Trip or Treat? Psychedelics Fall Short

Remember when psychiatrists were convinced that LSD was a breakthrough drug treatment for conditions like schizophrenia? Well, we all know how that turned out: a bunch of patients got to trip balls on the government dime (including Cary Grant), but the only tangible result was that one of the Harvard experimental scientists, a fellow named Timothy Leary, got high on his own supply and proceeded to blow the minds of a generation. Nobody’s schizophrenia got cured, but a hell of a lot of people got to talk to the lizard gods.

Still, the determination of enthusiasts, to claim that their preferred substance is, like, a medical miracle, man is the equal and opposite of the most determined prohibitionist. Often with as little cause. As I’ve written previously, actual evidence for the efficacy of marijuana-based medicines is notably thin, apart from perhaps a few specific conditions. Undeterred, though, enthusiasts are pushing psychedelics as the Next Big Thing, making almost exactly the same claims that failed in the ’50s and early ’60s. Is there anything to this ‘New Reality of Psychedelics’? In his book of that title, Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics, neuropsychologist and therapist Andy Mitchell personally tests a range of the most popular psychedelic treatments, such as psilocybin, mescaline and DMT.

His conclusion? Pretty much the same as Leary’s: it’s a hell of a lot fun, maybe (the anecdote about finding the meaning of the universe in a trash can at Yosemite is a particularly memorable one), but the actual evidence, once again, is notably thin.

Two studies published in JAMA Psychiatry today investigated the effectiveness of psychedelics compared to traditional antidepressants.

The first study, which reviewed clinical trials that looked at LSD, psilocybin, peyote and ayahuasca, concluded these performed no better than traditional antidepressants for treating depression.

Results from the second study, which trialled psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was inconclusive.

These follow hot on the heels of yet another study debunking most of the over-excited claims about cannabis.

The studies come after another study published in the Lancet this week found there was no evidence from 54 clinical trials that cannabis and cannabinoids were effective treatments for depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

Still, they’re not giving up easily. ‘We haven’t proved anything – yet’, is the line.

Jack Wilson, lead author of the cannabis study and a research fellow at the University of Sydney, said that the lack of evidence did not mean the treatments had no potential.

Oddly, many of the same people who (rightly) lambasted authorities for pushing Covid vaccines without good evidence seem to be just as ready to champion ‘alternative treatments’ like psychedelics, despite a similar lack of good evidence.

“But when we have access to medicines, we want to make sure that they’re safe and effective, and we want to make sure that there’s adequate evidence for them,” he said.

“The absence of evidence here really does not justify the widespread use of these medicines” […]

Sam Moreton, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Wollongong, said it was not surprising the psychedelics did not outperform antidepressants.

“The hype around psychedelic therapy has consistently run ahead of what the evidence actually supports,” Dr Moreton said.

But, hey, it’ll work next time, as the saying goes.

“There are good theoretical reasons to think psychedelic-assisted therapy could help with depression and other mental health conditions, and I think it’s absolutely worth researching properly.

“But the field has serious methodological problems that have been well documented.”

Part of the “serious methodological problems” is designing gold-standard double-blind clinical trials. The researchers handing out the pills may not know whether they’ve given a subject a sugar pill or an acid trip, but the patient tends to notice when next door’s cat turns green and starts to recite Lewis Carroll poems at them.

He said the second JAMA Psychiatry study was “methodologically careful”, using a low dose of psilocybin as a control, as well as a full dose and a placebo, to try and keep patients ignorant of which treatment they were receiving.

But 86 per cent of participants could still accurately guess which group they belonged to.

Probably because Tim Leary descended from heaven on a rainbow cloud and told them while Tiny Tim played the solo from Freebird.

One way around this problem was to compare psychedelic experiments only with antidepressant trials, where participants knew what they were being prescribed so everyone was aware of what they were taking. Comparing apples with apples, so to speak. Even so, the news wasn’t good for trippers hoping for a prescription.

“I think we should be very wary of psychedelic-assisted therapies going down the same path as medicinal cannabis,” Dr Wilson said […]

Medicinal cannabis was first legalised in Australia in 2016.

“Medicinal cannabis originally had many hoops to jump through, like psychedelic-assisted therapies do in Australia now. But in 2021, things streamlined and it became much easier to access,” Dr Wilson said.

His study followed a similar process to the first JAMA Psychiatry study, examining clinical trials on cannabis and cannabinoids published between 1980 and 2025.

While they found tentative evidence that suggested cannabinoids could help treat some conditions, such as Tourette’s syndrome and insomnia, they found no evidence it could treat depression, anxiety or PTSD.

And those, as it happens, are the top three conditions for which it’s prescribed. With even less testing, in some cases, than the infamous Covid vaccines.

“In fact, there was actually not a single randomised controlled trial that examined cannabis use for the treatment of depression, which is really concerning” […Dr Wilson said.]

And before anybody jumps in with ‘but at least there’s no harm’, bear in mind that marijuana and psychedelic-induced psychosis is a very real possibility with overuse of such substances. Indeed, in one of the most notorious early experiments with LSD, an American biological warfare scientist and army captain suicided after being covertly dosed by the CIA.