Psilocybin (active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms), LSD (derived from compounds from rye ergot), dimethyltryptamine (or DMT, used in the composition of ayahuasca), mescaline (derived from peyote), but also MDMA (an amphetamine better known as ecstasy) or even ketamine, this anesthetic long used in veterinary medicine (and diverted in rave parties) before becoming the darling of psychiatry labs… Praised to the skies by the thurifers of the Beat Generation and the counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s, then banned at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s – the UN classified them on the list of narcotics, dangerous and of no therapeutic interest, in 1971 – psychedelics have experienced a strong resurgence of interest from the scientific community for a ten years. The first study on the use of psilocybin to treat tobacco addiction dates back to 2014; since then, this research has multiplied. “On the ClinicalTrials.gov website alone, which lists therapeutic trials conducted in the United States, there are 275 studies on the use of psychedelic molecules, half of which concern psilocybin, and the rest MDMA or LSD,” notes Pierre-Marie Lledo, director of the Neuroscience department at the Pasteur Institute, who advocates that France, once at the forefront of research on these substances, participate more actively than it does in this renewal of the pharmacopoeia.
The latter, in fact, really needs to be renewed, particularly with regard to the illness of the century that is depression. While conventional antidepressants take, in the best case scenario, between 4 and 6 weeks to act, and a third of patients receiving these drugs do not experience any improvement and continue to sink deeper and deeper into the depths of depression, the “journey” induced by the controlled intake of certain hallucinogenic molecules can have a rapid and lasting beneficial effect, including against the most stubborn depressions. On condition, however, that this is done in a hospital environment, the only one that can offer guarantees on the composition of the molecule and where all precautions are taken to prevent the experience from turning into a “bad trip”.
