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CCHR Warns Against $7 Billion Psychedelic Drug Push to Treat Mental Issues

CCHR Warns Against $7 Billion Psychedelic Drug Push to Treat Mental Issues

Rev. Shaw from the group’s Racism Task Force also cautions African Americans against offers to treat racial trauma with psychedelics, citing history of racist psychiatric research and Elijah McClain’s death from psychedelic drug, ketamine, given during police restraint.

Rev. Shaw from the group’s Racism Task Force also cautions African Americans against offers to treat racial trauma with psychedelics

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, March 2, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The mental health industry watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) warned against the growing wave of psychedelic drug promotion to treat psychiatric conditions. In February, psychedelic “therapy” was predicted to be imminent with a market likely to reach $7 billion by 2027.[1] Astoundingly, CCHR says, a psychologist suggests that African Americans not shy away from “psychedelic-assisted therapy,” and already offers ketamine for treating racial trauma at her clinic.

Rev. Fred Shaw, co-founder of CCHR’s Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics, draws attention to the tragic case of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old black man, who was killed last year during a police restraint when he was involuntarily administered ketamine. The drug is used as a tranquilizer by police departments that are attempting to avoid the liability of firearms and tasers.[2] A scathing independent probe into McClain’s death, released February 22, 2021, determined that a lethal dose of ketamine administered him had led to his cardiac arrest.[3]

Ketamine is most renowned as a “club” and “date rape” drug that causes disassociation—victims slipped the drug can enter a state in which they feel as if their mind and body aren’t connected.[4] When they wake up, there may be memory lapses, where they can’t account for a period of time, including when raped.[5]

The drug was the first legally prescribed psychedelic for so-called treatment-resistant depression.[6] Ketamine is also used to induce unconsciousness for the administration of electroshock treatment, masking the violence causing a brain-damaging grand mal seizure.

The Food and Drug Administration recently gave three psychedelic drugs, including MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy and Molly) and Psilocybin a “Breakthrough Therapy Designation” that could speed up future approval of these mind-altering drugs. Clinical trials of LSD for “Assisted Therapy for Anxiety” and another using smaller amounts of LSD, known as microdosing, are already extant for Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Medical studies show LSD can induce a “psychotic psychedelic experience characterized by intense fear to the point of panic, paranoid delusions of suspicion or grandeur, toxic confusion, depersonalization” and all of these could “be of powerful magnitude.”[7]

“Psychedelics are the last thing African Americans need to combat the impact of racism. These are mind-altering drugs that have been used on the black community to oppress them,” says Rev. Shaw.

Shaw said that in the 1950s at the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Kentucky, under Dr. Harris Isabell, drug-addicted African Americans were given LSD, keeping some hallucinating for 77 consecutive days. At this same center, healthy African American men were used in the 1960s as test subjects for the experimental drug, BZ, a military agent described as a “central nervous system depressant,” which was 100 times more powerful than LSD.[8]

In a 2020 article titled, “How psychedelic drugs are used as a tool of state violence: There is a long, racist history of psychedelic drugs being used to repress—and oppress,” the authors stated, “It is also no surprise that paralleling the rise of ketamine clinics across the United States, involuntary state-administered ketamine has been weaponized by police, in particular against Black people.” Elijah McClain, they said, “was snuffed out with the help of one of the medicines that the psychedelic community has been advocating for and using as a model for future medicalization.”[9]

Psycho-pharmaceutical treatments have been a giant failure, CCHR says, so now psychiatrists resort back to an earlier dangerous practice: psychedelic drugs. Underpinning this is the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that a former NIMH director stated lacks validity. This has led to nearly 80 million Americans already taking psychiatric drugs, who may have been otherwise helped. As of 2018, nearly one in eight Americans used antidepressants alone.[10]

Psychotropic drug side effects include anxiety, increased depression, heart irregularities, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, impotence, sexual dysfunction, strokes and suicide to name but a few.[11] Studies show that antidepressants can also cause “a general reduction in the intensity of the emotions” experienced, with consumers describing themselves as feeling “dulled,” “numbed,” “flattened,” or “blocked.”[12]

“Now, psychiatrists and psychologists want to add psychedelics to this epidemic of potentially harmful psychotropic drug use,” Shaw says. “We went through this in the 60s and 70s and it didn’t work then. Governments should not endorse a new wave of turning on and tuning out using psychedelic chemicals,” he adds.

CCHR is responsible for more than 180 laws that protect patients from damaging psychiatric practices. DONATE to support its work https://www.cchrint.org/cchrint-donate/

[1] Derek Beres, “How will psychiatrists administer psychedelic treatments?” Big Think, 1 Feb 2021,
https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/psychiatrists-psychedeli-therapy

[2] Jonathon Dickinson, Dimitri Mugianis, “How psychedelic drugs are used as a tool of state violence: There is a long, racist history of psychedelic drugs being used to repress—and oppress,” Salon, 1 Aug. 2020, https://www.salon.com/2020/08/01/how-psychedelic-drugs-became-a-tool-of-state-violence/; Claire Lampen, "What We Know About the Killing of Elijah McClain," The Cut, 22 Feb. 2021, https://www.thecut.com/2021/02/the-killing-of-elijah-mcclain-everything-we-know.html

[3] Crystal Bonvillian, “Report: Colorado police, fire medics had no cause to detain, drug Elijah McClain prior to death,” Cox Media Group National Content Desk, Fox 13 News, 23 Feb. 2021, https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/trending/report-colorado-police-fire-medics-had-little-cause-detain-drug-elijah-mcclain-prior-death/TRFESAU2PJELZPG7VCUB4NWXYM/

[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2020/08/11/date-rape-suicide-inducing-drug-fda-oked-to-treat-suicidal-ideas/ citing: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320409.php; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-05/ketamine-could-soon-be-used-to-treat-suicidal-ideation

[5] “Facts about Ketamine,” Tulane University, https://publicsafety.tulane.edu/date-rape-drugs

[6] “The 2020s: The decade of psychedelic breakthroughs? Clinical studies are underway. How we treat them moving forward matters,” Big Think, 23 Dec. 2019, https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/psychedelics-michael-ehlers

[7] Wayne O. Evans, Ph.D. and Nathan S. Kline, M.D., Psychotropic Drugs In The Year 2000: Use By Normal Humans (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1971), p. 89.

[8] https://www.cchrtaskforce.org/articles/mental-health-racism, citing: “Dr. Harris Isbell’s experiments,” AHRP, 18 Jan. 2015, https://ahrp.org/dr-harris-isbells-experiments/; https://pages.uoregon.edu/munno/OregonCourses/REL253F12/REL253Notes/BZStory.htm

[9] Op. cit., Salon, 1 Aug. 2020

[10] “Psychedelics as Antidepressants: The treatments of the future may arise from a long-stigmatized class of drugs,” Scientific American, 30 Jan. 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychedelics-as-antidepressants/

[11] https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/

[12] Alex Preston, “Does Prozac help artists be creative?” The Guardian, May 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/may/19/does-prozac-help-artists-be-creative

Amber Rauscher
Citizens Commission on Human Rights
+1 323-467-4242
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