A growing number of medics think they could be.

Steve Shorney is a serious man, quiet and thoughtful. But the first time
he took psilocybin he could not stop laughing. “I’ve never felt so much
joy,” the 64-year-old says, recounting his participation in a clinical
trial of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. “It was the most
extraordinary experience. I spent a lot of that session laughing in
astonishment. All those big questions that one tends to ask about the
meaning of life, the universe and everything — those questions were
answered in the most colourful, psychedelic way you could imagine.”

Shorney’s second trip, two weeks later, was less happy. “It was pretty
dark,” he says. “I spent a lot of the time crying. I had to deal with
the sort of things that one spends a lifetime avoiding or suppressing.
The drug invites you to go in there and deal with it. That is not easy
to do. It was pretty scary.”

Shorney, a father of two who lives with his wife, Jane, in Surrey, has
struggled with depression and anxiety for most of his life. The former
broadcast journalist had tried counselling and antidepressants, to no
avail. “The world was a flat, grey place,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot
of joy.”

And then three years ago he applied to take part in a trial of
psilocybin at Imperial College London. He was accepted and arrived at a
room in Hammersmith Hospital. “They really did their best to set it up
nicely. It was a typical hospital room that had been disguised. There
was a lovely reclining bed with big fluffy pillows and they lined the
walls with forest scenes.”

After a cup of tea, he took five little pills, closed his eyes and,
flanked by two therapists throughout the six-hour trip, drifted into
another world. “The immediate impact was — wow. There really are no
words to describe it. It just blows the lid off the reality that you know.”

Psychedelics were never intended as a party drug. Albert Hofmann, a
Swiss chemist, developed LSD in 1938 as a circulation booster and, five
years later, inadvertently discovered its psychoactive properties when
he accidentally ingested some of the substance he was working on.
Hofmann was always puzzled by its adoption as a recreational drug — his
accidental first trip, and subsequent self-experiments, revealed a
terrifying aspect to LSD. “A demon had invaded me, had taken possession
of my body, mind and soul,” he wrote in his book LSD: My Problem Child.
But when he awoke the next morning he felt reborn. “Everything glistened
and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created. All my
senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted
for the entire day.”

Hofmann, who went on to identify and then synthesise psilocybin as the
active ingredient in magic mushrooms, believed his creation had huge
therapeutic potential for psychological conditions. Combined with
psychotherapy, he wrote, these drugs could help patients “perceive their
problems in their true significance”.

Yet fate — at least for the next few decades — would take the drugs in
quite a different direction. “Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD
in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected
was that this substance could ever find application as anything
approaching a pleasure drug,” he wrote.

Psychedelics — acid, mushrooms and mescaline — became a symbol of 1960s
hippy culture. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg described psilocybin as a
“psychic godsend”, the Beatles sang Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and
tripping became synonymous with the summer of love, opposition to the
Vietnam War, turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs” followed and by the early 1970s
psychedelics were banned on both sides of the Atlantic. Drugs were
driven underground, but they didn’t go away. Generation after generation
sought new mind-bending experiences.

The 1980s and 1990s rave scene adopted Ecstasy — it had originally been
developed to control bleeding — as its drug of choice. In 1992 the
Scottish acid house group the Shamen immortalised it in the hit
Ebeneezer Goode (“Es are good, Es are good, he’s Ebeneezer Goode”).
Ketamine, an anaesthetic used on American soldiers in Vietnam, then
became a popular alternative, musically chronicled by the Chemical
Brothers in their 1997 track Lost in the K-Hole and by the rock band
Placebo’s 2001 song Special K.

Now, though, psychedelics and other related drugs, such as MDMA and
ketamine, are being reclaimed by the medical profession in a bid to
tackle the mental health epidemic.

One in six British adults live with some form of a common mental health
problem, such as anxiety or depression. This quiet crisis has a huge
impact on individuals, on families and on businesses. Mental health
problems cost the UK economy £118 billion a year, mainly in lost
productivity and work absence, according to a recent study by the London
School of Economics and Political Science and the Mental Health
Foundation. That is equivalent to 5 per cent of UK GDP.

Doctors, of course, already have drugs they can prescribe. And prescribe
them they do, in ever-increasing numbers. Antidepressants — mostly
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — were doled out to 8.3
million people in England alone last year, up more than 5 per cent from
7.9 million in the previous year. But roughly a third of people who take
these drugs see no benefit and many end up trying two, or three, or even
more different medications before they are classed as having
“treatment-resistant depression”.

This, a growing number of psychiatrists believe, is where psychedelics
can play a role. Earlier this month the UK start-up Compass Pathways
published the results of the biggest randomised control trial conducted
into psilocybin. The study of 233 people, led by King’s College London
and published in The New England Journal of Medicine — the world’s most
influential medical journal — suggested that Albert Hofmann may have
been right all those years ago. The researchers found that, three weeks
after taking a single capsule containing 25mg of a synthetic crystalline
form of the drug, nearly a third of patients were in remission from
depression. These participants had each suffered with their illness for
years, having experienced an average of seven previous depressive
episodes. They had all tried two to four different antidepressants in
the past, without success.

As with any drug, there are side-effects. As Hofmann found, a bad trip
can be terrifying. The Compass researchers had to sedate one patient who
had a frightening episode. Nadav Liam Modlin of King’s College London, a
psychological therapist who worked on the trial, says these experiences
are often an intrinsic part of the treatment. “Effective psychotherapy
and healing requires encountering or going towards challenging
experiences. We work with participants to develop trust, not only in the
therapist, but also in themselves to navigate and actually make use of
challenging experiences.”

Patients with a history of psychosis have been excluded from the trials
for fear it may make their symptoms worse. Some patients became
suicidal, although this may be part of their underlying condition rather
than a result of the drug itself. These drugs are generally thought not
to be addictive, though overuse can lead to a build-up of tolerance.

Next month Compass is to start two bigger trials, involving a total of
946 people, in an attempt to establish definitively just how effective
the drug is, as well as to quantify the risk of side-effects. By 2025,
the company hopes, it will have enough evidence to apply for medical
licences from drug regulators around the world.

Companies are waking up to the fact that, if they can crack the problem,
there are huge profits to be made. Some 100 million people globally are
thought to suffer from treatment-resistant depression. And so, bit by
bit, psychedelics are being reclaimed from the hippies and the ravers.
They are going mainstream.

And it is not just psilocybin that holds potential, and not just
depression that could be treated. Trials are underway of MDMA to treat
former soldiers with PTSD; trial results of a new formulation of
ketamine for depression are expected in the next month;
dimethyltryptamine is being trialled for alcoholism and depression;
psilocybin is being explored for anorexia and fibromyalgia; and
ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic that can induce a 48-hour trip, is
being studied as a way to overcome opioid addiction.

“There is a lot going on,” says Professor Robin Carhart-Harris, one of
the pioneers of the psychedelic renaissance. He led the first trials of
psilocybin in London — including the one in which Shorney participated.
If clinical trials go as expected, within two years he believes the
first licence will be granted. “That will really be the watershed moment
for psychedelic medicine,” he says.

And that moment is badly needed. Conventional antidepressants,
Carhart-Harris says, are not meeting our needs. “It’s not a good enough
curative action. Some people are helped, but the way they’re helped is a
bit superficial.” He cites his former mentor, Professor David Nutt — the
former government drugs adviser who said that there was “not much
difference” between taking Ecstasy and horse riding — who describes
SSRIs as “incubating against stress”. Carhart-Harris says this
incubation can make people more resilient. “But the cost of that is
people say they’re not really living. They have to live two years to
experience one — life is muted somehow, emotion is muted.”