Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Science, Psychedelics, and the FDA

In the past few weeks, two articles have come under my admittedly narrow radar about small clinical trials of psychedelic drugs. Now, it's only in the past decade that the FDA has finally begun to loosen the restrictions that are in place on these substances, and it's been a very slow and tentative process. Although a ton of restrictions are still in place, the little insight that has been gained in this time is very promising.

This article from the New York Times is about a study that was conducted in John Hopkins medical school about the possible effects of psilocybin on people suffering from chronic depression. While the study was very small, the results indicated that the drug could be useful for helping people get through depression, and many subjects listed the experience among the most positive of their lives.

Another article, this one from Scientific American, focuses on a study of MDMA, AKA street ecstasy, conducted by the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. This study was conducted on veterans suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and many subjects who had experienced no appreciable benefit from other methods of psychotherapy saw their symptoms disappear after a few trials with MDMA. The article also references the aforementioned psilocybin study, and goes into a very fair discussion of the FDA's loosening its heavy restrictions on these studies.

Really, I don't see why the FDA's been so sluggish in this arena. While I'm glad that they've finally loosened the restrictions to some extent, there still a long way to go, both time-wise and money-wise, before they will allow studies of the same scale as are given to other more "conventional" drugs. It would be so interesting to see what would come of larger scale studies. Also, veering away from the purely scientific, more studies on these "dangerous" narcotics, drugs which are placed in Schedule 1 in the United States (grouped together with heroin and the like) would go a long way in convincing the public that these drugs are not as dangerous as the politicians would like you to believe. It would be a fantastic little seed to plant in the mind of your average person, which could perhaps lead many to realize that the War on Drugs in general is just complete nonsense.

Unfortunately, this fantasy world of mine is currently just that - a fantasy. But I guess in the meantime, I can at least be thankful for the baby-steps we're making in that direction.

4 comments:

  1. I can't believe we really have to pretend recreational drugs have medicinal use in order to legalize them. I'm all for legalizing all drugs, but I wish we could be honest about it. The sad thing is, we're stuck trying to make this ridiculous "medicinal" argument because of the classification system for drugs. Schedule I drugs have no medicinal use, so trying to prove they do ends up being the easiest route to legalization.

    *sigh* Oh bureaucracy... is there anything you can't ruin?

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's the sad, sad world we live in. In an ideal universe, people could just accept that people have the right to put whatever substance they want, harmful or otherwise, into in their own bodies, and that'd be that. But unfortunately, the general public is still not receptive to that mode of thinking. With some of these Schedule 1 drugs, the easiest way to get them legalized is to prove that they are medicinally useful in some way.

    It's a really roundabout and idiotic process, but what isn't when government is concerned?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Almost 250 years of legislation... we are the oldest extant democracy . It's not surprising we have some confusion.

    I think we should eliminate the Senate and replace it with the House of Erasure. They won't be law makers, they'll be law erasers, and it can be their sole job to eliminate stupid laws.

    ReplyDelete
  4. They won't be law makers, they'll be law erasers

    What are you, some kind of an anarchist?

    Good title, though...

    This Fall on ABC...an all new hour long series...a team of rebels who hated the law and decided to do something about it!

    The Law Erasers!

    ReplyDelete

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