Neuroscientists find God in mushrooms

Neuroscientists find God in mushrooms

Wednesday July 12, 2006
By Jeremy Laurance

LONDON - A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects
can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms,
scientists claimed yesterday.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced
mysticism, urged his 1960s hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and
drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US have for
the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced
safely in the laboratory.

They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical
experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have
reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

And they argue that the potential of the hallucinogenic drugs, ignored
for decades because of their links with illicit drug use in the 1960s,
must be explored to develop new treatments for depression, drug
addiction and the treatment of intolerable pain.

Anticipating criticism from church leaders, they say they are not
interested in the "Does God exist?" debate. "This work can't and won't
go there."

Interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs is growing around
the world. In the UK, the Royal College of Psychiatrists debated their
use at a conference in March for the first time for 30 years. A
conference held in Basel, Switzerland, last January, reviewed the
growing psychedelic psychiatry movement.

The drug psilocybin is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, which
grow wild in Wales and were openly sold in London markets until a
change in the law last year.

For the Johns Hopkins study, 30 middle-aged volunteers who had
religious or spiritual interests attended two eight-hour drug
sessions, two months apart, receiving psilocybin in one session and a
non-hallucinogenic stimulant - Ritalin - in the other. They were not
told which drug was which.

One-third described the experience with psilocybin as the most
spiritually significant of their lifetime and two-thirds rated it
among their five most meaningful experiences.

In more than 60 per cent of cases the experience qualified as a "full
mystical experience" based on established psychological scales, the
researchers say. Some likened it to the importance of the birth of
their first child or the death of a parent.

The effects lasted for at least two months. Eight out of 10 of the
volunteers reported moderately or greatly increased wellbeing or life
satisfaction. Relatives, friends and colleagues confirmed the changes.

The study is one of the first in the new discipline of "neurotheology"
-the neurology of religious experience. The researchers, who report
their findings in the online journal Psychopharmacology, say that,
though unorthodox, their aim is to explore the possible benefits of
drugs like psilocybin.

Professor Roland Griffiths, of the department of neuroscience and
psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, said: "As a reaction to the excesses of
the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen
in time. I had a healthy scepticism going into this. [But] under
defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and
fairly reliably occasion what's called a primary mystical experience
that may lead to positive changes in a person.

"It is an early step in what we hope will be a large body of
scientific work that will ultimately help people."

A third of the volunteers became frightened during the drug sessions
with some reporting feelings of paranoia.

The researchers say psilocybin is not toxic or addictive, unlike
alcohol and cocaine, but that volunteers must be accompanied
throughout the experience by people who can help them through it.

The study is hailed as a landmark by former director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, Charles Schuster, in a commentary published
alongside the research.

In a second commentary, Huston Smith, America's leading authority on
comparative religion, writes that mystical experience "is as old as
humankind" and attempts to induce it using psychoactive plants were
made in some ancient cultures, such as classical Greece, and in some
contemporary small-scale cultures.

"But this is the first scientific demonstration in 40 years, and the
most rigorous ever, that profound mystical states can be produced
safely in the laboratory. The potential is great."