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Psychedelic Medicine News Articles

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Congress quietly ends federal government's ban on medical marijuana
2014-12-16, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-medical-pot-20141216-story.html

Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government's prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy. The bill's passage ... marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant legislation backed by legalization advocates. It brings almost to a close two decades of tension between the states and Washington over medical use of marijuana. Under the provision, states where medical pot is legal would no longer need to worry about federal drug agents raiding retail operations. Agents would be prohibited from doing so. Congress for years had resisted calls to allow states to chart their own path on pot. The marijuana measure, which forbids the federal government from using any of its resources to impede state medical marijuana laws, was previously rejected half a dozen times. Even as Congress has shifted ground on medical marijuana, lawmakers remain uneasy about full legalization. Marijuana proponents nonetheless said they felt more confident than ever that Congress was drifting toward their point of view. Approval of the pot measure comes after the Obama administration directed federal prosecutors last year to stop enforcing drug laws that contradict state marijuana policies.

Note: The war on drugs has been called a "trillion dollar failure". The healing potentials of mind altering drugs are starting to be openly investigated.


Ecstasy and Acid in Your Medicine Cabinet? Doctors Explore Psychedelics
2014-10-14, Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/07/thats-trip-scientists-discuss-merits-psych...

Psychedelics, the drugs of choice for many in the 1960s counterculture movement, may be making a comeback. Scientists, doctors and scholars who have researched the health potential of drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms and ecstasy, gathered at the Horizons conference ... to discuss innovations in the field. Psychedelics ... went out of favor with the law in the 1960s and 1970s, [which] slammed the lid on research. Those prohibitions seem to be loosening somewhat, with some governments allowing a small amount of research with psychedelic drugs, results of which show they may carry promise for treating a wide variety of ailments, from anxiety to addiction. Some of the most significant civilizations have given an honored place to psychedelics, scholar and writer Graham Hancock told conference attendees. Hancock said hallucinogenic mushrooms played a part in cultures such as the Mayan Civilization and were depicted in European and African cave paintings as far back as 9,000 years ago. A recently completed project at New York University found that psilocybin appears to reduce anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients. It appeared that psilocybin led many of the study participants, who were all in various stages of life-threatening cancer, to have mystical experiences that gave them great insights, improved their anxiety and generally made them more positive and loving, they and their loved ones reported. To date there have been no adverse reactions to psilocybin in any study.

Note: While the war on drugs has been called a "trillion dollar failure", articles like this suggest the healing potentials of mind altering drugs are starting to be investigated more scientifically.


Controversial Drugs Get Another Look
2014-09-14, CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1409/13/hcsg.01.html

Dr Sanjay Gupta: There's a group of outlawed drugs out there that are generating new interest among a growing number of doctors. Some of these drugs include things like MDMA also known as ecstasy, also LSD. Psychiatrists have (long) been fascinated by the properties of psychedelics. The U.S. military's efforts in the 1950s ... tested LSD as a potential weapon. But the interests in these drugs didn't stay in the lab. They trickled on to the black market and were soon outlawed. The pattern repeated itself with MDMA. Therapists tried it with patients. Millions tried it on their own. And in 1985, it was banned under federal law. Over the last decade, a small band of researchers wrangled permission to try again. This time giving MDMA during therapy sessions with patients who were suffering post-traumatic stress. DR. MICHAEL MITHOEFER, TESTING MDMA AS TREATMENT FOR PTSD PATIENTS: It was revisiting the trauma that was painful. The MDMA seemed to make it possible for them to do it effectively. GUPTA: Dr. Mithoefer has treated nearly 50 patients. He's currently working with veterans. RICK DOBLIN, MULTIDISCIPLINARY ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHEDELIC STUDIES: People are able to look at traumatic memories, the fear is reduced, and then they're able to separate out it was happening then and not now. GUPTA: So, if they're going through counselling, for example, it could make that counselling more effective, they're not as paralyzed if you will by the memories that are being brought up? DOBLIN: We're saying that MDMA itself is not the medicine, it's MDMA assisted psychotherapy.

