A Really Long Strange Trip
How some dedicated scientists and former flower children managed to
bring hallucinogenic drug research back to mainstream labs after more
than 30 years.
Jeneen Interlandi
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 4:47 PM ET Jul 2, 2008
It's been more than a year since John Hayes, a professor of pastoral
counseling at Loyola College, ingested psilocybin, the active
ingredient in magic mushrooms. He claims that the series of three
eight-hour highs, administered=97in a laboratory-turned-living room at
Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore=97have made him a calmer, less
fearful person. "It gave me this sense that space and time are human
constructions that can collapse," says Hayes, 59. "The ultimate
reality is something beyond those constructions, and more im****tantly,
everything in the world is connected."
These are familiar sentiments to Roland Griffiths, the scientist who
led a study of 36 volunteers, most of whom detailed similar
experiences after taking the hallucinogenic compound. In a re****t
published on July 1st in the Journal of Pharmacology, more than 60
percent of those intrepid volunteers re****ted substantial increases in
life satisfaction a year after the experiment. "We have people saying
these eight hours in the lab are among the most meaningful in their
lives," says Griffiths. "Some rank it alongside births and deaths of
loved ones." (Eleven volunteers experienced side effects such as fear
or anxiety, only eight of them for a significant ****tion of the
session.) Despite the long-held promise that such substances might
reveal the secrets of the conscious mind, the study of hallucinogenic
compounds has always been controversial. Once a thriving area of
research, projects like these ground to a halt in the late 1960s when
a media frenzy over rampant recreational use led the federal
government to criminalize both psilocybin and LSD. There were re****ts
of college students diving out of windows, staring at the sun until
they went blind or developing schizophrenia after taking the drugs.
While Griffiths insists many of these re****ts were pure myth, they
scared scientists and administrators away.
For a time, it seemed that convincing America's premier research
institutions to fund or sponsor research like this was nigh on
impossible. In fact, the Journal of Pharmacology study represents one
of the first yields of a 30-year effort to rebuild legitimate
psychedelic research programs from the ashes of 1960s.
So how did Griffiths and his colleagues get the funding and approval
to bring magic mushrooms and their pharmacological siblings back into
mainstream labs? It's been a long strange trip. In fact, the story of
how a small group of scientists worked for decades to revive
scientific interest in psychedelic drugs and attract private donors to
fill the funding gap left by a skeptical establishment is almost as
fascinating as the research itself. Griffiths and Purdue
pharmacologist Dave Nichols were just beginning their careers when the
excesses of their forbears effectively shut down the field of
psychedelic research in the early 1970s. "There's just a handful of us
driving this, and we're sort of all in the time frame where we just
caught the tail-end of the whole Haight-Ashbury period," says Nichols.
"But we saw some amazing effects, and the interest never went away,
even if the research did." Some of the most striking of those effects
had been seen in the terminally ill, who often lost their fear of
death and found comfort and peace from drugs such as psilocybin. "The
hospice movement had yet to begin," says Nichols. "At the time we were
just leaving terminal patients in a sterile corner of the hospital."
But with federal agencies reluctant to fund research into illegal
substances and major universities unwilling to chance a 1960s-style
meltdown (should the chemicals make their way from labs to dorm
rooms), those early threads could not be pursued. So Nichols focused
on the biochemistry of psychedelics, relying exclusively on animal
models. And Griffiths went on to study the influence of other
substances on behavior. Still, the questions that first sparked their
curiosity=97namely how a particular molecule could so profoundly
influence one's perception of the world=97lingered on. Until, that is,
Nichols and his colleagues rose to a level of prominence that they
could leverage to probe their still-controversial interest in these
substances.
"I had been saying for decades that you could still do the research if
you had private funding," says Nichols. "Finally I realized if I
waited any longer, I'd be retired and I'd really regret not having
done anything with it."
