Associate professor of psychiatry Matthew Johnson, the new associate director of the psychedelic research center, said he’s eager to do more work and “capture more ‘Aha’ moments.”
“On a 10 point scale I’m at 100. I’m as excited as you can be about something in my professional career,” Johnson said. “It’s something Roland [and others] have worked on for over a decade and now we have a high level of support.”
He added that the center is going to look at opioid addiction, as well as the combination of alcoholism and depression, and find evidence to treat both, in addition to looking at the brain mechanisms to discover “how psychedelics can treat addiction and the nature of that.”
“The addiction angle is really fascinating,” Johnson continued, adding that they will dig deeper into research on how LSD can be used to treat alcoholism and explore other successful studies using psilocybin.
Johnson also said he hopes to uncover “the big picture role that the drug use is playing in ones life,” with respect to the side effects and issues that are “quintessentially common” among users.
Previously, Johns Hopkins psychedelic research group became the first to achieve “regulatory approval in the U.S. to re-initiate research with psychedelics in healthy volunteers who had never used a psychedelic,” according to a university press release. “Their 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin sparked a renewal of psychedelic research worldwide.”
Sourse: abcnews.go.com
