Tag: psychedelics

Are psychedelics a treatment for long COVID? Researchers probing this mystery don’t have answers yet

It was March 2020 and Ash was the healthiest she’d been in 15 years. She had just started an exciting new job and COVID was still a nameless “novel coronavirus” mainly appearing on cruise ships. One evening, after getting home from the gym, Ash was suddenly struck with a wave of feverish delirium. She passed out and eventually came to a couple of hours later on the kitchen floor with her dog staring down at her.

The next two weeks were a blur, but eventually Ash started to feel better. About a month after the initial illness she had pretty much recovered. And then things started getting strange. She had this feeling her teeth were rotting. A painful pressure began building in her head.

“And it just took over my nerves,” Ash explained in a conversation with Salon. “About six weeks after COVID, I started losing the use of my hands.”

Everything from opening a ziploc bag to using scissors became profoundly difficult. Multiple GPs, dentists, clinical specialists and even a Chinese acupuncturist all had no idea what was going on. By the end of 2020 Ash had stopped working altogether. Alongside the neuropathic problems all the now common neurological long COVID issues had become entrenched: Brain fog, dissociation, extreme fatigue, memory troubles.

Alienated by mainstream medicine’s denial of her condition, Ash became her own guinea pig for the next couple of years. With a deep knowledge of science and a pool of friends in the entheogenic community Ash tried anything and everything to overcome her debilitating symptoms. Steroids, low-dose naltrexone, melatonin, lecithin, goldenseal, sceletium and a whole world of anti-inflammatory botanical ferments like kefir. Some helped temporarily, some didn’t help at all. Ash kept a detailed treatment diary, tracking the effects of everything she consumed.

“People were just sending me random obscure stuff. And I’m like, yep, that doesn’t work. That works. That doesn’t work. Oh, that doesn’t work for more than three days.”

Then in early 2023, Ash tried something completely different. Something she described as a game-changer for her condition: A powerful hallucinogenic plant called iboga that originates from Africa. It’s active ingredient is known as ibogaine and it’s being explored for addiction treatment. It’s not clear yet if it will really help — but even more questions remain about its potential for alleviating long COVID.

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House And Senate Reach Deal To Require Psychedelics Clinical Trials For Active Duty Military Service Members Under Defense Bill

Bipartisan and bicameral congressional lawmakers have reached an agreement on a large-scale defense bill that contains a House GOP-led section to fund studies into the therapeutic use of psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA for military service members.

Following negotiations, lawmakers released the conference report for the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday evening, maintaining psychedelics research provisions championed by Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) that were attached to the House version over the summer. The report notes, however, that the House negotiators receded on a separate section to create a medical cannabis pilot program for veterans.

The psychedelics provisions that have been adopted would require the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish a process by which service members with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury could participate in clinical trials involving psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. The list of covered psychedelics was also expanded to broadly include “qualified plant-based alternative therapies.”

DOD would need to facilitate that process within 180 days of enactment. It could partner with eligible federal or state government agencies, as well as academic institutions to carry out the clinical trials, with $10 million in funding.

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Top Federal Health Official Says Abstinence-Only Drug Treatment Is ‘Magical’ Thinking That ‘Costs A Lot Of Lives’

A top federal health official is offering some pointed critiques of the U.S. drug criminalization model, stressing how politicizing addiction has fostered a system of incarceration that increases overdose risk while biasing research that could reveal the benefits, as well as the risks, of substances such as marijuana and psilocybin. She also rebuked treatment approaches that focus exclusively on abstinence.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow made the comments in an appearance last month at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference, speaking on a panel with Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) Executive Director Kassandra Frederique.

One of the conversation points touched on the dangers of focusing on abstinence in drug treatment, rather than meeting people who use drugs where they’re at. The “inflexibility” of abstinence-only “costs a lot of lives,” Volkow said.

If a person wants to get treatment and abstain from drugs, “that’s great” as a “theoretical ideal,” the official said. “But to basically impose that as a reality for everyone—who have very different backgrounds and opportunities—I think it’s sort of like a magical thought and not practical.”

In general, the policies and strategies the U.S. has historically pursued to combat drug misuse are “not helping to address the overdose crisis,” evidenced by the fact that “overdose fatalities are continuing to rise,” Volkow argued.

“What it tells us is whatever we’re doing is clearly not sufficient. What do we need to do to change this?” she said at the panel, a recording of which was shared with Marijuana Moment. “This very polarized categorical perspective that it’s either, ‘you go abstinent or we don’t pay any attention to you and we send you to jail’ is catastrophic. I mean, it has basically contributed to what we’re seeing as a horrific problem in our country with horrible fatalities like we’ve never seen.”

