The Colorado researchers hypothesize that psilocybin may help with a profound problem for late-stage cancer patients.
“They’re facing the end. And to be able to face it in a way that was maybe without fear and guilt… I thought that was something that was very valuable,” said Jim Grigsby, a neuroscientist who is one of three researchers leading the project.
This idea that psychedelics could help people confront death is not new, and Grigsby has been waiting a half-century to try an experiment like this.
“It’s been there all along, and a lot of people knew it, but couldn’t do the work,” he said.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsJim Grigsby in the library at his home in the Colorado foothills near Ward, May 9, 2024.
In the 1970s, Grigsby was a wayward undergraduate at the University of Kansas. He had some academic false starts, dropping out to work on jackhammer crews and loading docks. But a revelatory experience with the psychedelic drug LSD changed that.
After his mind-altering experience, he decided to study the brain itself. And he knew the place to do that was about 800 miles north, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
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Saskatchewan had emerged as a free-thinking center for psychedelics research, where academics studied the drugs’ potential therapeutic effects for conditions like alcoholism, and used them to study schizophrenia.
“You had a number of very committed researchers who were also quite prolific in terms of their networking and correspondence,” said Erika Dyck, a historian at the University of Saskatchewan. Among them was the English doctor Humphry Osmond, who came to Canada because of its welcoming research environment. While he was there, he coined the word “psychedelics.”
Death was an early focus of some of those so-called “psychedelic pioneers” in Saskatchewan and beyond. The author Aldous Huxley, who was friends with Osmond, took LSD in the final hours before he died of larynx cancer,
“Suddenly he had accepted the fact of death; he had taken this moksha medicine in which he believed,” wrote his wife, Laura Huxley, in a letter, referencing a fictional psychedelic drug in one of Huxley’s novels. Huxley’s widow asked whether “his way of dying” could benefit others, too.
The young Jim Grigsby was particularly drawn to the 1960s work of Eric Kast at the Chicago Medical School, who found that LSD offered significant pain relief and improved morale to cancer patients.
Some of these early Western experiments drew from the knowledge and practices of Indigenous cultures that have long used psychedelics. In Saskatchewan, a local community contributed to the white researchers’ ideas about how to design psychedelic trials.
Concerns about appropriation
The Western scientists suspected that psychedelics, with their seeming ability to reorient the mind, could help people to find new meaning in the face of the unknown. Grigsby wanted to be part of it, so he applied to the University of Regina and later loaded up his blue Datsun station wagon to drive north into Canada.
But there was something he didn’t quite grasp that summer in 1972.
Amid President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” the governments of the U.S. and Canada were cracking down on psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD, which quickly diminished academic and pharmaceutical industry interest in the drugs.
Also, governments had put much tighter regulations on medical trials overall, after the failure to properly regulate the drug thalidomide caused thousands of babies to be born with anomalies like missing limbs.
As a result, as Grigsby arrived in Saskatchewan, he learned that the psychedelic revolution in Western medicine was all but over.
“As far as I knew, the door to psychedelic research was permanently closed,” he said.
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