Feed Your Head; Psilocybin Research Shows Promise

Maybe in the future it will be used to treat depression and other mental illnesses. Maybe the idiotic war on drugs will finally end, or at least focus on more lethal drugs than pot and shrooms. Since 1992, about six million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges. Stupid. What a waste of resources.

The positive psychological effects of psilocybin — the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms — last for more than a year, say scientists.

Fourteen months after taking psilocybin pills administered by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Roland Griffiths, more than half of 36 volunteers said the experience was among the most significant of their lives.

The results, published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, demonstrate the persistence of effects first reported by Griffiths in a landmark 2006 experiment. That study, published inPsychopharmacology, was the first in 40 years to test a hallucinogen on people in a clinical setting in the United States.

Formerly the focus of academic and government inquiry, hallucinogens were abandoned by researchers in the aftermath of the Sixties, when rampant recreational abuse frightened authorities and the drugs became culturally intertwined with chemical excess. But with a small but growing number of researchers now studying hallucinogens, the once-promising field is alive again.