How science is taking tripping mainstream

President Trump recently signed an order to speed up the evaluation of psychedelics to treat the brain. That’s coming after decades of strict prohibition on psychedelic drug use dating back to President Nixon. So how did we go from that to a psychedelic renaissance? A look into a key institution in the world of psychedelic research may give us some clues. This episode, NPR’s brain correspondent Jon Hamilton http://google.com/search?q=jon+hamilton&rlz=1C1GCFQ_enUS1162US1163&oq=jon+hamilton&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggAEAAY4wIYgAQyCggAEAAY4wIYgAQyBwgBEC4YgAQyBwgCEAAYgAQyBwgDEAAYgAQyBwgEEAAYgAQyBwgFEAAYgAQyBwgGEAAYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyBwgIEAAYgAQyBwgJEAAYgATSAQgxNDIyajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 shares insight from a recent trip. (No pun intended.) Want more psychedelic content? Catch our episode on ketamine therapy here https://lnk.to/GkjpoM, or learn why some scientists want to take the trip out of psychedelics here https://lnk.to/a1FdVe. Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from EasyCater, the workplace food platform. EasyCater helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget with employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 24/7 customer support, all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:26Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. When it comes to research on psychedelic drugs, the times are a-changing. At least, that's what I hear from my psycho-not colleague, John Hamilton. Hey, John.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Hey, how's it going, Gina?

• 0:39Regina Barber?

  So you cover brain science, and you're here to talk about why mind-bending drugs from the '60s are having a moment right now, right, John?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I am. And I gotta say, things really have changed a lot since then.

• 0:50Regina Barber?

  Yeah, for a long time, psychedelic drugs were seen in the mainstream as like, dangerous, not helpful, I remember, dare. What has changed, then?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Well, two things: science and society. You know, if you look at the past couple of decades, researchers have been taking a whole nother look at drugs like psilocybin, which is the substance, of course, that makes some mushrooms hallucinogenic.

• 1:12Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Or magic. And the emphasis hasn't been on just expanding consciousness these days. It's been on treating conditions like depression and PTSD.

• 1:22Regina Barber?

  So do these drugs actually work for PTSD, depression?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  There's more and more evidence that they do, and that has led to a lot more mainstream acceptance of these drugs. You know, even at the White House, I should say. Listen to this cut from President Trump talking about ibogaine, which is this powerful hallucinogen that's also known as the leaf of God.

• 1:42Regina Barber?

  Can I have some, please? I'll take it.

• 1:45Regina Barber?

  Was he joking?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Only sort of. I mean, it's not like he was about to go pop a capsule of ibogaine. But he made that remark as he was signing an executive order to speed up evaluation of psychedelic drugs for treating psychiatric conditions. That order is telling agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health to seriously consider drugs like psilocybin, or LSD, or MDMA.

• 2:09Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Oh, and of course, ibogaine, which seems to be a personal favorite of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. All of this is a huge change because there's been this strict prohibition on psychedelic drug use and research, and that dates back to President Nixon.

• 2:25Regina Barber?

  Yeah, that was part of the whole backlash to the 1960s counterculture, right? Was there more scientific research on these drugs before the ban?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Not a lot. The military looked into using them as weapons.

• 2:38Regina Barber?

  Oh.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  During the 60s, though, what you had was mostly individuals experimenting with their own brains.

• 2:43Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  You did have a few academics, like the famous Timothy Leary at Harvard. He was really more of an advocate than a researcher. These days, what you've got is serious scientists asking whether psychedelic drugs can really help people with a range of disabling psychiatric disorders. I actually just got back from a reporting trip to the UK, where I visited a place that has played a central role in legitimizing psychedelic studies. It's called the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, London.

• 3:14Regina Barber?

  Today on the show, why psychedelic drugs are having a scientific renaissance.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  And how a small team of scientists in the UK helped bring these drugs into the scientific mainstream.

