Andrew M Brown

Psychedelic revival

Mind-bending drugs are making a comeback in the field of psychiatry

Acid is back. For the first time since the 1960s there are signs of a rekindling of serious interest in psychedelic drugs — conferences, clinical tests, and a full-blown study is planned, with human subjects. LSD belonged to history — to grizzly-haired hippies and travellers, the ‘counter culture’. Now, an informal alliance of psychiatrists, therapists and psychopharmacologists are seeking to shine a fresh light on to psychedelics, the group which includes LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms). MDMA (ecstasy) is also in this category.

There are two main areas of interest: what psychedelics reveal about how the brain works; and their potential as medicines. There is a third, fuzzier angle: the hippies’ conviction that these are quasi-sacred substances, and that they act as a doorway into a mystical experience. In hippy terms, once you’ve passed through that gate, you’re ‘experienced’; you’ve ‘passed the acid test’. It’s a notion going back to Albert Hofmann, the idealistic Swiss chemist who first synthesised LSD, and beyond, to tribal cultures that use plants to induce visions.

Dr Ben Sessa is a consultant psychiatrist and one of the doctors planning a major trial of MDMA, in Cardiff. He lives with his family in the west country. He is, by his own account, exceedingly cautious. But even he has a hunch the hippies were on to something: ‘I can imagine a day when [psychedelics] are seen as having a value, for healthy people to have a life-affirming experience, not in a hedonistic way but for expanding normal life.’ He has taken psilocybin himself, under clinical supervision.

For hardcore enthusiasts, LSD never went away, despite the fact that it was made illegal in 1966 and is a Class A drug, attracting a maximum life sentence for supply.

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