival. Even though it can take one to a mystical place, the goal is to bring all this back down to earth.

You can have a mystical experience through lots of different means. You can have it by fasting a very accepted practice in almost every religious tradition. What happens when you fast? Things happen in your brain, a biochemical reaction. If you go on a hardcore meditation retreat with sensory deprivation, you are having a biochemical reaction in your brain. So whether it is through fasting or meditation or drugs or plant medicines, I believe what is happening in your brain is the same an alteration of consciousness through brain chemistry. It can happen through prayer and through meditation, and it can happen with psychedelic drugs. That is why the experiences are so similar. But the rubber hits the road with what you do with the experience. Does it make you a better person, kinder, more aware? (Religion scholar and mystic) Huston Smith used to say of psychedelics, It is not about altered states, it is about altered traits.

Don Lattin, author of Changing Our Minds, discusses the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs at Books Inc. in Berkeley, Calif. RNS photo by Kimberly Winston

There are actual churches in the U.S. that can legally have psychedelic communion with ayahuasca under a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, but they must be affiliated with one of two Brazilian sects. Outside of those brands of organized religion, I dont see much destigmatization. Religious leaders, like a lot of other people, have a very black-and-white attitude toward drugs. Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins is doing a study of religious professionals with clergy burnout to see if these substances could revive their interest in their calling through a mystical experience that might hit the reset button for them. But he has found it very hard to find clergy who want to volunteer. That said, I think psychedelics are slowly are being destigmatized by the universities and medical centers across the country that are sponsoring research. Peoples minds are changing about these substances when used in the proper context. The media coverage of the clinical trials has been very positive. At the same time, I think it is important to say these drugs are not for everyone. They are probably not for most people. But there are a large number of people these medicines can help.

Faithful Viewer logo. Religion News Service graphic by T.J. Thomson

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She covers atheism and freethought for RNS.

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'Changing Our Minds' explores psychedelic drugs and spiritual healing - Religion News Service

Today, research on the effects of psychedelics is one of the most exciting fields of psychology. The US Food and Drug Administration recently approved a clinical trial to test if the psychedelic compound in ecstasy can treat PTSD; psilocybin, the key ingredient in magic mushrooms is now considered a promising treatment for depression; and studies suggest that LSD could help combat alcoholism. Theres still plenty of red tape and skepticism, but it feels like scientists are well on their way to establishing the health benefits of these powerful drugs.

It feels terribly cutting edge, but such research is, in fact, old. Before LSD became a party drug, it was used to treat conditions like alcoholism, PTSD, and depression. And, as a new documentary on Cary Grant explores, the actor was one of the first to experience LSD in a psychiatric setting.

According to the film, Becoming Cary Grant, the actor first tried LSD at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills in 1958 and took the drug 100 times over the following three years. He was effusive about the results, as Vanity Fair reports, telling Look magazine in 1959, at last, I am close to happiness. He viewed the treatment as a way of resolving childhood trauma and coming to terms with the ends of difficult marriages; after starting his LSD treatment, Grant realized, all my life, Ive been going around in a fog.

Though LSD had been used as treatment for a few years previously, Grants enthusiasm helped popularize the then-little-known drug. In total, from 1950-1965, around 40,000 patients were prescribed LSD to treat a variety of conditions. The drug was little known at first but gradually increased in popularity before US drug safety regulations began to restrict its use in 1962. In 1966, possession of the drug was made illegal in the US.

The backlash against LSDpartly attributed to negative experiences of the drug, or bad trips, and partly to its association with the political counterculture of the timewas closely linked not just to its recreational use, but also the lack of rigor around psychological research at the time. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who was studying the psychological effects of psychedelics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was not allowed to continue working at the university in 1963, in part due to his sloppy research. Leary was accused of giving psychedelics to undergraduates without medical supervision and, after leaving academia, went on to promote psychedelics with the phrase, Turn on, tune in, drop out. Then-president Richard Nixon reportedly called him the most dangerous man in America.

But though early research in LSD as therapy has a decidedly mixed reputation, Robin Carhart-Harris, head of Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, says that much of the work undertaken in the 1950s and 60s was actually quite strong.

Its easy for us to be derogatory about the old research but they were asking all the questions were asking now, he says, Perhaps the methods werent as tight as they are today but, even so, there was a fair amount of good work.

Today, he says researchers are more privileged. Brain imaging has been instrumental in navigating the effects of psychedelics and there are now standard rating scales for measuring depression, for example, as well as careful placebo control procedures and a greater awareness of biases.

Carhart-Harris says he and his colleagues occasionally read through older literature. It can feel reassuring, he says, to see that the effects theyre finding today were also noted decades ago.

In a way were re-inventing the wheel, but were doing it with the knowledge and methods we have now, he says. You can think of the old literature as being quite extensive and rich but also a little loose and quite poetic.

Herbert Kleber, professor of psychiatry and substance-abuse researcher at Columbia University, notes that the smaller doses used today are far safer than in previous decades. While working on narcotics addiction at the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (now called the Federal Medical Center) in 1965, Kleber conducted research into LSDs potential as a treatment treatment for addiction.

He did not get far in his research, and though he believed there were early signs that the drug could be useful for breaking addiction cycles, he also saw plenty of bad trips. I remember there was a painting on the wall and under the influence of LSD, one patient [in the study] saw the painting come off the wall and chase him around the room, he says. Another one tried to break down a door because he was convinced his wife was on the other side and we were keeping her from him. Kleber was interested in testing the drug at a lower dose, he says, but LSD was banned soon after.

Despite the downsides, researchers were uncovering the potential value of LSD. Carhart-Harris points out that prominent figures such as senator Robert F. Kennedy were supportive of the research, and went to bat for LSD in Washington, DC. If they [LSD experiments] were worthwhile six months ago, why arent they worthwhile now? Kennedy asked the FDA in 1966, after research on the drug was banned. Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that [LSD] can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.

But research into the medical benefits of psychedelics stalled in the late 1960s. [Cultural attitudes] are very powerful and they stick, says Carhart-Harris. Were the victims of that, and so are patients to some extentvictims of this stigma and misinformation. As a result, there are no approved medicinal uses for LSD, but both Kleber and Carhart-Harris agree theres evidence the research should continue. If you have a compound that seems to be beneficial, works in a novel way, and does something different than currently available treatments, then you could really question the ethics of withholding funding, says Carhart-Harris.

The good news is that, thanks in part to tighter research methods, government agencies are starting to loosen up restrictions on studying psychedelics. Psychologists are now picking up a decades old experiment. Were both catching up and advancing, adds Carhart-Harris.

But theres no guarantee that the trend will hold. I dont want to be too naive and say, its just not going to happen this time because weve learnt from the mistakes of the past, says Carhart-Harris. After all, he adds, in politics, anything can happen.

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Cary Grant was one of the first to benefit from LSD therapy - Quartz

Human hallucinogen use precedes written history, and has shaped many lives and cultures throughout time. These drugs can be quite different from each other, however, and are commonly grouped into three major categories: psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants.

Psychedelics

Examples: cannabis (marijuana), methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstacy), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin mushrooms

The category psychedelic drug is a blanket term for many chemical compounds with a variety of effects. The three sub-groups of psychedelics are cannabinoids, empathogens (also known as entactogens), and serotonergics. The underlying similarities between all three types of psychedelic drugs are that they produce changes in consciousness that are generally unfamiliar, while other classes of drugs such as stimulants or depressants give rise to familiar, if greatly magnified, states of mind.

Cannabinoid drugs, which work as antagonists of cannabinoid receptors in the brain, are named after the prototypical drug in this class, cannabis (also known as marijuana), which contains the psychoactive compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Effects of cannabinoids vary between dosages, users, and the types and amounts of particular compounds (different cannabis strains contain differing ratios of many different cannabinoid compounds). Users commonly report mild euphoria, senses of well-being, increased awareness of external sensations, increased hunger, and disruption of linear memory processes.

Empathogens are a class of psychedelics that release serotonin in the brain and derive their name from one of their major effects: increased feelings of empathy. The best-known drug in this class is MDMA, although several similar compounds exist as well. Users generally report heightened feelings of love, openness, euphoria, and overall enhancement of sensory experiences.

Serotonergic drugs are so named due to their activity as agonists of a specific serotonin receptor (5-HT2A) in the brain. Drugs in this class include LSD, DMT, psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms), and phenethylamines such as mescaline and 2C-B. Users of these drugs experience intense, fundamental alterations of perception, including synesthesia, visual and auditory hallucinations, and unusual thought patterns or emotional responses.

Dissociatives

Examples: ibogaine, phencyclidine (PCP), ketamine, dextromethorphan (DXM)

Dissociative hallucinogens, including ibogaine, PCP, ketamine, and DXM (at dosages many times larger than its use as a cough suppressant), work as antagonists of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the brain. While many of these drugs produce perceptual alterations similar to the psychedelic drugs listed above, the distinguishing features of dissociatives are feelings of depersonalization, or being disconnected from ones body. Derealization, or the sensation that ones surrounding environment is somehow not real, is also a characteristic of these drugs.

Deliriants

Examples: atropine, scopolamine (hyoscine), diphenhydramine (benadryl)

Deliriants are a class of psychoactive drug that generally block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from binding to receptors in the brain and central nervous system. As recreational drugs, deliriants produce vivid and generally very unpleasant hallucinations in addition to potentially dangerous side-effects. While users of psychedelics and dissociatives often report having euphoric, spiritual experiences, users of deliriants almost universally report unpleasant effects and have no desire to use these drugs again.

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The Three Types of Hallucinogens: Psychedelics ...

This story is part of When the Drugs Hit, a Motherboard journey into the science, politics, and culture of today's psychedelic renaissance. Follow along here.

After a flurry of scientific research in the 1950s and 60s, all human psychedelic drug trials in the US were effectively banned with the passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act in 1970. This moratorium on psychedelic research lasted until psychiatrist Rick Strassman's DMT trials at the University of New Mexico opened the door for new psychedelic research in 1990.

Since then, a number of studies have looked at the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelic substances. And in almost all of these trials, including Strassman's landmark study, the drugs have been supplied by a single individual: Dave Nichols.

As a chemist at Purdue University, Nicholas was in the business of supplying America's psychedelic research compounds from 1969 until he retired in 2012. He is perhaps best known for synthesizing the MDMA, DMT, LSD and psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in "magic mushrooms") that have been used in the new wave of psychedelic research. But most of Nichols' career was spent researching psychedelic analogs, molecules which have similar structures or effects to their well-known controlled relatives.

Despite his academic pedigree, Nichols has come under fire for fueling a "designer drug" boom that resulted in obscure research chemicals making their way from the lab to the street and resulted in a few deaths along the way. But this is merely an unfortunate side effect of his researchanyone with access to chemistry journals and a decent lab set up would be able to reproduce his research. Nichols has also strongly condemned a number of designer drugs, particularly synthetic cannabinoids like spice, as dangerous for consumption.

In many ways, Nichols is like a contemporary Sasha Shulgin, the infamous chemist who co-authored TIHKAL and PIHKAL , which are essentially psychedelic cookbooks interwoven with a love story (indeed, Nichols was actually the first to synthesize a handful of chemicals described in PIHKAL). But whereas Shulgin was getting high on his own supply in his backyard lab, Nichols isn't trying to spark a psychedelic awakening and was certainly not tripping in his Purdue laboratory.

"There was nobody else really doing what I was doing so it was fun and I didn't have to worry about getting scooped."

Still, life ain't easy for a psychedelic scientist, so I caught up with Nichols to learn about how he became one of the largest producers of psychedelic research chemicals in the US, and what that experience was like at a time when there was zero tolerance for psychedelic research on humans.

Motherboard: How did you get started making psychedelic drugs? David Nichols: I started in this field in 1969 as a graduate student, doing my PhD on mescaline analogs, basically. Then I got an academic position at Purdue and that allowed me to pursue whatever I wanted to follow, so I just kept working on psychotomimetics. I was lucky to get a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and that grant continued for about 29 years. There was nobody else really doing what I was doing so it was fun and I didn't have to worry about getting scooped by someone else working in the same area because we were doing a pretty novel thing.

Was it hard getting approval to make Schedule I psychedelics? Not really. When I made the MDMA it was before it was illegal so there wasn't a problem with that. And with Rick Strassman's DMT, I had a schedule I license for DMT already. Same thing was true with the psilocybin I made for Johns Hopkins. You're allowed to make a Schedule I substance if it's in collaboration with someone else who has a Schedule I license so that wasn't that difficult. I had to get the Schedule I license in the beginning, which required getting everything certified, but it wasn't as difficult as people might imagine.

The DEA never pushed back against your research? I had a license for 15 different Schedule I substances. At one point they started getting really pushy. Do you have an active protocol? Do you need all these? We'd like to get some of them out of your lab if you don't really need these 15. How often do you use them?

So I had to write a letter saying we don't do the kind of research you're used to. We don't fit in a boilerplate. We do studies where we modify a receptor and mutate different amino acids in the receptor. We have a whole library of compounds we want to put in there and see what did that mutation do to the activity of those structures. We never know which compound we might need on any given day.

The DEA aren't scientists, they're basically policemen. At a certain point they started sending protocols over to the FDA, which is totally inappropriate. But anyway they'd ask if this [is] research worth doing. That's an inappropriate question. If you're qualified, you have an academic appointment, you're respected, and you've got a CV, the DEA shouldn't be asking whether this research should be done. Anyway, if they got feedback saying the project was worth doing, then they'd come and investigate your facilities. They wanted to see what kind of safe you were going to keep substances in, where the safe's located. They're basically concerned with diversion of controlled substances. They want to make sure if you get it, no one else can get it.

What was your security like for these substances you were making? My office had a two-inch solid oak door that had a key lock that would've been difficult to pick. Inside my office I had a big, heavy steel fireproof file cabinet. In addition to the regular pushlocks, it had a hasp welded on top with another place welded on the bottom so that a one-inch steel bar could fit in front of the drawers with a padlock on the top. To get in that you'd have to be able to break through a solid oak door, then pick or cut off a substantial padlock, and then use a crowbar or something to break open the file cabinet.

Read more: A Beginner's Guide to Tripping on Acid

How long did it take you to get your license? That can take six months to two years depending on how you appear to the DEA. It's supposed to be a non-political process, but I've known people who've taken two years because the DEA said they lost their inspection forms after doing an inspection. You don't know if these things are willful are not. I've always had the impression that the DEA doesn't appreciate having to do Schedule I. They think these things are so dangerous, why should we be working with them. But that's just my own impression.

This was back in the 70s. Do you think studying psychedelic drugs has gotten easier? I think the DEA has gotten more stringent. When I first started the process seemed more transparent and I didn't have any trouble getting a license. I've talked to many people over the years who've really had a difficult time. Also the DEA didn't used to send the protocols to the FDA to get a ruling as to whether they were worth doing or not. It's like the DEA saying, "we don't trust you, we need to get an outside check to make sure you're a legitimate guy." They're real suspicious.

