Dying without fear

— How psychedelics can ease the anxiety of terminal illness

A palliative care physician on keeping ‘1 foot in the medical world and 1 foot in the psycho-spiritual world’

By Anne Strainchamps

When Lou Lukas meets a new patient, she knows two things right away. First, that her patient has been diagnosed with a terminal illness; and second, that they’re terrified.

For Lukas, who teaches palliative medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical School, guiding patients through that fear and anxiety is just as important as treating their disease, because it’s what will determine how they live during the time they have left.

“What happens to most people is that they’re so frightened, they start to shut down,” Lukas says. “They become depressed and anxious. Meanwhile, we start scheduling them for medical treatments that may or may not work. But we haven’t questioned whether we can stop treatment because they’re too terrified to think about the possibility. So we get stuck in this cycle of clinging to life, even if it means I’m spending three days a week going through treatment and not spending time with my family. And in the end, nobody gets out of here alive, right?”

Lukas believes psychedelics have the potential to transform life after a terminal diagnosis by easing the grip of fear. Like many palliative medicine physicians, she pays close attention to the growing body of clinical trials for psychedelic-assisted therapy.

“It’s phenomenal,” she says. “Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of people have profound experiences that dramatically change their life and their perception of their illness, which is remarkable because nothing else works like this.”

Wanting to know more about the future of psychedelics in end-of-life care, Anne Strainchamps of “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” got in touch with Lukas.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Anne Strainchamps: The FDA has not yet approved psilocybin for medical use. But clinical trials are underway in medical centers around the country. Tell me about yours.

Lou Lukas: I’m doing a trial of a psilocybin protocol for people who have pancreas cancer, which as you know is one of the most lethal of the solid organ cancers. Most people are diagnosed very far along and we can give them a couple of months usually, but not a whole lot longer than that. Some people might live a year, a year and a half. So you can imagine being told this.

AS: It’s a terrifying diagnosis.

LL: It is. And so people who are at our cancer center being treated for their pancreas cancer will be offered admission into this study, which will take them through six to eight hours of preparatory counseling, a day-long dosing session, and then several sessions of integration afterwards.

AS: What is it like to take psilocybin, for someone who has a terminal illness? How do they feel the day after? What’s different?

LL: It isn’t even the day after! When the dosing session is finished, when they come back into consensus reality, they just look at you like — “that was amazing.”

I witnessed one patient say, “All that anxiety I felt? It’s just stories. And I can get a different story. Yeah, I’ve got cancer, but I don’t need to be that worried about it.”

Underneath it all, people report a sense of being in the presence of love. You know, we put up a lot of defenses to get through our world, to keep ourselves physically and emotionally safe. And if we were able to let some of those defenses down, maybe we would have more access to love. And if you have that, then you can really accept a lot of things.

AS: What opens up for patients and their families, when they’re less frightened of the prospect of dying, when that anxiety eases?

LL: Then it becomes possible to think about going out with some joy and some curiosity and really full of life. Like: “What gifts do I need to leave to my family? How do I pass on some of my wisdom?”

We’ve all got a deadline in life.

There are some people who even talk about the ecstatic grief of knowing that this life we’re living is so precious and so sacred. But it’s only when there’s not that much of it left that you really feel the beauty and magnificence of it. So if you can help to convey that to people, if you can say, “Wow, look at this gift we’re sharing. Look at the intimacy we’re able to have now because I don’t have that much more time to hold your hand,” then you can really help people grow from generation to generation.

AS: You must be a very unusual palliative physician, because honestly, I think most would be more like, “Maybe we should add some more morphine.”

LL: I think given the opportunity, most palliative doctors would go into similar territory. I teach residents and fellows, and I tell them, “If you don’t talk to people about this, who will?” Because even if a patient has a trusted spiritual advisor, their pastor may not have any idea how sick they are. And if you don’t initiate those conversations about making meaning out of their life, they’re never going to connect with their pastor in a different way.

