Tag: psychedelics

Science recently uncovered these 5 fascinating facts about psychedelic substances

Scientists are interested in studying psychedelic substances because they have the potential to alter perception, cognition, and mood in ways that may be beneficial for treating a variety of mental health conditions. Some studies suggest that certain psychedelics may have therapeutic effects for conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety.

The most commonly studied psychedelic drugs include psilocybin (the active compound found in “magic” mushrooms), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD, also known simply as “acid”), dimethyltryptamine (or DMT, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in many plants and animals), and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (known as MDMA or molly, a synthetic drug that produces both psychedelic and stimulant effects).

Below are five recent scientific discoveries related to psychedelic substances and their therapeutic potential.

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Oregon’s Appetite for Psilocybin Is Being Fed Outside the Law in the Mushroom Underground

Three thousand five hundred dollars.

That’s how much it’s going to cost to swallow 4 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and undergo a six-hour therapy session at EPIC Healing Eugene—if and when the clinic gets its license to run a “psilocybin service center” and its owner, Cathy Jonas, gets her facilitator license after undergoing 300 hours of training and passing a state-mandated test.

Together, those two licenses will cost her $12,000 a year. On top of that, she must spend thousands on a security system, liability insurance, and a 375-pound safe. All in, Jonas estimates she’ll spend $60,000 to open her service center and, at $3,500 a session, she expects to barely break even. “They have really made this hard,” Jonas, 56, says.

Two and a half years ago, Oregon voters approved Measure 109, making Oregon the first state in the nation to legalize the supervised use of psilocybin mushrooms. But that freedom comes with fine print. The program requires users to trip only in the presence of a trained facilitator in a service center using psilocybin grown by state-approved manufacturers and tested by state-licensed labs.

All of that adds costs. The result is a price tag that’s going to astonish the fungi-curious. A single session—5 grams, six hours—will cost more than the median Oregonian’s biweekly take-home pay.

Still willing to pony up? Sorry, get in line. At press time, no service centers—the only places you’re allowed to take psilocybin legally—had been licensed by the Oregon Health Authority. Three manufacturers, one testing lab, and just four facilitators had been licensed as of April 25.

In other words, the ballot measure created an appetite that the regulated system seems unprepared to satisfy. The outcome? The legalization of psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon is spurring an expansion of the decades-old illegal market.

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UK university launches postgraduate course in clinical use of psychedelics

A UK university is launching one of the world’s first postgraduate qualifications on psychedelics to teach healthcare workers about using psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and other psychoactive drugs in therapeutic work.

The certificate from Exeter University cements psychedelics as an area of scientific importance in the UK. It could help pave the way for clinical therapies becoming available within the next five years, with some treatments being in the final stages of clinical trials.

This would follow Australia, which has become the first country to allow psychiatrists to prescribe psychedelics for treatment-resistant depression. In the US, MDMA may be licensed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder by the end of the year, and Oregon and Colorado are planning to legalise the regulated use of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms.

Celia Morgan, a professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Exeter and a co-lead of the programme, said: “As the world wakes up to the potential for psychedelics to be an important part of the toolkit to treat some of our most damaging mental health conditions, it’s vital that we’re training the workforce to meet the demand. The global body of high-quality evidence is now irrefutable – psychedelics can work where other treatments have failed.”

Noting that the main barriers to their use were legal and structural rather than medical, she added: “I think this shows how far we have come from the fear and stigma that dogged this field for years, a change which we also see reflected in leading universities around the world conducting gold-standard clinical trials.

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Helping veterans, battling opioid addiction driving magic mushroom legislation progress

Forty lawmakers, 36 Democrats and 4 Republicans, have co-sponsored a bill aiming to allow for the medical use of psilocybin and a psilocybin therapy grant program, which is currently sitting at the committee level of the Assembly, with its Senate version also in committee. The Assembly bill, A03581, was introduced by Democrat Pat Burke in February. There has been other legislation introduced regarding the hallucinogen as well, with Linda Rosenthal’s version legalizing the adult possession and use of hallucinogens like it.

Research has shown that psilocybin, an organic psychedelic compound, can benefit people with cluster headaches, depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, ADHD and obsessive compulsive disorder, but it’s getting the most universal traction because of its impact on those suffering from PTSD.

