How Christopher Hitchens Could Help His Fellow Cancer Patients by Promoting Psychedelic End-of-Life Therapy

Christopher Hitchens announced last month that throat cancer has claimed his voice. Writing to an atheist’s society whose conference he was scheduled to address, he described the development as part of “a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death.”For the noted conversationalist and debater, the loss of speech is an especially rueful development in the steady diminution of powers associated with stage-four cancer. “It is assuredly to die more than a little,” he writes in the June Vanity Fair.

But Hitchens still has his pen. Though unable to make reporting trips to the Middle East or trade barbs behind lecterns, he’s still cranking out combative columns and artful essays. With this mismatch in mind — shrinking physical range; intellect intact — Hitchens might consider a trip to the most exhilarating destination he remains capable of visiting, from which he may be better suited to send back dispatches than any writer living. His journey to this unmapped territory would rival the adrenaline rushes of his years reporting from the front lines of revolution and war. In this place, he could dive straight into the heart of a new sort of action, where the brilliantly colored ordnance doesn’t destroy bodies so much as render them irrelevant.

Stated plainly: Christopher Hitchens might consider adding psychedelic psychotherapy to his cancer treatments. Doing so would allow him to publicize and benefit from a promising therapy for relieving anxiety and depression associated with terminal illness. It would also constitute the mother of all immersion journalism assignments, one that doubles as an exceptionally bold rejoinder in his “long argument with the specter of death.”

In interviews since his diagnosis, Hitchens has discussed his desire to contribute to the development of experimental cancer treatments, such as an experimental drug regimen based on DNA mapping. The same logic would support his participation in psychedelic psychotherapy, officially still in trial phase but proven to provide emotional and even physical comfort to late-stage cancer patients. The clinical literature goes back five decades and was only recently started up again, ending a long state-imposed hibernation that lasted most of the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Today’s researchers are finding the same results as first-generation pioneers: psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD, when administered by a trained therapist, increase the mental and emotional well-being of the terminally ill. According to Dr. Charles Grob of UCLA, who recently published the results of his psilocybin study inArchives of General Psychiatry, his patients measured “a significant reduction in anxiety.” There is also evidence to suggest that psychedelics can assuage pain and fatigue. (Two patient video testimonials from Grob’s UCLA study can be viewed here and here.)

Despite their promise, Big Pharma and the big foundations have shown no interest in mainstreaming medicinal psychedelics. “Too much stigma, not enough profit potential,” says one researcher in the field. Although they cause no bodily damage and do not form habits, the drugs remain illegal and out of reach of all but a handful of FDA-approved researchers. As the world’s most famous cancer patient, Hitchens is in a unique position to do something about this backward and inhumane policy.

He would not have to look far for a pilot project. Dr. Roland Griffiths is currently recruiting cancer patients for an ongoing psilocybin program at Johns Hopkins Medical School,a morning’s drive from Hitchens’ Washington D.C. home. (Dr. Stephen Ross is currently recruiting for a similar program at NYU.) If Hitchens qualified and his doctors approved, the Vanity Fair columnist would probably find a hearty welcome at one of these studies.