Showing posts with label LSD therapy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LSD therapy. Show all posts

Friday, March 16, 2012

LSD and Alcohol: The History


Back when acid was legal.

After last week’s blitz of coverage concerning studies done in the 60s on the use of LSD for the treatment of alcoholism, I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of background; some pertinent psychedelic history to help put this information in perspective:

It may come as a surprise to many people that throughout the 60s, there were LSD clinics operating in England and Europe. European LSD therapists tended to use very low doses as an adjunct to traditional psychoanalytic techniques. But North American researchers took a different, bolder approach. When “psychedelic” therapy began to catch on in Canada and the United States, therapists typically gave patients only one or two sessions at very high doses. These early efforts were aimed at producing spontaneous breakthroughs or recoveries in alcoholics through some manner of religious epiphany or inner conversion experience. The only other quasi-medical approach of the day, the Schick Treatment Center’s brand of “aversion therapy,” was not seen to produce very compelling long-term recovery rates, and subsequently fell out of favor. In this light, the early successes with LSD therapy, sometimes claimed to be in the 50-75 per cent range, looked noteworthy indeed. However, the design and criteria of the LSD/alcoholism studies varied so widely that it has never been possible to draw definitive conclusions about the work that was done, except to say that LSD therapy seemed to be strikingly effective for certain alcoholics. Some patients were claiming that two or three trips on LSD were worth years of conventional psychotherapy—a claim not heard again until the advent of Prozac thirty years later.

 “I’ve taken lysergic acid several times, and have collected considerable information about it,” Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, disclosed in a private letter written in 1958. “At the moment, it can only be used for research purposes. It would certainly be a huge misfortune if it ever got loose in the general public without a careful preparation as to what the drug is and what the meaning of its effects may be.”  Like many others, Wilson was excited by LSD’s potential as a treatment for chronic alcoholism. Even Hollywood was hip to the new therapy. Cary Grant, among others, took LSD under psychiatric supervision and pronounced it immensely helpful as a tool for psychological insight. Andre Previn, Jack Nicholson, and James Coburn agreed. (It could be argued that the human potential movement began here).

No drug this powerful and strange, if American history was any guide, could remain legal for long. Unlike their colleagues in the intelligence agencies, politicians and law enforcement officers didn’t know about Mongolian shamans and their fly agaric mushrooms; about European witches and their use of psychoactive plant drugs like nightshade and henbane; about Persian sheiks with their cannabis water pipes; Latin American brujos with their magic vines.

But for the CIA, the big fish was always LSD.

What interested the Central Intelligence Agency about LSD was its apparent ability to produce the symptoms of acute psychosis. Operation ARTICHOKE was designed to ferret out LSD’s usefulness as an instrument of psychological torture, and as a possible means of destabilizing enemy forces by means of aerosol sprays or contaminated water supplies. (The drug’s overwhelming potency made such parts-per-billion fantasies a possibility.)

The agency knew where to turn for a secure American source of supply. Eli Lilly and Co., the giant drug manufacturer, was already involved in LSD research on behalf of the U.S. government. The trouble was that LSD was expensive, and all roads led to Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. Organic LSD had to be painstakingly extracted from ergot, a fungus that grows in kernels of rye. Eventually, Sandoz and Eli Lilly successfully synthesized LSD in their own laboratories. With the advent of a reliable domestic supplier of synthetic LSD, the CIA under Allen Dulles was assured of a steady source for experimental purposes.

When LSD did not pan out as a reliable agent of interrogation, CIA investigators turned their attention to its purported ability to mimic acute psychosis—its “psychomimetic” aspect—which researchers were praising as a new avenue toward a biological understanding of schizophrenia. The CIA funneled grant money for LSD research into the academic and commercial R&D world through a host of conduits. Various experiments with non-consenting subjects—typically military or prison personnel—showed that LSD could sometimes break down established patterns of thought, creating a “twilight zone” during which the mind was more susceptible to various forms of psychological coercion and control. Perhaps, under the influence of LSD, prisoners could be transformed into counter-espionage agents. It also occurred to the CIA that the same drug could be used on their own agents for the same purposes. Numerous CIA agents took LSD trips in order to familiarize them with acid’s Alice-in-Wonderland terrain. Some of these unusual experiments were captured on film for use in military training videos.

One place where ARTICHOKE research took place was the Addiction Research Centre at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky—the same hospital that specialized in the treatment of hardcore heroin addicts. Lexington was part hospital and part penitentiary, which made it perfect for human experimentation. The addict/inmates of Lexington were sometimes given LSD without their consent, a practice also conducted at the federal prison in Atlanta, and at the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey. 

