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."