THE WHOLE IDEA of using a psychedelic drug to treat addiction is not new.
Native Americans have long used peyote as both a sacrament and a
treatment for alcoholism, a scourge of the indigenous community since
the arrival of the white man. Speaking at a meeting of the American
Psychiatric Association in 1971, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger said that
“peyote is not harmful to these people . . . It is a better antidote to alcohol
than anything the missionaries, the white man, the American Medical
Association, and the public health services have come up with.”
Thousands of alcoholics were treated with LSD and other psychedelics
in the 1950s and 1960s, though until recently it’s been hard to say
anything definitive about the results. For a time, the therapy was deemed
effective enough to become a standard treatment for alcoholism in
Saskatchewan. Clinical reports were enthusiastic, yet most of the formal
studies conducted were poorly designed and badly controlled, if at all.
Results were notably impressive when the studies were performed by
sympathetic therapists (and especially by therapists who themselves had
taken LSD) and notably dismal when conducted by inexperienced
investigators who gave mammoth doses to patients with no attention to
set or setting.
The record was a complete muddle until 2012, when a meta-analysis
that combined data from the six best randomized controlled studies done
in the 1960s and 1970s (involving more than five hundred patients in all)
found that indeed there had been a statistically robust and clinically
“significant beneficial effect on alcohol misuse” from a single dose of
LSD, an effect that lasted up to six months. “Given the evidence for a
beneficial effect of LSD on alcoholism,” the authors concluded, “it is
puzzling why this treatment has been largely overlooked.”
Since then, psychedelic therapy for alcohol and other addictions has
undergone a modest and so far encouraging revival, both in university
studies and in various underground settings. In a 2015 pilot study
conducted at the University of New Mexico ten alcoholics received
psilocybin, combined with “motivational enhancement therapy,” a type of
cognitive behavioral therapy designed expressly to treat addiction. By
itself, the psychotherapy had little effect on drinking behavior, but after
the psilocybin session drinking decreased significantly, and these changes
were sustained during the thirty-six weeks of follow-up. Michael
Bogenschutz, the lead investigator, reported a strong correlation between
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