lsd

Researchers from several countries are meeting in San Jose, CA, this week for the largest scientific conference on hallucinogens in the U.S. for 40 years.  As opposed to the largest non-scientific conferences on hallucinogens, held on your neighbor’s deck every Saturday, from the sound of it.

The New York Times has an interesting article on psilocybin research led by Dr. Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins medical school.  His first experiment involved 36 healthy people with no prior psilocyban experience:

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.  The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group. [NYTimes]

They went on to experiment with giving psilocybin to depressed and terminally ill patients.  I’m suddenly feeling depressed.  Hook me up with some medicines.  The ones with a unicorn stamped on the packaging, so all my wishes will come true.

Obligatory:

You never see a positive drug story on the news. They always have the same LSD story. You’ve all seen it: “Today a young man on acid . . . thought he could fly . . . jumped out of a building . . . what a tragedy!” What a d–k. He’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly why didn’t he take off from the ground first? Check it out? You don’t see geese lined up to catch elevators to fly south; they fly from the f—ing ground. He’s an idiot. He’s dead. Good! We lost a moron? F—ing celebrate. There’s one less moron in the world.
Wouldn’t you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition? Perhaps? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Just for once?
“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”
– Bill Hicks.