As promised this is the second article regarding what I discovered in the mountains of Colorado last month.

In our last episode I had just discovered the other training tracks of the conference not only held the information I had braved the mountains of America looking for but also a group of people I felt more comfortable learning and sitting with. Those people I referred to as my tribe, hopefully that was not offensive to anyone though I acknowledge it could be, but I also call them scientists. My wife refers to us as nerds but what is in a name anyway?

For those of you who have forgotten what it is I am rambling on about, in June I attended a psychedelic research and therapy conference put on by MAPS.

To be honest I have been struggling a bit with how to present or discuss the information I was exposed to at the conference. I don’t know that I have figured it out completely but I’m ready to give it a go as I feel I may have strayed into procrastinationland.

If you do a google or a YouTube search you will find countless numbers of people extolling the benefits of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of everything from severe mental illnesses such as untreatable (also referred to as drug resistant) depression and anxiety, and PTSD to mood to creativity and energy. I have even seen blog posts and YouTubers saying that using psychedelics “stimulates neural plasticity” and “brain growth.”

Needless to say a lot of anecdotal and opinion statements which are not in anyway scientifically founded or supported. At best a lot of these statements are nonsense and worse some of them are actually really dangerous.

I know that phrases like “neural plasticity” are quite the rage these days but honestly how many of you actually know what that phrase really means? I doubt the average internet presence (I refuse to use the word influencer) has any idea. So let me tell you. Neural plasticity is not something which needs to be stimulated, it is happening all the time. think of it as……hmmm I was going to give an example of a cassette tape but not only would that date me a bit it may not make any sense unless you too are old enough to remember what a cassette tape is and how it is used….let me try it this way

When a bit of brain or a nerve cell for that matter “knows” something that knowledge is actually a complex web of dendritic connections between not just other nerve cells but other nerve cells or other dendrites. A nerve cell is something like an extension cord that plugs itself into other extension cords. More than an extension cord it is like one of those power strips, which is essentially just an extension cord which has instead of one place to plug stuff into but several. I think they might be called surge suppressors now a days.

(I used to have a comic from a strip I think was called “Hermon” which actually showed a cut away of a person’s head and inside the brain was a worker in overalls plugging extension cords into each other. I lost it over the years and have never been able to find it online. I would be eternally grateful if you found it or had it and could send it to me….)

One way the plasticity part comes in when one of those extension cords is no longer being used and is reassigned to somewhere else. Say you no longer like your desk lamp and so you unplug it and thereby free up a place you could now plug your phone charger into.

When you learned Algebra in high school a network of nerve cells was created to retain and use the information and then when you graduated and never used algebra again (or so you think) those connections where no longer being used as much as some of the dendrites moved to connect to other cells and remember (or know) other things.

A more desperate way the plasticity comes in is when there is a brain injury. if you have a head trauma, be it a stroke or repeated concussive injuries (cause you play football), those connections are not moving, they are gone. The nerve cells are damaged or killed and though they can come back, after the age of about 25 the growth of new brain cells is incredibly slow. What this means is that after a brain injury you will lose functionality based on the severity of the injury and you will regain some function, but you will not likely regain all function in severe situations, because the brain simply does not grow back fast enough. worse still what does grow back doesn’t know the information that was lost. think wolverine from that one movie nobody but me seems to have liked. Wolverine has crazy healing abilities and after being shot in the head with an antimantium bullet his brain did grow back, but it did not have any of the information which was lost. That is where wolverine’s amnesia came from. and yes I know Deadpool can lose his head and crow a new one with all of his old memories but there is a different kind of super healing happening there and a different form of memory encoding as well. probably on the DNA level because he actually regrew out of a single drop of blood once which was super cool as it would require not only DNA encoding of memory but stem cell regeneration on an incredible level and….

I think I understand why my wife calls me a nerd

anyway so yes your brain heals and yes you can recover from some seriously horrible injuries but no taking a psychedelic mushroom or LSD will not make your brain grow brain cells faster and no it will not make you smarter or better at sudoko.

What psychedelics have shown to do is dramatically reduce the symptoms associated with some the major psychological and even medical issues of our time.