Note: Watch this CNN news clip and decide for yourself. For more about how the CIA secretly experimented on people with LSD and other drugs, read this deeply revealing information about a project called MK ULTRA. For more about the legitimate therapeutic uses of these drugs, and how investigation into these is suppressed, see these concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles from reliable sources.


Prescription painkiller deaths fall in medical marijuana states
2014-08-25, Chicago Tribune/Reuters
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-us-medical-marijuana-deaths-20140825-sto...

Researchers aren't sure why, but in the 23 U.S. states where medical marijuana has been legalized, deaths from opioid overdoses have decreased by almost 25 percent, according to a new analysis. "Most of the discussion on medical marijuana has been about its effect on individuals in terms of reducing pain or other symptoms," said lead author Dr. Marcus Bachhuber. "The unique contribution of our study is the finding that medical marijuana laws and policies may have a broader impact on public health." California, Oregon and Washington first legalized medical marijuana before 1999, with 10 more following suit between then and 2010, the time period of the analysis. Another 10 states and Washington, D.C. adopted similar laws since 2010. For the study, Bachhuber, of the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues used state-level death certificate data for all 50 states between 1999 and 2010. In states with a medical marijuana law, overdose deaths from opioids like morphine, oxycodone and heroin decreased by an average of 20 percent after one year, 25 percent by two years and up to 33 percent by years five and six compared to what would have been expected, according to results in JAMA Internal Medicine. Meanwhile, opioid overdose deaths across the country increased dramatically, from 4,030 in 1999 to 16,651 in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Three of every four of those deaths involved prescription pain medications.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing mind-altering drug news articles from reliable major media sources.


The Other Cannabis War?: The Battle Over Hemp
2014-06-03, Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-other-cannabis-war-20140603

Buried in Februarys $956 billion farm bill is an amendment ... that legally distinguishes industrial hemp from marijuana, after decades of conflation [of the two]. It defines hemp as an agricultural crop rather than a drug and effectively frees American farmers to grow it for the first time in almost 60 years. For 20 years, legislators, farmers, hippies, activists, agency heads and agronomists have worked to recast hemp as a game-changer, an American cash crop that could jump-start the country's next economic revival. Colorado, Vermont and Kentucky wasted no time launching their industrial hemp research and the pilot programs provided for in the farm bill. In an obscure notice dated April 16th, the USDA alerted state and county officials that farmers in states that [approved] hemp production (15 so far) could now include hemp acreage in their crop reports. The floodgates have opened. The current American hemp market is estimated at nearly half a billion dollars, with hemps oil, seed and fiber used in food, carbon-negative building materials, and automobile composites that are already inside millions of cars. Hemp cultivation is ... as old as the country itself. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it, hemp was once legal tender, and several drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper. During WWII, American farmers were paid to grow it, cultivating more than 150 million pounds of industrial hemp to support the American war effort.

Note: Hemp is derived from the cannabis sativa plant, which also produces marijuana. For news on mind altering substances, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


U.S. hemp crop zero despite strong sales
2013-02-08, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/U-S-hemp-crop-zero-despite-strong-sale...

$452 million: That's the value of retail products containing imported hemp that were sold in the United States in 2011. While a cousin of marijuana, the plant can't get you high. Instead, it can be used to make clothes, horse bedding, auto parts, soap and even concrete. But thanks to it being classified like all cannabis plants as a Schedule I substance - the same as heroin - the U.S. hemp crop is precisely zero. If you want to grow hemp and avoid a jail sentence, you need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Note: Many have suspected that hemp was outlawed along with marijuana to block competition with lumber and other industries. To see a 1938 Popular Mechanics article touting hemp as the "new billion dollar crop," click here.


