'Magic mushrooms' ease cancer patients' fear of death

[TonyGosling]

Key ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms’ eased cancer patients’ fear of death
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hallucinogenic- drugs-relieved-cancer-patients-of-existential-distress/2016/11/30/fed6 0968-b1ab-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html

Dinah Bazer, seen at her home in Brooklyn, said participating in the NYU psilocybin trial was a “life-changing” experience. (Sasha Arutyunova/For The Washington Post)
By Laurie McGinley December 1
A single dose of psilocybin, the long-banned active compound in “magic mushrooms,” significantly reduced anxiety, depression and the fear of death among cancer patients for months at a time, according to two studies published Thursday.

Eighty people in separate clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and New York University Langone Medical Center were given psilocybin under close supervision. The vast majority experienced an increase in optimism, a feeling of connection with other people, and mystical and spiritual experiences. The effects persisted through the six-month follow-up period.

The research, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, is the latest to suggest that psilocybin and other hallucinogenic drugs might be beneficial for people with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug, alcohol or tobacco addictions.

[3 cancer patients explain how psychedelics eased their fears]

Craig Blinderman, a palliative care expert at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the research, called the results “groundbreaking.” If they are confirmed, he said, psilocybin could become a powerful tool in easing “existential distress” in people with life-threatening cancer and other diseases.

Psilocybin may help cancer patients with anxiety Play Video5:07
Researchers at NYU's Langone Medical Center explain their research giving cancer patients suffering from anxiety or depression a dose of psilocybin, the drug found in "magic mushrooms." (New York University Langone Medical Center)
Other scientists cautioned that psilocybin and other hallucinogens can be unpredictable.

For Dinah Bazer, a 69-year-old Brooklyn resident, the NYU trial was a “life-changing” experience. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in May 2010, she was treated successfully but “really went nuts” worrying that the cancer would return, she said.

In the fall of 2012, she was given psilocybin — though at the time she was not told whether she was getting the drug or a placebo — and stretched out on a couch listening to music under the watchful eye of two therapists. Soon, she said, she saw a black mass, like a giant lump of coal under her rib — her fear. Erupting in anger, she shouted, “Get the f---out! I won’t be eaten alive!”

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Later during the experience, Bazer, an atheist, said she felt “bathed in God’s love.” She said she has not worried about a return of the cancer since.

The Hopkins and NYU studies had some differences but produced almost identical results. Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist who led the Hopkins study, said the key finding — that a single dose of psilocybin produced “enduring” relief — represented a possible new model for treating other psychiatric ailments. Psychiatrist Stephen Ross, who led the NYU study, said it is critical to find new treatments for anguished cancer patients because such distress is linked to increased rates of suicide and decreased survival.

In both studies, about 80 percent of participants said the psilocybin’s effects lasted for at least several months; more than 70 percent said the experiences were among the most meaningful of their lives. They reported no serious side effects.

In almost a dozen opinion pieces accompanying the studies, other researchers called for stepped-up research on hallucinogens. “It’s time to take psychedelic treatments in psychiatric and oncology seriously as we did in the 1950s and 1960s, which means we need to go back to the future,” wrote David Nutt, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London.

Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, called the research “fascinating.” He added that “anything that has that dramatic effect is worth looking at carefully.” But he also said that it was important to proceed cautiously because “sometimes people will try things on their own to see if it works, and that’s something you want to avoid.”

Others expressed additional concerns. Glen Hanson, a pharmacologist who is the director of the Utah Addiction Center at the University of Utah, warned that the drug is unpredictable and could cause extreme anxiety, even psychosis. Psychobiologist Bertha Madras of Harvard Medical School worried about “medicalizing” the drug.

“We are already seeing a national epidemic of opioid overdose deaths,” she said. “And if we medicalize another group of drugs, one has to weigh the cost-benefit equation to society. Will people think this is a safe drug . . . but will it, in fact, be a plague on society?”

Griffiths and Ross, the study leaders, said psilocybin is not addictive but agreed that it should not be used outside clinical trials, where participants are carefully screened.

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Both trials — NYU had 29 participants, and Hopkins had 51 — used synthetic psilocybin. The studies were randomized, and neither the patients nor their monitors knew who was receiving the drug and who was getting the placebo. Several weeks after the first dosing, participants received whatever treatment they had not received the first time.

