Psychedelics took a back seat in research after the War on Drugs, but in recent years they’ve reentered the science scene — showing promise as potential treatment for mental conditions like PTSD, OCD, anxiety, and depression.
Dr. Christine Ziemer, a professor of psychology at Missouri Western State University, said that psychedelics have a unique ability to affect even permanent-seeming aspects of our brains, such as a person’s personality.
“People think that they’re inherently dangerous,” said Ziemer. “But if we look at the actual safety profiles of things like psilocybin, MDMA, which is also known as ecstasy, and even LSD, they’re not addictive. And they actually, when we look at their effect on the body, their effect on society, they’re a lot safer than a lot of the other things that we do have legal access to, like alcohol and cigarettes.”…