By Shannon Powers. Mentored and edited by Alla Katsnelson.
Psychedelic therapies such as psilocybin and MDMA may one day help people recover from severe depression, trauma, and substance abuse, but scientists are struggling to access them for studies due to strict regulations, researchers said last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“Most of these medications are currently scheduled as illicit substances and [to do] research with these drugs right now there is considerable barrier,” said Devon Christie, a physician at Numinus, a company in Vancouver, British Columbia, that combines psychedelics and talk therapy.
Currently, these drugs are extremely difficult to obtain. Agencies that regulate illicit substances require approval and strict protocols for using them because they are considered to have a high risk of abuse. Researchers who want to study them must request special permission and often have to adhere to high security protocols. But to develop the drugs into effective therapies, the agencies will need to reclassify them to allow freer access to them by medical researchers, as long as researchers document the studies well, Christie added.
Clinical trials of psychedelics to treat anxiety and depression have been especially promising, said Frederick Barrett, a cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. For example, in a study he conducted psilocybin significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients for 6 months. In a study led by other researchers, people with treatment resistant depression experienced a drastic reduction of symptoms for three months, before returning to baseline. Even if psilocybin’s effects aren’t permanent, Barrett said, the drug is much more effective than any other available treatment.
Slowly, researchers are beginning to tease out psychedelics’ therapeutic effects, said Robin Carhart-Davis, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “While it’s early days and we’re scratching the surface, there are some things that we do know, and I think we’re starting to get an idea of how psychedelics therapies work in the brain and in the mind.”
But researchers must be aware that psychedelics can have severe averse consequences, cautioned Christie. “What’s right for one person from one background may not be the right optimized environment for somebody [else],” she said. Unlike other drugs, the aesthetic of the environment and mental state someone is in when they take a psychedelic could cause them to have a bad trip. To prevent this, larger studies will be needed to determine what the optimal environments might be. That, too, will require wider access for clinical studies.
A major barrier to reclassifying these substances is that their use carries a lot of social and political stigma – and because of that, we often do not value the experience patients can have while using them, the researchers said. Yet this experience, especially in combination with talk therapy can provide lasting relief. Changing how these drugs are classified will make it possible for researchers to study them on a larger scale.
Carhartt-Harris said he believes that increased interest in these substances reflects psychiatrists' desperate desire to help their patients. “They’re dissatisfied with the current tool kits that they have,” he said. “They are keen for something new and different.”
Shannon Powers is a third year Developmental Psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Denver. She studies the effects of cannabis use during pregnancy on the neurobiology of parenting. Follow her on Twitter at @shan_e_powers or email her at sepowers94@gmail.com.
