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NARR: In the medical community, hallucinogenic drugs have long held a stigma that has thwarted research and discouraged their clinical use. Dr. John Halpern, who studies psychedelics at McLean hospital outside Boston says the negative attitudes toward psychedelics are a result of the history of LSD.
HALPERN: Way back when research was done with Hallucinogens in the 1950's, 1960s there were no investigational review boards, there were no committees of oversight then, the FDA hadn't formulated the type of checks and balances that were in place - the DEA didn't even exist back then.
NARR: But in 1966 the federal government classified LSD as a schedule 1 drug - one that has no accepted medical use. The widespread belief that hallucinogens had no therapeutic benefit, and the tight regulations imposed by the government meant that it was easier to study the harmful effects of LSD than its potential benefits. But Halpern says the LSD research that did happen ultimately paved the way for modern psychiatric treatments.
HALPERN: (17:40) Remember as well we discovered the neurotransmitter seretonin from the discovery of LSD
NARR: Seretonin, otherwise known as 5HT, is one of the main chemicals neurons use to communicate with each other. It regulates mood, arousal, and appetite. Drugs like Prozac target seretonin receptors and are used to treat depression, anxiety, even schizophrenia.
LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs activate a particular subtype of the seretonin receptor called the 2A receptor. But not ALL drugs that act at seretonin 2A receptors have hallucinogenic effects - and for years researchers have wondered why.
NARR: Stuart Sealfon and his colleagues at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine believe they may have finally have answered that question.
SEALFON: The receptor acts as if it's a switch and the switch has more than one way of being turned on. And the drugs are like a key…that fits into it very precisely, and the hallucinogens are keys that fit into this receptor and turn it into one position and cause a different kind of response in those cells than the non-hallucinogens.
NARR: In other words the 2A receptor has two "on" positions -hallucinogenic keys flip the switch one direction and non-hallucinogens flip it the other. It may seem like a trivial detail, but Sealfon says understanding this mechanism may lead to new treatments for neurological disease.
SEALFON: These findings of ours might be of some value in trying to develop better drugs to treat schizophrenia or to separate out the characteristics of known drugs and understand why clinically they may differ in the effects that they have.
NARR: Scientists hope that by understanding the differences in the way hallucinogens and non-hallucinogens work they may eventually develop effective medications without the psychedelic side-effects. Gretchen Cuda, Columbia Radio News.