02 Feb THE TRIP TREATMENT | THE NEW YORKER
As a sign of growing public awareness and acceptance of psychedelic research, The New Yorker, possibly the nation’s most prestigious general-interest magazine, features an extensive article on the subject in its issue of February 9th, 2015. Author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) focuses on the use of psilocybin as a treatment for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients. Pollan interviewed several Heffter-supported researchers at Johns Hopkins and New York University.
“As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.
“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants ‘that they must be faking it,’” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death, they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”