Can LSD cure depression?
2012-09-25, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9565026/Can-LSD-cure-depression.html

Until recently, prescribing Ecstasy, mescaline or magic mushrooms has been a guaranteed way for a psychiatrist to lose his research funding, his job or even his liberty. But now, scientists are beginning to suspect that such illegal drugs may be the key to treating a range of intractable illnesses, from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression. These chemicals [include] the psychedelic drugs psilocybin, derived from magic mushrooms, and LSD, as well as Ecstasy. A series of studies performed in Britain and the US is beginning to tease out their potential benefits. People become very emotionally tender on Ecstasy, which makes you more responsive to psychotherapy, explains Dr Robin Carhart-Harris. [In] volunteers given the ... drug, the area of their brain involved in positive memories became more active, while another processing negative memories was damped down. We think this would make it easier for patients to revisit a traumatic memory and overwrite or control it, says Carhart-Harris. Earlier studies have made surprising discoveries about what psilocybin, a class-A drug in Britain, was doing in the brain. These in turn could lead to new treatments for depression and agonising cluster headaches. This may all sound radical, or even dangerous yet half a century ago, research into the effects of psychedelic drugs was widespread and respectable. More than 1,000 papers were published looking at ways that psychiatrists could help patients with hallucinogenic chemicals.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on mind-altering drugs, click here.


Doctors consider using street drugs to ease suffering of dying patients
2012-04-24, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/04/24/doctors-consider-using-street-drugs-...

Recent studies at Harvard, U.C.L.A. [and] John Hopkins have now made it plain that doctors should [soon] be free to offer illicit drugs to patients who are terminally ill, in order to ease their emotional suffering. At Harvard, Dr. John Halpern ... tested MDMA (the street drug Ecstasy) to determine if it would ease the anxieties in two patients with terminal cancer. At U.C.L.A. and Hopkins, Drs. Charles Grob and Roland Griffiths used psilocybin (the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms) to help cancer patients past their paralyzing, debilitating fears. The results are reportedly consistently good. In many cases, patients are able to cope with their physical pain and psychological turmoil better than before. Some, no doubt, feel the drugs opened doors of perception previously closed to them, allowing them to make peace with their lives and the impending end of their lives. Recent data also show that low doses of the street drug Special K (ketamine), when slowly infused via IV, can instantly [relieve] major depression ... in many patients. And opiates like oxycodone ... are also extremely useful for those patients who ... suffer with unwieldy anxiety that cannot be addressed ... in any other way.

Note: For more news articles from reliable sources on mind-altering drugs, click here.


Clearing the smoke: the science of cannabis
2011-03-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/mar/03/1

A new documentary [has been] produced and aired by Montana PBS, a non-profit publicly-supported broadcasting television service in the United States. Their programme, "Clearing the Smoke", investigates the science of marijuana, [exploring] how cannabis acts on the brain and in the body in medically beneficial ways to treat nausea, pain, epilepsy and possibly even cancer. This programme includes extensive interviews with patients, doctors, [and] researchers, and skeptics detail the promises and the limitations of medicinal cannabis. Marijuana use is illegal throughout many countries of the world for reasons that are not clear. This video is important because it mainly investigates the scientific basis underlying the medical benefits of marijuana use instead of focusing on the social, political and legal hysteria that have been attached to it. The paper mentioned in this video, Marijuana Reconsidered, was published in book form and can be purchased from Amazon. The author, Dr Grinspoon, is the world's leading authority on marijuana. In this book, Dr Grinspoon examines -- and debunks -- many of the common misconceptions about marijuana.

Note: For an intriguing two-minute video clip of this program showing that cannabis has cured some forms of cancer in mice, click here. For the full, astonishing PBS documentary, click here.


'Magic mushrooms' ingredient beneficial to cancer patients, report says
2010-09-07, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magic-mushrooms-20100907,0,4230087...

