LSD: ADIC TESTS

Research into hallucinogenic drugs begins to shake off decades of taboo.


THE psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), with promising results.

Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University, was one of the best-known workers in the field, but it was also he who was widely blamed for discrediting it, by his unconventional research methods and his lax handling of drugs. Now, the details of Leary's research will be made public, with the recent purchase of his papers by the New York Public Library. These papers will be interesting not only culturally, but also scientifically, as they reflect what happened between the early medical promise of hallucinogens and their subsequent blacklisting by authorities around the world.

American researchers began experimenting with LSD in 1949, at first using it to simulate mental illness. Once its psychedelic effects were realised, they then tried it in psychotherapy and as a treatment for alcoholism, for which it became known at the time as a miracle cure.

By 1965 over 1,000 papers had been published describing positive results for LSD therapy. It, and its close chemical relative psilocybin, isolated from hallucinogenic mushrooms, were reported as having potential for treating anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, bereavement and even sexual dysfunction. Unfortunately, most of the studies that came to these conclusions were flawed: many results were anecdotal, and control groups were not established to take account of the placebo effect.

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