Psychedelic drugs have a controversial history, both on and off college campuses. But studies are showing that these substances have great potential for therapeutic use. Here’s Allison Rauch with more.
NARRATION: Last spring, Jacob Milendorf came up with an idea for a club. He wanted a space to discuss a topic he’s passionate about.
MILENDORF: I’ve kind of been fascinated with psychedelics for a while. Because I really see it as one of the most interesting puzzles… academic puzzles, personal puzzles…My kind of aim as a human being, for as long as I remember, has been, like, a lot of philosophical questions, like how do I need the best life? How do I be the best person? How can I be happy? And psychedelics seem to answer a lot of those questions.
NARRATION: Milendorf was inspired by his cousin at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. She told him about the psychedelics club she goes to.
MILENDORF: I kind of heard that and was like, Well, I can’t believe that. You go, like, you go to a club every week for this, and this is like, university sanctioned. And she was like yeah. And like, you know, we don’t, we don’t – no one does psychedelics, we talk about psychedelics, we kind of tried to tap into, like the psychedelic experience that was brought up so like meditation art.
NARRATION: Milendorf looked into similar clubs at other universities. He used this information to propose a similar club at Northwestern.
MILENDORF: All of the values were taken off of Harvard’s website for their psychedelics published by the official Harvard Club, it’s not like underground,.. I went through the regular club process. And I don’t know exactly how it works for my channel understanding isn’t a student body that will pass it. And then there’s a kind of an official, adult organization that has it. So it went through the student section. And they said, you know, this, this went through your decisions pending, we’ll let you know. That was, or we’re pushing on five on SEO and I have not heard back from them.
NARRATION: Milendorf was frustrated by the university’s lack of response. But this isn’t the first time he’s gotten some blowback from the university about his interests. Last year, his presentation on mushrooms was shut down by the Willard Residential College board.
MILENDORF: I think they were just so concerned that the topic of psychedelic mushrooms might come off that they didn’t want to chance it. Because I didn’t, it wasn’t even advertised that it was about saying that, in fact, I wouldn’t have even done the bulk of the presentation, maybe a quarter of it.
NARRATION: Psychedelics, or hallucinogens, have a complicated history on college campuses, and in the U.S. at large. But today, they’re at the center of a new movement in medicine.
BRIAN BARNETT: The psychedelic renaissance in medicine, is commonly said, by most people in the field to have started in 2006, when Roland Griffiths and associates at Johns Hopkins published a study on using psilocybin to induce mystical experiences.
NARRATION: That’s Dr. Brian Barnett. He’s an assistant professor of psychiatry in Cleveland. His work focuses around treatment resistant mood disorders. And with that, Barnett has been conducting some interesting research on psychedelics.
BARNETT: When I got to residency…I quickly realized that there are a large number of patients with psychiatric disorders, who don’t respond to basically any treatment that we have right now. There’s about a third of patients for most diagnoses, who are considered treatment resistant, it’s very difficult to help those patients find relief. And I started digging into the history of psychedelics and was just kind of floored by what I found.
NARRATION: Barnett was surprised to find that 1950s and early 1960s, psychedelics were making a splash in medicine. Just like they are now.
BARNETT: LSD, psilocybin, they were psychiatric medicines that were marketed. Like psychiatrists in the 50s and 60s, used them to treat their patients. And then all that sort of disappeared with the beginning of the drug war in the late 60s, early 70s.
WESLEY SHIROLA: Indeed, about 40,000 patients, if I recall, were treated with LSD and traditional psychotherapy between 1950 and 1965. And more than 1000 research papers on LSD and other psychedelics were published in that same period of time.
NARRATION: That’s Wesley Shirola. He’s not a doctor, but he’s passionate about psychedelic use in medicine. When he was at Northwestern, he wrote a series of op-eds for the Daily Northwestern. Each op-ed focused on government policies around different substances.
SHIROLA: When many of us hear the word psychedelics, I think it brings to mind images of the 1960s of the hippies of the music festivals. Right. And I think that a lot of people would be surprised to find out that these infamous drugs, which include LSD, and MDMA actually can have very powerful therapeutic effects.
NARRATION: Barnett and Shirola both noted that psychedelics could be uniquely valuable in therapy. LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA have all been shown to be useful in treating multiple mental health issues.
BARNETT: Psychedelics really raised the question of: are mental illnesses, really just different forms of cognitive rigidity, you know, people getting stuck in weird patterns, that that manifests differently, you know, based on environment based on personal experience.
NARRATION: So then, if psychedelics are so useful, why are we just now getting around to normalizing their usage? Shirola thinks that lingering stigma is one reason.
SHIROLA: Psychedelics are not just drugs of the counterculture, and that they’re nothing like opioids or cocaine, in terms of their potentially negative and dangerous effects.
NARRATION: The War on Drugs, and Nixon classifying psychedelics as Schedule One drugs, seems to be a key sticking point. But stigma might not be the only roadblock. Barnett noted that practicality could play a big role, too.
BARNETT: LSD can last twice as long as psilocybin. And that really matters for clinical care. Because, you know, if it’s going to take, you know, 12 hours, you have to be with this patient two therapists have to be present in the room. That’s a huge amount of medical resources that are being consumed. There’s real concern, psychedelic therapy because it is so resource intensive…that the reimbursement from insurance companies will be too low to entice therapists to offer that as a service… so there’s big issues around equity. And, you know, not just the financial issues, but access for minority groups as well.
NARRATION: So it seems that for as far as psychedelics have come, they’ve got much farther to go. Maybe they’ll become less stigmatized, and perhaps even legalized in medicine. Maybe then, other areas of our culture will become more receptive. Maybe Northwestern will let Milendorf make his club.
MILENDORF: Like, psychedelics can be dangerous, right?…But you can think about it kind of like driving a car. Like, you wouldn’t let like a 10 year old drive a car, you like, wouldn’t want to drink and drive a car, you wouldn’t want to, like drive if you don’t know how, if your experience. But like, if you know how it’s done, there’s really not a problem, again, you might be stressed out during traffic or whatever. But like, you’ll get through it.
NARRATION: For WNUR News, I’m Allison Rauch.
