Psilocybin In Magic Mushrooms Helps With Cancer Anxiety

by NowPublic Staff | September 7, 2010 at 09:59 am

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Harbor-UCLA Magic Mushroom Study For Cancer Anxiety: Active Igredient Psilocybin Helps With Cancer Anxiety
A Harbor-UCLA study of 12 cancer patients treated with Psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) shows that it help alleviate anxiety in patients with the terminal illness. The study showed that those cancer patients who received a controlled moderate dose of Psilocybin were less depressed after six months than those patients who received a placebo.

Professor Charles Grob, from the LA BioMed research institute in Los Angeles, California, said: "We are working with a patient population that often does not respond well to conventional treatments.

"Following their treatments with psilocybin, the patients and their families reported benefit from the use of this hallucinogen in reducing their anxiety.

"This study shows psilocybin can be administered safely, and that further investigation of hallucinogens should be pursued to determine their benefits."

Further interviews with the cancer patients shows that after taking the Psilocybin they were not only less anxious but were closer to their family and friends.

Grob's findings are "important because he's showing that you can administer these compounds safely to cancer patients with anxiety," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore.

Academic and medical research involving Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and Magic Mushrooms was largely abandoned by the 1970s after the legal clampdown on the recreational usage of such drugs