Ecstasy, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ketamine (the date-rape drug), ibogaine, ayahuasca, mescaline and even wacko Dr. Timothy Leary’s trippy dope-of-the-day (LSD) are being touted by psychiatrists as the latest “miracle cures.” They support their claims with “evidence” they say proves that a teensy-weensy dose of these Magical Mystery Tour drugs can make us all happily whole again.
But, unfortunately for them, science just burst their bubble.
Acid failed the acid test.
A six-week controlled study, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), examined whether microdosing with LSD can reduce the symptoms of “ADHD.”
Researchers from the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, and Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that “microdosing psychedelics, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has gained attention for its potential benefits in several psychiatric disorders.” Nevertheless, LSD “failed to demonstrate efficacy compared with placebo.”
In other words, LSD worked about as well as the placebo did—or about as well as a cherry popsicle.
“Despite the enthusiasm online and in the media, there has been little clinical research testing whether microdosing actually works,” an article in PsyPost about the study read.
The study, entitled “Safety and Efficacy of Repeated Low-Dose LSD for ADHD Treatment in Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” was the “first double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2A randomized clinical trial that investigated effects of repeated low doses of LSD in adults with ADHD,” according to researchers.
Translation: This was a study designed to evaluate the efficacy and side effects of a drug, in which neither the participants nor the researchers knew who was getting the drug and who was getting a placebo, in order to obtain unbiased results.
And obtain unbiased results they did.
Acid failed the acid test.
Which begs the question: Why would psychiatrists make unsupported claims for the effectiveness of these psychedelics?
Money, for one thing. “Ketamine therapy” brought in $3.1 billion in 2022—a figure projected to climb 10.6 percent each year until 2030. Psilocybin is the “magic mushroom” indeed, at $2 billion a year, expected to grow by 11.3 percent annually.
The LSD study was sponsored by Mind Medicine, a psychopharmacological company obviously hoping it would prove the drug worked as a miracle cure to “cure” ADHD.
Some 366 million adults worldwide are diagnosed with that “mental illness” no one can define. Just imagine the size of that market and the astronomical profits to be made cranking out and peddling “acid” if it were proven to “cure.”
Man, those test results must have hurt!
“Psychedelic research currently appears to be trapped in a hype bubble driven largely by media and industry interests,” JAMA Network wrote. “We believe that it would benefit the field of psychedelic research if this bubble were to be systematically deflated by researchers and clinicians using good science communication practices.”
And that’s exactly what they just did.
So perhaps there is no magic miracle cure to make everything wonderful and sunshiny again. Maybe, just maybe, psychiatry is wrong and always has been. Maybe some witch doctor’s all-purpose fix-of-the-day, in the end, fixes nothing.
Except, of course, the bank account of the drug pusher.
