Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD have shown real promise as safe and effective therapies for stubbornly hard-to-treat maladies like depression, post-traumatic stress disorders and addiction — in addition to their well-known impacts on consciousness and perception. But research has been stymied since the 1970s “war on drugs,” which demonized psychedelics and outlawed them as Schedule 1 controlled substances. While interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics is growing, they remain illegal in most U.S. states, and thus are not easily studied. As a result, scientists rely heavily on philanthropy to fund the basic and clinical studies needed to understand the drugs’ biological functions and effects.
Recently, a philanthropic gift to University of California, San Diego — long a site of research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics — is enabling a pioneering study of the drug DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. DMT has become increasingly recognizable in recent years, largely as an active ingredient in ayahuasca, a ceremonial brew originally used by Indigenous cultures in South America. Growing numbers of people in the U.S. and elsewhere have taken part in ayahuasca ceremonies, while others have consumed DMT in other ways, adding to reports of the drug’s value in addressing serious, long-term conditions like depression and addiction.
The $1.5 million gift to UCSD, from San Francisco Bay Area software developer Eugene Jhong, will fund the launch of a research program to study the biological and psychological effects of the drug DMT in humans. Users of ayahuasca and DMT have reported profound psychological experiences of wellbeing and connection to others and their surroundings, which appear to play a role in their therapeutic value. But little is understood about how the drug functions in the body and brain, said principal investigator Fadel Zeidan, associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
“People from different Indigenous cultures have used this drug for thousands of years,” Zeidan said. “But we as scientists don’t yet have a lot of strong empirical evidence of what it’s actually doing, how it’s working, and what it works for. We’re starting from scratch, taking a scientifically rigorous approach.” The UC San Diego researchers aim to do the basic research needed to understand how DMT functions in the human brain and body.
Jhong, who provided the funding for the DMT research, describes his philanthropy as “sporadic.” But the software developer, who has worked at mySimon Inc. and Google, is interested in the function of human consciousness. “My conversations with academics indicate to me that research with this very intellectually defensible perspective is stunted because of unwarranted stigma,” Jhong said. “This seems to be slowly shifting, and perhaps I have added a little nudge here and there.”
The research will be conducted within UCSD’s Psychedelic and Health Research Initiative. In a move that reflects the school’s commitment to this type of research, the initiative will be renamed the Center for Psychedelic Research, as a newly approved academic center at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
DMT is particularly interesting among psychedelics because it is present naturally within human body. Because the peak psychedelic effects of DMT can dissipate quickly, the UCSD researchers will administer the drug via continuous intravenous infusion. This will enable the study participants to experience an extended state of the drug’s effect; UCSD is currently the only university in the U.S. that has a dedicated division to conduct the extended-state DMT research technique.
Another psychedelic, psilocybin (found in so-called magic mushrooms) is also the focus of research as a treatment for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other conditions. Researchers at UCSD are investigating psilocybin for treatment of chronic pain — thanks in part to philanthropic support. In 2021, the school announced a $1.3 million gift from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation to fund a clinical trial investigating the potential of psilocybin to ease phantom limb pain, the sometimes cripplingly intense agony that amputees feel in the part of their body that was removed. Traditional painkillers, such as opioids and analgesics, can sometimes mask the pain but don’t address the underlying pathology. In fact, opioids don’t treat chronic pain very well, said Zeidan. Since the pain originates in the spinal cord and brain, researchers theorized that psilocybin could reset the aberrant neural circuits that produce the phantom pain.
Pain is, of course, a complex but widespread problem desperately in need of a breakthrough. Chronic pain is the No. 1 cause of disability, impacting some 50 million people in 2021. And it’s one of the drivers of the epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose, which has killed nearly a million Americans in the last two decades.
Zeidan stressed the importance of philanthropy in psychedelics research, an area that NIH dollars have barely touched. IP has covered several such gifts, including $17 million from a group of donors to establish the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University. Another collaborative funding effort aims to advance study of the drug MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Psychedelics are not legal, and I don’t think they can be legal without evidence. Without philanthropy, we really can’t do the work to generate the evidence.” It’s not yet clear how well psychedelics can effectively treat things like chronic pain and depression, but as comparatively safe and nonaddictive drugs, if effective, the value in healthcare would be immense. If the legal obstacles clear, the NIH could allow more funding to flow to psychedelic research, which could transform the field and create much-needed therapies, and perhaps insights into human consciousness.