Our ability to reclaim some of the shamanic origins of medicine means learning how to bridge this gap. We need more physicians who feel called to edge-walking — one foot in the medical world and one foot in the psycho-spiritual world.

AS: I imagine some of these terminally ill patients must say, “If only I’d had this revelation 30, 40 years ago, I might have lived differently.” It does raise the question — why should people have to wait until they’re dying to have psychedelic therapy?

LL: Well, exactly. I’ve been thinking that it could be used like a sacrament, or rite of passage. Maybe when you come into adulthood, and then perhaps when you get married or have a child, or perhaps every decade, you just touch back down and remember that you’re connected to everything.

Almost like a ritual bath, a mikvah in Judaism — perhaps there’s this time when I take a psychedelic bath, when I think, “I’m going to wash myself in the universe. I’m going to immerse myself in the unconscious mind. I’m going to feel that expanse of consciousness and realize that I’m part of everything.”

And then come back and do the laundry and change the diapers.

Complete Article HERE!

Death and psychedelics

— How science is reviving this ancient connection

By

In November 1963, the writer and psychedelic explorer Aldous Huxley laid in bed, unable to speak. He was dying of cancer. One of his final acts was to pass a handwritten note to his wife Laura. 

His famous last words: “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.”

It was Huxley’s dying wish: a large dose of acid, please. Laura Huxley fulfilled the request twice during her husband’s final hours.

First synthesized 25 years before Huxley’s death, LSD was still legal in 1963. Scientists were studying it as a potential treatment for alcoholism and other ailments, as well as investigating its similarity to other psychedelics. It wasn’t until 1968 that the federal government outlawed these drugs due to their association with the cultural turbulence of the 1960s.

Today, several decades later, terminal cancer patients are once again taking psychedelics. This time around the drugs are being administered by doctors and scientists in controlled settings—and they are not microdoses. The results of this research have been nothing short of remarkable.

Laura Archera Huxley, 40-year-old musician and filmmaker, and husband Aldous Huxley, 61-year-old British novelist, pictured at their Hollywood home in Hollywood in 1956. On his deathbed seven years later, Huxley asked his wife for a massive dose of LSD.

Alleviating anxiety and despair

Terminal patients often suffer from feelings of intense anxiety and despair after receiving their diagnoses. For many, this is just too much to bear. The overall suicide risk for these patients is double or more compared to the general population, with suicide typically occurring in the first year after diagnosis.

Terminal patients have twice the suicide risk of the general public. Psychedelics may help reduce their fear and suffering.

That’s where psychedelic therapy may help. After a single large dose of psilocybin, taken in a curated space and supervised by a pair of doctors, many patients report feeling reborn. It’s not that the underlying physical disease has been cured. Rather, the drug prompts a shift in the theme of their emotional self-narrative—from anxiety and despair to acceptance and gratitude.

It may seem curious to think about psychedelic drugs, often associated with hippies and the Grateful Dead, as clinical-grade tools for overcoming our primordial aversion to death. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe this is only surprising if your window of historical perspective is too narrow. Maybe these “novel findings” are, in a sense, a return to somewhere we’ve been before.

Psychedelics at the dawn of civilization

In late 2020 I spoke to Brian Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, about the use of psychoactive plant medicine throughout antiquity. Our podcast conversation covers this history in more detail, but it’s clear that humanity’s relationship with psychoactive plants extends back at least to ancient Greece—if not further. It’s hard to look at prehistoric cave paintings like the Tassili mushroom figure and not wonder if psychedelics played a part in their creation.

Western philosophy may have developed with help from psychedelics as well. In Plato’s well-known allegory of the cave, a group of prisoners live chained to a cave wall, seeing nothing but the shadows of objects projected onto it by fire. The shadows are their reality; they know nothing outside of it. Philosophers, Plato states, are like prisoners freed from the cave. They know the shadows are mere reflections, and they aim to understand deeper levels of reality.

Plato’s philosophical ideas might have been influenced by psychedelic experiences.

Was Plato tripping?

