Tag: psychedelics

Viking Drug Use: From Riotous Parties to Berserker Fury

The Vikings stand as legendary figures, their exploits on the seas and battlefields shrouded in myth and mystery. Yet beyond their tales of conquest and exploration lies a lesser-known aspect of Viking culture: their relationship with mind-altering substances.

From the halls of Valhalla to the depths of the dark Nordic forests, some believe the Vikings indulged in a variety of intoxicants, from potent mead brewed from honey to hallucinogenic mushrooms harvested from the wild and maybe even cannabis. It’s even said the Viking’s most fearsome warriors, the Berserkers, were fueled by narcotics.

As is so often the case with Viking history, separating fact from fiction isn’t easy when it comes to Norse drug use.

A Match Made In Valhalla?

The Vikings have a pretty wild reputation, and they were indeed no strangers to revelry and celebrations. Feasts, gatherings, and festivals served as integral parts of their social fabric. Much like many social gatherings today, imbibing certain drugs was a central part of how Vikings socialized.

Their primary drug of choice was, unsurprisingly, alcohol. Not just a means of relaxation and merriment after a hard day’s raiding, it was a symbol of social status and hospitality (a key aspect of Viking culture). Mead, often referred to as the “drink of the gods,” held particular reverence among the Norse with reference being made to it throughout various mythological tales, sagas, and rituals.

But it is likely they didn’t stop there. Over the years there has been much speculation over what other drugs the Vikings may have consumed, especially the potential use of hallucinogenic substances among the Norse.

References in sagas and folklore hint at the consumption of psychoactive mushrooms, such as  Amanita muscaria, known for their mind-altering properties. While evidence for widespread use remains elusive, the possibility of occasional experimentation cannot be discounted.

But before we begin speculating as to what the Vikings may have used, let’s focus on what we know they definitely used. In Viking society, alcohol consumption was a deeply ingrained cultural practice that permeated every aspect of life. Think British pub culture, but even more fundamental and much more spiritual.

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Were Plato and Dante munching on magic mushrooms? Probably

Dr Bill Richards looks at me with kind eyes through the computer screen, his face framed by an overgrown plant, bookshelves and an abstract painting. It hangs behind him in shades of blue, yellow and red, the colours fluid and swirling yet handsomely encased in shapes that have no clear name. If that sounds akin to a psychedelic experience, you’re in luck: because Bill and I are sitting down to discuss just that.

Not one experience in particular, but hundreds of them. Hundreds which Bill has studied in his career as a leader in the field of psychedelic research. He was one of the first to explore psychedelics’ potential for treating addiction as well as end of life anxiety among terminal cancer patients. His passion for this subject began in Germany in 1963 and was nurtured under the tutelage of psychologist Abraham Maslow and the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner. He returned to the US to carry out psychotherapy research with psychedelics from 1967 to 1977; then, at the height of the War on Drugs, he had to shut things down.

He had by then already made waves in the field, notably with his seminal articl – Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism – co-authored overnight in 1966 with Walter Pahnke and mailed off at sunrise. 

Today, Bill has an academic appointment in the psychiatry department of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he led a study in 2016 on how psilocybin could be used among cancer patients to alleviate depression. It was described as “the most rigorous controlled trial of psilocybin to date”. He appeared in Michael Pollan’s 2022 documentary, How To Change Your Mind, and his much-lauded book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, is out in Spanish this May.

Bill is a rare breed in the field of psychedelics in that he straddles both scientific and spiritual sides of the discipline. What’s more, he believes the dichotomy that separates the two is false. “It’s not either-or,” he quips. For Bill, it would be remiss to discuss psychedelics in purely scientific terms, just as it would be reductive to explore only their spiritual dimension.

Alongside his psychology credentials, Bill holds a Master of Divinity from Yale (at which point he wished to become a minister) and a PhD from The Catholic University of America. “I grew up with a father who taught chemistry, physics and geology, and a rather pious mother — so science and religion have always been in my blood,” he says. Today still, he plays the organ in his local Episcopal Church. This dual influence has profoundly impacted Bill — whose ideas, out of all those I have heard, I find to be the most inspirational. The mystical experience induced by psilocybin or ayahuasca is, according to him, not caused by the drugs at all. Rather, these substances unlock what is already in our mind. Religious mystics, Bill argues, can access such states of consciousness without the help of psychoactive compounds.

These “transcendental states of consciousness” defy our categories of thinking about “time and space”. “Sometimes,” Bill adds, “it seems more the realm of philosophy than of science.” Some might perceive such a statement as invalidating the scientific relevance of psychedelics; but that is not Bill’s intention. “These drugs,” he says, have likely been around since the dawn of civilisation. They “emerge in cultures” and then “get suppressed”. We have lost touch with historic knowledge, with wisdom that used to be passed down among our ancestors. “Plato and Dante were writing out of mystical states of consciousness,” Bill claims. “But whether they were natural mystics or were munching on magic mushrooms, I have no idea.”

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Single LSD dose provides lasting anxiety relief: Research

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted breakthrough therapy status to an LSD formula to treat generalized anxiety disorder after an initial study has shown that a single dose of the drug could provide lasting relief.

The LSD therapy developed by Mind Medicine Inc. (MindMed) must still go through the standard FDA approval process and will soon enter Phase 3 clinical trials.

The study that prompted FDA advancement found the drug was “generally well-tolerated with most adverse events rated as mild to moderate, transient and occurring on dosing day, and being consistent with expected acute effects of the study drug,” according to a release on the findings.

The most common adverse effects on the initial “dosing day” — or when patients were first given the drug — included hallucinations, euphoric mood, abnormal thinking, headache, dizziness and nausea, among others.

The company plans to meet for an update with the FDA in the coming months and begin an expanded clinical program in the second half of the year.

MindMed, a pharmaceutical company focused on developing psychedelic drugs into medicines, has spent years researching possible medicinal uses for LSD, an illicit drug that has never been approved for medicinal use. The specific LSD formula from the study is dubbed MM120.

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UN Body Reaffirms That Marijuana Legalization Violates International Treaties, While Addressing Germany Cannabis Reform And U.S. Psychedelics Movement

The United Nations’s (UN) drug control body is reiterating that it considers legalizing marijuana for non-medical or scientific purposes a violation of international treaties, though it also said it appreciates that Germany’s government scaled back its cannabis plan ahead of a recent vote. The global narcotics agency is also taking note of the psychedelics policy reform movement in U.S. states.

This is mostly par for the course for the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which has routinely criticized countries for allowing the enactment of cannabis legalization due to their obligations under various Single Convention treaties going back to 1961. But as Germany entered the fold, and the U.S. has continued to move toward marijuana and psychedelics reform, the body is again making its disappointment known.

INCB’s 2023 annual report, which was published on Tuesday, “underscores” that member nations are required to “take such legislative and administrative measures as may be necessary” to criminalize “the production, manufacture, export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of drugs” such as marijuana under decades-old treaty agreements.

“The Board continues to reiterate its concern regarding the legalization of the use of cannabis for non-medical and non-scientific purposes in several jurisdictions, with other jurisdictions considering similar action,” it said.

To that point, INCB also included a recommendation in the latest report to recall an analysis from its 2022 report that, at one point, suggested that the U.S. is out of compliance with drug treaty obligations because the federal government is passively allowing states within the country to legalize marijuana.

“The apparent tension between these provisions and the trend towards legalization must be addressed by the signatories to the three drug control conventions,” it said.

