![]() Nutt has said that the risks of psychedelics have been “grossly, grossly exaggerated and the benefits … deliberately minimized”. A man deserves to be paid for his toil, but the reader should keep in mind the book could be regarded as something of a sales pitch. He’s now on the board or a scientific adviser to four psychedelic companies, and has received consulting fees from others. Having announced that alcohol was the riskiest drug, he went on to launch his own alcohol substitute. Big Brother meets Brave New World.Īlthough the tag line for Drug Science is “the truth about drugs, free from political or commercial influence”, Nutt is not entirely without commercial interests. At one point, he tells us, his only option was to seek funding from Channel 4 to run a live TV trial of MDMA. You have to admire his persistence in the years when no one was interested in psychedelic research. If the FDA approves MDMA and psilocybin therapy in the near future, then under a new reciprocal approach announced by the UK government, these treatments could also become accessible in Britain, and Nutt’s two- decade struggle will have succeeded. He was instrumental in persuading Australia to legalise psychedelic therapy this year, having been flown over by a psychedelic charity, Mind Medicine, to present the benefits of psychedelics to Australia’s drugs regulator. The two moved to Imperial College and established the world’s first academic centre dedicated to psychedelics.Ī prophet is rarely listened to at home and Nutt’s libertarian attitude to drugs has enjoyed more influence abroad than in Tory Britain. At the same time, Nutt hired young postgraduate Robin Carhart-Harris, who restarted research into mushrooms after a 50-year hiatus in the UK. It published an influential table showing the relative risks of different drugs – alcohol was rated by far the most dangerous, magic mushrooms the safest. Undeterred, he launched an organisation called Drug Science, which would disclose “the truth about drugs, free from political or commercial influence”. He was the UK government’s “drugs tsar” in the noughties, until he was fired in 2009 after pointing out that fewer deaths were caused by MDMA than by horse riding. We also hear about Nutt’s long struggle to liberalise the laws governing these substances. I once heard him say psychedelics could even make you a better artist. We hear about psychedelics for depression, addiction, anxiety, anorexia, pain, OCD, end-of-life anxiety and ADHD. ![]() Here the professor opens his suitcase to reveal some of the wares soon to be available, and outlines the research on each. A neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London, Nutt has done more to advance the “psychedelic renaissance” than almost anyone. It’s yet to be seen whether the same fate will befall David Nutt’s effort.
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