“Psilocybin doesn’t have the huge appeal that marijuana had,” Democrat Assemblyman Phil Steck, who is the Assembly’s Chairman of the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Committee, says. “But, there are definitely people who make a strong case for the proposition that it helps with PTSD. Certainly we want to do everything that we can to help people that are coming back from war, and if psilocybin has proven to do that, then it should be legal for that purpose.”

Johns Hopkins University has conducted several studies on psilocybin, saying it has substantial antidepressant effects, but needs to be administered under carefully controlled conditions through trained clinicians and therapists.

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US could soon approve MDMA therapy — opening an era of psychedelic medicine

For Rick Doblin, 2023 could be a landmark year: the year that the US government decides whether it will allow the use of hallucinogenic drugs to treat mental illness.

Doblin, who is based in Belmont, Massachusetts, is the founder and president of the non-profit organization Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He has spent nearly 40 years researching whether the experience produced by the psychedelic drug MDMA — also called ecstasy or molly — can help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2021, MAPS’s phase III clinical trial of 90 people with PTSD found that those who received MDMA coupled with psychotherapy were twice as likely to recover from the condition as were those who received psychotherapy with a placebo1 (see ‘Response to MDMA therapy’).

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Celebrating The 80th Anniversary Of Bicycle Day: A Different Kind Of Trip

Every year, on April 19, an important anniversary rolls around that you may never have heard of. To those in the know, it’s called Bicycle Day, and it commemorates the first-ever intentional LSD trip. 

It all started when a Swiss chemist called Albert Hofmann had a very peculiar time while cycling home from the lab. Hofmann was the first person to synthesize LSD back in 1938. He did it by isolating chemical compounds found in a fungus called ergot, which infects grasses like rye and can have some profound effects on any humans unfortunate enough to accidentally consume it.

It’s safe to say that Hofmann didn’t think much of his discovery to begin with. What we now know as LSD was actually the 25th in a long line of similar compounds that he’d been experimenting with, and Hofmann’s research notes from the time reportedly reveal how no one was particularly enthused by it: “The new substance, however, aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians; testing was therefore discontinued.”

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NEVADA COMMITTEE TO VOTE ON BILL FOR RESEARCH, DECRIMINALIZATION OF PSILOCYBIN

Greg Rea had his first experience with psychedelics when he was 56 years old. Up until then, he’d been a Reno police officer on SWAT for 12 years before retiring from the force to become a pastor and then a real estate investor.

“I retired a couple years ago, but I still was a pretty tightly wound guy,” Rea tells the Weekly in a phone interview. “And I had a seven-days-a-week drinking problem.”

Rea says that despite having a “pretty good life,” like many first responders, alcohol use was adversely affecting him—until about three years ago, when a friend invited him to a group psychedelic experience.

During that experience, which comprised several sessions, a combination of psilocybin [the drug in “magic” mushrooms] and MDMA [aka ecstasy or Molly]took Rea back to two “fairly violent, critical incidents” in which he was involved as a SWAT officer. The intense, emotional trip led to a breakthrough, he says.

“I realized I had some form of PTSD connected to those things,” Rea says. “And I had no idea I’d carried it for almost 20 years.”

After group sessions with other first responders, he began to find a community to talk about mental health—“inner world things” that the wider community might misunderstand. “First responders are exposed to an inordinate amount of human suffering [that] the typical citizen isn’t. So, we said, why don’t we start our own group?”

In the group, firefighters, first responders and current and former military service members are opening up and “finding their healing with psychedelic medicine,” he says. “And I’m free from my seven-days-a-week alcohol habit. My life is just inordinately better. And my relationships are better.”

Rea was one of many who gave public comment during a March 23 hearing for Senate Bill 242 (SB242).

In his testimony, Assemblyman Max Carter said that his therapy with ketamine, the only drug currently legal for psychedelic therapy, has been “transformational” in his mental health and struggle with chronic depression.

“Psilocybin, studies show, is much more powerful. Where I’ve gone through eight or nine ketamine sessions, [it] probably would have been one or two [sessions], if psilocybin was legal,” Carter said, adding that, based on studies, the effects of psilocybin appear to be longer lasting than ketamine.

