WAS TIMOTHY LEARY RIGHT?

Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question
that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic
renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science,
including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard,
which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into
therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the
university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open
the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the
first time?

The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the
'50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the
'70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two
top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of
Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the
use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies,
just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author,
Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders
Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant
effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given
ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other
study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of
Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic
mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom
later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers
at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety
disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received
approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since
the 1970s.

Psychedelics chemically alter the way your brain takes in information
and may cause you to lose control of typical thought patterns. The
theory motivating the recent research is that if your thoughts are
depressed or obsessive, the drugs may reveal a path through them. For
Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to
experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless
possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping
passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert
Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31
psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter
has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs
into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room.

A half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic
research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical
Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful
insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only
for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a
last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take
part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after
ordinary treatment.

Antidrug warriors may argue that the research will lend the drugs an
aura of respectability, prompting a new round of recreational use.
That's possible, but today we have no priestly Leary figure spewing
vertiginous pro-drug proclamations. Instead we have a Leary for a
less naive age: Richard Doblin. Also a Harvard guy--his Ph.D. is in
public policy--Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986 to help scientists get funding and
approval to study the drugs. (Doblin, 53, says he was too shy for the
'60s, but he was inspired by the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof,
who authored a 1975 book about promising LSD research--research that
ended with antidrug crackdowns.) Doblin has painstakingly worked with
intensely skeptical federal authorities to win necessary permissions.
MAPS helped launch all four of the current Ecstasy studies, a process
that took two decades. It's the antithesis of Leary's approach.

All drugs have benefits and risks, but in psychedelics we have been
tempted to see only one or the other. Not anymore.