mushrooms

Jacob Sullum:

In the new study, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins, 30 "hallucinogen-naive adults reporting regular participation in religious or spiritual activities" were randomly assigned to a group given psilocybin or a group given Ritalin. The subjects "were encouraged to close their eyes and direct their attention inward." Two months later, the two groups were switched; another control group of six subjects received Ritalin in both sessions. In questionnaires two months after the psilocybin sessions, "the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers."

To which non-hallucinogen-naive adults may respond, "Duh."

You can get the actual paper here. For those of you that don't spend a significant portion of your time reading the pharmacology literature, Psychopharmacology is what those of us that do fondly refer to as a "real" journal. (Peer review and all that. This ain't High Times is what I'm saying.)

The spin being put on the story is instructive--not so much on the issues of scientific interest raised by the study as much as how the underlying premises of U.S. drug policy ultimately stifle real inquiry. NIDA director Nora Volkow is already in ass-covering mode (and considering who's in charge in DC these days, I can hardly blame her):

Although there is no evidence that psilocybin is addictive, its adverse effects are well known...Psilocybin can trigger psychosis in susceptible individuals and cause other deleterious psychological effects, such as paranoia and extreme anxiety.

Meh. So can church.

She goes on to imply that NIDA didn't know they were funding psilocybin research, which may be true (to use controlled substances, you have to be licensed by the FDA, not NIDA), but I'm not buying it. Giving human subjects a Schedule I substance is kind of hard to keep under the radar.

The default position of U.S. drug policy is that molecules (drugs) are either "good" (which is to say, FDA-approved--or in the case of nicotine and ethanol, lucrative tax generators) or "bad" (which is to say, not officially approved and/or prohibited). The sheer lunacy of assigning what amounts to moral values to particular arrangements of carbon atoms ought to be obvious on on its face, but perhaps not...

My point here is that the ability of certain classes of drugs to induce profound feelings of introspection, empathy, and insight is hardly news. In the western world, people have been talking about it for decades. (Naturally, other cultures have been aware of this for centuries.) That serious scientists have finally gotten around to replicating a study done in 1962--and are making news by doing so--is something I find more sad than anything else.

There is bottomless potential here to understand ourselves better. While so many neuroscientists toil away pretending that our brains are just like computers, we have ignored for nearly half a century the possibility that some simple little molecules can replicate such a fundamentally human experience as transcendence.

Some of the reluctance to go down this road may stem from a fear of reducing life's experiences to a series of chemical reactions. Perhaps. But my thought is...

So what?

So what if falling in love or religious ecstasy can be understood on a neurochemical level? Does that actually diminish the value of the subjective experience? I'd venture to say that people with firsthand knowledge that their experience has been manipulated would say that it doesn't matter much.

Actually, I don't have to venture. From the report:

Thirty-three percent of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as being the single most spiritually significant experience of his or her life, with an additional 38% rating it to be among the top five...