Outside of your lab, who else was synthesizing psychedelics? I don't know that there were that many people just making things. We generally made them because we had a certain hypothesis. So when we were doing the MDMA work, we were trying to develop a molecule that had MDMA-like activity but which was completely new so we wouldn't have to worry about the stigma of it being a research chemical or drug of abuse.

That was what drove a lot of the MDMA research. We basically were trying to understand the features of the receptor that were necessary for activity. It was a pretty complex program designed to understand how the molecules were interacting with biological targets. We didn't just make compounds like Sasha Shulgin, just to see what we could make and take. He was an alchemist, not a scientist. We had specific hypotheses, we made the molecules with specific ideas of what we wanted to figure out. I don't know anyone else who was really doing that with respect to psychedelics.

"I think it's because of the internet that these things have just proliferated."

A lot of your work was focused on psychedelic analogs. In recent years, the DEA has really been cracking down on analogs. Why do you think this is? Well, there are a lot more analogs out there than people are aware of now. In fact, a lot of the things I've made are now called designer drugs and are out on the street. But they don't have to cause any damage, they don't even have to be problematic. All the DEA has to do is suspect that they have abuse potential, then all of a sudden say we better control this. They don't wait for something to show up as a problem, they try to think of everything possible.

I think they can probably wait and see until these things are showing up on the street in a significant amount. They can quickly schedule with emergency scheduling. But they claim it makes their life easier if they have these things scheduled already, but it does shut off legitimate research. If these things have medical potential, nobody is going to look at them. So then that means they'll only be examined in the context of being drugs of abuse. So any potential benefit will never be studied.

A lot of the chemicals made in your lab have shown up on the street. How did it feel to know people were recreationally taking these obscure compounds you created? I was surprised. Some of the things we made were not that simple of a synthesis to carry out. So when these things showed up, I thought, "wow, someone's gone to a lot of trouble to make these." We published a lot of these things years ago, but they just started showing up in the last few years.

I think it's because of the internet that these things have just proliferated. Now people can go on sites like Erowid and read about these different substances and say, "oh, that sounds interesting," and there's people that sell the stuff so they can go buy a sample. That didn't used to happen. They used to have to go to a library and do some actual research.

Were pharmaceutical companies showing any interest in psychedelic analogs when you were working in the lab? Drug companies have stayed away from this field entirely. It was the case in their research that if they found a molecule that activated the serotonin 2A receptor, which is the target for psychedelics, it was a kiss of death for that molecule right off the bat. I think the drug industry has been very circumspect about things hitting targets that could be drugs of abuse. I don't really think that the drug industry as a whole sees these things as any sort of profit source for them now or in the future.

In terms of the paradigm, using psilocybin once or twice a year maybe, isn't the model that the pharmaceutical industry follows. Most of the research chemicals are like that. They're analogs of psychedelics. But pharmaceutical companies are looking for a pill you take everyday for the rest of your life. That's how they make their money.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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America's Trippiest Chemist: Making Psychedelics 'Was Fun' - Motherboard

This story is part of When the Drugs Hit, a Motherboard journey into the science, politics, and culture of today's psychedelic renaissance. Follow along here.

In 1988, Rick Strassman set out to do what seemed to be impossible: convince the US government to let him give people illegal drugs.

But not just any illegal substances. Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, wanted to dose subjects with one of the most potent psychedelics ever discovered: dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a neurotransmitter and tryptamine molecule that naturally occurs in the plant and animal kingdoms, including in humans. Strassman hoped to investigate the physiological and psychological effects of DMT, the so-called "spirit molecule," but knew that getting approval to do this research was a long shot.

Like pretty much every other psychedelic drug known at the time, DMT had been classified as a Schedule I substance under the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. This meant that there was no recognized medical use for the substances and effectively placed a moratorium on all psychedelic research using human subjects. Studying and administering substances gets progressively easier as you move from Schedule I to Schedule V. Substances in Schedule I, including heroin, are the only ones, in fact, that require a special license to study.

But these obstacles didn't deter Strassman. After 19 months of arduous paperwork and a seemingly interminable argument with the Drug Enforcement Administration, in early 1990 he dosed his first participant with DMT. It was the first psychedelic study using humans in two decades.

"I figured as long as the DEA weren't saying no, it remained a potential yes," Strassman told me recently. "I never really gave up."

"'I don't care if you guys are smoking mushrooms back there, just keep out of the paper, get your grants and keep your cards close to your chest.'"

In the nearly three decades since Strassman's groundbreaking DMT study, little has changed for researchers hoping to study the effects of psychedelic compounds on humans. Although psychedelic research is experiencing a sort of renaissance, getting approval to study these substances is more difficult than ever.

At the same time, recent work done on psychedelics has shown potential in treating everything from post-traumatic stress in veterans to promoting creative problem solving and treating addictions.

If the federal decision to classify these substances as having no medical value was premature, then understanding the benefits (and dangers) of psychedelics in a rigorous and empirical way has been hindered by bureaucracy and authorities policing research laboratories. I reached out to Strassman and contemporary clinicians to learn more about their experiences and the difficulties faced by psychedelic researchers today. Just how hard was itis itto get the greenlight from Uncle Sam?

That's getting ahead. For most psychedelic scientists, problems begin at the local level.

*

To do science on humans with illegal substances, researches are required to submit a proposal to an institutional review board, which is supposed to ensure the experiment is both ethical and safe. Given the taboo surrounding psychedelics and universities' tendency to avoid controversy, even the safest and most well-designed studies may flounder on the shores of a dean's idea of what constitutes respectable science.

Fortunately for Strassman, he said the University of New Mexico was somewhat "off the beaten path," and that his psychedelic study was much less likely to draw significant attention than if it had been conducted at an Ivy League institution. Moreover, Strassman said neither his department chair nor the university president really cared what he was up to in his lab, so long as he "kept his nose clean."

Read More: America's Trippiest Chemist Says Making Psychedelics 'Was Fun'

"I spoke with the chairman of the research unit and he said, 'I don't care if you guys are smoking mushrooms back there, just keep out of the paper, get your grants and keep your cards close to your chest,'" Strassman remembered.

After gaining approval from the university, Strassman then had to make his pitch at the federal level, specifically the DEA and the Food and Drug Administration. The DEA was responsible for doling out Schedule I licenses, which authorized licensees to possess these illicit substances. The FDA, for its part, would give Strassman approval for what's known as an IND, or Investigative New Drug trial, which would allow him to administer the Schedule I substance to human subjects.

There was only one problem: The DEA wanted to see the FDA's IND license before granting its Schedule I license, and the FDA, in turn, wanted to see that Strassman was approved to use the Schedule I substance before granting the IND. It was a catch-22.

But as Strassman began to facilitate unprecedented degrees of contact between these two federal agencies, he realized he had a far more pressing problem to deal with: how to procure the DMT for the trials in the first place. In order to get his Schedule I license from the DEA, he would have to show that the DMT was pure, and that he would only have access to a limited and necessary amount of the substance.

Eventually Strassman linked up with Dave Nichols, a chemist at Purdue University with DEA approval to synthesize 15 Schedule I psychedelics and 20 years of experience doing just that. After finding a hookup for the DMT, Strassman returned to the DEA and started filling out the paperwork.

Several months later, Strassman had his Schedule I license and IND. It had been over a year-and-a-half of starts, stops, and red tape. But he was finally set to begin his research.

DMT crystals. Photo: Psychonaught/Wikimedia Commons

When Strassman was setting out, he had to rely on trial and error in his dealings with the feds, who were less than receptive to the idea of allowing Schedule I substances to be opened for research purposes.

The first paper Strassman wrote after receiving approval for his study was about how he managed to even make this happena kind of blueprint for getting approval to do psychedelic science. Although he was criticized for revealing hard-won, "sensitive" information about government legal processes, his blueprint was effective. According to Strassman, it helped guide researchers at the University of Arizona, University of Miami, and Johns Hopkins University set up their own studies on psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in "magic mushrooms") and ibogaine in the late 90s and early 2000s.

But overregulation continues to crush psychedelic science. Even with Strassman's blueprint and a number of precedents in place, getting approval to study psychedelics is still a steep challenge.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), for example, has been pushing the limits of psychedelic research for decades now, yet its trials on MDMA and PTSD keep stalling out in a maze of bureaucratic and legal obstacles.

MAPS hopes to begin the third and final FDA study this year, and to see MDMA be a FDA-approved prescription medicine by 2021. But the phase 3 study is also the most difficult since it requires special parameters for the trials, which include large cohorts of study participants as well as using chemicals produced under a Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regime. GMPs are mostly quality control measures, but since the MDMA used in the first two phases was already 99 percent pure, this means that GMP is mostly a regulatory requirement that places copious paperwork and protocols on the researchers for the duration of the trial phase.

"Rescheduling would release a lot of these barriers that exist only for Schedule I substances."

This also means that MAPS will have to find a new source for its MDMA since the drug must be manufactured under GMP conditions. Even though pharma companies like Sigma-Aldrich have websites set up where you can order small quantities of every imaginable psychedelic, these won't meet the phase 3 GMP requirements. Natalie Ginsberg, a MAPS policy and advocacy manager, said so far just finding a manufacturer for the stuff has been hard enough.

Then there's the money problem. Historically, most psychedelic studies have been funded by the National Institute of Drug Addiction (NIDA). Although NIDA's pockets run deep, the agency is particular about the kind of drug research it will fundthat is to say, only research that investigates the abuse potential of substances, not their therapeutic potential. As such, organizations like MAPS have had to seek private funding for studies, which, all told, will cost millions of dollars. The GMP MDMA alone will cost nearly $500,000 for 1.5 kilos.

In this respect, Strassman realizes he was lucky. For his DMT trials, he had secured two competitive grants to support him during the year-and-a-half it took to get approval just to begin his research. Without this grant money, Strassman said it's unlikely he would've had the time or energy to pursue this research project.

Ultimately, he and Ginsberg see the difficulties faced by researchers as a consequence of the War on Drugs and its scheduling regime.

"All these extra burdens put on researchers like waiting for a Schedule I license, finding the right location, finding a manufacturer of the drug, add months or years to the process," said Ginsberg. "People who do psychedelic research aren't just any old researchersthey have to be committed and willing to fight through the regulations and have patience to wait for months on end for approval. Rescheduling would release a lot of these barriers that exist only for Schedule I substances."

Read More: How to Legally Buy a Kilo of Pure MDMA

Strassman likewise said he'd like to see psychedelic substances rescheduled, though he realizes researchers are caught between a rock and a hard place. To keep psychedelics as Schedule I substances makes researching them prohibitively hard, but to call for reclassifying them as Schedule II substances is unlikely to succeed either.

Schedule II substances, including stimulants like cocaine and Adderall, can be prescribed by everyone from dentists to veterinarians. As Strassman sees it, trying to argue that something like LSD should be as easily accessible as Adderall is a non-starter. Instead, he advocates for a new, intermediate schedule between I and II, that would make the substances easier to study, but not absurdly easy for a layperson to obtain.

"I think that category of clinical reality ought to be combined with a legal category of the scheduling," Strassman said. "People wouldn't be able to possess and give these drugs without special training and without certification and supervision, but if you keep them kind of behind the lock and key of Schedule I, you're also not going to be able to give them to people who might benefit."

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Stop Policing Psychedelic Science - Motherboard

At the end of a dark earthen trail in the Peruvian Amazon stands a round structure with a thatched roof that appears to glow from within. In the Temple of the Way of Light, as it is known, indigenous healers called Onanya teach visitors about the therapeutic uses of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew that's been used by locals for thousands of years.

Across the Atlantic, researchers in an ornate blue-tiled hospital in Barcelona, Spain are studying ayahuasca's physical effects on the brain.

The teams in those two disparate locations approach the study of the psychedelic drug very differently, but researchers at each one are coming to similar conclusions about the way ayahuasca affects the mind.

Among volunteers who take ayahuasca for studies, scientists have documented a rise in certain key traits that mirror those of experienced meditators . These changes include increases in openness, optimism, and a particularly powerful ability known as decentering.

Amanda Feilding, the founder and director of the UK-based nonprofit Beckley Foundation , collaborates with scientists around the world to understand how psychedelic drugs affect the brain. Feilding describes decentering as "the ability to objectively observe one's thoughts and feelings without associating them with identity."

Decentering might sound esoteric, but it's one of the key aims of mindful meditation and is also a goal of successful depression treatments in some cases. In volunteers who've taken ayahuasca as part of Beckley's research, decentering has been linked with higher scores on questionnaires designed to measure well-being and happiness and lower scores on measurements of depressive or anxious thoughts and symptoms of grief.

"It's interesting because even though our research out of Peru is based on surveys, while in Barcelona it's based on more traditional scientific research , our results out of both places are showing an increase in these traits," Feilding says, adding, "It seems patients are finally able to liberate themselves from the emotional pain they've long been suffering from. To calmly observe one's thoughts and feelings in an objective way in order to become less judgmental and more self-accepting."

Since the findings out of Peru are based on surveys, they can't prove that ayahuasca caused the reduction in symptoms of depression and grief - only that there's a connection between the two. But in Spain, as part of a collaboration between Beckley and Sant Pau hospital, neurologist Jordi Riba is looking at the brain activity in depressed volunteers who are given ayahuasca. His findings indicate that in addition to people simply reporting that they feel more decentered and less depressed after taking ayahuasca, there is a corresponding neurological change in their brain activity.

One small study of 17 depressed volunteers who took ayahuasca saw a decrease in activity in areas of the brain that tend to be overactive in conditions like depression and anxiety. And a new study of regular ayahuasca users suggests a physical shrinking in these parts of the brain, though that work has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

These findings are bolstered by other research on the potential therapeautic effects of psychedelics. Studies out of New York University and Johns Hopkins suggest that the psychedelic drug psilocybin - the ingredient in magic mushrooms - elicits similar effects among depressed people.

"With the psilocybin, you get an appreciation - it's out of time - of well-being, of simply being alive and a witness to life and to everything and to the mystery itself," Clark Martin, a patient who participated in one of the Johns Hopkins trials, previously told Business Insider of his experience.

David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London, has been working with Feilding, and says the brains of people with depression or addiction get locked into patterns of thinking driven by the brain's control center.

"Psychedelics disrupt that process so people can escape," he says.

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Meditation and the psychedelic drug ayahuasca seem to change the brain in surprisingly similar ways - Businessinsider India

A growing number of women are swapping the therapists sofa for hallucinogenic medicine. But does science back up the benefits? And whats it really like to get high for therapeutic purposes? Health journalist Charlotte Haigh experiences the highly controversial world of psychedelic psychiatry first-hand to find out

Im sitting in the humid blackness of a wooden hall in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon. The only sound is the clicking of a shamans beads as he pours out shot glasses of a murky brown liquid. The substance is ayahuasca, a traditional hallucinogenic medicine made of up of two plants: chacruna, which contains a substance called DMT generating visions, and the ayahuasca vine itself, which allows DMT to work in the brain. Its a Monday night and it suddenly strikes me how far away I am away from my regular Monday evening routine scanning the latest news on my phone in my flat in the London suburbs after a long day meeting deadlines as a freelance health journalist.

