Pubdate: Sun, 17 Aug 2014
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2014 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: Laurence Phelan

DR ROBIN CARHART-HARRIS IS THE FIRST SCIENTIST IN OVER 40 YEARS TO TEST 
LSD ON HUMANS - AND YOU'RE NEXT

The scientist talks to Laurence Phelan about fighting the
establishment, battling preconceptions and breaking down egos

On a hot evening in June, in a crowded room above a London pub, Dr
Robin Carhart-Harris, a research associate in the Centre for
Neuropsychopharma-cology at Imperial College, is giving a public talk
about his work. He is having to make himself heard over the boozy
commotion downstairs, where people are watching Chile put Spain out of
the World Cup. But there is a slightly giddy atmosphere in the
function room, too, because the doctor's area of research is as
exciting as it is taboo: he is investigating the brain effects and
potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs.

Carhart-Harris is the first person in the UK to have legally
administered doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to human
volunteers since the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971, and his presentation
climaxes with a slide showing something no one else has seen before:
an as-yet unpublished cross-sectional image of the brain of a
volunteer who was in an fMRI scanner while tripping on acid. Blobs of
colour indicate changes in blood flow, from which can be inferred
changes in levels of activity in specific brain regions - notably, in
this case, the hippo-campus, which is involved, among other things, in
making memories and giving them context.

"We've only looked in six brains so far," says Carhart-Harris when we
meet a couple of weeks later in a coffee shop near his flat in Notting
Hill. Born in Durham 33 years ago and raised in Bournemouth, he has an
indie haircut and looks a bit like he could be the celebrity physicist
Brian Cox's cooler younger brother. He is a careful and articulate
speaker, but his enthusiasm for his work is evident. "We're at an
early, but certainly promising, stage. It's really exciting," he says.

The potential scientific benefits of psychedelics (as distinct from
whatever cultural, social, artistic, spiritual or subjectively
enjoyable benefits one might also argue they have) fall broadly into
two categories. They look like being medicinally or therapeutically
useful, and they offer an unconventional view of the workings of the
human mind, such that the age-old, so-called "hard problem of
consciousness" might be made a little easier. The etymology of the
word "psychedelic" is, after all, from the Greek for
"mind-revealing".

Plant-derived psychedelics such as mescaline (from the peyote cactus),
DMT (from the root of the ayahuasca vine) and psilocybin (magic
mushrooms) have been used therapeutically and medicinally for
millennia. In 1943, however, Albert Hofmann, a 37-year-old Swiss
chemist in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical company Sandoz in
Basel, accidentally ingested - through his fingertips - a chemical he
had synthesised from the ergot fungus, and became the first person to
experience its remarkable mind-altering properties. Interviewed
shortly before his 100th birthday, he called LSD "medicine for the
soul".

Uniquely potent in minute doses, and with what Carhart-Harris calls "a
very favourable physiological safety profile" - which is to say, it is
non-toxic - this newly synthesised psychedelic drug opened new doors,
in more ways than one. "You could say the birth of the science of
psychedelics occurred with the discovery of LSD," says Carhart-Harris.
"It was only then that we started to study them systematically."

By 1947, Sandoz was promoting LSD, under the brand name Delysid, as an
adjunct to psychotherapy. Cary Grant famously used it during his
therapy, as did the Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson.
Between the 1950s and 1965, when Sandoz withdrew the drug, there were
more than 1,000 clinical papers discussing 40,000 patients. A 2012
meta-analysis of six controlled trials from the era found its clinical
efficiency for the treatment of alcohol addiction to be as effective
as any treatment developed since.

"I personally think it has a great deal of potential for treating
addiction," says Carhart-Harris. "It's slightly hypothetical, but it's
based on what we know about the way the brain works, which is that it
settles into configurations of activity that seem to underly certain
psychopathologies.

"Depression and addictions rest on reinforced patterns of brain
activity, and a psychedelic will introduce a relative chaos. Patterns
that have become reinforced disintegrate under the drug. I've used the
metaphor of shaking a snowglobe. And there's some evidence that
psychedelics induce plasticity, in terms of neural connections in the
brain, such that there is a window of opportunity in which connections
can either be broken or reinforced. New things can be learnt at the
same time that old things can be unlearnt. It induces a kind of
suppleness of mind."

The biological mechanisms that underlie the psychedelic experience
were unknowable in the 1950s and 1960s, prior to the modern era of
neuroscience and brain imaging. "Rather than testing whether a drug
works, finding that it seems to, and then trying to understand how, I
prefer the way we're doing it now," says Carhart-Harris. "It's a bit
more logical and cautious."

