RESEARCH | +80 articles

[mr peabody]

Becoming a Psychedelic Researcher

Sewell, Baggott, Cozzi, Doblin, Forte, Goldsmith, Goodwin, Guillot, Hanna, Holmes, Jerome, Kumar, Lovett, Merkur, Onnie-Hay, Peden, Roberts, Ruderman, Sachs, van Vee

With the current renaissance in psychedelic research, after a forty-year moratorium, undergraduates interested in the topic are increasingly starting to ask: How can I get involved? Unfortunately, psychedelics are still heavily stigmatized, and there is as yet no obvious infrastructure into which enthusiasts can channel their energy. There are no psychedelic research graduate programs, no psychedelic student groups, no psychedelic scholarships, and few professors willing to provide mentorship or funding agencies willing to sponsor such research. This leaves undergraduates inspired by psychedelics frustrated and uncertain about what they should be doing in order to most help the cause. Here are some suggestions and guidance for those so perplexed.

First, examine your motives for entering psychedelic research. Is it because psychedelics are novel and cool? If so, you are apt to find psychedelic research disappointing. While Dr. Timothy Leary, perhaps the most famous of the psychedelic researchers, found it a route to enduring fame and hot sex with large numbers of young women, he did this primarily through his showmanship rather than his scientific research. If such a lifestyle is appealing to you, there are shorter routes to this goal than decades of scholarly study.

Or is it because you have had a mystical or life-changing experience on a psychedelic? You do not need to become a psychedelic researcher in order to continue your self-exploration; you do not even need to continue to take psychedelics, as there are many other methods of changing one’s own consciousness, from yoga to meditation to Holotropic Breathwork. Such a path may prove profoundly self-altering; however, it is unlikely to change society.

Or is it because you are frustrated living in a culture that tramples individual freedoms, discourages introspection and insight, substitutes lies and half-truths for genuine science, encourages people to self–censor and conform to that which they know is harmful and wrong, and that you wish instead to change society for the better? You do not need to be a scientific researcher in order to be an activist. Ultimately, scientific research is only useful as a tool in the hands of the activist, for it is the activist who compels society to improve.

Or is it because you are motivated by a genuine curiosity about these peculiar substances, and wish to apply the tools of modern inquiry toward understanding their properties? Perhaps you appreciate that scientists such as Ralph Abraham, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Andrew Weil, and Nobel Prize winners such as Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, and Kary Mullis have found psychedelics valuable tools in formulating their great discoveries, and wonder how this can be so? Maybe you know that the discovery of LSD was what sparked interest in the serotonin system and prompted the explosive growth of modern psychopharmacology that continues today? Possibly you contemplate what other wonders may lie hidden in the closed box of psychedelic science?

And are you willing to accept that your unconventional interests may lead to professional isolation or even ostracism, and that the time-consuming navigation of the layers of red tape endemic to psychedelic research will inevitably slow your publication rate and consequently promotions compared with your peers? And are you aware that the total lack of government or corporate support for such endeavors means that you will never be rich, and you may in fact eventually land in jail on trumped up charges of one sort or another? If such considerations do not trouble you, then read on.

As an undergraduate get your degree! Lie low and infiltrate the System

The undergraduate years are a difficult time for the nascent psychedelic researcher because of the stigma that these drugs still hold. Many undergraduates come to realize that broadcasting their unconventional views at this time could potentially harm their future careers, and thus indirectly harm psychedelic research. Sometimes we have to conform to others’ expectations in order to establish a solid base of credibility, and wait for a time when we can be more independent in our pursuits. The book Why Shrooms Are Good by Joe Schmoe is likely to be ignored; Therapeutic Benefits of Psilocybin by Dr. Joe Schmoe considerably less so, even if both books say exactly the same thing. Incidentally, this was the path I followed; I didn’t breathe a word of my interests until I was already on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Be warned, however–conformity for too long can corrode the soul. And in retrospect, you are freer as an undergraduate than you may think you are.

Educate yourself about psychedelics

Read what scientific literature does exist regarding psychedelics, not just the material that draws popular attention. If possible, take a course in psychedelics. Dr. Stacy B. Schaefer teaches a class on Indigenous People of Latin America at California State University, Chico, dealing in part with the peyote-using Huichol Indians. Dr. Constantino Manuel Torres teaches an Art and Shamanism course at Florida International University, exploring traditional cultures that use psychedelics. Northern Illinois University offers regular courses by Dr. Thomas Roberts. Invite him to be a guest lecturer at your own school! Dr. Roberts writes:

If your department or another would like to offer either course – Foundations of Psychedelic Studies, or Entheogens – Sacramentals or Sacrilege? – to students (graduate or undergraduate), it might be possible for me to travel every now and then and meet with a class, say over long weekends or for a day or two every couple of weeks. The rest we can do by Internet.

Alternately, design your own independent study course (or courses) for credit in psychedelics. This is the approach MAPS President Rick Doblin took for his undergraduate education at New College of Florida. Use Dr. Robert’s syllabus as a basis. Paul Goodwin is starting a web site aimed at interested students offering links and short descriptions of courses relevant to psychedelic studies. This should be online by the fall of 2006 (www.psycomp.org.uk). Keep current with the literature in your area of interest, and start thinking about ideas for your own research project.

Another graduate student writes:

I completed an honors thesis as an undergraduate, which basically was a literature review, and it ended up resulting in my first publication a few years later. It also led up to my masters thesis (a quasi-experimental study) and a few other papers in press. The best thing undergraduates can do to help is to prepare themselves, I believe. Be persistent about being a part of psychedelic research, if that is truly where your heart lies. I may not be able to do exactly what I want right now, but I still can keep it in mind for the future.

“The Implications of Psychedelic Research for XXX” often makes a good term paper topic. Rephrasing a title as a question is one tactic to use when encountering skeptical professors: “Do Psychedelics Have Implications for XXX?” or “How Should We Evaluate Psychedelic Claims of XXX?” Also, consider requesting that your local and school libraries acquire psychedelic books. Not only does this help spread knowledge, it also helps authors and encourages publishers to accept more psychedelic titles.

In the meantime, attend a convention! There’s quite a bit of psychedelic research presented at the yearly Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conferences (http://slsa.press.jhu.edu). Similarly, the Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences held in Tucson, Arizona every other year also always have some presentations dealing with psychedelic research (www.consciousness.arizona.edu). And more specifically focused on psychedelics and altered states are the yearly Mind States conventions, where aboveground researchers and underground psychonauts congregate to discuss their latest discoveries. The Mind States emailing list provides updates on similar events that happen worldwide (www.mindstates.org).

Underground publications often present cutting-edge discoveries in the arenas of psychedelic chemistry, botany, and pharmacology. The Entheogen Review, for example, was the first place to discuss the extraction of tryptamines from Phalaris grasses for ayahuasca analogues and the first to confirm the psychoactivity of Mimosa tenuiflora (= M. hostilis) without coadministration of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. These days, countless web sites and discussion forums carry first-person reports of the latest synthetic psychedelics and botanical preparations. Amateur science flourishes in our current legal situation, in which professional science is so difficult to perform that most discoveries have to be made underground. Remember, though, that the rigorous controls present in aboveground science are usually lacking in underground efforts, rendering many results questionable at best.

Start a psychedelic student group

While one undergraduate is easy to intimidate, large groups of them have a history of occupying administration buildings to facilitate societal change. Fish travel in schools for a reason! Another strategy, therefore, is to start a student group. One possibility would be to form a chapter of a national organization such as the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) or Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). This approach would be similar to student chapters of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or Students for a Free Tibet.

One notorious troublemaker writes:

I took out an ad in the school’s newspaper, Come to the first meeting of the University of Chicago Education Society. We met at the spot that marked the beginning of the Atomic Age, a Henry Moore sculpture called The Nuclear Egg. About a hundred people showed up. We shared stories, brought speakers to town, dreamed of a saner world, and labored to manifest one.

At Harvard, where I work, there is no recognized undergraduate student organization focused on psychedelic research. The procedure for creating such an organization can be found on-line at: www.college.harvard.edu/student/handbook.pdf. The advantages of forming a recognized student organization are many. Not only can recognized groups get permission to use campus facilities and assembly halls for events and symposia, they are also eligible to apply for funding from the student government. A student organization focused on psychedelic research could engage in outreach with other student groups and academic departments encompassing most of the physical, biological, and social sciences, as well as those pertaining to the arts, humanities, and civil liberties. Events could be held on campus to educate and inform, and university funds could be used to bring in speakers and arrange conferences. Such events could draw participants from all over the world. While these activities do not necessarily amount to actual psychedelic research, they could be fashioned in a manner to do so, if, for example, a faculty member were enlisted to supervise a survey-based study. More importantly, student organizations spread awareness, generate understanding, and de-stigmatize psychedelics, thereby helping to set the stage for actual research when the time and place are right.

SSDP and the student ACLU group helped sponsor the ethnopharmacology society’s seminar on the co-evolution of plants and humans. We also were awarded a grant from the student organization office–raising more than a thousand bucks!–and were able to bring in Dennis McKenna as the outside speaker. It was a splendid event, with Dennis giving a great talk examining plant chemical communication signals that may be driving the interesting side of human evolution. It was followed by a panel discussion that included some of University of Washington’s botany professors, a classics scholar, and an Incan medicine man.

Volunteer

umerous organizations exist that appreciate people who offer to do volunteer work. MAPS needs help with their on-line psychedelic bibliography, creating abstracts for many of the articles that are listed. The Erowid web site also sometimes uses volunteers (see www.erowid.org/general/about/about_volunteers.shtml). Find an organization with which you resonate and contact them to see what sort of help they need.

Write letters

Without government approval, psychedelic research will stagnate as it has for the last forty or so years. Government politicians, agencies, and organizations need to understand that people interested in psychedelics are not thoughtlessly promoting drug use, but are sincerely searching for personal and scientific truths. Write letters and share how you feel! Nobody can arrest you for an opinion–yet.

Donate money to psychedelic organizations

This is by far the easiest way to get involved. With no support from government or industry, that means that funding for psychedelic research is going to come from one place only–you!

As a graduate student

Your first stop should be the Heffter Research Institute’s Scientific Advisory Panel, which is a list of psychedelic allies in the international academic world. The locations where these individuals work are areas where there is possible support for psychedelic research.

Failing this, Dr. Alexander Shulgin’s recommendation is to get as strong a foundation in graduate school as possible. Work in a highly-respected institution with good people doing solid, reputable research, pick up as many skills as you can along the way (for you never know which will ultimately be useful) then pursue what it is that you genuinely want to do, which you might not even know until after graduate school anyway. Learn solid methodology and techniques, gain as much knowledge as you can, hone your analytic skills–while keeping sight of the big picture–and then apply all these resources to psychedelic research when the time comes. The more rigorous and stringent your research and its interpretation, the harder it will be for people to argue with it, reject it, or not take it seriously–and that can make all the difference. If you try to get as much as you can out of graduate or medical school, you’ll always have those tools, analytical skills, and knowledge of sound techniques available to do excellent research in whatever field you choose. In addition, it is important to have proficiency and credibility in a field other than psychedelic research, to serve as a fallback position when changing political winds make times tough.

My own path was one of going to medical school and becoming a medical doctor, which I figured was a necessity if I ever wanted to actually give these drugs to people, which I do. Furthermore, I believe that an M.D. sometimes has more credibility than a Ph.D. or politician when it comes to telling people what’s good and bad for them. My grant proposals can afford to be a little more daring because if they’re all turned down, I won’t be living on the street–seeing patients for money is always an option. One disadvantage, of course, is the length of training–which in my case (neurology/ psychiatry) was ten years after college. Another disadvantage is the large loans and consequent temptation to specialize in something more profitable than psychedelics (and ample opportunities to do so). But I have no regrets about the path I have chosen to follow.

If you wish to follow the Ph.D. route, however, pure neuroscience or neuropharmacology is extremely valuable, as it is much easier politically to give psychedelics to animals or tissue cultures than it is to humans, and there is a large amount of funding available in areas indirectly applicable to the study of psychedelics, such as the pharmacology and physiology of serotonin. This sort of research builds the credibility necessary to apply for funding to study psychedelics directly. Unfortunately, much of the research done in these fields is on animals and never directly examines higher-order thought and cognition–the levels at which psychedelics engage human consciousness in the most fascinating way. And sadly, there are few academics in these fields willing to serve as mentors for students interested in psychedelics.

Experimental psychology, the study of the human mind, is also valuable, but psychonaut psychologists have given graduate-level psychology study mixed reviews. Today’s experimental psychology Ph.D. programs reportedly involve working in very restricted domains, performing tightly controlled experiments that rarely resemble real-world conditions, focus primarily on outward behavior (as opposed to studying mind), and interpreting data in ways that are inevitably constrained by how well they fit with currently accepted theories.

Clinical psychology will allow you to build the skills necessary in any multidisciplinary team researching the psychotherapeutic value of psychedelics. When psychedelics are ultimately approved as a treatment modality, a clinical psychologist will undoubtedly be part of any such treatment team. And as a clinical psychologist, you’ll be able to design clinical trials sensitive to set and setting, which are largely ignored in contemporary psychedelic research. A focus on psychedelic–psychotherapy outcome research would be an especially useful degree, and could lead to a job at MAPS. Clinical psychology graduate students report that the most prominent psychological perspective today is cognitive-behavioral, an approach more balanced between observable behavior and cognition. Less mainstream, transpersonal graduate schools such as the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, or the Saybrook Institute provide an alternative to the prevailing cognitive-behavioral paradigm. Collectively, these institutes are the central hubs of clinical psychology wisdom, knowledge, and experience from the sixties, largely due to the influx of faculty such as Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Richard Tarnas, Stanley Krippner, and other veterans of the psychedelic science community.

Also consider psychoanalytic training, which is not just for M.D.s anymore–learning to navigate the subconscious is a valuable skill for anyone doing psychedelic psychotherapy! A dream is not so different from a trip, and dream analysis skills translate directly. But if you’re interested in research, make sure that you get a Ph.D. rather than a Psy.D.

Cognitive science is a pure science of the mind, drawing from a variety of disciplines, including computer science. (Cognitive science was largely founded as an attempt to model and imitate the human mind on a computer system.) There are far fewer such programs than comparable psychology programs, which are ubiquitous, yet cognitive science differs from experimental psychology in that it relies strongly on theoretical and empirical work done in other fields (such as ethnographic research), especially philosophy, neuroscience, and linguistics, but also sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. These data are then used in an integrative way to better understand and modify theoretical foundations, rather than looked at as orthogonal data from a different field. The boundaries between disciplines often dissolve, resulting in integration that is necessary in order to understand the psychedelic experience and consciousness in general.

Cognitive science, as the science of higher–order conceptual structure and thought, will permit you to broadly study the mind itself, its cognitive components, how it is manifested in neural tissue, and how meaning is created, organized, modified, and communicated by humans in the real ecological, social, and cultural environment that we inhabit. Many cognitive science programs emphasize computational modeling, which is unfortunately still in its infancy. One cognitive scientist writes:

Here, in a cognitive science program, I am able to work in labs doing both brain-imaging (fMRI) as well as electrophysiological (EEG/ ERP) brainwave research, but at the same time, study in rigorous detail theories from philosophy and linguistics while attempting to form a coherent picture of how the mind works, what thought is, and how we comprehend reality.

Ultimately, when deciding on a graduate program that will nurture your growth and refine your skills, your decision should be based on the professors under whom you will be working, the type of research that is carried out in their labs, the resources available to you, and the fit of your questions and ideas with those of your advisor. Whatever route you follow, learn as much as you can and keep your mind, eyes, and ears wide open. Absorb and integrate what you are studying with your own interests and ideas, but never shy away from something because it seems too rigid or intuitively wrong or entrenched within illusory modes of thought. Decide what you think is accurate and what is not, know why what you think is wrong is wrong, then envision a better way to understand and explain the phenomenon.

There are many paths to becoming a psychedelic researcher. Like the Internet, science views censorship as a system failure and routes around it; psychedelic research, which has long lain fallow, is slowly germinating once again. You may end up studying the biochemical and neural basis for the psychedelic experience, psychedelic psychotherapy, religious and contemplative approaches to the ecstatic experience, the nature of consciousness, law reform and public policy, going on ethnographic and anthropological expeditions, or designing and running clinical trials. You may become a strong voice in the media. But what matters most in the end is that you attain success and satisfaction on a personal, professional, and spiritual level, while at the same time remaining true to yourself and your beliefs.

So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? R. Andrew Sewell, MD Answers. - MAPS

With the current renaissance in psychedelic research, after a forty-year moratorium, undergraduates interested in the topic are increasingly starting to ask: How can I get involved? Unfortunately, psychedelics are still heavily stigmatized, and...

maps.org

 

[mr peabody]

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris

Imperial launches world’s first Centre for Psychedelic Research

by Ryan O'Hare | 26 April 2019

The first formal Centre for Psychedelic Research in the world will launch at Imperial College London today.

Funded by more than 3 million from five founding donors, the new Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research will build on over a decade of pioneering work in this area carried out at Imperial, including a clinical trial that has kick-started global efforts to develop psilocybin therapy into a licensed treatment for depression. It will also investigate their potential for treating other conditions, including anorexia.

Led by Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, the Centre will focus on two main research themes: the use of psychedelics in mental health care; and as tools to probe the brain’s basis of consciousness.

