The famous hallucigenic drug has been around for 70+ years now. has it ever been proven useful for any medical purpose?
Guys like Tomoth Leary claimed that it helped you expand your consciousness, and it was tried (by the CIA) as a means of interrogation.
But as far as i know, nothing really usefil ever came of this. Is anybody studying its use today?
I’ve heard of uses like helping the terminally ill accept their mortality but if it turns out that there aren’t many, I don’t think that means much. Drugs classified as schedule (class) I narcotics have a huge stigma attached to them not to mention the legal issues so researchers aren’t busting a nut to do clinical trials with them unless they already have very good reasons to think they might be beneficial. So you can see the catch-22 here.
I know that for a few days after I did acid I felt much better than my usual mental state. It’s impossible to describe except to say that I felt “normal”. And after about a year of doing MDA off and on, my OCD symptoms virtually disappeared for several years but gradually crept back.
This isn’t about LSD per se, but here’s a study on Psilocybin, the active ingredient in “Magic Mushrooms” (which acts on the 5HT receptors of the brain, the same receptors LSD acts upon) so I think this is at least partially relevant.
I’m to dumb the find the cite at the moment but I’ll keep looking. Anyway, I read ‘something somewhere’ to the effect that LSD was proven to be very successful in the treatment of alcoholics. IIRC, there was some evidence that the majority of alcoholics so treated stayed sober indefinitely.
I must have misspelled a word or something equally stupid; Googling ‘treating alcoholism with LSD’ will get you a ton of hits. It seems that a comprehensive study was conducted in Canada; give it a shot.
It was in the experimental stage of treatment for autism when it’s scheduling classification asserted that it had no accepted medical use.
I remember that study. LSD was just one aspect of the treatment program; when the study was repeated with the same program minus the LSD, the success rates were similar.
The Multidiscliplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies researches the medical application of LSD and other psychedelics. Their website contains lots of information on current research and findings.
I just watched a BBC doku about drugs - legal and illegal - sorted from 20 to 1 according to how dangerous they are, and when LSD came up, they said that it was originally developed to help people with schizophrenia, and had some success there, before the counter-culture discovered it. They had not only Prof. O’Leary, but a younger doctor who argued that all the hysteria about the dangers of LSD should be put aside (since they were exaggerated and untrue - nobody jumped out of the window because of LSD, that’s just an UL) and it should be studied anew without prejudice.
Well, they’re wrong. LSD was discovered entirely by accident; a Swiss scientist, Albert Hofmann, was synthesizing various ergot-related drugs in hopes of developing migraine medications. LSD was one such creation; he discovered its psychedelic properties only when he accidentally ingested some in his lab one day. He published what is now a very famous account of this first acid trip; I’m sure it’s available online.
According to House, LSD can help with chronic pain and migraines.
Okay, so he’s not a doctor. But he plays one on TV.
I wasn’t aware of that; thanks for the update.
I am sure many artists have used it for inspiration and the like, sounds useful for me
I see what you did there … 
This.
In another life, I was a clinical psych grad student. I took on an interest in psychedelic psychotherapy after <mumble/> and reading an article about the use of ibogaine in treating addictions and OCD. So I decided to write a paper on it.
The sixties were long gone at that point. So for that matter were the eighties. What greeted me at the university library:
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Tons of papers that were written before LSD and psilocybin became Schedule 1. Mostly anecdotal, nothing you could really hang your hat on. No followup research on humans worth reporting after, say, 1975.
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There were a few papers written later about how well rabbits learned mazes and puzzles while tripping. But those findings could be written off to state-dependant learning.
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Really nothing at all from the last few years, except the ibogaine thing, which hadn’t been reproduced at the time (anybody hear anything, because I ain’t heard even a whisper).
All of which completely failed to teach me to stay away from an interesting, badly documented subject in spite of the D I got.
Well there is the sad case of Frank Olson, though the complete truth about it will probably never be known.
This doesn’t really have any bearing on recreational use of course.
I wish it was that easy.
Not really. It’s true that Albert Hofmann discovered LSD, but that’s just the first step. He was working for Sandoz, and they eventually determined that it might have psychiatric uses and developed it along those lines.
IIRC, LSD has been used in veterinary care of some large animals (mostly horses) with some neurological disorders.