Psychotropics Shown to Have Benefits

Dear Papabear,

What are the benefits of psychedelics, if any? I ask this because it may or may be possible certain ones may be legal someday. It's not like they are all bad; it's just ... is it right from a moral stand point to make certain ones legal in Canada?

Sergie

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Dear Sergie,

Good question :-3 Some people, such as, famously, the late Dr. Timothy Leary, have promoted the benefits of drugs like LSD. There are those who say it has a spiritual effect, allowing people to experience things they could not in the mundane world. Scientists who have studied drugs such as psilocybin (psilocybin, baeocystin, norbaeocystin, and psilocin are all hallucinogens found in eleven different mushroom genera), speculate that this is because psychotropics bring down the barriers around our sense of self, our ego, and make us feel more open-minded and connected to the world around us.

While there have not been any major studies on the effects of hallucinogens just yet, there have been a number of smaller ones involving a couple dozen subjects. Focusing on psilocybin, they concluded hallucinogens have benefits for both healthy and mentally ill patients. For those with various emotional and mental illnesses, the drug has been found effective for such disorders as depression, anxiety, and addiction (one study reported successfully curing 80% of test subjects of nicotine addiction). When administered to healthy patients, the drugs have notable effects on personalities. They tend to make people calmer, more creative, more focused, compassionate, tolerant--in short, NICER people! Interestingly, these effects can be noted with a single dose of a hallucinogen and can last over a year.

There is an important caveat to this, however, which is that psychotropics do have risks. For some people, they can cause "bad trips," as people who dropped acid in the Sixties and Seventies used to say, which can make you go literally nuts. For this reason, should drugs like psilocybin be approved someday for medical use, they should only be administered by skilled physicians and not taken recreationally. Taking the wrong dose of these medicines is highly dangerous.

So, when you ask about whether hallucinogens are good from a "moral" standpoint, I would say they are as moral as any other medication might be. There are many potential benefits for them that I don't think we should ignore and that require further research by the medical community.


Hugs,
Papabear