LSD, magic mushrooms, and ecstasy ‘could help treat anxiety, PTSD, and addiction’, experts say

published on September 8, 2015 by Lizzie Parry in MailOnline

LSD, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs could be used to treat anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder and addiction, a new study has today suggested.

It is more than 40 years since Harvard University researcher Timothy Leary urged America to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ causing President Richard Nixon to brand him ‘the most dangerous man in America’.

He conducted experiments under the Harvard Psilocybin Project and advocated the use of LSD, but was fired amid controversy with some supporters claiming the experiments produced useful psychiatry data.

Experiments using psychedelic drugs – substances that have a strong effect on one’s ‘conscious experience’ – grew in the 1950s and 1960s until they were stopped as LSD and other drugs were outlawed.

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Professor of medicine, Dr Evan Wood said: ‘Since the termination of a period of research from the 1950s to the early 1970s, most psychedelic substances have been classified as “drugs of abuse” with no recognised medical value.

‘However, controlled clinical studies have recently been conducted to assess the basic psycho-pharmacological properties and therapeutic efficacy of these drugs as adjuncts to existing psycho-therapeutic approaches.