Psychedelic mushrooms work their magic on many

WASHINGTON, July 12 (Reuters) ''Magic mushrooms,'' used by Native Americans and hippies to alter consciousness, appear to have similar mystical effects on many people, U.S. researchers have reported.

More than 60 percent of volunteers given capsules of psilocybin derived from mushrooms said they had a ''full mystical experience.'' ''Many of the volunteers in our study reported, in one way or another, a direct, personal experience of the ''beyond,'' said Roland Griffiths, a professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who led the study yesterday.

A third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes. Many likened it to the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

And the effects lingered.

Two months after getting the drug, 79 percent of the volunteers said they felt a moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction, according to the report published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

''Discovering how these mystical and altered consciousness states arise in the brain could have major therapeutic possibilities,'' said Griffiths.

These include ''treatment of intolerable pain, treatment of refractory depression, amelioration of the pain and suffering of the terminally ill,'' he added.

Griffiths and colleagues tested 36 healthy, educated volunteers who all reported they had active spiritual lives.

''We thought a familiarity with spiritual practice would give them a framework for interpreting their experiences and that they'd be less likely to be confused or troubled by them,'' Griffiths said in a statement.

Griffiths said he did not want to be accused of working like Timothy Leary, the former Harvard University psychologist best known for his 1960s experiments with LSD, another mind-altering drug.

NOT TURNING ON AND TUNING IN ''We are conducting rigorous, systematic research with psilocybin under carefully monitored conditions, a route which Dr. Leary abandoned in the early 1960s,'' Griffiths said.

''Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia,'' he added.

''Under unmonitored conditions, it's not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior.'' Psilocybin acts like a message-carrying chemical called serotonin on brain cells. Serotonin is linked with mood.

''Unlike drugs of abuse such as alcohol and cocaine, the classic hallucinogens are not known to be physically toxic and they are virtually non-addictive, so those are not concerns,'' Griffiths said.

To ensure that people did not imagine their experiences, each volunteer got either psilocybin or methylphenidate, a stimulant best known for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Then the drugs were swapped, so that every volunteer got both drugs, but neither the subjects nor the staff working with them knew who got which drug or when.

Afterwards, 22 of the 36 volunteers said they had a ''complete'' mystical experience with psilocybin, compared to four after they got methylphenidate.

Former National Institute on Drug Abuse director Dr. Charles Schuster praised the study and said such drugs may some day be used to treat addictions.

Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who says he has experimented with LSD himself, said the experiment might lead to a way to find the ''locus of religion'' and the biological basis of consciousness in the brain.

But Griffiths said such study would be purely scientific.

''We're not entering into 'Does God exist or not exist.' This work can't and won't go there,'' he said.

REUTERS VA KP0842