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Mind-altering ketamine becomes new pain treatment, despite little research or regulation

As U.S. doctors scale back their use of opioid painkillers, a new option for hard-to-treat pain is taking root: ketamine, the decades-old surgical drug that is now a trendy psychedelic therapy.

Prescriptions for ketamine have soared in recent years, driven by for-profit clinics and telehealth services offering the medication as a treatment for pain, depression, anxiety and other conditions. The generic drug can be purchased cheaply and prescribed by most physicians and some nurses, regardless of their training.

With limited research on its effectiveness against pain, some experts worry the U.S. may be repeating mistakes that gave rise to the opioid crisis: overprescribing a questionable drug that carries significant safety and abuse risks.

“There’s a paucity of options for pain and so there’s a tendency to just grab the next thing that can make a difference,” said Dr. Padma Gulur, a Duke University pain specialist who is studying ketamine’s use. “A medical journal will publish a few papers saying, ‘Oh, look, this is doing good things,’ and then there’s rampant off-label use, without necessarily the science behind it.”

When Gulur and her colleagues tracked 300 patients receiving ketamine at Duke, more than a third of them reported significant side effects that required professional attention, such as hallucinations, troubling thoughts and visual disturbances.

Ketamine also didn’t result in lower rates of opioid prescribing in the months following treatment, a common goal of therapy, according to Gulur. Her research is under review for medical journal publication.

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The Heirs to a Vault of Novel Psychedelics Take a Trip Into the Unknown

In April 1960, a Dow Chemicals biochemist named Alexander Shulgin consumed 400mg of a compound called mescaline, and had his first psychedelic experience. He saw “hundreds of nuances of color” that he had never seen before. “The world amazed me,” Shulgin later wrote. “I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me.” He found the encounter so extraordinary, that he dedicated the rest of his life to uncovering the secrets that psychedelic chemistry could contain. 

“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” Shulgin recalled. “We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” However, it struck him as curious why scant work had been done on compounds, known as phenethylamines, which are similar to mescaline—the psychedelic derived from peyote that was first isolated in 1897. The trip, “unquestionably confirmed the entire direction” of his life, he wrote in his 1991 classic PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. “I had found my learning path.”

Shulgin, known as “Sasha,” was a hero to the psychedelic counterculture, but not necessarily a movement insider, went on to make the psychedelic experience more accessible than anyone else in history. He worked out of a ramshackle backyard lab on his 20-acre ranch in Lafayette, California, and discovered more than 200 new psychedelic compounds. A number of his compounds became popular, notably 2C-B (also known as “tripstasy”). He also tripped several thousand times himself, before he died in 2014 aged 88. 

He informally established the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute (ASRI), during the 1980s at a time when “the mere mention of psychedelics, even in the freedom-of-thought world of academia, was a career killer,” the ASRI says on its website. Today, the institute continues Shulgin’s psychedelic legacy. It was officially incorporated on Bicycle Day on 19 April 2021 by his wife Ann, before she died in 2022. Two of his long-time research colleagues, Paul Daley, and Nicholas Cozzi, took up leadership roles following Shulgin’s death. The institute is creating new psychedelics, which it is patenting, and scouring the vault of Shulgin’s creations for any overlooked gems.

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Advocates File California Ballot Initiative To Legalize Psychedelics For Medical, Therapeutic And Spiritual Use In 2024

Advocates in California filed a ballot initiative with state officials on Friday that would create a right “to obtain and use psychedelics for medical, therapeutic and spiritual purposes” with the recommendation of a doctor. It would also allow adults to possess and use the substances in their home as well as cultivate entheogenic plants and fungi on private property.

Known as the Psychedelic Wellness and Healing Initiative of 2024, the measure is the third psychedelics-related prospective citizen-led measure attempting to qualify for next year’s ballot. Another would legalize psilocybin for adult and therapeutic use, while a third would commit $5 billion to create a state agency focused on advancing research and development of psychedelic therapies.

Dave Hodges, an initiative organizer and the founder of the Church of Ambrosia, in Oakland, acknowledged in an interview earlier this month that the campaign behind the newest proposal is filing its paperwork later than initially hoped. Advocates won’t be able to start gathering signatures until the state attorney general’s office issues the proposal an official ballot title and summary, which can take more than a month.

Hodges said the goal of the proposal is to ensure broad access to psychedelics while ensuring a base level of safety.

“We aren’t just saying, ‘Everybody gets psychedelics!’” Hodges said. “We’re saying you gotta go talk to a doctor first, and if the doctor recommends that you try them, then you can come get them.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) recent veto of an adult-use psilocybin bill passed by the legislature this session was a disappointment, he added, “but at the same time, I completely agree with it.” The governor said in his veto statement that he couldn’t support allowing access to psilocybin without first establishing therapeutic standards.

