Not So Far Out - Researchers reopen their minds to the healing potential of pychedelic drugs

[BridgeTheGap]

Mike is hunched over a pile of soggy wood chips at the bottom of a glade in Golden Gate Park. It’s a clear winter afternoon and sunlight filters through the eucalyptus trees, landing on grass still damp from a recent storm. Mike sifts through the wood chips, slowly and deliberately examining the soil beneath. Two paper bags fill a pocket of his Patagonia fleece jacket.

A 28-year-old engineer at a prominent software company in San Francisco, Mike is soft-spoken and self-possessed; on weekends he drives his Subaru Forester to his time-share in Tahoe to ski. He donates to public radio, and he has made himself into an aficionado of the city’s Indian restaurants. He is, or seems like, a well-adjusted member of society.

But what Mike is doing is a felony. He is searching for psilocybin, the psychedelic mushrooms that grow wild in San Francisco and neighboring Marin County from fall to spring. If he finds any, he’ll stuff them in the bags, put the bags in his backpack, and backstreet home on his bike.

Mike doesn’t do mushrooms very often—maybe once or twice a year—but when he does, it’s for a reason. “When I take them, it may be because I have a decision to make, or maybe I suspect that my outlook toward something is not as healthy or as loving as I would like it to be,” he says. “Psilocybin allows me to see things with a fresh point of view. When I’m on them, not as burdened by cynicism or other self-protective layers in my psychology.”

Is Mike delusional or is he onto something?

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Not-So-Far-Out-Research-Psychedelic-Drugs.aspx#ixzz1WcAqwr5y

[panader0]

1. I always thought that LSD could be a therapy for Alzheimer's

[get the red out]

2. This is SO criminal

Yet how many Oxy prescriptions are written every day? Stigma and propaganda govern rather than rationality.

[CanSocDem]

3. The secrets of the 60's...

...are being unearthed!!! Or the power of the Internet is overwhelming PharmaCorpInc.

"Psilocybin has the potential to facilitate what’s been called a psycho-spiritual epiphany."

One reason it hasn't been available to the masses is because ModernMedicineInc has determined that "psycho-spiritual epiphanies" have no scientific basis, clearly, no proven medical 'use' and are probably another herbal scam by some old hippie boomer.


“Many of the subjects told us that it helped them come to terms with the fact that they were going to die,” Grob says. “It gave them the strength to confront directly what was going on. They told us that their experience helped them to live in the moment, to take each day as it came in the time they had remaining, as opposed to feeling immobilized because of their predicament.”

That's how I remember it.

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Read more: http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Not-So-Far-Out-Research-Psychedelic-Drugs.aspx?page=3#ixzz1WdbOXkrb