Caution, readers might be pleased to note, is a watchword throughout
our conversation. "The dangers with psychedelics - and there are
potential dangers," says the doctor, " arise when they are taken
without the proper caution. The model for how the drugs are taken
therapeutically is very different from how people might take them
recreationally. People are in a particularly sensitive and vulnerable
state on psychedelics, and I do think you need that professionalism
and structure to have it done properly."

The doses Carhart-Harris administers are lower than a recreational
user might typically take, but if anything the volunteers' experiences
would seem to be more vivid. "When people take psychedelics
recreationally, in a social context," he says, "they might get
preoccupied by the perceptual changes and the novelty, and they'll
laugh their way through with a certain amount of confusion and
anxiety. But in an experimental context, particularly in the
therapeutic context, people lie on a couch with their eyes closed and
have a very introspective experience. It's richer; psychologically,
it's more interesting. Without distractions, emotions and memories are
more likely to emerge spontaneously. There is a possibility of having
quite vivid recollections of past experiences, such that they're not
past any more and can be re-experienced in the present. It gets very
interesting when people start describing where they're going in their
minds. It's the kind of stuff you just wouldn't he! ar
ordinarily."

Music is used in both the therapeutic and the brain-imaging studies.
"People typically play classical music in psychedelic-assisted
psychotherapy," says Carhart-Harris, "But we're going with some
relaxing ambient stuff, particularly in the setting of a noisy MRI
scanner. We're also looking at the interaction between music and LSD;
seeing whether emotional arousal and ego dissolution are enhanced. The
theory - and it k is only a theory because it's never been tested
until now - is that the music can do a number of things. It can have a
steadying influence, but it can also help facilitate emotional release."

The subjects, who have mostly been men - "We need more female
volunteers," says Carhart-Harris - have largely reported positive
experiences. But, he adds, "We've had some tears, some people who've
been anxious and at least one who hasn't enjoyed it." One subject
recalled a relationship break-up, which was "melancholic but also
moving, and not necessarily negative".

Last month, the Daily Mail reported on Carhart-Harris's research into
psilocybin and its potential for treating depression. I suggest that
the comments below the article ("Duh, but your brain will be fried and
later on you'll be stupid" or "How can you be depressed if you're dead
or in a mental institution?") might offer a representative sample of
commonly held fears. But Carhart-Harris isn't sure. "That's an example
of primitive thinking, really, where instead of being rational and
assessing the evidence, one is biased by one's emotions - in this
case, one's fear about the unknown."

Having said that, "There have been some cases in the past of psychosis
being induced by psychedelics. More so when the drugs are taken
recreationally. It hasn't happened in modern trials, but it was
reported in a few cases in the 1960s. We recruit only people who have
previous experience with psychedelics. If our main aim is to find out
how the drugs work in the brain, we may as well play on the safe side
and get volunteers who've previously tolerated them."

LSD is a Schedule I drug under the 1971 UN Convention of Psychotropic
Drugs, and a Schedule I, Class A drug under the UK Misuse of Drugs
Act. But this categorisation, which both earns the drug its forbidding
reputation and hinders research into it, is something of a historical
accident rather than an accurate reflection of the dangers it poses.

Heroin, for example, is a lesser, Schedule II drug under the 2001
Amendment to the UK Act, because while it is more dangerous than LSD
and has a high potential for abuse, its usefulness as a pain
medication had long been recognised. To stock LSD, which was deemed
not to have any medical uses, on the other hand, requires a licence
from the Home Office. Such licences have been prohibitively expensive
and time-consuming for researchers to obtain; only four have ever been
granted. You also have to find a lab willing and able to manufacture
the drug, and there are similarly few of them, for the same reasons.

Professor David Nutt, the director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit
where Carhart-Harris is doing the research ("The buck stops with me,
but Robin's doing all the legwork and I'm just taking the credit," he
says), has written extensively about the wrong-headedness of the
current drug laws. "It is absurd to treat LSD and psilocybin as more
dangerous than heroin," he tells me. In a 2010 study published in The
Lancet, following on from the work that led to his controversial
sacking from the chair of the Government's Advisory Council on the
Misuse of Drugs the year before, Professor Nutt ranked the 20 most
commonly used drugs according to the evidence for the overall amount
of harm they do to the users and to society. Psilocybin came last,
with an overall harm score of six, and LSD came 18th with a score of
seven, compared with alcohol's 72 and heroin's 55.

When I ask why LSD was prohibited, he has a surprisingly simple
three-word answer: "the Vietnam war". Essentially, when its use spread
to the general population in the mid 1960s, "Young Americans realised
they didn't want to fight any more. That brought a huge tension into
society. So they had to create reasons for banning the drug. Everyone
knew the arguments were totally specious. But no one stood up."