The bill would establish a framework for research of psilocybin in the state and, if passed as amended, decriminalize possession of the substance, currently listed as a Schedule 1 drug.

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Colorado steps off into the world of ‘magic mushrooms’

It is being hailed as everything from the beginning of a journey to the coming of a new industry, but for sure it’s a step toward legal consumption of “magic mushrooms” in Colorado. The involved event is merely a bureaucratic exercise — today’s first advisory board meeting will, over the next couple of years, move “magic mushrooms” into a legal and regulated space.

The mushrooms are usually eaten and are therefore considered a food safety issue by some. 

Psilocybin mushrooms are classified as an illegal Schedule I drug under federal law. Schedule I drugs include substances that are not recognized for medical use and that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) defines as having a high potential for abuse and dependence.

The 15-member advisory board appointed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is supposed to make an exception for Colorado. The Natural Medicine Advisory Board will advise Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) on the manufacturing, testing, and use of psilocybin and psilocin — the psychoactive compounds in “magic mushrooms.”

In November 2022, Colorado became the second state to legalize psilocybin by passage of a ballot measure. Oregon was the first in 2020. The City and County of Denver in 2021 also approved Ordinance 301 to decriminalize the use and possession in Denver of magic mushrooms.

The Denver ordinance deprioritizes, to the greatest extent possible, the imposition of criminal penalties on anyone 21 years of age and older for the personal use and personal possession of psilocybin mushrooms; and prohibits the city and county of Denver from spending resources on imposing criminal penalties on people 21 years of age and older for the personal use and personal possession of psilocybin mushroom.

Just as it did with recreational marijuana after the 2012 voter initiative, Colorado is clearing the path to make the use of “magic mushrooms” legal. The current schedule calls for the advisory board to make its first recommendations to DORA by Sept. 30, 2023, and DORA is supposed to adopt rules and begin licensing for the centers where mushroom use will be administered one year later by Sept. 30, 2024.

Also by Jan. 1, 2024, individuals who’ve gone through required training will become eligible for licenses.

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Psychedelic drugs were used by ancient man, new study shows

Researchers have found evidence of drug use during Bronze Age ceremonies.

Analysis of strands of human hair from a burial site on the Spanish island of Menorca indicates ancient human civilisations used hallucinogenic drugs derived from plants.

The findings are the first direct evidence of ancient drug use in Europe, which may have been used as part of ritualistic ceremonies, researchers say.

Researchers detected scopolamine, ephedrine and atropine in three replicated hair samples.

Atropine and scopolamine are naturally found in the nightshade plant family and can induce delirium, hallucinations and altered sensory perception.

Ephedrine is a stimulant derived from certain species of shrubs and pines which can increase excitement, alertness and physical activity.

Elisa Guerra-Doce, from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, and colleagues examined hair from the Es Carritx cave, which was first occupied around 3,600 years ago.

Writing in the Scientific Reports journal, the authors said: “Interestingly, the psychoactive substances detected in this study are not suitable for alleviating the pain involved in severe palaeopathological conditions attested in the population buried in the cave of Es Carritx, such as periapical abscesses, severe caries and arthropathies.

“Considering the potential toxicity of the alkaloids found in the hair, their handling, use and applications represented highly specialised knowledge. This knowledge was typically possessed by shamans, who were capable of controlling the side-effects of the plant drugs through an ecstasy that made diagnosis or divination possible.”

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Psychedelic drug improves symptoms of depression for six months, finds study

A psychedelic drug that gives trips lasting half an hour improves the symptoms of moderate to severe depression for up to six months, early trial results suggest.

Biotechnology company Small Pharma announced the results of its phase 2a clinical trials of the effects of a pharmaceutical-grade formulation of Dimethyltryptamine (SPL026) on major depressive disorder, simply referred to as depression.

The drug is a powerful hallucinogenic found in several plants and is the psychoactive compound found in ayahuasca, a compound used in shamanic rituals in South America.

In the study, 34 patients were given the drug during a clinical session with supportive therapy.

The individual sessions lasted less than two-and-a-half hours, and included a preparation session with a therapist, a psychedelic experience after administering the drug (where the therapist was present) lasting less than 30 minutes, and a therapy session to help patients process their trip.

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