Scientists from UCSF, UC San Diego and Stanford argued that psychedelic research needs better methods for keeping study participants and researchers unaware of who receives an experimental drug or placebo, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sept. 16.
More than 90% of participants in high-dose psychedelic trials are able to tell if they received the drug or placebo, compared with 50% to 60% who guess correctly in studies for depression, according to an opinion piece published Sept. 16 in JAMA Psychiatry.
Here are three things to know:
1. Josh Woolley, MD, a psychiatrist and director of the translational psychedelic research program at UCSF, and three colleagues argued that better masking is necessary to thoroughly evaluate psychedelics. They said expectations about receiving a psychedelic or placebo can affect trial outcomes.
2. The authors proposed several approaches to improve masking, including combining drugs from different classes to create an intense experience that could make treatment assignments less apparent. They also suggested limiting information about study design while continuing to disclose risks.
3. Balázs Szigeti, a computational neuroscientist who works with Dr. Woolley but was not involved in the opinion piece, said fully disguising psychedelic drugs may not be possible because of the distinctive nature of their effects.
“You can get really, really drunk and that’s an intense experience, but it’s not the same as a psychedelic experience,” he said. “No non-psychedelic drug is going to make looking at the carpet feel like another world. Every drug that makes you feel like that is a psychedelic.”
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