The newly established Centre will be based at Imperial’s Hammersmith campus, sharing space between Imperial College London and the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

The Centre also aims to develop a research clinic that could help to gather additional clinical evidence and become a prototype for the licensed psychedelic care facilities of the future.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research, said: “This new Centre represents a watershed moment for psychedelic science; symbolic of its now mainstream recognition. Psychedelics are set to have a major impact on neuroscience and psychiatry in the coming years. It’s such a privilege to be at the forefront of one of the most exciting areas in medical science. I am immensely grateful to the donors who have made all of this possible."

Dr Carhart-Harris adds: “It may take a few years for psychedelic therapy to be available for patients, but research so far has been very encouraging. Early stage clinical research has shown that when delivered safely and professionally, psychedelic therapy holds a great deal of promise for treating some very serious mental health conditions and may one day offer new hope to vulnerable people with limited treatment options.”

Pioneering research

In the last decade a number of research groups in Europe and the Americas have conducted studies into the safety and effectiveness of psychedelics for conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but the new Imperial Centre is the first to gain this level of stature within a major academic institution.

Imperial’s Psychedelic Research Group was the first in the world to investigate the brain effects of LSD using modern brain imaging and the first to study psilocybin – the active compound in magic mushrooms – for treating severe depression. These studies have laid the groundwork for larger trials that are now taking place around the world.

Other pioneering work from the group includes breakthrough neuroimaging research with psilocybin, MDMA and DMT (the psychoactive compounds found in ecstasy and ayahuasca respectively).

Earlier this year the group began a new trial directly comparing psilocybin therapy with a conventional antidepressant drug in patients with depression – a study for which they are still recruiting volunteers. Building on this, they also plan to begin another new trial next year to explore the safety and feasibility of psilocybin for treating patients with anorexia.

Professor Paul Matthews, Head of the Division of Brain Sciences at Imperial, said: “This new Centre demonstrates the real commitment of the funders and of the College to rigorous investigation of what has been, until recently, a fringe area of medical science. Through this and other aspects of our internationally leading neuropharmacological research, we may one day be able to better address the widespread and serious mental health conditions that can devastate people’s lives and for which there are currently few effective treatments.”

For further details about the ongoing clinical trial for treatment-resistant depression, contact Ashleigh Murphy: [email protected] and visit the team’s webpage for more details.

The trial currently carried out at Imperial – Psilocybin for Major Depression – is a randomised control trial in major depressive disorder. The researchers are using fMRI to compare the treatment mechanisms of six weeks of daily Escitalopram (SSRI antidepressant) with two doses of psilocybin. The trial commenced in January 2019 and the team are still recruiting for participants. For full details, visit the web page of the Psychedelic research group.

The current trial into psilocybin is carried out with funding support from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust.

Imperial launches world’s first Centre for Psychedelics Research | Imperial News | Imperial College London

The first formal centre for psychedelic research in the world will launch at Imperial College London today.

www.imperial.ac.uk

 

[mr peabody]

Becoming a psychedelic researcher

by Russell Hausfeld | April 25, 2018

In the summer of 2017, Alan Kooi Davis was at a crossroads in his career.

He had recently graduated with a Ph.D from Bowling Green State University, where he researched drug cravings, drug abuse and harm reduction with professor Harold Rosenberg.

After graduating, Davis went on to work at the University of Michigan, where he says that his colleagues were “cautiously interested” in his pursuit of psychedelic research. They could all respect that the research should be done, but believed it was a risky career move.

After several months of conversations about his career trajectory with co-workers in Michigan, he got a phone call from the psychedelic research team at Johns Hopkins University. They said they were interested in interviewing him for a fellowship. The team at Hopkins — led by Roland Griffiths — is doing groundbreaking research on substances like psilocybin.

“I don’t think the universe could have given a better sign than that,” Davis said.

After securing the job and completing several projects at UM, Davis and his little ewok-of-a-dog, Morty, made the move from Ann Arbor to Baltimore.

He represents a swath of new researchers making the decision, albeit risky, to study the potential uses for psychedelic substances. This kind of research, Davis believes, is the next frontier for psychology, psychiatry, and the broader culture at large. A tool with the potential for true healing for conditions like addiction, PTSD and depression, as opposed to mere symptom alleviation.

This is perhaps especially important for several sub-groups in the US population.

“After working with Veterans in the VA system for much of the past three years, my heart is especially connected to bringing healing to those suffering with trauma, depression and addiction,” Davis said. “I believe one of the keys is re-connection to self and others. If we can do that, then healing is possible.”

Psychedelic research could play a vital role in the lives of future psychologists and psychiatrists. But, results from this kind of work also impact disciplines like religion, environmental conservation, criminal justice and more. They have the potential to impact our culture, Davis says, by increasing our abilities to connect. Not only do psychedelics appear to harness a deeper human connection, but they also seem to catalyze a deeper connection with nature, and with the sacred and spiritual.

For example, just before beginning his new job at Hopkins, Davis and his colleague Joseph Barsuglia — a Clinical Research Director at Crossroads Treatment Center — wrapped up a survey1 they conducted on the psychedelic substance 5-MeO-DMT. This is a fast-acting psychedelic, which produces profound experiences. Renowned psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin recounted his experience with the substance in his book “TiKHAL.”

"At about 60 seconds after I smoked this free base, I beheld every thought that was going on everywhere in the universe and all possible realities while I was wracked out with this horrible ruthless love. It scared the hell out of me. When I could see again (15 minutes later) it was almost as if there was an echo of a thought in my head saying that I was given an extremely rare look at the true consciousness of it all. I’ve never been hit this hard since then.”

Amidst results from the survey about users’ safety precautions and experiences, Davis was equally curious to find out where people were obtaining the substance from. Because, 5-MeO-DMT is typically obtained either synthetically or from the Bufo alvarius toad, whose population has dropped in places like New Mexico and California as people remove the toads from their natural environment.

“The more people start hearing about this drug, the more they go searching for it,” Davis said. “We must be mindful that as more research is done, more articles are written. And that preservation of indigenous cultures and the ecology of psychedelics are protected from psychedelic tourism and misinformed attempts to harvest psychedelics from living species.”

Concerned citizens have already begun conservation efforts for the Bufo toad. Gerardo Sandoval, in particular, is working on creating a sanctuary for nearly 2,500 toads with the end goal of repopulating their native environment in the Sonoran Desert. Research like Davis’ and Barsuglia’s could help efforts like this prove their legitimacy and assess the true scope of the problems they hope to tackle.

Luckily, there seems to be excitement within the research community around 5-MeO-DMT, according to Davis. So, alongside his research on psilocybin, he hopes to be able to continue his 5-MeO-DMT work in the future.

Davis’ pursuit of psychedelic research began in earnest, he said, after he presented research on MDMA cravings at Psychedelic Science 2013. It was there that he first realized that there was a community of people out there who were working diligently to legitimize research into psychedelics — research he was equipped to provide.

And now, he is... at one of the most respected psychedelic research facilities.

Davis is working to create a new non-profit research and education organization to help other potential psychedelic researchers. His pending non-profit — the Source Research Foundation — aims to “connect, inspire, and support students who study the epidemiology, phenomenology, and the environmental, cultural and clinical contexts of psychedelic use, and to develop a virtual collaboratory of students, scientists, and community members who are passionate about psychedelic science."

https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/becoming-a-psychedelic-researcher/​

 

[mr peabody]

The Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapies & Research

by Lisa Denenmark

Word has definitely gotten around about the Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapies & Research. In the past nine months, there were 150 serious inquiries about the Certificate, most of them from therapists who are not from CIIS.

"They're coming in at three or four a week," says Janis Phelps, Director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies & Research (the Center), which houses the Certificate program. "And we haven't even started the heavy publicity."

The Certificate was created to serve a growing need for trained licensed therapist guides to facilitate in future FDA-approved psychedelic- and entactogen-assisted psychotherapy research. Research and medical experts have estimated that need at perhaps several hundred therapist guides in the next three to six years. The Certificate, which launches in Spring 2016, comprises 180 hours of comprehensive, in-depth academic training.

Phenomenal timing

The field of research into medical applications of psychedelics, especially for the treatment of end-of-life distress, chronic PTSD, and longstanding substance abuse and addiction, is again heating up. Michael Pollan's widely popular article "The Trip Treatment," in The New Yorker, earlier this year ignited strong interest in the midst of the revival of psychedelic research.

Studies by research scientists are more regularly appearing in such prestigious publications as the Journal of Psychopharmacology and Archives of General Psychiatry, and adding new legitimacy to the field. And two summary reports on Phase II psilocybin studies by Johns Hopkins University and New York University due out in Spring 2016 are sure to further spark positive sentiment about the medicines.

With meditation and mindfulness, holism and hospice now in the vernacular and the backlash against recreational psychedelic drug use in the '60s abated, some experts believe that culturally in the United States, the time just might be right to integrate psychedelics further into mainstream medical care. Enter CIIS.

"The return of government-approved scientific research into psilocybin and related compounds has significant potential for myriad scientific and clinical studies, including the important treatment of existential distress at the end of life," says Dr. Anthony Bossis, Co-Principal Investigator of the Cancer and Palliative Care Research, Psilocybin Cancer Project at NYU School of Medicine. "The reemergence of this field will require serious multidisciplinary academic centers to address the theoretical, research, and clinical domains of this work. CIIS, with its history integrating psychology and spirituality, is uniquely and enormously qualified to meet this historic challenge," he says.

In offering the Certificate, the Center joins three of its partner organizations, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Usona Institute, and the Heffter Research Institute (Heffter), in running successful training programs for psychedelic research therapists.

Many researchers at MAPS and Heffter are predicting that Phase III studies of MDMA and psilocybin will begin rolling out in two to four years, particularly for chronic PTSD and advanced cancer anxiety and distress. Phase III trials, which can involve patient groups of up to 3,000, are typically the definitive assessment of a drug's effectiveness. In anticipation of these events, the Center developed the Certificate program.

Luminaries leading the way

CIIS' long tradition of rigorous education in contemplative mysticism, spirituality, psychedelic research, transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, and anthropology makes the University an unparalleled place to train future therapist guides. The Certificate, though it emphasizes the therapeutic medical model of psychedelic research, will address the philosophy and theory from these other intellectual traditions as well.

MAPS and Heffter researchers as lead instructors will teach alongside Bay Area psychedelic luminaries Stan Grof and Ralph Metzner, who are longtime CIIS faculty. Members of the Center's Council of Advisors-many of them psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists from leading universities and research centers-will be teaching in the program.

Among these well-known leaders in the field are Bossis and Jeffrey Guss (NYU School of Medicine), William Richards and Mary Cosimano (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), Charles Grob (UCLA), Robert Jesse (Council on Spiritual Practices), Rick Doblin and Annie and Michael Mithoefer (MAPS), Daniel Muller (University of Wisconsin School of Medicine), and psychiatrist Gabor Maté-many of whom have given lecturers and workshops sponsored by CIIS Public Programs & Performances.

Since March 2015, the Center has been providing diverse public education about psychedelic research from past decades, harm-histories of the research, as well as film screenings and book readings.

Professional Development

For licensed master's and doctoral clinicians in CIIS therapy training programs, the Certificate can be viewed as a postgraduate development opportunity.

"Ideally, the skills and knowledge learned in the Certificate program will be finalized in advanced training at a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research center affiliated with MAPS and/or Heffter," says Phelps. Graduates can apply for internships or scholarships at the medical centers that will provide them with mentoring and advanced training with real volunteers in FDA-approved research studies. Phelps is active in the push to reinstitute research in the Bay Area.

Students applying for the Certificate must be licensed professionals (or those seeking licensure) in mental health and medicine, or senior members of the clergy. Several scholarships are available.

Optimal enrollment is 16 for the first year and 30-plus for the second. "We have aspirations about the second year being a hybrid residential-online program to enable distance learning," says Phelps.

Graduates of the program will have a significant knowledge base in pharmacology, session preparation and later integration, competency skills, and design of research protocols. They can apply to MAPS and Heffter for on-site, advanced training and can then apply to work in actual clinical studies. There will likely be opportunities for therapists to work with psychiatrists prescribing these medicines to people during a period of "expanded access."

Expanded access refers to a process by which people with intractable mental health indications, for which few (if any) other drugs or therapies have worked to alleviate symptoms, can be eligible to be given such medicines under supervision of a physician.

"Accompanying the rebirth of psychedelic research and its many promising clinical, educational, and religious applications, CIIS has stepped forward to design a program that not only offers techniques and information, but also nurtures the psychological and spiritual maturation of future investigators and practitioners," says William Richards, of Johns Hopkins University. "It is an honor to be associated with CIIS and to contribute to the rich unfolding of this educational trajectory."

In collaboration with scientists from Heffter, MAPS, Usona, and the Council for Spiritual Practices, "innovative and inspired ideas have been implemented in the curriculum," says Phelps. "We are fully engaged and enthusiastic in spearheading this cutting-edge Certificate for psychedelic practitioners of the future."

The Altering State of Psychedelics Research

CIIS' new Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapies & Research offered in March by the San Francisco University's Center for Psychedelic Therapies & Research places CIIS on the cutting edge of the re-emerging field.

www.ciis.edu

 

[mr peabody]

World's first Centre for Psychedelics Research launched in the UK

by Rich Haridy | April 28th, 2019

In an incredible milestone, representing the ongoing legitimization of psychedelic science, a formal facility dedicated to the study of psychedelics has been launched at Imperial College London. While the newly established Centre for Psychedelics Research is not the only major psychedelic research group in the world, it is the first to be officially integrated into a large academic institution.

The Centre will be led by Robin Carhart-Harris, a leading UK figure in the new wave of psychedelic research. Carhart-Harris has worked for well over a decade in the field of psychopharmacology, and is known for completing the first modern brain imaging study of the effects of LSD.

"This new Centre represents a watershed moment for psychedelic science; symbolic of its now mainstream recognition," says Carhart-Harris. "Psychedelics are set to have a major impact on neuroscience and psychiatry in the coming years. It's such a privilege to be at the forefront of one of the most exciting areas in medical science. I am immensely grateful to the donors who have made all of this possible."

The Centre is funded by over £3 million (US$3.8 million) in donations from five founding donors, and its initial research strands will investigate the clinical utility of psychedelics in mental health care, and the fundamental actions of psychedelics on the brain.

One fascinating trial already underway by Carhart-Harris and the Imperial research team is an investigation into psilocybin as treatment for major depressive disorder. Psilocybin, the major psychoactive component in magic mushrooms, was just last year granted a Breakthrough Therapy designation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), suggesting the treatment demonstrates significant potential in early clinical evidence.

This latest randomized control trial is set to be the first to directly compare the effects of psilocybin on depression against a conventional SSRI antidepressant drug. Another trial is being prepared to look at the efficacy of psilocybin as a treatment for anorexia.

"It may take a few years for psychedelic therapy to be available for patients, but research so far has been very encouraging," says Carhart-Harris. "Early stage clinical research has shown that when delivered safely and professionally, psychedelic therapy holds a great deal of promise for treating some very serious mental health conditions and may one day offer new hope to vulnerable people with limited treatment options."

World-first Centre for Psychedelics Research launched in UK

In an incredible milestone, representing the ongoing legitimization of psychedelic science, a formal facility dedicated to the study of psychedelics has been launched at Imperial College London. While the newly established Centre for Psychedelics Research is not the only major psychedelic research…

newatlas.com

 

[mr peabody]

Who's driving research on psychedelic drugs?

by Marlene Rupp | Sapiensoup

Psychedelic drugs were declared illegal by the mid 1960s and thus early psychedelic research came to a standstill. For more than four decades, it was virtually impossible to conduct further research. Over the last 15 years however, research on psychedelics has experienced a renaissance.

Today, psychedelic drugs are not the north star of a young political counterculture. It’s renowned scientists and non-profit pharmaceutical companies who carry out studies and work with government legislators. No riots, no orgies, no festivals, no cult.

Prestigious research teams across the world run fully randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled trials—the gold standard of modern research—to explore the therapeutic properties of psychedelic drugs. And reputable science journals and newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian or Wired publish the findings. Why? Because the results are literally mind-altering.

The organizations gathering these findings are amongst the most prestigious in the world:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found that a single high dose of psilocybin decreased depression and anxiety in 92 percent of patients with life-threatening cancer. In another study, psilocybin helped smokers overcome their nicotine addiction. At six months 80 percent were still abstinent. Compare that to an otherwise typical success rate of 15 to 30 percent.

A research group from Imperial College London looked at patients who suffered from treatment-resistant depression and found that only two doses of psilocybin could stop or decrease their symptoms of depression for months.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) achieved groundbreaking results applying MDMA-assisted therapy to patients suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD. After only three sessions of MDMA, 61 percent of patients no longer met the criteria for PTSD. And the benefits even increased over time.

Scientists present their studies on psychedelics at TED conferences. New York Times bestselling authors are writing about a revolution in states of consciousness.17 Silicon Valley connoisseur Tim Ferriss states “The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” And the rest of the valley follows: microdosing LSD is trending for its alleged performance-enhancing and problem-solving properties. The stigma on psychedelics is eroding in front of our eyes.

The stigma on psychedelic drugs is eroding in front of our eyes.

Who is not driving research? —Big pharma. Drugs which are administered only once or twice are not good for business. Therefore, research is driven predominantly by universities and nonprofit organizations.

