Within the last year, 1.5 million people in the USA experienced methamphetamine misuse, and around three million Americans have or have had opioid use disorder.
But now, new studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Psychoactive Substances Research have found promising results when testing the treatment of opioid use disorder with psilocybin.
There is already a wealth of evidence for the use of psilocybin and other psychoactive substances to treat other mental health issues, such as depression, PTSD, and other mental health disorders.
The aim of these trials is simply to test for safety and feasibility – this opens up a pathway for more clinical trials to test just how effective treatment is. Essentially, this is the first step to getting the use of psychoactive substances for opioid use disorder into mainstream treatment centers.
Each participant will first undergo psychological screening and at least six hours of counseling to ensure their safety throughout the trial. They will then receive at least one dose (25 milligrams) of psilocybin and be observed for eight hours by two licensed therapists to ensure their continued safety and record information from the trial.
During these eight hours participants will sit in a replication of a living room to ensure comfort, complete with candles and art hung on the walls. The only difference is the presence of recording equipment, which will ensure that this study is easier to replicate in the future.
All participants will spend at least a night in the clinical research unit at the University of Wisconsin Hospital to ensure that they do not respond poorly to the treatment. This will be followed by a final debriefing session with a licensed psychologist.
This falls in line with current medical advice that all treatment with psychedelics be joined with psychiatric treatment in order to talk patients through the experiences they went through, as well as maximize the effectiveness of the treatment as a whole.
Four weeks after the first trial session, participants will be given the option to undergo a second session with either the same dose if they received an adequate psychedelic experience or a higher dose of 50 milligrams if they did not.
Something else that is interesting about this trial is how inclusive they are in allowing participants to enter the study. Usually, these kinds of trials are extremely stringent, which can often exclude past users of opioids or methamphetamine, meaning that there is very little data including those people. These trials, however, have a higher focus on individual safety in order to include more vulnerable participants. They are recruiting participants who are currently actively using methamphetamine, rather than the usual method of patients who have already detoxed, which allows further scans to show how networks in the brain associated with active addiction change during treatment.
All participants will have a final follow-up visit two months after the last dose of psilocybin, both to collect more data and to ensure the patients have not had any negative reactions.
Seeing as there is no evidence of psilocybin or LSD being addictive, the trial also hopes to dispel the myth that those treating opioid use disorder with psychedelic substances as “just swapping one substance for another.” The team hopes that this will help with the scientific and cultural understanding of psilocybins, as well as their use in addiction treatments.