• 3:25Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. If you've listened to enough podcasts, you know a confident answer isn't necessarily a correct one. Sources matter. The same goes for AI, tax, and compliance. Aviator is grounded in 20-plus years of Avalara tax intelligence and delivers source-backed audit-defensible outcomes with human oversight built in. Because the AI said so, won't pass an audit. Visit avalara.com/aviator.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is designed to make language learning intuitive. It mimics how people naturally acquire speech as children, helping users read, write, and think in a second language. More at rosettastone.com.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  This message comes from BetterHelp. BetterHelp is in-network with more than 125 health plans, with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Don't have eligible insurance? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/NPR to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash NPR.

• 4:55Regina Barber?

  All right, John, earlier we talked about the shift in overall attitudes about psychedelics. How did that shift happen? That let hallucinogenic drugs go from being counterculture icons to potentially the next big thing in psychiatry?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  It began in the early 2000s. You had a few scientists in the US and Europe who began studying how these drugs actually affected the brain. There was a guy, the late Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. You had Dr. David Nutt at the University of Bristol, and then Imperial College London, where he still works. And by 2010, David Nutt was in charge of these two young researchers who would play a major role in showing what psychedelic drugs did in the brain and how they could be used to treat psychiatric disorders.

• 5:39Regina Barber?

  Yeah, that's not that long ago. Who were these two young researchers?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Well, one of them was a guy named Robin Carhart-Harris. He's a neuropsychologist. He's now at the University of California, San Francisco. Robin told me that his interest in brain science actually started when he took LSD for the first time.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  I was very young. I was only 14. So that was the initial spark of wonder. And I guess psychedelic science crystallized as something I could do just ahead of my PhD in psychopharmacology.

• 6:15Regina Barber?

  Wow. This was like a gateway to a PhD. It led to a career studying psychedelics.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  In this case, it did, Gina. But as you probably know, there are other paths to academic success.

• 6:26Regina Barber?

  True, I had a different one.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  That brings us to the other young researcher at Imperial College London, a guy named Dr. David Eritzo.

• 6:34Regina Barber?

  Another David.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Another David. He was a psychiatrist from Denmark who came to the UK to study addiction. Instead, or maybe I should say in addition, David ended up working with Robin on the first formal study that used psilocybin to treat depression. The idea was so new when they did this that they weren't even sure how they should administer the drug in a medical setting. So David told me that he and Robin made a trip to Johns Hopkins, which was one of the few places on earth at the time that had any experience with experiments like this.

• 7:05Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  I remember how extremely excited we were. We were really in a big group hug of excitement at Johns Hopkins and were like, we want to do these studies you guys are doing.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  And when David and Robin got back to London, they did their psilocybin study, and it produced preliminary evidence that the drug really did help with depression. As it turned out, that was just the beginning. This team at Imperial College London went on to become an incredibly productive group. They published this stream of papers on psilocybin, as well as other hallucinogenic compounds like MDMA and DMT. These studies looked at how the drugs affected human behavior, but they also used the latest brain scanning technology to show how each of these drugs was altering the way that the brain worked.

• 7:52Regina Barber?

  So how did it alter the brain? Can you give me some examples of what they discovered?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. One finding was that psilocybin causes a kind of breakdown of the brain's default mode network. That's a network that becomes active when we're daydreaming rather than focusing on a specific task, studying for a test, something like that. The default mode network appears to be critical to things like our sense of self. So the fact that it breaks down when we're tripping may explain why people report seeing themselves from a different perspective or being able to put some traumatic event in a different light.

• 8:27Regina Barber?

  Wow, OK. So were these accepted by the scientific community, these results? Like, was there pushback?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Scientists can be a pretty skeptical bunch, but they do believe in data. And as more and more of these high-quality studies got published, the scientific and the medical community got more and more interested in this idea that psychedelic drugs really might help somebody who had an anxiety disorder or depression, PTSD, drug addiction, I mean, even anorexia.

• 8:56Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Eventually, the studies from Robin and David's team, they started appearing in really prestigious journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine. And I should mention that those publications have continued even now that Robin has moved to UCSF, which he did in 2021. So that was one reason psychedelics got more mainstream. Another was ketamine.

• 9:16Regina Barber?

  Yeah, ketamine, we've actually done stories on ketamine on Shorewave, but it's not quite a psychedelic, right?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Right. It is at least not a classic psychedelic. It's considered a dissociative drug because it can cause this sense of being detached from your own body. You know, you ask somebody who takes it at a club, they will tell you that exactly.

