guided Mettes that day, and his colleague Stephen Ross, the Bellevue
psychiatrist who directed the trial, which sought to determine whether a
single high dose of psilocybin could alleviate the anxiety and depression
that often follow a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
While Bossis, hirsute and bearish, looks the part of a fifty-something
Manhattan shrink with an interest in alternative therapies, Ross, who is
in his forties, comes across as more of a straight arrow; neatly trimmed in
a suit and tie, he could pass for a Wall Street banker. A bookish teenager
growing up in L.A., Ross says he had no personal experience of
psychedelics and knew next to nothing about them before a colleague
happened to mention that LSD had been used successfully to treat
alcoholics in the 1950s and 1960s. This being his psychiatric specialty,
Ross did some research and was astonished to discover a “completely
buried body of knowledge.” By the 1990s, when he began his residency in
psychiatry at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the
history of psychedelic therapy had been erased from the field, never to be
mentioned.
The trial at NYU, along with a sister study conducted in Roland
Griffiths’s lab at Johns Hopkins, represents one of a handful of efforts to
pick up the thread of inquiry that got dropped in the 1970s when
sanctioned psychedelic therapy ended. While the NYU and Hopkins trials
are assessing the potential of psychedelics to help the dying, other trials
now under way are exploring the possibility that psychedelics (usually
psilocybin rather than LSD, because, as Ross explained, it “carries none
of the political baggage of those three letters”) could be used to lift
depression and break addictions—to alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco.
None of this work is exactly new: to delve into the history of clinical
research with psychedelics is to realize that most of this ground has
already been tilled. Charles Grob, the UCLA psychiatrist whose 2011 pilot
study of psilocybin for cancer anxiety cleared the path for the NYU and
Hopkins trials, acknowledges that “in a lot of ways we are simply picking
up the torch from earlier generations of researchers who had to put it
down because of cultural pressures.” But if psychedelics are ever to find
acceptance in modern medicine, all this buried knowledge will need to be
excavated and the experiments that produced it reprised according to the
prevailing scientific standards.
frankie
(Frankie)
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