By Mickey Friedman
December 15, 2016
I have watched people I love suffer not only life-threatening cancers but the depression and anxiety that accompanies cancer. My mother descended into a paranoid hell as her cancer metastasized and spread to her brain. A considerate and humble woman during eighty-three plus of her years, she somehow became unreasonable, nasty in her last months, even berating the nurses who unstintingly cared for her.
My dear friend Jim’s anxiety spun out of control toward the end as his heart-wrenching fear of finding himself alone overcame his great innate kindness.
Cancer, a most diabolical disease, relentless eats away at our selves.
I have written about addiction and the sway it holds over so many in our community. But life is often more complicated than we’d like it be: our desire for simple stories, clear explanations, and an easy-to-download guide to living the good life so often thwarted by complexity and contradiction.
We have recently been crafting a consensus in the Berkshires about the unrelenting despair that awaits those who succumb to drugs. A coalition of police and health professionals warn about the inevitable path that smoking marijuana or using hallucinogens leads to – one gateway drug leading to a worse drug leading to an inevitable addiction and darkness. This is a compelling narrative, often a truth, meant to warn, meant to encourage saying no.
Which brings me to the other morning when I was punishing myself by reading the New York Times’ daily dissection of our transition to Trumpdom, a litany of doom and gloom without a single nod to irony. But as I was reading about yet another scary cabinet member, there, without warning, was an extraordinary ray of journalistic sunshine. For me, at least, considering my aforementioned history.
Here at Fuel Great Barrington and there on my computer was this headline: “A Single Dose of a Hallucinogen, and Then Lasting Peace.” With this summary enticing me to read Jan Hoffman’s story: “Two studies used psilocybin, an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms, to see if it could reduce depression and anxiety in cancer patients. The results were striking.” Words we haven’t seen thrown together since Timothy Leary: hallucinogen and lasting peace.
Striking considering the recent barrage of bad news. Death by heroin and OxyContin; lives lost and families torn asunder. Alcohol abuse and more lives lost. Striking because we’ve become so accustomed to the link between drugs and darkness.
But here now was news that mushrooms might actually be magic. Might bring light to those in such great need. Might be a solution and not just a problem. Imagine. That psilocybin could be the gateway drug to less pain. A desperately earned bliss, perhaps. A major step in the right direction, not the wrong.
Remember: this news came not from a bunch of twenty-somethings too stoned to see, but from medical professionals who know how to conduct a rigorous double blind study. From New York University’s Langone Medical Center and from Johns Hopkins in Maryland.
Johns Hopkins studied 59 patients with recurrent or metastasized life-threatening cancers; NYU 29. According to the Hopkins team, each participant had two treatment sessions scheduled five weeks apart, one with a capsule of a psilocybin dose too low to produce effects that served as a placebo “control.” Then participants received a moderate or high dose.
Researchers assessed their patients’ mood, attitudes about life and spirituality, and their behaviors, with questionnaires and interviews conducted before the first session, seven hours after taking the psilocybin, five weeks after each session, and then again six months later. Immediately after each session, participants noted “changes in visual, auditory, and body perceptions; feelings of transcendence; changes in mood; and more.”
The Hopkins study showed “that psilocybin decreased clinician- and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety. The compound increased quality of life, life meaning, and optimism.” Six months after the final treatment: “About 80% of participants continued to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety, with about 60% showing symptom remission into the normal range:
83% reported increases in well-being or life satisfaction
67% of participants reported the experience as one of the top five meaningful experiences in their lives
About 70% reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events”
For over 40 years, psilocybin has been illegal. According to Hoffman, when Octavian Mihai who suffers from Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma swallowed his psilocybin “images flew by like shooting stars: a spinning world that looked like a blue-green chessboard; himself on a stretcher in front of a hospital; his parents, gazing at him with aching sadness as he reached out to them, suffused with childlike love.”
If anyone deserves relief, it’s those who suffer cancer. But really when you think about it, why not treat all who battle depression and anxiety. Sometimes it may pay to just say “yes.” Because maybe these mushrooms are magic.
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For more information:
A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace
The New York Times, December. 1, 2016 By Jan Hoffman
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-anxiety-depression.html?
New York University School of Medicine and Bluestone Center for Clinical Research Study Information
http://nyucanceranxiety.org/study_information.html
Johns Hopkins Press Release
Vanessa McMains
December 1, 2016
“Hallucinogenic drug found in ‘magic mushrooms’ eases depression, anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer”
https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/12/01/hallucinogen-treats-cancer-depression-anxiety/
Journal of Psychopharmacology
2016, Vol. 30(12) 1181–1197
http://jop.sagepub.com/content/30/12/1181.full.pdf
Maybe Mushrooms Are Magic was first published in the December 8, 2016 issue of The Berkshire Record.