Various university laboratories, including Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Imperial College London, have been conducting experiments into psychedelics since the 1990s. Psychedelics were banned in the mid-1960s and labelled as dangerous, addictive drugs with no recognised medical value, but they are now the subject of a new line of research into the mysteries of human consciousness. What’s more, they are also being used experimentally to treat a wide range of conditions, including anxiety and depression in cancer patients, addictions to alcohol and nicotine, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, eating disorders, and trauma. It would appear, in fact, that the use of psychedelics can lead to a temporary dissolution of the ego, which rewires the brain, essentially rewriting its neural pathways and eliminating the connections that cause anxiety, depression, addiction, and obsessive tendencies. In healthy people, this rewriting of established thought patterns could lead to an increase in well-being, creativity, and open-mindedness.
This second wave of research into psychedelics comes at a time when traditional psychotherapy is failing to cope with the unprecedented increase in cases of depression and suicide rates in the Western world. Some researchers, therefore, suggest that the time has come to develop a new approach, one which is able to treat both the mind and brain in a single form of therapy.
Michael Pollan’s research focuses on two psychedelic substances, which are currently being widely studied by scientists: LSD, the common name for lysergic acid diethylamide, and psilocybin, the substance found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. There are many other psychedelic substances, but although they are equally powerful, they have still not been researched extensively, either due to the challenges in accessing them and physically bringing them into the laboratory, such as ayahuasca, or because they are not unanimously considered psychedelics, such as MDMA, also known as ecstasy.
