Study: Single Dose of LSD Provides Lasting Anxiety Relief

A single dose of LSD can reduce symptoms of severe anxiety for weeks, according to research published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The randomized clinical trial, which involved 198 participating adults, recruited participants with moderate to severe generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and 22 research centers throughout the U.S. cooperated for the study.. Participants received either a low dose of LSD (25 or 50 micrograms), a high dose (100 or 200 micrograms), or a placebo.

The group that received a lower dose level reported no improvement over the placebo group; however, the individuals who were given higher doses of LSD experienced rapid and significant improvements, the researchers said.

“By the next day, they were showing strong improvements,” Dr. David Feifel of the San Diego-based Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute, who helped facilitate the study, told NPR. “And those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks.”

Current antianxiety medications are ineffective for about half of patients diagnosed with GAD, the report said.

LSD remains a Schedule I substance and is considered by the federal government to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, researchers in California said they developed an analog of LSD without psychedelic side effects that could be an effective treatment for schizophrenia.