Griffiths said he tried to minimize the placebo effect — in which patients perceive an improvement from an inactive treatment — by using a low dose of psilocybin as the placebo and a high dose as the treatment medication. The patients knew they would get psilocybin both times, but didn’t know the doses. He said there was such a large difference in the results that he didn’t think the placebo effect was a problem. NYU used niacin, a B vitamin known to produce a “rush,” as the placebo.

Psilocybin attracted intense interest from researchers in the 1950s and 1960s, but the work was shut down when the drug was banned under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Today, it is classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning it is deemed to have a high potential for abuse and no legitimate medical purpose.

In the past decade or so, research has slowly resumed, funded mostly by nonprofits and advocates who believe in psilocybin’s therapeutic value. The Hopkins and NYU studies, for example, were largely paid for by the Heffter Research Institute, a New Mexico nonprofit. George Greer, Heffter’s medical director, said the group was working with a nonprofit institute in Wisconsin to try to move the drug into larger, Phase 3 trials that would be required to receive Food and Drug Administration approval.

Petra, a 63-year-old Seattle resident who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used for privacy, was treated for ovarian cancer and, like Bazer, was worried it would recur. But during her treatment with psilocybin, she said, she calmed down.

“I felt an acceptance of the world as it is and myself as I am,” she said. She learned new ways to handle stress, such as meditation. Two years later, when doctors saw a suspicious lesion and suggested surgery, she urged them to wait, saying it was unlikely to be cancer — which turned out to be correct. “The psilocybin had knocked back my anxiety almost completely,” she said.

[TonyGosling]

Magic mushroom chemical psilocybin could be key to treating depression - studies
Immediate reduction in depression and anxiety for up to eight months seen in patients with advanced cancer given a single dose of psilocybin
The drug psilocybin in pill form. Two trials have shown a single dose reduced depression and anxiety caused by cancer and that the effect can last up to eight months.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/01/magic-mushroom-ingredi ent-psilocybin-can-lift-depression-studies-show

Thursday 1 December 2016 09.40 GMT First published on Thursday 1 December 2016 05.01 GMT

A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, can lift the anxiety and depression experienced by people with advanced cancer for six months or even longer, two new studies show.

Researchers involved in the two trials in the United States say the results are remarkable. The volunteers had “profoundly meaningful and spiritual experiences” which made most of them rethink life and death, ended their despair and brought about lasting improvement in the quality of their lives.

The results of the research are published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology together with no less than ten commentaries from leading scientists in the fields of psychiatry and palliative care, who all back further research. While the effects of magic mushrooms have been of interest to psychiatry since the 1950s, the classification of all psychedelics in the US as schedule 1 drugs in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam war and the rise of recreational drug use in the hippy counter-culture, has erected daunting legal and financial obstacles to running trials.

“I think it is a big deal both in terms of the findings and in terms of the history and what it represents. It was part of psychiatry and vanished and now it’s been brought back,” said Dr Stephen Ross, director of addiction psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center and lead investigator of the study that was based there.


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Around 40-50% of newly diagnosed cancer patients suffer some sort of depression or anxiety. Antidepressants have little effect, particularly on the “existential” depression that can lead some to feel their lives are meaningless and contemplate suicide.

The main findings of the NYU study, which involved 29 patients, and the larger one from Johns Hopkins University with 51 patients, that a single dose of the medication can lead to immediate reduction in the depression and anxiety caused by cancer and that the effect can last up to eight months, “is unprecedented,” said Ross. “We don’t have anything like it.”

The results of the studies were very similar, with around 80% of the patients attributing moderately or greatly improved wellbeing or life satisfaction to a single high dose of the drug, given with psychotherapy support.

Professor Roland Griffiths, of the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience who led the study at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, said he did not expect the findings, which he described as remarkable. “I am bred as a sceptic. I was sceptical at the outset that this drug could produce long-lasting changes,” he said. These were people “facing the deepest existential questions that humans can encounter - what is the nature of life and death, the meaning of life.”

But the results were similar to those they had found in earlier studies in healthy volunteers. “In spite of their unique vulnerability and the mood disruption that the illness and contemplation of their death has prompted, these participants have the same kind of experiences, that are deeply meaningful, spiritually significant and producing enduring positive changes in life and mood and behaviour,” he said.

Patients describe the experiences as “re-organisational”, said Griffiths. Some in the field had used the term “mystical”, which he thought was unfortunate. “It sounds unscientific. It sounds like we’re postulating mechanisms other than neuroscience and I’m certainly not making that claim.”

