Drug in mushrooms influences behaviour

A hallucinogenic drug found in mushrooms was found to induce "mystical experiences" in 36 volunteers who tried it, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The details of the study are published online in Tuesday's edition of the journal, Psychopharmacology.

Researchers suggest the drug, Psilocybin, induces a sort of spiritual experience in users. "A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques," said lead author Roland Griffiths, who is a professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. "That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years."

The 36 volunteers were either given psilocybin or Ritalin. 22 of them reported a "full mystical experience" as measured by established psychological scales. Even two months after the study, 79 percent of the volunteers said they felt unusually happy. "Unlike drugs of abuse such as alcohol and cocaine, the classic hallucinogens are not known to be physically toxic and they are virtually non-addictive, so those are not concerns," Griffiths said.

He added that the researchers were careful not to tread the path followed by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard University psychologist, who worked with LSD in 1960s.Griffiths said their study was structured in a different way and was tightly controlled.

(Google News)