Pubdate: Mon, 15 Apr 2013
Source: Evening Standard (London, UK)
Copyright: 2013 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/914
Author: Nick Curtis
Page: 21
Cited: http://beckleyfoundation.org/

THE PSYCHEDELIC COUNTESS ON A MUSHROOM MISSION TO FREE YOUR MIND

Lady Neidpath, Who Once Drilled a Hole in Her Own Head, Is Dead Serious
About Drugs. Nick Curtis Hears Why Our Fear of Illegal Highs Means We
Could Be Missing Out on Cures for Depression

I DO NOT doubt for one moment the absolute sincerity of the drugs
campaigner Amanda Feilding, aka Lady Neidpath, Countess of Wemyss and
March. Nor the good sense in her argument that narcotics should be
scientifically studied, decriminalised, and licensed and regulated by
the state for medical or recreational use as appropriate - a
"sensible" alternative to the vast waste of lives and money in the
unwinnable War on Drugs. But I can see how easy it is for her
opponents to demonise the 70-year-old as a batty aristo.

The ex-artist and mother of two is the product of one grand family,
traceable back to Charles II, and she married, aged 53, into another,
richer one, which gives her clipped pronouncements on social policy a
distinct whiff of de hauten bas. A pivot-point in her bohemian life
came when she drilled a hole in her own skull in 1970: her long-term
partner and father of her sons, Chelsea gallerist Joseph Mellen, and
her husband Jamie Charteris, Lord Neidpath, have also had it done.
Feilding still believes trepanation is an important tool in the study
of consciousness, which is the root of all her work, but prefers not
to talk about it in case it gives ammo to her political enemies.

Much of her life has been dedicated to the idea that psychoactive
drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms),
LSD and cannabis, as opposed to heroin and cocaine, can do good as
well as harm. So this is an exciting time. The Medical Research
Council has stumped up UKP550,000 for Professor David Nutt's team at
Imperial College to test the use of psilocybin to treat depression.
This was on the basis of earlier research by Nutt initiated and funded
by the Beckley Foundation, which Feilding set up in 1998 and runs from
her ancestral Tudor home outside Oxford.

The early tests showed that in subjects at rest, psilocybin decreased
blood supply to a system in the brain called "the default mode
network, which is the modern terminology for the ego". This means the
brain becomes "looser, more anarchic, but it also means that the
repression is lessened, so that traumatic memories can be accessed and
cleaned out". It ties in with similar research the Beckley is running
with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore into the use of psilocybin
alongside psychotherapy to deal with treatment-resistant addiction, in
this case smoking. "So far we have got a more or less 100 per cent
success rate," enthuses Feilding.

These tests couldn't have happened 10 years ago because the
brain-imaging technology wasn't available and nor was the political
will. Back in 2002 Feilding suggested to neuroscientist Colin
Blakemore that they devise a scale of harm and benefits of
psychoactive drugs.

He pointed out that not just all the research but all the terminology
only indicated the damage drugs did: the idea of benefits was anathema.

This she ascribes to a knee-jerk error of the Sixties. "LSD was
discovered by Albert Hoffman in 1943, and it became in the Fifties the
new wonder drug of doctors and psychotherapists," she says. "Then,
because it got out into the recreational world and was misused, and
became associated with counterculture and revolution, that put it
under taboo for 50 years.

I think society made a mistake by simplifying the issue." She set up
the Beckley to work on both scientific research and social policy,
believing the two are symbiotic.

Her argument is pretty straightforward: that criminalisation of drugs
perpetuates the $50 billion worldwide trade and "destabilises
countries, ruins the environment, makes people kill each other ... The
horrors on the Mexican-American border!

People become completely inhuman, they can skin people, do horrible
things.

But if you take the policy harms out of the equation, the actual
damage these substances cause in terms of the deaths they cause is
pretty minimal.

"There is so much money involved in the illicit trade you cannot close
it off.

Surely the governments of the world must be able to regulate these
things in a more harm-reducing way than criminal cartels whose only
motive is profit?

The success of a drugs policy should not be judged on how many people
we imprison or how many drugs we capture at the border: health, harm
reduction, cost effectiveness and human rights should be our aims."
book and Spotify, Sean Parker, has given money to the Beckley, and
Yoko Ono (Feilding's accent renders it "Yerker Earner") made a
donation instead of a wedding present when Feilding's son Rocky got
married.

