Tag: lsd

Trial shows promise for treating anxiety with LSD

At Dr. David Feifel’s Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute clinic in La Jolla, patients come in with depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD and eating disorders.

But what sets this office apart is how these diagnoses are treated.

“I just felt that I wanted to create a center that focused on these advanced treatments that have expertise in these treatments and that also would be involved in developing the next generation of treatments,” Dr. Feifel said.

He opened his clinic in 2017 and is excited for this new era in psychedelic research.

“We’re picking up where we left off 30-40 years ago, and they are just looking very, very promising,” Dr. Feifel said.

One of the fastest-growing conditions his clinic sees is generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD.

“We see it especially growing among the youth and young females especially,” Dr. Feifel said.

One of those patients is Lucas Hoffman, who’s battled GAD for years, trying treatment after treatment for several years, with no major benefits.

As part of Dr. Feifel’s clinic, Hoffman joined a clinical trial for a new investigational drug called MM-120, a pharmaceutically optimized version of LSD.

“I came in that morning, I was a little late for the dosing session because I was dragging at home,” Hoffman said. “I was pretty, pretty nervous,”

In a controlled environment, patients receive a single monitored dose.

“I really personally, and this cannot represent the expectation for any of you on the trial, I really did, feel a sense of freedom,” Hoffman said. “I felt a breakthrough of some of the anxiety that was holding on so tightly to me.”

Early results are encouraging.

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High Doses Of LSD Lead To ‘Greater Reductions In Depression’ Compared To Low Doses Of The Psychedelic, New Study Finds

Taking a high dose of LSD, coupled with assisted therapy, led to “greater reductions in depression” among patients compared to those who received a low dose of the psychedelic, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland investigated the therapeutic potential of LSD for people with moderate-to-severe major depressive disorder, and they found the substance showed “promise” as a “novel approach” to treating the condition.

Notably, the study—published this month in the journal Med—indicated that “high-dose-LSD-assisted therapy reduced depressive symptoms more than low-dose therapy” and that the improvements lasted for up to 12 weeks after the treatment.

The randomized, double-blind trial involved administering doses of 100μg and 200μg of LSD for one cohort and two doses of 25μg of the psychedelic for the other. Symptoms of depression were measured at multiple intervals, starting with the baseline and followed up with examinations after two weeks, six weeks and 12 weeks.

After assessing the 61 patients post-administration, the researchers concluded that the “findings of this exploratory study support further investigation of LSD-assisted therapy in depression in a larger phase 3 trial.”

“The present trial’s strengths include a clinically representative sample with respect to the duration of illness, common comorbid conditions, and various pretreatments,” the study authors said. “Other strengths include the comparison with a low-dose group and a relatively long follow-up period of 12 weeks after the last administration.”

“LSD could be used safely within the framework of this study,” they said, adding that compared to previous trials involving psilocybin, “LSD has a longer duration of action.”

“This prolonged effect makes clinical application more resource intensive. It remains to be resolved whether this extended duration offers clinical advantages,” the study text says. “Furthermore, it is yet to be determined if there are other relevant differences among hallucinogenic drugs in terms of therapeutic potential.”

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RFK Jr. Says He Had A ‘Wonderful Experience’ Tripping On LSD And Trying To See Dinosaurs

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), says he had a “wonderful experience” with LSD at 15 years old, which he took because he thought he’d be able to see dinosaurs, as portrayed in a comic book he was a fan of.

Unfortunately, he said that LSD trip led him to later take methamphetamine and, ultimately, go through a decade-long battle with heroin addiction.

At the 2025 Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville on Thursday, Kennedy spoke candidly about his own journey with certain drugs, offering a window into the HHS secretary’s perspective on substance use as he assumes a critical health and drug policy role in the Trump administration.

Kennedy said he was straight-edge up until he was 15, when he went to a party that became a “melee” and met a person who offered him LSD as they hitchhiked home.

“I would never have taken it,” he said. But in his town, there was a store kids flocked to every week for comic books—and in one of his favorite series, Turok: Son of Stone, the characters took “some kind of hallucinogen” like mescaline and they saw dinosaurs.