Medical benefits of psychedelic drugs

Ecstasy, LSD, magic mushrooms and ketamine were found to be extraordinarily effective in treating mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety or PTSD.

sapiensoup.com

 

[mr peabody]

Misreporting and confirmation bias in psychedelic research

by Bernardo Kastrup and Edward Kelly | Scientific American | Sept 3 2018

A long-awaited resurgence in psychedelic research is now under way and some of its early results have been startling. Whereas most scientists expected the mind-boggling experiences of psychedelic states to correlate with increased brain activity,a landmark study from 2012 found the opposite to be the case. Writing in this magazine, neuroscientist Christof Koch expressed the community’s collective surprise. These unexpected findings have since been repeatedly confirmed with a variety of psychedelic agents and measures of brain activity.

Under the mainstream physicalist view that brain activity is, or somehow generates, the mind, the findings certainly seem counterintuitive: How can the richness of experience go up when brain activity goes down? Understandably, therefore, researchers have subsequently endeavored to find something in patterns of brain activity that reliably increases in psychedelic states. Alternatives include brain activity variability, functional coupling between different brain areas and, most recently, a property of brain activity variously labeled as “complexity,” “diversity,” “entropy” or “randomness”—terms viewed as approximately synonymous.

The problem is that modern brain imaging techniques do detect clear spikes in raw brain activity when sleeping subjects dream even of dull things such as staring at a statue or clenching a hand. So why are only decreasesin brain activity conclusively seen when subjects undergo psychedelic experiences, instead of dreams? Given how difficult it is to find one biological basis for consciousness, how plausible is it that two fundamentally different mechanisms underlie conscious experience in the otherwise analogous psychedelic and dreaming states?

Perhaps because it is so hard to make sense of these results, science journalists routinely report them inaccurately, sometimes encouraged by careless statements from the researchers themselves. For instance, a 2014 study found that psychedelics increase activity variabilityin certain brain regions. Naturally, variability is not the same as activity, for the same reason that acceleration is not the same as speed. Yet, here is how the media reported on the study:

“Researchers … found increased activity in regions of the brain that are known to be activated during dreaming.”

This echoes the way a study co-author seems to have inadvertently misrepresented the study’s findings in a non-technical essay:

“The psychedelic increased the amplitude (or ‘volume') of activity in regions of the brain that are reliably activated during dream sleep.”

Despite these statements, the technical study alluded to says nothing of the kind, neither explicitly nor by implication. It only shows that activity levels varied more in psychedelic states.

This pattern of misreporting is consistent and sustained, as one of us elaborated upon elsewhere following the spectacularly erroneous manner in which the media covered the 2016 publication of yet another study.

Let us be clear: we are not suggesting malicious intent. Our point is that paradigmatic expectations can make it all too easy to cherry-pick, misunderstand and then misrepresent results so as to render them consistent with the reigning worldview. And because the community at large shares the same expectations, such errors easily go unnoticed.

Perhaps more worryingly, paradigmatic expectations may be playing a disproportionate role in the research itself. For example, in a 2014 study the correlations between activity in different brain regions were represented as graphs, with the regions as nodes and the associated correlations as links drawn between nodes. By applying successively lower levels of correlation as the minimum threshold for linking nodes, the researchers created the appearance that the brain under psychedelics displays dramatically increased global connectivity.

In all fairness, the authors themselves described these graphs as “simplified cartoons” and encouraged caution in their interpretation. However, the graphs were subsequently used with no such qualification by respected journalist Michael Pollan—in his otherwise excellent recent book on psychedelics—as the primary prop for a conventional physicalist interpretation of the brain imaging results. Puzzlingly, Pollan barely mentions the far more impressive and direct measurements of decreased brain activity reported in multiple other studies.

Recently, researchers reanalyzed data from several experiments using their own measures of the brain activity “diversity” mentioned earlier. Their measures successfully discriminated between ordinary waking consciousness and conditions involving diminished awareness. More importantly, they also discriminated statistically between waking consciousness and states of expanded awareness produced by psychedelics.

However, the increases in “diversity” observed in psychedelic states were tiny—far smaller than the reductions associated with diminished awareness—and occurred very near the top of the complexity scale, meaning that there is little room for improvement. An inherent and unresolved tension also remains between (a) “diversity” as a measure of differentiation in neural activity and (b) the long-range integrationacross brain regions that is required by the associated theories. Finally, to suggest that brain activity randomness explains psychedelic experiences seems inconsistent with the fact that these experiences can be highly structured and meaningful—often even the most meaningful in life.

In short, a formidable chasm still yawns between the extraordinary richness of psychedelic experiences and the modest alterations in brain activity patterns so far observed. It remains possible that further improvements in measurement technique will at least partly bridge this chasm. If an alternative measure closely related to, but more elaborate than, “diversity”were applied to psychedelic states, for example, a conspicuous gap in the literature would be closed.

A recent overview situates the latest psychedelic research in a larger historical context. Informed observers have always interpreted psychedelic experiences as incursions into awareness of normally hidden parts of the mind. The hypothesis is that psychedelics disrupt some sort of “reducing valve” mechanism that normally confines awareness within limits defined by the needs of everyday life. Today’s physicalist neuroscientists aspire to provide an account of this process in strictly neural terms, under the assumption that everything that enters awareness must come from somewhere in the brain.

Earlier advocates of the “reducing valve” model, however, felt compelled by evidence to adopt a broader view: consciousness, they argued, “overflows the organism” (Henri Bergson) and is ultimately grounded in some sort of transpersonal “mind at large” (Aldous Huxley).

Although determined proponents of the physicalist worldview regard such ideas as unworthy of consideration, we dare to think otherwise. For one, transformative experiences like those produced by psychedelics can occur under a wide variety of circumstances bearing little physiological similarity with psychedelic states. A broader—but still naturalistic—“reducing valve” model can accommodate these phenomena. It can also more naturally make sense of the overall reductions in brain activity produced by psychedelics—their most prominent effect—the expansion of awareness sometimes associated with brain function impairment and numerous related phenomena.

Despite assumptions to the contrary, physicalism is notthe only scientifically grounded worldview on offer. Alternative conceptual frameworks of that sort exist, as we have elaborated upon in our past and upcoming books. The psychedelic brain imaging research discussed here has brought us to a major theoretical decision point as to which framework best fits with all relevant data. We hope this essay will encourage open-minded readers to take seriously the wider possibilities now coming into view.

Misreporting and Confirmation Bias in Psychedelic Research

What do images of the brain under psychedelics really tell us about its relation to the mind?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

 

[mr peabody]

Research on psychedelics should be wide open

by James Hsu | Scientific American |

Cannabis, LSD, psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”), MDMA (the “ecstasy” drug) and other psychedelic drugs all have significant potential medical uses, as illustrated in the limited research organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) have facilitated over the years.

But the war on drugs and resulting classification of those psychoactive substances as Schedule I—meaning with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse" according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration—has caused a national research blockade and left that medical potential largely untapped.

The editors of Scientific American—the 168-year-old magazine to which scientists like Albert Einstein have contributed—have called for an end to the “national ban” on psychoactive drug research, noting that LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and cannabis all “had their origins in the medical pharmacopeia.”

More than 1,000 scientific publications chronicled the uses of LSD for psychotherapy during the mid-’60s, and MDMA similarly complemented talk therapy through the ‘70s.

"Cannabis has logged thousands of years as a medicament for diseases and conditions ranging from malaria to rheumatism." – Scientific American

Scientific American lamented the fact that since the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 declared these psychoactive drugs void of any medical use by categorizing them as Schedule I substances—and three United Nations treaties extend similar restrictions to much of the world—a catch-22 has arisen:

"Research on these drugs is banned because they have 'no accepted medical use,' but researchers cannot explore their therapeutic potential because they are banned." – Scientific American

High barriers to psychedelic research

While the stigma that comes from Schedule I placement of these substances makes scientific research clearance and fundraising difficult, research itself is not prohibited. Scientific American’s assertion that there is a “research ban” is innacurate. For example, MAPS has been performing FDA-approved studies on psychoactive substances for years.

Brad Burge, the director of communications and marketing from MAPS said there is not an explicit ban on cannabis research either, “though there are laws in place that make doing research to make marijuana into a prescription medicine impossible, so far.”

The few privately funded studies that have looked at these compounds have yielded tantalizing hints that some of these ideas merit consideration.

"Yet doing this research through standard channels … requires traversing a daunting bureaucratic labyrinth that can dissuade even the most committed investigator." – Scientific American

As a result, some psychologists are left wondering “whether MDMA can help with intractable post-traumatic stress disorder [as work with combat veterans has shown], whether LSD or psilocybin can provide relief for cluster headaches or obsessive compulsive disorder and whether the particular docking receptors on brain cells that many psychedelics latch onto are critical sites for regulating conscious states that go awry in schizophrenia and depression,” the article notes.

Additionally, while doctors in 20 states (and counting) can recommend medical marijuana, researchers aren’t allowed to properly study its effects. Scientific American notes that this leaves “unanswered the question of whether the drug might help treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, nausea, sleep apnea, multiple sclerosis and a host of other conditions.”

Consciousness and freedom

Like many researchers, therapists and drug policy activists have been saying for decades, it is time to allow scientific researchers to do their jobs and find out what these substances can actually do—and in order for that to happen, the U.S. needs to reschedule these substances and effectively lift its research blockade.

As the Scientific American article concludes, the endless obstructions to research caused by current scheduling have meant a research standstill for Schedule I drugs:

This is a shame. If some of the obstacles to research can be overcome, it may be possible to finally detach research on psychoactive chemicals from the hyperbolic rhetoric that is a legacy of the war on drugs.

"Only then will it be possible to judge whether LSD, ecstasy, marijuana and other highly regulated compounds—subjected to the gauntlet of clinical testing for safety and efficacy—can actually yield effective new treatments for devastating psychiatric illnesses." – Scientific American

The more trusted publications like Scientific American come out and call for change, the closer we will be to medical research and scientific facts that liberate us from the medical Dark Ages when it comes to psychoactive drugs.

Research on Psychedelics Should Be Wide Open - Scientific American - Third Monk

Cannabis, LSD, psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”), MDMA (the “ecstasy” drug) and other psychedelics all have significant potential medical uses, as illustrated in the limited research organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) have facilitated over the years.

thirdmonk.net

 

[mr peabody]

Psilocybin could replace antidepressants within five years, says new Centre for Psychedelic Research

by Alex Matthews-King | The Independent | June 9, 2019

Psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms could be about to break big pharma’s stranglehold on the hugely lucrative market for antidepressants, according to the head of the world’s first Centre for Psychedelic Research.

Antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in England in a decade with around seven million adults taking the drugs, and the global market is predicted to be worth $15.9bn (£12.5bn) by 2023.

At Imperial College London, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris is leading one of the first trials to test how therapy using psilocybin mushrooms, which are currently banned in the UK, compares to leading antidepressants.

While he won’t prejudge the results of the study, he says participants describe a cathartic emotional “release” with psilocybin therapy – the polar opposite of antidepressants, which patients complain leave their emotions, whether positive or negative, “blunted”.

It is the first of many studies planned under the banner of the new Centre for Psychedelic Research at London’s Imperial College.

A large empty floor of the university’s Hammersmith campus will house a bank of treatment rooms that make it the UK’s first psychedelic therapy research clinic, and a “prototype and inspiration” for licensed psychedelic medicine clinics of the future.

Trials of psilocybin in treating eating disorders, and a study of the effects of powerful psychedelic DMT on the brain, are already planned following Imperial’s commitment to the centre.

But it is the work on depression where research is most advanced, and most promising.

On the current trial, around 60 participants with moderate to severe depression will receive psilocybin treatment accompanied by a therapy session with a clinical psychologist.

The participants will also be randomly allocated to receive either a placebo or the drug escitalopram, with neither researchers or patients knowing who is in each group.

Escitalopram is a type of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the drugs which account for the largest chunk of the antidepressant market.

“If you ask people who are taking SSRIs chronically, they often say ‘I feel blunted’,” Dr Carhart-Harris told The Independent, "meaning both negative and positive emotions are suppressed."

“With psilocybin therapy they say the opposite, they talk about an emotional release, a re-connection, and this key emotional centre being more responsive.”

The team use MRI scans to study psychedelics’ effects on the brain and the drug appears to reduce activity in the coordinating regions, releasing their grip and allowing the more primitive emotional centres to the fore.

Other early indications are that the list of side-effects is “twice as long” for escitalopram as it is for psilocybin therapy, and it is much faster acting than antidepressants – which can take months to work.

However, the treatment may not be suitable for everyone.

During the therapy sessions, patients are encouraged to follow the stream of the psychedelic experience which can be extremely vivid and may require them to confront past traumas or experiences.

“We don’t call it a ‘bad trip’,” Dr Carhart-Harris says. “We call it a ‘challenging psychological experience’ and we’re honest with people that it can be hellish."

“It can be nightmarish, but we’re prepared for this and this treatment model requires you literally face your demons.”

Psychedelic therapy is unlikely to be suitable for people with psychosis and regulators will need evidence of its effectiveness and safety from clinical trials.

But there is little evidence that they pose a risk of overdose or addiction and that could speed their route to approval.

Fresh magic mushrooms could be picked or bought in shops legally in the UK until 2005, when a change in law closed the loop hole and made them Class A drugs alongside crack cocaine.

“I would imagine if you had some bookmakers doing the odds, there would be strong odds on that [psychedelic therapy] will be licensed sometime in the next five to 10 years – maybe sooner,” Dr Carhart-Harris says.

That could put it on a collision course with powerful interests of the pharmaceutical industry, particularly if trials show psilocybin therapy to be superior to SSRIs.

“The implications of that are actually frightening to me, thinking of the power and influence of big pharma,” Carhart-Harris says. “What are they going to do with that if there’s this big public demand for the ‘mushroom therapy’, and not the Prozac?”

While there is a growing trend for “microdosing” psilocybin or LSD, the evidence to date suggests it is the combination of therapy and psychedelic experience that offers the best option of a lasting alternative to chronic antidepressants.

“If you strip the drug away from therapy you start seeing the adverse events that were being reported in the 1960s, when psychedelics left the clinic and became popularised,” Dr Carhart-Harris adds.

“None of us want those mistakes to be made again.”

Dr James Rucker is another of those researching the potential benefits of psychedelics, over at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London.

The King’s team are launching two trials, one looking at whether psilocybin therapy can help people whose depression is resistant to treatment with conventional antidepressants.

He says it was “possible” the drug could be licensed in five years. “But only if everything goes to plan, and you know what they say about best-laid plans.”

In Dr Rucker’s mind the process is similar to the approval of ketamine, where the first trials in depression took place in the 1990s and the first ketamine-based medicines are only now being licensed.

Psilocybin has much lower potential for abuse and overdose, but watchdogs will still need stage three trials which haven’t even begun.

“Like all treatments, they will suit some people but not others,” he told The Independent. “The trick, as ever, is trying to work that out before administration. But that trick has proven to be remarkably difficult to pull off, particularly in psychiatry.”

Magic mushrooms could be treating depression in five years, says psychedelics expert

Exclusive: ‘People on antidepressants long-term say they feel blunted, with psychedelic therapy it’s the opposite, they talk about an emotional release, a reconnection’

www.independent.co.uk

 

[mr peabody]

Sgt. Pepper

Scientists identify molecular process in brain cells that could be a major driver of drug addiction*

Medical Xpress | Oct 23 2019

Scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a molecular process in brain cells that may be a major driver of drug addiction, and thus may become a target for future addiction treatments.

The scientists, who published their discovery on Oct. 22 in Cell Reports, used an advanced imaging technique to visualize brain cell activity during exposure to an opioid, in a part of the brain known to be centrally important for addiction. They found that key brain-cell changes that occur with addiction and help sustain addiction behavior are accompanied by—and plausibly driven by—particular changes in a signaling system involving a messenger molecule called cyclic AMP (cAMP).

"Our findings suggest the possibility, which we now want to test, that an intervention to reverse these cAMP changes could reduce symptoms of addiction, such as drug cravings and withdrawal dysphoria," says the study's senior author Kirill Martemyanov, Ph.D., professor and co-chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Research.

Drug overdoses—most of which involve opioids—kill about 70,000 people in the United States every year, and on the whole, drug addiction or dependency is estimated to affect tens of millions of Americans. Yet, researchers have never found a cure or even a very good treatment for addiction. That is mainly because they have lacked techniques for studying the deep molecular mechanisms in the brain that underlie the addiction process.

Last year, Martemyanov's team—in collaboration with Dr. Ronald Davis' laboratory, also at Scripps Research—developed a tool that could help with such investigations: a sensor system genetically engineered into mice to enable real-time recordings of cAMP levels in any type of neuron. The cAMP molecule functions as an internal messenger in neurons, carrying signals from receptors embedded in the cell's outer membrane into the inner workings of the cell. Until now, this realm of neurobiology has been relatively obscure for scientists.

In the new study, the scientists used their sensor system to track cAMP levels in neurons that make up a brain structure called the nucleus accumbens—a central component of the brain's reward and motivation system, which is essentially subverted by addiction. Opioids, like other drugs of abuse, cause an unnaturally large surge of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens. When this happens repeatedly, reward and motivation processing is altered, and this alteration largely accounts for the behavioral features of addiction—including the buildup of tolerance to the drug so that ever-higher doses are needed, and the drug cravings and dysphoria that occur with drug withdrawal. The researchers wanted to see how cAMP signaling from dopamine receptors on nucleus accumbens neurons change with repeated opioid exposure, and if that could explain the changes to accumbens function.

