are magic mushrooms illegal?
Could magic mushrooms help with depression?
Posted: Tuesday 24 January 2012
Today's news includes research from Professor David Nutt, the former government drug adviser, and his team, on using psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, for depression. He suggests that such substances should not be banned from research just because of their legal status.
Street drugs and licensed psychiatric drugs are all psychoactive substances – they affect brain chemistry, and the way we feel, perceive, and understand our surroundings, at least for a short while after we have taken them.
People tend to regard street drugs as unsafe and ill-advised and psychiatric drugs as safe to take, whereas in reality they all have both good and bad effects. And just as we need to recognise that long-term use of psychiatric drugs can cause (rather than correcting) long-term chemical imbalances in the brain, as well as significant adverse physical effects, so we should also accept that street drugs can have positive effects (the reason many people take them), and we should study these and make use of them.
But we need to be cautious. LSD was used in the 1960s and '70s to 'facilitate' psychotherapy. In the '90s a number of people rang our infoline to say that they had been given LSD in this way in the past, they felt that they had been damaged by it and had never recovered, and the reason they were ringing Mind was to find out who they could sue for the long-term harm they had been caused.
So my feeling is that all substances that we know to be psychoactive should be open to further investigation as to their therapeutic potential, regardless of their current legal status.