One study using magic mushrooms (or for the initiated psilocybin) showed a 75% improvement in patient depression. Now in case you are not super up on how statistics work comparative improvement (between before and after therapeutics are applied) of .05 is significant. If your study shows significance (referred to as a p value) of 1, then your fellow scientists and researchers will accuse you of making mathematical errors or cheating your data.

An improvement level of 75% is EARTH SHATTERINGLY good. It is unheard of really. Have I made my point? As the researcher doing the presentation put it, “this was some really good results.”

Similar findings have been seen with MDMA (used to be called ecstasy back in the olden days) and PTSD and anxiety. There has even been studies which show that patients who are in chronic pain found significantly reduced pain from one moderate dose of psilocybin.

This is some amazing stuff for sure but the shiny, large numbers in the results are not the whole story.

Many of the researchers admitted, and I was proud of them for doing so, that they had no idea why the results were what they were. The chemicals in the psychedelic drugs are not known to do any of the things the psychedelics were doing. There are no pain relieving properties in magic mushrooms per se, but one researcher did say his study found as a secondary result that magic mushrooms have anti-inflammatory properties which he could not account for or explain.

I can hear you now, ‘but SoulDoc these people got better, what difference does it make how they got better?’

Well that is a fair question and I think there are two possible answers–one simple and one not so simple.

The simple explanation is that psychedelic substances have been outlawed at the federal level since the 1960’s. They designated as Schedule 1 which means these substances have no purpose or benefit beyond getting someone high. That means it is illegal to buy, own, or use these substances and it also means in is illegal to research these substances, even though the research that was being done prior to rescheduling showed a lot of promise.

These bans were only recently lifted and with the promise that is being shown the bans against research have been further reduced.

so there’s that

The other reason was that because of these bans and the large amount of rather effective propaganda spread about these substances over the past 50 years or so, the evidence that these drugs do more than get you high has got to be without fault and that is a level of precision that is very difficult to achieve.

The guy who started MAPS, Richard Doblin, has been trying to get MDMA rescheduled for almost 40 years. For those who missed the 1980’s for whatever reason, MDMA or ecstasy was a drug prescribed by doctors for the treatment of many different psychological issues. It was incredibly effective in couples therapy, the elderly, the dying, and those struggling with anxiety and PTSD, but as other drugs had done before it, it escaped the lab and became popular with the rave culture. Back in the 80’s (and maybe today I don’t know, it’s not my scene) raves would take place in basements, abandoned buildings, and empty fields. People would basically brake into these places, set up a giant sound system and light show, and kids of all ages would show up and dance all night long. If it were not also for the drugs being used, ecstasy among them, these “underground dance parties” would probably have remained an occasional annoyance.

the problem with drugs in general and psychedelics in particular, is that the general public has no idea how they work, and when the effects they cause are enjoyable caution, as they say, gets thrown to the wind.

Well one of the things that ecstasy does is raise the amount of endorphins in the blood stream to basically all you got. These chemicals make a person feel absolutely fantastic and as anyone who has taken ecstasy would tell you, it feels like you are in love with everything. Also dumped are your reserves of sugar and adrenal chemicals so not only do you want to dance all night long but you have the energy to do so.

Some of the other things that ecstasy does is raise your heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. In a well controlled environment these things can be treated , but in an abandoned warehouse in the derelict part of town you don’t even have running water let alone emergency personnel on site. So some kids died, some others ended up in the hospital and blam-o Reagan I think it was pushed to have the drug rescheduled as a dangerous party drug with no medical benefits.

Of course Doblin’s research has shown that MDMA (no longer called ecstasy) is amazingly effective at treating PTSD. So effective in fact MAPS is in the final stage of applying for FDA rescheduling of the drug. Exciting stuff to say the least.

this is getting too long so I will wrap this up soon, I promise

Another reason why this research is so important is that psychedelics have long had a bit of a legendary status. Those of us old enough to have used them “in the wild” or heard stories from our parents or grandparents about what the Summer of Love was really like have romanticized the use of psychedelics to the point that many believe they can not just free your mind but can cure everything from lethargy to cancer.

