A clinical trial designed to determine if a hallucinogen from magic mushrooms can be used to treat poeple with depression has been stalled due to European and specifically British rules for the use of illegal drugs in research.

President of the British Neuroscience Association and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, David Nutt said that he had been granted the ethical go ahead and the funding for the trial, but regulations were blocking Nutt from continuing research, saying, “We live in a world of insanity in terms of regulating drugs.”

Previously Nutt had experimented on healthy volunteers, and found that psilocybin, which is the psychedelic ingredient found in magic mushrooms, did have the potential to alleviate sever forms of depression in patients that have not responded to other treatments.

Due to these results he was awarded a $844,000 (R7,6 million) grant to conduct a full clinical trial in patients from the UK’s Medical Research Council.

But this psychedelic ingredient, psilocybin is illegal in Britain. And under the United Nations 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the ingredient is classified as a  Schedule 1 drug meaning it has a high potential for abuse. These rules mean scientists need a special licence in order to use magic mushrooms for trial purposes.

This has resulted in Nutt being unable to find a company to supply the drug for his trial. Nutt said:

Finding companies who could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence, which can take up to a year and triple the price, is proving very difficult.

The regulatory authorities, according to Nutt have a “primitive, old-fashioned attitude that Schedule 1 drugs could never have therapeutic potential,” despite previous experiments that suggest the trial would be successful.

United States researchers have seen positive results regarding a trial with MDMA – party drug – in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

What we are trying to do is to tap into the reservoir of under-researched illegal drugs to see if we can find new and beneficial uses for them in people whose lives are often severely affected by illnesses such as depression.

Nutt’s proposed trial would involve 60 patients with depression who had two previously failed attempts with other medication. When previous research was conducted it was found that when psilocybin when injected into healthy volunteers, the chemical switched off the anterior cingulate cortex, this part of the brain is said to be overactive in people with depression.

Even in normal people, the more that part of the brain was switched off under the influence of the drug, the better they felt two weeks later. So there was a relationship between that transient switching off of the brain circuit and their subsequent mood.

[Source: Huffington Post, YouTube]