• 9:34Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  In the brain, though, ketamine acts a lot like a psychedelic drug in that it seems to open up this window when the brain is able to learn and change really rapidly. David told me about the experience that one of his patients had. This is a patient with depression. And his description, you know, it sounds pretty trippy.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  He was describing a great sense of empowerment was the main thing. He felt that he had become back in touch with a sense of wonder and curiosity that he had lost. Almost a bit like childlike, curious sense of wonder towards the world.

• 10:13Regina Barber?

  Wow. And that was life-changing?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  It was to him, yeah. And the thing about ketamine is that it has been widely available as an anesthetic since about 1970, at least in the US. So unlike psychedelics, it was pretty easy to get legally and to use in experiments. About 20 years ago, scientists at the National Institute of Health showed that ketamine could help people with severe depression. You know, this is depression that hadn't responded to any other treatment. And in 2019, both the US and the UK approved a nasal spray version of ketamine for treating depression. That kind of opened the door to testing some of these classic psychedelic drugs for psychiatric disorders. I should also mention that in 2019, Imperial College

• 10:58Speaker 02

  London founded something called the Center for Psychedelic Research, which became the first academic center focused on the use of psychedelics in mental health care. Robin ran the center until he left for UCSF and now David is running it.

• 11:13Regina Barber?

  So how does this psychedelic treatment work? I mean, do they just send you home with this nasal spray or some pills?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I would hope not.

• 11:22Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Robin and David helped develop this sort of protocol for giving these drugs. It involves what they call set and setting, right? You prepare a person psychologically for this experience. Then the drug is administered under supervision in a special treatment room. Robin told me the idea is to create in this room the sort of opposite of a typical treatment facility, you know, with its bright lights and stainless steel and all that.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  We convert that so that those lights are off and we've got like a salt lamp, you know, glowing, a couple of these and maybe a sort of colored mood lamp on the floor. So that would be the first thing. And then you'd notice that there are some drapes, you know, some soft silken drapes. And yeah, we might have a little vaporizer with frankincense bubbling out into the room and the music.

• 12:18Regina Barber?

  Yeah, this is giving me like a visual of, I don't know, those kind of like crystal shops and stuff where they're playing like mellow music.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  A lot, yeah, it has, it has that vibe, right?

• 12:30Regina Barber?

  Yeah, incense, you know?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  One of the early members of the scientific team created an entire playlist that's meant to help guide people on their psychedelic journey.

• 12:40Regina Barber?

  I want to hear this playlist now, honestly.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  It's on Spotify, I'll send it to you. And it's got titles like Articulate Silences.

• 12:47Regina Barber?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  And Lost in the Humming Air and When We Forgive.

• 12:52Regina Barber?

  Wow, I definitely want this.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, Robin told me that, that in this setting, you know, music is what he called the hidden therapist in a session. Meanwhile, of course, there's an actual therapist who's talking to the person about their life or their depression or their addiction. So it's an interesting combination of medication, talk therapy, and something you might call, I don't know, spiritual journey. Every now and then, somebody does have a bad experience, we should note. But most people say they come away helped.

• 13:23Regina Barber?

  Yeah, this makes sense why psychedelic therapy is having a moment right now.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Right, and it may soon be coming to a clinic near you. Stay tuned, Gina.

• 13:32Regina Barber?

  OK, thank you, John, and thank you for that playlist you're going to send me later. I'm going to stay tuned for that.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  It's on the way, Gina.

• 13:40Regina Barber?

  If you liked this episode and you want to hear more about psychedelic research, check our show notes for our psychedelic drug series.

• 13:48Regina Barber?

  If Short Wave is part of your weekly ritual, make it official on the NPR app. You'll get every episode the moment it's ready. Just turn on notifications and we'll handle the rest. Download the NPR app today. And in the meantime, follow us wherever else you may be listening from. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Rosetta Stone, offering an alternative approach to language learning. Without relying on traditional memorization, the platform guides users to intuitively think in a second language. More information at rosettastone.com. This message comes from EasyCater, making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com.