LSD may not be bad for you, says Norwegian study
The late acid guru Dr Timothy Leary would doubtless have claimed to have known it all along, but after conducting an exhaustive study on tens of thousands of Americans, a team of Norwegian scientists has concluded that LSD may actually be good for you.
Researchers Pal-Orjan Johansen and Teri Krebs from Norway’s University of Science and Technology in Trondheim examined American drug-use surveys carried out between 2001 and 2004 on over 130,000 US citizens, of which 22,000 had used a psychedelic drug such as LSD at least once in their lives.
The results may not amount to an appeal to “turn on, tune in and drop out”, but they appear to overturn the opinion long-held in parts of the medical establishment that LSD and other “mind-enhancing” drugs automatically result in debilitating flashbacks, uncontrollable paranoia attacks and a desire to leap off buildings.
“Everything has some risk; psychedelics can elicit temporary feelings of anxiety and confusion, but accidents leading to serious injury are extremely rare,” explained Mrs Krebs. “Over the past 50 years, tens of millions of people have used psychedelics and there is just not much evidence of long-term problems,” she added.
Both scientists concluded in a report published last year in the British Journal of Psychopharmacology that a single dose of LSD was a highly effective treatment for alcoholism. They recommended that the drug be used more often to help patients with a drink problem and argued that it was probably just as effective as current medications used to treat alcohol addiction.
Dr Leary – a champion of LSD who was simultaneously a cult figure for the late 1960s Hippie movement and branded the “most dangerous man in America” by President Nixon – came to similar conclusions in the 1950s while researching the drug at Harvard. He died in 1995.
The Trondheim researchers said their conclusions about LSD and alcoholism were based on surveys carried out in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. They said they had come across a total of six studies which met contemporary scientific standards. They established that 59 per cent of patients who had been given a dose of LSD had either stopped drinking completely or were drinking less than they were before taking the drug.
More information on this topic: The Independent
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