I look around at the 20 other people in the room, mostly European professional men and women in their late twenties to mid-forties. Were all here on an organised retreat, to participate in four ayahuasca ceremonies in an attempt to sort out deep-rooted emotional or psychological problems, or simply work out our next steps in life. Were hoping this strange brew, used by Peruvian shamans for centuries, might just give us the answers were struggling to find at home. In fact, studies are now suggesting psychedelics may help a range of mental health conditions, which is why Im here.

The strongest evidence is currently for addiction, then depression and anxiety, followed by moderate evidence for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), says Professor David Nutt, a psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist I speak to for advice, and who has pioneered the research. In a study we published in The Lancet, one dose of psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, produced lasting changes in people with chronic depression who hadnt responded to medicines or to therapy. Half of the participants were still well after six months. Its not a magic bullet, but its very promising.

Psychedelics are considered relatively safe in comparison to alcohol, but experts strongly advise against trying them in a recreational or non-clinical setting, as you may have a disturbing experience. As psychedelics loosen your brains usual patterns, defences start to dissolve, says Dr Rucker, a psychiatrist who researches the effects of psychedelics. That can be hard, because its the things you dont want to deal with that you keep locked away. Thats why you need a safe, supportive environment and someone you trust like a therapist to help you work through difficult things. Anyone with a family history of mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, and anyone taking drugs, including SSRI antidepressants, should avoid them completely.

As I gulp down the thick, sickly drink and lie down on my assigned mattress, I wonder what will come next. As a health journalist, Ive done my research and spoken to many people whove taken it. I know its considered safe, but Im nervous about what my subconscious mind might show me under the influence. Im not a natural risk-taker so its certainly a step outside my comfort zone, but it may help me work through some relationship issues Ive been struggling to process this past year. Thankfully, this is not like taking drugs in a nightclub. It feels like a safe environment and there are experienced assistants and shamans on hand to offer support. We are sitting in a large, circular wooden building and mattresses are arranged around the outside of the room. For a few days before, I follow the special cleansing diet no alcohol, sugar, caffeine, pork or fatty foods and as requested by the organisers, I have set an intention in my mind of what I want to gain from the journey.

After half an hour of drinking the liquid, a wave of nausea surges through me. The medicine is infamous for causing vomiting. I grab the plastic bowl next to the mattress but the feeling passes and then Im plunged into a vision, like a hyper-vivid dream. Im on a rain-whipped beach, trailed by three shivering, sad-eyed children. I recognise at once that theyre the babies I lost in successive miscarriages while trying for a longed-for child with my then-husband, who Im now in the process of divorcing. I cuddle them but theyre still cold, so I put them all into a sack and search for a sanctuary. When I open the sack again, theres just a pile of ashes. Im distraught. And then a huge sun bursts the clouds open and I see a woman in the sky, smiling and cradling the children. Im crying, but then Im overwhelmed with a sudden sense of peace.

Later, when I come to process my journey, as ayahuasca trips are termed, I know Ive finally reached a point Ive been struggling to get to for months: Ive accepted my losses. In my trip, I came to a forest, where I saw a vibrant woman with a group of people, laughing and watering plants. It was me. It seemed to suggest that I still have a role in society even if Im never a mother which is something Id been grappling with.

Following my four-hour trip, I feel newly calm and positive about my future; a sense that something deep has shifted. Six months on, that feeling hasnt left me. Your brain is like a snow globe capable of being shaken up. Psychedelics may help get you out of an entrenched perspective, Dr Rucker tells me later. Biologically, all psychedelics, including ayahuasca, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD, stimulate the 2a serotonin receptors, found most commonly in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, the area that processes and coordinates complex information to help you think and get perspectives on different situations. This area also helps you define your sense of self and the world, so that can become distorted when something goes wrong here.

Brain scans show that in depression, the prefrontal cortex is overactive, as people become trapped by repetitive negative thinking. By triggering the type 2A serotonin receptor, the psychedelic encourages the brain to broaden its scope and come up with other ways of seeing things. Under the influence of a psychedelic, the overactive bit of the prefrontal cortex quietens down, and parts of the brain that werent talking to each other start communicating, adds Dr Rucker.

This cross wiring may be one of the reasons why synaesthesia where your senses get mixed up is a common experience with psychedelics (on my first ayahuasca journey, I associated yellow colours with an intense raspberry flavour).

But while the brains biological response to the drug is key, the trip itself also plays an important role. The more spiritual or personal the experience, the more likely people are to have long-term benefits, says Dr Rucker. Theres no guarantee youll get a big breakthrough and not everyone has powerful visions, but for some it can be profound. Sarah, a 32-year-old solicitor, spent two weeks in Peru at an ayahuasca retreat, drinking the medicine every other night to help her overcome grief following her sisters death. Id become scared of losing people I cared about and was avoiding relationships, she says. On my journey, I saw a coffin and the lid started to open. I was terrified, but when I looked inside I saw galaxies of moons and stars. Ive never been religious, however I had a new understanding that nothing is truly final, and that life can be beautiful again. Somehow, it moved me on.

Ayahuasca can be challenging, though. It made me look at things Id been avoiding in real life, says Susannah, 26, a social-media manager from London. I went to a retreat in the Netherlands because I was having relationship problems and wanted to work through them. Id never taken drugs in my life. A friend had found ayahuasca helpful with body image issues and I thought it might be what I needed. In one journey, I saw myself on a battlefield trying to help someone who was badly injured, but they bled to death. Afterwards, I realised the person who died represented my relationship Id been trying to fix it but the medicine showed me I couldnt. Although it was upsetting at the time, it gave me the confidence to leave. Dr Rucker believes millennials may be more willing to look to psychedelics for answers because theyre more educated about the risks and benefits. This generation has always been exposed to the internet and many different sources of information theyre more curious about the psychedelic experience and dont believe the demonisation of drugs. Magic mushrooms and ayahuasca are both natural substances and ayahuasca has been used in a sacred way for thousands of years, which might be part of its appeal.

In the UK, psychedelics are illegal, so its not possible to take them in a clinical setting. This may be a reason why retreats in Peru like the one I attended are soaring in popularity. Ayahuasca is taken in a group ceremony led by highly experienced shamans and assistants to keep an eye on everyone, so you feel safe, says Skie Hummingbird, a UK-based shaman who takes groups out to Peru (sungate.org.uk). But you need to choose the right place, as some centres are run by unscrupulous people who arent properly trained. Personal recommendation is the best way. And shes seen radical transformations. Some people undergo dramatic changes on a ten-day retreat, overcoming lifelong problems, she says. But its not for everyone: some people do report having highly distressing journeys.

Some of the latest research suggests ayahuasca could generate the birth of new brain cells, potentially treating neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers, as well as psychiatric illnesses, while LSD and psilocybin show promise in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, Professor Nutt advises caution. We need more studies, and such studies are limited by the law. Psychedelics are currently schedule 1 substances, which means theyre considered dangerous, making further research almost impossible. Nevertheless, the growing wave of interest in psychedelic psychiatry (a recent public talk at University College London sold out in 20 minutes) may address that. As Professor Nutt observes, Its groundbreaking science. These substances could potentially change peoples lives, providing we can do more thorough testing.

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Tripping out: the highs and lows of psychedelic therapy - Marie Claire UK

Still from The Last Shaman (Courtesy of Raz Degan, Peace Productions)

There seems to be a growing consensus that conventional pharmaceuticals are not so great, as Cat Marnell makes clear in her recently published memoir, How to Murder Your Life. She describes how an Adderall prescription helped her ADD but also put her on a path that led to some serious Sid and Nancy and Girl, Interrupted scenarios(she also got to hang out with Courtney Love, but whatever).

So where to turn when legal drugs fail you? The answer might just be hallucinogens, if were to believe A Really Good Day, a new book about a writers experiment with LSD microdosing, and The Last Shaman, a forthcoming documentary about a young mans experiments with ayahuasca.

This isnt the first filmabout ayahuasca, and microdosing seems to be the trend du jour, but these two releases represent a new level of mainstreaming both are the accounts of relative drugvirgins who take drastic measures because all else has failed to treat their depression and anxiety. (Oh, and thisayahuasca doc is co-produced by Leo DiCaprio.)

Still from The Last Shaman (Courtesy of Raz Degan, Peace Productions)

The author of A Really Good Dayis Ayelet Waldman, who has made a nice life for herself as an essayist, novelist, and mother in Berkeley, California. Shes by no means deeply depressed, but she has been diagnosed with bipolar II disordershe has trouble sleeping, suffers from mood swings and self-doubt, and often finds herself arguing with her husband (the novelist Michael Chabon). Therapy, anti-depressants, and meditation havent helpedthough the occasional MDMA trip has served to reboot her marriage.

Desperate for a solution, Waldman scores some LSD from an old hippie who calls himself Lewis Carroll (get it?) andundergoes a regimenrecommended by former psychedelics researcher Dr. Jim Fadiman: ten micrograms of LSD (one tenth of what youd take to trip) every three days for thirty days, accompanied by active self-monitoring.

Fadimans USDA-permitted trials with LSD in the mid-60s found that the drug helped Silicon Valley types with creative problem solving. Since the publication of his 2011 book, The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, Fediman has collected dozens of microdosing reports. Theyre overwhelmingly positive, and involve claims of anxiety reduction, mood elevation, sustained creativity, and improved relationships.

A Good Day which is what many of Fadimans correspondents reported having reads like a real-time journal of Waldmans daily self-evaluations, interspersed with background information about the governments misguided, hysteria-driven, racially discriminatory drug wars, and the history of psychedelic research. (Fun fact: one of the cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous had a positive experience with LSD therapy and sought to make it a part of AA. Not-so-fun fact: The CIA experimented with weaponizing psychedelics, and once set up brothels in San Francisco where drinks were spiked with LSD.)

Waldman is deeply aware that for every level-headed LSD user and researcher, there are gonzo psychonauts like Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey, whove made it tough for the government to reverse its course on hallucinogensand whove made it hard for her to admit her use to her kids, despite her belief that honesty is the best policy in drug education. Still, there are clinical studies of psilocybin being conducted, as Michael Pollan noted in a 2015 New Yorker article. An NYU researcher told Pollan that he had witnessedunprecedented results:People who had been palpably scared of deaththey lost their fear.

By the end of the book, Waldman definitely seems sold on the therapy. Normally a pessimist, she finds herself experiencing surprising moments of optimism and being more aware of her surroundings, and her chronic shoulder pain decreases. But she acknowledges that microdosing isnt a cure-all: Microdose Day is fun and productive, but sometimes it has an edge, she observes on Day 19. Senses are ever so slightly heightened, which can be pleasurable, but does incline me to a version of my infamous irritability, albeit a mellower one. Still, she no longer finds herself flying into a rage at the sound of her husband chewing, and she doesnt completely freak when she thinks her daughter has gotten a bad tattoo.

Waldman also found that her productivity shot up, but she acknowledges that it might not have been the microdosing. I dont know if this is a result of the protocol itself or the means to force myself to put words on paper each and every day.

And theres the rub. Is the microdosing working because it stimulates serotonin receptors and effects parts of the brain associated with growth, memory, and learning, or is it working simply because Waldman is being more mindful and is focused on recovery? Not to mention, actively occupied with writing what she must know will be a very sexy and salable a book?

That paradox arises in The Last Shaman, as well. At one point during the documentary, its protagonist James Freeman is shown pouring flower water over his head, a cleansing that precedes an ayahuasca ceremony. Im just trying to keep an open mind and not be judging any of this, he says of the rituals. And I think theres a part of me that believes that that itself is healing. So, the journey is the reward?

Still from The Last Shaman (Courtesy of Raz Degan, Peace Productions)

The film follows Freeman, a young preppie from Boston, as he ventures into the jungles of Peru to find a shaman who can cure him of the suicidaldepression that hit him during his late teens, when he finally buckled under the stress of trying to live up to the expectations of his father. His parents, both accomplished doctors, seem okay with electroshock therapy, but, like some of Waldmans peers, theyre dubious about the whole hallucinogen thing.

Filmmaker Raz Degan decided to make the documentary after his own ayahuasca experience helped cure a bout of pneumonia; the experience convinced him to arrange an ayahuasca retreat for his mom that he says helped with her depression. Once he left his acting career in Italy and started shooting the doc, however, he discovered the sacred brewwasnt all rainbows and unicornsthe docs early scenes show the corpse of a man who suffocated to death while under the care of a shaman at the Anaconda Cosmica in Iquitos (ayahuasca can be fatal when taken with other medications; according to aMens Journal article about the drugs dark side, this wasnt the only death that occurred at Anaconda).

Still from The Last Shaman (Courtesy of Raz Degan, Peace Productions)

Freeman, who was also present for the incident, remains undeterred, and links up with a wild-eyed American expat an ex-addict and ex-con from Kentucky who organizes cockfights but also considers himself a spiritual warrior. The gringo shamans treasure chest is said to contain some $250,000 worth of ayahuasca.

Ultimately, however, Freeman opts for a shaman who isntso set on monetization, which is depicted in the documentary as an increasing threat to indigenous communities. He finds one in the Shipibo village of Santa Rosa de Dinamarca. The gold-toothed shaman prescribes strict isolation, ingestion of a variety of plants, and regular tokes off a pipe containing mapacho, a highly potent jungle tobacco thats often used in conjunction with ayahuasca. During the dubstep montage of Freemansmarathontreatment, he speaks of an exorcism-like combination of fevers, cramps, sweats, nightmares, incredible visions, and a letting-go of anger toward his father. It all looks very intense, and yet somehow after five months of this he emerges looking rested, healthy, and suddenly capable of frolicking with street dogs and playing soccer with the local kids.

Though I wasnt necessarily cured, I feel like I came back with a will to live, he later says, which more or less jibes with Waldmans thoughts about macrodosing.

Clearly, both the film and Waldmans account aim to encourage less anecdotal experiments. Andthose are actually happening just this week, the Guardian wrote about a study of ayahuascas effects on people with PTSD, and Business Insider reported that ayahuasca has been shown to affect the brain in the same way meditation does. At the same time, a new study of LSD conducted by scientists at the University of Basel indicates that 100 micrograms reduces activity in the region of the brain related to the handling of negative emotions like fear a finding that could be useful in the treatment of depression and anxiety.

Of course, that LSD study was just one of the results when I searched LSD on Google News. Most of the others involved people getting arrested.

But hey, watching a documentary that uses dubstep to simulate an ayahuasca trip is still legal. The Last Shaman is in theaters May 12, and A Really Good Day is in bookstores now.

Continued here:

Hallucinogens Help, According to a Mom's Memoir and Son's Documentary - Bedford + Bowery

Hallucinations. Vivid images. Intense sounds. Greater self-awareness.

