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Emerging from the Drug War Dark Age: LSD and Other Psychedelic Medicines

Make a Comeback

By Shaw, AlterNet

Posted on July 11, 2008, Printed on July 11, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/90958/

The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for

Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert

Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102.

Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary

Association for Psychedelic Studies <http://maps.org/> , an organization

that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials

of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to

break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that

surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.

More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what

he refers to as the " 40-year-long bad trip " that researchers like him

have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and

other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This

40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by

" enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated

stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive. "

We've all heard the tales of kids jumping off rooftops because they

think they can fly, of otherwise normal people taking a single hit of

LSD and " going insane, " and of course the all-pervasive myth of the

" acid flashback. " Although there were acid casualties, most were rare or

aberrant tragedies, most often occurring in individuals with

pre-existing mental health conditions who never should have taken LSD in

the first place. Most of the tales are apocryphal at best, intentional

propaganda meant to discourage use.

An Era of Censorship

Why would our government embark on this 40-year Inquisition to burn the

psychedelic prophets at the stake and wipe clean from the Earth the true

history of psychedelic culture, as if it were the secret of the Holy

Grail and the Merovingian dynasty? Why has the psychedelic revolution of

the 1960s -- one of the most powerful revolutions in human consciousness

in all of history -- been reduced to pejorative tales of tie-dyed morons

skipping through Golden Gate Park in an orgy of self-indulgence? Why

would something that the government claims does not deserve respectable

attention be the recipient of such Draconian repressive measures? Could

it be because, like the secret of Magdalene, the truth could bring

the whole order crashing down?

The answer, my friend, blew away in the wind. The extent to which LSD

fomented the cultural revolution of the 1960s has all but disappeared in

a miasma of drug war propaganda. But do not be fooled. This was no

hippie-dippy bullshit. In its time, LSD was more dangerous to the ruling

order than Mao, Che or the Founding Fathers themselves. As the New York

Times obituary for Hofmann

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04carey.html?_r=3 & oref=s

login & oref=slogin & oref=slogin> read, " [LSD] was no hustler from a

shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born

into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter

societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions. "

The U.S. government threw everything but the kitchen sink at getting

(certain) Americans to stop " turning on, " launching the drug war that

eventually locked up millions of drug users. They handed down

ridiculously disproportionate federal sentences to LSD makers that would

have made Pablo Escobar commit suicide. But it wasn't the " turning on "

part that they feared, for there are many benefits to having a

population otherwise occupied in a false reality. No, it was the " tuning

in " and " dropping out " part that kept them awake at night.

Although it may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand at face

value, LSD and other psychedelic compounds can have a profound

life-altering affect on the user that, more often than not, serves to

connect them (or reconnect, as the case may be) to the universal

compassion and love for life that is inherent in our species. It

invariably causes them to question the validity of the status quo, to

examine their life and what surrounds them in terms of beliefs and

values.

And in this epoch of industrial civilization, the last thing a corporate

culture that survives on war, aggression and consumer spending needs is

a consciously awakened population of people who inexorably choose to

leave said culture in droves because they see it is killing the planet,

themselves, and each other. This is precisely, to the letter, the

meaning of " Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. "

But even for those who would call this hyperbole, what was lost in all

the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds

like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga -- plant medicines

thousands of years old -- was the fact that they are miraculously

powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some

cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders

plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder,

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, migraine and cluster headaches and

schizophrenia. They are also effective palliatives for the sick and

dying.

Something with such legitimate potential to heal can only be kept in the

bottle for so long. In fact, these transcendent therapies are now ebbing

back into mainstream respectability. Doblin will be the first to tell

you that times are changing, driven by too much government repression,

too much scientific orthodoxy, and, perhaps more than any other factor,

our culture's desperate need to learn how to handle what he calls our

" collective emotional state. "

" We talk about the veterans suffering PTSD, but it's really a

culture-wide phenomenon, " he said. " We're at a place where technology

and the structure of contemporary life have taken us so far away from

our emotions as to create pathological conditions. The systemic violence

and selfishness and greed that are in our society need treatment. "

Doblin was one of the first to break through that wall of obstinacy and

challenge the Inquisition. He got the U.S. government to approve

clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy

<http://www.maps.org/mdma/protocol/index.html> for returning veterans

and victims of violent crime or abuse who suffer from Post-Traumatic

Stress Disorder <http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/89625/> . In many

ways it was this Newtonian breakthrough that finally challenged the

orthodoxy that reigned over the 40-year Dark Age. Western governments

had to ask themselves what was more important to them: their irrational

and erroneous drug propaganda, or the possibility that the millions of

lives they had devastated by war, violence and iniquitous economic

policies might actually be repaired. In this, the seeds of a psychedelic

renaissance were planted.

A Return to Respectability

Much greater than usual media attention accompanied the most recent

World Psychedelic Forum held in March in Basel, Switzerland, the home of

Albert Hofmann. A headline in the May issue of the staid British medical

journal The Lancet -- known for challenging the Pentagon's Iraq casualty

numbers -- read, " Research on Psychedelics Moves into the Mainstream. "

The Lancet article identified a number of early-stage clinical trials

being conducted on various " anxiety and neurotic disorders " using

psychedelic compounds. As previously mentioned, Doblin and MAPS are

conducting three parallel studies in Israel, Switzerland and the United

States on the use of Ecstasy for treating PTSD. MAPS is also funding the

work of controversial Harvard researcher Halpern and his Yale

counterpart Sewell, who are studying LSD and psilocybin as

treatments for cluster headaches. (Information about their research is

available on clusterbusters.com and Erowid, an online clearinghouse for

reliable data on virtually every psychoactive plant and chemical known

to humans.)