Kennedy said he “had a deep interest in paleontology” at the time, and the person who gave him the LSD said it was possible he could see dinosaurs, too.

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A trip too far: The LSD experience that blew up the Huxley family

In November 1956, three people gathered in a converted Connecticut barn to take LSD, a powerful psychedelic drug that was legal at the time. 

The children had just been put to bed upstairs. In the converted barn’s main room, Elizabethan ballads drifted through smoke-thick air as someone scattered chrysanthemum petals across a sheepskin rug. The flowers seemed to reanimate in the candlelight, blooming and dying with each flicker. Two of the participants lay hand-in-hand in ecstatic communion, while a third sat rigid and apart, his detachment crumbling into barely contained fury. 

By midnight, everything would shatter. 

One participant spiraled into visions of nuclear war. Another transformed into a 10-foot colossus of feminine power. And in the space between these extremes, a marriage began its quiet collapse. 

The aftershocks would reverberate through three generations of Britain’s most celebrated intellectual family, the Huxleys, leaving wounds that simmered in private letters for more than sixty years. 

It’s fitting that this story should be told on Bicycle Day, the annual commemoration of April 19, 1943, when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first rode his bike home under the effects of LSD — and ushered in the modern psychedelic era. Nearly 14 years after that inaugural ride, the drug had drifted from the lab into the lives of artists, seekers and intellectual elites like the Huxleys. 

The trip’s architect was Dr. Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist who had first guided Aldous Huxley — the author of “Brave New World” and “The Doors of Perception” — in experiments with mescaline. and coined the term “psychedelic.” His subjects that evening were Aldous’ only son, Matthew Huxley; Matthew’s wife, Ellen; and Francis Huxley, Matthew’s cousin and the son of biologist Julian Huxley. 

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Using Psychedelics Is Tied To 25% Lower Likelihood Of ‘Frequent Bad Headaches,’ Study Shows

People who have used so-called “classic psychedelics” such as psilocybin or LSD are less likely to report having frequent bad headaches, a new study concludes.

The results, authors wrote this month in the Journal of Pharmacology, “add to the literature suggesting classic psychedelics as a possible future prophylactic treatment option for primary headache disorders.”

Researchers gathered data from 11,419 records collected from 1999 to 2000 as part of the British Child Development Study 1958, which follows a cohort of people born over the course of a single week in March 1958.

Specifically, they looked at responses to three questions: “Do you often have bad headaches?” “Have you ever tried LSD, also known as acid or trips?” and “Have you ever tried magic mushrooms?”

The team’s analysis showed that “lifetime use of classic psychedelics was associated with 25% lower odds of having frequent bad headaches.”

There are, of course, limitations as to what conclusions can be drawn from the observational nature of the study.

“Although we have proposed a direction of association, we cannot draw any causal inferences about the association between lifetime use of classic psychedelics and frequent bad headaches,” they wrote. “It is possible that the negative association found is a result of people suffering from frequent bad headaches abstaining from the use of classic psychedelics.”

Data from the same survey, for example, showed that low alcohol use was associated with higher likelihood of frequent bad headaches. In that case, authors interpreted the finding by saying it “may be explained by individuals experiencing frequent bad headaches choosing to abstain from alcohol,” noting that alcohol is understood to be a trigger for headaches.

Overall, 16 percent of people in the survey reported frequent bad headaches. Of those, 71 percent were female and 29 percent were male. Lifetime use of classic psychedelics, meanwhile, was reported by 6.5 percent of people with frequent bad headaches and 8.6 percent of those without.

Notably, when the research team divided reports by sex, they noticed a stronger association between psychedelics use and headaches among female respondents.

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Operation Midnight Climax: A CIA Sex, Drugs and Surveillance Program

Key Takeaways

  • Operation Midnight Climax was a CIA experiment in San Francisco from the 1950s to 1960s testing the effects of LSD and sex on men’s behavior.
  • The experiment was part of the larger MKULTRA program aimed at developing mind-control capabilities.
  • The CIA used prostitutes to lure men to a wired bordello for surveillance, but the unethical program was terminated in 1967.

