The past two months have been an incredibly busy and productive time for global drug policy reform and scientific research into psychedelic drugs. Never in my 15 years as director of the Beckley Foundation have I seen such rapid progress in these complementary fields.
Earlier this week, Imperial College and the foundation hosted a forum on psychedelic drugs research, which discussed the breakthroughs that have been made by our organisations' research programme and heard presentations from scientists from around the world. And in April, the three-day Psychedelic Science Conference took place in San Francisco, also co-hosted by the Beckley Foundation.
At last the potential value of these compounds is beginning to be explored. Not only are they gateways to understanding consciousness itself, they also – alone or as aids to psychotherapy – open up valuable new avenues of treatment for many human ills, including depression, cluster headaches, anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. After many years in the darkness, we are finally starting to uncover the potential of these compounds, which inter-relate with human neurochemistry so intimately that they bring about radical changes in consciousness that – with careful handling – can be channelled into treating disease and transforming awareness.
Research into the potential of these drugs has been blocked for the past 40 years by their being scheduled as "controlled substances". This has surrounded them with taboos and regulations that still make research extremely difficult and expensive, deterring all but the most determined explorers. I am fortunate to have been collaborating for the last few years with leading researchers including David Nutt of Imperial College, Valerie Curran of UCL and Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.
