Psychedelics Could Treat Addiction Says Vancouver Official
City's drug policy honcho sees 'profound benefits'. A special report.
By Danielle Egan
Published: August 9, 2006
TheTyee.ca
Vancouver's top drug policy official and B.C. public health physicians believe addicts might be treated by giving them psychedelic drugs, and they hope the city will lead in exploring the controversial approach.
In the late 1950s, New Westminster-based Hollywood Hospital was a leader in therapeutic psychedelics, almost a decade before Timothy Leary encouraged the masses to "turn on, tune in and drop out" on acid. Founded by eccentric American entrepreneur Al Hubbard, Hollywood Hospital catered to a mixed clientele of American celebrities and Canadian politicians given LSD to treat alcoholism, drug addiction and psychological burn-out. For almost a decade after LSD was criminalized in North America in the late 1960s, Hollywood Hospital served up therapeutic LSD before the provincial government pulled funding in 1975 and the hospital closed.
One Canadian Medical Association Journal paper written by University of Toronto professor Harold Kalant in 2001 discussed the varied potentially fatal risks of taking street ecstasy but he added that there was "no evidence" that taking the drug would lead to addiction and even said that the drug "may be of potential value as an aid in psychotherapy" though "similar claims were made earlier for MDA, LSD and other hallucinogens but...no lasting benefit was found in a 10-year follow-up study of patients treated with LSD" and "no comparable study has been conducted on patients treated with MDMA."
The recommendations in the reports by the city of Vancouver and the Health Officers Council of B.C. have also turned on Americ
an researchers. "Those reports touch on the vanguard of treatment efforts with substance abuse and are a common-sense approach to drug abuse treatment and harm reduction," said Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist and psychedelic drug researcher based in Minnesota who plans to return to Vancouver to research Amazonian plants this September at BCIT. McKenna, a "child of the 60s," started sampling psychedelics in the Haight-Ashbury, area of San Francisco, then split for the Amazon to sample psilocybin with his brother Terrence, who detailed their trips in the book True Hallucinations.http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/08/09/Psychedelics/print.html
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