The scientists found that injections of morphine, and the resulting flood of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens, led to distinct changes in cAMP signaling in the two types of dopamine-sensitive neurons known as D1 and D2 medium spiny neurons that comprise this brain structure. An initial morphine dose made the D1 neurons—whose activity is associated with positive, rewarding experiences—much more responsive to dopamine based on their cAMP signaling, compared to the D2 neurons, which are thought to inhibit the reward signal.

By contrast, the team found that with repeated daily morphine exposures, simulating chronic drug use that would cause addiction, the balance in the activity of the two types of neurons—reflected in their cAMP responses to dopamine—shifted strongly in favor of the inhibitory D2 neurons. They think that these neuronal adaptations may be responsible for the downward spiral of tolerance and withdrawal dysphoria that develops as addiction progresses.

"Seeing these changes in cAMP responses really helped us understand how these two different neuron populations in the accumbens can be stimulated at the same time, while also producing different outcomes," says Brian Muntean, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research associate in the Martemyanov lab who was first author of the study and did most of the work to develop the cAMP reporter tool.

Martemyanov and his team now plan to see if reversing these cAMP changes can remove or reduce behavioral signs of addiction in animal models.

They also intend to use their cAMP reporter tool to investigate genes that influence susceptibility to opioid addiction. In a related study published recently in PLoS Biology, Martemyanov's group showed that a gene linked to a neuropsychiatric disorder called neurofibromatosis type I acts in striatal neurons to boost the rewarding effects of morphine and regulates dopamine signaling to cAMP.

"Using this new tool for imaging cAMP responses, we can now study a variety of circuits in the brain to see how cAMP signaling underlies cognitive and motivational processes and even go after the processes that underlie mental illnesses such as depression," Martemyanov says.

*From the article here :

Scientists identify what may be a key mechanism of opioid addiction

Scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a molecular process in brain cells that may be a major driver of drug addiction, and thus may become a target for future addiction treatments.

medicalxpress.com

 

[mr peabody]

The Canadian revival of psychedelic drug research

by Kerry Banks | Jun 14 2019

In the 1950s, the Prairies were a hub for psychedelic science. Some 60 years later, Canadian researchers are showing a renewed interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Psychiatrists in Vancouver will soon begin a phase III clinical trial of MDMA, a hallucinogenic drug commonly known as ecstasy, for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The treatment consists of three monthly, eight-hour sessions under the influence of MDMA, interspersed by nine 90-minute sessions without it. This work is historically significant, say the researchers involved, because it marks the first time in more than four decades that an illegal psychedelic drug has been clinically tested in Canada.

This double-blind, placebo-controlled study is being run by the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), a provincial organization with a mandate to develop, evaluate and help implement evidence-based approaches to treat substance use and addiction. Vancouver is one of 16 locations in North America and Israel where teams are working on the same experiment under the guidance of the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

A phase III clinical trial is typically the last phase of review a drug undergoes before it is approved for public use. Only 25 to 30 percent of drugs that enter phase III trials pass successfully, but MAPS’ phase II review, which concluded in 2016, produced glowing results. One year after patients were treated with MDMA, 68 percent reported that they no longer experienced symptoms.

Eliminating symptoms entirely would be a huge breakthrough, as PSTD is notoriously difficult to treat, says Mark Haden, executive director of MAPS Canada and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health. “The traumatic memory of the incident replays like a tape loop in the patient’s mind. MDMA doesn’t eliminate the traumatic memory, but it takes away the emotional impact so that the memory no longer controls a person,” explains Dr. Haden, who hopes to have MDMA approved as a treatment for PTSD by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and by Health Canada by 2021.

History repeating

The MDMA work is just one aspect of a recent resurgence of scientific curiosity about the healing properties of psychedelic drugs, an area of investigation that initially showed considerable promise in the 1950s for the treatment of mental health problems and substance abuse, including alcoholism. Much of that pioneering research took place in Saskatchewan at the Weyburn Mental Hospital under the direction of Humphry Osmond, an English psychiatrist, and Abram Hoffer, a Canadian biochemist, who were given great freedom to follow their medical instincts by the government of then-premier Tommy Douglas.

The Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, circa 1955.

Erika Dyck, who holds the Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan and is the author of the 2008 book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus, says Drs. Osmond and Hoffer began experimenting with LSD, mescaline and peyote in order to find an alternative to the brutal methods of electroshock and lobotomy that were often used for treating mental disorders at the time. The quest became surprisingly free-ranging in scope. “Osmond and Hoffer not only treated patients with psychedelics, they also encouraged doctors, nurses and support staff to take the drugs,” says Dr. Dyck. They even had their wives partake, and Dr. Osmond convinced architect Kiyoshi Izumi to ingest LSD several times before he submitted his designs for a new mental hospital in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

All this exploration of the human psyche came to a sudden halt in the late 1960s when politicians, reacting to the growing recreational use of LSD, peyote and psilocybin, reclassified these substances as dangerous drugs with no medical value.

Today, however, the research is gaining fresh momentum with new investigations of the powers of LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca. LSD is being evaluated for its ability to relieve anxiety, psilocybin for the cessation of smoking, the treatment of depression and reducing the fear of death in people with terminal illness, and ayahuasca for its ability to combat depression.

“Psychedelics, under carefully controlled conditions, can create experiences of wonder and awe and a connection to a divine realm that leads to significant behavioural changes,” says Kenneth Tupper, director of implementation and partnerships at BCCSU and, like Dr. Haden, an adjunct professor in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC.

The topic has received mainstream media exposure with the publication of books such as Michael Pollan’s 2018 bestseller, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, the global interchange on social media and a growing dissatisfaction with conventional drug therapy.

“It’s a subject that is being increasingly addressed by a number of distinguished people and across many disciplines,” says Brian Rush, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and public health at the University of Toronto and a researcher with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. “I was recently invited to give a presentation at a prestigious international conference in Lisbon. The conference had a category for psychedelics. I’d never encountered that before.”

But while there is clear evidence of renewed interest in psychedelic drugs, exactly how these compounds affect the biology of the brain is still something of a mystery. The emerging view among neuroscientists is that psychedelics dissolve the barriers in the brain that separate the networks that perform such common functions as vision, movement and hearing. As a result, crosstalk ensues between circuits that normally do not interact. The temporary formation of a more integrated brain may spark the spiritual feelings of “connectedness” often reported by users of these drugs.

While this work is going on, Canadian scientists are exploring other frontiers of the psychedelic spectrum. Adèle Lafrance Robinson, a consulting psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Laurentian University, published a 2017 study that found that ayahuasca may have potential as a therapy for difficult-to-treat eating disorders. Dr. Robinson’s data was gathered by interviewing 16 individuals with a diagnosed eating disorder who had also participated in ayahuasca ceremonies.

In 2017, Mr. Thomas Anderson, a PhD student and cognitive neuroscientist, and Rotem Petranker, a graduate student of psychology at York University, conducted one of the first scientific investigations of microdosing. Through an anonymous online survey, they queried 909 participants ranging in age from late teens to late 70s from 29 countries about the quantity and frequency of their psychedelic use, their reasons for microdosing, the effect on mood, focus and creativity, and the benefits and drawbacks. The study found that microdosers scored higher on measures of wisdom, open-mindedness and creativity, and lower on neurotic and dysfunctional attitudes.

In the wake of this innovative study, the pair recently launched the University of Toronto Centre for Psychedelic Studies, which they hope will become a hub for North American research into psychedelics. Mr. Anderson says their next project is a randomized, placebo-controlled trial that will involve giving measured doses of psilocybin to 100 participants. They have secured $350,000 in funding from the Canadian charity Singhal Health Foundation and are now completing a Health Canada application that will enable them to acquire a quantity of medical-grade psilocybin. “Our goal,” says Mr. Anderson, “is to use conventional methods and do the best science we can to determine if microdosing actually works.”

Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, Dr. Tupper says that the BCCSU is preparing for its second foray into psychedelics: the use of psilocybin for the treatment of substance-use disorders. But this type of research still faces serious obstacles. The MMDA project took six years and $200,000 simply to get in motion, and the phase III trial is expected to cost about $26 million.

“Funding is a constant headache because we don’t have support from the pharmaceutical industry,” says Dr. Haden. Instead, MAPS’ funding comes from private donors, many of them connected with the tech sector. As Dr. Haden notes, because the therapy and cure for PSTD involves so few doses of MDMA, it doesn’t suit the business model of Big Pharma. “The drug companies want drugs that people have to take on a daily basis, to treat symptoms, not the problem.”

Should this avenue of research continue to produce positive results, however, we may be on the brink of a revolution in mental health care. As the influential Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof once stated: “It does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, may become for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy.”

The Canadian revival of psychedelic drug research | University Affairs

In the 1950s, the Prairies were a hub for psychedelic science. Some 60 years later, Canadian researchers are showing a renewed interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

www.universityaffairs.ca

 

[mr peabody]

Australia's psychedelic renaissance*

by Jesse Noakes | The Guardian | 14 Apr 2019

In January St Vincent’s hospital in Melbourne announced that Australia’s first trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for 30 people with terminal illnesses will start in coming months. It is believed the mind-expanding and mystical properties of the psychedelic experience might be especially effective at relieving the existential angst and hopelessness that often accompanies a terminal diagnosis. “When you’re working with psychedelics you can reliably expect these deeply embodied transformational moments,” says Rosalind Watts, a clinical psychologist working on the Beckley/Imperial trial.

Williams, who is co-investigator on the St Vincent’s study, which Prism has helped organise, says "What has been called the “psychedelic renaissance” overseas is more like the dawning of a new age in Australia, where there is no history of psychedelic research. It’s definitely a major step forward because … as long as we achieve positive results from the research, then we expect to move that into therapeutic practice in a period of time … perhaps five to 10 years.”

Gillinder Bedi, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who has previously run US studies of the pharmacology of MDMA, says of some advocates: “They are the true believers. Scientists are a little bit uncomfortable with the language that gets used. I don’t think organisations like Maps understand the effect of coming from the counterculture on the people outside it.”

For Bedi their findings are almost too good to be true: “The results I’ve seen are unique – the effects are really clear. It’s just that they’ve been in small studies and they’ve been conducted by people who have massively vested interests in the whole thing … There’s a part of me that goes, ‘Why did your data end up so neat and nice?’ I’m not sceptical about the rigour of the science, I’m just confused more than anything.”

But Bedi insists that contrary to its reputation MDMA is safe to use therapeutically: “It’s pretty clear now that we can administer it in a controlled environment with appropriate supervision pretty safely.” Psychedelics studies exclude people with a history of psychosis or mania, as well as those with certain medical conditions that the drug effects could exacerbate. “If it’s given to people who are well screened beforehand, those risks can be controlled.”

The Prism team was cagey about the St Vincent’s study until the moment it was announced, but Williams has noticeably relaxed his attitude discussing psychedelics in the Australian context. “I think there’s been a broad shift in the public discourse, which has been this ongoing process, probably since the results of the clinical trials in the US and Europe were first communicated,” he says. “ … It’s thanks to the great groundwork of Maps and others overseas that we’re at the point we are now at all.”

A new non-profit called Mind Medicines Australia launches next month to coordinate training more therapists to meet the potential demand. Williams and Strauss are planning a study of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, modeled on UK research.

For more than a decade, the Beckley Foundation has developed groundbreaking psychedelic research in partnership with Imperial College London. They produced the first brain scans of the LSD and psilocybin experience which suggest that, rather than amplifying neural activity as expected, psychedelics appear to selectively inhibit the “default mode network”, which regulates executive brain function like a disciplinarian teacher. When psychedelics take it out of the picture for a period, a whole bunch of new connections and neural activity fires up like exuberant children, allowing a wider range of phenomena to reach conscious awareness. Brain scans of long-term meditators have shown the same pattern.

The novel neural connections facilitated in the psychedelic state can lead to lasting changes. A 2018 Beckley/Imperial study using data from their previous depression trial measured significant increases in the personality domain of “openness”’ three months after the single high dose of psilocybin.

It replicates similar findings from Johns Hopkins University in the US. Albert Garcia-Romeu, who is leading another Hopkins psilocybin study, told me that openness goes hand-in-hand with reductions in symptoms such as rigid negative thinking. “It has shown association with overall happiness and quality of life, so in that regard I think it can be an important piece of the puzzle in terms of psychedelics’ therapeutic potentials,” he says.

Ian Roullier, a participant in the Beckley study of treatment-resistant depression, described how he experienced it: “Depression is a very narrow, restricted state and taking psilocybin really helps you to zoom out a lot more … I felt a lightness within myself and more of a freedom.” Like MDMA for PTSD, psilocybin has just been given “breakthrough therapy” status for treatment-resistant depression and large-scale trials are being rushed through across Europe.

For me, about an hour and a half after I lay down in New York, I took off the eye mask and sat up to a world transformed. For as long as I could remember there had been a wall of glass between the world and me, trapping me in a numb limbo that a litany of talk therapy and medications couldn’t touch.

Like magic, the wall was gone. Everything I looked at had a new clarity and immediacy as I drank it in. It was as though an iron knot of tension in my forehead, which contracted my whole body in its clenching grip, had suddenly dissolved. I felt calm, confident and connected. I didn’t feel like I was tripping – I felt like myself for the first time in years. It was the purest relief I’d ever known.

Almost three years later I’m back living in Fremantle but it’s all changed. I had spent past Western Australian summers in bed, staring at the wall with the blinds down. This year I’m up at five most mornings making the most of the rising sun: gym, swim, long walk on the beach, and in the studio by eight this morning to finish off my edits before uni. I’d always wanted to write but the words wouldn’t come, and while I still have to work bloody hard to keep the show on the road, it’s all flowing now.

*From the article here:

Psychedelic renaissance: could MDMA help with PTSD, depression and anxiety?

As Australia’s first trial for psychedelic therapy for terminally ill patients gets under way, a growing movement says it could also help other conditions

www.theguardian.com

 

[mr peabody]

Psychedelics research at Imperial College London enters a new phase

by Joe Sheppard | 21 June 2019

The second phase to be exact. This year the newly minted Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London began conducting a first-of-its-kind phase II clinical trial designed to test how effective the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin is at treating patients with major depressive disorder versus a current prescription antidepressant, escitalopram. While several clinical trials using psilocybin have been catching headlines recently, the research at Imperial College is taking the next step by comparing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, with the current standard of care, to see just how much better, if at all, psychedelics can make the lives of patients.

Why the sudden interest in psychedelic compounds?

It may surprise you to know that the idea of using psychedelics during psychotherapy has been around for some time, and can be traced back to the modern rediscovery of psychedelics in the 1940s and 50s. Less than 10 years after its rediscovery by renowned chemist Albert Hoffman, psilocybin was already being synthesised in commercial labs and sold as a novel psycho-therapeutic drug under the brand name indocybin, sharing a place on the shelf with over-the-counter LSD, branded as Delysid. Despite showing promise as psychotherapeutics in many clinical studies throughout the 50s, the spread of psilocybin and LSD out of the clinic and into the general public worried the American government. Afraid that the values of middle-class Americans were being eroded, the government banned psychedelics, labelling them as being “without any currently accepted medical use in treatment.” Research into the medicinal benefit of psychedelic compounds was almost completely abandoned by the end of the 1970s and yet the idea that the intense experiences induced through the psychedelic state might help patients reconcile grief or engrained addictive behaviour persisted in the minds of a few pioneers.

Interest was reignited in 2001 following FDA approval for a clinical trial showing that psilocybin could reduce obsessive behaviour in patients with OCD, and again in 2006 with a study showing that psilocybin-induced spiritual experiences could have long-lasting positive effects on wellbeing and behaviour, even in healthy patients. In effect, these two studies opened the floodgates on FDA approval for clinical trials using psychedelics and granted long sought after credibility to the emotional significance of “the trip” and what is now called the psychedelic therapy model, in which patients without a history of schizophrenia are given high-dose psychedelics and are guided through the trip by trained therapists under controlled conditions.

How does psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy work?

The experiences that follow taking a psychedelic are highly contextual and deeply personal, the word psychedelic is itself derived from the Greek words psyche (mind) and dēlos (manifest), alluding to the highly individual effects of taking these molecules. The types of experiences that participants encounter during guided sessions can vary hugely, but cases of reconciliation with past grief, deep personal introspection or feelings of bliss are consistently reported. This is an important factor in the treatment mechanism of the psychedelic therapy model. Rather than blunting the emotions of patients with depression, which is a commonly reported side effect of antidepressants, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy has granted them insights into the emotional root of their issues, with some patients revealing that they had achieved one of the most significant emotional breakthroughs of their lives during psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. It is easy then to misinterpret psilocybin as a wonder drug which can fast-track the benefits of visiting a psychologist or taking antidepressants, which often require months of sessions or repeat prescriptions to achieve results. But this is not the case, psilocybin is thought to push the brain into a more flexible state wherein negative thought patterns can be loosened and through heightened association new personal insights can be uncovered. Combined with the support of trained therapists, the psychedelic state can lead patients to find new perspective on events in their past. Indeed, it may be through reconnection with the past that the benefits of psilocybin are achieved, in line with a newly proposed feature of depression called derailment, which suggests that an inability to identify with past versions of yourself can cause a loss of identity and purpose which may lead to depression.