If that sounds like someone who’s explored those deeper levels with psychedelic assistance…well, maybe it was. In his book, Brian Muraresku explores the significance of the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret ceremonies that involved death and rebirth. For centuries, philosophers and mystics traveled to the Greek town of Eleusis to partake in a ritual that involved an elixir known as pharmakon athanasias, “the drug of immortality.”

“Within the toolkit of the archaic techniques of ecstasy–plant medicine just being one among many–something you find again and again, in Ancient Greece and other traditional societies, is this sense that to ‘die’ in this lifetime, or achieve a sense of timelessness in the here and now, is the real trick.” -Brian Muraresku

Contemporary archaeologists, digging outside Eleusis, have unearthed ancient chalices containing a residue of beer and Ergotized grain. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain. It produces alkaloids similar to LSD. It’s possible, then, that influential thinkers like Plato were inspired by genuine psychedelic experiences.

This connection between psychedelics and death didn’t end with Eleusis. It survived, often repressed and hidden from view, right through the time of Aldous Huxley.

The connection re-emerges in the 1960s

In the 1960s, Timothy Leary co-wrote a book called The Psychedelic Experience: A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, the exiled Harvard professor and psychedelic guru, dedicated the book, “with profound admiration and gratitude,” to Aldous Huxley. It opens with a passage from The Doors of Perception, Huxley’s essay on the psychedelic experience. Huxley is asked if he can fix his attention on what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Clear Light. He answers yes, “but only if there were somebody there to tell me about the Clear Light.”

It couldn’t be done alone. That’s the point of the Tibetan ritual, he says: You need “somebody sitting there all the time telling you what’s what.”

Huxley was describing a trip sitter, someone who guides a person along their psychedelic journey. Sometimes it’s an ayauasquero in the heart of the Amazon. Sometimes it’s a doctor holding your hand in a hospital.

Timothy Leary, shown at home in California in 1979, was deeply influenced by Huxley’s work.

Seeking rebirth within the mind

In his book, Leary grounded Eastern spiritual concepts in the understanding of neurology we had at the time. The states of consciousness achieved by meditation masters and those induced by three hits of Orange Sunshine, he wrote, may actually be the same. Both involve dissolving the ego (“death”) and allowing it to recrystallize as the default mode of consciousness returns (“rebirth”). 

Leary wasn’t talking about magic. Scientists know these as “non-ordinary brain states,” inducible by rigorous attentional practice (meditation), pharmacological intervention (psychedelics), and organic decay (dying).

The ability of psychedelics to induce these remarkable brain states may also be why they’re showing such promise in alleviating the very ordinary fear of death.

Today’s psychedelic treatments: Coping with death

So what, exactly, has recent research on psilocybin as an end-of-life anxiety treatment involved?

A few small studies have seen psilocybin administered to dozens of cancer patients. They’ve been conducted in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled fashion. In general, a large majority of patients showed sustained, clinically significant reductions in measures of psychosocial stress and increased levels of overall well-being.

For example, in one study, 80% of the patients found that a single dose of psilocybin quickly relieved their distress. Remarkably, in some patients that positive effect lasted for more than six months.

Sprouting new physical connections

What’s going on at the neuronal level to produce those changes? We don’t know for sure, but some preclinical research has given us a hint. Both psilocybin and LSD have been shown to induce rapid and lasting antidepressant effects in lab animals.

Early studies hint at how psychedelics may produce positive changes in the brain.

Early indications are that psychedelics may allow brain circuits to rapidly sprout new physical connections. This is exciting, but again: These are non-human studies, and it’s early.

It’s gratifying to see any of these studies happening, frankly. This is research that’s been stalled by the Schedule I status of psychedelics for half a century. Much of this work requires obtaining a special federal waiver to study banned substances, which slows progress.

Potential help for end-of-life patients

Fortunately, the FDA recently designated psilocybin therapy as a “breakthrough therapy” and the DEA has proposed increasing the supply of psilocybin for research. This should speed up the rate at which we understand the clinical efficacy of psilocybin and related psychedelics.

