Most of you, I’m sure, have friends or relatives whose lives have been upended by cancer. Oncologists are better than ever at treating cancer; death rates from common cancers, including lung, breast, and prostate cancers have declined steadily for years. But they are not as well-equipped to deal with the emotional suffering – the depression, anxiety or fear of death – that often accompany a cancer diagnosis.

A startup company called Sunstone Therapies, which operates out of the Aquilino Cancer Center in Rockville, MD, has set out to change that. Sunstone provides cancer patients and, in some cases, their family members with therapy assisted by psychedelic medicines, including psilocybin, MDMA and LSD. Preliminary findings from a small trial of 30 cancer patients who were administered psilocybin and therapy are very encouraging.

The stories emerging from the trial are powerful, too. Here’s Pradeep Bansal, a Long Island, NY, gastroenterologist with metastatic cancer who participated in the Sunstone trial, speaking on a podcast.

"I don't think anybody can truly describe the [psilocybin] experience. One can use phrases and words that are common - ineffable, mystical, powerful. All I can say is it was the most powerful experience of my life that I have gone through, ever."

I visited Sunstone’s new offices to research a story about the company for Lucid News. Sunstone is noteworthy because some of its clinical trials treat patients in groups; this reduces the costs of psychedelic therapy and it may well help participants better integrate their psychedelic trips because they share the experience with others. The founders of Sunstone include two experiences oncologists, Manish Agrawal and Paul Thambi, and Bill Richards, an elder of the psychedelic movement who treated patients with LSD and psilocybin during the late 1960s and early 1970s, before authorities stopped research into psychedelics for about 25 years, as part of the War on Drugs.

I came away impressed by the people I met at Sunstone. Their work is profoundly important. You can read more in my story for Lucid News.

As medical director of the Aquilino Cancer Center, Dr. Manish Agrawal has seen the progress made possible by cancer research. Death rates from cancer have declined steadily among men and women.

But Dr. Agrawal has also seen patients struggle with depression and anxiety. Some cannot get the help they need.

“There’s so much emotional and psychological suffering that cancer patients and their families go through,” he says, “We never fully address that.”

Now, a small group of patients at Aquilino, an outpatient treatment center at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, MD, will have the chance to try something new — treatment that combines group therapy with a single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug that is the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. Psilocybin is illegal, but the government gives select researchers permission to use it in controlled clinical settings.

You can read the rest of this story on Medium