Pharmacology versus psychedelics

Rather than aiming to treat a single chemical imbalance in the brain, as do traditional antidepressants, called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), psilocybin assisted psychotherapy uses the brain states created through altering that chemistry to bring about lasting emotional improvement. But how good is it? Does the psychological benefit persist or do patients relapse shortly afterwards? The lack of head-to-head comparison has so far prevented researchers from objectively quantifying the benefit of psychedelics versus antidepressants. This is where the clinical trial at ICL comes into play. In this trial, patients with major depressive disorder will be randomised to receive psilocybin at varying dosages and six weeks of daily escitalopram or placebo, with all patients participating in guided psychotherapy. The effectiveness of both treatments will be determined through self-assessed questionnaires on depressive symptoms as well as fMRI scans of the brain, paying special attention to areas of the brain sensitive to emotional stimuli.

As previous research has shown, depressed patients show greater activation of the amygdala, an area of the brain sensitive to emotional stimuli, when they are confronted with visual stimuli that evoke negative reactions, such as angry or fearful faces, a response that is dampened by antidepressants. Conversely, psilocybin has been found to cause increased amygdala activation in response to both negative and positive visual stimuli and the strength of this activation predicted reductions in the severity of symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant depression. The attenuation of visually stimulated amygdala activation in patients receiving antidepressants and enhancement in patients receiving psilocybin gives credence to the hypothesis that psilocybin can put patients with depression back in touch with their emotions.

Using fMRI to study how psilocybin and SSRIs can alleviate the symptoms of depression despite their different mechanism in the brain can offer researchers insights into the complex neurobiology of these conditions. fMRI also offers researchers a chance to more objectively assess the magnitude of relief from depressive symptoms and, by combining this analysis with questionnaires, conclusively demonstrate the therapeutic potential of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. When the results of this study are published it will be interesting to see, not only which treatment offered the most benefit to patients, but also what aspects of the psychedelic-trip can predict the best outcomes for patients and if these meaningful experiences can be sought out and encouraged in our daily lives.

Psychedelics research at Imperial College enters a new phase

The second phase to be exact. This year the newly minted Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London began conducting a …

felixonline.co.uk

 

[mr peabody]

Roland Griffiths and Matthew Johnson

Grant and Award Announcement
Johns Hopkins Medicine
September 4th, 2019

Johns Hopkins Launches Center For Psychedelic Research

Researchers to use psychedelics to study the mind and identify therapies for diseases such as addiction, PTSD and Alzheimer’s

A group of private donors has given $17 million to start the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine, making it what’s believed to be the first such research center in the U.S., and the largest research center of its kind in the world. In the absence of federal funding for such therapeutic research in people, the new center will rely on the gifts announced today to advance the emerging field of psychedelics for therapies and wellness.

Psychedelics are a class of drugs that produce unique and profound changes of consciousness over the course of several hours. Much of the early work at Johns Hopkins has focused on psilocybin, the chemical found in so-called magic mushrooms.

The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research will focus on how psychedelics affect behavior, brain function, learning and memory, the brain’s biology and mood. Studies of psilocybin in patients will determine its effectiveness as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (formerly known as chronic Lyme disease), anorexia nervosa and alcohol use in people with major depression. The researchers hope to create precision medicine treatments tailored to individual patients’ specific needs.

“The center’s establishment reflects a new era of research in therapeutics and the mind through studying this unique and remarkable class of pharmacological compounds,” says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., the center’s director and professor of behavioral biology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “In addition to studies on new therapeutics, we plan to investigate creativity and well-being in healthy volunteers that we hope will open up new ways to support human thriving.”

“Johns Hopkins is deeply committed to exploring innovative treatments for our patients,” says Paul B. Rothman, M.D., dean of the medical faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Our scientists have shown that psychedelics have real potential as medicine, and this new center will help us explore that potential.”

The center will provide support for a team of six faculty neuroscientists, experimental psychologists and clinicians with expertise in psychedelic science, as well as five postdoctoral scientists.

“I am thrilled about this magnificent opportunity that has been provided by enlightened private funders,” says James Potash, M.D., M.P.H., the Henry Phipps Professor and director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “This center will allow our enormously talented faculty to focus extensively on psychedelic research, where their passions lie and where promising new horizons beckon.”

The center’s operational expenses for the first five years will be covered by private funding from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and four philanthropists: Tim Ferriss (author and technology investor), Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress), Blake Mycoskie (founder of TOMS, a shoe and accessory brand) and Craig Nerenberg (investor).

“We have to take braver and bolder steps if we want to help those suffering from chronic illness, addiction and mental health challenges,” says Alex Cohen, president, Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation. “By investing in the Johns Hopkins center, we are investing in the hope that researchers will keep proving the benefits of psychedelics — and people will have new ways to heal.”

The center’s faculty will train graduate and medical students who want to pursue careers in psychedelic science, where there have historically been few avenues for career advancement.

“This represents the largest investment to date in psychedelic research, as well as in training the next generation of psychedelic researchers,” says Ferriss. “I sincerely hope this ambitious Johns Hopkins center will inspire others to think big and establish more psychedelic research centers in the U.S. and overseas, as there’s never been a better time to support such important work.”

In 2000, the psychedelic research group at Johns Hopkins was the first to achieve regulatory approval in the U.S. to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy volunteers who had never used a psychedelic. Their 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin sparked a renewal of psychedelic research worldwide.

Since then, the researchers have published studies in more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles. Their research has demonstrated therapeutic benefits for people who suffer from conditions including nicotine addiction, and depression/anxiety caused by life-threatening diseases such as cancer. It has paved the way for current studies on treatment of major depressive disorder. They have also led the field by publishing safety guidelines that have helped gain approval for psychedelic studies at other universities around the world, and by developing new ways to measure mystical and emotionally challenging experiences while under the influence of psychedelics. Their research also explores the interaction of psilocybin and meditation.

The group’s findings on both the promise and the risks of psilocybin helped create a path forward for its potential medical approval and reclassification from a Schedule I drug, the most restrictive federal government category, to a more appropriate level. Psilocybin was classified as Schedule I during the Nixon administration, but research over the last decade has shown psilocybin to have low toxicity and abuse potential.

“This very substantial level of funding should enable a quantum leap in psychedelic-focused research,” adds Potash. “It will accelerate the process of sorting out what works and what doesn’t.”


The Center’s Staff Members:

Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., initiated the psilocybin research program at Johns Hopkins almost 20 years ago, leading the first studies investigating the effects of its use by healthy volunteers. His pioneering work led to the consideration of psilocybin as a therapy for serious health conditions. Griffiths recruited and trained the center faculty in psychedelic research as well.

Matthew Johnson, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, has expertise in drug addictions and behavioral economic decision-making, and has conducted psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins since 2004 (with well over 100 publications). He led studies showing psilocybin can treat nicotine addiction. Johnson will lead two new clinical trials and will be associate director of the new center.

Frederick Barrett, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, has expertise in cognitive and affective (study of emotions) neuroscience, as well as psychological assessment. The focus of his past and ongoing research is the impact of psychedelics on emotional and brain functioning. Barrett will be the center’s director of neurophysiological mechanism and biomarker assessment, overseeing a project that looks at how psychedelics change brain function and blood biomarkers that may predict response to psychedelics.

Albert Garcia-Romeu, Ph.D., is an instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences with expertise in assessing the psychological and subjective effects of psychedelics, and in addiction treatment with psychedelics. At the new center, Garcia-Romeu will lead several clinical trials and will supervise key elements of participant recruitment and care.

Natalie Gukasyan, M.D., is a Johns Hopkins trained psychiatrist and a study team member for the ongoing psilocybin depression study. Gukasyan will lead the study on psilocybin treatment for anorexia nervosa and serve as the new center’s medical director.

Alan Davis, Ph.D., a part-time adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, is one of the lead psilocybin session therapists on the ongoing psilocybin depression study and lead investigator of several past and ongoing survey studies exploring the effects of psychedelics in real-world and clinical settings. At the new center, he will provide clinical supervision and consultation across clinical trials.

Mary Cosimano, M.S.W., has been a member of the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research team since its inception and has served as a study guide for hundreds of psychedelic sessions. Cosimano will be the director of clinical services for the new center, with responsibility for training and supervising center staff members who prepare, support and provide after care for study participants.

William Richards, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who conducted research with psychedelics in the 1960s. He has been a member of the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research team since its inception.

​

About Johns Hopkins

“Johns Hopkins is deeply committed to exploring innovative treatments for our patients. Our scientists have shown that psychedelics have real potential as medicine, and this new center will help us explore that potential.”
- Paul B. Rothman, M.D., Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Scientists today are entering a new era of studying a truly unique class of pharmacological compounds known as psychedelics. Although research with these compounds was first started in the 1950s and ‘60s, it abruptly ended in the early 1970s in response to unfavorable media coverage, resulting in misperceptions of risk and highly restrictive regulations.

After a decades-long hiatus, in 2000 our research group at Johns Hopkins was the first to obtain regulatory approval in the United States to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy, psychedelic-naive volunteers. Our 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin is widely considered the landmark study that sparked a renewal of psychedelic research world-wide.

Since that time, we have published further groundbreaking studies in more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in respected scientific journals. This makes Johns Hopkins the leading psychedelic research institution in the U.S., and among the few leading groups worldwide. Our research has demonstrated therapeutic effects in people who suffer a range of challenging conditions including addiction (smoking, alcohol, other drugs of abuse), existential distress caused by life-threatening disease, and treatment-resistant depression. Studying healthy volunteers has also advanced our understanding of the enduring positive effects of psilocybin and provided unique insight into neurophysiological mechanisms of action, with implications for understanding consciousness and optimizing therapeutic and non-therapeutic enduring positive effects.

At the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, researchers will focus on how psychedelics affect behavior, mood, cognition, brain function, and biological markers of health. Upcoming studies will determine the effectiveness of psilocybin as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (formerly known as chronic Lyme disease), anorexia nervosa and alcohol use in people with major depression. The researchers hope to create precision medicine treatments tailored to the specific needs of individual patients.

Notable Achievements

Optimal dosing for psilocybin pharmacotherapy: Considering weight-adjusted and fixed dosing approaches (2021)
We analyzed acute subjective drug effects (mystical, challenging, and intensity) associated with therapeutic outcomes from ten previous studies [total N=28] in which psilocybin was administered in the range 20 to 30mg/70kg (inclusive). Analyses examined the relationships between demographic variables including body weight and subjective effects in participants receiving 20 mg/70 kg (n = 120), participants receiving 30mg/70kg (n=182), and participants whose weight-adjusted dose was about 25mg (to approximate the fixed dose that is currently being evaluated in registration trials for major depressive disorder) (n=103). No significant associations were found between subjective effects and demographic variables including body weight or sex. Across a wide range of body weights (49 to 113kg) the present results showed no evidence that body weight affected subjective effects of psilocybin. These results suggest that the convenience and lower cost of administering psilocybin as a fixed dose outweigh any potential advantage of weight-adjusted dosing.

Clinical response and remission of depression after psilocybin therapy (2020)
We completed the first randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of psilocybin therapy for depression among 24 adults. Findings showed that participants who received immediate psilocybin-assisted therapy compared with delayed treatment showed improvement in blinded clinician rater–assessed depression severity and in self-reported secondary outcomes through the 1-month follow-up. In the overall sample, 71% at 1 month had a clinically significant response to the intervention, and 54% at 1 month were in remission. Findings suggest that psilocybin with therapy is efficacious in treating MDD, thus extending the results of previous studies of this intervention in patients with cancer and depression and of a nonrandomized study in patients with treatment-resistant depression.

Measurement of psychological insight occurring during psychedelic experiences (2020)
Although several measures have been developed to examine acute psychedelic effects (e.g., mystical-type and challenging experiences), no measure assesses acute psychologically insightful experiences that may occur during psychedelic experiences. We recently developed a new measure of psychological insight and tested its psychometric properties in a large international survey study. The measure demonstrated support for several elements of reliability and validity. The measure has the potential to extend the understanding of the acute and enduring effects of psychedelics.

Assessment of pharmacological manipulation of the human claustrum (2020)
The claustrum, once thought to be the seat of consciousness, is a thin sheet of gray matter that reaches out to every other region in the brain. The claustrum has historically been difficult to study, and thus, its function remains mysterious to scientists. Using fMRI brain imaging techniques, CPCR researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Maryland, observed the activity and connectivity of the claustrum in 15 people after taking psilocybin or placebo. Results showed that both the default mode network and areas of the brain believed to be responsible for setting attention and switching tasks may be disrupted during the effects of psilocybin, and alterations in the claustrum may account for these changes. This study moves us one step closer to understanding the mechanisms of psilocybin in the brain.

Enduring effects of psychedelic administration on human brain function (2020)
Findings from the first study to investigate longitudinal effects on brain function after taking psilocybin suggest that psilocybin may increase emotional and brain plasticity. Brain functioning in regions related to emotions and top-down control of emotions were altered, and overall brain connectivity was increased at 1-week and 1-month after psilocybin.

Paving the way for Moving Psilocybin Out of Schedule I [2018]
Anticipating the potential that Phase 3 research may confirm the efficacy and safety of psilocybin for one or more medical disorders, the Hopkins team critically reviewed available evidence on the abuse liability of psilocybin, from chemistry to animal models to large scale government surveys, according the structure of the Controlled Substances Act. They concluded that if psilocybin is approved as medicine, placement in Schedule IV may be appropriate with additional FDA mandated risk management provisions.

Psilocybin Effects in Special Groups - Beginning and Long-Term Meditators and Religious Clergy (2018 and Ongoing)
First studies demonstrating sustained positive effects of psilocybin in several special populations of individuals with interest in spirituality and religious practices.

Interactions Between Music and Psychedelic Drug Effects (2017-2018]
The first study to describe features of music that may support peak psychedelic experiences, and the first study to demonstrate how LSD alters the neural basis of music perception.

MDMA Harm Reduction (2017)
First study showing that pill testing services reduce harm by decreasing intended consumption of unintended or unknown substances. This research provides the first evidence regarding harm-reduction claims for such services for use in legislation and judicial cases.

First-ever NIH grant to study effects of psilocybin on brain function (2016)
The NIH awarded a grant to study the effects psilocybin on brain function. This study utilized fMRI brain imaging techniques to study the effects of psilocybin 1-day before, 1-week after, and 1-month after drug administration, and is the first study of it’s kind to study the long-term effects of psilocybin on brain function.

Palliative Effects of Psilocybin Treatment in Cancer Patients (2016)
Largest and most rigorous study demonstrating that a single administration of psilocybin produces large and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. The results of this landmark study is providing the basis for the initiation of registration trials in the United States and Europe seeking approval of psilocybin for medical treatment.

Measuring Adverse Effects and Challenging Experiences after Psilocybin (2016, 2017)
First validated psychological scale specifically designed for assessing psychologically challenging experiences with psychedelics (what are often called “bad trips” outside of clinical research). Also, first large scale survey study documenting both acute and enduring adverse experiences after taking psilocybin mushrooms in uncontrolled settings. Also in addition, the first study suggesting a relationship between challenging experiences and the personality domain of neuroticism.

Psychedelic Assisted Smoking Cessation (2014, 2017)
First research since the 1970s using a classic psychedelic (psilocybin) to treat addiction, and the first ever study to examine a psychedelic to treat tobacco/nicotine addiction. The pilot study showed that 80% of participants were biologically verified as smoke free 6 months after psilocybin treatment. These are drastically higher than typical success rates, with the most effective medications showing success rates less than 35%.

Measuring Mystical Experience (2012, 2015)
First validated psychological scale specifically designed for assessing spiritual (mystical) subjective aspects of psychedelic experiences. Measuring mystical experience is important because research with addicted cigarette smokers, distressed cancer patients, and healthy volunteers in non-therapeutic studies have all shown that mystical experience during psilocybin sessions predicts positive behavior change at least 6 months after sessions. Investigating mystical experiences may therefore be critical to further optimizing psychedelic interventions, and understanding how psilocybin affects consciousness.

Assessment of the Novel Psychedelic Salvinorin A (2011, 2015, 2016)
First research determining the psychoactive effects of salvinorin A in humans under blind conditions and first human research showing these effects are mediated at opioid but not serotonin-2A receptors. Salvinorin A is the psychoactive constituent of the Salvia divinorum plant from Oaxaca Mexico. This non-classic psychedelic compound is the subject of intense scientific interest as a novel, non-addictive opioid that might hold promise in the treatment of pain and in the treatment of addiction.

Psilocybin Increases the Personality Domain of Openness (2011)
First study to show that a single administration of psilocybin produced enduring change in personality, which was considered to be a fixed characteristic of individuals that does not change across the lifetime. The personality domain of openness is associated with creativity in the arts and sciences.

Guidelines for Human Psychedelic Research (2008]
First framework for safely shaping the new era of research. This highly cited analysis has provided guidance to researchers and Institutional Review Boards at a growing number of universities which initiated research with psychedelics. This manuscript has helped safely shepherd the growing field of psychedelic research regarding the risks of psychedelic administration and the safeguards which are critical in addressing these risks.

Psilocybin Produces Enduring Positive Effects (2006,2008]
First research since the 1970s to administer a classic psychedelic (psilocybin) to drug naïve participants. Psilocybin led to profound experiences that 67% of participants rated as among the top 5 most meaningful experiences of their lifetime. The single psilocybin session led to positive changes in moods, attitudes, and behavior for 14 months (and possibly longer), with 64% indicating the experience increased well-being or life-satisfaction. The study also established the safety of high dose psilocybin administration.