Here’s more good news: In terms of psilocybin’s efficacy as a treatment for end-of-life anxiety, larger human trials are already underway.

Dr. Stephen Ross, one of the field’s leading researchers, has described the significance of this work: “If larger clinical trials prove successful, then we could ultimately have available a safe, effective, and inexpensive medication—dispensed under strict control—to alleviate the distress that increases suicide rates among cancer patients.”

Huxley: Ahead of his time

In one sense, Aldous Huxley was ahead of his time. More than a half-century before today’s renaissance in psychedelic research, his own experiences had evidently brought him to the conclusion that the best way to experience death was in a psychedelic trance.

In another sense, though, Huxley was one in a long line of creators stretching back to ancient Greek philosophers and perhaps even to prehistoric cave artists. They may all have used psychedelics to catalyze their outward creativity and comfort their inner distress.

Huxley titled his famous introspective essay, The Doors of Perception, after a quote from the English poet, William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to [us] as it is, infinite.”

We will never know what he experienced in the final hours before his death, after handing that note to his wife. I like to think that for him, the last breath seemed to last forever.

Complete Article HERE!

Research shows psilocybin — a Schedule I narcotic — to be of great help to patients with end-of-life problems


Guided LSD session at Johns Hopkins University.

“People in this country don’t talk about death. When I would talk about it sometimes with people they would say, ‘Oh be optimistic! Don’t talk that way. You’re gonna be fine.’ You really need to look at it (death) and this is the perfect way to do it.”
Ann Levy – psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy study participant

I remember the ride home being really quiet. Typically, my mom would be driving me nuts, loudly singing old Methodist hymns, rather than letting us listen to music on the radio. But this time she just drove silently as my grandmother, Lillian Brustad, stared out the window of our well-traveled station wagon. We had just left my grandmother’s oncology appointment in Rochester, New York and we were heading back to her home in Hamilton. There was no discussion about the appointment, no talk about any diagnosis, no ‘next steps’ and no ‘why me’s?’ What was said was said in a meeting with my mother, my grandmother and her doctors.

I’d break the silence with my repetitive pre-teen complaints as to why we should have stopped in Rochester, rather than waiting until Syracuse to pull into a Friendly’s restaurant for a Jim Dandy sundae. I’d debate from the back seat that stopping in Rochester would have made me full and happy. Stopping would have better allowed me to finish this book report on Mickey Mantle that I was putting off.

When I wasn’t complaining; there was silence…

We made many more trips to Rochester over the next few years. My grandmother remained stoic in her battle against cancer, despite it wreaking havoc on her physical body, eventually taking her life.

The final months of life are often marked by increasing physical and emotional suffering. As one approaches death, we often experience varying degrees of depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and a desire to hasten death. The prospect of our loved one’s looming death can lead to feelings of defeat, helplessness, and despair in family members and within the patient’s medical team.

How do you want to die? Most people hope to die at home, with their loved ones, but sadly an overwhelming majority of us die in a hospital or extended care home surrounded by beeping equipment.

What would a good death look like? Anthony Bocelli, PhD, is a palliative care psychologist and investigator in a study conducted at the NYU School of Medicine on the use of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to help patients and families deal better with end-of-life distress.

“Death needs to be humanized,” he says. “Although the end-of-life can be profoundly difficult, it can also trigger a search for meaning and an openness for the sacred.”

Maria Sabina called psilocybin mushrooms her ‘saint children.’ Sabina was the Mazatec curandera/healer that banker Gordon Wasson sought out to learn the secrets of ‘magic mushrooms.’ Sabina introduced Wasson and his wife Valentina to teonanácatl; the Psilocybe mushroom. ‘nti-ši-tho in Mazatec, meaning the ‘Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth’.

Wasson went on to famously detail his psychedelic experience in Life Magazine, introducing these sacred mushrooms to the Western world. Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD and chemist at the Swiss Sandoz Laboratories, isolated psilocybin in 1957 from mushrooms collected by Wasson’s team on their second trip to Oaxaca.

