Psychedelics have been shunned by the medical community for many years despite there being evidence that it has potential for it to be used within a medical context effectively. One of the most researched piece to the psychedelic puzzle in recent years has been the role they are able to play in end-of-life death acceptance.
Death can be a scary thing to think about, for those suffering from cancer and other life threatening conditions, its almost like they can see their own death. If only there was a way in which they could experience it before hand and come to terms with the inevitable. That would allow people to live the last days of their lives in peace rather then in fear. This is where psychedelics come in.
The following is an excerpt from this MAPS article:
"....learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths. Grob’s interest in the power of psychedelics to mitigate mortality’s sting is not just the obsession of one lone researcher. Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont Mass., a psychiatric training hospital for Harvard Medical School, used MDMA — also known as ecstasy — in an effort to ease end-of-life anxieties in two patients with Stage 4 cancer. And there are two ongoing studies using psilocybin with terminal patients, one at New York University’s medical school, led by Stephen Ross, and another at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where Roland Griffiths has administered psilocybin to 22 cancer patients and is aiming for a sample size of 44. “This research is in its very early stages,” Grob told me earlier this month, “but we’re getting consistently good results.”..."
"...Over all among his subjects, he found that their scores on the anxiety scale at one and three months after treatment “demonstrated a sustained reduction in anxiety,” the researchers wrote in The Archives of General Psychiatry. They also found that their subjects’ scores on the Beck Depression Inventory dropped significantly at the six-month follow-up. “The dose of psilocybin that we gave our subjects was relatively low in comparison to the doses in Stanislav Grof’s studies,” Grob told me. “Nevertheless, and even with this modest dose, it appears the drug can relieve the angst and fear of the dying.”..."
The studies are still earlier but it goes to show that a long misunderstood substance can be used for much more then recreation. If you like me, understand why psychedelics are illegal and considered dangerous (Arg! Nixon & Fear Campaigns!!), then you may also know why there has been little to no medical research done on them. Up until recently the FDA in the US has made it extremely difficult for anyone to get approval just to hold onto these drugs for medical testing (Even if the testing is not even on live subjects!!). Tides have begun to shift in another direction and the FDA has been slowly loosening the chains on medical researchers.
Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins initiated a series of studies on Psilocybin mushrooms. When asked what he sees from his subjects are a session he said this”
"To see people who are so beaten down by this illness, and they start actually providing reassurance to the people who love them most, telling them ‘it is all okay and there is no need to worry’— when a dying person can provide that type of clarity for their caretakers, even we researchers are left with a sense of wonder."
This fascinates me and really makes me wonder could be in store, in the future, for psychedelic medicine. How many people right now are on their deaths bed and living with the depression and anxiety right to the bitter end? To many that’s how much… If the studies end up with a net positive then we could see this being introduced into the general public in the next 10 years. Very exciting for someone like who believes in psychedelics as honest-to-god medicine.
When asked about the future of Psilocybin medicine Griffiths says:
"The Heffter Research Institute, which funded our study, has just opened a dialogue with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) about initiating a phase 3 investigation. A phase 3 clinical trial is the gold standard for determining whether something is clinically efficacious and meets the standards that are necessary for it to be released as a pharmaceutical."
I’m really excited for the future of psychedelic experience being integrated into medicine and think you all should be too.
