DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman-pages

Page 42 of 369

Page 42 of 369
DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman-pages

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occurred.” PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS: SCIENCE AND SOCIETY + 27 age. However, these follow-up studies generated much less fanfare than did the original damaging reports. Papers in the psychiatric literature describing "bad trips," or adverse psychological reactions to psychedelics, also multiplied, but are simi- larly limited. In order to address these concerns in my own study, I read every paper describing such negative effects and published the results. It was clear that rates of psychiatric complications were extraordinarily low in controlled research settings, for both normal volunteers and psychiat- ric patients. However, when psychiatrically ill or unstable individuals took impure or unknown psychedelics, combined with alcohol and other drugs, in an uncontrolled setting with inadequate supervision, problems 7 In response to the public's anxiety about uncontrolled LSD use, and over the objections of nearly every investigator in the field, the United States Congress passed a law in 1970 making LSD and other psychedelics illegal. The government told scientists to return their drugs, paperwork requirements for obtaining and maintaining new supplies of psychedelics for research became a time-consuming and confusing burden, and there was little hope for new projects. Money for studies dried up and research- ers abandoned their experiments. With the new drug laws in place, interest in human psychedelic research died off almost as rapidly as it had begun. It was as if the psychedelic drugs became "un-discovered." Considering the intense pace of human research with psychedelics just thirty years ago, it is amazing how little today's medical and psychiatric training programs teach about them. Psychedelics were the growth area in psychiatry for over twenty years. Now young physicians and psychiatrists know nearly nothing about them. By the time I was a medical student in the mid-1970s, less than ten years after the drug laws changed, psychedelics were the topic of just two lectures in my four years of study. Even this may have been more informa- tion than students received at most other medical schools, because there was a research group performing animal studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where I trained. In the mid-1990s,