Turn on, tune in and get better?

Hallucinogens and other street drugs are increasingly being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses, such as helping patients deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction,Canada goose chronic pain, depression and even terminal illness.
Janeen Delany describes herself as an "old hippie" who's smoked plenty of marijuana. But she never really dabbled in hallucinogens — until two years ago, at the age of 59.

A diagnosis of incurable leukemia had knocked the optimism out of the retired plant nurserywoman living in Phoenix. So she signed up for a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin — the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" — could help with depression or anxiety following a grim diagnosis.

Delaney swallowed a blue capsule of psilocybin in a cozy office at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She donned a blindfold,Canada goose jackor a blood pressure cuff and a headset playing classical music. With two researchers at her side, she embarked on a six-hour journey into altered consciousness that she calls "the single most life-changing experience I've ever had."

What a long, strange trip it's been. In the 1960s and '70s,Expedition parka a rebellious generation embraced hallucinogens and a wide array of street drugs to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Almost half a century later, magic mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy and ketamine are being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses. Scientists believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug or alcohol addiction, unremitting pain or depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness.

"Scientifically,Snow mantra these compounds are way too important not to study," said Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, who conducted the psilocybin trial.

In their next incarnation, these drugs may help the psychologically wounded tune in to their darkest feelings and memories and turn therapy sessions into heightened opportunities to learn and heal.

"We're trying to break a social mind-set saying these are strictly drugs of abuse," said Rick Doblin, a public policy expert who founded the Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic Studies in 1986 to encourage research on therapeutic uses for medical marijuana and hallucinogens. "It's not the drug but how the drug is used that matters."

Regulators and medical researchers remain wary. But among at least some experts at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, the shift in attitude "has been dramatic," Doblin said.

Researchers explored the usefulness of hallucinogenic agents as an adjunct to psychotherapy in the 1950s and '60s. But allegations that hallucinogens were used in government-funded "mind control" efforts, freewheeling experimentation by proponents like Dr. Timothy Leary, and the drugs' appeal to a generation in revolt quashed legitimate research for decades.

The thaw has been slow in coming. In 2008, Griffiths co-wrote a report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology comparing psilocybin with a placebo for people dealing with incurable diseases. Psilocybin resulted in "mystical experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance," according to the study, the first since 1972 to explore a hallucinogen's therapeutic value.

In January, a team led by UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob reported in Archives of General Psychiatry that psilocybin improved the mood of patients with "existential anxiety" related to advanced-stage cancer. The benefits lasted at least three months.

Janeen Delany is a typical case: The insights she gleaned during her encounter with psilocybin continue to shape her attitudes toward life and death.

Delany said her "trip" awakened a deep and reassuring sense of "knowing." She came to see the universe and everything in it as interconnected. As the music in her headphones reached a crescendo, she held her breath and realized it would OK — no, really easy — not to breathe anymore. She sensed there was nothing more she needed to know and therefore nothing she needed to fear about dying.

And that, paradoxically, has allowed her to live.

"When you take the veil of fear away from your life, you can see and experience everything in such a present way," she said. "I don't have to know what the future is. Every day is the day of days."

Fighting addiction

Such mystical insights are central in another potential use for psilocybin — as an addiction treatment. Griffiths is conducting a pilot study combining psilocybin with cognitive behavioral therapy to help smokers quit. Four people have completed the program, and so far none has returned to smoking, Griffiths says.

At the University of Arizona in Tucson, addiction specialist Dr. Michael P. Bogenschutz has proposed a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin can help ease alcohol dependence. If the NIH agrees to fund the study, it would be the first instance in decades of government financial support for a trial involving any drug of abuse.

Psilocybin's effect on the brain can be described, if not explained. It increases the activity of serotonin, a chemical that affects mood. Brain networks associated with emotions are highly active in the presence of psilocybin, as are structures involved in higher reasoning and judgment, MRI scans show.

'Leap Second' Could Be Abolished

"The times," sang Bob Dylan, "they are a-changin'." His words could become literal truth in January, when the World Radiocommunication Conference of the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland,Canada Goose Jakke will vote on whether to redefine Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and pull our clock time out of synchronization with the Sun's location in the sky.

At issue is whether to abolish the 'leap second'--the extra second added every year or so to keep UTC in step with Earth's slightly unpredictable orbit. UTC--the reference against which international time zones are set -- is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks,Canada Goose Jakke with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.

But "leap seconds are a nuisance", says Elisa Felicitas Arias, the director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France. They cannot be preprogrammed into software because they are typically announced only six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Frankfurt, Germany. If the seconds get implemented inconsistently in different systems,Canadian Jakke clocks can briefly go out of synch, potentially leading to glitches that can stall computers and leave international financial markets vulnerable to attack.

Still, some countries--principally China, Canada and the United Kingdom--want to keep leap seconds to maintain the link with solar time, in part for philosophical reasons. "Most Chinese scholars think it is important for timekeeping to have a connection to astronomical time because of traditional Chinese culture," says Chunhao Han of the Beijing Global Information Center of Application and Exploration,Canada Goose Parka who adds, however, that China has yet to decide how it will vote in January.

Last week, scientists and government representatives met at the Kavli Royal Society International Centre near Milton Keynes, UK, to discuss the issue, but they failed to reach a consensus, making the outcome of the January vote hard to predict. Arias, who co-organized that meeting, argues that leap seconds are obsolete now that global navigation systems, which set their own internal timescales, have replaced solar time for navigation and precision scientific measurements such as the motion of tectonic plates and how Earth's mass warps space-time.

Adding an extra second inconsistently to multiple clocks across satellite networks could cause a system to fail for long enough to cause an air disaster, says WBodzimierz Lewandowski, a physicist at the BIPM. The US Global Positioning System ignores leap seconds for just this reason, and Russia's GLONASS system has had problems in the past incorporating the leap. Europe's Galileo system, which launched its first two satellites last month, and China's developing BeiDou system will also mark time with their own internal clocks.

But Markus Kuhn, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that most problems could be overcome by having a consistent prescription for adding extra seconds. Linux operating systems, for example, have experienced problems because they add the whole second in one abrupt jump at midnight, which confuses the software. In September, Google announced that it would use an alternative 'soft-leap' strategy, in which operating systems add portions of the second smoothly over an extended period. "This should be the standard approach," says Kuhn.

Peter Whibberley, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, says that despite ten years of debate, "there's no convincing evidence that anything serious would happen if you made a mistake introducing a leap second into a system". Abolishing leap seconds only defers any problems, he adds. "A century down the line, we'll need to introduce a 'leap minute', and nobody has any sensible arguments for why that won't be a worse issue."