“My church now has over 100,000 members,” Hodges said. “If each of them could have gone and talked to a doctor before having access to psychedelics, I would have considered that a great thing.”

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Eureka, CA Decriminalizes Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Eureka, CA, has passed a resolution decriminalizing entheogens and psychedelic plant medicines, making it the sixth California city to do so and the second such city in Humboldt County.

The Eureka City Council unanimously approved an initiative last week to decriminalize plant medicines such as psilocybin mushrooms within city limits. The announcement came less than two weeks after CA Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed an initiative which would have decriminalized psychedelics statewide. The City of Arcata, just a few miles to the north, voted to decriminalize in 2021 thanks to efforts by a group who also provided the language used in the Eureka resolution, Decriminalize Nature Humboldt.

According to an article in the Lost Coast Outpost, the resolution was passed without much trouble from the council, though a particular phrase was removed from the language of the bill. The council voted to remove language which seemed to endorse entheogenic plants’ ability to “catalyze profound experiences of personal and spiritual growth.” Not for nothing, but one of recently deceased Johns Hopkins professor Roland Griffiths’ first studies on psilocybin in 2006 was on psilocybin’s ability to induce mystical and spiritual experiences in the user. Much of Griffiths’ later work at Johns Hopkins has been referenced in similar legislative discussions surrounding the legality of psychedelics.

Other than the removal of the aforementioned phrase, the resolution was passed without much protest from the rest of the council members.There were some concerns voiced by local law enforcement representatives, mirroring Gov. Newsom’s concerns about potentially unforeseen consequences to the resolution. City Manager Miles Slattery, however, pointed out that he had consulted with the Arcata Police Department who reported no serious issues to him after just over two years of psychedelic decriminalization. He also pointed out that the City of Eureka only saw five cases of arrests related to entheogens in the previous year and almost every case was related to something more serious such as domestic violence. 

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Human Use Of Cannabis—For Food, Fiber And Psychoactive Effects—Stretches Back Millennia, New Report Says

A new paper in the European Journal for Chemistry traces the history of cannabis through “thousands of years of contact with mankind,” noting the plant’s legacy as a source of fiber, nutrition, medicine, spirituality and pleasure.

At the same time, it notes that cannabis “is perhaps one of the greatest controversies in contemporary humanity” and a key driver of the modern war on drugs.

The paper, “From ancient Asian relics to contemporaneity: A review of historical and chemical aspects of Cannabis,” was written by Gabriel Vitor de Lima Marques and Renata Barbosa de Olivera, of the pharmacy department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

The cannabis plant appears to have first been used for its fiber, as a material for ropes and other manufactured goods, the authors wrote. Use of hemp fiber dates back to approximately 10,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia and to roughly 6,000 and 5,000 years ago in China and Kazakhstan, respectively.

Ancient peoples considered cannabis one of the five main grains, along with rice, soy, barley and millet, the paper continues. And once stalks were processed into hemp fibers, they became durable materials for ropes, sails and boat rigging, clothing, paper, animal husbandry and more.

“Used as a stunner to facilitate the capture of fish,” it says, “Cannabis is possibly the first plant to be cultivated for non-food purposes.”

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California Governor Newsom Vetoes Psychedelics Legalization, But Calls For New Bill On Therapeutic Access Next Year

The governor of California has vetoed a bill to legalize certain psychedelics and create a pathway to regulated access—a move that comes at a time when two states have already enacted comprehensive psychedelics policy reform and as two campaigns are working to put the issue on California’s 2024 ballot.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D)—who was one of the most prominent and earliest lawmakers to call for an end to the war on drugs as mayor of San Francisco and later push for the legalization of cannabis as lieutenant governor of California—vetoed the bill, SB 58, from Sen. Scott Wiener (D) on Saturday.

In a veto message, the governor caveated that he wants the legislature to send him a new bill next year establishing guidelines for regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics and also consider a “potential” framework for broader decriminalization in the future. But at this stage, he’s unwilling to let the reform be enacted with his signature.

“Both peer-reviewed science and powerful personal anecdotes lead me to support new opportunities to address mental health through psychedelic medicines like those addressed in this bill,” Newsom said in a veto message on Saturday. “Psychedelics have proven to relieve people suffering from certain conditions such as depression, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and other addictive personality traits. This is an exciting frontier and California will be on the front-end of leading it.”

“California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines—replete with dosing information, therapeutic guidelines, rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments, and medical clearance of no underlying psychoses,” he continued.  “Unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to these guidelines going into place, and I cannot sign it.”

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