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The liberation of medical cannabis for Billy Caldwell and others suffering from intractable conditions, which cannabinoids can remedy, is a welcome relief from the UK’s antiquated drug laws.

But it begs many questions, such as why the government denied the truth about medical cannabis for so long, and how many patients may have suffered unnecessarily as a result of this politically motivated denial of medical evidence.

Up until recently, cannabis was considered a schedule one drug, meaning it was classified by the government as not acceptable for medical use, unless the Home Office issued a license for it.

These new developments should make sensible people wonder if other schedule one drugs might also have therapeutic properties.

In my opinion, the answer to whether or not they do is a very simple yes.

Like cannabis, a number of schedule one drugs were once medicines, and so should still be available for medical practitioners to research and maybe even prescribe.

These include hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms, LSD and MDMA (ecstasy).

Studies conducted on psilocybin and LSD in the 50s and 60s showed significant benefits in a range of disorders, such as alcoholism and depression.

Before 1967, the US government had funded 140 studies on the therapeutic value of psychedelics, as described by Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston.

This especially applied to LSD, where most of the studies had positive outcomes.

But once these psychedelics became a part of music and youth culture, they were banned and research stopped, with little if any consideration for patients.

Even if LSD had only helped 10% of those people, that would equate to 15 million prevented deaths.

These past five decades of denied research have been the worst ever in terms of censorship of scientific inquiry.

In my estimation, 150 million people worldwide have died of alcoholism in that time period.

Even if LSD had only helped 10% of those people, that would equate to 15 million prevented deaths.

And it’s not as if the ban had any obvious impact on the recreational use or harm of psychedelics; on the contrary, it was greatly exaggerated to justify the drugs being banned in the first place.

As with the cannabis fiasco, it’s patients and their relatives who suffer at the hands of politically-motivated drug bans.

Thankfully, in the case of cannabis, the situation is now going to be rectified.

Groups like Compass Pathways, for which I am the scientific adviser, have begun to climb the regulatory hurdles that are put in the way of researchers.

We conducted the first modern study of psilocybin as a treatment for depression and found that it had remarkable effects in people who had failed in other drug treatments and also not responded to psychotherapy.

The only drawback was the cost, which came to £1,500 per dose due to the extreme nature of the regulations that we had to comply with.

Because psilocybin is considered a class A, schedule one drug, the safety measures surrounding it are more stringent than those for heroin.

As a doctor, I am trusted to be able to prescribe strong opioid painkillers, but to research magic mushrooms, I need an extra high level police clearance check, and a special license that costs thousands of pounds. Why?

Similarly in the US, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has conducted several studies of MDMA as a treatment for soldiers and others with PTSD, where conventional psychiatric medicines and psychotherapeutic approaches have failed, and these studies saw considerable success.

Two other US groups at Johns Hopkins and New York University recently found that psilocybin could help people who are dealing with anxiety and depression, which have occurred as a result of being given a diagnosis of terminal illness.

In all these cases, the impact of the currently illegal drug is profound and immediate.

Treatment consists of one or two administrations with appropriate psychotherapy; quite different from the current psychiatric approach of taking medicine every day.

Psilocybin seems to work by enabling patients to find an understanding or even solution to their illness, and so overcome them, rather than by doing what current treatments do, which is keeping symptoms at bay.

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At the moment, we and the other research groups have patients contacting us on a regular basis asking for these treatments for their intractable illnesses and we are powerless to help.

Perhaps now the Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies can review this scientific literature and come to the same conclusion as she did with cannabis – that these drugs are medicines and should be taken out of schedule one, so that we as medical professionals can easily and properly research them and help people.

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