LSD Returns–For Psychotherapeutics
Posted by Nathan Solomon | 25 September 2009, 3:32 am
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural
movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential
benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual
practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was
tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific
research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of
an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above
all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in
his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.
For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his
death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first
scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his
native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, �?a long wish
finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading
the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands
of medical doctors again.”
The preliminary study picks up where investigators left off. It
explores the possible therapeutic effects of the drug on the intense
anxiety experienced by patients with life-threatening disease, such
as cancer. A number of the hundreds of studies conducted on lysergic
acid diethylamide-25 from the 1940s into the 1970s (many of poor
quality by contemporary standards) delved into the personal insights
the drug supplied that enabled patients to reconcile themselves with
their own mortality. In recent years some researchers have studied
psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) and MDMA
(Ecstasy), among others, as possible treatments for this “existential
anxiety,” but not LSD.
Gasser, head of the Swiss Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy,
which he joined after his own therapist-administered LSD experience,
has only recently begun to discuss his research, revealing the
challenges of studying psychedelics. The $190,000 study approved by
Swiss medical authorities, was almost entirely funded by the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a U.S.
nonprofit that sponsors research toward the goal of making
psychedelics and marijuana into prescription drugs. Begun in 2008,
the study intends to treat 12 patients (eight who will receive LSD
and four a placebo). Finding eligible candidates has been
difficult­after 18 months only five patients had been recruited, and
just four had gone through the trial’s regimen of a pair of all-day
sessions. “Because LSD is not a usual treatment, an oncologist will
not recommend it to a patient,” Gasser laments.
The patients who received the drug found the experience aided them
emotionally, and none experienced panic reactions or other untoward
events. One patient, Udo Schulz, told the German weekly Der Spiegel
that the therapy with LSD helped him overcome anxious feelings after
being diagnosed with stomach cancer, and the experience with the drug
aided his reentry into the workplace.
The trials follow a strict protocol­“all LSD treatment sessions will
begin at 11 a.m.”­and the researchers are scrupulous about avoiding
mistakes that, at times, occurred during older psychedelic trials,
when investigators would leave subjects alone during a drug session.
Both Gasser and a female co-therapist are present throughout the
eight-hour sessions that take place in quiet, darkened rooms, with
emergency medical equipment close at hand. Before receiving LSD,
subjects have to undergo psychological testing and preliminary
psychotherapy sessions.
Another group is also pursuing LSD research. The British-based
Beckley Foundation is funding and collaborating on a 12-person pilot
study at the University of California, Berkeley, that is assessing
how the drug may foster creativity and what changes in neural
activity go along with altered conscious experience induced by the
chemical. Whether LSD will one day become the drug of choice for
psychedelic psychotherapy remains in question because there may be
better solutions. “We chose psilocybin over LSD because it is gentler
and generally less intense,” says Charles S. Grob, a professor of
psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, who
conducted a trial to test psilocybin’s effects on anxiety in terminal
cancer patients. Moreover, “it is associated with fewer panic
reactions and less chance of paranoia and, most important, over the
past half a century psilocybin has attracted far less negative
publicity and carries far less cultural baggage than LSD.”
Others assert the importance of comparative pharmacology­how does LSD
differ from psilocybin?­because of the extended period of research
quiescence. Just because many types of so-called SSRI antidepressants
exist, “it doesn’t mean that they are all identical,” observes Roland
Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who conducts trials
with psilocybin. In any case, on the 40th anniversary of the
Woodstock music festival, psychoactive substances that represented
the apotheosis of the counterculture lifestyle are no longer just
hippie elixirs.  - Scientific American