Johns Hopkins seeks volunteers to take magic mushrooms
A research program designed to enhance spiritual awareness for persons with a cancer diagnosis is accepting volunteer participants at the Bayview Campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The program consists of a brief counseling intervention, including medical screening, rapport-building appointments, two all-day sessions that include psilocybin administration, and appointments to facilitate initial integration and application of insights gained. More detailed information is available at cancer-insight.orgConducted by Drs. Roland Griffiths, William Richards and colleagues, this program is designed to help cancer patients who are suffering with some degree of psychological distress to become less anxious and depressed, and to become more fully engaged with life again. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the "sacred mushrooms" that have been used in religious ceremonies by indigenous people in Mesoamerica for approximately two thousand years, is employed to facilitate the resolution of personal conflicts and to occasion states of consciousness that for some may be indistinguishable from visions and mystical experiences recorded in the history of religions. Psilocybin has not been found to be toxic or addictive, and is considered reasonably safe for persons without a history of serious mental illness, when administered in accordance with the safety guidelines published by the Hopkins researchers. Additional information on safety and the unique contributions this intervention may make to human personal and spiritual well-being, may be found here.
The research is FDA approved and is open to persons between 21 and 70. Confidentiality is maintained for all applicants and participants.
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Oh how wonderful. The sooner pscilocybin is removed as a Schedule 1, the better for humanity.
Thanks for posting, and thanks to Johns Hopkins.
In other news today banks were looking for volunteers for a scientific study on the effects of huge amounts of money on human happiness.
I live right off of the John's Hopkins campus and I've had a few friends sign up for this program and a few others involving mescaline. They pay BIG BUCKS if you stick with the program they have you in.
Although now that I think of it I'm not really sure what they're trying to get out of mescaline, doubtful it has anything to do with cancer patients...
Is there a distance learning version?
the gubment can put Psilocybin on whatever schedule they like. there's still no test for it as there are for other "narcotics".
can't they cut your head off and look inside for the rainbows?
"two all-day sessions that include psilocybin administration"
OOsh. Lousy setting. Any way to sign up for a call when sessions are scheduled at Macchu Picchu?
Somewhere Terry McKenna is laughing his ass off.
Oh hell yes!
Look at the bats!
I'm glad to see what appears to be honest scientific research in this area.
This hearkens back to the Good Friday Experiment at Harvard (also involving Psilocybin) on April 20, 1962.
theres a way to get this for free? why did i just buy an ounce?
an ounce
an ounce
an ownce
an pwnce
an pwnse
en pwnse...
or, sorry, what!?
:(
harmless and useful. Correctly used.
You'd think realizing that you're dying from cancer would be trippy enough.
TWO all day sessions? I would hope they're not back-to-back. Usually, I don't even feel like smoking dope for a couple of days after a shroom trip.
Do they let you work via mail order?
this is pretty tremendous - my first, and as of yet only, mushroom trip was absolutely one of the most life affirming and religiously affirming experiances of my life.
yeah man these cant be back to back. after taking mushrooms last friday and saturday im only now starting to feel right again.
#4
Yes. Unfortunately the distance learning version involves reading a textual description of the mushrooms, and then imagining the trip you might be having if you had physical access to them.
I thought that psilocybin had a pronounced tolerance effect, such that you have to wait several days before taking it again produces significant hallucinations?
@19 Zikzak
Yeppers. It seems that if you do them the next day, they just don't have the same potency and effect. The effect is more muted and after the second "trip" and it feels like you are more drained afterward, like your brain is out of happy for a day or so.
But overall, I'm not so much excited about this news as I am interested. I know for certain that after the first time I took mushrooms that my entire outlook on life changed. I can still conjure up the memories of the experience and juxtapose my views of various things in life on & off of the mushrooms. I can honestly say that certain anxieties and insecurities were revealed as baseless and my feelings for others warmed. I don't mean to get all hippie here, but I realized for the first time that there are beautiful things about people. As cheesy as that may sound, my experiences of "enlightenment" were not so dissimilar to those of others who had gone through the same experience.
As to the addiction; spot on. I currently have no need, or even desire to do them again... but they would be nice if say I was on a beach, huge giant meadow, or in a forest, or anywhere else immersed in nature. My desire to consume alcohol is infinity times greater than mushrooms or weed for that matter.
It's still weird to me how telling people in the 50's that you felt free and relaxed in a "free society" was so frightening that a unfounded campaign of fear and overzealous politics led to our current super successful war on drugs.
neurotransmitters need time to "re-set".
"I don't mean to get all hippie here, but I realized for the first time that there are beautiful things about people."
thats so true about psilocybin, you find yourself thinking "Maybe those hippies are on to something." even if you don't share the same scene.
I Had a friend who was destitute in flint michigan and going to join the army. I didn't want him in iraq so i bought him a train ticket and set him up out here in San Francisco. He didn't tell me he was addicted to heroin though and ended up stealing a bunch of my stuff and pawning it, then fleeing back to michigan.
A year went by and i know he's sorry. he's one of my oldest friends, so i understand how strong the addiction has to be to make you do something like that. Then one day while on magic mushrooms i was sitting around with friends and realized i forgave him. Just like that. It wasn't worth holding on to. I made a mental note to check and see how i felt about it when the drug wore off.
Even though i wasn't necessarily as psyched to get a hold of him and let him know things would be okay between us, i decided that if he could steal my stuff because of drugs and had to live with it, Then i could stick to forgiving him because of the mushrooms.
It turned out to be the right thing to do. I need a bracelet W.W.T.D.O.M. (what would tim do on mushrooms?"
^^ forgiveness is huge, no matter how it comes about. Props to you Tim.
ROAD TRIP!
It's a damn shame they're only "seeking volunteers with a current or past diagnosis of cancer."
@25 (Myself!), Actually, it's not a damn shame. It's a Good Thing since that's who they're ultimately trying to help. But if they did a study that was open to everyone.... well, that'd be pretty swell, too.