WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC
KEEPINTOUCH
RECENTNEWS
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15 July 2015 by Stephen Clark
NEWS ARTICLE_
Scientists wowed by new views of ‘psychedelic’ Pluto.
Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon share an alien environment on the Solar System’s outer frontier, with patches of organic ices and diverse rock types illustrated in colour imagery released Tuesday. Speaking hours after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed 7,700 miles from Pluto on the first-ever encounter with the mystery world, scientists said early images show remarkable diversity across Pluto’s surface. The images yield new insights on the distant dwarf’s composition, a teaser before more refined data on Pluto’s mineral makeup arrives back on Earth later this week. “From the ground, we knew that there were a lot different colours on Pluto, but we never imagined anything like this,” said Cathy Olkin, New Horizons’ deputy project scientist from the Southwest Research Institute. Olkin said Pluto appeared “psychedelic” in colour. While Pluto’s appearance in recent New Horizons photos approximates what the human eye would see, the false colour image exaggerates different shades of Pluto’s rust-coloured crust, allowing scientists to dig deeper into the geology of the faraway outpost. The Ralph instrument on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured the colour data as the probe flew inbound toward Pluto on Monday. “This is an aesthetic moment as much as it is a science moment,” said Jeff Moore, geology and geophysics team lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Having been a reader of science fiction and an admirer of space art, I don’t believe that even the best space artist in the world could make a painting as beautiful as this. This is nature outdoing us.” The colour imagery shows a brilliant heart-shaped marking appears to be divided into two compositional sections with a clear line separating the units. “The heart actually is two different beasts,” Moore said. “The west half of the heart, which is on the left-hand side, is smooth. We think it might actually be smooth, although we can’t be completely sure.”
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February 9, 2015 Issue
NEWS ARTICLE_
The Trip Treatment
On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick Mettes, a fifty-four-year-old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive. The article, headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning in Again,” mentioned clinical trials at several universities, including N.Y.U., in which psilocybin—the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms—was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and “existential distress.” One of the researchers was quoted as saying that, under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” Patrick had never taken a psychedelic drug, but he immediately wanted to volunteer. Lisa was against the idea. “I didn’t want there to be an easy way out,” she recently told me. “I wanted him to fight.”
Patrick made the call anyway and, after filling out some forms and answering a long list of questions, was accepted into the trial. Since hallucinogens can sometimes bring to the surface latent psychological problems, researchers try to weed out volunteers at high risk by asking questions about drug use and whether there is a family history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. After the screening, Mettes was assigned to a therapist named Anthony Bossis, a bearded, bearish psychologist in his mid-fifties, with a specialty in palliative care. Bossis is a co-principal investigator for the N.Y.U. trial.
After four meetings with Bossis, Mettes was scheduled for two dosings—one of them an “active” placebo (in this case, a high dose of niacin, which can produce a tingling sensation), and the other a pill containing the psilocybin. Both sessions, Mettes was told, would take place in a room decorated to look more like a living room than like a medical office, with a comfortable couch, landscape paintings on the wall, and, on the shelves, books of art and mythology, along with various aboriginal and spiritual tchotchkes, including a Buddha and a glazed ceramic mushroom. During each session, which would last the better part of a day, Mettes would lie on the couch wearing an eye mask and listening through headphones to a carefully curated playlist—Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, Ravi Shankar. Bossis and a second therapist would be there throughout, saying little but being available to help should he run into any trouble.
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Sep 9, 2015 By Lecia Bushak
NEWS ARTICLE_
We’ve known about the mental health potential of psychedelic drugs for some time now. Past research has shown that mentally ill patients who used LSD or other psychedelic drugs saw a reduction in suicidal thoughts and psychological distress. Another study published in 2013 concluded that psychedelics have “lasting” health benefits for mental health.
But in order for these potential therapies to move forward, we have to overcome the stigma about the psychedelic culture and its association with stoned hippies and counterculture. Currently, similar to marijuana research, studying any type of illegal psychedelic drug is often met with backlash, rejection, or tight regulations, making it difficult for scientists to move forward in an effective way.