Academic Publications

Doss, M.K., Považan, M., Rosenberg, M.D., Sepeda, N.D., Davis, A.K., Finan, P.H., Smith, G.S., Pekar, J.J., Barker, P.B., Griffiths, R.R., & Barrett, F.S. (2021). Psilocybin therapy increases cognitive and neural flexibility in patients with major depressive disorder. Translational Psychiatry, 11, 574.

Agin-Liebes, G., & Davis, A.K. (2021). Psilocybin for Treatment of Depression: A Promising New Pharmacotherapy Approach. In: . Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Published Online. November 23, 2021.

Mangini, P., Averill, L.A., & Davis, A.K. (2021). Psychedelic treatment for co-occurring alcohol misuse and post-traumatic stress symptoms among United States Special Operations Forces Veterans. Journal of Psychedelic Studies. Published Online. November 16, 2021.

Garcia-Romeu A., Darcy S., Jackson H., White T., Rosenberg P. (2021) Psychedelics as Novel Therapeutics in Alzheimer’s Disease: Rationale and Potential Mechanisms. In: . Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Published Online. November 04, 2021.

Mathai, D.S., McCathern, A.G., Guzick, A.G., Schneider, S.C., Weinzimmer, S.A., Cepeda, S.L., Garcia-Romeu, A., & Storch, E.A. (2021). Parental attitudes toward use of ketamine in adolescent mood disorders and suicidality. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.

Ermakova, A.O., Dunbar, F., Rucker, J., & Johnson, M.W. (2021). A narrative synthesis of research with 5-MeO-DMT. Journal of Psychopharmacology. Published Online. October 19, 2021.

Davis, A.K., Mangini, P., & Xin, Y. (2021). Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for trauma-exposed patients in an outpatient setting: A clinical chart review study. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 5(2), 94-102.

Davis, A.K., Agin-Liebes, G., España, M., Pilecki, B., & Luoma, J.B. (2021). Attitudes and beliefs about the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs among psychologists in the United States. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. Published Online. September 01, 2021.

Nayak, S.M., Gukasyan, N., Barrett, F.S., Erowid, E., Erowid, F., Griffiths, R.R. (2021). Classic psychedelic coadministration with lithium, but not lamotrigine, is associated with seizures: an analysis of online psychedelic experience reports. Pharmacopsychiatry, 54(05), 240-245.

Davis, A.K., Xin, Y., Sepeda, N.D., Garcia-Romeu, A., & Williams, M.T. (2021). Increases in psychological flexibility mediate relationship between acute psychedelic effects and decreases in racial trauma symptoms among people of color. Chronic Stress. Published Online. August 03, 2021.

Yaden, Y.B., Berghella, A.P., Regier, P.S., Garcia-Romeu, A., Johnson, M.W., & Hendricks, P.S. (2021). Classic psychedelics in the treatment of substance use disorder: Potential synergies with twelve-step programs. International Journal of Drug Policy, 98, 103380.

Yaden, Y.B., Johnson, M.W., Griffiths, R.R., Doss, M., Garcia-Romeu, A., Nayak, S., Gukasyan, N., Mathur, B.N., & Barrett, F.S. (2021). Psychedelics and consciousness: Distinctions, demarcations, and opportunities. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 24.

Cox, D.J., Garcia-Romeu, A., & Johnson, M.W. (2021). Predicting changes in substance use following psychedelic experiences: natural language processing of psychedelic session narratives. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 47(4), 444-454.

Uthaug, M.V., Davis, A.K., Haas, T.F., Davis, D., Dolan, S.B., Lancelotta, R., Timmermann, C., Ramaekers, J.G. (2021). The epidemiology of mescaline use: Pattern of use, motivations for consumption, and perceived consequences, benefits, and acute and enduring subjective effects. Journal of Psychopharmacology. Published Online. May 5, 2021.

Thrul, J., & Garcia-Romeu, A. (2021). Whitewashing psychedelics: racial equity in the emerging field of psychedelic-assisted mental health research and treatment. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 28(3), 211-214.

Agin-Liebes, G., Haas, T.F., Lancelotta, R., Uthaug, M.V., Ramaekers, J.G., & Davis, A.K. (2021). Naturalistic use of mescaline is associated with self-reported psychiatric improvements and enduring positive life changes. ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 4(2), 543–552.

Aday, J.S., Davis, A.K., Mitzkovitz, C.M., Bloesch, E.M., & Davoli, C.C. (2021). Predicting reactions to psychedelic drugs: a systematic review of states and traits related to acute drug effects. ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 4(2), 424–435.

Garcia-Romeu, A., Barrett, F.S., Carbonaro, T.M., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2021). Optimal dosing for psilocybin pharmacotherapy: Considering weight-adjusted and fixed dosing approaches. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 35(4), 353-361.

Lawrence, D.W., Sharma, B., Griffiths, R.R., Carhart-Harris, R. (2021). Trends in the Top-Cited Articles on Classic Psychedelics. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. Published Online. February 03, 2021.

Gukasyan, N. & Nayak, S. (2021). Psychedelics, placebo effects, and set and setting: insights from common factors theory of psychotherapy. Transcultural Psychiatry. Published Online.

Davis, A.K., Barrett, F.S., So, S., Gukasyan, N., Swift, T.C., & Griffiths, R.R. (2021). Development of the Psychological Insight Questionnaire among a sample of people who have consumed psilocybin or LSD. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 35(4), 437-446.

Strickland, J.C., Garcia-Romeu, A., & Johnson, M.W. (2021). Set and setting: a randomized study of different musical genres in supporting psychedelic therapy. ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 4(2), 472-478.

Johnson, M.W. (2021). Consciousness, religion, and gurus: pitfalls of psychedelic medicine. ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 4(2), 578-581.

Yaden, D.B., & Griffiths, R.R. (2021). The subjective effects of psychedelics are necessary for their enduring therapeutic effects. ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, 4(2), 568-572.

Williams, M.T., Davis, A.K., Xin, Y., Sepeda, N.D., Grigas, P.C., Sinnott, S., & Haeny, A.M. (2021). People of color in North America report improvements in racial trauma and mental health symptoms following psychedelic experiences. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 28(3), 215-226.

Nayak, S., & Johnson, M.W. (2021). Psychedelics and psychotherapy. Pharmacopsychiatry, 54(04), 167-175.

Yaden, D.B., Yaden, M., & Griffiths, R.R. (2021). Psychedelics in Psychiatry—Keeping the Renaissance From Going Off the Rails. JAMA Psychiatry, 78(5), 469-470.

Davis, A.K., Barrett, F.S., May, D.G., Cosimano, M.P., Sepeda, N.D., Johnson, M.W., Finan, P.H., & Griffiths, R.R. (2021). Effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 78(5), 481-489.

Doss, M.K., May, D.G., Johnson, M.W., Clifton, J.M., Hedrick, S.L., Prisinzano, T.E., Griffiths, R.R., & Barrett, F.S. (2020). The acute effects of the atypical dissociative hallucinogen Salvinorin A on functional connectivity in the human brain. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 16392.

Barrett, F.S., Krimmel, S.R., Griffiths, R.R., Seminowicz, D.A., & Mathur, B.N. (2020). Psilocybin acutely alters the functional connectivity of the claustrum with brain networks that support perception, memory, and attention. NeuroImage, 218:116980.

Davis, A.K., Averill, L.A., Sepeda, N.D., Barsuglia, J.P., & Amoroso, T. (2020). Psychedelic treatment for trauma-related psychological and cognitive impairment among US Special Operations Forces Veterans. Chronic Stress, 4, 1-11.

Luoma, J. B., Chwyl, C., Bathje, G. J., Davis, A. K., & Lancelotta, R. (published online 2020, print edition in press). A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 52(4), 289-299.

Müller, F., Johnson, M. W., & Borgwardt, S. (2020). Editorial: Hallucinogens and Entactogens: Establishing a New Class of Psychotherapeutic Drugs? Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, Article 497.

Davis, A.K., Clifton, J.M., Weaver, E.G., Hurwitz, E.H., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2020). Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 34(9), 1008-1020.

Carbonaro, T.M., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2020). Subjective features of the psilocybin experience that may account for its self-administration by humans: a double-blind comparison of psilocybin and dextromethorphan. Psychopharmacology, 237, 2293–2304.

Dolan, S.B., & Johnson, M.W. (2020). The drug purity discounting task: Ecstasy use likelihood is reduced by probabilistic impurity according to harmfulness of adulterants. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 208, 107772.

Aday, J.S., Mitzkovitz, C.M., Bloesch, E.K., Davoli, C.C, & Davis, A.K. (2020). Long-term effect of psychedelic drugs: A systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 113, 179-189

Lancelotta, R & Davis, A.K. (2020). Use of benefit enhancement strategies among 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) users: associations with mystical, challenging, and enduring effects. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 52(3), 273-281.

Barrett, FS, Doss, MK, Sepeda ND, Pekar JJ, & Griffiths RR (2020). Emotions and brain function are altered up to one month after a single high dose of psilocybin. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 2214.

Uthaug, M.V., Lancelotta, R., Szabo, A., Davis, A.K., Riba, J., Ramaekers, J.G. (2020). Prospective examination of synthetic 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine inhalation: effects on salivary IL-6, cortisol levels, affect, and non-judgment. Psychopharmacology, 237(3), 773-785.

Garcia-Romeu, A., Davis, A.K., Erowid, E., Erowid, F., Griffiths, R.R., & Johnson, M.W. (2020). Persisting reductions in cannabis, opioid, and stimulant misuse after naturalistic psychedelic use: An online survey. Frontiers Psychiatry, 10, 955.

Uthaug, M.V., Lancelotta, R., Ortiz Bernal, A.M., Davis, A.K., & Ramaekers, J.G. (2020). A comparison of reactivation experiences following vaporization and intramuscular injection (IM) of synthetic 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) in a natural setting. Journal of Psychedelic Studies.

Sepeda, N.D., Clifton, J.M., Doyle, L.Y., Lancelotta, R., Griffiths, R.R., & Davis, A.K. (2019). Inhaled 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Supportive context associated with positive acute and enduring effects. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 4(2), 114-122.

Davis, A.K., Barrett, F.S., & Griffiths, R.R. (2020). Psychological flexibility mediates the relations between acute psychedelic effects and subjective decreases in depression and anxiety. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 15, 39-45.

Garcia-Romeu, A. Davis, A.K., Erowid, F., Erowid, E., Griffiths, R.R., & Johnson, M.W. (2019). Cessation and reduction in alcohol consumption and misuse after psychedelic use. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 33(9), 1088-1101.

Griffiths, R.R., Hurwitz, E.S., Davis, A.K., Johnson, M.W., & Jesse, R. (2019). Survey of subjective “God encounter experiences”: Comparisons among naturally occurring experiences and those occasioned by the classic psychedelics psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT. PLoS ONE, 14(4), e0214377.

Davis, A.K., So, S., Lancelotta, R., Barsuglia, J.P., & Griffiths, R.R. (2019). 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) used in a naturalistic group setting is associated with unintended improvements in depression and anxiety. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 1-16.

Barsuglia, J., Davis, A.K., Palmer, R., Lancelotta, R., Windham-Herman, A.M., Peterson, K., Polanco, M., Grant, R., & Griffiths, R.R. (2018). Intensity of mystical experiences occasioned by 5-MeO-DMT and comparison with a prior psilocybin study. Frontiers Psychology, 9, 2459.

Johnson, M.W., Hendricks, P.S., Barrett, F.S., Griffiths, R.R. (2018]. Classic Psychedelics: An integrative review of epidemiology, mystical experience, brain network function, and therapeutics. Journal of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 197, 83-102.

Johnson, M.W. (2018]. Psychiatry might need some psychedelic therapy. International Review of Psychiatry. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 285-290.

Garcia-Romeu, A.G., & Richards, W.A. (2018]. Current perspectives on psychedelic therapy: use of serotonergic hallucinogens in clinical interventions. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 291-316.

Barrett, F.S., Preller, K.H., & Kaelen, M. (2018]. Psychedelics and music: neuroscience and therapeutic implications. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 350-362.

Barrett, F.S., Carbonaro, T.M., Hurwitz, E., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2018]. Double-blind comparison of the two hallucinogens psilocybin and dextromethorphan: effects of cognition. Psychopharmacology, 235(10), 2915-2927.

Davis, A.K., Renn, E., Windham-Herman, A.M., Polanco, M., & Barsuglia, J.P. (2018]. A mixed-method analysis of persisting effects associated with positive outcomes following ibogaine detoxification. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 50(4), 287-297.

Noorani, T., Garcia-Romeu, A., Swift, T.C., Griffiths, R.R., & Johnson, M.W. (2018]. Psychedelic therapy for smoking cessation: Qualitative analysis of participant accounts. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 756-769.

Davis, A.K., Barsulglia, J.P., Lancelotta, R., Grant, R.M., & Renn, E. (2018]. The epidemiology of 5-methyoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) use: Benefits, consequences, patterns of use, subjective uses, and reasons for consumption. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 779-792.

Johnson, M.W., Griffiths, R.R., Hendricks, P.S., Henningfield, J.E. (2018]. The abuse potential of medical psilocybin according to the 8 factors of the Controlled Substances Act. Neuropharmacology, 1-24.

Barrett, F.S., Schlienz, J.N., Lembeck, N., Waqas, M., Vandrey, R. (2018]. "Hallucinations" Following Acute Cannabis Dosing: A Case Report and Comparison to Other Hallucinogenic Drugs. Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, 3(1), 85-93.

Carbonaro, T.M., Johnson, M.W., Hurwitz, E., & Griffiths, R.R. (2018]. Double-blind comparison of the two hallucinogens psilocybin and dextromethorphan: similarities and difference in subjective experiences. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 235(2), 521-534.

Griffiths, R.R., Johnson, M.W., Richards, W.A., Richards, B.D., Jesse, R., MacLean, K.A., Barrett, F.S., Cosimano, M.P., & Klinedinst, M.A. (2018]. Psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experience in combination with meditation and other spiritual practices produces enduring positive changes in psychological functioning and in trait measures of prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(1), 49-69.

Johnson, M.J., Garcia-Romeu, A., Johnson, P.S. & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). An online survey of tobacco smoking cessation associated with naturalistic psychedelic use. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 31(7), 841-850.

Garcia-Romeu, A., Griffiths, R.R., & , Johnson, M.W. (2017). Psychedelic-associated addiction remission: An online survey. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 171, e69.

Davis, A.K., Barsuglia, J.P., Windham-Herman, A., Lynch, M., & Polanco, M. (2017). Subjective effectiveness of ibogaine treatment for problematic opioid consumption: Short- and long-term outcomes and current psychological functioning. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 1(2), 65-73.

Saleemi, S., Pennybacker, S.J. Wooldridge, M., & Johnson, M.W. (2017). Who is ‘Molly’? MDMA adulterants by product name and the impact of harm-reduction services at raves. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 31.

Barrett, F.S., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Neuroticism is associated with challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms. Personality and Individual Differences, 117, 155-160.

Barrett, F.S, Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Psilocybin in long-term meditators: Effects on default mode network functional connectivity and retrospective ratings of quality experience. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 171, e15-e16.

Barrett, F.S., Robbin, H., Smooke, D., Brown, J.L., & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Qualitative and Quantitative Features of Music Reported to Support Peak Mystical Experiences during Psychedelic Therapy Sessions. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1-12.

Barrett, F.S., Preller, K.H., Herdener, M., Janata, P., & Vollenweider, F.X. (2017). Serotonin 2A receptor signaling underlies LSD-induced alteration of the neural response to dynamic changes in music. Cerebral Cortex, 1-12.

Barrett F.S. & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences: Phenomenology and Neural Correlates in AL Halberstadt, FX Vollenweider, and DE Nichols (Eds.) Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs, Curr Top Behav Neurosci. Epub Ahead of Print: 2017 Mar 26. DOI: 10.1007/7854_2017_474

Johnson, M.W. & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin. Neurotherapeutics, 14(3), 734-740.

Johnson, M.W., Garcia-Romeu, A., & Griffiths, R.R. (2017). Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 43(1), 55-60.

Nichols, D.E., Johnson, M.W., Nichols, C.D. (2017). Psychedelics as medicines: An emerging new paradigm. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 101(2), 209-219.

Griffiths, R.R., Johnson, M.W., Carducci, M.A., Umbricht, A., Richards, W.A., Richards, B.D., Cosimano, M.P., & Klinedinst, M.A. (2016). Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1181-1197.

Garcia-Romeu, A., Kersgaard, B., & Addy, P.H. (2016) Clinical applications of hallucinogens: A review. Experimental Clinical Psychopharmacology, 24(4), 229-268.

Barrett, F.S., Bradstreet, M.P., Leoutsakos, J-M.S., Johnson, M.W. & Griffiths, R.R. (2016). The Challenging Experience Questionnaire: Characterization of challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1279-1295.

Carbonaro, T.M., Bradstreet, M.P., Barrett, F.S., MacLean, K.A., Jesse, R., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12). 1268-1278.

Bogenschutz, M.P & Johnson, M.W. (2016). Classic hallucinogens in the treatment of addictions. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, 64, 250-258.