Ross said psilocybin activates a sub-type of serotonin receptor in the brain. “Our brains are hard-wired to have these kinds of experiences - these alterations of consciousness. We have endogenous chemicals in our brain. We have a little system that, when you tickle it, it produces these altered states that have been described as spiritual states, mystical states in different religious branches.

“They are defined by a sense of oneness – people feel that their separation between the personal ego and the outside world is sort of dissolved and they feel that they are part of some continuous energy or consciousness in the universe. Patients can feel sort of transported to a different dimension of reality, sort of like a waking dream.”

Some patients describe seeing images from their childhood and very commonly, scenes or images from a confrontation with cancer, he said. The doctors warn patients that it may happen and not to be scared, but to embrace it and pass through it, he said.

The commentators writing in the journal include two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, the past president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a previous deputy director of the Office of USA National Drug Control Policy and a previous head of the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority.

The journal editor, Professor David Nutt, was himself involved in a small trial of psilocybin in a dozen people with severe depression in the UK in May. The ten commentators in the journal, he writes in an editorial, “all essentially say the same thing: it’s time to take psychedelic treatments in psychiatry and oncology seriously, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Much more research needs to be done, he writes. “But the key point is that all agree we are now in an exciting new phase of psychedelic psychopharmacology that needs to be encouraged not impeded.”

The studies were funded by the Heffter Research Institute in the USA. “These findings, the most profound to date in the medical use of psilocybin, indicate it could be more effective at treating serious psychiatric diseases than traditional pharmaceutical approaches, and without having to take a medication every day,” said its medical director George Greer.

[TonyGosling]

Magic mushrooms 'reboot' brain in depressed people – study
Patients unresponsive to conventional treatments benefit when treated with natural psychoactive compound, but researchers warn against self medication
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/magic-mushrooms-reboot -brain-in-depressed-people-study

Haroon Siddique Friday 13 October 2017 10.00 BST Last modified on Friday 13 October 2017 22.00 BST
Magic mushrooms may effectively “reset” the activity of key brain circuits known to play a role in depression, the latest study to highlight the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics suggests.

Psychedelics have shown promising results in the treatment of depression and addictions in a number of clinical trials over the last decade. Imperial College London researchers used psilocybin – the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in magic mushrooms – to treat a small number of patients with depression, monitoring their brain function, before and after.

Images of patients’ brains revealed changes in brain activity that were associated with marked and lasting reductions in depressive symptoms and participants in the trial reported benefits lasting up to five weeks after treatment.


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Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, who led the study, said: “We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments.

“Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted’.

“Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.”

For the study, published in Scientific Reports on Friday, 20 patients with treatment-resistant depression were given two doses of psilocybin (10 mg and 25 mg), with the second dose a week after the first. Of these, 19 underwent initial brain imaging and then a second scan one day after the high dose treatment. The team used two main brain imaging methods to measure changes in blood flow and the crosstalk between brain regions, with patients reporting their depressive symptoms through completing clinical questionnaires.

Immediately following treatment with psilocybin, patients reported a decrease in depressive symptoms, such as improvements in mood and stress relief.

MRI imaging revealed reduced blood flow in areas of the brain, including the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped region of the brain known to be involved in processing emotional responses, stress and fear.

The authors believe the findings provide a new window into what happens in the brains of people after they have ‘come down’ from a psychedelic, with an initial disintegration of brain networks during the drug ‘trip’ followed by a re-integration afterwards.

Last year, two US studies showed that a single dose of psilocybin could lift the anxiety and depression experienced by people with advanced cancer for six months or even longer.

The Imperial College researchers acknowledge that the significance of their results is limited by the small sample size and the absence of a control/placebo group for comparison. They also stress that it would be dangerous for patients with depression to attempt to self-medicate.

Professor David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences, and senior author of the paper, said: “Larger studies are needed to see if this positive effect can be reproduced in more patients. But these initial findings are exciting and provide another treatment avenue to explore.”

The authors currently plan to test psilocybin against a leading antidepressant in a trial set to start early next year.

The research was supported by the Medical Research Council, the Alex Mosley Charitable Trust and the Safra Foundation.

[TonyGosling]

Magic mushrooms and the roots of witchcraft
A study of the effects of hallucinogenic plants can explain much about sorcery and demonic possession through the ages
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/magic-mushrooms-and-the-roots-of-w itchcraft/

Robert Carver 19 August 2017

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was a ‘social construct’ of the Christian patriarchy persecuting innocent women, as it had innocent Jews indicted for the same satanic practices.

