Magic Mushrooms
“Almost 40 years after Richard Nixon called former Harvard University psychologist Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America for promoting use of hallucinogenic substances, there is a rebirth of interest in their therapeutic benefits. Reamer was enrolled in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins to relieve fear of death in cancer patients, one of a half-dozen similar studies under way at New York University, Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of New Mexico.
The new research, largely driven by the psychiatric community, is also testing psychedelics for use against depression, chronic headaches and addiction as current scientists, much like their 1960s predecessors, seek to understand the “consciousness-expanding” effects of the drugs.” Bloomberg
The U.S. has an interesting history with the medicinal and/or therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Let’s find out more.
And to kick things off, Cary Grant took LSD!? Well yes, in fact, he did. Quite a lot, actually.
by Cari Beauchamp and Judy Bachrach | Vanity Fair | August 2010
Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy. With LSD research beginning a comeback, the authors recount how two Beverly Hills doctors promoted a new “wonder drug,” at $100 a session, profoundly altering the lives of their glamorous patients, Balaban included.
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTACY: THE QUIET MISSION TO FIGHT PTSD WITH PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS
by Brian Anderson | Motherboard | August 2011
The daylong sessions that follow are part of a small, open-label Phase II study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. The experiment examines how 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as ecstasy, may alleviate the crippling, long-term horrors of “chronic, treatment-resistant, combat-related PTSD” when administered at low doses and in controlled settings.
This is the leading edge of a 10-year, $10 million push by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies for Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA as prescription medicine. Rick Doblin, the founder and director of MAPS, envisions a day when ecstasy can be picked up at the corner drug store.
MODERN PSYCHEDELIC SCIENTISTS FIND DATA IN COUNTERCULTURE PAST
by Alexis Madrigal | Wired | April 2010
Patients who underwent two eight-hour therapy sessions and took MDMA showed much better short- and long-term clinical outcomes than people who just received a placebo and the therapy. At least in the early study, MDMA did much better than Zoloft in treating PTSD, Mithoefer said.
by Jeff Warren | Maisonneuve | April 2011
As researchers explore using psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness, a powerful Amazonian hallucinogen is gaining the most devoted followers of all.
And two on the guys responsible for the existence of these drugs.
by Drake Bennett | The New York Times | January 2005
Most of the scientific community considers Shulgin at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vindication. A little more than a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Harvard Medical School study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of terminal cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., started his study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, with somewhat less attention, studies at the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and the University of Arizona, Tucson, have focused on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin (the active ingredient in ”magic mushrooms”). It’s far from a revolution, but it is an opening, and as both scientist and advocate, Shulgin has helped create it. If — and it’s a big ”if” — the results of the studies are promising enough, it might bring something like legitimacy to the Shulgin pharmacopoeia.
Rolling Stone is always a bit colorful, no?
OWSLEY STANLEY: THE KING OF LSD
by Robert Greenfield | Rolling Stone | July 2007
No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten.