The Second Coming of LSD

“Cold” tells how humanity discovered psychedelics, then banned them, and now treats diseases with them

Australia recently became the first country in the world where doctors can prescribe psychedelic drugs to patients. Thus history came full circle: from the discovery of LSD, general enthusiasm and the psychedelic revolution to an almost complete ban - and a return to clinical practice.

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Opening

This story began 80 years ago, in April 1943. Not long before this, Albert Hofmann, an employee of the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, first obtained lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD - from ergot (fungi of the genus Cláviceps). It was supposed to be used as a drug for the treatment of migraines and nervous disorders, as well as to induce labor: such properties were exhibited by the alkaloids contained in ergot.

While working with the new substance, Hoffman felt unwell, assumed that the problem was precisely the microscopic amounts of LSD remaining on his hands, and decided to test this by taking 0.25 mg consciously. He felt unwell again and rode his bike home. This trip turned out to be the first psychedelic trip, and this day itself - April 19 - entered the calendars as the day of the beginning of the psychedelic era, “bicycle day”.

The first scientific article describing the properties of LSD was published in 1947, and in 1949 Sandoz began offering it to research institutions as an experimental drug. By 1951, more than 100 scientific articles had been published around the world describing various properties and aspects of the use of LSD. In addition, the drug quickly acquired “neighbors”—drugs of the same class, mescaline, psilocybin, and dimethyltryptamine, which also began to be intensively studied.

Psychedelics were seen as a means of simulating exacerbations of schizophrenia (that is, you take a drug and it is as if you are experiencing an exacerbation of schizophrenia) to study the very nature of mental disorders, so LSD was called a “psychotomimetic”, that is, a substance that allows you to reproduce the state of psychosis. In addition, they have been tried as remedies for chronic alcoholism, chronic pain and obsessive neuroses, drug addiction and symptoms of depression. As part of psychotherapy, LSD was used to quickly restore memories of experienced trauma and thereby make therapy more effective. In the 1950s and 60s, approximately 40 thousand people underwent psychedelic therapy.

program LSD was experimented with by the CIA, which hoped to obtain a means to improve the effectiveness of interrogations - in the MKUltra , which began in 1953 and lasted more than 10 years. During the experiments, the subjects received the drug without knowing it; two Americans died and many more suffered from the consequences of these experiments. Already in 1976, journalists found out that the CIA planned to order 10 kilograms of LSD - that’s 100 million doses.

But the real fame of LSD and drugs in this class came from completely different experiments - numerous attempts to achieve new spiritual experiences with its help, made by adherents of the countercultural psychedelic revival: artists, rock musicians, poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, who considered psychedelics as one of the elements of their opposition to the world of the establishment and the cult of profit.

However, scientists have also been involved in this kind of experiments. For example, in 1962, Walter Pahnke of Harvard conducted a blinded, placebo-controlled study of theology students to test whether psilocybin could induce deep spiritual experiences in them. Twenty participants (half given a placebo - niacin, half - psilocybin) attended a church service on Good Friday (hence the name of the experiment, the Good Friday Experiment). After six months, participants who were under the influence of psilocybin said that the experiment had revitalized their religious lives and inspired them to serve.

The prophet of the psychedelic revival was Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who believed that drugs could free a person from the grip of the “world of play” (in Eric Berne’s terminology).

Who is Eric Berne

Eric Berne (1910–1970), American psychologist and psychiatrist, developer of transactional analysis and author of the widely known book “Games People Play,” according to which any human interaction with the outside world is subject to the logic of the role - child, adult and parent - which he takes over.

In the fall of 1960, Leary began involving colleagues, students, and even local prison inmates in his experiments with psilocybin as part of a rehabilitation project. He was arrested more than once for possession of marijuana.

However, the revolution ended very quickly: in 1966, US authorities began to ban LSD at the state level - due to the widespread use of it “non-medically” and its strong associations with countercultural movements. Quite a lot of complaints have accumulated against the results of experiments and many suspicions that taking psychedelics is not so harmless to health: some experiments on animals showed that psychedelics can affect genes and fertility (later these results were not confirmed), some people complained about flashbacks - uninvited and unprovoked psychedelic sensations without the participation of substances.

In the early 1970s, drug companies stopped producing psychedelics, ending fundamental experimentation with them.

Return

However, in the last two decades, psychedelics have begun to make a comeback in laboratories and hospital wards - despite the fact that in most countries around the world they are included in the lists of controlled substances and are prohibited.

What has changed? Neuroscientists have powerful new tools for studying the brain - most notably functional magnetic resonance imaging, which allows live monitoring of brain activity and understanding how mental experiences relate to what is happening in the brain, and how exactly psychedelics affect it. In addition, the accumulated data has eliminated many previous concerns. In particular, it has not yet been possible to establish a lethal dose of psilocybin, although it is clear that it should be at least a thousand times higher than the therapeutic one.

From 2000 to 2020, scientists conducted more than 600 studies related to the study of various aspects of the use of psychedelics. With the help of psilocybin and MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine - a semi-synthetic psychoactive compound of the amphetamine series, belonging to the phenylethylamine group, widely known under the slang name of the tablet form of ecstasy), they are again trying to treat depression, PTSD, anxiety and obsessive - compulsive disorders and tobacco addiction , alcohol , trying to relieve anxiety in people with autism.

Prophet MDMA

The second coming of psychedelics had its own prophet - chemist and pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin , who synthesized numerous “designer” psychedelic substances in the 1970–1980s; independently, with friends and with his wife, he experimented with them and, in particular, contributed to the spread of MDMA.

In particular, the results of one clinical study indicate that 67% of patients were able to get rid of PTSD with the help of MDMA. “I was really able to feel like it (the trauma) was no longer part of me, no longer attached to me,” says one participant in another study.

Another psychedelic drug, psilocybin, has been shown to help treat depression, and fMRI confirmed that patients had improved neural connections in their brains. Over the past decade and a half, at least six clinical studies with psilocybin have shown significant improvements in patients with depression.

According to scientists, the disorders for which psychedelics are effective - from mood disorders to addictions - are associated with vicious cycles, mental patterns formed by feelings of guilt and attempts to get rid of it, such as in alcoholism. “People get stuck in these patterns, and the hypothesis is that these remedies help shake people out of these repetitive mental patterns,” says Dr. Greg Fonzo of the University of Texas at Austin.

Side effects Clinical studies in recent years have not found any dangerous side effects when taking psilocybin, LSD and a number of other psychedelics. Side effects included panic attacks, headaches, nausea and diarrhea, low mood, chills, feeling cold, a feeling of body deformation and various types of illusions. But they all passed pretty quickly. At the same time, scientists emphasize that all experiments were carried out taking into account safety requirements when taking psychedelics. The main one is the presence of observers, since the main risk in this case is severe stress and panic, which can lead to dangerous behavior and death.

So it is possible that the “second psychedelic revolution” will not be as bright as it was in the 1960s, but it will be able to bring many out of the “inner psychic prison”.