The psychedelic drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms," can improve mood and reduce anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients, Los Angeles researchers reported [on September 6]. A single modest dose of the hallucinogen ... can improve patients' functioning for as long as six months, allowing them to spend their last days with more peace, researchers said. Dr. Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at Harbor- UCLA Medical Center and the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute ... and his colleagues studied 12 patients, ages 36 to 58, with advanced-stage cancer and anxiety resulting from their diagnoses. The patients were given a relatively low dose of psilocybin, 0.2 milligram per kilogram of body weight. Nonetheless, the team reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, all patients reported a significant improvement in mood for at least two weeks after the psilocybin treatment and up to a six-month improvement on a scale that measures depression and anxiety. Most also reported a decreased need for narcotic pain relievers. No adverse reactions were observed. These types of patients normally do not respond well to psychological therapy, Grob said, but his study showed that the drug has "great promise for alleviating anxiety and other psychiatric symptoms."

Note: For many hope-inspiring reports from reliable sources on new cancer coping strategies and possible cures, click here.


Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again
2010-04-11, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan Turn on, tune in, drop out. Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness. Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol. Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins. In one of Dr. Griffithss first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them.

Note: For key reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.


Psilocybin as mental health therapy? Here’s what I found.
2022-09-05, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/09/05/psilocybin-mental-health-psy...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in learning more about psychedelics, especially how they might help me with depression and anxiety. That’s a broad category of plant medicines including psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, MDMA (ecstasy), DMT (Dimitri or the Businessman’s Trip), ketamine (“special K”) and some others. My friend told me he’d recently taken his first “trip,” which he described as life-changing. I asked him — a real estate developer living in Northern California, married with kids — why he decided to try a psychedelic substance. “My work felt increasingly stale and meaningless,” he explained to me over a beer. “Despite a massive amount of reflection and coaching around how to break the rut, I felt as though I was still off track.” When I confided my interest in psychedelics to a few other friends, several said they had tried the drugs and experienced several benefits: from easing anxiety to finding spiritual insights to combating depression and, among some with cancer, helping to reduce the fear of dying. They are hardly outliers. According to a new YouGovAmerica study, “one in four Americans say they’ve tried at least one psychedelic drug,” amounting to some 72 million U.S. adults. When I queried my psychiatrist about participating to help improve my mental health, he was supportive, with two caveats: Do it with a trained therapist or guide, and do your best to ensure that the substance is what it’s said to be.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.


Biden Administration Plans for Legal Psychedelic Therapies Within Two Years
2022-07-26, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2022/07/26/mdma-psilocybin-fda-ptsd/

As twin mental health and drug misuse crises kill thousands of people per week, the potential of psychedelic-assisted therapies “must be explored,” urges a federal letter on behalf of the U.S. health secretary. President Joe Biden’s administration “anticipates” that regulators will approve MDMA and psilocybin within the next two years for designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD and depression, respectively. The administration is “exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor” the emerging psychedelic treatment ecosystem, according to the letter sent by Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use. The move followed [the] introduction of a bipartisan bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., to force the DEA to stop barring terminally ill patients from trying controlled drugs which have passed early trials. The right to try experimental therapies has been enshrined in federal law since 2018, but the DEA currently blocks its use among people with late-stage cancer who wish to be treated with psilocybin, a Schedule I controlled substance. “Studies have shown that psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety among patients with life-threatening cancer,” Booker wrote. “While typically terminally ill patients are allowed to access drugs that are in FDA clinical trials, they are barred from accessing Schedule I drugs, despite their therapeutic potential.”

Note: Read more about the healing potentials of psychedelic medicine. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.


Jurvetson’s Big Gift Shows How Psychedelics Capital Is Different
2021-12-06, Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-12-06/stephen-jurvetson-backs...