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Copper Age Settlement Shows Evidence of Accidental Ritual Mercury Abuse

Getting high off toxic insolvents and chemicals to induce mind-altering effects, is a public health concern today. Dial back 5,000 years ago, in the Iberian Peninsula, groups of women adorned in immaculate ceremonial attire would participate in a ritual dance before an audience, inhaling a vibrant red powder, or mixing it an elixir. This powder, derived from the mineral cinnabar, induced a fevered trance accompanied by tremors and delirium, and its users, visited different astral planes. But the dark side of this tradition was it necessitated a lifetime of dangerous and lethal mercury abuse.

What the users were unlikely to be aware of was that the ‘trip’ was a byproduct of the toxic metal mercury, today one of the most widely banned substances by public health departments all over the world. This usage and more have been wonderfully documented in a study published in late 2023 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

“Western medicine has basically banned mercury … [like] public health enemy No. 1,” says Leonardo García Sanjuán, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “But the truth is, the history of the relationship of humans with mercury has been quite complex.”

Repeated exposure to these rituals led to the accumulation of mercury in the women’s bodily tissues over their lifetimes. Millennia later, archaeological analysis revealed significantly elevated levels of mercury in the bones of these women and others from their community, far surpassing modern health tolerances.

It appears that at the Copper Age settlement of Valencina, between approximately 2900 and 2650 BC, ritual leaders purposefully ingested mercury-rich cinnabar for ceremonial or magical purposes. Meanwhile, other community members may have inadvertently consumed it while working with the pigment or through environmental contamination.

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Activists Renew Effort To Use Opioid Settlement Funds To Study Ibogaine For Addiction In Ohio After Kentucky Plan Falls Through

Psychedelic medicine proponents are redirecting their efforts to use millions in opioid-related state settlement money for ibogaine research from Kentucky to Ohio.

The original plan to use $42 million from Kentucky’s opioid settlement fund for psychedelics research fell through late last year after the state’s new attorney general replaced then-Kentucky Opioid Commission Chairman Bryan Hubbard, who was spearheading the ibogaine initiative, with a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official.

Now Hubbard has joined ResultsOHIO, a division of the Ohio Treasurer’s Office, where he will be partnering with the Reaching Everyone in Distress (REID) Foundation in hopes of securing a portion of that state’s opioid settlement funds to promote psychedelics clinical trials for substance misuse treatment.

“I’m honored to work with the REID Foundation and the people of Ohio to bring hope and healing to veterans and families being torn apart by the opioid crisis,” Hubbard said in a press release. “The development of ibogaine as a treatment option for opioid-dependent individuals is a moral imperative.”

A Kentucky commission focused on opioid overdose abatement held several meetings last year to go over the ibogaine initiative that’s since fizzled out in that state under the new attorney general. Members heard testimony from military veterans, parents, psychologists and other advocates—including former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R)—about the therapeutic potential of the psychedelic.

Like Kentucky, Ohio has been hard hit by the opioid overdose crisis. And under the settlement agreement, the state is expected to receive about $1 billion that could be used for various programs and services to help mitigate the public health issue.

The plan for the ibogaine effort is to seek funding for the research through a public-private partnership, while also exploring the creation of a specific program under ResultsOHIO to facilitate the partial settlement distribution, Psychedelic Alpha reported.

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FDA Grants Priority Review Of MDMA-Assisted Therapy For PTSD, Psychedelics Drug Development Company Says

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has agreed to review MDMA-assisted therapy as a potential treatment option for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the application has been granted priority status, according to the psychedelics-focused drug development company that’s leading the effort.

About two months after Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation) submitted the new drug application (NDA) for MDMA in combination with psychotherapy, FDA granted it priority review last week and has set a target date for determination by August 11, the company announced on Friday.

If the NDA is ultimately approved, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would then need to reschedule MDMA accordingly. It would become the first psychedelic in history to be approved as a pharmaceutical, to be administered in tandem with talk therapy and other supportive services.

“Securing priority review for our investigational MDMA-assisted therapy is a significant accomplishment and underscores the urgent unmet need for new innovation in the treatment of PTSD,” Lykos CEO Amy Emerson said in a press release. “We remain focused on working with the FDA through the review process and preparing for a controlled launch with an emphasis on quality should this potential treatment be approved.”

