Timothy may have been onto something.

[oscarthewild]

Well, it was known that Timothy may have been on something now it turns out Timothy may have been onto something.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/hea...cle1834341.ece

 

[Lucky Strike]

* In the late 1960s, a recreational dose typically amounted to one tenth of a grain of sand, or between 100 and 200 micrograms or "mics". Jim Morrison allegedly took 10,000 mics before performing with The Doors in 1966. * But, according to the NHS, there is no evidence to suggest LSD does any long-term damage to the body or mind.

Really?

 

[faustian bargain]

here's an article from January 11, UK Guardian, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hoffman:

[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Psychiatrist calls for end to 30-year taboo over use of LSD as a medical treatment[/FONT] [FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]· Drug inventor celebrates 100th birthday today · Battle ahead for approval and funding of UK studies[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Sarah Boseley, health editor Wednesday January 11, 2006 The Guardian [/FONT] British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once "acid" hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon. Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March - the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years. "I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument," says Dr Sessa. "I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience. "Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That's what really drives me." LSD was brought to the UK in 1952 by psychiatrist Ronnie Sandison who had visited the labs of the drug company Sandoz, where Dr Hofmann worked. He came home with 100 ampoules in his bag and began to use them at Powick hospital, near Malvern in Worcestershire, on selected patients with conditions such as obsessional hand-washing or anxiety who did not respond to psychoanalysis. Dr Sessa has looked back on the papers published by Dr Sandison and others from the heyday of psychedelic psychiatry, and thinks they may have modern relevance. They claim positive results in patients who were given LSD in psychotherapy to get to the deep-seated roots of anxiety disorders and neuroses. It took them, as the title of Aldous Huxley's book has it, from the poem of William Blake, through "the doors of perception". Yet when he was a student, says 33-year-old Dr Sessa, all his textbooks stated categorically that LSD had no medical use. "It is as if a whole generation of psychiatrists have had this systematically erased from their education," he says. "But for the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It's almost as if there has been an active demonisation." He says he understands why. LSD became a huge social issue. But he argues that nobody would ask anaesthetists to forgo morphine use because heroin is a social evil, and cannabis is now being formulated as a therapeutic drug. Since the 1960s, when research was stopped on LSD, "depression and anxiety disorders have risen to almost epidemic proportions and are now the greatest single burden on today's health services. Therefore, today's political climate may be just right for the medical profession to reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs", writes Dr Sessa in an as-yet unpublished paper with Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation which promotes research into the nature of consciousness. A major conference is being held in Basel, Switzerland, this weekend in honour of Dr Hofmann's birthday. Scientists in the burgeoning psychedelic psychiatry movement will be there, alongside artists, musicians and those who look to hallucinatory drugs for spiritual experience. In the past five years, the international climate has been changing, albeit very slowly. In the US, Israel, Switzerland and Spain, a few research projects have been permitted into the effects of LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms - on the brain. They look at the use of the drugs in conditions such as post-traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive disorder and the alleviation of distress in the dying. But Dr Sessa knows it will be an uphill struggle to get research proposals approved and funded in the UK. He believes the drugs are safe in medical use - given in a pure form in tiny doses and in controlled and supervised surroundings. But LSD is associated with flashbacks, and brain scans of clubbers using ecstasy have shown damage. Some psychiatrists are likely to be appalled at the idea. Former patients of Dr Sandison claimed his use of LSD had caused them long-term problems and attempted to bring a court action for compensation. Dr Sandison says his early experimentation with LSD in the 50s produced results in difficult cases. "I recall one young woman. She had a near-drowning experience. She developed a severe anxiety state. It coloured everything. "We didn't get anywhere with ordinary psychotherapy, so we went on to LSD. She recalled an extraordinary memory of how, when she was eight, she had gone into a store with her mother and become separated from her. She went to a counter to ask an assistant and felt a man behind her trying to feel her up. She felt very confused by this and said she thought it was an odd way of stealing her purse." he said. "It was pretty alarming. She had suppressed all this. We began to get somewhere and we discovered why she had sexual difficulties with her husband and felt angry towards men." In 1954 he wrote his first paper, for the Journal of Mental Sciences, on LSD use in 36 patients. It concluded: "We consider that the drug will find a significant place in the treatment of the psychoneuroses and allied mental illnesses." But by the mid-60s, Dr Sandison had had enough. The drug had become a street problem. He gave evidence in a couple of Old Bailey cases where arson and a murder were committed under the influence of LSD. "I don't see either ethically or professionally or technically why it shouldn't be used in the future," he says. "But anything done now has to be very different from what we did. All the expertise developed in those years by a large number of people has been lost so we have to start again."

 

[Dakota rube]

As one who has taken LSD and other hallucinogenics hundreds of times (but none for the last 25 years) I cannot for the life of me understand how there can be a constructive medical use.

 

[lawyerdad]

Originally Posted by Dakota rube

As one who has taken LSD and other hallucinogenics hundreds of times (but none for the last 25 years) I cannot for the life of me understand how there can be a constructive medical use.
Well of course you can't understand it, you've fried your brains with all those drugs, you old hippy!

 

[lawyerdad]

Or maybe you haven't take enough. It's definitely one or the other.

