Blue-blooded brain behind it – with NO science qualifications
One of the driving forces behind the research into psychedelic drugs is Amanda Feilding, the 75- year- old Countess of Wemyss and March.
She stood unsuccessfully for Parliament on the platform that trepanation — drilling a hole in the head — should be available on the nHS to allow people to experience a higher state of consciousness.
In a speech she gave to a conference on psychedelic drugs last October, Feilding said she ‘ learned the value’ of regular doses of LSD back in the Sixties. She was able to ‘live and work on LSD, and in my opinion to see much further and deeper . . .I grew to love this state’.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss Feilding as just eccentric.
She is a leading figure in the explosion of research into the ‘medicinal use’ of psychedelic drugs and a founder and co-director (with Professor David nutt) of the Beckley Imperial Research Programme at Imperial College London, as well as working with other UK and international universities.
On the website of the Beckley Foundation, which she set up in 1996 as the Foundation to Further Consciousness, she is described as ‘ the “hidden hand” behind the renaissance of psychedelic science’.
Since 2010, the foundation, which is based at Beckley Park — her spectacular stately home in Oxfordshire — has funded, or otherwise been involved in, the research for almost 60 papers published in scientific journals investigating the properties and therapeutic potential of illicit mind-altering drugs including LSD, ecstasy and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms).
‘none of it would have been possible without Amanda and the Beckley Foundation,’ Dr Robin CarhartHarris, the head of Imperial’s Psychedelic Research Group, told a newspaper in 2015.
Good Health has learned that at least five British universities have accepted money from the foundation. Imperial College London has received £108,519 since 2009, while the University of exeter received £11,488 for a study on cannabidiol (a component of cannabis).
The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London was given £4,000, also for cannabis studies, and Cardiff University says the foundation has agreed to give it £ 50,000 to investigate ecstasy for posttraumatic stress disorder.
University College London (UCL) says it has ‘no record of any philanthropic donations from the Beckley Foundation or Amanda Feilding’. But between 2012 and 2015 Feilding collaborated with Val Curran, a professor of psychopharmacology at UCL.
One 2012 paper on cannabis, on which Professor Curran and Feilding are co-authors, clearly states the study was part-funded by the Beckley Foundation. Another paper published in 2013 and co-authored by Feilding looking at ‘the harms and benefits’ of psychoactive drugs acknowledges as ‘a potential conflict of interest . . . the study was funded by the Beckley Foundation which seeks to change global drug policy’.
The Beckley Foundation has a lot of money at its disposal. Accounts filed with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator show that between 2013 and 2017 it had an income of £2.26 million.
Since 2009 the foundation has supported the Beckley Imperial Research Programme which aims ‘to develop a comprehensive account of how substances such as LSD, psilocybin [and] MDMA [ecstasy] affect the brain to alter consciousness, and how they produce their potentially therapeutic effects’.
F
EILDING’S involvement doesn’t stop at funding. Despite confirming to Good Health that she has ‘no formal qualifications’, she is credited as a co-author on 37 academic papers published in journals ranging from The Lancet Psychiatry to the Journal of Psychopharmacology (24 of these papers, exploring the potential clinical uses of drugs including psilocybin, LSD and ecstasy, have been published in collaboration with Imperial researchers, including Professor nutt and Dr Carhart-Harris).
On almost all of these 37 papers on which Feilding is a co-author, her foundation is acknowledged as having funded the research. Yet on almost none is her dual role recognised as a potential conflict of interest.
A spokesperson for the Beckley Foundation said that Feilding had ‘actively participated in the inception, design, and writing up’ of all the papers where she was a co-author. All had been peer-reviewed, ‘which
means that the scientific community at large is confident that these results speak for themselves, regardless of the author’s viewpoint or political position’.
But criticism of this unusual arrangement was voiced in January 2017 in a paper in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, which queried the merits of a paper on psilocybin published by the Beckley Foundation-funded Imperial College team in the British Journal of Psychiatry in March 2012.
It said: ‘Since detailed information on conflicts of interest has not been provided scepticism may arise as to the role of such foundations [i.e. Beckley] in study design and execution, potentially biasing the results.’
Feilding’s influence extends to the upper reaches of the scientific community. Members of the Beckley Foundation’s scientific advisory board include Sir Colin Blakemore, former chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), which controls much of the public funding for medical research and which, since Sir Colin’s tenure ended, has funded Professor Nutt’s work with psilocybin to the tune of £750,000.
In its annual report for 2017, the Beckley Foundation celebrated the MRC’s backing as ‘the first time UK government funds have been allocated to a classic psychedelic study since before prohibition’.
Sir Colin has been a member of the board since 2001, including during his leadership of the MRC (from 2003 to 2007).
While still head of the MRC, Sir Colin was a co-author with Professor Nutt on a paper in The Lancet that challenged the classification of illegal drugs. ‘Some of the ideas developed in this paper,’ they wrote, ‘arose out of discussion at workshops organised by the Beckley Foundation.’
An MRC spokesperson told us: ‘Neither Colin nor the MRC saw his involvement with the Beckley Foundation as a conflict with his position at the MRC.’
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Beckley Foundation said it was ‘an inaccurate shortcut’ to suggest Feilding wanted banned drugs such as LSD legalised for recreational use. Rather, she believed ‘such drugs should be investigated thoroughly, both in terms of their safety and their therapeutic potential, and that their legal scheduling should be based on facts rather than ungrounded beliefs’.
Imperial College London, Amanda Feilding, Professor Nutt and Dr Carhart-Harris did not respond to requests for their comments.