Don't Trust Snakes: Yes, but will they cure Rigellian fever?

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Yes, but will they cure Rigellian fever?

"Magic" mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient.

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Griffiths's team recruited 36 healthy volunteers who had not experimented with the drug before. They were informed that they would receive a hallucinogen but did not know in which of two or three sessions they would receive it. Each session was separated by two months.

They either received a substantial dose—about 30 milligrams—of psilocybin or a similar dose of an "active" placebo, Ritalin. The latter has a stimulating effect but is not known as a hallucinogen. An inactive placebo would be easy to identify by the volunteers when compared to psilocybin, which could bias the experiences they reported.

The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a "complete" mystical experience after taking psilocybin—far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin. [emphasis mine] - NewScientist.com, July 11, 2006

Someone is going to have to explain how using Ritalin as the placebo made sense, especially since the researchers indicated that (a) it would bias the subjects' reporting of their experiences if they could identify whether or not they'd had the placebo, (b) Ritalin is not a hallucinogen and (c) subjects were informed they would receive a hallucinogen (presumably subjects also knew they might get the placebo). I don't know, if I didn't hallucinate, I might conclude I'd had the placebo, even if it made me feel funny. But maybe that's just me.

Perhaps LSD or peyote would have made a better placebo, but the Johns Hopkins researchers probably preferred not to have to conduct their experiments at a CIA black site in Poland. So hard to find good blue crabs and unbiased volunteers in places like that.

Anyway, if you can chemically induce something scientifically indistinguishable from a religious experience then it seems to me that says more about the nature of authentic religious experiences and what science is able to say about them than it does about psilocybin. Can't we just as well say that someone who has a natural "mystical experience" has had a "complete" psilocybin trip? Doesn't the way the study is conceptualized rather privilege the "mystical experience" over the "psilocybin trip" even though the study says they have the same subjective qualities? What does Occam's Razor say about authentic religious experiences if you can replicate them by adding a chemical to your brain?

But do we really believe that an innocent-looking handful of mushrooms could produce the symptoms we observe in Tom Cruise? (Of course, the problem is that I don't know the history of psychiatry. Tom Cruise does.)

As an aside, I must note that, to this day, I can't read something about Ritalin without thinking of the classic Star Trek episode "Requiem For Methuselah." Just one of several curses that afflict me.