Pubdate: Sun, 27 Sep 2009
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Page: A - 1, Front Page
Copyright: 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer
Cited: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies 
http://www.maps.org/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)

LSD'S LONG, STRANGE TRIP BACK INTO THE LAB

LSD, the drug that launched the psychedelic era and became one of the 
resounding symbols of the counterculture movement of the '60s, is 
back in the labs.

Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD 
and other hallucinogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their 
work, researchers at a handful of major institutions - including UCSF 
and Harvard University - are reigniting studies. Scientists started 
looking at less controversial drugs, like ecstasy and magic 
mushrooms, in the late 1990s, but LSD studies only began about a year 
ago and are still rare.

The study at UCSF, which is being run by a UC Berkeley graduate 
student, is looking into the mechanisms of LSD and how it works in 
the brain. The hope is that such research might support further 
studies into medical applications of LSD - for chronic headaches, for 
example - or psychiatric uses.

"Psychedelics are in labs all over the world and there's a lot of 
promise," said Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary 
Association for Psychedelic Studies in Santa Cruz. "The situation 
with LSD is that because it was the quintessential symbol of the 
'60s, it was the last to enter the lab."

LSD - lysergic acid diethylamide - is a synthetic psychedelic drug 
and one of the strongest hallucinogens in the world.

Created in Switzerland in 1938, LSD was used primarily for 
psychiatric research through the next couple of decades before it 
burst onto the counterculture scene as a recreational drug.

Harvard University Professor Timothy Leary, along with a handful of 
scientists, began promoting LSD use for the psychedelic trips. With a 
fairly small dose, users discovered they could experience vivid 
visual hallucinations and altered consciousness. But as recreational 
use increased, so did cases of users having negative and even 
dangerous experiences with the drug, especially when they mixed LSD 
with other drugs.

Polarizing Issue

Researchers were using LSD to explore treatment into everything from 
alcoholism and drug addiction to anxiety in cancer patients. But as 
notoriety of the drug spread, it became a polarizing issue among 
serious scientists, many of whom abandoned their research.

In 1966, the federal government made LSD illegal, and by the early 
1970s, research into all psychedelic drugs in humans had come to a 
halt, although some scientists continued to study the drugs in animals.

"What poisoned the well was the widespread abuse being promoted by 
scientists to the public," said Dr. John Mendelson, an associate 
professor of medicine and psychiatry at UCSF who is helping run the 
LSD study. "That put a lot of researchers off, and it made it very 
hard for researchers to justify getting back into the field. And 
there were no pressing health needs, no pressing treatments other 
than curiosity."

Researchers at UCLA were among the first to return to hallucinogen 
studies, starting with the drug ecstasy about 10 years ago. Research 
into psychedelic drugs expanded, with prominent labs around the 
country studying ecstasy and natural hallucinogens like psilocybin, 
or magic mushrooms, and peyote.

But LSD, still in disrepute, remained off-limits. The first studies 
involving LSD in human subjects started last year at Harvard 
University, and the UCSF study is only the second in the country. At 
Harvard, scientists are studying potential uses of LSD to treat 
cluster headaches - chronic headaches that affect sufferers during 
months-long cycles several times a year.

The federal government never banned LSD outright for use in research, 
but for decades it was nearly impossible to get funding or federal approval.

As research into hallucinogens has slowly picked up, private and 
nonprofit groups have sprung up to seek funding sources.

It still isn't easy to get an LSD study off the ground. Researchers 
must get permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 
the Drug Enforcement Administration plus state regulators, and they 
need approval from the institution they work for. Then they have to 
get approval for the source of the actual drug - in the case of UCSF, 
researchers are using LSD that was manufactured years ago in Switzerland.

Regulatory Maze

"Getting through the regulatory maze is quite daunting. It's taken me 
years to build a system where the FDA and DEA and everyone are happy 
with how we do our work," Mendelson said. "You have to have a very 
safe protocol. It's a very cautious system."

Even finding participants for the studies can be a difficult process. 
The UC researchers usually have to screen 100 volunteers before they 
can find one who meets their needs. Subjects must have done LSD at 
least a couple of times before, Mendelson said.

"You don't want people who are looking for a legal way to get a first 
experience," he said. "This isn't fun. There's no Grateful Dead music 
playing. This is serious business."

Stanislav Grof was one of the last scientists to abandon 
hallucinogenic research when he shut down several projects at the 
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in 1973 after his funding dried 
up. He moved to California to work at a research institute in Big 
Sur, where he turned to studies about how to re-create the effects of 
those drugs through meditation and breathing techniques.

Mixed Feelings

Now semiretired and living in Mill Valley, Grof said he has mixed 
feelings about the re-emergence of hallucinogen studies. He's pleased 
to see some of the stigma falling away from drugs like LSD, but it 
bothers him that the scientific community lost decades of research.

"I thought psychiatry and psychology really lost a major opportunity 
because of the abuse that happened with unsupervised research," Grof 
said. "These are fascinating substances - and they're very, very 
powerful, so they should be used with great precaution."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake