"Magic mushrooms," used by Native Americans and hippies to alter consciousness, appear to have similar mystical effects on many people, US researchers reported on Tuesday.

A view of the crowd from the stage at Woodstock, 1969. 'Magic mushrooms,' used by Native Americans and hippies to alter consciousness, appear to have similar mystical effects on many people, US researchers reported on Tuesday. [AP Photo]

At least one team of doctors is already testing whether using them can help terminal cancer patients come to terms with their fates.

More than 60 percent of volunteers given capsules of psilocybin derived from mushrooms said they had a "full mystical experience."

"Many of the volunteers in our study reported, in one way or another, a direct, personal experience of the 'beyond,"' said Roland Griffiths, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry and behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who led the study.

A third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes. Many likened it to the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

And the effects lingered.

Two months after getting the drug, 79 percent of the volunteers said they felt a moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction, according to the report published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

Griffiths said the drug might be used to treat addiction as well as severe pain or depression.

Griffiths and colleagues tested 36 healthy, educated volunteers who all reported they had active spiritual lives, the idea being that spiritual people would be less troubled by the drug's effects.

He said he did not want to be accused of working like Timothy Leary, a former Harvard University psychologist known for 1960s experiments with LSD, another mind-altering drug.

Not Turning On and Dropping Out

"We are conducting rigorous, systematic research with psilocybin under carefully monitored conditions, a route which Dr. Leary abandoned in the early 1960s," Griffiths said.

"Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia," he added.

"Under unmonitored conditions, it's not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior."

Psilocybin, which is nontoxic and not addictive, acts like a message-carrying chemical called serotonin on brain cells. Serotonin is linked with mood.

It is produced by several species of mushrooms native to the Americas. Under US law it is a Schedule I hallucinogenic substance, on a par with drugs such as heroin.

But its use in medical experiments is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and one team led by Dr. Charles Grob at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California is testing the drug on patients with end-stage cancer.

Grob said in a telephone interview his team has tested the drug on seven terminal cancer patients to see if it could work to reduce pain, calm them down and provide them some sense of well-being.

Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who says he has experimented with LSD himself, said the experiment might lead to a way to find the "locus of religion" and the biological basis of consciousness in the brain.

But Griffiths said such study would be purely scientific.

"We're not entering into 'Does God exist or not exist.' This work can't and won't go there," he said.