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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

For thousands of years, naturally occurring psychedelics have been used medicinally. But for the past few decades, research into their potential has been on hold, because their supply and use is illegal.

Now, things are changing. In Australia there are a number of trials currently underway investigating the use of psychedelics as a way to treat depression and addiction. But while the research is happening, for some it’s not happening fast enough - and there are those who are taking matters into their own hands.

Today, contributor to The Monthly, James Bradley, on his personal experience of how psychedelics are transforming mental health therapies.

It’s Monday, August 9.

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RUBY:

James, a little while ago, you found yourself in a room with a cup of psychedelic tea about to take a sip. How did you get there?

JAMES:

Oh, look, I suffered from depression - episodes of depression - for most of my life, and I and I guess around the end of last year, I started kind of slipping into one and it got very bad by about March or April of this year. And I've been reading a lot about the growing use of psychedelics and particularly mushrooms, psilocybin, in the treatment of depression. And I kind of reached this point where I knew I had to do something.

And so I reached out to a friend of mine who I knew knew something about that kind of world. She put me on in touch with this guy who's a kind of an illegal practitioner, who is a mental health professional but he works with mushrooms and he works doing psychedelic therapy with people. And once I had kind of reached out to him, I agreed to see him and found myself in the room about to do the therapy.

I turned up at about lunchtime and he gave me the tea. The tea is literally hot water and ground up mushrooms and then you drink it down. It's a very strong dose and you wait for it to happen. I was of course, sitting there thinking this - lying there, in fact, on a bed - thinking this is not working, and then quite suddenly it was working and then once it was working, there was just no way back. I mean, literally, like I was being washed away. All the boundaries between me and the world had broken down.

RUBY:

Wow. So, that treatment, as you said, it’s actually illegal, because supplying and using psychedelic drugs is a criminal offence. Can you tell me why that's the case?

JAMES:

The interesting thing about these psychedelic drugs and psychedelic treatments is that they didn't used to be illegal. Cultures around the world have used psychedelic drugs for thousands of years. As a kind of a gateway to other kinds of perception, but also for various kinds of healing.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“I can see everything in colour, I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life.”

JAMES:

But amongst kind of Western medicine, they were used as well.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“It passed right through me!”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“Could you feel it?”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“Me? there isn’t any me.”

JAMES:

So, you have the discovery of LSD in the 1940s. And so they basically released this drug into the world and researchers started using it.

Archival tape -- Robert Gordon:

“I'm Robert Gordon, a psychiatrist practising in Sydney since 1963, so I’m old (laughs)...”

JAMES:

...and I came across a psychiatrist up here in Sydney called Robert Gordon. A fascinating man, he's in his late 80s now. He's an expert on trauma. He's still practising a couple of days a week.

Archival tape -- Robert Gordon:

“A colleague of mine who was my best friend at the time decided that if we were going to use it, we better find out what it works like. And so each of us had a dose. It was the first time under LSD that I realised that this substance had the capacity to bring back memories that you couldn't ordinarily bring back.”

JAMES:

In the 1960s, when he kind of went out into practise, he suggested to the people he was working with that they start running a small study on this. And they'd selected a group of people. Some of them had chronic anxiety. Some of them were very depressed. One had OCD. And these people would come in one at a time to a hospital in Mosman and they'd be injected with LSD. Then they'd come back for these kinds of reintegration sessions afterwards and they had these just extraordinary results.

Archival tape -- Robert Gordon:

“The intriguing thing was that after the 15 sessions, none of them had any symptoms left. And that was amazing.”

JAMES:

So you had this huge use of it. And so, in fact, by the 1960s, tens of thousands of people in the US who'd taken it was being used all over the place by psychiatrists. It was seen as a kind of wonder drug.

Archival tape -- Richard Nixon:

“Ladies and gentlemen I would like to summarise for you the meeting I just had…”

JAMES:

And then there began to be this kind of moral panic around it.

Archival tape -- Richard Nixon:

“America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.”

JAMES:

And by 1971, when Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs, they were just taken off the table.

Archival tape -- Richard Nixon:

“Fundamentally, it is essential for the American people to be alerted to this danger, to recognise that it is a danger that will not pass…”

RUBY:

So what happened then, did the use of LSD therapeutically - did it just stop?

JAMES:

So you had this thing that had been this kind of wonder drug being used by everybody which had completely disappeared by 1971, like the research into which just stopped dead.

Archival tape -- Robert Gordon:

“I think we would have had a very powerful tool in helping human beings to find a better way of living their lives and a much quicker way of doing it. The fact was that once it is gone, it's gone. And so we had to return to using the substances that were available at the time.”

