"In the future, it may be increasingly common for doctors and therapists to efficiently use psychedelic-assisted therapy to benefit their patients.
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is a neuropsychopharmacologist (or a ‘scientist’ if you want to be more general) who works at Imperial College London. In the past he worked under David Nutt, the former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Nutt was fired for being a bit nutty (in the eyes of the government anyway) by claiming that ecstasy and magic mushrooms were less harmful than horse-riding and alcohol. To anyone who watched the two-part programme Drugs Live on Channel 4, Carhart-Harris was one of the scientists involved in administering MDMA, in a clinical setting, to a priest and Keith Allen. The programme helped to promote the evidence that MDMA could be useful in helping PTSD sufferers face their trauma with an anxiety-free attitude, eventually being able to overcome it.
In the near future Cahart-Harris will be carrying out two new exciting experimental studies. One is with psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms; the second is on LSD. Both will make use of brain imaging techniques. The LSD study will be ground-breaking because we will be able to see which different brain regions are affected under the influence of the drug, where blood flow and activity is most prominent, for example."
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Lots of good stuff happening with psychedelics in the scientific world lately. Still many obstacles, but thankfully there has already been enough posive results to jusitify further research.
For those in the U.s, you may be interested in this;
http://www.maps.org/conference/3-day-conference/
And for The U.k people,At Psychedelic Science 2013, over 100 of the world's leading researchers from 13 countries will present recent findings on the benefits and risks of LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, ibogaine, 2C-B, ketamine, marijuana, and more, over three days of conference presentations, and two days of pre- and post-conference workshops.
http://breakingconvention.co.uk/
Breaking Convention is a biennial conference on psychedelic consciousness, the only one of its kind operating in Britain, convened by a non-profit organization of the same name. Breaking Convention 2013 will be held at the University of Greenwich on July 12-14 and will feature ten symposia of invited speakers and a track dedicated to talks from submitted abstracts, as well as galleries, exhibitions, films and evening entertainments.
What do other ninjas think about psychedelics as a potential route for therapy? It seems like we are going full circle and "rediscovering" the techniques and methods shamans and medicine men and women have been using as far back as we know. It's good that the stigma is being addressed and these psychotropic substances are being recognized for their medicinal purposes as apposed to the culturally imposed propaganda we hear about them.
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....Learn to achieve similar states in the mean time without anything and you'll benefit much more from being able to get in to natural altered states of conciousness and not always relying on anything outside of yourself)
