The hallucinogenic has been used for far more than getting high in a field
“Suddenly, he had accepted the fact of death; he had taken this moksha medicine in which he believed. I had the feeling that he was interested, relieved and quiet.”
Coinciding as they did with the deaths of John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis in 1963, writer Aldous Huxley’s last hours were in danger of slipping away unnoticed. That is until his wife Laura, wrote about the experience of his death in a five-page letter to Huxley’s older brother Julian. She describes the effect of administering LSD to her husband after he silently passed her a scribbled note reading: “Try LSD, 100 µg, (…) intramuscular”. After giving her husband the drug, she noted the expression of “pure bliss and love” on his face, before he passed away several hours later.
“The breathing became slower and slower, and there was absolutely not the slightest indication of contraction, of struggle,” she wrote. “It was just that the breathing became slower – and slower – and slower, and at 5.20pm the breathing stopped… Both doctors and nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle.”
It wasn’t the first time Huxley had used LSD – he’d been taking it for some time prior to his death from laryngeal cancer. This week, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease announced the findings from a drug trial carried out in Switzerland, where doctors tested the efficacy of LSD for terminally ill patients during their final months of life.
In the US, under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, clinical trials of the hallucinogen have been banned, and yet other for studies using psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), as well as MDMA, tests have been ongoing. The aims are the same for both investigations: to discover whether these drugs reduce anxiety and depression over the long term, for those to whom a cure, or hope of recovery, is no longer an option. Hospitals and hospices have a variety of vetted, approved anaesthetics to keep physical pain somewhat at bay, but the mind is a new hell all of its own.
The recent studies in Switzerland, led by Dr Peter Gasser, evaluated the reactions of 12 terminal patients, most of whom were battling cancer. Various amounts of LSD were administered to them as an alternative to psychotherapy treatment. Many reported similar feelings to those they’d already been experiencing, albeit with more intensity. Despite this, anxiety levels decreased by 20% in the eight patients given full doses (200 micrograms: the average amount usually taken for a ‘good’ high is 100-200mg), compared to the four patients who took an active placebo of 20 micrograms. None reported any form of psychotic crisis.
Despite being a Class A drug in the UK, and carrying heavy fines and prison terms both here and in the US, the Swiss have a very different attitude to LSD. Its discovery by the late Alfred Hoffman has seen the scientist lauded as a national hero in Switzerland. It was used first and foremost as an aid to psychiatric therapy, even before it became associated with recreational usage.
The spectrum of reactions to hallucinogens is indicative of the effects they produce: unlike many other recreational drugs, they fail to produce a common trip – each person responds differently. Therefore, it’s fitting that medical opinion has remained so divided over its usefulness in end-of-life treatments. A huge number of studies, conducted before the wider ban came into place in the 60s, confirmed LSD’s therapeutic efficiency for illnesses, ranging from depression to OCD and autism. In 1953 Canadian scientists tested the reactions of alcoholics to LSD as part of rehabilitation programmes: many of them achieved sobriety and thanked the ‘mystical experiences’ of their respective trips.
Of course, darker, more sinister usages have reared their heads over the years. In 1951, a southern French village erupted in a spate of hallucination in an incident still referred to as ‘Le Pain Maudit’ (Cursed Bread). One suggested theory for this event is that American CIA agents had laced the villagers’ bread in an attempted ‘mind-control experiment’ at the height of the Cold War. It’s therefore perhaps understandable why, after many found themselves in asylums, scientists and doctors are wary of experimentation.
Maybe temporary oblivion is preferable to reality at times
In the past other, less intense hallucinogens have been touted as remedies for what’s become known as ‘existential anxiety’. They’re used because they’re thought to be gentler and carry less risk of paranoia. But as Huxley’s doctor is reported to have said, as he watched his wife fill a syringe, “What harm can it possibly do him now?” Maybe temporary oblivion, in whatever form that might take for the user, is preferable to reality.
LSD, as this most recently study has elucidated, may intensify emotion but in the process, has been found to free the mind of its users during a trip, allowing them to fully open up during psychotherapy sessions in ways they might have not felt able to before. These trials must surely be a positive thing: for who can judge the desire to take some respite, in whatever form it’s offered, from otherwise ceaseless swirls of fear and doubt? Where end-of-life care and psychedelic drugs are concerned, these results prove that they might be part of treatment, when for decades they’ve been dubbed the disease.
Images: YouTube, Wikipedia
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