JAMES:

As anyone today would know, I mean, psychedelic drugs are treated with such kind of horror in our culture. You know, they are essentially very safe. You know, they have almost no negative effects. And, you know, despite all the kind of the stigma around them, they are not just safe, but actually clearly very effective in a whole series of therapeutic contexts.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

James, can you tell me about the science of these psychedelic drugs. How do they work, and how do they help treat mental health issues?

JAMES:

It's really fascinating, the science behind it, because it's quite different to other kinds of drugs. So what we know about psychedelics is that there's a kind of network in the brain called the Default Mode Network. And what it does is it's kind of like the conductor that runs the rest of the brain. And what happens with psychedelics is that’s suppressed. And so you have all of the other bits of the brain kind of come up playing randomly. So you get visions, things, memories burst out.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“The use of magic mushrooms, ecstasy and other psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness will soon undergo clinical trials funded by the federal government.”

JAMES:

There's a lot of this huge amount of research going on at the moment.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“Around 3000 patients overseas have participated in research trials of psychedelic medicines.”

JAMES:

There's a big trial at the moment which they're doing with people in palliative care at St Vincent's Hospital.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“St Vincent's Hospital is the first in Australia to be granted permission to research the use of magic mushrooms on palliative care patients.”

JAMES:

There's another study beginning with methamphetamine addiction up here in Sydney very soon. So there's this kind of real explosion of interest in it here in a kind of formal context.
And they've shown quite remarkable results.

RUBY:

Really? What kind of results?

JAMES:

There is a study this year at Imperial College which showed that two doses of psilocybin was effective in twice as many people suffering from moderate to severe depression as conventional SSRI’s. But I mean, what's really fascinating is that it seems to be effective on a whole range of things. You know, it's effective on alcoholism, it's effective on addiction. It's effective on… there’s some stuff suggesting it works on PTSD, you know, so that's driving a lot of interest overseas, particularly in the use of psychedelic therapies.

RUBY:

Hmm. And James, this is a pretty big cultural shift that we're talking about here. These types of drugs have been illegal for the past 40 years or so. There hasn't been a lot of research for that reason. So why do you think that this resurgence is happening now? And is there any kind of hesitation within the scientific community around this? Are there things that that we need to consider in moving forward?

JAMES:

Look, I mean, I think there's probably a few things going on. I think one of
the things is that, you know, there's a desperate need for better treatments for depression and anxiety. I mean, the figures on it are shocking. I mean, you know, something like one in seven Australians experience depression. One in four experience anxiety across their lives. You know, in any given moment, one in six people are suffering from depression or anxiety or both. You know, there is this need for better treatments. The treatments we have don't work terribly well. But it's important to remember that they are very powerful medicines, you know, so everyone I spoke to said you've got to understand that, you know, when you take this kind of psychedelic treatment, it can turn your life upside down. And, you know, that's something that people need to kind of bear in mind while they're using them. It's not a you know, these are not magic bullets. They're not something that you take and you're suddenly better. They are something that needs to be used in a kind of careful way.

RUBY:

Mm hmm. And so, James, it's been a couple of months now since your psychedelic experience. How are you?

JAMES:

So I, look, I was pretty disordered in a couple of days after my psychedelic experience. I have to say but I guess there were some things I realised in there that were really, really helpful and important for me. I was badly depressed, I had very serious anxiety. And I was, you know, I was in a bad place. And I'm basically fine. I mean, I, I have had no anxiety, really, since the treatment. It kind of tailed off over about a week after the treatment. It just stopped happening.

I feel connected, I feel more robust, which has really mattered. I mean, I think over the last few weeks, we've been in lockdown. Sydney, you know, as all of you many people know, that's a, it's quite a difficult place to be. I've dealt with it much better than I would have three months ago. Like I went in I went in a mess, like probably almost as bad as I've ever been. And I came out as myself again. I came out happy.

RUBY:

Well, James, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for talking to me about all of this.

JAMES:

Thank you for having me.

RUBY:

You can read James Bradley’s story ‘A trip to the doctor’ in the latest issue of The Monthly.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

NSW recorded another 262 cases of Covid-19 on Sunday, as Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a further tightening of restrictions in the Penrith local government area.

In Queensland the south-east of the state emerged from lockdown yesterday afternoon, but the Cairns and Yarrabah council areas have entered a three-day lockdown to deal with a fresh outbreak.

And hundreds of staff and students at a school in Melbourne’s north have been forced into a 14-day isolation after a positive case was detected in Dallas.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.