A research fellow at the University of Oxford's Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities writes in Scientific American:
How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which — although far more effective than any available alternative — might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party?
These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem. Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in "magic mushrooms," seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine...
[E]merging evidence suggests the relationship could be causal, with clinically administered psilocybin actively shifting political values, just as it shifts many other nonclinical characteristics. Notably, one study of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression reported that the treatment decreased authoritarian political views in patients. That clinical trial also detected another effect that had previously been reported in healthy participants: psilocybin use leads to increases in the personality domain of openness, itself a predictor of liberal values... With sample sizes currently small, more research is needed to understand whether there truly is a causal relationship at work, and, if so, what its nature might be. Perhaps psilocybin doesn't so much induce liberal values, but rather consolidates whatever values were present before treatment. A health care modality that entrenches preexisting political sentiments is, at the least, unlikely to make enemies.
The same could not be said of a treatment that shifts patients in one direction along the political spectrum.
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