Time For Some Good Ole '60's-Era Hallucinations?

I never understood why, but one of my nicknames in college was "Tripmaster. I only took something like 65 or 75 trips. I had friends who took tons more. I never thought of it as anything beyond a journey into my spiritual side but now Paul Tullis wrote about a medical aspect relevant to the age of pandemics. And, I guarantee you, this coronavirus won't be the last, whether it was made in a lab-- now viewed as likely-- or not. He reminds his readers that "Switzerland is the only place in the world where use of psychedelics in limited cases-- as medicine-- is allowed... That would be for cluster headaches, based on research being done at Matthhias Liechti’s institution, the University Hospital of Basel. Though LSD has been illegal in the U.S. (and, effectively, everywhere else) since 1970, Liechti and a few others, in Basel and at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Hospital, have since the 1990s been ­quietly researching how psychedelics act on the brain, looking at LSD specifically since 2012. And that is why New York–based MindMed is working in Basel. "In March it became the first among several psychedelic pharmaceutical companies to go public, listing on Canada’s NEO exchange. You are not hallucinating: Psychedelic drugs, demonized by politicians, prosecutors, doctors, parents, and virtually everyone else for the last 50 years, are showing remarkable promise as a treatment for a host of significant health conditions, including depression, PTSD, addiction, inflammation, and more." But not specifically COVID-19.

Venture capital is rushing in. [Billionaire Trump crony] Peter Thiel’s Breakthrough Ventures, and Able Partners, an investor in Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand, Goop, are behind a London-based company that has patented a formulation of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for use with treatment-resistant depression. The evidence for psychedelics as medicine far exceeds the evidence for CBD, a compound in marijuana that companies are selling, based on basically nothing, to relieve ills ranging from Parkinson’s to Crohn’s diseases.

Liechti hopes to collaborate with MindMed soon to test whether sub-perceptual doses of LSD are an effective treatment for ADHD in adults-- and there is actually some indication that it might work. “We’re using chemicals to enhance neuronal connectivity in the brain, opening different parts of the brain to talk to each other,” Freeman says.

...MindMed is also working on a compound derived from ibogaine, a psychedelic that comes from the bark of a tree that grows in central Africa, to treat opioid addiction. Ibogaine was extolled by the late banking heir and Bitcoin billionaire Matthew Mellon, ex-­husband of Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon; he said it cured him of his opioid addiction.

Meanwhile ketamine, which at certain doses is used as a general anesthetic for children (and as a club drug by slightly older children), is already available by prescription for-- treatment-­resistant depression. MDMA (aka ecstasy or molly) has been used illegally in psychotherapy for decades, but it can now legally be given to select patients with PTSD outside a clinical trial-- even though it’s still a DEA Schedule I drug “with no currently accepted medical use.”

...Compass Pathways, the London company testing whether psilocybin helps with ­treatment-­resistant depression, seems to be on the brink of something too. “The best available evidence” of whether it works, or whether previous studies conducted without a control group taking a placebo were a fluke, “will come from this study,” says Metten Somers, a psychiatrist who runs one of the trial’s 21 sites, at University Medical Center–Utrecht in the Netherlands.

...In 1953, British author Aldous Huxley took mescaline, a compound that occurs in peyote and other cacti and has effects similar to those of LSD, and he described his experience as overwhelmingly positive. Two years later Manhattan banker and mushroom fanatic R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, having heard reports from a Harvard ethnobotanist of a species that caused “visions.” He wrote up his experience in Life magazine.

Reading reports that sounded similar to descriptions by the severely mentally ill of what was going on in their minds, researchers began to wonder if what drove mental disorders was chemistry—a question that eventually led to the development of Prozac and other antidepressants, which have helped millions. By 1961 researchers at Stanford and other universities were studying the effects of LSD and mescaline on healthy volunteers under permits from the FDA.

Could these compounds be the key to unlocking the mysteries of psychosis? Sandoz supplied LSD to researchers all over the U.S., from Maryland to California, and Hofmann would go on to identify psilocybin as the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and synthesize it.

But psychedelics would quickly spill out of academic and institutional control. In 1960, LSD started showing up as a street drug. The same year, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took mushrooms together. Leary and a colleague (Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass) began to evangelize about psychedelics and their potential to expand human consciousness.

As hundreds of thousands of young people decided to see for themselves, media reports, many of them false, started telling horror stories about kids who had taken the drugs and ended up in hospitals, or dead. In 1966, Sandoz withdrew its supply from scientists, and the FDA ordered 60 psychedelic researchers to halt their work. The first wave of psychedelic research came to an abrupt end nearly everywhere. California banned LSD that year, and the federal government followed in 1970.

