particular interest is a 2006 psilocybin study by the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine that was partly funded by the HRI. Researchers looked at the effects of psilocybin in healthy volunteers and found that when administered in comfortable and supportive conditions psilocybin potentiated life-affirming mystical experiences in the majority of the subjects. While this is nothing new, it is at least refreshing. The study also made headlines in many magazines and Internet video reports.
Apart from studying the effects of psychedelics upon healthy people, the main thrust of both MAPS and the HRI is finding a therapeutic use for these substances. This is a practical agenda that appears to be more acceptable to the various officiating bodies that control the availability of psychedelic agents to science. In reality, I believe that both organizations are acutely aware of the role that entheogens can play in the study of consciousness in and of itself. They are, perhaps wisely, less vocal about this “other” agenda. Despite wishes to the contrary, politics and science invariably mix, and this is the main reason why the therapeutic application of entheogens gets priority funding. Perhaps we are witness to paradigm shifting by stealth.
One recent study of note involved giving psilocybin to patients suffering from advanced-stage cancer. This was done to ascertain if psilocybin could, somewhat ironically perhaps, alleviate feelings of anxiety. Although the study was tentative and only involved a dozen terminal-cancer patients, the results were encouraging and showed that, according to some scales, anxiety was indeed reduced. This suggests that psilocybin can allow one to come to terms with troubling processes beyond one’s control, to let go as it were to that which must perforce be left behind, and thereby find some kind of peace and acceptance. I have seen a poignant video clip of Pam Sakuda, one of the subjects involved in the study, and was deeply moved by her account of how the psilocybin experience helped her deal with the terrible ordeal of having a terminal illness. I was even more moved when I did an Internet search about her and learned she had died a few years after the study. It seemed that her psilocybin experience enabled her to speak bravely about what she was going though at the time.
Similar tentative studies have been conducted in which psilocybin was administered to patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). All those in the study showed decreases in their OCD symptoms while under the influence of psilocybin, with an improvement in their condition generally lasting more than 24 hours. As of 2011, psilocybin investigations are also under way under the auspices of the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust based in Oxford in the United Kingdom. They are currently setting up studies to investigate psilocybin’s role in memory recall, particularly the recall of repressed memories, which can be useful in psychotherapy, along with studies that will determine whether psilocybin can be used to successfully treat addiction to drugs like nicotine and alcohol. This latter study will prove interesting. For if psilocybin can, through sheer spiritual force, help people kick their addiction to booze and tobacco, then millions of people will likely be up for treatment and thus millions of spiritual experiences might be in the making. Who knows? Maybe we will be witness to an alchemical plot of global proportions in which various psychoactive substances are mingling, catalyzing one another’s production, and even vying for cultural supremacy.
The Medical Use of Ibogaine
Another psychedelic drug presently receiving much scientific scrutiny over its possible medical utilization is ibogaine, an alkaloid derived from the West African plant
Ironically, perhaps, scientists have now established that the psychological effects of ibogaine can be used to break hard drug addiction. In the mid-1980s, Howard Lotsof, an ex-junkie cured through his experiences with ibogaine, formed a company to promote the medical use of ibogaine. So assured was he of ibogaine’s capacity to break drug addiction, that Lotsof patented ibogaine treatments in the mid-1980s. Apparently, it is the unusually intense and personally significant visionary effects of ibogaine that can break the curse of hard drug addiction. Lotsof describes the visions induced by ibogaine in patients he has treated as being like movie clips: “The presentation of visual material is rapid. Some patients have described it as a movie run at high speed. Others describe it as a slide show, each slide containing a motion picture of a specific event or circumstance in the viewer’s life.”{22}
Once more, we see the capacity of entheogens to instigate dramatic visionary experiences within the human psyche. Lotsof refers to these movie-clip visions as having Freudian and Jungian connotations, as if they could convey deep and significant meaning to the experiencer, and he infers that it is this process that lies at the heart of ibogaine’s efficacy in breaking patterns of addiction. Lotsof believes that ibogaine is able to make patients reevaluate their lives and see the mistakes that they may have made and that may have led them into uncontrollable bouts of drug-taking. After treatment with a single dose of ibogaine, the majority of patients remain free from chemical dependence for three to six months, which indicates that ibogaine therapy needs to be ongoing and, if possible, be accompanied by other treatments. Interestingly, a recent BBC television documentary named
Dimethyltryptamine
A leading figure in the second wave of psychedelic research is Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist who carried out some remarkable studies at the University of New Mexico in the mid-1990s. A look at his groundbreaking research reveals the spirit of a scientist determined to break through political bureaucracy in order to advance the frontiers of knowledge and add to the pharmaceutical armory of the practicing psychiatrist.
Strassman’s work has centered on the prototypical entheogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Recall that DMT is a naturally occurring substance employed for millennia in the botanical potions and snuffs utilized by native Amazonian shamans. Classed as an ultra-short-acting hallucinogen, DMT, when administered intravenously to humans (as opposed to the drinking of an ayahuasca brew), causes fantastic alterations in consciousness and yet is completely inactive within thirty minutes (the effects of ayahuasca can last for hours). If DMT is smoked, the experience is even shorter, sometimes lasting less than five minutes.
Because DMT is believed, strangely enough, to occur naturally in the human brain (trace amounts have been found in blood, urine, and spinal fluid, and precursor enzymes for it have been found in brain tissue), it was apparent to Strassman that an understanding of its action might shed some light on the development and possible treatment of endogenous hallucinatory conditions like schizophrenia. It is in this way that clinical science comes to make antipsychotic drugs, substances that can block pathological forms of thought. Once you understand the neurochemical events that accompany abnormal states of mind, then you are in a position to develop drugs to treat such conditions.
Despite his purely clinical leanings, Strassman was also interested in using DMT to explore the ever-more- popular brain/mind issue. This murky area of science—which we shall be returning to in later chapters—is concerned with how the physiochemical brain (the unsightly mass of gray jellylike stuff in our skulls) is related to the nonphysical mind with all its attendant thoughts, ideas, fears, beliefs, and so on. What exactly is the connection? Strassman argues that because psychedelic drugs alter consciousness, they should be able to tell us something about how consciousness is formed in the normal brain. In other words, since psychedelics alter higher cognitive functions connected with what it is to be a conscious human being, then they can essentially be employed as probes to study the mind/brain interface. This is, of course, exactly the point I outlined in the prologue of this book.
