Psychedelic Drugs

A new wave study on hallucinogens, and other mind-altering substances, was organized to address whether these

In his article “Psychedelic Psychotherapy: The Ethics of Medicine for the Soul,” Brian Anderson supports the use of psychedelics in transpersonal psychotherapy, a new field of mental illness treatment using psychology instead of medicine. More specifically, he recalls from scientific studies that psychedelics are capable of altering a person’s states of consciousness. According to Anderson,

“Psychoactive substances exert their their effects by modifying biochemical or physiological processes in the brain.” Psychedelics are taken out of context to be for recreational use only, when they can be taken to enhance spiritual journeys.

Jyllian Kemsley Ph.D. is a chemical research scientist, and scientific research contributor to the CENtral Science’s Safety Zone blog that seeks to “cover science and technology, business and industry, government and policy, education, and employment aspects of the chemistry field”. Her article entitled “Psychedelic Compounds like Ecstasy May Be Good for More than Just a High", reports on the revolutionary research theory within the field of medicine that seeks to examine the prospective benefits of using psychoactive compounds in treating a number of mental conditions. The piece is well written, and presents a number of background studies that have evaluated the efficiency of these

Within the 1960’s a new form of drug was created and was said to be an essential pharmaceutical that should be in every doctor’s bag. This drug was called lysergic acid diethylamide, but is more commonly know as LSD. Albert Hofmann, as Swiss chemist, created this new drug in hopes that he might have found a profitable analeptic that could cure migraines. However, this was not the case. Hofmann decided to dose himself with the drug to see if it would help subdue headaches. He quickly discovered that this new

LSD acts to decrease the responsiveness of the LGN to signals from the retina. How this effects the production of visual hallucinations is unclear LSD is also concentrated highly in parts of the limbic system. The limbic system is dedicated to regulating emotion, aggression, docility, and memory. Also, LSD concentrates in areas of the reticular formation. The reticular formation mediates the level of arousal and alertness in the brain.

Psychedelic chemicals are currently banned for any medical use and strictly limited in research to determine if they can be used effectively to help patient. With one out of ten people in America suffering from depression and one out of four people struggling with some type of mental illness not using every tool available to use seem foolish to limit the tools used by psychotherapist. During the next few pages I will discuss earlier uses for MDMA in psychotherapy and whether these results support or contradict these uses. This will be broken up into four sections; a brief overview of effects, couples therapy, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and schizophrenia.

Throughout history a multitude of human populations have been using and abusing a number of psychoactive drugs. These drugs can include very common substances such as caffeine to the more deadly but arguably just as addictive heroine. Further on the list of psychoactive drugs include those of the psychedelic variety. These would include the chemicals such as d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), peyote and psilocybin among others. All of which have hallucinogenic properties that tend to blur the line between fantasy and reality. How dangerous are these chemicals, and what are the consequences of sustained long term use? Due to the controversial nature of the use of psychedelic drugs in a medical setting, the study of short and long term effects

Do the mentally ill commonly take psychiatric drugs because the drugs actually work, or do they take them because they believe that these drugs work? Robert Whitaker, the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, suggests that psychiatric drugs may catalyze or possibly create mental and physical illnesses rather than improve mental health. However, psychedelic drugs, which are also psychoactive agents like psychiatric drugs, may be better alternatives. Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception, proposes that psychedelic drugs can help people understand mental illness from a more personal perspective, and that they can also expand the mind. The recreational use of these drugs can uncover a hidden external reality, and in turn, enrich the spirit. But perhaps aside from recreational use, psychedelic drugs should be more widely used instead of psychiatric drugs to treat both the longtime and the newly mentally ill. Under moderated use, psychedelics not only profoundly enhance one’s creative vision but also provide therapeutic mental health benefits.

Ecstasy, a word stemming from Late Latin extasis, meaning "entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place." The definition is rather spot on given the side effects that the hallucinogenic drug produces. Ecstasy or MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) originates from Germany when chemist Anton Köllisch was performing trial and error experiments with Amphetamine. At the time of its creation, Köllisch worked for pharmaceutical company Merck, who later in 1913 patents the drug. Although ecstasy is seen as a highly addictive drug with no purpose in our society today the drug was actually meant to sold as a appetite supplement. Many of Köllisch did not believe their coworker when he stated the reasoning

It is important to note that from the tens of thousands of doses of LSD and other classical compounds such as mescaline which has been conducted under medical administration, a general fact about these drugs have emerge which posits that the drugs are not addictive but is self-limiting meaning that if taken three days in a row it will no longer produce a psychic effect (Buckley, 1966). Studies on LSD have revealed that it causes no organic changes to the brain or any permanent changes in brain activity.

N,N-dimethyltryptamine(DMT) is a psychoactive chemical in the tryptamine family, which causes intense visuals and strong psychedelic mental affects when smoked, injected, snorted, or when swallowed orally (with an MAOI such as haramaline). DMT was first synthesized in 1931, and demonstrated to be hallucinogenic in 1956. It

Newer treatments for schizophrenia symptom management focus on both the DA and the 5-HT systems in an attempt to alleviate positive, negative and cognitive symptoms (Leucht et al., 2009; Leucht, Wahlbeck, Hamann, & Kissling, 2003). The 5-HT hypothesis of schizophrenia arose from toxicologic explanations of mental illness that were popular in the 1950s (Osmond, 1958). Toxicologic explanations received their inspiration from the observation that exogenous substances could produce effects that resemble certain signs and symptoms of mental illness, such as hallucinations (Osmond, 1958). The 5-HT hypothesis arose based on the observation that hallucinogenic-effects, such as those seen with LSD administration, are mediated by 5-HT agonism, and hence, schizophrenia symptoms likely arise from a similar mechanism (Baumeister & Hawkins, 2004). However, in the 1970s, the 5-HT hypothesis of schizophrenia was almost completely replaced by the DA hypothesis, only making a comeback later with the proven effectiveness of the atypical antipsychotics, such as clozapine (Baumeister & Hawkins, 2004).

Shrooms, boomers, magic, psychedelic or hallucinogenic mushrooms are a fungi containing substance capable of causing the user to hallucinate. These types of mushrooms have been around for many years and exist in many different species. These fungi look just like an ordinary fungi but are illegal in many countries; just like other hallucinogenic drugs. They have many different effects on the body, which is why people buy and sell these "magic mushrooms".

An individual’s behavior and emotion becomes chemically altered often resulting in dependency, aggression, onset of diseases and poor judgement. This poses a dangerous threat to the neurotransmitters since they have multiple jobs in different parts of the brain. Drugs of abuse are able to exert influence over the brain reward pathway either by directly influencing the action of dopamine within the system, or by altering the activity of other neurotransmitters that exert a modulatory influence over this pathway. These drugs are often powerful and have been known to trigger schizophrenic behavior and can also cause a person to cease breathing, for example hallucinogens such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin are able to artificially stimulate the serotonin receptor (Sapolsky, 2005).