Harvard University, which conducted the last legal research on LSD in

the mid-1960s and was the site for one of Halpern's studies on the

effects of MDMA on dying cancer patients, is once again considering

clinical trials to support Halpern's research.

And in a major milestone, on May 13 of this year, Swiss doctor

Gasser administered the first legal dose of LSD in more than 36 years.

It was for a study of anxiety in palliative care, which helps terminally

ill patients transition more peacefully -- and with as little pain as

possible -- into death.

Other complexes like addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder are

being treated with what are called the " shamanic plant medicines " :

ayahuasca, the Amazonian vine preparation whose psychoactive component

is dimethyltryptamine (DMT); peyote, the North American cactus whose

psychoactive component is mescaline; and iboga, an African rainforest

shrub.

Addiction is one of the most important new fields of study, not only

because of the sheer numbers of afflicted, which the National Institute

on Drug Abuse estimates at 23.6 million persons a year at a cost of $181

billion. According to a newly released report from the World Health

Organization, the United States is the world's most addicted society. Of

those who are lucky enough to get treatment, half eventually go back to

heavy use, and 90 percent suffer brief or episodic relapses for the rest

of their lives. This makes the search for an effective and long-lasting

new treatment more attractive -- and more pressing -- than ever.

The Healing Potential of Psychedelics

Unlike other treatments, which have shown pitifully low success rates,

psychedelic-assisted therapy focuses on the emotional context under

which a patient suffers addiction, not the use of the drugs themselves.

" This, " says Tom , a professor of psychology at Northern Illinois

University and the co-editor of a new two-volume compilation,

Psychedelic Medicine, " is what makes them uniquely effective. They allow

negative ideas and feelings -- where most addictions have their origins

-- to surface into consciousness. With the guidance of a mental health

professional, the person can let them go. " Once these negative feelings

are gone, says, the person no longer feels the need to deaden

them with drugs or alcohol.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy for addiction pokes a hole in conventional

wisdom about drug use, which goes something like this: If, under

American law, all illegal drugs are bad for you, how can you then treat

an addiction to one drug with another purportedly dangerous drug? This

shortsighted line of thinking has been keeping psychedelic compounds

illegal in spite of evidence pointing to their benefits.

Indigenous peoples have been using psychedelics as traditional medicine

for thousands of years. Ayahuasca and peyote have been used to treat

toothaches, pain in childbirth, fever, breast pain, skin diseases,

rheumatism, diabetes, colds, blindness, parasites and more. They have

also been used as spiritual medicines to cure emotional disorders.

Native Americans use peyote to treat the astronomical rates of

alcoholism found on the reservations, reportedly with great success,

although hard figures are difficult to obtain due to the legal

protections given to the Native American Church.

And Western scientists have known of the healing capabilities of

psychedelics for decades.

In 1954 two chemists, D.W. Woolley and E. Shaw, published an article in

Science magazine that argued that the neurochemical serotonin was the

likely culprit behind most major mental disorders, writes Dirk Hanson in

Addiction: A Search for a Cure. The worst of the bunch were depression,

drug addiction and alcoholism. Woolley and Shaw also confirmed in their

study that the most powerful known manipulator of serotonin was LSD

because it had an " eerily " similar chemical structure.

Later in the '50s, a well-known LSD " apostle " named Alfred

" Captain Al " Hubbard started pedaling the idea that LSD might hold

considerable psychotherapeutic potential. With the assistance of Aldous

Huxley and other prominent acid-taking intellectuals, Hubbard gave LSD

to Canadian researchers Abram Hoffer, Ross Mclean, and Humphrey Osmond,

who studied it as a treatment for alcoholism, while a similar study was

conducted at the Stanford Research Institute.

Later, Stan Grof worked with street-level addicts while Leary

conducted LSD psychotherapy on prisoners. Even Bill , the founder

of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an acid enthusiast, promoting LSD as a

" gateway to an accelerated spiritual awakening. " noticed that the

turnaround in alcoholics did not happen until they hit bottom, and LSD,

because it surfaced difficult emotions, hastened an alcoholic's bottom

and helped them avoid more catastrophic bottoms.

The therapy is reinforced through the " afterglow " effect of a

" transcendent psychedelic event " (a trip), which Psychedelic Medicine

says is " characterized by an elevated and energetic mood and a relative

freedom from concerns of the past and from guilt and anxiety. " There

emerges an " enhanced disposition and capacity to enter into close

relationships. " The " afterglow " usually lasts anywhere from two weeks to

a month and then gradually fades into a series of memories that are

thought to continue affecting attitude and behavior.

All of these researchers stress that psychological professionals must

guide psychedelic sessions, and that full recovery is only possible

through continued therapy.

" After 40 years of review, " Doblin takes great care to mention, " we can

accurately say it's not a miracle cure. " Psychedelic-assisted therapy

has powerful healing potential, he says, but " does not work for people

who don't really want to look at their inner conflicts. "

Shaw, a Chicago-based writer, is a regular contributor to

AlterNet. He is the former editorial director of the Conscious Choice

publications and a contributor to Reality Sandwich and the Huffington

Post. He is currently writing Exile Nation, a drug war memoir.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/90958/

S. Kalman PhD, RD, CCRC, FACN

Miami Research Associates

Director, Nutrition & Applied Clinical Research

6141 Sunset Drive #301

Miami, FL. 33143

(fax)

www.miamiresearch.com <http://www.miamiresearch.com>