Those are the hallmark effects associated with the world's four most popular psychedelic drugs. 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. Not all trips are created equal, though if you're sipping ayahuasca, your high could last a couple of hours. But if you're consuming DMT, that buzz will last under than 20 minutes.

How some doctors are risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens

Still, no matter the length of the high, classic psychedelics are powerful. Brain imaging studies have shown that all four drugs have profound effects on neural activity. Brain function is less constrained while under the influence, which means you're better able to emotion. And the networks in your brain are far more connected, which allows for a higher state of consciousness and introspection.

These psychological benefits have led researchers to suggest that psychedelics could be effective therapeutic treatments. In fact, many studies have discovered that all four drugs, in one way or another, have the potential to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and other mental health conditions. By opening up the mind, the theory goes, people under the influence of psychedelics can confront their painful pasts or self-destructive behavior without shame or fear. They're not emotionally numb; rather, they're far more objective.

Of course, these substances are not without their side effects. But current research at least suggests that ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms have the potential to change the way doctors can treat mental illness particularly for those who are treatment-resistant. More in-depth studies are needed to understand their exact effects on the human brain, but what we know now is at least promising. Here, a look at how each drug affects your brain and how that's being used to our advantage.

AyahuascaAyahuasca is an ancient plant-based tea derived from a combination of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaves of the plant psychotria viridis. Shamans in the Amazon have long used ayahuasca to cure illness and tap into the spiritual world. Some religious groups in Brazil consume the hallucinogenic brew as religious sacrament. In recent years, regular folk have started to use ayahuasca for greater self-awareness.

That's because brain scans have shown that ayahuasca increases the neural activity in the brain's visual cortex, as well as its limbic system the region deep inside the medial temporal lobe that's responsible for processing memories and emotion. Ayahuasca can also quiet the brain's default mode network, which, when overactive, causes depression, anxiety and social phobia, according to a video released last year by YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE. Those who consume it end up in a meditative state.

"Ayahuasca induces an introspective state of awareness during which people have very personally meaningful experiences," says Dr. Jordi Riba, a leading ayahuasca researcher. "It's common to have emotionally-laden, autobiographic memories coming to the mind's eye in the form of visions, not unlike those we experience during sleep."

According to Riba, people who use ayahuasca experience a trip that can be "quite intense" depending on the dose consumed. The psychological effects come on after about 45 minutes and hit their peak within an hour or two; physically, the worst a person will feel is nausea and vomiting, Riba says. Unlike with LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, people high on ayahuasca are fully aware that they're hallucinating. It's this self-conscious tripping that has led people to use ayahuasca as a means to overcome addiction and face traumatic issues. Riba and his research group at Hospital do Sant Pau in Barcelona, Spain, have also begun "rigorous clinical trials" using ayahuasca for treating depression; so far, the plant-based drug has shown to reduce depressive symptoms in treatment-resistant patients, as well as produce "a very antidepressant effect that is maintained for weeks," says Riba, who has studied the drug with support from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an American nonprofit founded in the mid-1980s.

His team is currently studying the post-acute stage of ayahuasca effects what they've dubbed the "after-glow." So far, they've found that, during this "after-glow" period, the regions of the brain associated with sense-of-self have a stronger connection to other areas that control autobiographic memories and emotion. According to Riba, it's during this time that the mind is more open to psychotherapeutic intervention, so the research team is working to incorporate a small number of ayahuasca sessions into mindfulness psychotherapy.

"These functional changes correlate with increased 'mindfulness' capacities," Riba says. "We believe that the synergy between the ayahuasca experience and the mindfulness training will boost the success rate of the psychotherapeutic intervention."

DMTAyahuasca and the compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine or DMT are closely linked. DMT is present in the leaves of the plant psychotria viridis and is responsible for the hallucinations ayahuasca users experience. DMT is close in structure to melatonin and serotonin and has properties similar to the psychedelic compounds found in magic mushrooms and LSD.

If taken orally, DMT has no real effects on the body because stomach enzymes break down the compound immediately. But the Banisteriopsis caapi vines used in ayahuasca block those enzymes, causing DMT to enter your bloodstream and travel to your brain. DMT, like other classic psychedelic drugs, affect the brain's serotonin receptors, which research shows alters emotion, vision, and sense of bodily integrity. In other words: you're on one hell of a trip.

Much of what is known about DMT is thanks to Dr. Rick Strassman, who first published groundbreaking research on the psychedelic drug two decades ago. According to Strassman, DMT is one of the only compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier the membrane wall separating circulating blood from the brain extracellular fluid in the central nervous system. DMT's ability to cross this divides means the compound "appears to be a necessary component of normal brain physiology," says Strassman, the author of two quintessential books on the psychedelic, DMT: The Spirit Molecule and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy.

"The brain only brings things into its confines using energy to get things across the blood-brain barrier for nutrients, which it can't make on its own things like blood sugar or glucose," he continued. "DMT is unique in that way, in that the brain expends energy to get it into its confines."

DMT actually naturally occurs in the human body, and is particularly present in the lungs. Strassman says it may also be found in the pineal gland the small part of the brain associated with the mind's "third eye." The effects of overly active DMT when ingested via ayahuasca can last for hours. But taken on its own that is, smoked or injected and your high lasts only a few minutes, according to Strassman.

Although short, the trip from DMT can be intense, more so than other psychedelics, Strassman says. Users on DMT have reported similar experiences to that of ayahuasca: A greater sense of self, vivid images and sounds and deeper introspection. In the past, Strassman has suggested DMT to be used as a therapy tool to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions, as well as aid with self-improvement and discovery. But studies of DMT are actually scarce, so it's hard to know the full extent of its therapeutic benefits.

"There isn't much research with DMT and it ought to be studied more," Strassman says.

MDMAUnlike DMT, MDMA is not a naturally occurring psychedelic. The drug otherwise called molly or ecstasy is a synthetic concoction popular among ravers and club kids. People can pop MDMA as a capsule, tablet or pill. The drug (sometimes called ecstasy or molly) triggers the release of three key neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. The synthetic drug also increases levels of the hormones oxytocin and prolactin, resulting in a feeling of euphoria and being uninhibited. The most significant effect of MDMA is the release of serotonin in large quantities, which drains the brain's supply which can mean days of depression after its use.

Brain imaging has also shown that MDMA causes a decrease in activity in the amygdala the brain's almond-shaped region that perceives threats and fear as well as an increase in the prefrontal cortex, which is considered the brain's higher processing center. Ongoing research on psychedelic drugs and the effects on various neural networks has also found that MDMA allows for more flexibility in brain function, which means people tripping on the drug can filter emotions and reactions without being "stuck in old ways of processing," according to Dr. Michael Mithoefer, who has studied MDMA extensively.

"People are less likely to be overwhelmed by anxiety and better able to process experience without being numb to emotion," he says.

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted researchers permission to move ahead with plans for a large-scale clinical trial to examine the effects of using MDMA as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Mithoefer oversaw the phase-two trials, backed by MAPS, that informed the FDA's decision. During the study, people living with PTSD were able to address their trauma without withdrawing from their emotions while under the influence of MDMA because of the complex interaction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Since the phase two trials had strong results, Mithoefer told Rolling Stone in December that he expects the FDA to approve the phase three trial plans sometime early this year.

While research into MDMA's use for PTSD treatment is promising, Mithoefer cautions that the drug not be used outside of a therapeutic setting, as it raises blood pressure, body temperature and pulse, and causes nausea, muscle tension, increased appetite, sweating, chills and blurred vision. MDMA could also lead to dehydration, heart failure, kidney failure and an irregular heartbeat. If someone on MDMA doesn't drink enough water or has an underlying health condition, the side effects can be life threatening.

Psilocybin MushroomsMushrooms are another psychedelic with a long history of use in health and healing ceremonies, particularly in the Eastern world. People tripping on 'shrooms will experience vivid hallucinations within an hour of ingestion, thanks to the body's breakdown psilocybin, the naturally-occurring psychedelic ingredient found in more than 200 species of mushrooms.

Research out of the Imperial College London, published in 2014, found that psilocybin, a serotonin receptor, causes a stronger communication between the parts of the brain that are normally disconnected from each other. Scientists reviewing fMRI brain scans of people who've ingested psilocybin and people who've taken a placebo discovered that magic mushrooms trigger a different connectivity pattern in the brain that's only present in a hallucinogenic state. In this condition, the brain's functioning with less constraint and more intercommunication; according to researchers from Imperial College London, this type of psilocybin-induced brain activity is similar to what's seen with dreaming and enhanced emotional being.

"These stronger connections are responsible for creating a different state of consciousness," says Dr. Paul Expert, a methodologist and physicist who worked on the Imperial College London study. "Psychedelic drugs are a potentially very powerful way of understanding normal brain function."

Emerging research may prove magic mushrooms effective at treating depression and other mental health conditions. Much like ayahuasca, brain scans have shown that psilocybin can suppress activity in the brain's default mode network, and people tripping on 'shrooms have reported experiencing "a higher level of happiness and belonging to the world," according to Expert. To that end, a study published last year in the U.K. medical journal The Lancet discovered that a high dose of mushrooms reduced depressive symptoms in treatment-resistant patients.

That same study noted that psilocybin could potentially treat anxiety, addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder because of its mood-elevating properties. And other research has found that psilocybin can reduce the fear response in mice, signaling the drug's potential as a treatment for PTSD.

Despite these positive findings, research on psychedelics is limited, and consuming magic mushrooms does comes with some risk. People tripping on psilocybin can experience paranoia or a complete loss of subjective self-identity, known as ego dissolution, according to Expert. Their response to the hallucinogenic drug will also depend on their physical and psychological environment. Magic mushrooms should be consumed with caution because the positive or negative effect on the user can be "profound (and uncontrolled) and long lasting," Expert says. "We don't really understand the mechanism behind the cognitive effect of psychedelics, and thus cannot 100 percent control the psychedelic experience."

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What Psychedelics Really Do to Your Brain - Rolling Stone - RollingStone.com

How some doctors are risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens

How some doctors are risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens

Dr. X is a dad. Appropriately boringly at 4:37 p.m. on a national holiday, he is lighting a charcoal grill, about to grab a pair of tongs with one hand and a beer with the other. His kids are running around their suburban patio, which could be anywhere; Dr. X, though impressively educated now, grew up poor in a town that is basically nowhere. Like most Americans, he is a Christian. Like a lot of health-conscious men, he fights dad bod by working out once or twice a week, before going into his medical practice.

Somewhat less conventionally, two hours ago, he was escorting a woman around his yard, helping her walk off a large dose of MDMA. He's the one who'd given it to her, earlier in the morning, drugging her out of her mind.

This would be psychedelic-assisted therapy, the not-new but increasingly popular practice of administering psychotropic substances to treat a wide range of physical, psychological and psycho-spiritual concerns. "Some people stagger out" of the room in Dr. X's home that he uses for these "journeys," as sessions are called in the semiofficial parlance. Some have to stay for hours and hours beyond the standard five or so, crying or waiting to emotionally rebalance, lying on a mattress, probing the secrets, trauma, belief or grief buried in their subconscious. Dr. X recalls a patient who was considering a round-the-clock Klonopin prescription for anxiety; she reluctantly decided to try a journey instead. On the "medicine," she spent seven hours unraveling ballistically, picturing herself dumping sadness out of her chest into a jade box that she put a golden heart-shaped lock on and tossed into the sea. She'd been skeptical going in, but after it was over, Dr. X says, "She was so angry that it was illegal."

Because Dr. X's hallmark treatment an MDMA session or two, then further journeys with psilocybin mushrooms if called for is, absolutely, illegal. MDMA is a Schedule I controlled substance. Psilocybin is as well. Exposure could get his medical license suspended, if not revoked, along with his parental rights, or freedom. "This should be a part of health care, and is a true part of health care," he says in his defense. The oversimplified concept behind MDMA therapy, which causes intense neurotransmitter activity including the release of adrenaline and serotonin (believed to produce positive mood), is that it tamps down fear, allowing people to interact with and deal with parts of their psyche they otherwise can't. Psychedelics in general are thought to bring an observational part of the ego online to allow a new perspective on one's self and one's memories, potentially leading to deep understanding and healing.

As an internal-medicine specialist, Dr. X doesn't have any patients who come to him seeking psychotherapy. But the longer he does the work, the more "I'm seeing that consciousness correlates to disease," he says. "Every disease." Narcolepsy. Cataplexy. Crohn's. Diabetes one patient's psychedelic therapy preceded a 30 percent reduction in fasting blood-sugar levels. Sufferers of food allergies discover in their journeys that they've been internally attacking themselves. "Consciousness is so vastly undervalued," Dr. X says. "We use it in every other facet in our life and esteem the intellectual part of it, but deny the emotional or intuitive part of it." Psychedelic therapy "reinvigorated my passion and belief in healing. I think it's the best tool to achieving well-being, so I feel morally and ethically compelled to open up that space."

Currently legally we're in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. New York University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Zurich, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Alabama and the University of California-Los Angeles have all partnered with the psilocybin-focused Heffter Research Institute, studying the compound for smoking cessation, alcoholism, terminal-cancer anxiety and cocaine dependence; the biotech-CEO-founded Usona Institute funds research of "consciousness-expanding medicines" for depression and anxiety at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2000, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit based in Santa Cruz, California, has been funding clinical trials of MDMA for subjects with PTSD, mostly veterans, but also police, firefighters and civilians. In November, the FDA approved large-scale Phase III clinical trials the last phase before potential medicalization of MDMA for PTSD treatment. MAPS, which has committed $25 million to achieving that medicalization by 2021, also supports or runs research with ayahuasca (a concoction of Amazonian plants), LSD, medical marijuana and ibogaine, the pharmaceutical extract of the psychoactive African shrub iboga. The organization is additionally funding a study of MDMA for treating social anxiety in autistic adults, currently underway at UCLA Medical Center. Another study, using MDMA to treat anxiety in patients with life-threatening illnesses, has concluded.

"If we didn't have some idea about the potential importance of these medicines, we wouldn't be researching them," says Dr. Jeffrey Guss, psychiatry professor at NYU Medical Center and co-investigator of the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Project. "Their value has been written about and is well known from thousands of years of recorded history, from their being used in religious and healing settings. Their potential and their being worthy of exploration and study speaks for itself."

Optimistic insiders think that if all continues to go well, within 10 to 15 years some psychedelics could be legally administrable to the public, not just for specific conditions but even for personal growth. In the meantime, says Rick Doblin, MAPS' executive director, "there are hundreds of therapists willing to work with illegal Schedule I psychedelics" underground, like Dr. X. They're in Florida, Minnesota, New York, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New England, Lexington, Kentucky. "Hundreds in America," he says, though they're "spread out all over the world."

As within any field, underground practitioners vary in quality, expertise and method. Some are M.D.s, like Dr. X, or therapists, and some are less conventionally trained. They don't all use the same substances, and don't necessarily use just one. Some work with MDMA or psilocybin or ayahuasca, which has become trendy to drink in self-exploration ceremonies all over the country; others administer 5-MeO-DMT, extracted from a toad in the Sonoran Desert, or iboga or ibogaine, which, according to the scant research that exists, may be one of the most effective cures for opiate addiction on the planet but may also cause fatal heart complications.

