WILLIAM KING

Are Psychedelics Our Most Promising New Treatments

for Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction?
A slew of scientific trials—and eager investors—indicate that hallucinogens may be the key
to curing our most stubborn scourges.

BY PAUL TULLIS APR 13, 2020

A doctor, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a clinical pharmacologist have come to the end
of a road that leads up a wooded hill overlooking a valley on the Swiss-French
border. Below, under blue skies and a few clouds of the type a child would draw, farm elds
and a village centered on a white church with a black spire form a postcard image. Ahead, a
muddy path and a slippery grass slope. Only the pharmacologist, a Swiss native named
Matthias Liechti, has appropriate footwear. But they’ve come this far.

Scott Freeman, the doctor, ew from San Francisco to Basel, 12 miles away, to meet with
Liechti. Tomorrow they’ll discuss clinical trials Liechti will be leading of a drug that the
company of which Freeman is chief medical officer, MindMed, hopes to develop. The
entrepreneur, J.R. Rahn, is MindMed’s co-founder and co-CEO (the lawyer, Stephen Hurst,
is the other). Rahn is in town to meet with the administrator on the trial. Hurst needed to
be in Europe at the same time on other business, so the MindMed principals, who all live in
different cities, decided to convene in Basel for some old-fashioned face time.

Today they’ve taken an Uber—Rahn used to work at the company—up to the village of
Burg im Leimental, where a small castle balances atop a rocky promontory. Once the road
became too narrow for the Mercedes van they were in, they started hoong it, about half a
mile back.

Forging ahead, the quartet passes a white modernist house, all corners and windows, that
was the last home of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who rst synthesized LSD, in 1938,
while working at Sandoz, a Basel pharmaceutical company that today is a division of
Novartis. The smokestacks of the Novartis factory can be seen in the distance. The men’s
destination: Hofmann’s grave, 100 yards farther on.
KRISTIN FITZPATRICK

The road the Uber followed from downtown Basel to Burg im Leimental is something of a
Via Dolorosa for devotees of recreational LSD use. It is believed to be the route Hofmann
took on his bicycle after he accidentally absorbed some of the compound in his lab in 1943,
beginning the rst acid trip (and one of the more ill-advised bike rides) in history. The men
from MindMed are here on a pilgrimage too, though it’s purely professional in nature.

“Switzerland is the only place in the world where use of psychedelics in limited cases—as
medicine—is allowed,” Liechti explains. That would be for cluster headaches, based on
research being done at Liechti’s institution, the University Hospital of Basel. Though LSD
has been illegal in the U.S. (and, effectively, everywhere else) since 1970, Liechti and a few
others, in Basel and at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Hospital, have since the 1990s
been quietly researching how psychedelics act on the brain, looking at LSD specically since
2012.

In part because of Swiss national pride in Hofmann—he also isolated other compounds,
including one that is still used to control postpartum hemorrhaging—the government has
for several years allowed qualied researchers access to LSD to test its effects on volunteers.
GETTY IMAGES
Which is why New York–based MindMed is working in Basel. In March it became the rst
among several psychedelic pharmaceutical companies to go public, listing on Canada’s NEO
exchange. You are not hallucinating: Psychedelic drugs, demonized by politicians,
prosecutors, doctors, parents, and virtually everyone else for the last 50 years, are showing
remarkable promise as a treatment for a host of signicant health conditions, including
depression, PTSD, addiction, inammation, and more.

Venture capital is rushing in. Peter Thiel’s Breakthrough Ventures, and Able Partners, an
investor in Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand, Goop, are behind a London-based company
that has patented a formulation of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms,
for use with treatment-resistant depression. The evidence for psychedelics as medicine far
exceeds the evidence for CBD, a compound in marijuana that companies are selling, based
on basically nothing, to relieve ills ranging from Parkinson’s to Crohn’s diseases.

