1/3Magic mushrooms － The Economist June 8th 2019 医療用幻覚キノコ
Psilocybin
Shroom for improvement
Research into the therapeutic potential of magic mushroom is back in vogue
“My childhood was similar to those of many immigrants: my parents were under a lot of stress, and there was violence and alcoholism in the family,” says Carlos Plazola. “When I was under stress, reacted similarly. I always regretted my responses, but I couldn't override them. After a mushroom journey, I found new ways to respond that included compassion and empathy.” That is why Mr Plazola joined Decriminalise Nature Oakland, a group which this week persuaded the council of the California city in effect to tolerate the consumption of magic mushrooms and other psychoactive plants and fungi. Last month Denver voted to do the same, but just for magic mushrooms. A campaign in Oregon wants to legalise their use by registered therapists. A Republican state senator in Iowa, Jeff Shipley, has filed a bill to allow the use of psilocybin and other hallucinogens for medical purposes.
After half a century, psychedelic drugs are inching in from the cold. Magic mushrooms, whose active ingredient is psilocybin, are in the vanguard.
Attitudes towards the drug may be moving back towards those prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s, when psychedelics elicited interest rather than horror among ordinary Americans. The name “magic mushrooms” was coined, improbably, by a headline writer in stodgy old life magazine. The magazine’s owner, Henry Luce, who had been taking LSD with his wife, had commissioned a banker friend to write about taking part in the secret mushroom ceremonies that had persisted in Latin America for centuries after the drug was suppressed by the Spanish invaders.
The therapeutic potential of psychedelics was discussed by scientists and enthusiasts. Bill W, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said he got sober with the help of hallucinogen － the seeds of Belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Over 1,000 research papers, involving 40,000 volunteers, are reckoned to have been published in the period looking into their potential for treating a wide range of mental ills. But the research effort was scuppered by the moral panic sparked by Timothy Leary, founder of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, who, to the horror of parents and politicians, urged America’s young to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Magic mushrooms were banned in America in 1970, and are listed as Schedule 1 drugs by the UN, an assessment meaning that the potential for abuse outweighs their medical potential. Though barred in most of the world, psilocybin is legally available in a few places, such as Jamaica and the Netherlands, which has led to small but flourishing psychedelic- tourism business.
But things are changing, for a few reasons. That the widespread decriminalisation of marijuana in America did not bring the social and moral collapse some detractors predicted has opened minds to the possibility of doing the same for other drugs. Psychedelics have enjoyed a vogue in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs said taking LSD was “a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life” And consuming tiny amount doses of psychedelics to enhance productivity is fashionable these days. Influential pundits such as Sam Harris discuss their potential.
All this has helped rehabilitate psychedelics. But the main reason for the revival of interest is probably the determination of a group of scientists. A few of the older ones first worked on the drugs in America in the earlier wave of research; they have been joined by a younger, transatlantic band. Earlier this year, Imperial College in London opened the world’s first Center for Psychedelic Research.
The scientists’ findings are reaching a wider public through, for instance, the journalism of Michael Pollan, who last year published “How to Change Your Mind”, a book about the history and use of psychedelic drugs. In the words of Del Jolly of the victorious decriminalisation campaign in Denver: “There’s so much information out there. Healthy normals are beginning to understand the potential of these things.”
There are plenty of psychedelics researchers could work on, but the focus is on psilocybin. That is partly because nobody has heard of it, so, unlike LSD, it does not raise hackles. It is also relatively easy to synthesize. Since 2006, when the results of the new wave of studies was published, there have been a dozen papers showing that it may be a useful treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, tobacco addiction, alcoholism, depression and the anxiety that so often afflicts people when they are approaching death.
