The New Yorker:

Scientists want to redesign psychedelics so that they don’t induce a trip—but they still improve mental health.

By Clayton Dalton

In the year 2000, a team of Yale researchers published a surprising paper. The team had given ketamine, a mind-altering drug that is normally used to anesthetize patients during surgery, to ten people with depression. All but one reported a marked improvement in their symptoms after one dose. Curiously, the antidepressant effect emerged after the mind-altering experiences and persisted for more than a week, suggesting that ketamine might be doing more than making the patients trip. Around the same time, researchers at Johns Hopkins gave volunteers psilocybin, the active component in hallucinogenic mushrooms, to study its psychological effects. The U.S. has treated psilocybin as an illegal Schedule I substance for more than half a century, but, fourteen months after the experiment, many participants considered it one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives—akin to the birth of a child.

A chemical neuroscientist named David Olson, then a graduate student at Stanford, told me that he encountered these studies and was “struck by the ability of a substance, with a single dose, to have such long-lasting effects.” He wanted to know how the drugs worked. He followed closely as researchers began investigating the effects of mind-altering substances on depression, anxiety, substance-use disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions. These studies often identified positive results, sometimes marked ones, and they sparked discussions about a new mental-health paradigm. Might we one day take psychedelics as a kind of therapy? How would clinicians safely prescribe substances that change our perceptions, thoughts, and moods? And perhaps the most perplexing question of all: Why would such drugs make us feel better in the first place?

Go to link