After decades of political suppression, studies on psychedelics are now experiencing what top researchers have dubbed a renaissance. Here are four drugs that made recent breakthroughs in psychedelic science:
Psilocybin for end-of-life psychological disorders
Two small, controlled trials of “magic mushrooms” — whose active ingredient is psilocybin — for anxiety and depression in cancer patients found that 80 percent of the study’s participants immediately showed clinically significant reductions in their mental disorders after dosing. Minor side effects of the mushrooms included transient anxiety, headache and nausea, but the therapeutic effects lasted seven months.