{"id":981,"date":"2021-08-07T11:19:17","date_gmt":"2021-08-07T11:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/lsd-therapy-for-alcoholism-project-cbd\/"},"modified":"2021-08-07T11:19:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-07T11:19:17","slug":"lsd-therapy-for-alcoholism-project-cbd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/lsd-therapy-for-alcoholism-project-cbd\/","title":{"rendered":"LSD Therapy for Alcoholism | Project CBD"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div property=\"content:encoded\">\n<p><em>The following is adopted from<\/em> <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> The Wonder Child: The Golden Age of Psychedelic Research in the 1950s <em>by Tom Hatsis.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"image-autosize image-align-none\"><\/div>\n<p>Beginning in the late 1950s, five hospitals in the Saskatchewan District of Alberta, Canada, offered a new kind of psychedelic therapy: treating alcoholism with <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span>. Duncan Blewett, an Irish psychologist, played \u201can active role\u201d as an <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> facilitator at Saskatchewan, administering <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> to numerous alcoholics who couldn\u2019t tread the twelve steps. While there, in 1959 he wrote (perhaps) the world\u2019s first medical manual for using <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> to treat alcoholism, <em>The Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25: Individual and Group Procedures<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The use of a psychedelic to treat alcoholism actually had its origins in the early 1900s. Anthropologists working in 1907 reported on alcoholics among Native Americans, who had successfully given up the bottle in favor of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus. Those who had made the transition from whiskey to dry whiskey became \u201csuccessful, healthy and outstanding members\u201d of their society. Consider the following testimonial: \u201cJilt [peyote] cures us of our temporal ills as well as those of spiritual nature. It takes away the desire for strong drink [.] I myself have been cured of a loathsome disease too horrible to mention. So have hundreds of others.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Modern clinical work in this area had started with Saskatchewan psychiatrist Dr. Colin Smith who tried to replicate the delirium tremens (<span class=\"caps\">DT<\/span>s) often felt by alcohol withdrawal, which include running high fever, sweating profusely, nightmares, irritability, and hallucinations. Some severe cases can result in death. Smith hoped to \u201cshock [alcoholics] into full awareness of their degradation and [generate] a desire to reform,\u201d by using <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> to simulate <span class=\"caps\">DT<\/span>s.<\/p>\n<p>Others caught on quickly. Dr. Humphrey Osmond and Dr. Abram Hoffer both felt that alcoholics were prime candidates for <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> experimentation \u201cbecause it is often easier to know whether they are improved or not.\u201d Either they stopped drinking or they continued. And so they set out trying to find if <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> could effectively cure the \u201cspiritual disease\u201d of alcoholism. Osmond and Hoffer gave <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> to 500 alcoholics who had failed to sober up after receiving treatment from Alcoholics Anonymous and who had had no luck with traditional psychotherapy.<\/p>\n<h2>Psychosis or Gnosis?<\/h2>\n<p>Thinking at the time (1954) that <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> and related compounds rested in the psychotomimetic (\u201cmadness-mimicking\u201d) family of chemicals, Osmond and Hoffer \u201cconceived the idea that [<span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> and mescaline] represented something very similar to delirium tremens \u2014 that a good many people who really give up alcohol do so on basis of the fact that they\u2019ve had an attack of D.T.\u2019s and been converted by them. We [thought] it might be a very good idea to give a person an \u2018attack\u2019 before he\u2019d been completely destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pull-right\">\n<p>Roughly half the patients who received <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> either improved or stopped drinking alcohol altogether.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>The plan backfired. Instead of experiencing <span class=\"caps\">DT<\/span>, the patients were having \u201c[f]avorable personality changes \u2026\u00a0 even though this was not the purpose of the experiment.\u201d Where they had tried to trigger terror, they instead triggered \u201cilluminating\u201d experiences. Dr. Smith noted the change in alcoholics \u201cresemble the state of religious conversion.\u201d One patient sounded off about their \u201cmomentary oneness with God.\u201d The drunks weren\u2019t \u201cscared\u201d straight; quite the contrary, they were actually enjoying the numinous nature of <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span>. \u201cThose who have not had the transcendental experience are not changed. They continue to drink,\u201d Hoffer reported at the Josiah Macy Jr. Conference in 1959. \u201cThe large proportion of those who had it are changed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Follow-up surveys conducted after the <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> treatment revealed surprising results: \u201croughly half the patients either improved or stopped drinking altogether,\u201d a <em>Saturday Evening Post<\/em> article stated four years later. So promising was the success rate of recovering alcoholics with <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> therapy that Saskatchewan\u2019s Bureau of Alcoholism called <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> \u201cthe most helpful remedy we\u2019ve known.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Not bad for a chemical that supposedly makes people crazy.<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><em>This excerpt is adapted from<\/em> <span class=\"caps\">LSD<\/span> The Wonder Child: The Golden Age of Psychedelic Research in the 1950s <em>by Tom Hatsis (Park Street Press, 2021).<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Copyright, Project <span class=\"caps\">CBD<\/span>. May not be reprinted without permission.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.projectcbd.org\/medicine\/lsd-therapy-alcoholism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is adopted from LSD The Wonder Child: The Golden Age of Psychedelic Research in the 1950s by Tom Hatsis. Beginning in the late [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":982,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultimatehealthreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}