Liechti hopes to collaborate with MindMed soon to test whether sub-perceptual doses of
LSD are an effective treatment for ADHD in adults—and there is actually some indication
that it might work. “We’re using chemicals to enhance neuronal connectivity in the brain,
opening different parts of the brain to talk to each other,” Freeman says.
GETTY IMAGES

Researching an illegal substance requires mounds of approvals. MindMed’s intention is to

conduct all its clinical trials to the standards of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. “We
went to Switzerland,” Rahn explains, “because Dr. Liechti is the world leader in LSD
research.” Not just anyone can conduct a trial using LSD. “So it’s logical to work with him—
you can get started more efficiently.”
MindMed is also working on a compound derived from ibogaine, a psychedelic that comes
from the bark of a tree that grows in central Africa, to treat opioid addiction. Ibogaine was
extolled by the late banking heir and Bitcoin billionaire Matthew Mellon, ex-husband of
Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon; he said it cured him of his opioid addiction.

Meanwhile ketamine, which at certain doses is used as a general anesthetic for children
(and as a club drug by slightly older children), is already available by prescription for -
treatment-resistant depression. MDMA (aka ecstasy or molly) has been used illegally in
psychotherapy for decades, but it can now legally be given to select patients with PTSD
outside a clinical trial—even though it’s still a DEA Schedule I drug “with no currently
accepted medical use.”
KRISTIN FITZPATRICK

Compass Pathways, the London company testing whether psilocybin helps with treatment--
resistant depression, seems to be on the brink of something too. “The best available
evidence” of whether it works, or whether previous studies conducted without a control
group taking a placebo were a uke, “will come from this study,” says Metten Somers, a
psychiatrist who runs one of the trial’s 21 sites, at University Medical Center–Utrecht in the
Netherlands.

“When we started researching psychedelics, other researchers attacked us,” Liechti says. “A
few years later they were doing the same type of research.”

J ennifer Mitchell, an associate professor of neurology at the University of California San

Francisco, was a grad student in the early ’90s when she approached the head of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time, Alan Leshner, at a conference. Mitchell had
heard reports that ibogaine showed promise in treating opioid addiction with a single dose.
“Would you consider allowing researchers to have access to ibogaine for our experiments?”
she asked Leshner. Mitchell says he looked at her over the top of his glasses and said,
“Frankly, neurotoxicity is bad for you.” (“My view,” Leshner says now, “was that if the data
shows something is clinically useful, I’m happy to follow the science.”)
GETTY IMAGES

“It demonstrated shortsightedness,” Mitchell says over lunch at a Thai restaurant in

Berkeley. She has just come from a meeting with the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, about a project it’s sponsoring on treating PTSD with
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy; Mitchell is a site principal investigator in the study. Her
journey from naive grad student to researcher navigating the politics of Schedule I drugs to
published neuroscientist studying them is the story of how psychedelics have evolved, in
society’s eyes, from an evil into one of science’s best hopes in treating classes of mental
illness that are growing throughout the U.S. and for which the number of consistently
successful treatments is approximately zero.

Mitchell grew up in a working class area of San Francisco in the 1970s, a time when the
city was experiencing a surge in mental illness. “A lot of people had been in Vietnam,” she
says. Also, traumatized refugees from wars in Central America were streaming into the city.
“I saw a lot of people struggle, a lot of suicide and depression.” Mitchell became fascinated
with how some people could experience trauma and be resilient, while others fell into
mental illness; she decided to make a career out of trying to gure out why.
GETTY IMAGES

Discouraged by her encounter with Leshner, Mitchell spent years researching the
neurological pathways of addiction. In 2017 she heard that MAPS had money for a trial of
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and attended a meeting of investigators. MAPS had for a
while been considered on the fringe of mental health research, but at the meeting she
found “very smart, driven, type A women,” some with experience developing drugs for
Novartis. Mitchell decided to try to work with them. “I’m not a true believer” in
psychedelics, she says. “I was not trying to prove a thing I thought I already knew.”

