Magic mushrooms at Hopkins? Studies explore using hallucinogens to treat depression
by FERN SHEN
Hardworking Johns Hopkins University pre-meds may not have time to fool around with psychedelic substances, but their bow-tie-wearing professors are experimenting with them — and making headlines with their results.
As The New York Times reported yesterday, and locals have known for some time, Hopkins researchers are leading the way on a re-examination by mainstream medical researchers of the potential for psychoactive drugs such as psilocybin to treat “depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs and alcohol.”
Roland Griffiths, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, has been leading studies of medical uses of psilocybin.
The peg for this latest story is a conference in San Jose this week, the biggest in four decades, on psychedelic science.
The article features the work of Hopkins Behavioral Biology Professor Roland Griffiths, who has been has been conducting double-blinded studies of psilocybin’s effects on human subjects. He spoke about his research at TEDx MidAtlantic, held in Baltimore this past November. (Here’s a link to a video of his talk.)
Perhaps, with the imprimatur of The Times and Hopkins, the research can steer clear of the Culture War problems that brought down earlier efforts to learn about trippy hallucinogens’ possible capacity to help and heal.