Thursday, September 28, 2006

Drug induced mysticism: a follow-up

posted by diana at 1:12 AM :: 6 comments :: Post a Comment

The field of psychedelics research has been growing recently after being all but silenced for the past few decades. MAPS.org is a good website for checking out ongoing psychedelics studies. This new Johns Hopkins study, while exciting just for the fact that it was allowed to be done, is pretty much an exact replicate of a study done in 1962 called the Good Friday Experiment (not to be mistaken for the band of the same name), which found, unsurprisingly, very similar results. Rick Doblin, the head of MAPS, followed up with the subjects of the Good Friday Experiment in 1991. Here's a quote from that follow-up paper:

"All psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives. The positive changes described by the psilocybin subjects at six months, which in some cases involved basic vocational and value choices and spiritual understandings, had persisted over time and in some cases had deepened."

6 Comments:

Blogger lingawonga said...

While it's a really neat study, there's at least one significant compund, in that I think the subjects might have been self-selected to be interested in / open to / looking for a mystical experience. They were recruited for a “study of states of consciousness brought about by a naturally occurring psychoactive substance used sacramentally in some cultures" and were not offered anything else like money as compensation. So they asked people to come in for 2-3 8-hour sessions (plus meetings in-between!) with the only benefits being the potential experience of a cool drug, and the advancement of science.

Something more general like a "study of the effects of psychoactive substances" would have reduced this potential complication. And, if it were my study I would have the questionnaires have questions about mystical experience sort of "hidden" amidst a host of other drug experience-related questions, ensuring more that the participants wouldn't even know that the purpose of the study was to examine mystical effects.

I'm not sure what the normal rates of affiliation with a religious or spiritual community are in the U.S., but I thought 53% was sort of high. If that number is above normal, then again, the subjects were not very representative.

And a question I had for those people who've taken methylphenidate (or something fairly similiar like Ritalin)... how much cooler are the effects of shrooms compared to meth.? Although the study controlled well for observable physiological and behavioral effects of the drugs to maintain blindedness, as someone who's tried both, how easy would it be for you to identify a random drug you took as shrooms or not?

I guess my point is that I don't imagine meth. as a particularly mystical drug, and especially since the subjects might have been biased toward having a mystical experience, they would be more likely to rate shrooms as a spritually significant, personally meaningful experience simply because it produced more of a mystical state than meth. did.

8:11 AM EST  
Blogger lingawonga said...

Another thing thing I just thought of is that, while they controlled for expectancy regarding the effects of a potentially mystical drug (shrooms), they didn't control for the expectancy of a mystical experience in general, an expectancy that came with their recruitment blurb. Another way to control for this would be to have another control group, also double-blind crossover, but with meth. and some other non-hallucinogenic control drug.

Not that I disagree with the results of the study, I just think the method could have been more sound. It must be all this IRB experience I've been getting.

8:37 AM EST  
Blogger Unknown said...

Sorry for the extra post (I already commented below) but this topic is a button pusher for me.

Out of the 150 people screened, all subjects who were chosen for the study had, at some point in their lives, participated in religious or spiritual activity. None had history of psychiatric illness - a key point, as prolonged use of psilocybin has been shown to be associated with higher levels of latent schizophrenia (these are a series of symptoms that some chronic, heavy users of marijuana also exhibit after only a few years - n.b. previously non-psychotic).

I agree with Ling in that the team's preference for conscientious, highly educated subjects cannot be overlooked. I can see, for IRB-related reasons, why choosing such a group is ethically more sound from a scientific perspective than choosing any of the dozens of junkies pounding at the doors downstairs for these kinds of studies --- a free high, often in hand with thousands of dollars per study (though not in this case).

I could go on about clinical studies in drug abuse & their impact on the surrounding communities in East Baltimore where Hopkins recruits most of its subjects who are willing to risk their lives and safety for these studies - about institutionalized lives caught between the JHMI and The Max (the biggest prison in town - coincidence? you'd hope) just down the street - but I'll just shut up now. Great topic, kids.

9:03 AM EST  
Blogger Unknown said...

Okay one more post, regarding the methods. I think the methods were sound and the study did employ double-blind methods in informing all subjects that they would receive psilocybin and some other non-hallucinogenic drug (in this case, methylphenidate -- the generic form of Ritalin, a non-hallucinogenic - the list of other potentials were mostly uppers and downers). In terms of expectancy, this should have helped to control the study at least in part. But I could be misreading something, or misinterpreting your idea. Care to clarify?

9:12 AM EST  
Blogger lingawonga said...

J, what I meant was that while shrooms can invoke a mystical/spiritual experience, that significance rating by the subjects may have been inflated. So imagine if you were someone open to having a spirtitual experience, and signed up for this study. Of course you'd rate the hallucinogenic drug as creating more of a spirtual experience than a stimulant. So then does shrooms make the list of top 5 spiritual experiences simply becuase it was more spirtual than mehtylphenidate, or because it is inherently spiritually stimulating? I think that a double-blind crossover with say, methylphenidate and some other stiumlant drug in some subjects would allow you to tease this out of the question. Because if methylphenidate was also rated as a highly spiritual experience when compared to the other drug, well then maybe shrooms do not induce a highly spiritual experience in and of themselves, but drugs in general to the naive but willing user does.

12:43 AM EST  
Blogger Unknown said...

Oooh... I don't know that Ritalin is associated with hallucinations, but I see your distinction. Would be interesting to see if they cause mystical experiences in themselves (though I doubt it & think you're right about the subpopulation chosen - the experience is a function of the cultural ideas & behaviors one brings along). I mean, how do you explain to Baby Johnny when he grows up that, honey, having him in your arms was right up there with that last cap you tripped on when you were 19?

2:14 AM EST  

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