Underground psychedelic therapists are biased toward their preferred medicines, and those they think work best for particular indications. But they are united by true belief. "People that are involved are risking their careers, their freedom, in order to help others achieve a certain emotional freedom, and they disagree with prohibition," says Doblin. "The fact that people are willing to do these therapies at great personal risk says something about what they think the potential of these drugs actually is to enhance psychotherapy."

There are limitations. Psychedelics aren't for everyone. Or at all foolproof. Nary a researcher or provider, under- or aboveground, fails to point out that some pre-existing conditions make them inappropriate for use, and that though the dangers don't rise nearly to the level of drug-war -mythology (iboga/ibogaine is the major exception), adverse outcomes do happen. The toxicity of -ayahuasca is on par with codeine though codeine causes many thousands more deaths per year. Psilocybin's is even less. Some studies have found brain damage in chronic Ecstasy users, but in 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School studied a large sample of Mormons who used Ecstasy which the LDS Church was late to ban but no other drugs or alcohol, and failed to find cognitive consequences; safety studies of the dosages used in MDMA therapy have found no evidence of neurotoxicity or permanent changes in serotonin transporters. LSD does not stay in your body forever (its half-life is a matter of hours). But behaviorally, people on Ecstasy have died from heatstroke, or drinking too much or not enough water at raves; there have been assaults and even a murder at ayahuasca ceremonies for foreigners in Peru, which has seen a massive tourism boom around the substance's popularity. Probably the most common concern, the specter of "freaking out" during or long after a bad trip, has yet to happen in any of the clinical trials though it's not unusual for subjects to have tough experiences in their journeys. Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science at UCLA, who has conducted studies with MDMA, ayahuasca and psilocybin, says that's a function of screening, preparation and expert support. "This is serious medicine with a capital M," he says, "and if you don't watch yourself and you don't pay attention to the essential basics, you could be in for a very difficult time."

Even under the best of circumstances, the process catalyzed by psychedelic therapy is often far from painless. "It's definitely not that people just get blissed out and it gets better," says Dr. Michael Mithoefer, the lead clinician on the MDMA trials in Charleston, South Carolina (others are ongoing in Boulder, Colorado; Canada; and Israel). "It makes the healing process possible, not easy." When you take 125 milligrams of pure MDMA, enough to nearly immobilize you, and someone invites you to take a look at your deepest self, "it is a destabilizing agent," Dr. X cautions. But it's purposefully so. "It opens us," he says. "Sometimes the medicine can stabilize someone in a difficult situation. Sometimes it stirs up madness, so they can process that. Some people feel rejuvenated and ready to go back into their lives, but other people feel frazzled, spent, fragmented. I've had a few people say, 'That shattered who I thought I was.'"

Limitations and challenges aside, the evidence so far still makes researchers cautiously optimistic that psychedelics hold potential for great healing and change. If they're right, medicalization could address the deficits in treatment options for afflictions trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction that collectively impact millions of Americans, and ultimately shape our world. "If we move forward and understand that these substances should only be used under optimal conditions," says Grob, "it will have a positive impact on an individual, family, collective and societal level." In aboveground clinical trials like his, subjects routinely report that psychedelic therapy is among the top five most important experiences of their lives, akin to the birth of a child.

We've been here before: From the 1950s to the early Seventies, more than 40,000 cases of psychedelic treatment were studied in 1,000 different papers in the medical literature, covering everything from addiction to PTSD to OCD to antisocial disorders and autism. Despite encouraging results, says Grob, the "wild, uninhibited enthusiasm of the Sixties" contributed to some bad recreational outcomes that gave legislators ammunition to ban psychedelics from research for decades. But as the above-ground movement has again been picking up steam, so is the underground. More positive studies get published; more patients and doctors read them; more underground success stories spread through word of mouth. "The secret is out," says Grob, and, perhaps combined with depression and opiate overdoses at all-time highs, skyrocketing civilian and veteran suicide rates, and trends toward personal optimization and wellness, demand is increasing. Researchers at NYU, UCLA and Johns Hopkins all stressed that they cannot and do not ever work with people in the underground, but some of them admired the willingness of certain health care professionals to act, however illegally, on their belief that sometimes healing can't wait and that psychedelics are imperative to it. "I respect that in them," NYU's Guss says. "I really do. I've become a member of the most established establishment. And so in a way, we're isolated from all the wisdom and knowledge in the underground community." That vast, uncollected experience contains details about the medicines' potential and pitfalls, challenges and inconsistencies the variety of ways psychedelics might wholly, drastically change a life. "I'm very interested to learn," Guss says, "what underground psychedelic psychotherapists have to teach us."

My first introduction to underground psychedelic therapy was when, years ago, a doctor told me my vagina was depressed. I'd gone in for a pelvic exam because something felt wrong; at the follow-up appointment, when my test results were all negative and my answers to her hundred questions about the post-traumatic stress disorder I was in treatment for were all related to sexual threats and reporting on sexual violence, she said my genitals were just fucking bummed out.

This was San Francisco, and I did a lot of yoga; but even I rolled my eyes at the idea that my privates had an emotional disorder. I was very intrigued, however, when the doctor said she knew a therapist who could heal years of trauma in one five-hour swoop, so long as I had the secret password. The doctor gave me the number for that therapist who worked with MDMA.

I never called. I moved across the country. Years later, I was on vacation on the coast when my husband went out for a run, and I stayed behind and may or may not have contemplated suicide.

OK. I did. In the car, on the road, running an errand, I thought about driving off the edge of a cliff into the brilliant, crashing Pacific.

Yes, I had a history: the PTSD, with concomitant major depressive disorder, suicidal thoughts. On my official paperwork, I was technically permanently disabled, but I had been doing much better working, going to karaoke, having a life. I had backslides and big episodes, but if my "issues" were not exactly handled, they were at least on a general upswing thanks to years of constant treatment. But then, the night before my drive, I had started yelling in a restaurant, feeling that I was spiraling out of control but unable to stop myself from making a scene. Now, having coaxed my car away from the cliff edge and back to the hotel, I lay facedown and screamed into the pillows. I called a local therapist and begged for an emergency appointment. As I lay there in her office, in the fetal position, I wondered aloud if I should try MDMA therapy.

Weirdly (or magically, as would later be obvious), she happened to have the number of another therapist who worked with it.

The therapist who gave me the second referral said she had a client with whom she'd been working for years who had done a journey. The difference in that patient's suffering, she said, was like night and day. When I called the number, the woman who answered said we needed to meet in person, and when we did, she mentioned that my struggle was why the wait for MDMA to become widely available was untenable. She said, in a stunning lack of expectation management, that she could help me massively more, in a few sessions, than all my years and dollars of hard therapeutic work had combined.

So after one more conversation, I showed up nervous, but excited, but desperate on a Monday morning (as scheduled) with an empty stomach (as directed) to a charming room with a couch at one end and a bed at the other. After we did something like a prayer, I took the see-through capsule of white powder and retired to the bed with the journal I was encouraged to bring while the therapist went out on the deck to give me space. I'd been told that the journey with psychedelics truly starts beforehand, the moment you decide to do it, and I had indeed been struggling extra since then. Waiting for the medicine to come on was no exception.

The Journey. 9:35 a.m.

I'm full of grief, and gratitude, and terror. I've been extra wound up and tight, extra untouchable, since we put this on the calendar. My body must be gripping and tensing in preparation to let go....

9:55 is when the doubt sets in. About the pointlessness, the uselessness, the futility of this endeavor. A moment ago, I was envisioning lots of purple tears. I'm like, let's just go read a newspaper and drink some tea somewhere.

This is when the therapist, who had come back inside, told me I was higher than I realized, and to lie down and let it ride.

I hadn't anticipated tripping, or time-travel. But there were movies of my life, and visits with loved ones. The therapist had turned on jangly guitar music, which struck me as lame at first, but soon became the most beautiful, dynamic composition I'd ever heard because: Ecstasy. I breathed deep with my eyes closed and a hand on my chest. I cried, often, as I rewitnessed my life. My therapist said very little. She had said before that our collective job was to trust my intuition. I went back to the scenes where my PTSD started. In one of them, I revisited a remote, bleak room where a stranger cornered me. I watched the scenario which, in reality, I had escaped physically unscathed play out with an alternate ending. But I didn't get overpowered and raped, which is what I'd always assumed was so scary about it. Instead, the stranger stepped forward and, in one swift move, landed his hands in a death grip around my throat.

Several times, the scene replayed. Repeatedly, I watched myself get strangled.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh, I could see, suddenly. This isn't just a rape issue, as I'd been working through it in therapy for years. This is also a murder issue.

For weeks after the journey, every man I walked past triggered an automatic but definitive and elated! voice inside me that said: That guy's not gonna kill you! Down the sidewalk in a city, that guy's not gonna kill you, and that guy's not gonna kill you. If I had realized at the conscious level that I thought they would, I would have stopped leaving the house. No wonder I was always exhausted. After the journey, I stepped down the street with wild new energy. Seeing, finally, the ultimate fear of that moment, my feared choking death, was sort of terrible, I guess, but not really, it wasn't, because: Ecstasy. And as soon as I acknowledged it and saw it through, the moment lost its quiet, powerful rule over my system.

For some people, an MDMA journey ends after a few hours. They sit up and start talking. They drink the water and eat the snack given to them, and talk for a bit as the medicine wears off. And then they leave.

I had to be pulled out of mine. Whether because I have a genetic variation that makes people more sensitive to MDMA or because I am "a very intense person," around 2 p.m. the therapist had to shake me; it was time to get ready to go my husband was scheduled to pick me up, and the therapist had another appointment coming. She had me sit up and eat and drink and try to rejoin the present. When I left some half an hour later, I was cheerful and articulate, but still tripping. My husband, in utter bewilderment over how to handle me, took me to a nearby hotel, as planned. Later, we tried to go eat in a restaurant. I babbled, pleasantly at first, but then, about eight hours after my journey began, everything turned twitchy and dark. I called the therapist frantically and asked her if most people, post-journey, felt like every single thing in their entire lives needed to be burned down immediately, and she said no, not really, but that my job in any case was to "do nothing, very slowly."

In the clinical trials of MDMA for PTSD, the protocol is to keep patients overnight. The sessions typically there are three, spaced a month apart last at least eight hours, because that's sometimes when the heaviest processing will only begin to kick in, particularly for patients who have a history of dissociation, or severe detachment from reality which I do. My MDMA therapist, who had been doing journeys for a long time, had never happened to see a person quite like me, but for people like me, researchers say, it's not unheard of for the journey to get ugly at around the time I was in the middle of a dinner date.

But I didn't happen to know any of that.

That night, I ran, fleeing from the hotel into the rural darkness, alone. I had total conviction that every facet of my existence was a mistake. I was engulfed in panic. I had no idea what to do with myself, except for one specific thing, as the clear message of it kept ringing over and over in my head, and that message was: GET. DIVORCED.

It's harder to integrate if you have a life: a company, a house, a wife," Dr. Y explains to a patient during a phone session one day. Dr. Y, who looks younger than his middle age, paces and stretches while he talks to the man, many states away, who recently started therapy after he lost his relationship, lost his job and moved three of the top five stressful life events, psychologists say. Dr. Y is a psychiatrist, which means he has the ability to prescribe medications, but in this session, this patient's third, he instead asks whether the patient is feeling open to taking ayahuasca after having read all the literature Dr. Y assigned last time. He wants to be sure the man is fully aware of the "integration" process, which could be less charitably called "picking up the pieces of inner-personal land mines," that may follow. Half of Dr. Y's patients enact a major life change after ayahuasca. "Probably a quarter," he says, strongly consider a breakup or divorce.

Dr. Y considers about 90 percent of his patients to be fit for ayahuasca. The one out of 10 he believes it isn't right for could include people with a history of psychosis, mania or personality disorders, but more often it is those who don't have the support necessary for integration, or aren't ready to be led through symptom management while they're weaned off antidepressants. That's required by most knowledgeable practitioners: Like MDMA and psilocybin, ayahuasca increases serotonin in the body, and there's a risk of serotonin poisoning if it's taken with certain medications. Dr. Y's patient today doesn't have any of these contraindications. And Dr. Y believes the patient is strong enough to sort through his psychological contents as long as the patient also thinks he's ready, which he says he is after airing some hesitations ("You know," he says, "once you pull back a layer, there's no going back, and you can't unsee or unfeel what you saw"). Dr. Y will send him referrals to vetted, reputable providers in his preferred city. "Three nights [in a row] is better than two, and two is definitely better than one," he tells him. First night, drink ayahuasca, open up; next night, dive deeper in. Layers of self-discovery. The soul as a somewhat coy onion. Sometimes, the peeling of it with ayahuasca involves experiencing your own death. Dr. Y gives the patient instructions for the month leading up to his journey: no other drugs, no alcohol, no sex. No reading news, no violent TV; reduce stress, meditate, find quiet. And, in the final week, no meat, no spice, no fermented foods. "The cleaner you go in," Dr. Y, who himself has experienced hundreds of ceremonies, tells the man, "the more impactful the ceremony." Whatever happens, during or after, Dr. Y will be available.

There are downsides to doing things underground. In addition to the obvious threat of arrest, more risks are created at every step of the psychedelic-therapy process by illegality, providers say. There can be difficulty with something as basic as finding and ensuring clean compounds: MAPS helped run an MDMA testing program, and half of the pills sent in didn't contain any MDMA at all; there have been reports of some shamans spiking ayahuasca with a more toxic hallucinogenic plant to intensify the trip. The best-cared-for patient is still disadvantaged by the general lack of cultural wisdom and support around the treatment. Even good providers aren't as knowledgeable as they could be. Once a year, there is a secret conference that brings together 50 to 100 underground practitioners at a revolving location. "Information gets shared, and people learn new things," says one regular attendee. Another participant recalls lectures on practicalities like the best and most therapeutic doses, how to screen for patients with borderline personality whom many believe are not compatible with psychedelics and how different music and sounds impact sessions. But not nearly all the world's practitioners are there. And none of the minutes or findings can be published.

Plus, not every underground patient gets care as elaborate or expert as Dr. Y's. Some don't receive the preparation or follow-up they may need, because they can't afford it, or because in an underground, patients don't have the luxury to be picky about their providers; they may have to take anyone whose number they can manage to get their hands on, and it can be hard for laypeople to adequately vet providers anyway. An M.D. who used to administer psychedelics (he prefers not to say which) for depression and anxiety (and who, when I tell him he'll have a secret identity like Batman asks if he can be Dr. Batman) doesn't provide underground psychedelic treatment anymore because it started to feel too threatening to his legitimate practice, but in extreme cases he still refers opiate addicts to underground providers who work with ibogaine. "I know quite a few people who do that," he says. "But I only trust two of them. Out of about 10. These are nurses, or respiratory therapists people that know how to resolve an emergency." Outside of that, there's "a whole subculture" of more amateur iboga and ibogaine therapists, Dr. Batman says. "It's a movement that's driven by addicts helping other addicts. I don't think that's good, per se."