In 1953, then-CIA director Allen Dulles authorized Operation MK-ULTRA, which superseded earlier clandestine drug investigations. Under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist, the government began slipping LSD and other psychoactive drugs to unwitting military personnel. During a work retreat in Maryland that year, technicians from both the Army and the CIA were dosed without their knowledge, and were later told that they had ingested a mind-altering drug. Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian biochemist involved in research on biological warfare, wandered away from the gathering in a confused state, and committed suicide a few days later by leaping to his death from an upper floor of the Statler Hilton in New York City. The truth about Olson’s death was kept secret from his family, and from the rest of the nation, for more than twenty years. In 1966, LSD was added to the federal schedule of controlled substances, in the same category as heroin and amphetamine. Simple possession became a felony. The Feds had turned off the spigot, and the research came to a halt. Federal drug enforcement agents began showing up at the homes and offices of well-known West Coast therapists, demanding the surrender of all stockpiles of LSD-25. The original acid elite was being hounded, harassed, and threatened in a rancid atmosphere of pharmaceutical McCarthyism. Aldous Huxley, Humphrey Osmond, even father figure Albert Hoffman, all viewed these American developments with dismay. The carefully refined parameters and preparations, the attention to set and setting, the concerns over dosage, had gone out the window, replaced by a massive, uncontrolled experiment in the streets. Small wonder, then, that the circus atmosphere of the Haight-Ashbury “Summer of Love” in 1967 seemed so badly timed. Countercultural figures were extolling the virtues of LSD for the masses—not just for research, not just for therapy, not as part of some ancient religious ritual—but also just for the freewheeling American hell of it. What could be more democratic than the act of liberating the most powerful mind-altering drug known to man?

It is at least conceivable that researchers and clinicians eventually would have backed away from LSD anyway, on the grounds that the drug’s effects were simply too weird and unpredictable to conform to the rigorous dictates of clinical studies. Nonetheless, researchers had been given a glimpse down a long, strange tunnel, before federal authorities put an end to the research.


Graphics Credit: http://news.sky.com

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

MAPS Sponsors Psychedelic Confab


And J.R. will discuss his LSD trips with you.

The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has put together a roster of very big psychedelic guns, as well as a few surprises, for its mini-conference on December 12-13 in Los Angeles. On tap for the convocation are such luminaries as Stanislav Grof of Holotropic Breathwork fame; as well as Charles Grob, professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and a psychedelic research of long standing who recently studied the effects of psilocybin on death anxiety in terminal cancer patients.

“Catalysts: The Impact of Psychedelics from Consciousness to the Clinic, and from Culture to Creativity” will feature presentations and discussions on “psychedelic science, the current state of psychedelic research, and clinical applications for therapeutic use.”

Other experts among the scientists, physicians, psychologists, writers, and artists expected to attend include Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, who has specialized in research on MDMA (Ecstasy) as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. Another scheduled attendee, James Fadiman, was introduced to the field of psychedelic drugs by his Harvard undergraduate advisor Richard Alpert, who later became well known as Baba Ram Dass. Fadiman holds the distinction of being the last LSD researcher to be shut down by the U.S. government, when he was at San Francisco State University in 1972.

Also in attendance will be Julie Holland, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, and the author of “Ecstasy: A Complete Guide,” and Clare Wilkins, director of the Pangea Biomedics Ibogaine Clinic in Mexico.

Special Bonus Appearance:

I can’t imagine that anyone under the age of 55 is likely to know who Larry Hagman is. Long ago, he was on a camp TV show about a Texas oil bazillionaire with nasty habits. Not only was he a big TV star, he was also old enough to have been around when LSD psychotherapy came to the couches of Hollywood analysts for a brief period in the 1960s and attracted some other odd ducks like Cary Grant and James Coburn. Hagman, Star of TV’s “Dallas” and “I Dream of Jeannie,” will discuss his experiences with LSD psychotherapy.

Earlier, he talked about his experiences in a 2003 interview with Rick Doblin, published in the MAPS journal and excerpted below:

Before I tried LSD, I'd been going to a psychologist for a couple of years…. I had been addicted to tobacco and Bontril, a mild form of amphetamine, doctor-prescribed of course….

I was backstage at a performance one time with Crosby, Stills & Nash and I was talking about it to David Crosby. David said, well, shit, man, here. He handed me a handful of little pills. I said what the fuck? He says this is LSD. It was the best going around at that time. This was before Blue Cheer and Windowpane. This was the original Owsley. He gave me about 25 pills. I said, well, how much should I take? He says, well, don't take more than one….