But most of its money comes from other foundations: Getty, Soros,
Flora. Lord Neidpath is hugely wealthy and landed and is "very
supportive" but doesn't chip in: "It's not his thing." So Feilding
works herself "almost to my death, 15 hours a day, seven days a week,
to raise every penny".

Now the tide may be turning.

The legalisation of cannabis in Washington state and Colorado "makes
it harder for [the US] to criminalise the countries of Latin America.
But progress is slow. If it was hard to win ethical approval for
psilocybin tests, it's even harder to get the stuff itself thanks to
stringent EU regulations.

"No manufacturer wants to get involved in it: it's too much paperwork
for the tiny amount we need," Feilding says. "So though one can go out
and buy it on the street, one can't get it for scientific research."

It is still hard to have a grown-up, unhysterical conversation about
drugs. One newspaper scented conspiracy this week in the fact that the
Government's current drugs c z ar, Professor Les Iversen, was listed
on the Beckley's advisory board.

Nutt, his predecessor as drugs czar, was fired for stating that
cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes, and ecstasy
less risky than horse-riding. Feilding likens this to the Vatican's
treatment of Galileo.

She is a persuasive talker but what makes her such a complicated
advocate - and an easy target for critics - is that her perspective
seems incredibly rarefied.

What does she know of crack dealers in Baltimore or youths smoking
skunk in London squats?

She is descended from the Earls of Denbigh and Desmond and grew up in
Beckley Park with its three moats and extensive grounds . "We had
absolutely no money, no heating, no petrol, no toys or friends or
anything," she insists. "No one came here: it was a frozen, isolated
world."

I ask what her father did: "Well, he did nothing.

He was charming, he painted, he was a passionate lover of beauty and
he kind of half-heartedly farmed." The absolute lack of money is a
recurring theme but she also tells me she bought Beckley Park off her
siblings "when it came on the open market", and our refreshments are
brought by a factotum.

As a teenager, Feilding had "a passion for mystics and alternative
religions" and left school at 16 with UKP50 in her pocket in search of
a godfather whom she had never met but who had become a Buddhist monk
in Ceylon. She never found him but had "amazing adventures, lived with
the Bedouin in the desert". Later, she taught herself about psychology
and physiology and brain studies, and became a painter.

IN 1966 she met the Dutch advocate of trepanation Dr Bart Hughes, and
from the late Sixties she was living with Mellen, with whom she had
two sons, Rock or "Rocky" (born 1979, and now a Conservative
councillor in Kensington and Chelsea) and Cosmo (born 1985, and a
film-maker). Her grisly trepanation is viewable online: she stood for
Parliament in Chelsea in 1979 and 1983 on the single issue of getting
the procedure provided by the NHS, getting 40 votes the first time and
139 the second.

I ask her what drugs she tried in her youth. "Well, before
psychedelics were illegal I tried psychedelics, and came to recognise
their great potential value but also their potential for damage if
misused." To you, or to others? "Um, both." When I ask if she still
indulges, she gives me a narrow look and says: "We live in a heavily
criminalised society." But she has been able to educate her sons
"properly " about drugs, because they know she won't bullshit them.

As for trepanation - no, neither her sons nor her husband's children,
Mary the model and Dick the lawyer (Lord Elcho), from Jamie's first
marriage to Catherine Guinness, have been drilled.

But Feilding is conducting research in St Petersburg with Dr Yuri
Moskalenko that seems to suggest the improved circulation of blood and
cerebrospinal fluid attained through trepanation "washes out the big
toxic molecules" that cause Alzheimer's and dementia.

Trepanation freed her husband, a former Oxford academic who taught
international relations to Bill Clinton, from crippling headaches.
"It's been done in every culture since 10,000BC," she says airily.
"Then it got a bad name in the First World War when they started
performing lobotomies."

Feilding married her husband in 1995, at the Bent pyramid in Egypt:
both remain "best friends" with her ex, Mellen. They divide their
time between Beckley Park, his nearby Jacobean seat Stanway, and her
house in Chelsea, which she has hung onto since 1965 for sentimental
reasons: a pigeon chick she saved, and fed bits of Weetabix on the
end of a paintbrush, returned there for 15 years.

I know, I know. All of this has nothing to do with her very earnest
desire to improve our understanding of and attitude to drugs, here and
worldwide.

And sometimes I find myself thinking: if eccentric toffs didn't
undertake these crusades, who would? "Will you try not to make me
sound a complete fool?" says Lady Neidpath graciously as I go. I hope
I haven't.
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MAP posted-by: Matt