Maqueda, A.E., Valle, M., Addy, P.H., Antonijoan, R.M., Puntes, M., Coimbra, J., Ballester, M.R., Garrido, M., González, M., Claramunt, J., Barker, S., Lomnicka, I., Waguespack, M., Johnson, M.W., Griffiths, R.R., & Riba, J. (2016). Naltrexone but not ketanserin antagonizes the subjective, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine effects of salvinorin-A in humans. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 19(7), 1-13.

Johnson, M.W., MacLean, K.A., Caspers, M.J., Prisinzano, Griffiths, R.R. (2016). Time course of pharmacokinetic and hormonal effects of inhaled high-dose salvinorin A in humans. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(4), 323-329.

Barrett, F.S., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2015). Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental session with psilocybin. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 29(11), 1182-1190.

Kaelen, M., Barrett, F.S., Roseman, R., Lorenz, R., Bolstridge, M., Curran, H.V., Feilding, A., Nutt, D.J, & Carhart-Harris, R.L. (2015). LSD enhances the emotional response to music. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 232(19), 3607-3614.

Sessa, B. & Johnson, M.W. (2015). Can psychedelic compounds play a part in drug dependence therapy? The British Journal of Psychiatry, 206(1), 1-3.

Barrett, F.S., Bradstreet, M.P., Leoutsakos, J.S., Johnson, M.W., MacLean, K.A., Jess, R., & Griffiths, R.R. (2015). The challenging experience questionnaire: Characterization of acute adverse reactions to psilocybin. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 146, e218.

Carbonaro, T., Barrett, F., Bradstreet, M. P., Johnson, M.W., MacLean, K.A., Jess, R., & Griffiths, R.R. (2015). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Demographics and phenomenology. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 146, e239-e240.

Hendricks, P.S., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2015). Psilocybin, psychological distress, and suicidality. Journal of Psychopharmacology 29(9), 1041-1043.

Hendricks, P.S., Thorne, C.B., Clark, C.B., Coombs, D.W., &, Johnson, M.W. (2015) Classic psychedelic use is associated with reduced psychological distress and suicidality in the United States adult population. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 29(3), 280-288.

Sessa B, Johnson MW. From addiction to recovery using altered states of consciousness. In: Dickins R., ed. Psychedelic Press UK Volume 1; Cornwall, UK: Psychedelic Press; 2015;71-80.

Garcia-Romeu, A., Griffiths, R. R., & Johnson, M. W. (2015). Psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences in the treatment of tobacco addiction. Current Drug Abuse Reviews, 7(3), 157-164.

Tupper, K., Wood, E, Yensen, R., Johnson, M.W. (2015). Psychedelic medicine: a re-emerging therapeutic paradigm. Canadian Medical Journal, 187(14), 1054-1059.

MacLean, K.A., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2015). Hallucinogens and club drugs., In:, M. Galanter, H.D. Kleber, & K Brady (Eds.). The American Psychiatric Press Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment (Fifth Edition) (pp 209-222),The American Psychiatric Press, Arlington, VA.

Hendricks, P., Clark, C., Johnson, M.W. (2014) Hallucinogen use predicts reduced recidivism among substance-involved offenders under community corrections supervision. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 28(1), 62-66.

Jesse, R. and Griffiths, R.R. (2014) Psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins: A 2014 report. In: J.H. Ellens (Ed.). Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances (Volume 2) (pp 29-43). Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA

Johnson, M.W., Garcia-Romeu, A., Cosimano, M.P., & Griffiths, R.R. (2014). Pilot study of the 5-HT2AR agonist psilocybin in the treatment of tobacco addiction. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 11, 983-992.

Caspers, M.J., Williams, T.D., Lovell, K.M. Lozama, A, Butelman, E.R., Kreek, M.J., Johnson, M. Griffiths, R., MacLean, K., & Prisinzano, T.E. (2013). LC-MS/MS quantification of salvinorin A from biological fluids. Analytical Methods, 5, 7042-7048.

MacLean, K.A., Johnson, M.W., Reissig, C.J., Prisinzano, T.E., & Griffiths, R.R. (2013). Dose-related effects of salvinorin A in humans: Dissociative, hallucinogenic and memory effects. Psychopharmacology, 226, 381-392.

Grob, C.S., Bossis, A.P. & Griffiths, R.R. (2013). Use of the Classic Hallucinogen Psilocybin for Treatment of Existential Distress Associated with Cancer. In B.I. Carr and J.L.Steel (Eds), Psychological Aspects of Cancer, (pp. 291-308] Springer Science and Business Media LLC, New York.

MacLean, K.A., Leoutsakos, J-M.S., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2012) Factor analysis of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire: A study of experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51(4), 721-737.

Johnson MW. Hallucinogens. In: Rippe JM, ed. Encyclopedia of Lifestyle Medicine and Health. vol 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; 2012;529-30.

Reissig, C.J., Carter, L.P., Johnson, M.W., Mintzer, M.Z., Klinedinst, M.A. & Griffiths, R.R. (2012). High doses of dextromethorphan, an NMDA antagonist, produces effects similar to classic hallucinogens. Psychopharmacology, 223(1), 1-15.

Johnson, M.W., Sewell, R.A, & Griffiths, R.R. (2012). Psilocybin dose-dependently causes delayed, transient headaches in healthy volunteers. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 123, 132-140.

MacLean, K.A., Johnson, M.W., & Griffiths, R.R. (2011). Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 25(11), 1453-1461.

Griffiths, R.R., Johnson, M.W., Richards, W.A., Richards, B.D., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology, 218(4), 649-665.

Johnson, M.W. MacLean, K.A., Reissig, C.J., Prisinzano, T.E. & Griffiths, R.R. (2011). Human psychopharmacology and dose-effects of salvinorin A, a kappa opioid agonist hallucinogen present in the plant Salvia divinorum. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 115, 150-155.

Johnson MW. Salvia divinorum. In: Kleiman M, Hawdon J, Golson JG, eds. Encyclopedia of Drug Policy. vol 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; 2011;709-11.

Griffiths, R.R. & Grob, C.S. (2010). Hallucinogens as medicine. Scientific American, 303, 77-79.
Johnson, M.W., Richards, W.A., & Griffiths, R.R. (2008]. Human hallucinogen research: guidelines for safety. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(6), 603-620.

Griffiths, R.R., Johnson, M.W., Richards, W.A., McCann, U., & Richards, B.D. (2008]. Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(6), 621-632.

Griffiths, R.R., Richards, W.A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion mystical experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268-283.

Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research

The Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit website provides information about or lab, current projects, future directions, and past achievements. Viewers can find media articles and academic publications pertaining to psychedelic research, psilocybin research, psilocybin studies, salvia research, f

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[mr peabody]

5 facts you may not know about Albert Hofmann and LSD*

Hofmann’s work with LSD started with purpose, faded away, and then went down in history.

by Barbara E. Bauer, MS | Psychedelic Science Review | 16 Mar 2020

People with interest in psychedelics know that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann is credited for the first synthesis of LSD in 1938. At the time, he was a research chemist at Sandoz laboratories working on identifying and synthesizing active compounds from medicinal plants.

LSD came into being during a time Hofmann was working with an alkaloid from a fungus called ergot, which infects rye and other cereal grains. The alkaloid was called lysergic acid, and it was the chemical nucleus common to all the ergot alkaloids. Some of these alkaloids had medicinal properties. But often they had unwanted and sometimes severe side effects.

Hofmann was tasked with producing new lysergic acid compounds that did not have side effects. At the same time, he wanted compounds which, based on their chemistry could have pharmacological properties.

So began the story leading up to the synthesis of LSD and the discovery of its psychedelic effects. Below are five interesting facts about Albert Hofmann and his work with LSD over the years.​

1. LSD was one of several ergot derivatives Hofmann synthesized. The correct name of LSD is LSD-25. This is because it was the twenty-fifth in the series of lysergic acid derivatives Hofmann produced.​
2. He synthesized LSD with a purpose in mind. The synthesis of LSD was not an accident. Hoffman did not stumble upon it. He made LSD because he thought it would act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. He recognized that its chemical structure was similar to nicotinic acid diethylamide, a similar stimulant (analeptic) of that time.​
3. After Hofmann synthesized LSD, it sat on the shelf for five years. The initial testing of LSD done at Sandoz showed that LSD had a substantial effect on the uterine tissues, an effect seen with other ergot alkaloids. It also made the experimental animals restless during narcosis. As Hofmann recalled, “The new substance, however, aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians; testing was therefore discontinued.”​
4. Hofmann resurrected LSD because of a “feeling” he had. Or, as he called it a “peculiar presentiment.” Hofmann called LSD “relatively uninteresting” at the time he synthesized it. Despite this, five years later, he produced more and sent it to the pharmacological department at Sandoz for further tests. He said he felt that LSD could have properties other than what the initial testing found. He explained, “This was quite unusual; experimental substances, as a rule, were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest.”​
5. Bicycle Day was Hofmann’s second time on LSD. On Friday, April 16, 1943, Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD while working in his lab. He described a “not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition” with “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” To confirm that LSD was responsible for his experience, he decided to self-test the next workday, Monday, 18, 1943. The story of bicycle day is legendary. Hofmann’s account of his horrific experience self-testing LSD can be explained in part by the dose he took; 250 mcg of the tartaric acid salt. He said he chose the dose by “considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time.” But at the time, there is no way he could have understood the phenomenal potency of the compound he had created.​

*From the article here :

5 Fast Facts You May Not Know About Albert Hofmann and LSD

Hofmann’s work with LSD started with purpose, faded away, and then went down in history.

psychedelicreview.com

 

[mr peabody]

Tim Ferriss

World's first research center dedicated to psychedelic medicine

by Erin Brodwin | Business Insider | Apr 25 2019

The world's first research hub dedicated exclusively to psychedelics has opened, with backing from author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. Located in London, the new center will be ground zero for studying the potential of turning drugs like ecstasy and magic mushrooms into medical treatments. It's called the Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research, and it was funded with nearly $4 million from donors.

For one of his recent shows, Ferriss interviewed author Michael Pollan about his latest book, "How to Change Your Mind," which details Pollan's experiences trying several psychedelic drugs including magic mushrooms and LSD. After talking through Pollan's trips and diving into the science of how the drugs appear to impact the brain, Ferriss' interest was piqued.

On Friday, with Ferriss' financial backing, researchers will open the doors to the world's first research hub dedicated exclusively to psychedelics.

Located in London, the Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research will be home to scientists studying the potential to turn drugs like ecstasy, magic mushrooms, and LSD into approved medical treatments. Scientists will focus on addressing severe brain diseases which remain difficult to treat, such as depression and the eating disorder anorexia.

Robin Carhart-Harris

"Current treatments aren't cutting it. They're not making the difference we need," Robin Carhart-Harris, the head of the new center and a neuroscience and pharmacology researcher at London's Imperial College, told Business Insider.

The center's other funders include Canadian businessperson and founder of audiobooks.com Sanjay Singhal, banker-turned-philanthropist and Google advisor Shamil Chandaria, British executive Anton Bilton, and venture capitalist Bohdana Tamas.

While psychedelics like ayahuasca have played a medical and spiritual role in indigenous cultures across the globe for centuries, the new center will be the first formal hub of its kind.

"These compounds may help treat intractable conditions affecting tens of millions of people, and they may help us better understand the nature of consciousness itself," Ferris said in a statement.

A flurry of renewed interest in psychedelics as medicine

The center's opening comes on the heels of a flurry of renewed interest in psychedelics' potential to treat thorny brain diseases like depression.

Up until last month, there had been essentially only one kind of federally-approved antidepressant for decades. That drug is a pill called an SSRI. It is commonly sold under brand names like Lexapro and Prozac. But in March, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first new non-SSRI depression drug: a nasal spray inspired by the semi-psychedelic drug ketamine.

"Things have really started to gain momentum," Carhart-Harris said.

With nearly $4 million from its five founding donors, the center's researchers also aim to open a clinic. Ideally, the clinic would function as a prototype for future psychedelic medical facilities. Carhart-Harris said he hopes the space could serve simultaneously as a clinic for treating illness and also for helping to keep healthy people well.

Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research in London

Building on the pioneering work already done on magic mushrooms and LSD

In Carhart-Harris' view, the new center will help build on a foundation of pioneering efforts into studying psychedelics' medical potential.

Under his leadership, scientists at Imperial College were the first to study whether psilocybin, the main psychoactive component of magic mushrooms, had a positive impact on patients with severe depression. They were also global leaders in exploring the impacts of LSD on the human brain using modern brain-imaging technology.

Based on that work, researchers in New York and Baltimore launched their own clinical trials designed to further probe the drugs' therapeutic potential. They've now studied psilocybin in cancer patients facing severe anxiety about death; ecstasy in veterans with PTSD; and ayahuasca in people with depression.

"Still, psychedelic researchers have faced roadblocks along the way," Carhart-Harris said.

Part of the motivation for the new center came from frustration with repeated attempts to raise funds from mainstream medical groups like the National Institutes of Health and the UK's National Health Service.

"We've faced the perfect storm of stigma," Carhart-Harris said. "Psychedelics are scary to some people. And mental illness, that can be a sensitive topic. Even psychotherapy and psychology are also heavily stigmatized."

Earlier this year, Carhart-Harris' group started a new trial in people with depression that will compare psilocybin with a traditional antidepressant. Next year, they aim to assess whether the same drug could also hold potential to treat anorexia. Both diseases seem to be characterized by a kind of rigidity, he said. Whether they are about self-doubt or food, cyclical and pervasive thoughts trap the brain in a whirlwind of negativity.

"Psychedelics seem to relax these biases of thought and behavior so you get a kind of openness," Carhart-Harris said.

"That's a window of opportunity for therapy where if you can cultivate healthy changes, potentially you're on a good track."

Tim Ferriss just helped launch the world's first research center dedicated to turning psychedelics into medicines

The research hub opens Friday with funds from Tim Ferriss. Scientists will explore the drugs' potential to treat mental illnesses like depression.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[mr peabody]

Psychedelics and the full-fluency phenomenon

Psymposia | March 28, 2018

The healing potential of psychedelics for depression, PTSD, addiction, anxiety, and to some extent, cluster headaches, has been thoroughly documented by anecdotal testimonies, and increasingly by scientific research. Based on my personal experience and anecdotal reports that I’ve read online, one area worth deeper investigation is psychedelics for the treatment of speech disfluency: stuttering. Little is known about the etiology of stuttering, and a cure remains undiscovered for this disorder, which affects more than 70 million people worldwide. It’s unfortunate that the alleviation of disfluent speech through the use of psychedelics is not more widely known, so, as someone who stutters, I’d like to shine a light on how using psychedelics have helped do so for myself and others.

I first discovered the potential psychedelics have for treating stuttering during an experience with psilocybin mushrooms. For the length of the trip, I was able to speak as fluently and effortlessly as I ever have – more than I ever have. A helpful analogy for understanding this is, as one person who stutters put it, “I imagine that for the non-stammerer, language must be a little like thin air, a medium so compliant that most of the time you forget you’re moving within it. But for the stammerer, speaking is like moving through water – you are constantly aware of language because it constantly resists you.”

This resistance in one’s own speech creates wariness in any situation where social interaction is bound to occur, requiring a demanding amount of mental effort anticipating and attempting to avoid stuttering in these situations. However, while under the influence of the mushrooms, an amazing change had occurred: I was neither stuttering, nor cycling through potentialities in my mind for word or phrasing substitutions. For those brief hours my mind was at ease, and my speech flowed not as though I were treading water, but as if I were floating freely through air.

This was a profound experience at the time, because my stuttering had recently become more severe and was increasingly disrupting my life. Then, as if by magic, the mushrooms I ate that night induced a phenomenon of full-fluency that I had never imagined possible. It showed me that I have the ability within me to speak fluently, and that I only need to discover how to unlock the full potential of my speech.

This ignited a curiosity and passion within me to discover why psilocybin mushrooms so effectively increased my speech fluency, and whether other psychedelics could similarly do so. I was already open to experimenting with psychedelics prior to this experience, but thereafter I discovered a primary intention for engaging in further self-experimentation. Since then, I have found that, in addition to psilocybin, MDMA also reliably induces this full-fluency phenomenon.

That is, for me, anyway.

Curious if my experience was unique, I sought to discover whether the full-fluency phenomenon I had experienced was a one-off anomaly, or a shared phenomenon among other people who stutter.

After scouring through numerous articles and internet forums, I compiled a fair amount of additional anecdotal evidence, which, to my surprise, largely supports my own experience. Like me, the full-fluency phenomenon has been experienced by many other people who stutter while using psilocybin and MDMA, and unlike me, while using LSD as well.

One main distinction I’ve identified during my search, is that MDMA much more reliably induces the full-fluency phenomenon than either LSD or psilocybin. From the accounts I’ve compiled, not a single person who stutters experienced disfluent speech while under the influence of MDMA. As for psilocybin and LSD, they were less reliable in inducing the full-fluency phenomenon; for every two people that did experience full-fluency, one person did not.

This inconsistency suggests that the full-fluency phenomenon may be dependent upon dose, mechanistic action of the substance in the brain, or physiological differences between individuals. Likely, it depends on all three. This, however, has yet to be definitively answered.

Self-experimentation with these substances by people who stutter have led to individual discoveries of the full-fluency phenomenon, and the aggregation of these anecdotal reports has led me to believe that it is a shared phenomenon among the stuttering population. What’s left to discover now is how these substances induce the full-fluency phenomenon in people who stutter, which can only be accomplished through formal scientific research.

