posted January 04, 2008 04:21 PM
Scientists look anew at 'magic' mushroom
By Gareth Cook The Boston Globe
Published: July 19, 2006Psychedelic mushrooms have been a stubborn part of the drug problem in the United States for decades, offering their users a potentially dangerous, and illegal, way to warp their consciousness. Now government-funded scientists have found that the active ingredient in the mushrooms could be a powerful tool for scientific research, and they say it should be explored as a potential treatment for depression, anxiety, and other disorders.
In a paper published last week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say that a single dose of the ingredient, psilocybin, routinely brings about positive psychological changes that can last for months. This lasting effect is surprising and mysterious, the scientists said, but seems to be the result of what they call powerful, drug-induced "mystical experiences" that include a feeling of the
sacredness and oneness of the universe.
More than two-thirds of the volunteers described their session with the drug - several hours in a laboratory, under close monitoring - as one of the most meaningful and spiritually significant events in their life, on a par with the birth of a child or the death of a parent. "That just blew me away," said Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins scientist who led the study and is considered one of the world's top investigators into the psychological effects of drugs.
Griffiths and other scientists said the results suggest the time has come to study the scientific and medical potential of psilocybin, some four decades after the drug abuse of the 1960s shut down research into psychedelic drugs. Neuroscientists could study people under the influence of the drug to answer basic questions about human perception and consciousness. But the research also shows that scientists can safely and reliably provoke a mystical experience in a laboratory, meaning they now have an unprecedented chance to study the nature of the mystical experience itself, using brain scanning and other techniques to probe the biological basis of a puzzling human phenomenon that has powerfully shaped the world's religions.
"This represents a landmark study, because it is applying modern techniques to an area of human experience that goes back as long as humankind has been here," said Charles Schuster, a former director of the government's National Institute on Drug Abuse and currently a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University School of
Medicine in Detroit.
The Hopkins team is planning follow-up work to look at the drug's medical potential, but other groups have already begun similar research. Preliminary results from a study under way at a California hospital show that a single session with psilocybin helps patients overcome the anxiety and depression that occur with a diagnosis of incurable cancer...
In the California study, Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Los Angeles, recalled one session with a woman whose fear of dying had so overwhelmed her that it was cutting her off from the people who loved her. He said he watched as she cried and cried while under the influence of the drug. Grob said he thought that she was anguished by her mortality. Later, he asked her why she had been crying. She said that she was crying in empathy with her husband, that she felt the loneliness he felt at losing his connection to her. It was a revelation, she said, that has strengthened her marriage.
Lindaland
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