To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. I have a profound fear of death. It's not bad enough to cause serious depression or anxiety. But it is bad enough to make me avoid thinking about the possibility of dying — to avoid a mini existential crisis in my mind. But it turns out there may be a better cure for this fear than simply not thinking about it. It's not yoga, a new therapy program, or a medicine currently on the legal market.
It's psychedelic drugs — LSD, ibogaine, and psilocybin, which is found in magic mushrooms. This is the case for legalizing hallucinogens. Although the drugs have gotten some media attention in recent years for helping cancer patients deal with their fear of death and helping people quit smoking, there's also a similar potential boon for the nonmedical, even recreational psychedelic user. As hallucinogens get a renewed look by researchers, they're finding that the substances may improve almost anyone's mood and quality of life — as long as they're taken in the right setting, typically a controlled environment.
This isn't something that even drug policy reformers are comfortable calling for yet. But it's an idea that experts and researchers are taking more seriously. And while the studies are new and ongoing, and a national regulatory model for legal hallucinogens is practically nonexistent, the available research is very promising — enough to reconsider the demonization and prohibition of these potentially amazing drugs.
The most remarkable potential benefit of hallucinogens is what's called "ego death," an experience in which people lose their sense of self-identity and, as a result, are able to detach themselves from worldly concerns like a fear of death, addiction, and anxiety over temporary — perhaps exaggerated — life events.
When people take a potent dose of a psychedelic, they can experience spiritual, hallucinogenic trips that can make them feel like they're transcending their own bodies and even time and space. This, in turn, gives people a lot of perspective — if they can see themselves as a small part of a much broader universe, it's a lot easier for them to discard personal, relatively insignificant and inconsequential concerns about their own lives and death.
That may sound like pseudoscience. And the research on hallucinogens is so early that scientists don't fully grasp how it works. But it's a concept that's been found in some medical trials, and something that many people who've tried hallucinogens can vouch for experiencing.
It's one of the reasons why preliminary , small studies and research from the s and '60s found hallucinogens can treat — and maybe cure — addiction, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Charles Grob, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and pediatrics who studies psychedelics, conducted a study that gave psilocybin to late-stage cancer patients. In a fantastic look at the research, Michael Pollan at the New Yorker captured the phenomenon through the stories of cancer patients who participated in hallucinogen trials:.
Death looms large in the journeys taken by the cancer patients. A woman I'll call Deborah Ames, a breast-cancer survivor in her sixties she asked not to be identified , described zipping through space as if in a video game until she arrived at the wall of a crematorium and realized, with a fright, "I've died and now I'm going to be cremated.
The next thing I know, I'm below the ground in this gorgeous forest, deep woods, loamy and brown. There are roots all around me and I'm seeing the trees growing, and I'm part of them. It didn't feel sad or happy, just natural, contented, peaceful. I wasn't gone. I was part of the earth. Tammy Burgess, given a diagnosis of ovarian cancer at fifty-five, found herself gazing across "the great plain of consciousness.
It was very serene and beautiful. I felt alone but I could reach out and touch anyone I'd ever known. When my time came, that's where my life would go once it left me and that was O.
But Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at New York University's Marron Institute, noted that these benefits don't apply only to terminally ill patients. The studies conducted so far have found benefits that apply to anyone : a reduced fear of death, greater psychological openness, and increased life satisfaction. Those who consume it end up in a meditative state. Jordi Riba, a leading ayahuasca researcher.
The psychological effects come on after about 45 minutes and hit their peak within an hour or two; physically, the worst a person will feel is nausea and vomiting, Riba says. DMT is present in the leaves of the plant psychotria viridis and is responsible for the hallucinations ayahuasca users experience.
DMT is close in structure to melatonin and serotonin and has properties similar to the psychedelic compounds found in magic mushrooms and LSD. If taken orally, DMT has no real effects on the body because stomach enzymes break down the compound immediately. But the Banisteriopsis caapi vines used in ayahuasca block those enzymes, causing DMT to enter your bloodstream and travel to your brain.
Much of what is known about DMT is thanks to Dr. Rick Strassman, who first published groundbreaking research on the psychedelic drug two decades ago.
According to Strassman, DMT is one of the only compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier — the membrane wall separating circulating blood from the brain extracellular fluid in the central nervous system. DMT actually naturally occurs in the human body, and is particularly present in the lungs.
But taken on its own — that is, smoked or injected — and your high lasts only a few minutes, according to Strassman. Although short, the trip from DMT can be intense, more so than other psychedelics, Strassman says.
Users on DMT have reported similar experiences to that of ayahuasca: A greater sense of self, vivid images and sounds and deeper introspection. In the past, Strassman has suggested DMT to be used as a therapy tool to treat depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions, as well as aid with self-improvement and discovery.
The drug — otherwise called molly or ecstasy — is a synthetic concoction popular among ravers and club kids. People can pop MDMA as a capsule, tablet or pill. The drug sometimes called ecstasy or molly triggers the release of three key neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.
The synthetic drug also increases levels of the hormones oxytocin and prolactin, resulting in a feeling of euphoria and being uninhibited. Last year, the U. Food and Drug Administration granted researchers permission to move ahead with plans for a large-scale clinical trial to examine the effects of using MDMA as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD. The authors also note that hallucinogens can raise the pulse and blood pressure, but they say none of their patients ever experienced a medically-dangerous spike in blood pressure or had to take blood pressure drugs.
I did find one case report from of a year-old man whose death was attributed to LSD overdose based on toxicological examinations. Another case of a non-fatal but serious LSD overdose is cited in a couple of papers. In , after a dinner party in San Francisco, eight people snorted a very high dose of LSD, after mistaking it for cocaine.
They got really sick: five went into comas, three had to be intubated, four experienced mild generalized bleeding. But within 12 hours they were back to normal. Doctors followed five of the patients for a year and said they showed no apparent psychological or physical ills. By one estimate, the fatal dose of LSD is times larger than the dose that causes an effect.
So, it would be much harder to accidentally overdose on LSD than most other drugs — the fatal dose of intravenous heroin, for example, is just 5 times larger than the effective dose. But Johansen and Krebs write that these sorts of situations are very rare:. Furthermore, Dutch police report that legal sale of psilocybin mushrooms has not led to public order problems Van Amsterdam et al. Still, I did find a bunch of relatively recent news reports of people who either hurt themselves or other people, apparently while on LSD, though it was unclear in a lot of these stories whether that was toxicologically confirmed.
Despite horror stories about people having psychotic breaks or other mental health problems after taking psychedelics, two recent large-scale studies which examine a similar set of US data suggest people who have used psychedelics may be less likely to have serious mental health problems or be suicidal than those who have not. One paper, published in by a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama, analyzed data collected from more than , people between and during the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
The respondents who had used a classical psychedelic were 19 percent less likely to have been in psychological distress during the previous month, 14 percent less likely to have had suicidal thoughts over the last year, 29 percent less likely to have made plans for suicide and 36 percent less likely to have attempted suicide in the past year than the survey respondents who had never used psychedelics.
Interestingly, the use of other, non-psychedelic drugs was associated with more psychological distress and suicidality in this group. Of course, the study had limitations — for one, people self-reported both drug use and psychological distress. Also, these sort of studies can only demonstrate association, not causation. The same year, Johansen and Krebs published a paper that looked at responses to the same survey from a slightly different time period.
The respondents who had used psychedelics were no more likely to have experienced serious psychological distress, suicidal thoughts or behavior, anxiety, depression or to have needed or received mental health treatment in the past year than those who had not. In fact, people who had used psychedelics were less likely to have undergone inpatient psychiatric treatment than never-users. In general, use of psychedelics does not appear to be particularly dangerous when compared to other activities considered to have acceptable safety.
None of the subjects had prolonged psychotic reactions to the psilocybin sessions and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders were not precipitated in any of the subjects. One subject did seek treatment for symptoms of anxiety, emotional disability and depression. In their clinical research, they exclude people who meet the criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar I or II or other psychotic disorders. They also exclude people with a first or second degree relative with those disorders.
Here they describe some of the earlier evidence of psychotic breaks related to psychedelics given in a therapeutic setting:. In a survey of investigators who had administered LSD or mescaline, Sidney Cohen reported that only a single case of a psychotic reaction lasting more than 48 hours occurred in experimental non-patient research participants a rate of 0.
Notably, the individual was an identical twin of a schizophrenic patient and thus would have been excluded under the proposed guidelines. Prolonged reactions over 48 hours were slightly more frequent in patients undergoing psychotherapy than in experimental non-patient participants, but still relatively rare, occurring at a rate of 1. Cohen also reported that suicide attempts and completed suicides occurred at a rate of 1.
The causal link between hallucinogen exposure and suicide or suicide attempt was only clear for a portion of these cases in patients, and no suicides or suicide attempts were noted for the non-patient, experimental participants. However, it is important when evaluating these data to consider that only 44 of the 62 researchers queried by Cohen returned survey results Cohen, ; Novak, Although Cohen and Ditman subsequently expressed misgivings over the increased incidence of adverse effects due to the increasing recreational use of LSD and some questionable clinical practices, they maintained that when used under the proper guidelines, LSD was an important tool for use in human research cf.
McGlothin and Arnold reported 1 case out of individuals who received LSD in either experimental or psychotherapeutic studies in which an LSD-related psychotic reaction lasting more than 48 hours occurred.
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