In the rst couple of decades after Hofmann discovered LSD, many researchers believed—
maybe a little too strongly—that it had potential as a therapeutic. Michael Pollan’s 2018
book How to Change Your Mind details the early history of research into psychedelics.
In 1953, British author Aldous Huxley took mescaline, a compound that occurs in peyote
and other cacti and has effects similar to those of LSD, and he described his experience as
overwhelmingly positive. Two years later Manhattan banker and mushroom fanatic R.
Gordon Wasson traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, having heard reports from a Harvard
ethnobotanist of a species that caused “visions.” He wrote up his experience in Life
magazine.

KRISTIN FITZPATRCK

Reading reports that sounded similar to descriptions by the severely mentally ill of what
was going on in their minds, researchers began to wonder if what drove mental disorders
was chemistry—a question that eventually led to the development of Prozac and other
antidepressants, which have helped millions. By 1961 researchers at Stanford and other
universities were studying the effects of LSD and mescaline on healthy volunteers under
permits from the FDA.

Could these compounds be the key to unlocking the mysteries of psychosis? Sandoz
supplied LSD to researchers all over the U.S., from Maryland to California, and Hofmann
would go on to identify psilocybin as the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and
synthesize it.

But psychedelics would quickly spill out of academic and institutional control. In 1960, LSD
started showing up as a street drug. The same year, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary
and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took mushrooms together. Leary and a colleague (Richard
Alpert, aka Ram Dass) began to evangelize about psychedelics and their potential to expand
human consciousness.

As hundreds of thousands of young people decided to see for themselves, media reports,
many of them false, started telling horror stories about kids who had taken the drugs and
ended up in hospitals, or dead. In 1966, Sandoz withdrew its supply from scientists, and
the FDA ordered 60 psychedelic researchers to halt their work. The rst wave of
psychedelic research came to an abrupt end nearly everywhere. California banned LSD that
year, and the federal government followed in 1970.

MAPS was founded in Santa Cruz in 1986, the year after MDMA was made illegal. (Many
people don’t consider ecstasy a psychedelic, since it acts on different mechanisms in the
brain, but it can have effects on certain mental health conditions similar to psilocybin’s.)
Getting anyone to take seriously MAPS’s assertion that the drugs ought to be studied was
very slow going in the early days, especially in the face of untrue coverage, such as a
documentary MTV aired in 1985 in which it was claimed that MDMA caused “holes in the
brain.”

Then, in the 1990s, Bob Jesse, an engineer and executive at Bay Area software company
Oracle who had experimented with psychedelics, uncovered more than 1,000 scientic
papers on psychedelics published during the rst wave.
GETTY IMAGES

When scientists started looking at psychedelics, it was for insights into the mechanisms of
mental illness, but they soon discovered that the substances could also be cures.
Psychedelics had been studied as treatments for alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and OCD,
among other conditions. Though not well designed by today’s standards, many early studies
showed impressive results.

Moreover, there appeared to be no such thing as a lethal dose—something that cannot be

said even about many over-the-counter medications. People who freaked out and went to a
hospital after taking too much acid walked out several hours later. Wellness guru Andrew
Weil, volunteering at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968, developed a protocol for San
Franciscans on bad trips: Leave them alone.

Shortly after Jesse found the documents of decades of fruitful research, a psychiatrist
named Franz Vollenweider, working at the Zurich hospital where schizophrenia had rst
been described, in the 1950s, discovered in 1998 how psilocybin acts on the brain: It
activates a receptor of serotonin, a brain chemical involved with mood that is a target of
antidepressants. Hofmann himself had encouraged Vollenweider to go to medical school
after he stumbled, as a biochemistry student, across botanicals that caused dramatic effects
with a tiny dose. “He said, ‘It’s better to work with humans,’ ” Vollenweider told me.

