Diane never smoked marijuana, and she disapproved of her mother's past drug experiments. But cancer made the 33-year-old teacher ready to try anything that might help: she hoped she would find a cure in herbs from a Tibetan doctor or in the hands of a faith healer deep in the Brazilian rain forest.
Then, as the pain and fatigue of advanced colon cancer left Diane increasingly bedridden, she just wanted the strength to get out of bed.
That's when she found ecstasy, the illegal drug people often take at all-night dance parties. Though ecstasy can damage hearts and brain cells, some researchers say the hallucinogen can also inspire deep feelings of well-being and intimacy with others.
For a few hours at a time as the ecstasy took hold, Diane would leave her disease behind and walk in the park, sing with her parents, or talk about death without fear, her mother said.
Ecstasy "was the only thing that controlled the pain and her breathing," said Diane's mother, a Boston-area resident who asked not to be identified because last year she helped provide the illegal drugs for her daughter, whose middle name was Diane. "She was emotionally and spiritually uplifted" when she was on ecstasy. "She was her funny, witty self."
Forty years after widespread abuse led to a virtual ban on medical research involving psychedelic drugs, experiences like Diane's are leading scientists to take a second look. Though ecstasy, LSD, and "magic mushrooms" are now known by their partying reputation, psychedelic drugs were once seen as a promising treatment for schizophrenia and other mental conditions.
Already, researchers in Miami are giving heroin addicts a hallucinogen called ibogaine in an attempt to reduce withdrawal symptoms. Rape victims in South Carolina take Eecstasy in a study designed to help them talk about their ordeals. And soon, John Halpern at McLean Hospital in Belmont will begin giving ecstasy to people with advanced cancer to help them cope with the pain and anxiety of dying.
For advocates of psychedelic drug research, the study at McLean, an affiliate of Harvard University, represents a chance to reduce the stigma hanging over the field. Back in the 1960s, Harvard professor Timothy Leary helped spur the backlash against psychedelic drugs with ethically questionable experiments and by advocating recreational LSD use to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Halpern, by contrast, is a respected researcher whose past studies have found no evidence of brain damage among Navajos who regularly ingested peyote, a psychedelic drug derived from cactus.
"This is not Leary saying to young people ... ." Take LSD. "Drop out, and we're going to change society," said Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an advocacy group that has pushed for resumption of psychedelic studies for years. "This is something that can be helpful to people who have never done drugs before, and after they are done, they are not going to go out and undermine the foundations of our society."
But the research is politically loaded, coming at a time when the Bush administration is fighting efforts to offer marijuana as an anti-nausea medicine for cancer patients. Federal officials fear that research showing medical value for illegal drugs will only encourage drug abuse. David Murray, special assistant in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that some psychedelic studies are fueled by an agenda to promote the use of these drugs.
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