These sacred mushrooms have been used for millennia by indigenous cultures around the globe for healing and insight. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy melds this ancient sacred wisdom with modern day scientific technology. I am not talking here about eating a bag of ‘shrooms and tripping at a rock concert; this is about the therapeutic use of this valuable tool in a controlled setting under supervision by trained guides to help combat depression, addiction, and existential distress.

So why psilocybin mushrooms and why now? It has been said that psychedelics could be to psychiatry, what the microscope is to biology or the telescope was to astronomy. Bear in mind that telescopic science was prohibited in 1616 for over 100 years, in fear that people may discover that planet Earth was not the center of the universe.

Alicia Danforth, Ph.D, served as investigator on a psychedelic research study at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center examining the safety and efficacy of psilocybin as a treatment for advanced-cancer anxiety. She remarked, “It’s very important not to lose sight of the fact that research with psychedelic medicines has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. As long as there has been humans really. What’s new is when you get into the Western medical model.”

Dr. Danforth worked with Dr. Charles Grob on an important pilot study at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center on 12 patients who were facing end-of-life from advanced stages of cancer. Subjects were administered a placebo (niacin) during one session and the other session they received psilocybin.

I had the pleasure of discussing the study and their findings with Dr. Danforth. “Our participants were really near death. Some did not survive the six-month follow-up period,” she said.

Dr. Danforth detailed that they administered “one session at a low-to-moderate dose because we were the first cancer-treatment study in a new wave of psychedelic-assisted therapy and the FDA was really conservative. The main purpose for these little pilot studies is to establish that they are safe and is it even achievable. Does it work?”

The other studies that I will cite in this article worked with higher doses of psilocybin. However, Danforth stated that, ‘even with one session of preparatory psychotherapy session before (treatment day), then a really supported session on the day of treatment, then therapy afterwards, our study found a reduction in anxiety and a trend toward a reduction in depression.” She continued, “It’s more important to look at the trending that leads to larger studies so you can make stronger claims. We saw positive trends and there was a significant difference in the anxiety scores. The qualitative outcomes were good; the safety data were good. We didn’t have any serious adverse events and everything was green light go for the larger studies.”

As Danforth mentioned, humans have been conducting research for thousands of years on psychedelics. Prior to prohibition of these substances in the late sixties, there were more than a thousand studies conducted with more than 40,000 subjects and many showed positive trends.

During the 1960’s, Dr. Eric Kast, from the Chicago Medical School utilized LSD for a series of studies working with cancer patients encountering death. Several hundred advanced-stage cancer patients were administered LSD. Findings showed trends toward pain reduction for several weeks, relief of depression, improved sleep, and a lessened fear of death. Dr. Kast noted that some of these individuals showed a striking disregard for the gravity of their personal situations. They frequently talked about their impending death with an emotional attitude that would be considered atypical in our culture.

Another important study by William Pahnke from the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, in Baltimore conducted a study that was published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1969. His work examined the psychedelic mystical experience in the human encounter with death. He found, “The most dramatic effects came in the wake of a mystical experience.” He reported a decrease in fear, anxiety, worry and depression. Often the need for pain medications was lessened, because the patient was able to tolerate pain more easily. There was a profound increase in serenity, peace, and calmness, with a marked decrease in the fear of death.

Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator of the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Project. He and his team have been studying the effects of psilocybin and its ability to bring about mystical experiences. Their team conducted the largest and most rigorous study in this new wave of psychedelic research involving fifty-one patients who had received a potentially life-threatening cancer diagnosis.

“We found that the response was dose-specific,” Dr. Griffiths said. “The larger dose created a much larger response than the lower dose. We also found that the occurrence of mystical-type experiences is positively correlated with positive outcomes. Those who underwent them were more likely to have enduring, large-magnitude changes in depression and anxiety.”

