Are you, like so many other Dutch-Smarters, a big fan of psychedelics, but are you also curious about how and why these substances work the way they do? Then we have good news, because that’s exactly what the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has been trying to investigate. Their latest study sheds light on the psychoactive effects that distinguish psilocybin from other hallucinogenic substances, and the results are quite remarkable…
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Why do people use magic mushrooms?
“Recently, there has been a renewed interest in research involving psychedelic drugs,” explains Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is the corresponding author of the new study. In an interview, the professor discussed the many potential powers of psilocybin and how it might be used in the future, but for this study, the question was a bit simpler. “This study sought to answer a simple yet somewhat perplexing question: why do people use psilocybin?” The study was published in the journal Psychopharmacology.
“Psilocybin, in the form of hallucinogenic mushrooms, has been used for centuries for its psychoactive effects. Recent U.S. survey studies show that psilocybin use has been relatively modest and fairly stable over the past few decades,” Griffiths explains. “However, the National Institute on Drug Abuse does not consider psilocybin to be addictive because it does not cause uncontrollable drug-seeking behavior, does not produce classic euphoria, does not cause withdrawal syndrome, and does not activate brain mechanisms associated with classic drugs of abuse.”
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Positive experiences
In the double-blind study, 20 healthy participants with a history of hallucinogen use received doses of psilocybin, dextromethorphan (DXM), and a placebo during five experimental sessions.”Dextromethorphan was chosen as a comparator for psilocybin because, although it is a hallucinogen with some effects similar to psilocybin, has a significantly lower rate of non-medical use, despite its widespread availability as an over-the-counter cough medicine,” Griffiths told the English-language outlet Psypost.
The sessions were spaced two to seven days apart and took place in a living-room-like setting. The participants were then given the substances in question and instructed to lie down on a couch and listen to music. During the experimental sessions, the participants completed various assessments and subsequently wrote a brief description of their experiences. In addition, the participants filled out a follow-up questionnaire one week and one month after their last session.
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‘Heightened awareness of beauty’
The results were quite interesting. For instance, the researchers found that most participants who had taken psilocybin would like to take it again. Only 1 in 4 people who had received DXM said the same. “The study showed that various subjective characteristics of the drug experience predicted participants’ desire to take psilocybin again: psychological insight, meaning of the experience, heightened awareness of beauty, positive social effects (e.g., empathy), positive mood (e.g., inner peace), wonder, and mystical effects,” Griffiths explained.
In addition, more than half of all participants said that the psilocybin experience was one of the most meaningful and psychologically insightful experiences of their lives, something we’ve seen in other studies before. “The study provides an answer to the puzzle of why psilocybin has been used by people for hundreds of years,” says the study author. “The answer seems to lie in psilocybin’s ability to induce unique changes in human conscious experience that give rise to meaning, insight, experiences of beauty, and mystical effects,” he continues.