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Margaret Mead’s LSD Memo

With her paper-cluttered desk spotlit underneath a pendant lamp, Margaret Mead’s office in the western turret in the American Museum of Natural History resembled a Broadway theater set. All around her in the shadows hung masks and carved figures, as if the museum dioramas from the floors below had begun to creep into her workspace.

Back in her spiritual home after spending the last six months of 1953 in Manus, she felt refreshed, confident. She was already thinking through her book about her experience; New Lives for Old would be the title, and it would describe the Noise, an apocalyptic religious movement which spread through the island of Manus, which lies northeast of New Guinea, in the aftermath of World War II. In 1947, a prophet had emerged on Manus who predicted a coming age of abundance, even immortality. But first, the old ways had to be cast out. Reports poured in of visionary experiences, trance states, even seizures. Hats of colonial officials were ritually burned, and a coming age of abundance was proclaimed. Mead found the Noise fascinating because she saw it as a prelude to other new cultural forms which she believed would appear elsewhere as a response to the rapid changes of the 20th century—including in the United States. She saw the movement in relatively benign terms. True, it really was an apocalyptic cult, she wrote, complete with mystical “prophetic dreams” and the promise of “a utopia to be immediately established on earth.” But who said utopian dreams were entirely bad?

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THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORLD OF LSD

LSD is a drug which has had a bizarre inception and nuanced history. What began as a pharmacological experiment rapidly evolved into a substance which was used for a wide range of uses. From groundbreaking psychiatric work all the way to abuse in mind control military projects, let’s dive into some of the most significant examples of psychedelics’ use in society since its creation.

Hofmann’s Accidental Ingestion

Dubbed as the father of the psychedelic movement due to his work on the synthesis of LSD, Albert Hofmann was the first to produce and ingest LSD. Albert Hofmann first synthesised Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in November 1938 when studying the medicinal properties of the ergot fungus and the Mediterranean squill. Ergot is a fungus which grows on rye and can infect the grain causing muscle spasms, delusions, hallucinations, gangrenous symptoms and ultimately death to those who consume it. This process has been linked to plagues and famines which have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the past. 

Hofmann’s boss, Arthur Stoll, managed to isolate the toxic compounds in ergot: ergotamine and ergobasine. By utilising Aotamine, the medicinal compound in ergot, Stoll was able to produce medicines for his Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. 

Hofmann originally intended for LSD to be used as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. However, when he accidentally absorbed the drug in his lab in 1943, he discovered that it had a far more powerful impact on his state of consciousness. Hofmann originally was unsure of how he had experienced the effects, and believed that LSD couldn’t have been the cause for his symptoms as he had been meticulous in avoiding contamination due to his knowledge of the lethality of ergot. However, he attempted to reproduce his effects by consuming what he believed to be a miniscule dose of LSD to test whether it was the cause.

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Psilocybin, LSD And Other Psychedelics Improve Sexual Satisfaction For Months After Use, New Study Finds

Psychedelic substances, including psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and others, may improve sexual function—even months after a psychedelic experience, according to a new study.

The findings, published on Wednesday in Nature Scientific Reports, are based largely on a survey of 261 participants both before and after taking psychedelics. Researchers from Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research then combined those responses with results of a separate clinical trial that compared psilocybin and a commonly prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) for treating depression.

Authors say it’s the first scientific study to formally explore the effects of psychedelics on sexual functioning. While anecdotal reports and and qualitative evidence suggest the substances may be beneficial, the study says, “this has never been formally tested.”

“It’s important to stress our work does not focus on what happens to sexual functioning while people are on psychedelics, and we are not talking about perceived ‘sexual performance,’” said Tommaso Barba, a PhD student at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and the lead author of the study, “but it does indicate there may be a lasting positive impact on sexual functioning after their psychedelic experience, which could potentially have impacts on psychological wellbeing.”

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