It would be best, in Dr. Batman's opinion, for people to get iboga-based addiction treatment in a reputable clinic outside the country. According to one such center in Mexico, one in 10 patients needs some medical care, one in 100 needs serious medical intervention, and, even in the hospital-like setting, people do occasionally die. But not everyone has the money to travel to the best treatment. "It's very difficult for me to make that referral" to the underground for such a risky compound, Dr. Batman says. But sometimes his concern that someone will join the nearly 100 Americans who die of opioid overdose every day overrides his hesitation.

Even for comparatively safer MDMA and psilocybin, says Dr. X, "the fact that we have to do this and hide and send people back to their lives, versus doing it at an inpatient facility," where patients could stay for more integration, is less than ideal.

But all these are risks that people who feel they need psychedelic therapy are willing to take. Nigel McCourry, a 35-year-old Iraq War veteran who participated in a MAPS MDMA study, was so transformed by the PTSD treatment that he was determined to get it for one of his fellow Marines. "This is my Marine battle buddy," he says. "He needed help." It took a lot of searching and ultimately traveling to another state to find an underground therapist, whom neither Marine knew, and McCourry was acutely aware of how difficult the process could be: For up to a year after his own treatment began, he says, "It was really wild. I had all of these emotions coming up out of nowhere. I would cry at random times. I had to give myself so much space to be able to let that out. I would be crying and I had no idea what I was crying about. It was just really intense."

As a subject in the clinical trial, McCourry underwent three 90-minute preparatory sessions prior to dosing, another long integration session the morning after, a phone call every day for a week, and additional 90-minute sessions every week between the three journeys. His friend didn't have the money or opportunity for nearly that kind of support. But he took the journey anyway. In their infantry unit, 2/2 Warlords, "guys are consistently committing suicide," McCourry says. "I think [MDMA therapy] is really our best shot at solving the veteran suicide crisis."

Elizabeth Bast, a 41-year-old artist and mother, also felt like she was out of options when she and her husband, Joaquin Lamar Hailey (better known as street artist Chor Boogie), flew to Costa Rica to get iboga therapy at a healing center after Hailey relapsed into an old heroin addiction that both of them felt was going to kill him. When he felt he needed a booster dose six months later, they turned to an underground provider closer by, in the States. Iboga "was crucial," Bast says. "It saved his life." The couple have started organizing and facilitating treatment trips for addicts to other countries (the drug is illegal in less than a dozen). But there are a lot of others they can't help. Since Bast wrote a book about their experience, "I get inquiries every day: 'My brother's dying, and I can't get out of the country.' We would love to support that. But it's too risky."

Psychedelic medicalization isn't without its own potential problems. There is squabbling in the underground community about whether it would provoke too much regulation over who can administer medicines, and who can take them and how; or whether it would lead to corporatization, or a boom in licensed but low-quality providers of substances that are so intense. Even now, in the aboveground in other countries, "There are places where it's done that are very unprofessional," says Ben De Loenen, executive director of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research and Service (ICEERS), which provides resources for users and potential users of ayahuasca and iboga. UCLA's Grob has been called by patients who've suffered severe, persistent anxiety for months after a psychedelic-therapy experience, which he says tends to be the result of bad preparedness, ethics, or practices of providers. There are also questions about sustainability. As both deforestation of the Amazon and popularity of ayahuasca increase, shamans have had to trek deeper into the jungle to find the plants that compose it. The increasing popularity of 5-MeO-DMT, called "the Toad" for its origins in the venom sacs of an amphibian which are milked, the liquid then dried and basically free-based (smoking it is necessary; swallowing it can be fatal) has led to incidences of people stealing onto Native American reservations to find the frog, leaving empty beer bottles and trash in their wake. If the broader culture ever accepted the species as the path to healing or enlightenment, one can surmise how long it might survive.

Guss, the NYU researcher, sees a future where psychedelic therapy is the specialty of highly and appropriately trained professionals and a robust field of scientific inquiry. For now, there's the underground, some developing countries and the Internet. ICEERS offers tips for vetting practitioners, as well as free therapeutic support to people in crisis during or after ceremonies. MAPS has published a manual for how to do MDMA-assisted psychotherapy on its website, downloadable by anyone.

"Putting out info about how we do the therapy is more likely to contribute to safety than anything else," says Doblin. On the dark Web, sellers of iboga and ibogaine thrive. There were a thousand people on the wait list for MAPS' most recently completed MDMA trial. "People are desperate," Doblin says. "People are doing this."

Personally, my integration after MDMA was brutal. Though I eventually returned to my hotel room that first night, my state didn't improve. I didn't sleep, lying next to my husband, garnering every ounce of willpower to keep from saying that I was leaving, immediately and forever; my husband didn't sleep either, blanketed in my agitation. For weeks, we found ourselves on the floor, or in bed, one or both of us crying as he asked if I still wanted to be married and I didn't know; and I didn't know, for that matter, what my personality was (callous? Funny? Was I funny? If so, was I really, or just performing?) or whether I was bisexual like I always thought or strictly gay. My moods swung from extreme openness and optimism to utter despair and stunned confusion. One day, I spent hours indulging a rich and specific fantasy about filling a bathtub with hot water, downing the years-old bottle of Ativan from when I was first diagnosed, and slitting my forearms from wrist to elbow. Later, in an entirely different temperament, I saw the plan in my Journey Journal and recognized it as active suicidal ideation; if someone had taken the notebook to the police, they could have legally committed me to an institution against my will.

From the beginning, my MDMA therapist had recommended more than one journey. Next time, she said in one of our multiple follow-up integration sessions, I'd stay all night. I agreed that another journey was in order, but I happened to talk to someone who mentioned an underground therapist with a different practice and whom I got a good feeling from when we talked, and so, three months after the first journey, in a dark and silent room with three other people after nightfall, concerns about my family history of schizophrenia thoroughly discussed and considered, I drank ayahuasca.

On the first night of the two-night ceremony, sitting on the "nests" we each built with yoga mats and sleeping bags on the floor, I was nervous again. But less than last time. After drinking about an ounce of the thick sludge, I lay down. There were the initial sparkles and shooting stars behind my eyes, and after a while, as the facilitators started singing ancient songs they say come from the plant and help it work a vision of myself as a five-year-old appeared. There was a suggestion at a history, something bad that happened that I didn't remember; I did not like the direction it was going in; I also thought it was bullshit. The visions stopped. Instead, an abject, suffocating rage came over me, and I lay there in it for five hours thinking about getting in my car and driving away and wishing everyone else in the room would fucking die.

The next night, after a long, raw and still-irate day in the house, the first vision that showed up was five-year-old me again pissed. She wouldn't talk to me, however much I tried to coax her. I knew I had to get her to engage, which over the course of seven hours involved recognizing that I hated myself, that my self-hatred was my best and most reliable friend, and that my self-hatred would never die until I appreciated how it had protected me; when I did, and it did, I gave it a Viking funeral in the vision and in reality cried harder than I ever had in my life. Then I just had to reckon with shame. I sensed the five-year-old had brought it, actually, not me, but no matter, I assured her: I was the goddamn adult here, and I was going to take care of it. There was suffering and writhing and grief and nausea. I threw up, twice, prodigious quantities of black liquid, once so hard into a bucket that it splashed up all over the bottom half of my face.

A few inches away from me, a woman, who'd recently been in a car accident that put her in the hospital and in a wheelchair for a time, lay perfectly still and silent; a few inches from her, a man gnashed his teeth at visions of his abusive parent. At the other end of the room, another participant relived the night of his father's suicide. In the vision, as in real life, he was unable to stop him from slipping out into the garage to do it. But this time, when the man discovered his father's body and cut him down from the rope, he didn't falter under the weight and drop him, as he did when he was a teenager. This time, he had the strength of his adult self, and when he caught him, he held him. Suspending his own sense of horror and failure, and the calling of the police, and the screams of his mother, he got to hold him for a very long time.

In November, the results of two large studies showed that the majority of cancer patients who received one dose of psilocybin experienced lasting recovery from depression and anxiety. In February, a paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that "experience with psychedelic drugs is associated with decreased risk of opioid abuse and dependence." Medical-journal papers about ayahuasca suggest it can treat addiction, anxiety and depression, and change brain structure and personality. So far in the MDMA PTSD trials, zero participants haven't improved at all, and more than 80 percent have recovered to an extent that they don't qualify as having PTSD anymore. Estimates for the effectiveness of other PTSD treatments range as high as 70 percent but as low as 50 percent. The number is somewhat contentious, but even "if you think it's only 25 percent" for whom conventional treatments don't work, says Mithoefer, the lead clinician on the trials in Charleston, "that's still millions of people a year in the United States alone." All the participants in the trials had previously tried medication or therapy, usually both; as a cohort, they'd had PTSD for an average of 19 years.

But "ultimately, the decision to reschedule [psychedelics from Schedule I substances] is not a scientific one," points out NYU's Guss. "It's a governmental one. We may be able to prove safety and efficacy. But there still may be governmental legislative reasons that rescheduling doesn't move forward."

Psychedelic use has been opposed and persecuted by authorities for centuries, both in Europe and in the New World. Among those reasons, believers believe, is the fear that widespread smart psychedelic use could foment societal upheaval. That's not unlike the belief in the Sixties but we know more now about what psychedelics do and how to optimize them. "We didn't have as much data then as we do now," says Dr. Dan Engle, a board-certified psychiatrist who consults with plant-medicine healing centers worldwide. "And we didn't have as many of the safeguards as we have now." He envisions "the psychedelic renaissance as a cornerstone in the redemption of modern psychiatric care." Now, thanks to brain imaging, researchers can see that far greater "brain-network connections light up on psilocybin compared to the normal brain. More cross-regional firing. That's what the brain actually looks like on the 'drugs' that we've been using for hundreds if not thousands of years."

This has helped make psychedelics particularly popular in Silicon Valley, where a drive toward self-actualization meets the luxury of having the resources to pursue it. California, where Berkeley-born chemist Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin synthesized and distributed MDMA to therapists for decades before it was prohibited, has long been at the front of the movement; today, Doblin estimates, the state doesn't have quite the majority, but probably 40 percent of underground psychedelic therapists in the nation. Last year, California Sunday Magazine reporter Chris Colin profiled Entrepreneurs Awakening (EA), a company that arranges Peruvian ayahuasca sojourns primarily for tech and startup CEOs. The customers, says owner Michael Costuros, are "supersuccessful type-A people who use it to be better at what they do."

"These things are so powerful," says Eric Weinstein, managing director at Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm in San Francisco, "that they can get into layers of patterned behavior to show folks things that they could change and could do differently. And the brain has probably been playing with these ideas in the subconscious. This entire family of agents is extraordinary, as they appear to be very profound, unexpectedly constructive and surprisingly safe. Most people who take these agents seem to discover cognitive modes that they never knew even existed." Weinstein has been considering trying to put together a series of opposite-land "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" public-service commercials, in which other Silicon Valley luminaries and scientists like himself a Ph.D. mathematician and physicist out themselves as having "directed their own intellectual evolution with the use of psychedelics as self-hacking tools."

But even for the super-high-functioning, psychedelic use isn't just about optimizing. It also, Costuros says, makes them better people: "What I've seen consistently happen is CEOs become a people-centric, people-focused person." After well-administered and integrated psychedelics, "we're not gonna see the kind of Donald Trump entrepreneurs that are only about extracting value." After an ayahuasca journey with EA, an arms magnate left his multimillion- dollar company to build an art and music residency program. Chris Hunter, the 38-year-old inventor of caffeinated malt-liquor beverage Four Loko, went into his trip with EA's Costuros as a regular former Ohio State University fraternity brother from Youngstown and came out a new man. "Why are you such a dick?" he says he asked himself on ayahuasca. "What if you approached masculinity in a different way instead of being dominant and overseeing the women in your life, you came from the other side, underneath, fully supporting and lifting women up?" Ayahuasca users whom UCLA's Grob has researched in other countries "have become better partners to their spouses, better parents to their children, better children to their parents, better employees, better employers, just more responsible overall, bringing a higher level of ethical integrity to everything they do," he says.

It's possible that psychedelics could transform a wide array of people. Clinical trials have included subjects across demographic categories, including soldiers and conservatives and the elderly and people who've never taken drugs at all before. Some of Dr. X's patients most definitely do not vote Democrat. But the people who have access to psychedelic treatment underground (or overseas) do tend to have something in common: They are usually well-off. "If I could do it legally, I would not turn away anyone for treatment, if I could be aboveground and I could get them to supportive services [afterward]," Dr. X says. Because of the necessary secrecy and lack of outside support now, he considers it irresponsible to provide journeys to anyone without the time and resources to also pay for integration sessions. (McCourry had to pay for the first journey of his Marine friend, who didn't have any money; they had to find a wealthy benefactor to cover the next two.) Clients are also mostly white as are providers. "Sentencing for middle-class white people is a hell of a lot friendlier than for minorities and poor people," Dr. X says. "It's a tragedy that people with the most vulnerability, who need it most, we can't do it with them."

Doblin, for his part, speculates that the DEA hasn't cracked down on underground psychedelic therapists because they have more pressing priorities than those trying to heal a select few of the rich, the traumatized and the addicted. It's also one thing for psychedelics to be popular with millionaires and some Nobel laureates and business celebrities you'd never believe, Costuros maintains and the hip participants of the estimated 120 ayahuasca ceremonies that take place in New York City and the Bay Area every weekend. But who knows what might unfold if psychedelic therapy were available to people for whom the status quo doesn't work so well?

It's unclear if the current presidential administration, which includes some extremely drug-unfriendly members, will alter or slow the course of possible medicalization. For the time being, the researchers soldier on, and the underground grows. This year, K., a therapist with a traditional practice in an Appalachian state, administered her first MDMA journey with a client (with two additional medical professionals on hand for safety); the client, who'd still needed occasional suicide watch stemming from symptoms of complex PTSD despite 16 years of therapy, had brought her the MAPS manual, downloaded off the Internet. "I'm trained to provide the best care to my clients in a way that's ethical," K. says, "so if research is backing up that things that are now illegal are really helpful with little to no side effects, especially compared with psychiatric medications, which have a ton of side effects, then it's something I'm open to." When dosed, K.'s client, S., talked through a childhood of severe abuse and torture "but none of it was terrifying," S. says. "I talked in detail about a lot of horrific shit that happened. Then I said: The thing is, all those things are over, and I know they're over, and my body knows that everything is going to be OK."

For Silicon Valley's Weinstein, the success stories show the importance of advocating for broader access. "If we don't legalize, study and utilize these plants and other medicines, people who could be saved will die," he says. "Families will break apart. Parents will continue to bury depressed children who might have been saved by these miraculous agents. Can we bring ourselves to ask if a single professionally administered flood dose of legalized ibogaine could have saved Prince from opioid addiction? Some of these agents are anti-drug drugs...and we are still against them. I definitely would like to attack the idea that any of this makes any sense."

