Doctor's Looking At Street Drugs To Help Patients

I truly feel this a a good thing, if someone I loved was dying and wanted these drugs to help them I will probley help them if I could too!! Washington;"For some, the diagnosis comes out of the blue. For others, it arrives after a long battle. Either way, the news that death is just a few months away poses a daunting challenge for both doctor and patient. Drugs can ease pain and reduce anxiety, but what about the more profound issues that come with impending death? The wish to resolve lingering conflicts with family members. The longing to know, before it's too late, what it means to love, or what it meant to live. There is no medicine to address such dis-ease. Or is there? This month, the Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to a Harvard proposal to test the benefits of the illegal street drug known as "ecstasy" in patients diagnosed with severe anxiety related to advanced cancer. Has been referred to by psychiatrists as a drug especially good at putting people in touch with their emotions. Some believe it could help patients come to terms with the biggest emotional challenge of all: the end of life. The FDA's approval puts the study on track to become the first test of a psychedelic substance since 1963 at Harvard, where drug guru Timothy Leary lost his teaching privileges after using students in experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens. It also marks a milestone for a small but increasingly effective movement favoring a more open-minded attitude toward the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, virtually all of which have been criminalized and disparaged for decades as medically useless. Already, being tested for its ability to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Also studies are looking at the usefulness of magic mushrooms, in terminally ill cancer patients and in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Also hope to submit to the FDA an application to test psilocybin and LSD as treatments for cluster headaches. That would be a fitting birthday present for Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered both compounds while working for the Swiss drug company Sandoz and who turns 99 in January. Patients are being given psilocybin to see whether it can help them sort through emotional and spiritual issues. A "modest" dose of synthetic psilocybin, equivalent to two or three illicit mushrooms. They spend the next six hours or so in a comfortable setting with a psychiatrist, talking, thinking and sometimes listening to music with headphones. A 10-person study of psilocybin for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Also no complications in any of the five patients who have enrolled in his 20-person study for victims of violence struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is not about hippy dippy Halpern trying to turn on the world. I'm not looking at this as a magic bullet," he said. "But for a lot of people, the anxiety about death is so tremendous that there is no way to get their arms around the problems. Widow of the author and metaphysical pioneer Aldous Huxley, said her husband asked for and she provided a dose of LSD as he lay dying in 1963. "He wanted to be aware, took a wide array of psychedelics in the weeks leading up to his death from cancer in 1996. Some suspect the drugs clouded rather than sharpened his perceptions, but he died with a positive attitude. "It's kind of interesting really," he said of dying, talking to a friend in his final days. "You should try it sometime."