Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

by Judith Grisel

These findings replicate and extend previous research, reviewed in depth by David E. Nichols. For example, José Carlos Bouso and colleagues compared more than a hundred regular ayahuasca users with actively religious matched controls on a number of psychological variables including well-being, cognition, and several indices of psychopathology.8 Ayahuasca users were lower on all psychopathology scales, including tendencies toward OCD, anxiety, hostility, paranoia, and depression. They demonstrated no difference in cognitive measures but scored higher on measures of psychosocial well-being than a control group of religious subjects who did not use psychedelics.