Psychedelic Trips Aid Anxiety Treatments In Study
She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited. And then it came.
“The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome,” she recalled. Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open up to admit “this most incredible luminescence that made everything even more beautiful.”
Tears trickled down her face as she saw “how beautiful the world could actually be.”
Thats how Nicky Edlich, 67, began her first-ever trip on a psychedelic drug last year.
She says it has greatly helped her psychotherapeutic treatment for anxiety from her advanced ovarian cancer.
And for researchers, it was another small step toward showing that hallucinogenic drugs, famous but condemned in the 1960s, can one day help doctors treat conditions like cancer anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The New York University study Edlich participated in is among a handful now going on in the United States and elsewhere with drugs like LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) and psilocybin, the main ingredient of “magic mushrooms.” The work follows lines of research choked off four decades ago by the war on drugs. The research is still preliminary. But at least its there.
“There is now more psychedelic research taking place in the world than at any time in the last 40 years,” said Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which funds some of the work. “Were at the end of the beginning of the renaissance.”
He said that more than 1,200 people attended a conference in California last weekend on psychedelic science.
But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with government funders still leery and drug companies not interested in the compounds they cant patent. That pretty much leaves private donors.
“Theres still a lot of resistance to it,” said David Nichols, a Purdue University professor of medicinal chemistry and president of the Heffter Institute, which is supporting the NYU study. “The whole hippie thing in the 60s” and media coverage at the time “has kind of left a bad taste in the mouth of the public at large.
“When you tell people youre treating people with psychedelics, the first thing that comes to mind is Day-Glo art and tie-dyed shirts.”
“The whole idea was to create a living room-like setting” that would be relaxing, said study leader Dr. Stephen Ross.
Edlich, whose cancer forced her to retire from teaching French at a private school, had plenty of reason to seek help through the NYU project. Several recurrences of her ovarian cancer had provoked fears about suffering and dying and how her death would affect her family. She felt “profound sadness that my life was going to be cut short.” And she faced existential questions: Why live? What does it all mean? How can I go on?
“These things were in my head and I wanted them to take a back seat to living in the moment,” she said. So when she heard NYU researchers speak about the project at her cancer support group, she was interested.
Psilocybin has been shown to invoke powerful spiritual experiences during the four to six hours it affects the brain. A study published in 2008, in fact, found that even 14 months after healthy volunteers had taken a single dose, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience. They also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences theyd ever had.
Experts emphasize people shouldnt try psilocybin on their own because it can be harmful, sometimes causing bouts of anxiety and paranoia.