So in the early 1990s, he called several of his colleagues, including
Charles Grob, who had studied the religious use of another psychedelic
substance, iowasca, by indigenous tribes in Brazil. By then, the
stigma had begun to eva****ate a bit. Nichols's idea was to raise funds
to sup****t investigators at reputable institutions, so that the work
would be invested with some legitimacy from the outset. Before long,
the nonprofit Hefter Research Institute was born. Since incor****ating
in 1993, Hefter has funded around $1.4 million worth of studies.
The bulk of that money has come from a small group of donors, many of
whom are former flower children themselves. For example, Bob Wallace,
the ninth Microsoft employee, donated nearly $700,000 over a six-year
period. "Most donors are individuals who had [psychedelic] experiences
of their own and became convinced that these substances were im****tant
to understand," says Grob, a Hefter board member and UCLA scientist
who studies the therapeutic effects of psilocybin in cancer patients.
In addition to Hefter, two other nonprofits=97the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Beckley Foundation=97
have gone where traditional academic funding sources were reluctant to
venture. Among MAPS donors are the Pritzker family, owners of the
Hyatt hotel chain, and Peter Lewis, CEO of Progressive Auto
Insurance.
Around the same time that Nichols was forming Hefter, Curtis Wright, a
former FDA administrator, was digging through files on psychedelic
research at the Food and Drug Administration. For three decades,
research proposals had been collecting dust there. Led by Wright, a
group tasked with speeding up the drug development process reviewed
the old proposals and determined there was no scientific justification
for blocking some of them. "This is one case where the FDA put science
before politics," says MAPS founder Richard Doblin, who did his Ph.D.
on FDA regulation of psychedelic research.
But the FDA's decision to approve the investigation of some
psychedelic compounds was made 15 years ago. Only recently have major
universities followed the agency's lead. "In many cases, the
university review boards are more difficult to get through than the
federal ones," says Griffiths. "So their approval represents a huge
sea change."
Given the troubled history of psychedelic research in the U.S.=97Timothy
Leary was, after all, a Harvard scientist before he became the
godfather of recreational LSD use=97most of Griffiths' colleagues prefer
to work beneath the radar. Even as they told NEWSWEEK of a recently
approved LSD study at University of California at Berkeley, several
scientists declined to give specifics. "They are still waiting for the
FDA to grant final approval of the actual chemicals, which are being
im****ted from Switzerland," explains Grob. "The wrong kind of
attention could cause some administrator to come in and shut the
project down." If that happened, years of paperwork and gentle
prodding would be laid to waste.
To thwart criticism about the legitimacy of the work, psychedelic
researchers have focused on developing sound protocols. Unlike earlier
research, the current studies are double-blind with a control group=97
two staples of sound science that guard against researcher bias in the
interpretation of results.
And along with his latest study, Griffith has published a series of
guidelines intended to protect volunteers and ensure the integrity of
data. Those guidelines describe how to eliminate subjects with a
family history of mental illness and advise that the clinician
administering the substance take a full day to establish rap****t with
a given volunteer so that they can guide them through any difficult
moments the experience might cause.
It's a far cry from the Leary era, which was plagued by too much media
hype and not enough scientific rigor, but the approach is starting to
pay off. As Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCLA and others open their doors
to psilocybin, LSD and MDMA (Ecstasy), scientists there are beginning
to examine the therapeutic value of these long-maligned molecules.
Already, Psilocybin and MDMA have shown promise in treating a range of
conditions, including Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders (OCSD),
anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients, and Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD). Harvard scientists are at work on a protocol to study
the benefits of LSD in treating cluster headaches=97a project that began
when an online community of patients who were self-medicating with the
drug contacted researchers.
To be sure, these early trials are small, consisting of fewer than two
dozen patients each. Larger-scale investigations will require more
funding and wider acceptance, but proponents are optimistic. "I think
a lot of basic scientists will start to migrate back to this type of
work," says Nichols. "We'll start to see some real progress if we
don't burn any bridges and we keep ourselves squeaky clean."
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/144399
=A9 2008
|