Carhart-Harris has a further explanation: "Psychedelics are scary
because they reveal the mind, and people are scared of their own
minds. They're scared of the human condition, really."

The brain and mind both have a hierarchical structure, and what Freud
intuited and neuroscience has confirmed is that a significant portion
of our mental activity occurs at levels other than the one at which
your normal, waking, conscious self - your ego - is operating. As a
result and by their very nature, these unconscious processes have
traditionally been hard to investigate. But the non-normal
consciousness that psychedelics induce is characterised by a
dissolution of the ego; a loss of the sense of self. "That is why they
are so valuable as tools to understand the mind," says Carhart-Harris.
"This division between the ego-intact mode of consciousness and a mode
which is more primitive breaks down, so you can begin to observe the
unconscious mind."

No wonder the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, in 1975, predicted
that "psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be
for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is
for astronomy". Unfortunately, the effective prohibition of LSD
research meant it was not to be. Perhaps Professor Nutt has Grof in
mind when he says: "I think it's the worst censorship of research
since the Catholic Church banned the telescope." He continues:
"There's a lot of evidence for LSD being an efficacious treatment for
things such as addiction. But no one's done a study on it for 50
years. This is outrageous."

Perhaps because he sees such potential in them, or perhaps because he
suffered the latest in a line of funding knock-backs in the week that
we meet, Carhart-Harris sounds somewhat peeved that psychedelics
remain an outsider scientific interest. "I've been going for 10 years
and done a lot of, I think it's fair to say, quite pioneering
research. But it does feel as though there's some kind of conservative
resistance k to it. People may claim to be supportive of novel
research, but are they really?" he wonders.

Psychedelics certainly have their devotees. One such is Amanda
Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, who in 1998 founded the
Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust with the twin aims of
initiating and conducting research into psychedelics, and effecting
changes to global drugs policy. The foundation has provided a major
part of the funding for the LSD study. "She has been critical to our
progress," says Carhart-Harris, "and consistent in her support."

"I've been wanting to do this research for 20 years," Feilding tells
me - and adds that she had personally promised Albert Hofmann she
would get an LSD study off the ground in the modern era and in his
lifetime. ("He was truly delightful. Very small, but a remarkable
giant of a man." Unfortunately he died in 2008, aged 102.)

"I thought it essential to break the taboo on these substances,"
Feilding explains. "And hopefully, slowly, by doing good work with the
very best experts on both policy and science, we can build up an
evidence base which will inform people that these substances have
potential benefits, and that criminalising them doesn't help anyone.
Because historically they had always benefited mankind. They used to
be sacraments, they were termed the flesh of the gods but now they're
[considered] the substance of the devil."

Feilding "has been quite a lone voice, really", says Carhart-Harris,
which means he also has to consider other sources of research funding.
"I'm now thinking about crowd-funding," he says. "There's so much
enthusiasm out there: I get inundated with emails from people telling
me that they believe in its potential."

That potential is becoming clear, yet the barrier to progress is not
scientific but legal, and depends on political will. "It's very easy
to get caught up in the optimism of it all," says Carhart-Harris, "but
the more psychedelics become visible, the more likely it is that
there's going to be some kind of conservative reaction to them.

"Psychedelics are polarising, and people are opposed to them because
they're threatening. But science is an exercise in honesty, really.
That's its great merit. And if you want to understand reality better,
then you have to confront things that might be difficult."

For more information and to donate towards the research:
http://psychedelicscience.org.uk

- ----------------------------------

[sidebar]

A trip through time: The history of LSD

19 April 1943

Having accidentally ingested LSD three days earlier, Albert Hofmann
takes the world's first intentional acid trip and rides home from the
lab on his bike. The event is commemorated annually on "Bicycle Day"

May 1950

The first article about LSD appears in the American Journal of
Psychiatry

13 April 1953

The CIA initiates the MKULtra Project to investigate LSD's potential
as a mind-control drug

22 November 1963

Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception, instructs his wife
to administer him with LSD on his deathbed, and passes away "very,
very gently"

Summer 1964

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drive across America in a bus
called Further, and throw the parties chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

April 1965

The Beatles are introduced to acid by George's dentist. Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band comes out in June 1967, and while John denies
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was an intentional expansion of "LSD",
few believe him

14 January 1967

Four years after he is sacked from the psychology department at
Harvard, acid evangelist Dr Timothy Leary tells a 30,000-strong
gathering at the Human Be-In in San Francisco to, "Turn on, tune in,
drop out"

21 February 1971

The UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances makes LSD illegal in its
183 signatory nations
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MAP posted-by: Matt