-Reprinted from Time Magazine-
By John Cloud
Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question
that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic
renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science,
including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard,
which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into
therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the
university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open
the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the
first time?
The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the
'50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the
'70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top
journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of
Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the
use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies,
just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr.
Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research
Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that
remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine
(colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a
team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave
psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to
obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed
"acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are
studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the
Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin
what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.
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