Commonly known as LSD, the drug lysergic acid diethylamide has properties that can be used therapeutically to treat anxiety, according to research recently published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
The study, “Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases,” sponsored by the California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, was conducted by Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser between 2008 and 2012. It was the first government-approved controlled trial examining LSD’s healing power in more than 40 years.
For the study, Gasser used LSD to treat 12 individuals who were near death, as most of the participants had terminal cancer. Only one of the 12 participants had taken LSD prior to the study. The participants were asked to avoid anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications as well as alcohol for at least one day ahead of their session.
Gasser gave each participant either a 200-microgram dose of LSD or an “active placebo” of 20 micrograms of the drug. The larger dose was “expected to produce the full spectrum of a typical LSD experience, without fully dissolving normal ego structures,” while the placebo dose was expected to give the feeling of an LSD-induced trip, but not improve anxiety.
What Gasser found was that giving the participants the hallucinogen allowed their anxiety to not only decrease in the short-term, but in the long-term, as well. Those given the higher dose of LSD reported less anxiety than those who were given the placebo.
The participants’ “trips” lasted about 10 hours. Each patient was asked to sleep on a couch in Gasser’s office, where he or she would be observed for the duration of the “trip.”
“I told them that each session would be right here, in a safe environment, and I am part of it,’” Gasser told the New York Times. “I said, ‘I can’t guarantee you won’t have intense distress, but I can tell you that if you do, it will pass.’ ”
LSD was developed in Basel, Switzerland, in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company. It is a synthetic compound that can be derived from natural sources such as morning glory seeds and fungus mold on grains, but it is typically created synthetically by a chemist in a lab.
According to Brad Burge, director of communications and marketing for MAPS, the drug works by acting on serotonin, the neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates tension, awareness, perception and memory. Because LSD floods an individual’s serotonin system, Burge said it “produces these feelings of extensive awareness and feeling of connectedness and unity,” which is why it “can be distressing” to be under the effect of LSD.
Widely researched throughout the 1950s and early-1960s before it was banned in 1966 after a surge in nonmedical use, LSD showed promise in helping to treat a variety of medical conditions, including alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, LSD and other psychedelics popular in hippie culture are now classified as Schedule I narcotics, meaning the U.S. government considers them to be highly addictive, carry a high rate of abuse and lack any medicinal benefit. Marijuana is also a Schedule I drug.
Though several of the study’s participants died shortly after the study’s conclusion, since most were terminal cancer patients, one of the participants who is still alive recently shared his experience with the New York Times.
Peter, a 50-year-old Austrian social worker, said he had never taken LSD before, so he dreaded the day he would have to try it.
“There was this fear that it could all go wrong, that it could turn into a bad trip,” said Peter. But he didn’t have a bad trip. “I had what you would call a mystical experience, I guess, lasting for some time, and the major part was pure distress at all these memories I had successfully forgotten for decades.”
While research detailing the healing power of a hallucinogen like LSD may sound abstract to some, the reality is that psychopharmacologists have long believed that psychedelics could be used to help certain patients. LSD was used to treat psychosomatic disorders and neurosis, among other conditions, until it was made illegal in 1966.
Burge said that even though there was a significant amount of research conducted on LSD in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, most people first heard of the drug when it was used recreationally in the 1960s and 70s. Since its use was associated with radical movements, rock-and-roll, new sexual attitudes and other facets of the emerging counter-culture, Burge said the public was never educated on the basics of the drug, like its intended use.
Although Gasser admitted that the trial was too small to be conclusive, he and his fellow researchers — Dr. Rick Doblin, executive director of MAPS, Dominique Holstein of University Hospital Zurich and Rudolf Brenneisen of the University of Bern — indicated that the drug didn’t cause any serious side effects besides temporary “and therapeutically valuable” periods of distress.
Because funding for studies like this come mostly from private donors, Burge said additional research is temporarily on hold, but that MAPS is hoping to conduct additional studies on the medicinal benefits of LSD and other psychedelics.