A study involving the psychedelic psilocybin is showing promise as a way to permanently kick the smoking habit.
Tobacco use kills almost half a million Americans every year – almost half a million. Despite the dangers, nicotine addiction remains powerful so that many who try to stop cannot. That’s led scientists to study a new therapy to help smokers quit. It’s a treatment that uses psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. Stephanie O’Neill reports.
STEPHANIE O’NEILL: Giving up smoking seemed an impossibility to 65-year-old Carine Chen-McLaughlin and not just because of her physical addiction to nicotine. The Baltimore resident took up smoking at 18 and couldn’t imagine a life without it.
Therapeutic research on psychedelic drugs isn’t new. Scientists first started researching them in the 1950s, but when counterculture youth began using and abusing psychedelics in the 1960s, the feds criminalized their use, and that research skidded to a halt. Matthew Johnson leads the psilocybin smoking study at Johns Hopkins.
Among the advantages, he says, patients don’t need long-term prescriptions. Johnson’s smoking study, for instance, follows a protocol of counseling both before and after the patient takes just one dose of psilocybin during a guided session. So far, half the study participants have quit smoking, compared to 10 to 35% for conventional nicotine medication or counseling alone.
Read the full article at NPR
