THE PSYCHOTHERAPY MOVEMENT: ACID'S LONG TRIP BACK TO CLINICAL RESEARCH

After nearly 25 years of suffering from debilitating cluster headaches -
commonly referred to as "suicide headaches" because of their length and
intensity - Bob Wold was faced with a difficult - and unusual - decision:
get brain surgery or take a tab of LSD.

Six years ago, his clusters became nearly unbearable. Wold was scheduled
for several surgeries when he learned that acid, though controversial, was
a known cure for clusters. After a year of research, he decided to give LSD
a try, and took a small dose - roughly a quarter of what is used for
recreational purposes.

"When I took it, basically the only thing that I felt was that it took the
pain away almost immediately, within half an hour," says Wold. "It was
something completely different from any other medication I had tried - it
just totally cleared my head. I felt a little bit of a buzz for about four
or five hours, but I didn't see elephants or anything like that - no
hallucinations at all."

Taking at most two or three doses a year at the beginning of a headache
cycle, Wold has found profound relief - unhindered by the drug's other
effects - from using small amounts of the consciousness-expanding
tryptamine. Driven by his own success with LSD treatment, Wold founded
ClusterBusters, a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to researching
the use of psychedelic substances to treat cluster headaches. The group is
now funding research by Dr. John Halpern at Havard's McLean Hospital, who
has been administering modified LSD molecules to headache patients.

ClusterBusters is part of a global movement of progressive scientists and
researchers who have set out to harness the positive therapeutic benefits
of psychedelic drugs. While Wold's organization focuses on cluster-headache
treatment, research funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Research (MAPS) is pioneering a whole new branch of
psychotherapy which uses psychedelics to treat mental ailments such as
anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
After a 40-year hiatus, the doors of psychedelic research are finally being
reopened.

The psychedelic renaissance

On September 26, 2008, the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
approved research using LSD-assisted psychotherapy for end-of-life anxiety
in terminally ill patients. With FDA approval, data from clinical trials
currently taking place in Switzerland is now accepted and used in the
United States. The first legal dose of LSD in nearly four decades was
administered by Swiss doctor Peter Glasser last May in a study funded by MAPS.

The decision marks a milestone in the campaign for the legalization of
psychotherapy, as LSD is the latest psychedelic drug to be approved for
research purposes on human subjects. Research involving less potent
psychedelics, such as MDMA (also known as ecstasy), ketamine, and
psilocybin - the hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms - has been underway
for years.

"This is the first study with human subjects using LSD in more than 35
years, since they shut down all the research with LSD and human subjects in
the 1960s," says Randolph Hencken, Director of Communications for MAPS.
"The most remarkable thing about this trial is that we've been able to
overcome the stigma associated with LSD and get back to research . We say
that we're in a 'psychedelic-research renaissance' because there are more
studies using psychedelics on human subjects now than there have been in 40
years."

So far, the results of the studies in Switzerland and at Harvard have been
positive, and the number of studies on psychedelic substances is
multiplying. Two Vancouver psychologists, backed by MAPS, received an
exemption from Canadian narcotics laws to administer MDMA to PTSD patients.
Research on the effects of LSD on the brain is also underway at the
University of California, Berkeley and the California Pacific Medical Center.

"We're doing this research for serious illnesses - obsessive compulsive
disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and a lot of other things - and
seeing really good results," says Wold. "Some people are willing to put
their name, their reputation, and their profession on the line to research
this stuff and I think that it's finally doing some good."

Harnessing the therapeutic and healing power of LSD was the lifelong dream
of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who synthesized the chemical in
1943. Though Hofmann died last April at the age of 102, he was able to
witness the roots of a psychotherapy revolution in his last years.

Hofmann's problem child

Hofmann synthesized the chemical compound lysergic acid diethylamide from
the ergot fungus, a grain fungus that grows on rye. Soon after, on a day
that acid enthusiasts would forever after refer to as "Bicycle Day,"
Hofmann purposely ingested the sizable amount of 250 micrograms of LSD (a
threshold dose is 20 micrograms, making it the most potent drug in
existence), and as he biked home, he began to experience intense shifts in
perception and a profoundly altered state of consciousness.

"What stimulated Hofmann was to see whether or not you could harness the
energy of naturally occurring lysergic acid. So he came up with a very
close derivative, which is lysergic acid diethylamide," says Joseph
Schwarcz, a professor in the Chemistry Department at McGill who lectures on
the historical development of LSD in the World of Drugs course.

Over the course of his lifetime, Hofmann took hundreds of doses of LSD, and
was well aware of both its benefits and dangers. In his autobiographic
account LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann chronicles the drug's degradation
from researched chemical with enormous healing potential, to the oft-abused
recreational drug and counterculture emblem that it became in the 1960s.
Hofmann advocated therapeutic and psychiatric use of the chemical that made
him "aware of the wonder of creation," and he was deeply troubled by its
rampant misuse. When LSD was declared a Schedule I drug and prohibited in
mid-60s, it was driven from psychotherapy research labs to the black market.

Thirty-six years in the dark

The lack of medical research since the 1960s is mainly due to the drug's
illegality.

"People, governments, scientists all became scared to do research with
psychedelics . All the research started going underground at that point.
Drug prohibition and fear were the big roadblocks," says Hencken.