Psychedelics startups don’t just want to just reinvent mental health. They also want to reinvent capitalism. And judging by the news coming out of last week’s “Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics” conference in Manhattan, they’re having some early success. Stephen Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and a board member at SpaceX, told me ... that he’s a true believer in the industry’s mission to fix the state of mental-health care. He decided last week to carve up his own estate by giving around half of his net worth to fund psychedelic science. Organizations like the public-benefit corporation of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics Studies, or MAPS, and the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, a nonprofit organization, have both accepted charitable donations but fund research that could lead to blockbuster drugs. Psychedelics startups do need funding, and badly. Like biotech, it’s a high-risk industry with expensive clinical trials and regulatory uncertainty. And patents, a traditional financial engine for biotech, are harder to win for plants that have been around for centuries, or molecules that have already made the rounds as street drugs. MAPS also made a major announcement: The New York-based venture capital fund Vine Ventures has created a $70 million special purpose vehicle to fund its Phase 3 clinical trials on post-traumatic stress disorder and MDMA. The novel funding method ... will help keep MAPS a nonprofit while letting it retain control of its intellectual property.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.


Psychedelic Therapy Is Poised To Create A Revolution In Mental Health
2021-11-23, Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcarpenter/2021/11/23/psychedelic-therapy-is...

Legal psychedelic medicine is poised to soon disrupt the multibillion-dollar mental health field. Treatments being trialed today in clinical settings using substances like psilocybin-containing mushrooms will soon offer legal alternatives to the more than 50 percent of patients receiving therapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) who do not respond to approved depression medications. The creation of new effective therapies will likely put pressure on healthcare providers to examine the upside of psychedelic therapies and how such treatments will inevitably affect their bottom line. While these therapies will not be a cure-all for everyone, over the next three to five years an expanding number of psychedelic treatments will produce alternatives for the many patients who find no relief from FDA-approved, first-line therapeutics like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Since legalizing the use of psilocybin-containing magic mushrooms in 2020 through a ballot measure, Oregon is now in the process of creating an intricate statewide system for qualified caregivers to deliver psilocybin treatments in therapeutic settings. Sessions using psilocybin can last over six hours, which does not include vital therapy before and after treatments. MDMA-assisted therapy for severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is very close to being an FDA-approved therapy, will likewise require significant clinician involvement before, during and after a session.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.


War on drugs harmed public health: report
2016-03-24, CBC (Canada's public broadcasting system)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/drug-war-public-health-1.3504843

The war on drugs has failed, fuelling higher rates of infection and harming public health and human rights to such a degree that it's time to decriminalize non-violent minor drug offences, according to a new global report. The authors of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Public Health and International Drug Policy call for minor use, possession and petty use to be decriminalized following measurably worsened human health. "We've had three decades of the war on drugs, we've had decades of zero-tolerance policy," said Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the senior author of the report published Thursday in The Lancet. "It has had no measurable impact on supply or use, and so as a policy to control substance use it has arguably failed. It has evidently failed." Given that the goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production and trafficking of illicit drugs was to protect societies, the researchers evaluated the health effects and found they were overwhelmingly negative. For a role model, the authors point to Portugal, which decriminalized not only cannabis but also possession of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. HIV transmission, hepatitis C and incarcerations all decreased, Beyrer said, and there was about a 15 per cent decline in substance use by young people in Portugal.

Note: While the war on drugs has been called a "trillion dollar failure", and the healing potentials of mind altering drugs are starting to be investigated more openly, there remains powerful evidence that the CIA and US military are directly involved in the drug trade.


Dr Robin Carhart-Harris is the first scientist in over 40 years to test LSD on humans
2014-08-17, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/dr-robin-carhartharris-is-the-first-...

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, a research associate in the Centre for Neuropsychopharma-cology at Imperial College, is ... the first person in the UK to have legally administered doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to human volunteers since the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971. Born in Durham 33 years ago and raised in Bournemouth, he ... is a careful and articulate speaker, but his enthusiasm for his work is evident. "We're at an early, but certainly promising, stage. It's really exciting," he says. The potential scientific benefits of psychedelics ... fall broadly into two categories. They look like being medicinally or therapeutically useful, and they offer an unconventional view of the workings of the human mind, such that the age-old, so-called "hard problem of consciousness" might be made a little easier. Uniquely potent in minute doses, and with what Carhart-Harris calls "a very favourable physiological safety profile" which is to say, it is non-toxic this newly synthesised psychedelic drug opened new doors, in more ways than one. "You could say the birth of the science of psychedelics occurred with the discovery of LSD," says Carhart-Harris. "It was only then that we started to study them systematically." Cary Grant famously used it during his therapy, as did the Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson. Between the 1950s and 1965, when Sandoz withdrew the drug, there were more than 1,000 clinical papers discussing 40,000 patients. A 2012 meta-analysis of six controlled trials from the era found its clinical efficiency for the treatment of alcohol addiction to be as effective as any treatment developed since.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.


LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy
2014-03-04, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/health/lsd-reconsidered-for-therapy.html

On [March 4], The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease is posting online results from the first controlled trial of LSD in more than 40 years. The study, conducted in the office of a Swiss psychiatrist near Bern, tested the effects of the drug as a complement to talk therapy for 12 people nearing the end of life. Most of the subjects had terminal cancer, and several died within a year after the trial but not before having a mental adventure that appeared to have eased the existential gloom of their last days. Their anxiety went down and stayed down, said Dr. Peter Gasser, who conducted the therapy and followed up with his patients a year after the trial concluded. The new publication marks the latest in a series of baby steps by a loose coalition of researchers and fund-raisers who are working to bring hallucinogens back into the fold of mainstream psychiatry. Before research was effectively banned in 1966 in the United States, doctors tested LSDs effect for a variety of conditions, including end-of-life anxiety. But in the past few years, psychiatrists in the United States and abroad working with state regulators as well as ethics boards have tested Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress; and other trials with hallucinogens are in the works. The effort is both political and scientific, said Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a foundation that has financed many of the studies. We want to break these substances out of the mold of the counterculture and bring them back to the lab.

Note: For more on mind altering drugs, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Experimental treatment for PTSD: Ecstasy
2012-12-03, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/01/health/ecstasy-ptsd-1/

More than 7 million Americans suffer from PTSD, and by most estimates, only half of them -- at best -- are ever cured. A decade ago, the widely acknowledged need for better treatments opened the door to [South Carolina psychiatrist Dr. Michael] Mithoefer and his unconventional approach. By ... February 2005, the soft-spoken, ponytailed Mithoefer had managed to convince the Drug Enforcement Administration to green-light a study of Ecstasy as an adjunct to psychotherapy. He'd gotten the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methylamphetamine (MDMA) -- the chemical name for pure Ecstasy -- from Rick Doblin, the founder of a MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The group's stated purpose is to develop "medical, legal and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana." It wants to turn mind-altering drugs like Ecstasy into prescription medicine. To win broader acceptance for MDMA -- and for cousins like LSD and psilocybin, the mind-altering compound in so-called magic mushrooms -- "the medical route was the only route. Everything else was blocked." That meant a formal plan for drug development: study protocols, institutional review boards and the rest. Mithoefer, a University of Virginia-trained clinician who specializes in trauma and had a long-running interest in MDMA, was the perfect partner.

Note: To watch a CNN video clip on this showing remarkable success in treating PTSD, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on beneficial mind-altering drugs, click here.


How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death
2012-04-22, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-pat...

Charles Grob [is] a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who [has administered] psilocybin an active component of magic mushrooms to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. When the research was completed in 2008 ... the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects anxiety and depression about their impending deaths. Grobs interest in the power of psychedelics to mitigate mortalitys sting is not just the obsession of one lone researcher. Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont Mass., a psychiatric training hospital for Harvard Medical School, used MDMA also known as ecstasy in an effort to ease end-of-life anxieties in two patients with Stage 4 cancer. And there are two ongoing studies using psilocybin with terminal patients, one at New York Universitys medical school, led by Stephen Ross, and another at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where Roland Griffiths has administered psilocybin to 22 cancer patients and is aiming for a sample size of 44. This research is in its very early stages, Grob told me earlier this month, but were getting consistently good results. Grob and his colleagues are part of a resurgence of scientific interest in the healing power of psychedelics.

Note: For fascinating reports from major media sources on the beneficial uses of psychedelics, click here.


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