After the 2017 meeting with MAPS investigators, Jennifer Mitchell collaborated with UCSF
colleagues Josh Woolley and Brian Anderson to give psilocybin to AIDS survivors suffering
from demoralization. Men in San Francisco with full-blown AIDS were getting antiretroviral
therapy, which for most of them transformed the disease from a death sentence into a long-
term condition. But many of them had friends and lovers who hadn’t lived long enough to
benet from the advances. The survivors struggle with feelings of isolation, despair, and
guilt.
GETTY IMAGES

Mitchell believes the medical community’s successes against the AIDS epidemic and the Bay
Area’s acceptance of research into psychedelics as medicine are related. “This became a
very pro-medical, pro-research community” after antiretrovirals were discovered, she says.
“We have seen the value of research put into practice.”

O f course, the Bay Area, more than any other part of the country, had demonstrated its
comfort with psychedelics from the earliest days, when LSD was being studied at
Stanford and reports of the drug’s effects leaked out of a secret CIA experiment at Menlo
Park Veterans Administration Hospital through one of its subjects, author Ken Kesey, who
would go on to organize and promote the famous “acid tests” of the mid- to late ’60s, in
which thousands of people took black market LSD.

That comfort never really went away. One Sunday this past January, three days after I met
Mitchell, I rode shotgun with a dealer in illicit psychedelics on a delivery run. We met at his
house, a Victorian a few blocks from where the Grateful Dead lived together in the Haight-
Ashbury neighborhood during the Summer of Love. We stopped for coffee and gas and hit
the 101 South, toward Santa Cruz.
KRISTIN FITZPATRICK

A few years ago the dealer, a graduate of a Bay Area university and former corporate
executive I’ll call Rafe, took some mushrooms recreationally at a concert. He happened to
meet the fungus’s grower, who lived in a rural area far to the north and had been looking
for someone to move the product in the Bay Area. Soon Rafe was acquiring from this source
ve strains of mushroom, along with mescaline, 500 doses at a time. He had no trouble
unloading it.

As his ancient 4X4 swerved along the highway through the redwood forest that divides
Silicon Valley from Santa Cruz, Rafe told me his customers are not teenagers, taking the
drugs to get high, but adults, some as old as 65, seeking a therapeutic experience. Over the
last several years a trend known as “microdosing” has taken hold in Silicon Valley among
programmers and others who nd that psychedelics improve their focus and creativity.

Their anecdotal reports drove MindMed’s interest in testing LSD as therapy for ADHD. But
Rafe’s customers that I spoke to are nding in small doses of psychedelics relief from
anxiety, depression, and PTSD—precisely the conditions for which Mitchell and others are
testing the effects of psychedelics in larger doses and in conjunction with psychotherapy.
ALAMY

Psilocybin “has medicinal value, healing properties that are mental, spiritual, emotional,”
Rafe said. He has struggled off and on with depression since his twenties. “I had to navigate
these things myself over the years, so I like that I can help people. I feel I’m doing a service
to the community. To have someone with crippling anxiety say, ‘Oh my god, I can function
and not have a constant sense of dread’ is very rewarding.”

Rafe parked the car at the waterfront, and we walked past the carnival rides, across the
beach boardwalk, and out onto the pier. His customer appeared: a man in a zippered
hunting vest, Carhartt beanie, and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. Both now middle-aged, the men
have known each other since college. Tacos were called for. They stepped inside the
Dolphin restaurant as surfers caught the last breaks of the day.
GETTY IMAGES

The customer, whom I’ll call Brian, is a recovering alcoholic. “Having depression return in
sobriety, that’s brutal,” he said as Rafe sipped a nonalcoholic beer. “You’re doing everything
right, but you feel fundamentally, personally decient.” Brian, like Rafe, took his share of
psychedelics recreationally in his late teens and twenties. But at low doses it’s therapeutic,
he says. “Psilocybin at higher doses is pretty much an ordeal, but it’s almost best when you
can’t notice it.”

He pauses and looks out at the surfers silhouetted by the setting sun. “Really, I’m doing it so
that on Monday I will have done it. You don’t need to know it’s happening, but it’s there,
and it works.” He has found that if he takes it regularly “it’s 100 percent effective at keeping
the ever lurking depression at bay.” He’s not the only person who thinks so; a 2015 paper in
the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that off-label psychedelic use was associated with
reduced psychological distress and suicide.