The Johns Hopkins group reported that psilocybin decreased both clinician and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety. The results showed increased quality of life, sense of connectedness, and optimism. Participants expressed an increased belief that death is not an ending, but rather a transition to something even greater than this life. About 70% reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events, including the birth of a child or death of a loved one.”

He continued, “There are potential risks associated with these compounds. We can protect against a lot of those risks through the screening and preparation procedure in our medical setting. About 30 percent of our people reported some fear or discomfort arising sometime during the experience. If individuals are anxious, then we might say a few words, or hold their hand. It is really just grounding them in consensual reality, reminding them that they have taken psilocybin, that everything is going to be alright. Very often these short-lived experiences of psychological challenge can be cathartic and serve as doorways into personal meaning and transcendence.”

Dr Charles Grob, the principal investigator on the UCLA study reported similar results, “Psilocybin facilitates a greater likelihood of achieving a psycho-spiritual state of consciousness — a mystical kind of experience. The old research literature from the 50’s and 60’s very strongly indicated that individuals in psychedelic research studies, who experienced a spiritual epiphany during the course of their many hour treatment sessions, were more likely to have a long-term positive therapeutic outcome.”

Why does psilocybin appear to efficacious, while modern pharmaceutical efforts are largely ineffective?

Dr. Griffiths explains, “Psilocybin acts very selectively at serotonin-2A receptors, which are a neurotransmitter that promotes positive feelings. Acting like a ‘lock and key’, so psilocybin can click in to this receptor site and activate a variety of processes.” With all of the classical psychedelics; LSD, psilocybin, mescaline; the thing that they have in common is that they activate serotonin-2A receptors.

Dr. Danforth added, “Sometimes when we are in a challenging situation in life, our thoughts can get stuck in a loop. Negative thoughts just continue and continue and continue and psilocybin in a therapeutic setting can function like a big hand coming in and jiggling the needle on a skipping record, so that a tune can resume.”

Yet another study — this one conducted by NYU Langone Psilocybin Research Project — examined the effects of psilocybin on the psychosocial distress with patients with advanced cancer. This trial was led by Stephen Ross, M.D. and Anthony Bossis, Ph.D. Their study included 29 patients facing end-of-life. In their sessions, subjects were either given either a moderate dose of psilocybin or a placebo (niacin), cross-switching to the other after about seven weeks after the first session. Findings were very similar to the studies at UCLA and Johns Hopkins. They found that psilocybin produced immediate, substantial, and sustained improvements in anxiety and depression leading to decreases in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well being, and an increased quality of life. At the six-month follow-up, psilocybin was associated with enduring anxiolytic and antidepressant effects.

The NYU researchers further reported sustained benefits in existential distress and quality of life, as well as improved attitudes towards death.

There is growing anticipation that psilocybin could be rescheduled and open up further opportunities for psychedelic research. Decriminalization of psilocybin is going to the voters in the city of Denver on May 7.

“I look forward to a day, that if it were clinically indicated to be able to offer that service to certain clients,” Dr. Danforth said. “Expanded access is not available yet; no one in the United States is able to legally work with Schedule I substances in a clinical setting,”

She continued, “It’s possible in the near future that some in the MDMA (ecstasy) world we will have expanded access for PTSD therapy. It’s hard to anticipate what’s going to happen with MDMA and psilocybin, but I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. Everybody’s kind of waiting to see what happens in Denver and what that’ll mean… There are a ton of opportunists rushing in trying to make a buck, but in terms of real clinical work, that process moves at a snail’s pace, as it should.”

I asked Dr. Danforth on additional prospects for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. “My private practice is almost exclusively adults on the autism spectrum and some of them have very severe social anxiety and MDMA would be a real powerful clinical tool.”

She continued, “Others are very interested at looking at psychedelics for the betterment of well people. Two streams of effort working here — treating people that are unwell or providing guidance for those that are well, like we have been doing for thousands of years. They may have spiritual reasons for altering consciousness. It’s not all about getting a competitive edge in Silicon Valley, but it’s about how do we make our community healthy. For me it just happens to be the healing aspect. For people that are really suffering is where my interests lie.”

