Verified by 
Johns Hopkins researchers announced Thursday in the Journal of Psychopharmacology a stunning success rate in their pilot study using psilocybin-assisted therapy to help heavy smokers quit tobacco. The 12 of 15 recidivist smokers who managed to stop smoking for six months after three sessions with the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms represented an 80% success rate, unheard of in the notoriously difficult treatment of tobacco addiction. By contrast, the most successful current treatment – the drug varenicline – only has a 35% success rate.
It’s big news at a time when the use of psychedelic drugs for improving mental health is getting increasing attention after a generation in which all research had been shut down. In fact, in the Johns Hopkins findings, there is an unmistakable echo of research done inCanadaa half century ago.
Consider this from the study author, Matthew W. Johnson: “"Quitting smoking isn't a simple biological reaction to psilocybin, as with other medications that directly affect nicotine receptors." Instead, Johnson said, it was the subjective experience the smokers had when taking the psilocybin that changed them -- more like a conversion experience in religion, then getting a shot of penicillin to cure an infection.
This was exactly what psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer concluded way back in the 1950s when they had great success using LSD therapy to help alcoholics stop drinking. Hoffer and Osmond’s treatments proved successful enough that the Canadian government would eventually issue a report saying LSD was no longer an experimental treatment for alcoholism, but one that had proven effective.
“As a general rule,” Hoffer wrote, “those who have not had the transcendental experience are not changed; they continue to drink. However, the large proportion of those who have had it are changed.”
Now, five decades later, after draconian drug laws and a cultural panic reaction shut down Hoffer’s research and all other investigation of the possible benefits of psychedelic therapy, the researchers at Johns Hopkins are rediscovering the wheel, or maybe more apropos of smoking cessation, fire.
It’s hard not to wonder how the world would have been different if psychedelic clinical research had continued through all those fallow decades.
Those who had a transcendent experience, where people say they went into a mystical state that helped them feel unity with themselves and the universe, tended to have more success, the researchers said.
