A team of British scientists are preparing to run a world-first clinical trial – using the active ingredient in magic mushrooms to treat gambling addicts.
The government-funded study will give patients psilocybin – the mind-altering chemical found in certain fungi – from October in a bid to help develop a treatment that could become available on the NHS. It will be carried out by four top neuropharmacologists, including former government drug tsar David Nutt, at London’s prestigious Imperial College. Rayyan Zafar, who is leading the study, said: “This is a world-first.
“Nobody with a gambling addiction has ever been dosed with psychedelic therapy in a clinical trial so it really is quite a pioneering move. We’re super excited. We’ve been wanting to do this work for quite a while.” Rayyan is based at London’s Centre for Psychedelic research & Neuropsychopharmacology, where he is working with the National Problem Gambling Clinic – the NHS’ flagship clinic.
He added: “We’ll be starting from October onwards. Initially there will be five patients and then from next year onwards we’ll obviously ramp that up.”There have already been psilocybin trials in other addictions, including drugs and smoking, which have proven to help patients.
And a similar US-based trial involving alcoholics found that using psilocybin led to patients’ drinking days being cut by nearly two and a half times. Rayyan said: “Because they work for these substance addictions, we also think we can see these equally beneficial results.
“It shares very similar brain characteristics as we see in people with other addictions like alcohol and heroin and we think psychedelic therapy can be very beneficial to people with gambling addictions.” He added: “The rise of gambling addiction in the UK is horrendous and gambling addiction is now recognised as a medical diagnosis.
“But only about three per cent of individuals who have got a gambling addiction actually receive professional treatment in the UK and there’s no approved pharmacological interventions – licensed drugs or therapies – available. There’s a massive area of unmet clinical need so we’re hoping that psilocybin therapy may one day be used in the NHS to treat individuals with gambling disorder. It is an area which needs a lot of innovation.”
The potentially groundbreaking project is being funded by money awarded by Imperial College London out of UK-government funding. Rayyan said: “Historically with psychedelic research in the UK there’s been very little institutional or government-backed funding so this is a really positive sign. Maybe it’s a sign times are changing. It’s becoming more of a priority area and it’s no longer a fringe science.”