So what are the most promising areas in psilocybin research?

“Two of the most promising areas are Palliative Care; reducing the stress near the end of life and addiction studies,” Danforth replied. “I’ve always been really fascinated with the smoking cessation studies at John Hopkins and with Michael Bogenschutz M.D. (NYU) studies on alcoholism. I think that was one of the most promising areas of study from the first wave of psychedelic research in the sixties. I’d like to see more funding and research around treating addiction.”

Danforth said it’s frustrating not being able to use all the tools she’d like when treating patients. “I feel a bit like a firefighter who’s still allowed to fight fires, but I just can’t bring my hose,” she said. “The answer isn’t, ‘well let’s just give everybody fire hoses,’ because a lot of people could be hurt in an uncontrolled setting. I hope that we can find a middle ground.”

Dr. Danforth advises, “Psilocybin was used as a sacrament for sacred rituals, with a lot of reverence, wisdom, tradition, and mentoring. I’m not sure we are grown up enough as a culture to just have widespread access.”

Dr Danforth’s associate on the UCLA study, Gurpreet S. Chopra, emphasized, “I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand how we can use these tools in a Western Culture safely.”

I posed a similar thought to local clinical psychologist and founder of the Alaska Psilocybin Society, Dr. William Kerst. Dr. Kerst finds that psilocybin being a Schedule I substance to be ridiculous. “It clearly has potential medical benefit as demonstrated by the studies that are ongoing and not only is it not necessarily addictive, but it tends to be anti-addictive.”

“Working with the Alaska Psychedelic Society, I have had several patients that are struggling with end-of-life anxiety, which is one of the primary uses of psilocybin in some of these studies and they don’t have time for legalization efforts to get pushed through. They need relief and it looks like these substances may be able to do that, and right now we have to say, ‘no’ to these patients and that’s terrible. It’s heart-wrenching, honestly.”

Should you have further interest in investigating psychedelic substances, the Alaska Psychedelic Society is holding their monthly meeting on Saturday, April 27 from 2 to 4 pm at Uncle Leroy’s Coffee, located at 701 West 36th Avenue in Anchorage. Also visit the Society’s Facebook page to keep updated on future meetings as well as recent studies and articles regarding psychedelics.

Complete Article HERE!

Going Out on a High: the Doctor Advocating LSD for Dying People

Everybody’s got to die. But not everyone’s got to be miserable doing it.

By

The good doctor is irked. In a very gentle way, but still.

“I think it was Confucius who said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name,” says Dr. Ira Byock, 67, founder and chief medical director at the Providence St. Joseph Health Institute for Human Caring in Torrance, California. “So to be perfectly grammatically correct and to be absolutely legit, let’s focus on the adverbs and the adjectives, since what we’re really talking about is Dying Well.”

Which is exactly where throats start to get cleared and the death-phobic among us try to edge toward the exits. Because no matter the fact that each and every person alive to read this must one day perish, none of us wants to perish. Particularly not in misery and solitude. “I’ve had patients who have literally said to me that they’d rather be pushed down a flight of stairs,” intones Byock, “than have to face a future of crap care in some facility at the end of their lives.”

But Byock is not in the euthanasia camp — dying quicker doesn’t mean dying better. His pitch, instead: a menu of a few different things, the most compelling being “psychedelic-assisted therapies.”

Studies show about 25 percent of Medicare spending gets poured into caring for people in their last year of living — which would add up to $175 billion last year. That number is catching the eyes of cost-cutting politicians. All this penny-pinching has caused Byock to turn a jaundiced eye to the spate of now-legal physician-assisted death states: California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. “I call it Physician-Hastened Death,” says Byock. “And why the rush to hustle the old and the sick into the hereafter? Excuse me if it just seems a little too convenient to me.”