As Brian and other customers of Rafe’s consume psychedelics illegally, evidence of the
drugs’ positive effects in scientic trials is piling up. “Research into psychedelics might
identify novel therapeutic mechanisms and approaches”: Franz Vollenweider et al., Nature
Reviews Neuroscience, 2010. “Depressive symptoms were markedly reduced three months
after [a single] high-dose treatment with psilocybin with psychological support”: Robin -
Carhart-Harris et al., Lancet, 2016. “MDMA-assisted psychotherapy had a greater effect on
PTSD than prolonged exposure therapy, its most widely accepted treatment”: Timothy
Amoroso and Michael Workman, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016.
GETTY IMAGES

There is much that needs to be worked out before your doctor will be prescribing a session
of psilocybin in the presence of a psychiatrist in a softly lit room, with a van Gogh print on
the wall and spa music emanating from an egg-shaped speaker, like the one at University
Medical Center in Utrecht that I visited. What is the role of the therapist? How much should
he or she be involved? “Is music really required?” asked Josh Woolley, who works with
Mitchell on the study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for AIDS survivors. “Should you do
more music?” There is no end to such questions.
Some people, including MindMed’s Rahn, worry that the efforts to legalize psilocybin
underway in California, Oregon, and the District of Columbia could be a threat to
researchers’ access to the compounds in the future. “These are medicines, but if there’s a
backlash against state legislation, it could shut down the research,” he says. And the drugs
are not without risk: People with a history of psychosis or at risk of schizophrenia are
currently excluded from trials. Ibogaine evangelist Mellon reportedly died of a heart attack
after taking ayahuasca, a plant containing the psychedelic compound DMT, as part of a
therapeutic regimen.

Still, in light of the fact that the latest class of psychiatric drugs, a category that includes
Prozac, are ineffective in 30 percent of the patients who take them, and rates of serious
mental illness and suicide are climbing, it will be hard, as the data accumulates, for the
FDA to deny patients access to psychedelics—whatever middle-aged guys are selling on the
Santa Cruz wharf.
“When I was a resident, if someone had told me there could be a treatment you could take
once and immediately feel better from severe depression,” Woolley says, “I would have said
that’s impossible.”

“We’ve got a path,” Mitchell says. “It’s pretty clear. We just need to follow it. The data will
speak for itself.”

This story appears in the May 2020 issue of Town & Country.

PAUL TULLIS Contributor

Paul Tullis has covered science, technology, and other topics for The New York Times Magazine, Scientific
American, Nature, Bloomberg Businessweek, Slate, and many others.

MORE FROM

IN THE MAGAZINE

Tiffany's New T1 Collection by Reed Krakoff Adult Skincare Products That Are Safe for Kids

Why We're All Singers Now An Ayahuasca Party Etiquette Guide

Does Anyone Still Get a Face-Lift? Male Vanity in the 21st Century

'The Game Changers' Turns Meateaters Into A Spectacular Hamptons Garden by the Sea
Vegans

Halva: The Candy You Didn't Know You Were No One Retires Anymore
Missing

In the Magazine Society The Top T&C Stories of 2018 12 Must-Visit Restaurants in New Orleans

The Best Treatments to Lift and Smooth Your Neck

A Look Inside Some of the Most Whimsical Homes in Palm Beach

The Whitby is New York's Most Stylish New Hotel Best Products to Treat Keratosis Pilaris

    

Newsletter Contact Us

Subscribe Digital Editions

Other Hearst Subscriptions Advertise Online

About Us Give a Gift

Press Room Customer Service

Giveaways

Hearst Fashion and

Luxury Collection - A
Part of Hearst Digital
Media
A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Town & Country participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions
on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.

©2020 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Notice Your California Privacy Rights Interest-Based Ads Terms of Use Site Map

Do Not Sell My Info

Cookies Choices