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, men in San Francisco who patronized prostitutes ran the risk of becoming unwitting participants in a clandestine CIA experiment. It was designed to test whether the combination of sex and the hallucinogenic drug LSD might influence the men to reveal information that the government wanted. What information, nobody is really sure.

The experiment, known as Operation Midnight Climax inside the CIA, was part of a larger research program code-named MKULTRA. The agency launched MKULTRA out of worries that the Soviet Union had developed a mind-control drug.

CIA officials had observed the vacant gaze and trance-like behavior of Hungarian cleric Cardinal József Mindszenty at a show trial in Budapest in 1949. They were convinced that his confession had been extracted with chemicals, according to a 1977 New York Times article and decided that the U.S. needed to have similar capabilities.

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First Patient Dosed In Historic Study On Whether LSD Effectively Treats Anxiety

For the first time ever, researchers are administering LSD to patients in a Phase 3 clinical trial. The new study focuses on whether the psychedelic can be used to effectively treat generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Drugmaker MindMed says that the trial, dubbed Voyage, is eventually expected to enroll about 200 people in the U.S. and will compare the effects of its proprietary LSD product to a placebo. A second Phase 3 trial, called Panorama, will also be conducted in both the U.S. and Europe and is expected to kick off in the first half of next year.

“Today marks a pivotal moment in our journey towards advancing a novel treatment option for the 20 million people in the U.S. living with GAD,” MindMed’s chief medical officer, Daniel R. Karlin, said in a statement released on Monday. “Building on our scientifically rigorous Phase 2b study, which demonstrated efficacy that far exceeds today’s standard of care and a favorable tolerability profile, our Phase 3 studies are designed to adhere to the highest clinical and ethical standards and are in alignment with guidance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

In March of this year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted MindMed’s LSD product “breakthrough therapy” status as a treatment for GAD. That followed a Phase 2 trial showing that a single oral dose of LSD led to “clinically and statistically significant” reductions in anxiety scores 12 weeks after administration, with 65 percent of participants showing a clinical response and 48 percent in clinical remission following the treatment.

Breakthrough drug status is meant to recognize the therapeutic promise of an emerging substance or therapy as well as speed the research and development of treatments that fill an unmet need. MDMA and psilocybin have also previously been awarded the designation.

The new research will use dissolvable oral tablets of the drug, MM120 ODT, or lysergide D-tartrate, which MindMed describes as a “proprietary and pharmaceutically optimized form of LSD.”

The first Phase 3 study, Voyage, will last a year and consist of two parts: a 12-week randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to see how LSD affects anxiety symptoms. That will be followed by a 40-week extension period, during which participants can access open-label treatment with the drug based on the severity of their anxiety symptoms.

LSD has a noticeable subjective effect on sensation and cognition, which means it’s likely participants will know whether they received the psychedelic or a non-psychoactive placebo.

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New Study Finds One Dose of LSD Could Effectively Treat Anxiety in Many Patients

After years of criminalization and marginalization, scientists have begun looking at LSD’s medical benefits more closely, so much so that the Food and Drug Administration just issued a groundbreaking stamp of approval. 

Biopharmaceutical company Mind Medicine announced March 7 that the FDA has awarded “breakthrough therapy” status to its trial of patients using MM120 (lysergide D-tartrate) to treat anxiety. MindMed chief medical officer Daniel Karlin explained what the trial approval means going forward. “A breakthrough designation is a recognition that a drug has demonstrated evidence of clinical efficacy in meeting an unmet medical need with morbidity and mortality associated with it,” he told CNN. The move allows the FDA to “engage more closely in drug development” and speeds up the road to final approval as the agency is involved throughout the process. 

MM120 is the codename for MindMed’s lysergide D-tartrate compound, which resembles and delivers similar effects to lysergic acid diethylamide, known more commonly as LSD. In its ongoing trial, which kicked off in 2022, MindMed has so far found that a single dose of MM120 led to a 48-percent rate of remission from generalized anxiety disorder after 12 weeks following the drug’s administration. Scientists also noted significantly improved clinical signs of generalized anxiety disorder among 65 percent of patients within three months. 

“The clinical improvement for many patients was more than double what we see with today’s standard of care,” Karlin said. “This occurred at all levels of anxiety, from moderate all the way up to severe.”

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