...When scientists started looking at psychedelics, it was for insights into the mechanisms of mental illness, but they soon discovered that the substances could also be cures. Psychedelics had been studied as treatments for alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and OCD, among other conditions. Though not well designed by today’s standards, many early studies showed impressive results.

Moreover, there appeared to be no such thing as a lethal dose-- something that cannot be said even about many over-the-counter medications. People who freaked out and went to a hospital after taking too much acid walked out several hours later. Wellness guru Andrew Weil, volunteering at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968, developed a protocol for San Franciscans on bad trips: Leave them alone.

...[I]n light of the fact that the latest class of psychiatric drugs, a category that includes Prozac, are ineffective in 30 percent of the patients who take them, and rates of serious mental illness and suicide are climbing, it will be hard, as the data accumulates, for the FDA to deny patients access to psychedelics-- whatever middle-aged guys are selling on the Santa Cruz wharf.

“When I was a resident, if someone had told me there could be a treatment you could take once and immediately feel better from severe depression,” Woolley says, “I would have said that’s impossible.”

Why bring this up now? Depression. I don't get that and "cabin fever" hasn't been a problem for me during this pandemic. But it seems to be a big problem for millions of Americans. I wonder if we'' ever see them tripping their brains out and listening to-- well even to early Ted Nugent-- instead of running around dressed as terrorists with assault weapons.

Eric Massa, Baba Ram Dass and...What LSD Could Have Done

No gay stereotypes here

I've been speculating that my friend Eric Massa has been having a nervous breakdown because he spent his life so tightly closeted that he had never had to really confront the possibility that he was... bisexual or something. When he was outed, his entire world came crashing down around him, including his inner world-- all in the bright, unforgiving klieg lights of cheap national notoriety. Then a few days ago Noah raised the possibility that Eric's erratic behavior is caused by Rituximab, a genetically engineered chimeric monoclonal antibody used to treat non-Hodgkins lymphoma. a drug whose side effects sometimes include psychosis.

Eric's from a military family, went to Annapolis and has led a pretty regimented life. One of his kids remarked offhandedly that he always seemed angry.

I'll bet Eric doesn't read Out magazine. The newest issue has a short blurb about another man from our generation who had some trouble coping with his homosexuality, Richard Alpert. Never heard of him? How about Baba Ram Dass?

Both were important names-- of the same person-- when I was growing up. Alpert was a professor ay Harvard who worked with an old friend of mine-- the person who gave me my first acid trip-- Timothy Leary. I worked for Leary, briefly, in Millbrook, NY, where he and Alpert were doing LSD experiments. Soon after, Alpert went to India, immersed himself in spiritual Hinduism and came out the other side as an important teacher and the writer of one of the books most important to me in the world, Be Here Now. I never did ask Eric if he'd read it; I never thought he had. He should have-- that and maybe taken some acid.

The Out blurb riffs off a new book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin, and it addresses Alpert's/Ram Dass' coming to terms with his sexuality.

Out: Entwined in Alpert's part of the story is that he was having relationships with men from a young age.

Lattin: At boarding school he was caught rolling around naked with another boy-- he described it as "wrestling." Coming of age, he wasn't sure what to do with [his sexuality]-- it was the '50s. He danced around it for a long time. He called himself a bisexual in the '70s and '80s. He had a steady girlfriend. But he was basically gay.

Out: In the book, he says of his first trip, "For the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me."

Lattin: Psychedelics break down the barriers we construct around our sexuality. People really open up on them-- not necessarily in a sexual way, but in an emotional and spiritual way.

Out: What did his colleagues think about him being gay?

Lattin: Leary didn't want him to come out. He thought it would be bad for their reputation. That reinforced Alpert's internalized homophobia. Leary did an interview with Playboy in 1966 where he said all kinds of crazy things, and one of the most ridiculous was that LSD was "a cure for homosexuality."

Out: You write that Alpert decided "he was more homosexual than bisexual, but that being gay would never be his central, defining characteristic." What eventually led him to this resolution?

Lattin: He was on a spiritual quest-- another reason he didn't want to come out. It wasn't what he was about. The AIDS epidemic got him comfortable with dealing with his sexuality. He'd been doing grief counseling before [the crisis] and later saw himself as a counselor for people dying of AIDS, and many of them were gay. That really opened him up. Ultimately, he came to a reconciliation of his sexuality and his spirituality that's really beautiful.

Eric isn't taking my phone calls. I hope he's reading DWT, and I hope he's unwinding and relaxing and coming to grips with who he is in the context of his family and the rest of his life.