Wold agrees that the difficulty of finding Schedule I researchers who can
work with a Schedule I substance has been a major hindrance to research. In
addition, both Wold and Hencken cite the stigma against LSD as a result of
its recreational abuse as a main obstacle in securing funding and public
support for psychotherapy research.

"A lot of researchers and doctors just don't want to be associated with it
at all because of the fact that it's illegal, and a lot of people are
reluctant to donate money for funding because they don't want to be seen as
donating money to work with illegal drugs," says Wold. "It's been a long,
slow road."

As the most potent and arguably the most misunderstood psychedelic drug,
LSD has, to its detriment, long been associated with the youth movement,
rebellion, and counterculture. Acid's return as a focus of psychotherapy
research after a four-decade adjournment is part of a broader cultural
current of 60s nostalgia, which has taken the forms of remarketing The
Beatles, Gap's wildly successful 1969 Jeans ad campaign, and the fortieth
anniversary of Woodstock.

The veil of fear and mystery that has surrounded LSD since the 60s is, it
seems, beginning to lift.

"LSD has made pretty big advances over the past five or 10 years just
because people are trying to get this research going again and showing that
it does work. Everyone's starting out really small with whatever funding
they can find in different areas and showing the positive results with it
is what's helping us turn a corner," says Wold.

From the black market to the medical market

It will likely be years before LSD research enters the mainstream and is
legalized for use in therapeutic treatment. According to Hencken, another
generation will likely pass before LSD becomes completely acceptable in
society.

"I really don't see it being available by prescription for years and years
and years," says Wold. "What I see happening with LSD and psilocybin is
that hopefully you'll be able to go get it prescribed in a hospital or at a
clinic, not over the counter at a pharmacy."

ClusterBusters and MAPS are endeavoring to make LSD legal as an alternative
to antidepressants which tend to cover up pain or anxiety and create
dependence. But many scientists, including Schwarcz, question whether LSD
would provide positive benefits that can't be obtained from other drugs
with a similar chemical structure.

"LSD is what is called a serotonin psychedelic because the chemical
structure is so similar to that of serotonin. And there's a lot known about
serotonin and serotonin mimics," says Schwarcz. "I don't know where LSD
would fit in there or why there would be a need to look at this when there
are so many other serotonin mimics."

Hencken and Wold, however, argue that LSD and antidepressants that mimic
serotonin are on the same pages of very different books.

"There's nothing that's legal on the market that compares to LSD," says
Hencken. "What we have are sedatives; we have things that mellow people out
or numb them so they don't feel anxiety. But we don't have anything that
allows them to explore the issues that have caused them that anxiety in the
first place."

Another significant discrepancy is that while antidepressants must be taken
on a daily basis, psychotherapeutic use of LSD would require that the drug
be administered only a handful of times. Wold finds that while a couple of
doses is sufficient to end an excruciating months-long cycle of headaches
in only a week or two, he believes that this may be another obstacle in the
way of LSD's legal status.

"Pharmaceutical companies really aren't interested in funding this kind of
work because they can't sell a pill for someone to take four times a day
for the rest of their life when [instead] you can take two doses a year and
you're all done," says Wold.

Although concerns regarding regulation and control of the substance are
cited by those opposed to its illegality, regulated use of LSD may drive
the drug out of the black market and into the medical market.

"Having LSD available from a trained psychiatrist or psychologist or MD is
a much better situation than we have currently. In the U.S., 600,000 people
try LSD for the first time each year, and rarely in a circumstance that's
guided," says Hencken. "We would rather see a situation where people could
go and use these powerful medicines in a safe situation under the care of
somebody who's been trained . These drugs are more dangerous unregulated
than they would be regulated."

Schwarcz agrees that there are safe and dangerous ways to use drugs, but
that drugs are not safe or dangerous in and of themselves, so appropriate
regulations should therefore be designed.

"If it's significantly better than what exists, you can design proper
regulations and proper control. But from what I've seen, that isn't the
case," says Schwarcz. "My guess would be the benefits are not going to
outweigh the risks, and that it's not going to supplant anything that's out
there."

Barbara Davis,* U3 English literature and history, took acid for the first
time the way that most young people do - as a party drug. But after
extensively researching the drug, she discovered that it could benefit her
therapeutically.

"The third time I took LSD, I went through a massive phase of research
actually looking into the therapeutic uses, reading stuff by Albert Hofmann
and Timothy Leary. When I took it after that, I literally confronted all
the demons from my previous life and I was able to accept that it was
okay," says Davis. "It was really a huge deal. I'm bipolar, and after that,
for a week, I felt entirely cured. I wasn't having any mood swings - I
accepted everything."

For Davis, the greatest benefit of using the drug as a form of
self-medication is the lasting sense of self-acceptance, which persisted
well beyond the week after her trip. Though she obtained the drug illegally
and took it without psychiatric guidance, her use of LSD to treat bipolar
disorder gave her relief that antidepressants like Prozac and anti-anxiety
medication like Valium never provided.

"LSD is special because it makes me reevaluate the world and see how
beautiful the world is and how it can be free of all of its boundaries,"
she says. "That really affected me and my general outlook."

If psychedelic research continues with the success it so far has, those
suffering from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a slew of other
mental ailments may find similar results to Davis, but in a regulated - and
most importantly, legal - clinical setting.

"What we have on the market now are band-aids," says Hencken. "And what
we're developing with psychotherapy is actual psycho-spiritual surgery."

*Name has been changed.