So I'd done an underground MDMA session, and a weekend of illegal ayahuasca ceremonies.

The integration, as the months went on, seemed to go a bit smoother.

After ayahuasca, I still had good and bad days. The process was still intense but less earthshaking, either because I'd done the first big, tough layer of processing post-MDMA, or because the journey was different, or I was getting used to being unsettled, or all of the above. Or maybe the smoother time was a little reprieve, since something more shattering was about to happen.

After all the months, all the pieces that had been stirred up were not quite connected. I felt I needed one more sitting with the therapist and the psychedelic that at that point felt right. So I settled into a nest on a little patch of floor, again, in the same house as last time, but in a large, high-ceilinged living room full of moonlight coming in through the windows, and I whispered into a cup of ayahuasca a plea for wholeness, and drank it.

The vision is about me, as a five-year-old. Again.

Psychedelics, they say, will not give you what you want. But they will give you what you need.

I'm shocked to encounter the child again, but ready to see what she shows me this time. The child remembers; I remember, though the realization is slow, and the acceptance is slower.

When I thought I cried the hardest in my life the last time I drank ayahuasca, I was wrong.

I cannot (and would not) begin to encompass, in a brief space, what happens in the next long hours, and the next day, and the next night. The second night, the facilitators have to end the ceremony without me. They bless and blow smoke and perfume on the others because after so many hours, they're done, but I'm still deep in it. They take turns staying with me and singing. It goes on for so long, with so much shaking and sickness, that to be kind to my nervous system, my facilitator, who in her day job cares for homeless children, puts me in a bathtub of hot water.

I hyperventilate, for a long time, until I don't. I remember the bathtub-suicide fantasy. The facilitator is sitting next to me, on the floor, putting a soaked hot washcloth against my face, my neck, on my head. I tell her about the fantasy, and that I have come to know, in this bathtub, that I am not going to kill myself.

For a second she thinks I mean I won't kill myself in her bathtub, rather than in general. Then when she gets it, the two of us laugh about what a drag that would be for her, if I killed myself here, on drugs in her house, both of us joking about it: me, naked, her, trying to help me save my life.

We're laughing, but this moment is a big deal, and we know it. I am not healed. But I am whole. I can go ahead and get divorced if that turns out to be the right thing, but not because I was violated too many times to bear intimacy. There will be many more spectacularly challenging, professionally supported months of working through the terror and pain imprinted on my body when it was tiny, powerless under adult darkness and weight, but one of the end results has already arrived. The too-many years of my life where I sometimes actively, and maybe always a little bit passively, thought about killing myself are over.

But what has changed, people keep asking me, since the journeys. In my life, what difference did it make?

Every single thing is different, I tell them. Because I was splintered before, but now: I'm here.

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Inside the Psychedelic Underground - RollingStone.com

However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theorythe self-model theory of subjectivitypredicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction processof all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situationsfor example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

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Quotes About Psychedelics (48 quotes)

Photo Credit: agsandrew / Shutterstock.com

In a recent interview with Business Insider, crime and drug policy expert Mark Kleiman made a pretty quick and simple case for ending the prohibition on psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin.

Kleiman is the director of the Crime and Justice program at NYU's Marron Institute of Public Management, the editor of theJournal of Drug Policy Analysisand the author or co-author of numerous academically-informed books on dealing with drugs, includingDrugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Timothy Leary he's not, but he is open to loosening up on psychedelics. Although he doesn't mention it in the short segment below, Kleiman is undoubtedly aware that psychedelics are not addictive and have a virtually non-existent fatal overdose potential, so his concerns are eminently practical: bad trips and people doing stupid stuff under the influence.

But leave it up to Kleiman, long willing to dabble in outside-the-box notions about how to regulate drug use, to come up with a unique idea about trip-sitters to care for those too infused with the Godhead to take care of themselves.

Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.

Continued here:

WATCH: A Public Policy Expert Explains How to Safely Deregulate LSD and Other Psychedelics - AlterNet

Jag Davies is the director of communications strategy for the Drug Policy Alliance. This piece first appeared on the Drug Policy Alliance Blog.

The criminalization of people who use psychedelics is rooted in myths that are the vestiges of colonialism and the drug war and, one by one, those myths are crumbling down.

Weve learned in recent years that people who use psychedelics are significantly *less* likely to end up developing mental health problems, perpetrating domestic violence, or suffering from psychological distress and suicidal thinking.

Meanwhile, recent research has shown that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for people struggling with difficult-to-treat conditions such as substance use disorders. Not much has been known, though, about the connection between psychedelic use and substance misuse in the general population.

Now, a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology has found that experiences with psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms are associated with decreased risk of opioid abuse and dependence among respondents with a history of illegal opioid use. Psychedelic use is associated with 27% reduced risk of past-year opioid dependence and 40% reduced risk of past-year opioid abuse. Other than marijuana use, which was associated with 55% reduced risk of past-year opioid abuse, no other illegal drug was associated with reduced risk of past-year opioid dependence or abuse.

The study is based on six years of data from the federal governments National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which surveys 70,000 people each year. While the findings are far from causal, the authors conclude that the associations between psychedelic use and opioid misuse are pervasive and significant and suggest that psychedelics are associated with positive psychological characteristics and are consistent with prior reports suggesting efficacy in treatment of substance use disorders.

Although more research is needed to determine exactly why theres such a strong correlation between psychedelic use and decreased risk of opioid misuse, this study does appear to validate the experiences of many people who have found substances like ibogaine, marijuana or kratom to be life-changing tools that have helped them lead happier, more fulfilling lives. For many, these substances have helped them cut back or quit their use of opioids or other substances with which theyve had a problematic relationship. Safe access to these substances along with 911 Good Samaritan laws, naloxone access programs, supervised injection facilities, various forms of maintenance therapy, and, of course, ending the criminalization of drug use should be part of the discussion when it comes to dealing with addiction and skyrocketing rates of overdose deaths.

And lets not forget our commander-in-chief is ramping up the drug war and thinks he can deal with opioid addiction by building a giant wall and deporting millions of people, both documented and undocumented. Lets remember, too, that thousands of people are getting handcuffed, arrested, branded as criminals, and serving time behind bars every year simply for using or possessing a psychedelic substance in the U.S. and these people are more likely to be young, non-white, and socioeconomically marginalized than most people who use psychedelics.

While psychedelic-assisted therapy could be approved by the FDA in the next decade, that would do nothing to change the criminal penalties faced by millions of people who use psychedelics outside of government-sanctioned, medically-supervised settings. Thats why its incumbent upon people who care about psychedelics to advocate for reducing the criminalization of people who use them outside of medical contexts, while also advocating for psychedelic-assisted therapy research.

Given the widespread scientific consensus that drug use and addiction are best treated as health issues, theres no good reason for people who use psychedelics to be treated as criminals especially considering how much we already know about prohibitions discriminatory impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.

This study also forces us to reflect on why abstinence-only policies can be so harmful and counterproductive. Contrary to conventional wisdom, federal government data has consistently shown that the vast majority of people who use opioids, including heroin, dont end up developing an addiction. So our focus should be not just on preventing people from using opioids after all, they can be essential medical tools but also ensuring, above all else, that people who use them dont go on to struggle with addiction.

A truly health-centered approach to drug addiction assesses improvement by many measures, not simply by someones drug use level, but also by their overall health, their social relationships, and their general well-being. Determining success by boiling it down to the single measure of abstinence to an arbitrary group of certain drugs isnt realistic or effective.

Addiction is a complex phenomenon, but I think its safe to say that it can only be genuinely resolved when people find meaning in their lives. This study is yet another indication that the meaning people seem to find from psychedelics has considerable implications for our prevailing healthcare and addiction treatment paradigms.

Excerpt from:

Psychedelics Help Reduce Opioid Addiction, According to New ...

Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms - are powerful, able to transform the way that people who use them perceivethe world.

Because of that, after years of prohibition, psychiatric researchers in the US are hoping to take advantage of that power to transform mental health treatment.

And as the new documentary " A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin " shows, the results we've seen so far are powerful. Perhaps most interestingly, the film shows how these substances transformthe people who undergo this therapy.

"Psilocybin does in 30 seconds what antidepressants take three to four weeks to do," David Nutt , a professor of neuropsychopharmacology in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London explains in the film. Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin accompanied by therapy can have a transformational effect on mental health - like a "surgical intervention" - able to treat even cases of depression and anxiety that resist standard treatment.

The film follows the researchers and study participants that are at the forefront of this modern era of psychedelic study. Cancer patients facing distress about end of life talk about how their experience helps them overcome that distress and accept their condition. Healthy volunteers who took psilocybin for the first time to help show that it can be used safely in a therapeutic setting describe the way the "trip" changed their perception.

It's fascinating to see.

On a basic level, a part of the brain that seems to coordinate mood and is very active in cases of depression seems to basically stop acting for a time, allowing connections to form between regions of the brain that rarely communicate with each other. This mimics an effect seen in the minds of long term meditators. Something in this experience seems to cause the "trippy" effects of the drug, which participants in this research undergowhile listening to music and sitting with trained observers.

"In terms of whether these agents cause hallucinations, they're a little bit misclassified, a hallucination is an experience in some sensory phenomenon based on a stimuli that doesn't exist in reality, it's internally generated," says Stephen Ross , an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, in an interview in the film. "Versus an illusion would be looking at the wall and the wall is melting, that would be an illusion, and these drugs tend to cause more illusions than frank hallucinations, they alter how we perceive real stimuli."

In order to cause these effects, these drugs activate serotonin 2-A receptors, explains David Nichols, president and co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute.

But something about this experience- the brain activation, illusions, and hallucinations - seems to do something more profound that's harder to understand. It's able to reliably cause what researchers call a "mystical experience." That experience is strongly linked with lasting effects.

"It was like you're at the top of a roller coaster and you're about to go down and I remember inside myself saying, 'I'm taking my mind with me, I don't know where I'm going but I'm taking my mind with me' ... and I felt okay and off I went," says Sandy, one of the healthy volunteers who tried psilocybin for the first time, describing her experience.

People return from that journey changed.

"When we came back it was like someone had put on a light bulb inside Annie's head, she was literally glowing," says the husband of one terminally ill patient in one of these psilocybin studies at UCLA. "I felt wonderful, I think it's an incredibly useful tool ... what we did, it probably would have taken me years of therapy," she agrees.

You can watch the trailer for the film below and a current version of it can be rented from Vimeo .

Continued here:

How psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD actually change the way people see the world - Businessinsider India

Eleusis, the University's firststudent organization committed to studying psychedelics interdisciplinarily, held its first open house yesterday.

The organization seeks to remove the taboo from psychedelics, according to Eleusis founder and Executive Director Sonia Joseph 19.

Joseph explained that over the past five years, there has been a low-key renaissance, in which new studies have documented the use of psychedelics, such as psilocybin mushrooms and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), to treat mental illnesses. The research has implications for mental health treatment, therapy, and the academic study of human consciousness, according to Joseph.

Joseph said the increased interest in psychedelics is part of a longer conversation, which lacks an undergraduate voice. Eleusis seeks to bridge the gap between undergraduates and academics regarding psychedelics.

We want to bring in people from all disciplines [to discuss psychedelics], said Joseph, people from anthropology, religion, public policy, neuroscience, biochemistry.

The organization will invite speakers from the New Jersey, New York City, and Baltimore areas, host group discussions, and screen films about psychedelics.

Eleusis will approach the conversation from an academic standpoint, says its founder. Indeed,Joseph wants to dispel a dangerous misconception about the organization.

We are not involved in giving out drugs, she said, we are not a drug ring.

Joseph is one of the organization'ssix current board members.

Edgar Preciado 18, studying Spanish and Portuguese, serves as Director of PuPolicy Change. He is writing his junior paper on drug use among Mexican Americans in the 80s and 90s in Los Angeles, and his interest in psychedelics comes from its potential ability to treat addiction. He noted that people in his community of Compton have had histories of substance use.

It has motivated me, personally, to study . . . the context in which drug use is more likely to happen, Preciado said.

Students that attended the open house had a wide range of interests.

Javon Ryan 17, in the Classics Department, has been following the research on psychedelics.

As a person who has been dealing with some mental health issues of my own, Ive been interested in the potential of these compounds to help with issues such as anxiety and depression, Ryan said. Im interested in following and seeing what happens in the future with the research [from] anthropological, religious, neuroscientific, and psychological perspectives.

Many of the open house attendees are psychedelic users themselves and are interested in having a forum to discuss their experiences and best practices.

Ive had a long and complicated history with psychedelic use, said Joseph. I want to take a more neutral view.

She noted the wide range of experiences that people have with psychedelics, noting that Eleusis will take a safe, informed, rational perspective.

Of the twelve total attendees, a majority said that past psychedelic use had spurred their interest in Eleusis. According to Joseph, a number of professors at the University have expressed support.

Joseph expressed concern about psychedelics historical image, noting that Timothy Leary and others in the 60s marketed psychedelics as an anti-establishment drug, a sort of middle finger to the government.

Eventually, I think the stigma will fade, she added.

The open house took place in 1915 room at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday. Eleusis is currently recruiting board members.

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First U. student group on studying psychedelics holds open house - The Daily Princetonian

(A New Understanding)

Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin the active ingredient in magic mushrooms are powerful, able to transform the way that people who use them perceivethe world.

Because of that, after years of prohibition, psychiatric researchers in the US are hoping to take advantage of that power to transform mental health treatment.

And as the new documentary "A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin" shows, the results we've seen so far are powerful. Perhaps most interestingly, the film shows how these substances transformthe people who undergo this therapy.

"Psilocybin does in 30 seconds what antidepressants take three to four weeks to do," David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London explains in the film. Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin accompanied by therapy can have a transformational effect on mental health like a "surgical intervention" able to treat even cases of depression and anxiety that resist standard treatment.

The film follows the researchers and study participants that are at the forefront of this modern era of psychedelic study. Cancer patients facing distress about end of life talk about how their experience helps them overcome that distress and accept their condition. Healthy volunteers who took psilocybin for the first time to help show that it can be used safely in a therapeutic setting describe the way the "trip" changed their perception.

It's fascinating to see.

On a basic level, a part of the brain that seems to coordinate mood and is very active in cases of depression seems to basically quiet downfor a time, allowing connections to form between regions of the brain that rarely communicate with each other. This mimics an effect seen in the minds of long term meditators. Something in this experience seems to cause the "trippy" effects of the drug, which participants in this research undergowhile listening to music and sitting with trained observers.

"In terms of whether these agents cause hallucinations, they're a little bit misclassified, a hallucination is an experience in some sensory phenomenon based on a stimuli that doesn't exist in reality, it's internally generated," says Stephen Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, in an interview in the film. "Versus an illusion would be looking at the wall and the wall is melting, that would be an illusion, and these drugs tend to cause more illusions than frank hallucinations, they alter how we perceive real stimuli."

