A fresh analysis of six old experiments on LSD as a treatment for alcoholism found substantial evidence that the treatment worked—at least for a while.
There are obvious limits to evaluating studies at such a distance, the authors conceded, but collectively the experiments showed one LSD dose to be roughly as effective against alcoholism as daily doses of three medications often prescribed today: naltrexone, acamprosate and disulfiram.
The researchers identified six studies that appeared to be well-executed, between 1966 and 1970, involving more than 500 patients, of whom 325 received a single substantial dose of the psychedelic drug. The control groups either got no drug or very low LSD doses.
Typically, all participants also received counseling or group therapy. Over all, 59% of the patients who’d taken LSD showed improvement at the first follow-up after treatment, as revealed by interviews and self-reports, compared with 38% for the control group….