Science for the Win: Study Reveals the Promising Treatment of Nonwhites' Trauma From Racism - With LSD

If you’ve been the victim of racism — and according to the television, there’s a great chance — a new study is here to relieve your woes.

Sure — you could go the route of therapy.

But that commitment’s pretty large.

Per a new report, there’s a far easier — and, I must assume, more enjoyable — way to rid yourself of the racism blues.

And it comes in blue.

And any other color, from what I’ve heard.

Are you ready to drop your dreariness?

You can — by dropping acid.

As indicated by scientific research published in the journal Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, lysergic acid diethylamide — otherwise known as LSD — can overthrow what ails ya.

From the University of Ottawa’s Dr. Monnica Williams:

“Currently, there are no empirically supported treatments specifically for racial trauma. This study shows that psychedelics can be an important avenue for healing.”

Also under the umbrella of useful agents: Mushrooms and ecstasy.

Here’s how the conclusion was made, via the New York Post:

To test out the mind-bending theory, Williams and other researchers enlisted 313 people who reported taking a psychedelic drug in the past that they felt helped mitigate “the challenging effects of ethnic discrimination,” per the study. Participants identified as black, Asian, Latino, Native American or Indigenous Canadian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.

The group engaged in a survey concerning their experienced prejudice-packed pain.

Such included trauma from teachers, bosses, and neighbors.

In addition: injury from false accusations and physical violence.

Some participants had wanted to blow the whistle on their aggressors; instead, they held their breath.

And what a big breath that may have been: Ohio State University Assistant Professor of Social Work Alan Davis — a co-lead author of the study — noted the wide range of suffering, notably for those not white.

“Not everybody experiences every form of racial trauma, but certainly people of color are experiencing a lot of these different types of discrimination on a regular basis. So in addition to depression and anxiety, we were asking whether participants had symptoms of race-based PTSD.”

Subjects were asked about their experiences with psychotropics, which happened between ten years and several months prior to the study.

How did it affect — short- and long-term — their anxiety over racist acts?

Here’s how Alan explained the outcome:

“Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall and report on changes in symptoms from racial trauma that they had experienced in their lives, and they remembered it having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward.”

So there ya go — have a bad experience? Do what The Beatles did.

How bad could it go? They got Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Of course, the study’s not without its controversy.

After all, how “scientific” could it be when based on drug-taking volunteers’ memories?

Nevertheless, Allan posed that it’s promising:

“The first step in exploring whether people of color are experiencing benefits of psychedelics and, in particular, looking at a relevant feature of their mental health, which is their experience of racial trauma.”

The Post relays that something more official’s in the works:

To give their hypothesis a true “acid test,” the team is drafting proposals for clinical trials with which to illuminate the psychological effects of psychedelics in specific populations, including black, indigenous groups and other people of color.

And these days, it’s not so far out:

Some might balk at the idea of mending mental wounds via a psychotropic salve. However, microdoses of hallucinogens have been shown to potentially reduce the effects of ailments ranging from depression to Alzheimer’s. As such, many states are working toward decriminalizing the drugs, with Oregon becoming the first to legalize psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms last month.

Science is a fascinating thing.

And given the direction of our culture and Congress, when a future racism serves you a lump of coal, medication might just polish that thing right off.

Into a diamond: