DANGEROUS PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS
Mind-altering drugs are being fast-tracked as the new medical “breakthrough” in treating mental illness. The metal health watchdog CCHR (Citizens Commission for Human Rights) is investigating the medical claims, the hidden dangers and their disastrous consequences. To find out more about the actual nature of these drugs and how to protect yourself and others from becoming another psychiatric casualty, please read on …
What is the CCHR?
For 57 years, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has investigated and exposed medical abuse carried out in the name of psychiatry. It has fought to end destructive practices and helped to secure human rights for patients globally.
From electroshock to tranquillisers and benzodiazepines, CCHR has documented their damage, exposed hidden abuses, brought evidence before authorities and driven reforms to end harmful psychiatric practices. Key examples include:
UK- CCHR campaigns
1969 - CCHR founded internationally - campaigned against involuntary treatment, ECT, psychiatric labelling and drugging.
1883 - Mental health Act 1983 came into force - CCHR campaigned against aspects of compulsory detention and treatment under the Act.
2007 - Mental Health Act 2007 amended the 1983 Act. CCHR opposed aspects of compulsory community treatment.
2010s- present - CCHR ongoing campaign against ECT, particularly its use without informed consent and its use in vulnerable groups.
2018 onward - Melanie Leahy/Essex mental health campaign following her son’s death after detention at the Linden Centre, Chelmsford, UK. CCHR helped in this campaign.
2020- Essex Partnership University Foundation Trust pleaded guilty to failures of care relating to deaths of 11 patients. CCHR supported the claim for accountability.
Major international CCHR campaigns
1969-1970s - United States - CCHR investigations into abuses in state psychiatric facilities contributed to government enquiries in several states. In 1976, California passed legislation requiring informed consent for ECT and psychosurgery and restricting their use in children under 12.
*1980s-1990 Chelmsford: Australia - CCHR investigated and campaigned against Deep Sleep Therapy (DST) in which patients were kept unconscious for prolonged periods while being subjected to repeated ECT (Electro shock). 48 people were reported to have died during this ‘treatment.” The CCHR campaign contributed to the 1983 Mental Health Act which made DST a criminal offence. Chelmsford later closed.
*1990s - United States: restraint - CCHR investigated deaths associated with physical and chemical restraint. Federal regulations introduced in 1999 prohibited restrains used for coercion or discipline.
*1990s -2000s - psychiatric drug safety in children - CCHR campaigned around anti-depressant associated suicidality. The US FDA held hearings concerning Prozac in 1991 and in 2004 introduced its prominent black boxed warning concerning suicidal thoughts and behaviour in children and adolescents taking antidepressants.
*1990s -2000s - Italy - CCHR investigation of poor conditions in psychiatric institutions contributed to 97 subsequent closures.
*1990s onward - Germany - CCHR researched the involvement of German psychiatrists Nazi-era euthanasia programmes and published Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler - The Architects of Horror in 1995. In 2010, the German psychiatric association’s president issued an apology acknowledging the profession’s role in Nazi abuses.
Psychedelic drugs
Today, CCHR is confronting psychiatry’s latest experiment: psychedelic drugs - powerful mind-altering substances that cause hallucinations and radically distort perceptions, thought and mood, as well as sense of time, self and space.
Such drugs are being promoted to people with depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychiatric conditions but also to a wider non-psychiatric public seeking relief from stress, chronic fatigue or to promote greater wellbeing, creativity or personal transformation.
Once associated with the recreational drug-club culture, drugs like ketamine, LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) and psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms) are now being repackaged and fast tracked as “revolutionary treatments” for today’s mental health problems. Repeated, often clinically unsupervised use of tiny amounts of LDS or psilocybin - is promoted as a means of improving mood, focus and creativity, despite lack of scientific evidence for these claims.
Against powerful government and pharmaceutical backing, CCHR is exposing the spurious science, underreported adverse events (remind anyone of Series Two of The Gentlemen?) unknown long-term consequences and misleading claims that these drugs are “natural” therapies. It warns that people are once again being treated as guinea pigs in yet another psychiatric experiment.
Research into recreational drugs was revived in the 1990s and has since grown into a billion dollar industry. More than 70 universities and and nearly 40 companies in the US are now engaged in psychedelic drug research. An estimated 3,900 providers offer ketamine in all 50 states.
The UK is currently one of the major centres of psychedelic research, particularly at the Imperial Centre for Interventional Psychiatry and Psychedelic Research in London. Current research includes Psilocybin for opioid-use disorder, gambling disorder, anorexia nervosa, OCD, depression, chronic pain and brain mechanisms.
A US Executive Order in 2026 directed federal agencies to fast track FDA approval for psychedelic drugs for mental disorders and was fuelled by the claim that existing psychiatric drugs have failed. However, switching one mind-altering drug with another is as Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International put it, “like switching seats on the Titanic.”
