First LSD Test In 40 Years Reveal Drug Helps Terminal Patients Prepare For Death 221
EwanPalmer writes "The first controlled LSD study in more than 40 years reveals the drug could be used to help people with terminal illnesses deal better with death. The study, published in the Journal of nervous and Mental Disease, showed that 12 people who agreed to take the banned hallucinogenic drug during therapy sessions felt 'significant reductions in anxiety' about their lives ending."
Re:Is this even news? (Score:5, Informative)
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep? Great.
It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!
I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...
Re:Is this even news? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:same as booze being illegal in saudi arabia (Score:1, Informative)
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree strongly. There actually are several good reasons why LSD is a banned substance. I'd sit you down with my grandma who worked in LA as an RN from the 60s into the 90s, but alas, she died last year. But she had stories about LSD. Lots of them. Like basically several a night for 20 years. The most entertaining one in my book was a man who while on acid somehow decided filling his rectum with concrete was a good idea. I'm not sure he survived. There was of course the regular people peeling their skin off because they "had ants under their skin" and such. You go back to a few months ago, and though not LSD, but a different hallucinogen, mushrooms I think, a 17 year old kid stabbed one of his friends 8 or 9 times in the chest, killing him, and attacking the 3 others while on a camping trip. Things going horribly wrong while on hallucinogens isn't exactly rare, and as such should really only be used while under supervision. They are in fact so common, that they have an official slang term, "bad trip".
Beyond the bad trips, there's also the issue that the military experimented with using LSD as a mind control agent back in the 50s. This was abandoned however due to the unpredictable nature where you could get people to do things they normally wouldn't, but you didn't have fine control over it. This was demonstrated quite famously be a man named Charles Manson, who used it to brain wash his "children", sent them to go murder somebody at a house, can't remember if they went to the wrong house or if the person wasn't there/had sold the house, but anyway, they just went and killed whoever happened to be there at the time.
It's not exactly a harmless substance, and the dangers are quite will documented. If you choose to ignore them, well, that's your own prerogative, but don't claim it's harmless or even on the same plane as alcohol.
Re:same as booze being illegal in saudi arabia (Score:4, Informative)
From what I know of LSD (not having tried it) most of the bad effects are due to impure product, substituted product (i.e. it wasn't LSD) or wildly improper dosage.
Unsurprisingly, this is what happens when ANYthing is illegal and therefore all usage is uncontrolled. Look at alcohol during prohibition. It was frequently tainted with methanol, ethelyne glycol and god knows what else. Many people went crazy, committed horrible, violent, harmful acts or died suddenly because they drank tainted product. The major harm from illegal drugs stems from the very fact that they are illegal.
If drug purity and content were controlled and dosage information were freely available, the reduction in harm from these drugs would drop significantly. People who are going to do drugs are going to do them if they are legal or illegal. But if they were legal and controlled, people would know what they were getting, they would know how much they could do and they would be more likely to seek help if they had problems without fear of jail time. And far fewer people would commit crimes to get their next fix.
Yes, there would still be abusers and harm done, just like we still have chronic alcoholics, but the harm to the general public would be much less.
So no matter what your grandma said about LSD abusers there are far more reasons to legalize and have some control over drugs than to leave them in the murky shadows of the underworld.
Re:Is this even news? (Score:3, Informative)
I take it you haven't done any of these, since the effects of LSD is **NOT** identical to the effects of psilocybin mushrooms or mescaline-containing cacti. I have done all three, and all three are dramatically different from each other. For that matter, a trip from San Pedro cacti is different than a peyote trip, and a chemically-generated LSD trip is different than a morning glory seed generated LSD trip.