Professor Hutton is a follower of Cohn. His study, by ideological necessity, makes no reference to the historical and modern evidence that European witches used hallucinogenic drugs which produced psychedelic sensations of flying, time-space displacement, transformation into beasts, and close encounters, often sexual, with man-beast therianthropes such as the god Pan. The redcap Fly Agaric mushroom, which appears in many pictures showing witches, was one such psychedelic, as was psilocybin. The Solanaceae family of datura, nightshade, Belladonna, henbane, wolfsbane and mandrake give the sensation of flying when rubbed into the mucous membranes of vagina or anus as on a broomstick — and are heart-stopping poisons when ingested in even small amounts.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) observed that ‘witches believe that they do that which they do not do, transforming themselves into other bodies, not by incantations or ceremonies, but by ointments and anointing themselves’. Two of many studies on witches’ drug-taking are The Witches’ Ointment by Thomas Hatsis and Essential Substances by Richard Rudgley: neither are in Hutton’s bibliography, which contains no reference works at all on the subject. The reason for this omission is obvious: if witches used drugs, in secret, for cult purposes, then contrary to Cohn and the revisionists, witchcraft did actually exist, though was almost certainly not Satan worship.

Hutton also makes no reference to the cases of ergotism in the 16th to 19th centuries, this poisoning by the fungus on rye and barley called ergot, which when baked in bread changes into a chemical similar to LSD that causes visions and convulsions often interpreted as demonic possession. The Salem witch trials occurred in a wet, cold summer favourable to the ergot fungus: the next, hot and dry, produced no reports of demonic possession. Some scholars blame ergot poisoning of both victims and perpetrators for the Salem ‘possessions’.

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By logical extension magic and magicians have to be considered ‘social constructs’ and pagan religious relicts surviving into the Christian period are out too. Even pagan magic and drug use in Neolithic Europe are not mentioned. Hutton dismisses Frazer’s Golden Bough in a line. As well as witches, Jews and magicians, the medieval church, state and common people feared astrologers, alchemists, mathematicians, geometricians, herbalists, heretics and even those who could read the Greek alphabet. All arcane, occult knowledge was suspect. Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer, Dr John Dee, had his house at Mortlake and his library of 4,000 books burnt by an enraged mob which was terrified of his ‘conjuring’.

Hutton mentions that in folklore witches danced with elves, but not that until Shakespeare’s day elves were full-sized men who married ordinary mortals. They were ‘tall and fair’ in Norse and Celtic mythology. They had kings and queens, lived ‘under hills’ (in turf-covered earthen Neolithic barrows), had great knowledge of potions and drugs, ‘danced by moonlight’ with witches, shot ‘elf-bolts’ (flint arrow heads) that killed at a scratch as they were ‘dipped in the dew of hemlock’. Elves were obviously pagan pre-Celtic ancient Britons.

Hutton mentions that witches were accused of eating the flesh of babies, but not that in many cultures mushrooms are called ‘babies’ and ‘holy children’. Sliced redcap Fly Agaric looks like flesh. To accept Hutton one has to excise the whole European herbal tradition, for herbalists have to learn about magic mushrooms and Solanaceae to avoid poisoning themselves and others. Many herbalists were women living in rural areas where herbs were found and collected.

Stephen Oppenheimer in The Origins of the British shows evidence that there was no genocide of ancient Britons by either Celtic or Anglo-Saxon incomers. Genetic sampling shows that 75-95 per cent of the pre-1950 population came from neolithic Iberians who walked here after the last glaciation receded and we were joined to the continent. We are, most of us, descendants of the elves and witches. When you see a photo of a drunken, tattooed yob vomiting in the gutters of San Antonio, watched by a spaced-out chick in a weird hat capering about with a spliff in one hand and bottle of sangria in the other, it’s not decadence, merely modern British elf and witch doing their midsummer solstice thing.

Hutton’s are lo-fat weight-watchers, vanilla witches sans drugs, sans magic, sans pagan rituals, the sort you might meet at a Full Moon party in Ibiza, offering Bodyshop essential-oil rubs for 20 euros a pop. Hutton is in denial: the witches were whacked out of their gourds on a whole Glastonbury of hallucinogenics: they knew about poisons and how to administer them; they provided love philtres and abortifacients.They were, in fact, curanderas, ‘wise women’ deeply versed in the herbal lore their ancestors had learnt from ancient Iberian-British aboriginals, a.k.a. the elves.