Study finds mushrooms' magic

2008-07-01 10:07

New York - In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project.

She felt like she was taking off. She saw colours. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open.

But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day.

"I feel more centred in who I am and what I'm doing," said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, Rhode Island. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."

Scientists reported on Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they had ever had.

The drug, psilocybin, is found in so-called "magic mushrooms". It is illegal in the United States, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.

Hallucinogen

The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It is one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years, since research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of such drugs in the 1960s.

The project made headlines in 2006 when researchers reported on the volunteers just two months after they got the drug.

Experts emphasise that people should not try psilocybin on their own because it could be harmful. Even in the controlled setting of the laboratory, nearly a third of participants felt significant fear under the effects of the drug. Without proper supervision, someone could be harmed, researchers said.

Osborn, in a telephone interview, recalled a powerful feeling of being out of control during her lab experience. "It was ... like taking off, I'm being lifted up," she said. Then came "brilliant colours and beautiful patterns, just stunningly gorgeous, more intense than normal reality".

And then, the sensation that her heart was tearing open.

"It would come in waves," she recalled. "I found myself doing Lamaze-type breathing as the pain came on."

Yet "it was a joyful, ecstatic thing at the same time, like the joy of being alive," she said. She compared it to birthing pains. "There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened."

With further research, psilocybin may prove useful in helping to treat alcoholism and drug dependence, and in aiding seriously ill patients as they deal with psychological distress, said study lead author Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins.

God in a pill?

Griffiths also said that despite the spiritual characteristics reported for the drug experiences, the study says nothing about whether God exists.

"Is this God in a pill? Absolutely not," he said.

The experiment was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The results were published online on Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Fourteen months after taking the drug, 64% of the volunteers said they still felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in terms of things like feeling more creative, self-confident, flexible and optimistic.

And 61% reported at least a moderate behaviour change in what they considered positive ways.

That second question did not ask for details, but elsewhere the questionnaire answers indicated lasting gains in traits like being more sensitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate.

Researchers did not try to corroborate what the participants said about their own behaviour.

But in the earlier analysis at two months after the drug was given, researchers said family and friends backed up what those in the study said about behaviour changes. Griffiths said he has no reason to doubt the answers at 14 months.

Dr Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and paediatrics at the Harbour-UCLA Medical Centre, called the new work an important follow-up to the first study.

He said it is helping to reopen formal study of psychedelic drugs. Grob is on the board of the Heffter Research Institute, which promotes studies of psychedelic substances and helped pay for the new work.

- AP