'Shrooms

They're not just for omelettes anymore.

In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project.

She felt like she was taking off. She saw colors. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open.

But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day.

"I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing," said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."

Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had.

The drug, psilocybin, is found in so-called "magic mushrooms." It's illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.

The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It's one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years, since research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of such drugs in the 1960s.

Comments

[David Aquarius]

Ah, the days of wandering through the cow pastures, looking over the day-old pies for the tell tale grayish-blue Liberty caps.

I met Jesus and the Buddha on many of those sojourns. They helped me pick out the good ones.

[Neville Longbottom]

"Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had."

Which just leads me to believe even more strongly that religion is all in the mind, especially one that's chemical balance is such that religion seems real (whether it be from external influnces like mushrooms or internal influences like bi-polar disorder). I say this based on my wifes most religious experience that came after our 4th child was born and she went manic and was afterwards diagnosed bi-polar. She hasn't had a similar experience since being on lithium and we both feel like that's a good thing.

[Monkeyfister]

They were always good for me.

--mf