In order to cause these effects, these drugs activate serotonin 2a receptors, explains David Nichols, president and co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute.

But something about this experience the brain activation, illusions, and hallucinations seems to do something more profound that's harder to understand. It's able to reliably cause what researchers call a "mystical experience." That experience is strongly linked with lasting effects.

"It was like you're at the top of a roller coaster and you're about to go down and I remember inside myself saying, 'I'm taking my mind with me, I don't know where I'm going but I'm taking my mind with me' ... and I felt okay and off I went," says Sandy, one of the healthy volunteers who tried psilocybin for the first time, describing her experience.

People return from that journey changed.

"When we came back it was like someone had put on a light bulb inside Annie's head, she was literally glowing," says the husband of one terminally ill patient in one of these psilocybin studies at UCLA. "I felt wonderful, I think it's an incredibly useful tool ... what we did, it probably would have taken me years of therapy," she agrees.

You can watch the trailer for the film below and a current version of it can be rented from Vimeo.

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How psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD actually change the way ... - Yahoo Finance

By Britta Lokting February 27, 2017

Since Neal Goldsmith saw his soul during a particularly wild acid trip in 91, he's been at the forefront of the movement to normalize the psychedelic experience.

Photos by Vincent Tullo

Theformercab driverwithinNeal Goldsmithisunleashedas he swerveshis Audipastsignpostsin Dumbo, Brooklyn,andwhipsthroughan intersectionon his way into the cityaround seven p.m.He merges onto the Manhattan Bridge and lightsuponeof the eight joints he rolled anhour prior in his home office. He cracks the window and inhales. TheFreedom Towercomes into viewand the city lightsfloat closer in momentary silence.

Im not a masochist, Goldsmithsaysasthe bridge spits the car out ontoChrystieStreet. I dont want to die.

Hesnottalking abouthis driving, but rather hisuse of psychedelics, which,like marijuana, he candidly broadcasts.Aftera revelatory25years ago at age forty, he left his consulting career, opened a psychotherapy practice,and hasbecome a leadingproponentofdrug policy reform.Hissuccessas a public speaker,partially due to his purring voice andeasewithnormalizingthis once-shunned topic,haselevated him to aprominentposition in themovement to revivepsychedelics.

Hes really emerged as a leader in organizing serious professional and cultural events around psychedelics, says AndrewTatarsky,the founder and director of the Center for Optimal Living, a treatment facility for those with substance use issues.TatarskycallsGoldsmitharenaissance man,a guy whos really thinking at a very high level.He has a kind of encyclopedia grasp of the psychedelic literature, the research, and the history.

Goldsmithbeganexperimentingwith psychedelics as a college student in the early70s at Case Western Reserve University, where his listed activities and societies on LinkedIninclude, pre-med hippie. Yetthe drugsdidnt give him the deep, self-explorative experience he wouldlaterencounteras a middle-aged man.Rather,it wasthe mother of all tripsin 1991 that awakened himto understanding humanitys natural state, he says.

That yearhetooka blotterLSDfor the first time in nineteen years,at a relatives suggestion. Following some initial panicky feelings andthe need to pastereassuringPost-It notes aroundthehouse,Goldsmithsettled intothevisions.With his eyes closed, he followed himselfsinkingdeepintothesoilwhere hecame acrossa glowing, throbbing orb, which he then touched.

I hadrealized,in essence,I was perfect, he says, explaining that hed found his core,aplaceof puritywhen everyone was sweet and wonderfulbefore your parents fucked you up.To demonstrate this inconcreteterms, he spreads his legs, lifts the right one and grabs his crotch.

This is the fundamental existence, he says,launching intoan explanationof the seven levels of chakra and how hallucinogens illuminatethis path.

Over the past twenty years, Goldsmith hasgiven dozens of lecturesandWebinars,facilitatedpanel discussions,writtenforPsychology Todayandappearedon podcasts.His mostinfluentialstrideshave beenas the host ofHorizons, a psychedelics conference in New York each fall,and his2011bookcalledPsychedelic Healing: The Promise ofEntheogensfor Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development,whichTatarskyrefers to as the premiere book on psychedelics and emotional healing.

Its only in recent years thatstudying the positive effects of psychedelicshasgained traction in mainstream media after several well-known studies emerged followinga decades long ban of its use in labs and clinical trials since 1970.Goldsmiths leverage has helped publicize the results.

Foran outside person who isnt directly involved in the research, Neal has really been helpful andveryambitious in bringing the findings to the general public in his lectures and his book, says Dr. AnthonyBossis, a co-principal investigator of the New York UniversitysPsilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, which examined how the main psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms can alleviate angst about dying.

Hes been one of the most intelligent champions for psychedelics as medicine, says Alex Grey, a visionary painter. At this point, at least the info is getting outthere thatthere has been a rebirth and worldwide international interest in and experiences of psychedelics.

Still, Goldsmith wantsto seemore.

These new studies are a good start, but far from ideal,he writesin his book.

***

Now that hes smoking a jointat the wheel, Goldsmith adheres to the traffic rules.Only the silver coloring of his hair, an enviable, feathery plumage, andsomefaint smile lines give away his age. At 65, his skin still glows and stretches taut across hisforehead.He wears a black stud in the left lobe andacabin-cozycable-knit cardigan with slacks for the occasion.

Aftercarefullycruisingup Bowery to Cooper Union, hesnagsaparkingspotinfront of the apartment building that for the past ten years has been home to his monthly, word-of-mouthsalon called PoetryScience Talks or PST(pssst).

In a loft on the third floor, about45peoplewhosigned up to heara lectureabout the mind-body problem fromthe science journalist JohnHorganand engage in alively, albeitsomewhat abstract, discussion, begin arriving.Some attendees include a sex therapist, a psychedelics lawyer and a shaman.

As the guests mingleon couches, chatting about God and evolution,orin the kitchen near aspreadof homemadecharredchicken(madeto representones sense of desire), cauliflower (brain-shaped), and devils food cake (indulgence), Goldsmith taps the shoulders offourguests includingan investment bankerand whispers, Were going to the roof, whichiscode for, Letsgosmokenow.

Aftera couplehitsand light gossip,Goldsmith heads backto the elevatorwherethe building manager stops to question himlike aparent who whiffed somepot.After assuringthe man hes visiting a friendandreturningsafelybacktothe third floor,Goldsmith runshis fingertipsalong the hallway walland muses about the night ahead.Hemight call up a womanlater.

There is something appealing about me, he says, referring to howquicklywomen flock to him.They like my standing in the psychedelic community and that Im intelligent.

During the discussion,Goldsmith interjects from the back,where hes been taking notes on his iPhone, to challengeHorgansviewpoints includinga statementthat consciousness comes out of matter and anotherreferencing thephrasepeople who are too smart to believe in God.

Whenthe salon ends attenp.m., Goldsmith looks tired but no less assured of his ability tokeepa room rapt.

Theres no one like me, he says. Iama genius actually, but thats a numerical thing.

Britta Lokting is a writer and journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice and The Forward, among other publications. She is also a Narratively Features Reporter.

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Meet The People's Champion of Psychedelic Drugs - Narratively

Public health officials are calling the opioid crisis the worst drug epidemic in American history.

Overdoses claimed more than 33,000 lives in 2015, and these numbers are steadily on the rise. Its estimated that over 2 million people in the U.S. are addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, with many more using the drugs illegally.

Potential solutions to the rapidly escalating opioid crisis have been few and far between. But a long-demonized class of illegal drugs may provide one unlikely approach to tackling widespread opiate abuse and addiction.

A new study, published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, found that experience with psychedelics was linked with decreased opioid abuse and addiction an effect that appears to be unique to hallucinogens and marijuana. Conversely, use of other illegal drugs such as cocaine was associated with an increased risk of opioid abuse and dependence.

The findings underscore the positive psychological effects increasingly known to be associated with psychedelic experiences. Previous findings have linked psychedelic use with reduced psychological distress and a decreased risk of suicide, while a 2011 Johns Hopkins study showed a single trip on psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms) resulted in lasting positive personality changes such as increases in openness to experience, a trait associated with creativity and open-mindedness.

Studies have shown drugs like LSD and psilocybin as well as ayahuasca and ibogaine, plant medicines with a long history of use in indigenous cultures to be effective as therapeutic agents for addiction recovery. This new study is the first, however, to show a link between psychedelic use and decreased abuse of other illegal drugs in the general population.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data on 44,000 illicit opioid users who completed the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2008 and 2013, controlling for socio-economic factors like education and income level.

Among people with a history of illegal opiate use, those with some psychedelic experience were 40 percent less likely to report abusing opiates the past year, and 27 percent less likely to report opioid dependency in the past year. Marijuana use was associated with a 55 percent reduced risk of opiate abuse.

No other illegal drugs were associated with a lowered risk of opioid abuse and addiction, and some even carried an increased risk.

While the findings dont prove a causal effect, the strong correlation between psychedelic experience and reduced opioid use and abuse seems to warrant further investigation.

Of course, its important to note that psychedelics also carry a risk for abuse. But researchers have found that when used under careful conditions, in the proper set and setting,the risk for adverse effects is relatively low. (Set refers to the users mindset and expectations at the time of ingesting the drug, while setting suggests a good physical environment.) And contrary to popular myths, use of LSD and similar drugs is not associated with an increased risk of developing mental illness.

These findings are only the latest to suggest that public opinion and policy around psychedelics lags woefully behind the science. Demonized in the wake of Timothy Leary-era excesses and made into public enemies by the former Richard Nixon administration, drugs like LSD and psilocybin were made out to be dangerous and addictive.

With the passing of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, theDrug Enforcement Agencyhas listed LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs as Schedule I substances, meaning that they were deemed to have no medical value and high risk for abuse. They are the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychological and/or physical dependence, as the United Patients Groups explains. Drugs of this class are generally illegal.

Aside from heroin, most other opiates are listed in the less restrictive Schedule II and Schedule III, alongside other drugs considered less dangerous and more medically valuable than those in Schedule I.

Now, 50 years later, the war on drugs is widely regarded as a public policy failure. The lingering stigma against psychedelic drugs is slowly fading as rigorous scientific studies continue to demonstrate the compounds to have real medical value. An exciting and rapidly growing field of research is revealing psychedelic compounds to carry striking potential as a therapeutic agent for treating ailments ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to cancer-related anxiety and depression to cigarette addiction.

Marijuana, which is also listed as a Schedule I drug, has also proved to be an extremely promising tool for tackling the opioid epidemic. Many patients have turned to cannabis to relieve pain and to curb their reliance on prescription painkillers and, in states where marijuana is legal, there are fewer deaths from opioid overdose. Last year, Maine became the first state to petition to include opioid addiction in the list of ailments that can be treated by medical marijuana, although the health department denied the request.

With the specter of Obamacare repeal now threatening to cut treatment access for hundreds of thousands of people with opioid use disorders, more health experts could start to embrace these promising yet unconventional treatment options in the coming years.

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Psychedelics Could Play A Role In Tackling The Opioid Epidemic - Huffington Post

NEW YORK(ENEWSPF)February 23, 2017 By: Jag Davies

The criminalization of people who use psychedelics is rooted in myths that are the vestiges of colonialism and the drug war and, one by one, those myths are crumbling down.

Weve learned in recent years that people who use psychedelics are significantly *less* likely to end up developing mental health problems, perpetrating domestic violence, or suffering from psychological distress and suicidal thinking.

Meanwhile, recent research has shown that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for people struggling with difficult-to-treat conditions such as substance use disorders. Not much has been known, though, about the connection between psychedelic use and substance misuse in the general population.

Now, a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology has found that experiences with psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms are associated with decreased risk of opioid abuse and dependence among respondents with a history of illegal opioid use. Psychedelic use is associated with 27% reduced risk of past-year opioid dependence and 40% reduced risk of past-year opioid abuse. Other than marijuana use, which was associated with 55% reduced risk of past-year opioid abuse, no other illegal drug was associated with reduced risk of past-year opioid dependence or abuse.

The study is based on six years of data from the federal governments National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which surveys 70,000 people each year. While the findings are far from causal, the authors conclude that the associations between psychedelic use and opioid misuse are pervasive and significant and suggest that psychedelics are associated with positive psychological characteristics and are consistent with prior reports suggesting efficacy in treatment of substance use disorders.

Although more research is needed to determine exactly why theres such a strong correlation between psychedelic use and decreased risk of opioid misuse, this study does appear to validate the experiences of many people who have found substances like ibogaine, marijuana or kratom to be life-changing tools that have helped them lead happier, more fulfilling lives. For many, these substances have helped them cut back or quit their use of opioids or other substances with which theyve had a problematic relationship. Safe access to these substances along with 911 Good Samaritan laws, naloxone access programs, supervised injection facilities, various forms of maintenance therapy, and, of course, ending the criminalization of drug use should be part of the discussion when it comes to dealing with addiction and skyrocketing rates of overdose deaths.

And lets not forget our commander-in-chief is ramping up the drug war and thinks he can deal with opioid addiction by building a giant wall and deporting millions of people, both documented and undocumented. Lets remember, too, that thousands of people are getting handcuffed, arrested, branded as criminals, and serving time behind bars every year simply for using or possessing a psychedelic substance in the U.S. and these people are more likely to be young, non-white, and socioeconomically marginalized than most people who use psychedelics.

While psychedelic-assisted therapy could be approved by the FDA in the next decade, that would do nothing to change the criminal penalties faced by millions of people who use psychedelics outside of government-sanctioned, medically-supervised settings. Thats why its incumbent upon people who care about psychedelics to advocate for reducing the criminalization of people who use them outside of medical contexts, while also advocating for psychedelic-assisted therapy research.

Given the widespread scientific consensus that drug use and addiction are best treated as health issues, theres no good reason for people who use psychedelics to be treated as criminals especially considering how much we already know about prohibitions discriminatory impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.

This study also forces us to reflect on why abstinence-only policies can be so harmful and counterproductive. Contrary to conventional wisdom, federal government data has consistently shown that the vast majority of people who use opioids, including heroin, dont end up developing an addiction. So our focus should be not just on preventing people from using opioids after all, they can be essential medical tools but also ensuring, above all else, that people who use them dont go on to struggle with addiction.

A truly health-centered approach to drug addiction assesses improvement by many measures, not simply by someones drug use level, but also by their overall health, their social relationships, and their general well-being. Determining success by boiling it down to the single measure of abstinence to an arbitrary group of certain drugs isnt realistic or effective.

Addiction is a complex phenomenon, but I think its safe to say that it can only be genuinely resolved when people find meaning in their lives. This study is yet another indication that the meaning people seem to find from psychedelics has considerable implications for our prevailing criminal justice and healthcare paradigms.

Jag Davies is the director of communications strategy for the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)

Source: http://drugpolicy.org

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Psychedelics Help Reduce Opioid Addiction, According to New Study - eNews Park Forest