BACK IN THE early sixties, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leafy snuck LSD out of campus laboratories and into the mainstream. Soon, tie-dyed hell broke loose in popular culture, and psychedelic drugs were quickly banned. By decade's end, they had all but vanished from the psychological research scene.

Now, for the first time in some 30 years, human studies of such contraband substances are on the upswing. Many researchers say it should have happened sooner.

"The banning of psychedelics has been an absolute disaster for consciousness and medical research," says Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company funding much of this new work.

Many researchers say hallucinogens were kept out of research labs because of fear generated by drugs like methamphetamines and heroin and the "war on drugs." In fact, there's little evidence that psychedelics are either addictive or more dangerous than, say, alcohol or marijuana, researchers report. Doblin argues that in the intervening decades, advances in everything from disease treatment to consciousness studies to basic psychological research have suffered. "These new studies are just the first steps on a long road to recovery," he says.

The turnaround started in the early 1990s, when the Food and Drug Administration ran out of reasons, political and otherwise, to quash contraband drug research, Doblin says. Scientists hope hallucinogens can make inroads with tough-to-treat conditions, says Charles Grob, chief of adolescent and teen psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. Grob is picking up where another researcher, Eric Kast, left off in the 1960s. Kast had promising results using LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to relieve anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients. To follow up on those results, Grob is currently investigating psilocybin--the magic in "magic mushrooms"--as a treatment for anxiety in late-stage cancer patients.

Researchers hope this is only the beginning of a hallucinogenic data mine. As Grob also points out, "People forget, but psychedelics were the cutting edge of science in this country for 50 years." In fact, in the 1940s and '50s, so much money flowed in this direction that many top researchers got their start in this field. Many feel modern psychiatry owes its origins to the study of hallucinogens.

After all, it was the discovery of the neurotransmitter serotonin--thanks to LSD--that jump-started the brain chemistry revolution.

FLASHBACK IN THE LAB

SIX PSYCHEDELIC DRUG STUDIES ARE UNDERWAY, ALL AIMED AT
SOME OF MEDICINE'S MORE INTRACTABLE PROBLEMS.

The Researchers                      The Studies

The Medical University of South      MDMA (ecstasy) in conjunction with
Carolina: Michael Mithoefer          cognitive behavioral therapy for
                                     the treatment of post-traumatic
                                     stress disorder triggered by
                                     sexual abuse
University of Arizona:               Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Francisco Moreno                     treatment with psilocybin
University of California at          Late-stage cancer-related anxiety
Los Angeles:                         treated with psilocybin and
Charles Grob                         therapy
Harvard University: John Halpern     Late-stage cancer-related anxiety
                                     treated with MDMA and therapy
Harvard University: Andrew Sewell    Treatment of cluster headaches
(not yet approved)                   with LSD and psilocybin

COPYRIGHT 2005 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group