By Carolina Piras
It’s there, but we barely can see it: it’s the psychedelic renaissance…
American author, journalist, and current professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Michael Pollan brings us with him on a long, intricate, and illuminating journey through his book “How To Change Your Mind”, where he set out research on LSD and psilocybin, analysing their history and their promises.
Pollan dates the psychedelic renaissance to the late 1990s when research on the “magic mushrooms” started up again although psilocybin was still seen as the most dangerous and evil drug that ever existed.
But there is a turning point: psilocybin is now being tested as a tool for tackling depression, addiction, OCD, anxiety, and many others. Scientists working on this look at psilocybin as an increasingly important substance for psychotherapy. The UK is taking big steps for the potential clinical treatment of psilocybin and trials are currently underway at Imperial College.
“Counterculture fuel”
Former US President Richard Nixon called psychedelics “the fuel of counterculture”, and the rest of the Western world agreed with him: for many, psychedelic drugs are more than illegal and dangerous. They are considered addictive compounds, not indistinguishable from cocaine or heroin, which have been proved to be destructive.
Psychedelics suffered from demonising propaganda in the early 1970s, where “a lot is true, a lot is not: you need all the facts”, according to Dr. Roland Griffiths, in an interview for Broken Brain podcast.
Dr. Griffiths, Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has an important role in the course of psychedelic renaissance; in fact, we owe him the reintroduction of psychedelic research in the scientific field.
Having conducted in the past several extended research using sedative-hypnotics, caffeine, and mood-altering drugs, Griffiths initiated in 1999 an investigation about the effects of the psilocybin, using a psilocybin-facilitated treatment in healthy volunteers, treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients, or – to quit smoking – cigarette and psilocybin effects in meditators and religious leaders.
Therapeutic benefits
In January 2019, an article from Forbes started circulating that touched on the clinical treatment of psychedelics and collected data on why “psilocybin can provide therapeutic benefits that may support the development of an approvable New Drug Application (NDA)”.
On July 14th, 2020, the UK’s leading independent scientific body on drugs has launched the Drug Science Medical Psychedelics Working Group, showing confidence for the future of psychedelic medicine and describing it as “extremely promising”.
The target of the scientific group is to have a rational and illuminating approach to the benefits of psychedelics for clinical treatment, working in collaboration with industry partners Alta Flora, AWAKN, Entheos, Neo Kuma, Neuropharm, Scarlette Lillie Science & Innovation, and Small Pharma.
The UK has also founded the first formal centre for psychedelic research in the world, at Imperial College London, led by Dr. Carhart-Harris, which explained that the core of the research will be the use of psychedelics in mental health care and as a tool to probe the brain’s basis of consciousness.
Among the benefits of the psychedelic experiences during the clinical trials at Imperial College, it was noted that possibly psilocybin was enough to help 2/3 of smokers quit for at least a year; there were also several reports of having a mystical or transcendent experience during their psychedelic session.
“We are developing psilocybin therapy for people with treatment-resistant depression. We are doing this through a large-scale clinical trial that is taking place in approved sites across Europe and North America,” said Susan Stansfield, Senior Vice-President of the Clinical Operations for COMPASS Pathway.
“Our trial will assess whether psilocybin therapy could benefit people for whom existing treatments do not work.2
Stansfield said there are specific criteria to join this trial, and that only those who have tried two, three, or four medications without success in the last two years could be eligible to join.
“Each individual site is responsible for their participant recruitment, not COMPASS. It may be possible to receive treatment at a site in a country other than that where you live but this can be very complicated to organise and is up to the site to agree,” she explained.
“As a general rule, all applicants need to speak the national language of the country where the trial takes place. Also, due to the number of face-to-face clinic visits required, applicants should ideally live within one to two hours of the site, unless special provisions have been made.”
Psychedelic-assisted therapy
Bristol will see the first psychedelic-assisted therapy clinic very soon. “We are about to experience a massive wave of mental health problems—I’m seeing a rise in cases already in my caseload,” said Dr. Ben Sessa, psychiatrist, researcher, and writer who is currently part of AWAKN Life Science Inc company, which took big steps to apply a revolution in the mental care system.
“Now is the time for the innovative approaches to transforming how we do psychiatry,” he said in an interview.
What happens during the psychedelic experience is a neural change that brings to ego dissolution, leading to potential transcendence and a mystical feeling of oneness.
Scientists try to tackle distress and anxiety issues helping the patients to set a so-called ‘trip intention’ when taking psilocybin; the trip intention, is supposed to guide you through information, revelation and wisdom never experienced before, through spiritual evolution and, possibly, becoming the highest version of yourself.
Psilocybin connects regions of our brain that are usually – when we are awake – not in contact, which guides our mind to a sense of higher awareness, expanding beyond the range of our ego, self, familiar identity, which in many cases, makes the anxiety falls.
Where antidepressants and anxiolytics give people a heavy sense of blunt trauma, psilocybin is supposed to drive you through an experience where you feel relieved, emotionally and mentally, and to feel a real, deep connection with the external and internal reality.
Regions of our brain that are usually not in contact when we are awake, fully interact under the effect of psilocybin. “a) Your Brain. b) Your Brain on Shrooms. Any Questions?” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0Research and spiritual purposes
Erfan Parizi, a 22-year-old trader, told Holloway Express about his very recent experience with magic mushrooms, highlighting the aim of the trip was only for research and spiritual purposes.
“After the experience, I had no fear. No stress. I felt fearless, especially at the peak, there was no anxiety. But when it was gone, I’ve felt fearless, powerful again.
“When I say powerful, I mean it didn’t make me arrogant, like you being cocky and thinking you can f&&k anyone up, but powerful in terms of your being, getting into your goals. It made a lot of things much clearer and I’ve felt like I could do anything I wanted to do.”
He explains the effect of the psilocybin: “The coming up and the coming down were both the scariest moments of the trip. I won’t lie. I was scared.
“When I was going up, those little dragons were coming after me telling me ‘you never gonna be the same, you took drugs.’ Another dragon was my bad habits, another one was fear, and another one was my procrastination, and everything was attacking me altogether. They wanted to ruin my state of mind. But I got up and I faced them, and it was finished.
“Then suddenly I was at my peak. I was feeling powerful, not arrogant. I’ve felt in that moment I could achieve anything I wanted in my life. I look at bad habits differently, you know, my perspective on life was just different after that.
“The experience made me realise I was in another, totally different, state of being, where you have everything you want in front of you,” he said.
He also talked about his fears before the experience with psilocybin, and how he faced them. “I had one debt to pay, and anytime I thought about that, it created fear, stress, anxiety, I asked myself if I could do it or not.”
“But after the trip, I was fearless, not that I didn’t care about my debt, but it just made much clearer the ways I could do it. Is like the trip took the fear away.”
+Both fresh and prepared psilocybin mushrooms became illegal in the UK in 2005. It is also illegal to own anything but the spores, which do not contain psilocybin. Do not try this at home!
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