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Byock’s New Jersey roots, played through the betraying trace of an accent, are even more in evidence as he inveighs, not without flashes of humor, against dying badly and too soon. Working one of his first physician gigs after med school in a rural Montana emergency room for about 14 years, Byock created a clinical assessment tool that measured the quality of life for people who are suffering.

His prescriptions for the medical-industrial complex now include listening to patients, formulating care plans for disease and symptom treatments, helping them sleep, helping them move their bowels, addressing family needs and perhaps most importantly training doctors to do this early. So medical schools have to teach about caring for seriously ill or dying people up to and including the ethics of decision making, and should face financial penalties if they fail to do so. “Most med schools dedicate one month for pregnancy care even if the doctors in question won’t end up delivering babies,” Byock says. ”But 70 percent of physicians will be seeing sick or dying people.”

Byock talks about learning to listen, being sensitive to older patient needs — and then comes the needle-scratching-across-the record moment when he brings up psychedelics.

“I’m a child of the ’60s,” Byock laughs. “And there are legitimate medical uses of psychedelics when we’re talking about end-of-life wellbeing issues.” With an eye to easing pain and creating comfort, Byock turns to the early, legal uses of psychedelics as an adjunct to therapy, as well as the recent and well-publicized benefits of using psychedelics to mitigate PTSD.

Elizabeth Wong, a Northern California nurse and Byock fan who is training to be an end-of-life doula, points to controlled studies that show psychedelics having “lasting effects for up to six months on anxiety issues. It’s real science.” As legalization of medical and recreational marijuana has made clear, this is less of a traditional Democratic/Republican divide, says the committed progressive Byock, but more of which stakeholders win and which will lose.

Dr. Ira Byock, the doc from Jersey.

Losing? If the Dying Well’ers were to succeed, pharmaceutical companies and medical equip

ment manufacturers would take a hit. A contingent of pro-lifers under the aegis of the American Life League has blasted Byock’s work as “stealth euthanasia,” a charge Byock believes is risible. And winning? Nurses’ aides, nursing homes, hospices, long-term care facilities and pretty much anybody who expects to be dying.

“I think you’ll need more than a scorecard to get people to change their minds about this,” says senior care worker Josefine Nauckhoff. “Or at the very least America will have to take seriously those magical, mystical countries that have figured this out.”

Like? “Canada,” Byock says. “They’re taking this seriously,” with an emphasis on hospice centers, senior care facilities and addressing end-of-life issues as though they were both real and manageable.

Byock is pushing the U.S. to follow suit via his indefatigable advocacy in the wellness community, faith-based Catholic initiatives, books, conferences for reimagining the end of life and even the Death Over Dinner movement, where people bite the bullet, as well as biscuits, and talk seriously about death.

A movement is evident in the growing number of related books, death cafés, conferences, efforts at real legislative change and hospitals that are dealing on their own. In 2016, three-quarters of all U.S. hospitals had a palliative care team — focusing on improving quality of life for those with serious illnesses — up from one-quarter of hospitals in 2000, according to the Center to Advance Palliative Care.

“This is not just about avoiding suffering,” Byock said. “I’m in it for the joy. But, I mean, we’re all going to die. Best we do so the best ways we can.”

Byock and an ad hoc group of like-minded experts propose the following public policy planks to improve end-of-life care:

  • Raise training standards for physicians, nurses and allied clinicians in geriatrics, palliative care and related topics.
  • Establish minimum program standards for “palliative care” (disciplines, staffing, services, hours).
  • Require palliative care consultation before high-risk surgery or low-yield treatments for patients with advanced age or physiologic frailty.
  • Eliminate the requirement to forego disease treatments to receive hospice care for comfort, quality of life and family support.
  • Long-term care: Require adequate staffing of nurses and aides.
  • Long-term care: Require living wages and benefits for aide-level workers.
  • Annually revoke licenses of nursing homes in lowest 10 percent of quality and resident safety scores.
  • Award new licenses only to nursing homes qualifying as Greenhouse, Planetree or Beatitude-style models.

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