Part of that legendary status is fueled by the hippy generation but part of it is also fueled by a misunderstanding of what these drugs actually are and can actually do. Yes as Katt Williams so poetically stated, cannabis is a plant. “It grows out of the ground that way and if you should happen to set it on fire there is an effect.” Psilocybin mushrooms grow that way too and yes if you happen to eat one (or ten) there is an effect, but what is that effect and how does it help someone with depression?

short answer, nobody knows.

Don’t get me wrong some of it has been sorted out–we know that LSD mimic serotonin in the brain which causes neurons which usually would never fire together to fire together which when added to the euphoria the absolute flood of endorphins cause could account for some of what is going on, but anyone who has ever taken LSD would tell you, there is a lot more going on than brain cells firing whenever the hell they feel like.

One study showed that in rats given LSD they cycled through the sleep/REM cycle while not just wide awake but conscious. I think entering a dream state while conscious may explain an acid trip a bit but it doesn’t explain why having an acid trip would make a person less depressed or reduce symptoms of PTSD.

So we are back to the fact that while all of the researchers will say that something is happening which is beneficial to the study participants but they don’e know what. Even in studies where the participants report they did not experience anything mystical (due to continence or low administered dosages) there still is not a chemical or any other explanation for the benefits.

so that is a problem but honestly I don’t see that being an issue any different than those associated with currently prescribed psychiatric medications (if the drugs are legal you get to call them medications). If you read about any psychiatric medications mode of action and you will find a rather technical sounding explanation which roughly translates to we don’t know how this works. Honestly I think psychiatric medications are prescribed under false pretenses. A drug like Prozac is labeled a serotonin reuptake inhibiter but nobody knows if that is really happening. Honestly they don’t know for sure that the neurotransmitter serotonin or norepinephrine are even being affected by the drug sold as Prozac and referred to as an antidepressant. We cannot, at present measure the amount of serotonin present in a person at any given time, and in my opinion the only reason they believe serotonin is effected at all is the myth of the chemical imbalance–that is mental illnesses such as depression are caused by a person not having enough of a neurotransmitter such as serotonin. This myth has been categorically disproven but for some reason persists.

remind me to tell you about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs sometime. Sad to say psychology has myths too.

Another problem with psychedelic research is the general public and practitioners alike are seeing the results of studies like I mentioned earlier. Don’t get me wrong a 75% improvement in any symptom with any treatment is amazing but I left a few facts of that study out.

First thing to consider is that study had 8 participants in it which means at most it could serve as a pilot study. That is a study which proves we need to do more studies. No scientist worth their lab coat would ever say a study with only 8 people in it is generalizable (could be used with) the general population at large.

But do the home chemists and what I heard referred to as “underground shaman” will and are taking studies like that as absolute proof that taking psychedelics will results in a 75% reduction in depressive symptoms.

As the game show host says, but wait there’s more.

That study did show a 75% improvement but only half of the participants, that is 4 people, indicated any symptom improvement at all. This is referred to as the rate of effacacy. So that could mean taht in any given patient population half of the patients will show significant improvement and half will have no appreciable change at all.

You tell me, would you take a medication which had only a 50% chance of doing anything at all?

The last thing to mention, and I only heard this once the whole week but I think it may be the most important part of all of the research, in most of the studies the researchers were testing drugs which they admitted to taking themselves. Not that they were taking MDMA or shrooms with their participants but at some time before during or after the studies were conducted and while on their own time, they did take the same drugs they were studying.

What the presenter who brought this up stated was that while the studies themselves appear to be well conducted and their conclusions were valid, the fact that the researchers had used these drugs prior to studying them adds a rather unique but powerful form of bias.

Bias means something along the lines of assumption. I conduct a study and I think my treatment will work for women but not men means that I began my study with a bias against men, or a treatment bias.

There is a bias for all sorts of things but the I used these drugs before I decided to study them is a special kind of bias.

There is so much more I could say but this post is already way too long. So let me leave you with one thought: It does appear that psychedelics can be a benefit for a wide variety of affective (mood) disorders like depression, anxiety, and PTSD to name a few, and these drugs appear to be beneficial in other surprising areas such as pain, addiction, maybe even consciousness itself. Do these drugs represent a cure? Probably not but there could be some really effective treatments here.

If you made it this far let me know what you think.