UK Study to Explore DMT’s Role in Treating Alcohol Addiction

Alcohol addiction is a chronic disorder linked to the compulsive drinking of alcohol, with individuals finding it difficult to control or stop their use of alcohol despite adverse health, occupational, or social consequences. Normally, the disorder is managed with detoxes, therapy, various medications and a change in one’s lifestyle.

Now researchers are looking into whether DMT can help manage the disorder. DMT is a psychedelic drug that occurs in many plants and animals, including human beings. The drug is known to affect an individual’s senses, altering how they think as well as their emotions and sense of time. The drug has been used for millennia by different Indigenous groups during healing ceremonies.

Researchers at University College London are investigating whether one dose of DMT may assist alcohol addicts seeking to reduce their alcohol intakes.

Professor Ravi Das, who’s co-leading the trial with Professor Jeremy Skipper, explains that current treatments for alcohol addiction don’t work for most people, with 50% of individuals relapsing within 3 months. Das adds that treatment approaches have remained unchanged for decades.

The researchers have already determined the dose to be administered to the 120 trial participants, with Dr. Greg Cooper noting that the dose can reliably induce potent effects.

During the trial, each participant will receive the drug via IV, with the effects being expected to last a quarter of an hour. The control group will receive a non-hallucinogenic drug or placebo. The researchers also plan to use a special procedure to reactivate reward memories related to alcohol for every participant, their objective being to evaluate if the drug could disrupt them to decrease drinking.

Das explains that this is because excessive consumption of alcohol is partially driven by the drink hijacking the reward and motivation system of the brain.

In addition to this, every participant will undergo MRI brain scans while watching excerpts of films that feature alcohol, after which they’ll be followed for a 9-month period to evaluate how and whether the drug works.

The researchers posit that this may make their brains easier to rewire at the cellular level and hope that the success of their study will lay the foundation for a phase III clinical trial. They are actively recruiting volunteers, all of whom need to be regular drinkers aged between 21 to 65. Additionally, volunteers need not have been formally diagnosed with alcohol disorder.

It is important to note that self-medication using psychedelics is advised against by experts, primarily due to the drugs’ unpredictable effects. As more entities like atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ: ATAI) conduct their psychedelic drug development programs, more is likely to be known about the effects of these hallucinogens and how best they can be leveraged for the good of humanity.

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