The Hallucinogenic Way of Dying
Via Sophists.Org comes this article — culled from the LA Weekly — detailing a quite interesting contribution to death and dying studies.
Excerpt:
Almost as soon as Dr. Charles Grob secured approval to study the effects of psilocybin on Stage IV cancer patients, he faced another challenge, one nearly as formidable: recruiting 12 participants. Unlike so many other experiments in radical cancer treatment, Grob's does not offer a cure; he merely hopes to find that psilocybin, the most potent of the many compounds in psychedelic mushrooms, ameliorates a dying person's fear of death. The study targets patients relegated to "palliative" treatment, people with metastatic cancer for whom there is no reasonable hope for remission. It is a segment of the population, says the National Cancer Policy Board of the Institute of Medicine – which put out a call in 2001 for "novel" approaches to palliative treatment – largely ignored by medical science.