Psilocybin to Treat Smoking Addiction

Saturday, February 21st, 2015

Griffiths’s lab has conducted a pilot study on the potential of psilocybin to treat smoking addiction:

The sample is tiny — fifteen smokers — but the success rate is striking. Twelve subjects, all of whom had tried to quit multiple times, using various methods, were verified as abstinent six months after treatment, a success rate of eighty per cent. (Currently, the leading cessation treatment is nicotine-replacement therapy; a recent review article in the BMJ — formerly the British Medical Journal — reported that the treatment helped smokers remain abstinent for six months in less than seven per cent of cases.) In the Hopkins study, subjects underwent two or three psilocybin sessions and a course of cognitive-behavioral therapy to help them deal with cravings. The psychedelic experience seems to allow many subjects to reframe, and then break, a lifelong habit. “Smoking seemed irrelevant, so I stopped,” one subject told me. The volunteers who reported a more complete mystical experience had greater success in breaking the habit. A larger, Phase II trial comparing psilocybin to nicotine replacement (both in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy) is getting under way at Hopkins.

“We desperately need a new treatment approach for addiction,” Herbert Kleber told me. “Done in the right hands — and I stress that, because the whole psychedelic area attracts people who often think that they know the truth before doing the science — this could be a very useful one.”

I love that last dig.

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