JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A rigorous new study finds that a single dose of LSD can ease a person's anxiety for months. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports that the study shows how research on psychedelics is entering the mainstream.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: The study involved 198 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, which affects about 1 in 10 people over the course of a year. Dr. David Feifel of Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in San Diego says GAD can derail a person's life.
DAVID FEIFEL: It's characterized by continuous worry, inability to relax, and all the physical manifestations - racing heart rates and sweatiness.
HAMILTON: And it's often accompanied by depression. Current drugs are inadequate for about half of people diagnosed with GAD, so Feifel agreed to help test an alternative - a proprietary form of the psychedelic compound LSD. He says it's nothing like Prozac or Zoloft.
FEIFEL: This is something that has a very, very distinct subjective experience, you know (laughter), what people might call a trip.
HAMILTON: The drug, known as MM120, comes from MindMed, which funded the study. Participants were randomly assigned to get a placebo or one of four dosage levels of MM120. Lower doses had no significant effect, but Feifel says the two higher doses, which pretty much guaranteed a psychedelic experience, made a big difference.
FEIFEL: By the next day, the drug, for all intents and purposes, was out of their system, and yet the patient's average anxiety was greatly reduced.
HAMILTON: Feifel says seeing a drug work so quickly was remarkable.
FEIFEL: The other remarkable thing about it was those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks.
HAMILTON: Higher doses also relieved depression. The results appear in the journal of the American Medical Association, and Feifel says high-quality studies like this one are giving legitimacy to research on a range of psychedelics, like psilocybin and MDMA.
FEIFEL: This is a wave of new-generation medications that really would revolutionize treatment in psychiatry.
HAMILTON: That's probably true, says Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. But he has mixed feelings about the new study.
ROBIN CARHART-HARRIS: The safety looks good. The tolerability looks good. But where's the depth of information about the way you delivered this product?
HAMILTON: Carhart-Harris says researchers focused on the drug itself, while saying little about other factors that might have influenced the outcome. He says there's strong evidence that patients do better if they are carefully guided through a psychedelic experience and if the experience includes certain types of sensory stimulation like music.
CARHART-HARRIS: To not say anything about music listening, for example, when it's been present in virtually a hundred percent of the trials that have been published today on psychedelic therapy, is an obvious omission.
HAMILTON: In the MM120 study, people could request music, but it wasn't specified in the protocol. Carhart-Harris says that's too bad because it's critical to learn how to administer psychedelic drugs now, before doctors start prescribing them.
CARHART-HARRIS: Probably give it a couple of years and we'll be seeing drugs like psilocybin and magic mushrooms as medicines. And yeah, a whole cultural shift and mindset shift is going to happen around that.
HAMILTON: MindMed has already launched two larger studies of its LSD drug - one for anxiety, the other for depression. The company expects results sometime next year. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
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