 

[Manton]

Originally Posted by Dakota rube

As one who has taken LSD and other hallucinogenics hundreds of times (but none for the last 25 years) I cannot for the life of me understand how there can be a constructive medical use.
If I recall correctly what I read some years ago, LSD was developed by psychiatrists to treat certain mental illnesses. The early tests, conducted in the 50s, were considered clinically successful and written up in the journals. Ken Kesey was actually one of the test subjects. Back then, the stuff being so new, it was not illegal. The government probably didn't even know about it. Kesey ruined it for the docs by taking it outside the hospital and using it for play. That's what eventually got the stuff banned and all the trials stopped. A lot of the researchers were pissed off and thought that a promising treatment had been abused and then unfairly shut down. I think something like this account is given in Wolfe's Electric Koolaid Acid Test.

 

[RJman]

Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were two of the mental health professionals at Harvard who championed LSD and ended up becoming its proselytizers. Alpert later stopped using drugs and changed his name to Ram Dass. Leary, well, we know the story.

 

[caelte]

I can see in the right enviroment, maybe, it could be used to treat patients but it is like handling nitro. I don't know.

I think only sane, emotionally stable people, people who don't need help, should use it.

Preventing it's use professionally is stupid and ignorant.

I don't believe Jim Morrison took ten thousand mics before performing.

 

[VMan]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...a213221D59.DTL

Mushroom Drug Produces Mystical Experience By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Monday, July 10, 2006 (07-10) 21:32 PDT New York (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks — all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s. Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Such comments "just seemed unbelievable," said Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the study's lead author. But don't try this at home, he warned. "Absolutely don't." Almost a third of the research participants found the drug experience frightening even in the very controlled setting. That suggests people experimenting with the illicit drug on their own could be harmed, Griffiths said. Viewed by some as a landmark, the study is one of the few rigorous looks in the past 40 years at a hallucinogen's effects. The researchers suggest the drug someday may help drug addicts kick their habit or aid terminally ill patients struggling with anxiety and depression. It may also provide a way to study what happens in the brain during intense spiritual experiences, the scientists said. Funded in part by the federal government, the research was published online Tuesday by the journal Psychopharmacology. Psilocybin has been used for centuries in religious practices, and its ability to produce a mystical experience is no surprise. But the new work demonstrates it more clearly than before, Griffiths said. Even two months after taking the drug, pronounced SILL-oh-SY-bin, most of the volunteers said the experience had changed them in beneficial ways, such as making them more compassionate, loving, optimistic and patient. Family members and friends said they noticed a difference, too. Charles Schuster, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the work a landmark. "I believe this is one of the most rigorously well-controlled studies ever done" to evaluate psilocybin or similar substances for their potential to increase self-awareness and a sense of spirituality, he said. He did not participate in the research. Psilocybin, like LSD or mescaline, is one of a class of drugs called hallucinogens or psychedelics. While they have been studied by scientists in the past, research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of the drugs during the 1960s, Griffiths said. Some work resumed in the 1990s. "We've lost 40 years of (potential) research experience with this whole class of compounds," he said. Now, with modern-day scientific methods, "I think it's time to pick up this research field." The study volunteers had an average age of 46, had never used hallucinogens, and participated to some degree in religious or spiritual activities like prayer, meditation, discussion groups or religious services. Each tried psilocybin during one visit to the lab and the stimulant methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) on one or two other visits. Only six of the volunteers knew when they were getting psilocybin. Each visit lasted eight hours. The volunteers lay on a couch in a living-room-like setting, wearing an eye mask and listening to classical music. They were encouraged to focus their attention inward. Psilocybin's effects lasted for up to six hours, Griffiths said. Twenty-two of the 36 volunteers reported having a "complete" mystical experience, compared to four of those getting methylphenidate. That experience included such things as a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love. People say "they can't possibly put it into words," Griffiths said. Two months later, 24 of the participants filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their reaction to psilocybin one of the five top most meaningful experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with another 40 percent ranking it in the top five. About 80 percent said that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either "moderately" or "very much."

 

[FLMountainMan]

I used LSD in my college years and while I am glad I did, I would never do it again. The first four hours were great, just incredible, but you eventually just want to turn your brain off, unclench your teeth, and get some effing sleep. The effect it has on your brain is amazing, somewhat scary that it can affect you so much and that your grip on reality is that loose in the first place.
I do not see how a chemical that affects your brain so profoundly could not have any side effects from long-term use.

 

[itsstillmatt]

Originally Posted by FLMountainMan

I used LSD in my college years and while I am glad I did, I would never do it again. The first four hours were great, just incredible, but you eventually just want to turn your brain off, unclench your teeth, and get some effing sleep. The effect it has on your brain is amazing, somewhat scary that it can affect you so much and that your grip on reality is that loose in the first place.
I do not see how a chemical that affects your brain so profoundly could not have any side effects from long-term use.
+1 Exactly my experience as well. It is the lack of sleep at the end that kills.

 

[faustian bargain]

i'll leave the questions of utility and side effects for the psychiatrists to decide...if they're ever allowed to research it.

i'm about as likely to take LSD recreationally as I am to get crazy with any legal prescription mood-altering drug.

 

[lawyerdad]

I knew that behind the facades you were all just a bunch of f'ing hippies!

 

[Dakota rube]

One of the things about hallucinogens that always scared me was the utter lack of quality control. Two friends of mine and I injested some acid one night and went on to smoke and drink for a couple hours. One of my pals and I were not getting any buzz from the acid, so I went to the guy from whom I'd purchased it and demanded (get this!) not a refund, but three more hits!

My pal and I ate the additional dose and went back to the party and tracked down the third member of our merry little band to give him his. He looked at us and just about freaked out. "No way am I taking another one of these," he said. He'd started coming on in the last few minutes.

Like real humanitarians, we insisted he eat the second hit (along with us, of course). We proceeded to party like rock stars for about 16 hours!

BTW: the guy who supplied the goodies is now a member of Congress!