… my first acid trip was the most illuminating experience of my life. I would highly recommend it for people who study and prepare for it and who are not neurotic or psychotic. I don't know what it would do to psychotic people. I know what it does to neurotic people who can't handle that. They get terrified and do crazy things like jumping out of windows and stuff like that. That's happened to a couple of friends of mine.

Graphics Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Hagman

Monday, August 23, 2010

Psychedelics Back in the Spotlight


But will it be any different this time?

Two papers on the use of psychedelics for the treatment of mood disorders surfaced last week in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. The articles have garnered a great deal of publicity, especially the results having to do with the effect of ketamine on depression. I cannot pretend to offer more insightful coverage than the posts and articles listed below have already done, but I do think it’s profitable to take a closer look at the Nature piece by Franz X. Vollenweider and Michael Kometer. This paper looked at both dissociative anesthetics, like PCP and ketamine, AND “classical hallucinogens,” like psilocybin and LSD.

Traditionally, LSD has been thought of as a relentlessly serotonin-active drug, while ketamine was more actively involved with NMDA and other glutamate receptors. There is accumulating evidence, the researchers believe, that a common mechanism undergirds the operations of both kinds of psychedelics. “Despite their different primary modes of action,” they write, “classical hallucinogens and dissociative anesthetics both modulate glutamatergic neurotransmission in the prefrontal-limbic circuitry that is implicated in the pathophysiology of mood disorders.”

It’s worth noting that Vollenweider and Kometer maintain that almost all depressed patients relapse within two weeks after a single dose of ketamine. In studies of patients with advanced cancer, say the authors, psilocybin improves mood just as effectively, and lasts longer, than ketamine.

While there are significant differences between the subjective effects of ketamine and LSD, there is also “a set of overlapping psychological experiences.” The two trips are different, but not completely different—they share effects such as distortion of perception, visual and auditory hallucinations, a sense that the boundaries of self have softened, and often an ecstatic experience or sense of profound unity. The serotonin-glutamate connection leads the authors to assert that “classical hallucinogens are potent modulators of prefrontal network activity that involves a complex interaction between the serotonin and glutamate systems in prefrontal circuits.”

Alternately, these drugs can trigger a classic “bad trip” in certain users--time, place, circumstance, and innate biology depending.  As the authors put it: “The same hallucinogen might produce a pleasurable loss of ego boundaries combined with feelings of oneness or might lead to a more psychotic ego dissolution that involves fear and paranoid ideation.”

And there you have it: In the case of psychedelics, there are certain extenuating factors which may forever limit the use of these substances for therapeutic purposes. The primary problem is that the drugs are clinically unreliable. With psychedelics, it is always, in a sense, the Lady or the Tiger.  “The strongly dissociative effects of ketamine may limit clinical use despite its reported efficacy,” the researchers conclude. Which is, I think, putting it mildly--and which brings the authors to suggest that pharmacology-assisted psychotherapy might require some tweaks.

Specifically, the hunt is now on for psychedelics that are, well, less psychedelic. In the same way that pharmacologists seek to dial down the euphoric effects of pain medication to lessen the chances for black market abuse, researchers are now looking for ways to tone down the mental fireworks often associated with the use of ketamine, LSD, or psilocybin, on the assumption that these represent nothing but unwanted side effects, rather than the core of the experience that alleviates depression, OCD, and addiction—at least for awhile. These drugs are among the most powerful mind-altering compounds on the planet. So good luck with that project. Studying the behavioral effects of these drugs in the first place is a bit like trying to pin down a writhing fire hose with a pair of tweezers.

Curing or successfully treating chronic ailments like depression and addiction with a power psychoactive medication is both an old and an exciting idea. The Nature opinion piece also documents studies, beginning in the 1960s, which showed that psilocybin and LSD were effective treatments for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).  Other studies have shown alleged successes using low-dose ketamine for heroin addiction. And some of the earliest LSD studies of all showed impressive results when LSD and psychotherapy were combined as a treatment for alcoholism.

 By 1965, the authors claim, there were more than 1,000 published clinical studies on the therapeutic effects of psychedelics.  But many, if not most, of the early studies were marred by procedural problems, lack of control groups, and the fact that researchers from a dozen different disciplines, representing a dozen different experimental methods, predictably emphasized different kinds of experiential results.  The authors suggest that novel neuroimaging techniques combined with an increased understanding of molecular mechanisms of action mean that it will be different this time. If the only real result of the ketamine studies is increased funding for research on psychedelic drugs after a long hiatus, that is still progress, and it’s long overdue.

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