Opening Doors of Perception: Psychedelic Drugs and End-of-Life Care

Abstract

Psychedelic drugs are still tarred with their 1960s-era image of “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” but serious investigators had been studying these compounds at least since the 1940s to manage conditions such as alcoholism, chronic pain, and terminal illness. By the mid-1970s, most of that research had been shut down. But interest in the therapeutic properties of psychedelic agents never completely subsided, and over the past decade a new generation of researchers has quie tly been studying the effect of psilocybin on people in the late stages of cancer. When Charles Grob, M.D., and his colleagues published their findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2010, they noted that their study was “the first in 35 years to explore the potential utility of a psilocybin treatment model for patients with reactive anxiety associated with advanced-stage cancer.” Their subjects were 11 women and 1 man, aged 36–58 years. Four patients had no experience with hallucinogens. In initial meetings with the study staff, they learned about the study design and had a chance to develop a rapport with the investigators.