The Risks of Psychedelics in a Healthy Volunteer Study

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When you bring patients in, do you give them some sort of psychological test to make sure they're in a good place to do this kind of experiment? Yeah, we do. I mean, we do careful screening. Of course, if they're patients, they're often not in a good places. So there are some risks there. And there's also the psychological vulnerability which should be considered a risk. For that reason, it's so strongly emphasized and it's so important that it is that the psychedelic be taken in the right kind of context. That involves not just the context for the immediate experience but also ahead of the time that you come into the experience with some intention and preparation and

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific research as well. Along with restrictions placed by individual nations, it has been very difficult for scientists to study the effects of psychedelics on the brain, despite indications that they might have significant therapeutic potential. But this has gradually been changing, and researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris have begun to perform controlled experiments to see how psychedelics affect the brain, and what positive uses they might have. Robin and I talk about how psychedelics work, how they can help with conditions from addiction to depression, and how they can help people discover things about themselves.

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Robin Carhart-Harris received his Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and holds an honorary position at the University of Oxford. His research involves functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

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