As the renaissance in psychedelic research continues, it’s my hope that these anecdotal reports will pique an interest and inspire researchers to investigate this phenomenon. Just as PTSD, depression, and anxiety have been successfully treated through psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, stuttering could similarly follow this model with psychedelic-assisted speech therapy.

There’s also potential for immediate recovery from stuttering following a single high dose experience. One well told account of this comes from Paul Stamets, the renowned mycologist, whose stuttering stopped altogether following his first psilocybin mushroom experience. To sustain such a high increase in fluency after the effects of the drug wear off is rare, but Paul’s story gives testimony to the possibility for it to occur.

For someone who stutters, any possibility to speak more fluently is worth consideration, and for scientists who conduct research related to stuttering, consideration should be taken to study this full-fluency phenomenon. Let it be known that the healing potential of psychedelics extends to yet another disorder that is currently treated with little success conventionally: stuttering.

https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/p...cy-phenomenon/​

 

[mr peabody]

King’s College London

Researchers report no serious adverse effects in healthy adults given psilocybin*

by Rich Haridy | New Atlas | Dec 11 2019

Researchers from King’s College London, in conjunction with mental health care company Compass Pathways, are reporting positive results from an early Phase 1 trial exploring the safety profile of different psilocybin doses in healthy adults. As well as demonstrating the psychedelic drug to be safe, with no serious adverse effects reported, the trial also explored the potential of group dosing sessions as a way to speed up research and expand patient access if the treatment is ultimately approved.

The trial data was revealed during a presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). The double-blind, placebo controlled study is the largest trial conducted to date into the safety and tolerability of psilocybin. While Compass Pathways is currently conducting Phase 2b dose-ranging trials investigating the efficacy of psilocybin in subjects with treatment-resistant depression, this earlier study was focused on the effects and safety profile of the drug instead of any specific therapeutic efficacy.

The trial recruited 89 healthy subjects to compare the effects of a placebo against either 10 mg or 25 mg of psilocybin. In terms of demonstrating the safety profile of psilocybin, the trial suggests no serious adverse effects were reported from the acute day of dosage, up to 12 weeks of follow-up.

The trial revealed the psilocybin, of course, resulted in acute psychedelic effects on the day of dosage, but all of those hallucinatory ‘adverse effects’ resolved swiftly within hours, suggesting the drug does not cause residual negative psychoactive symptoms in the days or weeks following a dose. In other words, no subjects suffered from any kind of hallucinatory flashback in the weeks after taking psilocybin.

“The results of the study are clinically reassuring and support further development of psilocybin as a treatment for patients with mental health problems that haven’t improved with conventional therapy, such as treatment resistant depression,” says James Rucker, lead investigator on the study from King’s College London.

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this trial was the secondary exploration into the feasibility of simultaneous group administration of psilocybin. The trial encompassed 25 dosing sessions, in a variety of different group size permutations, the largest of which comprised six subjects being treated in the same space simultaneously.

In these group sessions, each subject is accompanied by their own therapist, with the entire session supervised by a lead therapist and study psychiatrist. As Compass Pathways’ Communications Officer Tracey Cheung tells New Atlas via email, "the motivation behind these group dosage experiments is primarily about exploring ways to streamline the treatment process. Scheduling more than one patient at a time offers the potential for accelerating the pace of clinical trials." Plus, looking further down the line, Cheung suggests this strategy could enhance patient access once the psychedelic treatment was approved and clinically deployed.

“This study is part of our overall clinical development program in treatment-resistant depression; we wanted to look at the safety and tolerability profile of our psilocybin, and to look at the feasibility of a model where up to six 1:1 sessions are held at the same time,” says Compass Pathways co-founder Ekaterina Malievskaia. “We are focused on getting psilocybin therapy safely to as many patients who would benefit from it as possible.”

There is no indication in the data presented so far to suggest the administration of psilocybin in this kind of group setting enhances the risk of negative responses to the treatment. The results presented at the annual ACNP meeting clearly state these simultaneous group dosages generated psychedelic effects that were consistent with what prior studies have identified. Plus, the researchers note the study achieved high retention rates with all participants willing to undergo this kind of simultaneous psilocybin administration.

However, it is worth noting, this particular study was conducted with psychologically healthy individuals, and not subjects suffering from mental health concerns. So, it is unclear at this point whether psychedelic group sessions are as efficacious from a treatment perspective.

After psilocybin therapy received a Breakthrough Therapy designation from the FDA late in 2018, Compass Pathways started a major international multi-site trial hoping to enrol over 200 subjects to test the efficacy of a range of psilocybin doses for treatment-resistant depression. A number of locations across Europe, Canada, the UK and US are still recruiting subjects so it may be some time before the large Phase 2 trial offers up clear results.

*From the article here :

New psilocybin trial data explores group psychedelic sessions

Researchers from King’s College London, in conjunction with mental health care company Compass Pathways, are reporting positive results from an early Phase 1 trial exploring the safety profile of different psilocybin doses in healthy adults. As well as demonstrating the psychedelic drug to be safe,…

newatlas.com

 

[mr peabody]

DMT: Extending life when you need it the most

by Ede Frecska | grahamhancock.com

Ede Frecska is Principal Investigator of a group of clinical researchers in Hungary. The group’s main tenet is that the naturally occurring Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) molecule has vital therapeutic and clinical qualities, and is pivotal to the progression of brain science. Their hypothesis is that, in event of near death experiences like heart attacks, strokes and deep comas, DMT’s presence on emergency crash carts in ambulances and hospitals could prevent surviving patients from enduring brain damage.

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is an endogenous hallucinogen, meaning our body is able to make it. It has also been known as trace amine, which means we have it in very tiny amounts compared to other ‘amines’ such as tryptamine and serotonin. In most circumstances DMT is barely detectable in animals, but we predict that it is also released under special circumstances.

While DMT is scarce in animals, it is abundant in the plant kingdom; countless plant species’ specimens contain DMT in significant amounts, and ethnobotanists suppose that DMT is a very ancient natural compound. A metabolite of DMT, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) is the most common and naturally occurring plant hormone of the ‘auxin’ class. Animals metabolize DMT to IAA and release it in their urine.

In 1961, Julius Axelrod discovered an enzyme called indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase (INMT) that could change the common amine tryptamine into DMT. This finding provoked an ongoing interest in the ability of mammalian tissues to make DMT. INMT can be found in its highest levels in the lungs, thyroid, and adrenal gland. Intermediate levels are also found in the placenta, skeletal muscle, heart, small intestine, stomach, pancreas, and lymph nodes. Contrary to the commonly held view, it is not the pineal glands that can synthetize DMT in a large amount. Nevertheless, the presence of DMT in the pineal gland was proved in 2013. The lungs, because of their size and central role in circulation, are in an ideal position to flood the brain with DMT in an emergency scenario. Based on Rick Strassman’s groundbreaking work, we assume that one emergency scenario can be near (clinical) death.

Julius Axelrod

Since the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, DMT has received the harshest (‘Schedule 1’) status among drugs that are addictive and/or have no medical use. This however has been unfounded and unjustified, for it’s classification and definition was based on no scientific evidence. DMT is not, in fact, addictive and the traditional medicinal use of DMT- found, for example, in ayahuasca in the Amazon basin, strongly suggests its medical potential.

A reaction diagram of DMT synthesis

The suggestion is advanced by the discovery that DMT is an endogenous ligand of the sigma-1 receptor. This receptor can influence the oxygen (energy) utilization of cells, and its activation has therapeutic value in many pathological conditions like stroke, myocardial infarct, retinal degeneration, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cancer, hypertension, aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. The common ground of the aforementioned conditions on a cellular level is protein folding deficit, mitochondrial dysfunction, calcium overload, and glutamate excitotoxicity, which all result from oxidative stress and sigma-1 receptor involvement.

Ayahuasca

How could DMT be of use to medicine?

There are many ways that DMT may be useful to modern medicine. This proposal rests on the assumption that one of the physiological roles of endogenous DMT is its protection against oxidative stress, otherwise known as ‘hypoxia’ or lack of oxygen. The way DMT works in the body strongly suggests that it could help our most precious organ, the brain, in times of low oxygen supply. In hospital, this condition occurs in patients who come very close to dying. If a patient’s heart has stopped beating and blood is no longer being pumped to the brain, the brain becomes starved of oxygen and this can lead to brain damage. This scenario, most common in elderly patients is usually the result of a heart attack or heart failure. We could also potentially find use in event of births, when umbilical cords become trapped around babies’ necks.

The longer the brain is starved of oxygen, the greater the chance and extent of brain damage. Our hypothesis is that DMT can extend the amount of time that the brain can survive unscathed in the absence of a steady stream of oxygen. We have already conducted research on DMT and immunology, which has shown a protective effect of DMT on cells. If our hypothesis is correct, the impact could be huge. First of all, we need to do the basic research to test the effect of DMT on neuronal tissue.

Rationale of the proposal

Further investigation into DMT’s relationship with the brain has revealed that the brain has what we call an ‘active uptake mechanism’ that aids DMT’s travel through three barriers. Furthermore, when DMT is taken up into the brain, it is stored in little sacs (vesicles) for up to a week. This poses the question, why would the brain store DMT if it does not use it? Research has also shown that a specific receptor called the ‘sigma 1 Receptor’ plays a protective role in oxidative stress and that DMT is one of the few ‘endogenous amines’ that binds to this receptor.

Additionally, testimonies of near death experiences lead us to believe that DMT plays a vital role during death. Many of the symptoms people describe; like seeing a light, reviewing past events with moral charge, and entities appearing, are very similar to the experiences people have on DMT. Research has also suggested that DMT may be involved in the birth process due to a high presence of the IMNT gene (which has the potential to make DMT) in the placenta.

Our methodology

We are a group of basic and clinical researchers in Hungary who follow the line of investigation started by the Hungarian Stephen Szara’s groundbreaking clinical studies with DMT. We are among the first ones who broke away of the mainstream scientific view of DMT as a psychopathological agent and proposed a somatophysiological role for this endogenous tryptamine, which is naturally occurring in the body. Our main tenet is that DMT is not only involved in the healing and regeneration of cells, but it also helps the body to survive extreme stress like clinical death. Our group has already provided experimental support of this concept in the field of immunology.

Stephen Szara with author Ede Frecska

To test our hypothesis, the first experimental step towards this goal involves exposing neuronal tissue cultures to a hypoxic (low oxygen) condition. We will conduct these studies in the lab, replicating the stress that neurons undergo by lack of oxygen, and testing the effect DMT has on the neurons under these conditions. Stem cell induced cortical neurons will be placed in an oxygen chamber with 3% oxygen. Batches of them will receive DMT in increasing concentrations, and their viability tested by a fluorometric flow-cytometry method. The primary goal is to test if DMT helps cell survival, but we also seek to assess, with a recetorblocker, if the effect is mediated via the sigma-1 receptor. If our hypothesis is correct, we will be in a better position to extend our research to testing the drug in animals, and later in human patients.

Significance of the planned study

If our hypothesis is correct, the impact of this research could be huge. Not only will we have demonstrated a potential clinical use for DMT, for we also could be changing the lives of people who survive strokes and heart attacks, and/or recover from deep coma and live to tell the tale. If the treatment works, patients who experience a lack of oxygen to the brain following a medical emergency could be saved from brain damage. We will not, however proceed to human studies until we have supportive data, and have obtained ethical approval.

Our ultimate goal is to have DMT ampoules for intravenous use on the crash carts of emergency vehicles, intensive care units and operating rooms that save hundreds of thousands of patients from brain damage. We are still in the basic research phase, however, so if you support this study you will be helping us take the very first steps in testing whether our dream could one day be a reality.

Even if there is a small chance that DMT could help with oxidative stress, we should test it. This is why we hope you will support this research. It is incredibly hard to secure funding for research into any ‘Schedule 1’ drug, yet these drugs, because of their active relationship with the brain, are pivotal agents in the development of brain therapy.

Beyond the health benefits, positive results will also help to deregulate DMT by dropping its scheduled status!

DMT: for Extending Life When You Need It the Most - Graham Hancock Official Website

Ede Frecska is Principal Investigator of a group of clinical researchers in Hungary. The group’s main tenet is that the naturally occurring Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) molecule has vital therapeutic and clinical qualities, and is pivotal to the progression of brain science. Their hypothesis is...

grahamhancock.com

 

[mr peabody]

Johns Hopkins opens new Psychedelic Research Center

Medical Xpress | Sep 5 2019

Johns Hopkins Medicine is launching a new psychedelic research center where scientists will test the potential of psilocybin and other drugs to treat some of the toughest mental health and addiction challenges.

The center, announced Wednesday, is believed to be the first center in the United States and the largest in the world to focus on drugs still better known as symbols of 1960s counterculture than serious medicine.

The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine is being funded by a $17 million donation from a group of private donors. Since federal funding cannot be used for such research, the center needs private support.

The Hopkins center's research will focus on applications of the drugs for treating opioid addiction, Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and depression, among other diseases.

"Psychedelics are a fascinating class of compounds," said Roland Griffiths, the center's director and a professor of behavioral biology in the Hopkins School of Medicine.

"They produce unique and profound change in consciousness," he said. "The center will allow us to expand on research to develop new treatments for a wide variety of psychiatric disorders. And it will allow us to extend on past research in healthy people to improve their sense of well being."

"Johns Hopkins is deeply committed to exploring innovative treatments for our patients," Dr. Paul B. Rothman, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of the medical school's faculty, said in a statement. "Our scientists have shown that psychedelics have real potential as medicine, and this new center will help us explore that potential."

Psilocybin and MDMA are illegal drugs in the United States classified by the federal government along with heroin and cocaine. Laws relating to salvia vary by state, but it's illegal in most states.

But researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere have said such drugs could help in areas of pain, addiction and brain disorders.

The center is being funded by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and philanthropists who include Tim Ferriss, an author and technology investor; Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress; Blake Mycoskie, founder of the shoe company TOMS; and Craig Nerenberg, an investor.

Ferriss said his interest in the drugs is personal. There is depression and brain disease among family members and a good friend died of a drug overdose. He said his contribution, between $2 million and $3 million, is the largest investment he has made in a corporate or nonprofit endeavor.

He said he was hoping to "affect the timeline" of federal regulatory approvals for psychedelic drugs, though he opposed over-the-counter uses.

"Good science takes time," he said, adding that he wanted "to support unlocking the full potential of productive teams."

The center will look at how psychedelics affect behavior, brain function, learning and memory, the brain's biology and mood.

The Hopkins researchers said Wednesday they understood the risks and dangers of using psychedelic drugs that they said were not addictive but could be abused. They said they could control for potential abuse or bad outcomes, such as long-term effects of the drug's use on those with undiagnosed mental health disorders, in a laboratory setting where people and drugs are carefully screened.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse says there are many potential short- and long-term harms from hallucinogens. Users can see, hear and feel things that don't exist, experiences that can be unpleasant, known as a "bad trip."

Users can suffer increased heart rate and blood pressure, nausea, intensified feelings, loss of appetite, sleep problems, excessive sweating and panic, though others may have intense spiritual experiences and feelings of relaxation. Users also can be a danger if they drive.

Over time, according to the drug abuse institute, users can suffer persistent psychosis, visual disturbances, disorganized thinking, paranoia and mood changes, among other problems.

The institute said people can overdose on some hallucinogens, such as PCP, though serious medical emergencies are not common and not associated with drugs typically used in the research studies. Drugs also can be contaminated, and those trying to use psilocybin could consume poisonous mushrooms that look like the ones containing the compound.

There are not currently any federally approved psychedelic drugs for medicinal purposes.

"The field is chalk full of lessons, and we take them seriously," said Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the medical school, who is the center's assistant director. But he said the potential benefits could be enormous.

"Overall we see psilocybin as paradigm shift, a game changer in treating mental health disorders," he said. "That, and for addiction, which is causing a staggering numbers of deaths."

The rate of fatal opioid overdoses is likely to make use of psilocybin more acceptable to the public, after a so-called war on drugs in the 1970s and '80s stymied all research into psychedelic substances for decades, said Sara Lappan, a visiting instructor in the counseling program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's department of human studies.

Lappan is working on a study using psilocybin to treat addiction to cocaine, a drug that has been making a comeback among users after years of declines. The Alabama study is among a handful around the country testing psilocybin for a variety of treatments.

That study aims to give people "the ability to change" because of how they view themselves. It's like giving them "10 years of therapy smashed into six hours," she said.

Researchers, she said, hope eventually to use their scientific data to change the legal status of the drug, though she said she knew of no researcher that wants recreational use of psilocybin. And she agreed that the studies have shown promise because the participants and the substances are carefully screened.

"Across the board there are really promising findings," she said of the small circle of researchers' studies.

At Hopkins, the funding is expected to support five years of research and a team of six faculty neuroscientists, experimental psychologists and clinicians. It will also fund five postdoctoral scientists and train graduate and medical students who want to pursue careers in psychedelic science.

The potential therapies are likely to please advocates for psychedelics, in part because research won't be limited to those suffering a devastating brain disorder.

"In addition to studies on new therapeutics," Griffiths said in his statement, "we plan to investigate creativity and well-being in healthy volunteers that we hope will open up new ways to support human thriving."

Johns Hopkins opening new psychedelic research center, studying use of 'magic mushrooms' and more

Johns Hopkins Medicine is launching a new psychedelic research center where scientists will test the potential of so-called magic mushrooms and other drugs to treat some of the toughest mental health and addiction challenges.

medicalxpress.com

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