Not Holistic, Natural or Plant Based
From spa-like clinics to South American retreats, hallucinogenic drugs are marketed as “natural plant- based holistic” therapy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Active molecules like psilocybin may occur naturally in fungi (and I did once meet a patient who had permanent kidney damage from foraging for these in the forest) but the products used in commercial clinics are wholly lab created. This mirrors the “chemical imbalance” deception used in the 1980s to promote antidepressants like Prozac. It took 30 years for the serotonin imbalance theory to be debunked. A landmark study in Molecular Psychiatry (2022) confirmed there was no convincing scientific evidence for the chemical imbalance theory at all. Marketing psychedelics as somehow natural is just as misleading.
Weak Science …
Another article published in October, 2024 in The Atlantic entitled The Weak Science Behind Psychedelics reported widespread red flags for these drugs which should ring alarm bells throughout the psychiatric drug community. It found adverse drug events were not properly assessed and likely underreported, that participants in the MDMA trail were pressured to report only positive outcomes, that worsening suicidal ideation was not properly recorded in the results and that some researchers were so biased in favour of psychedelics that this compromised their results.
…Dangerous Consequences
One of the well known casualties of psychedelics is actor Matthew Perry who was injecting ketamine six to eight times daily and spending $55,000 a month on the habit before he died. Five people, including two doctors, were charged and convicted in connected with his death. An off duty Alaska Airlines pilot who had taken psilocybin days before, tried to shut down plane engines mid-flight with 83 passengers on board. After taking psilocybin, a 26 year old US military employee shot two people dead and wounded three others at a music festival. A 32 year old British actress committed suicide weeks after taking a psychedelic plant brew at a healing retreat that caused her health to significantly worsen. In 2020, Vice media reported two lawsuits involving extreme violent acts after receiving ketamine treatments. The first was of a 32 year old man from Albuquerque who was receiving ketamine infusions at a clinic for chronic migraines, stabbed himself multiple times and fatally set himself on fire two days after his final treatment. In the second case, a man in Washington who had used a ketamine nasal spray for three weeks was charged with attempted rape and assault of police officers who tried to arrest him.
History repeating itself
CCHR has a long history of combatting psychiatric abuses. It warns of a pattern that has been investigated and exposed for decades:
*Vested interests use experimental psychiatric treatments.
*People seeking help are subjected to unsafe deceptively marketed treatments.
*Those who take the drugs suffer the risks.
*They are then left to suffer the consequences.
CCHR’s position is that psychedelic drugs should never be approved to treat mental problems. The history of psychiatric damage over the decades, weak science, and underreported adverse events do not justify exposing the population to yet another dangerous psychiatric experiment.
Guide to substances to avoid
*Psilocybin - the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms, now a lab-produced synthetic drug.
*Ketamine/ S-ketamine - an anaesthetic drug used in human and veterinary medicine - now increasingly marketed as an off-label mental health treatment.
*DMT - a highly potent hallucinogen, naturally occurring in some plants, now made synthetically.
*MDMA - a synthetic psychoactive drug commonly known as Ecstasy - repositioned from party drug to psychiatric treatment.
*Ibogaine - a psychoactive substance from an African plant - promoted for addiction and trauma treatment, despite documented medical dangers.
*LSD - a powerful hallucinogen once championed by psychiatry and later rejected - once again being promoted as a psychiatric treatment.
Real solutions to psychiatric problems
The real solutions to psychiatric problems and symptoms don’t involve taking mind-altering drugs. They most certainly do involve searching for any underlying physical conditions first that could be causing the psychiatric symptoms, including a full thyroid panel, a deep dive into immune function (including autoimmunity) and chronic low grade infections (whole body, gut and dental), checking nutritional deficiencies, allergies, drug side effects, serious metabolic imbalances and more. Unlike psychedelics, the science behind chronic infections in the brain and mental illness is very real. Counselling and calming rather than drugging and over stimulating are the watch words.
If you suffer from chronic unexplained symptoms and want to find the causes, please get in touch with the Good Health Clinic on goodhealthclinic@outlook.com to request a free 30 minute Enquiry Call or book an appointment. Please note that an Enquiry call is not a consultation but an exploratory call to see if this is a clinical approach you wish to pursue.To your very good health,
Suzanne Jeffery (Nutritional Medicine Consultant)
M.A.(Oxon), BSc.(NMed), PGCE, GNC, BSEM, MNNA, CNHC
The Good Health Clinic at The Business Centre, 2, Cattedown Road, Plymouth PL4 0EG
Tel no: 07836 552936/ Answer phone: 01752 774755
Disclaimer:
All advice given out by Suzanne Jeffery and the Good Health Clinic is for general guidance and informational purposes only. All advice relating to other health professionals’ advice is for general guidance and information purposes only. Readers are encouraged to confirm the information provided with other sources. Patients and consumers should review the information carefully with their professional health care provider. The information is not intended to replace medical advice offered by other practitioners and physicians. Suzanne Jeffery and the Good Health Clinic will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary or other damages arising therefrom.