New Visions for Hallucinogens

[Tim Strzechowski]

Researchers Explore New Visions for Hallucinogens
After a long hiatus, medical investigators return to studying the benefits of once-banned compounds

By SUSAN BROWN

Recently, 36 people who had never taken hallucinogens before gave them a try. The pill they took launched a daylong psychedelic journey, sometimes fantastic, sometimes frightening. When it was over, a few who took the drug said it was the most meaningful experience of their lives, as momentous as the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. Others wished never to repeat it.

The drug they took was psilocybin, the hallucinogenic molecule found in "magic" mushrooms.

Their tales do not come from an all-night desert trance or a radical festival like Burning Man but from Baltimore, where they participated in an experiment at the Johns Hopkins University Bayview Medical Center.

The study, which began in 2001, explored the drug's ability to induce a mystical state. Published in the journal Psychopharmacology this summer, it was the first federally approved research on psilocybin in humans to be reported in four decades and leads a vanguard of studies that mark a quiet revival of research on psychedelic drugs.

When scientists in the United States and Europe first learned of the mushrooms' strange effects in the 1950s, along with those of related hallucinogens like LSD, research on the topic exploded. More than a hundred published reports cataloged the effects of the drugs, some rigorously, others not so. [...]

http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 53, Issue 16, Page A12 


Contact me OFFLIST if you'd like the whole article.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061207/7851381b/attachment.html>