Psychology

Medical researchers are steps from legalizing ecstasy. Here’s how they did it.

“Regulators, governments, health economists, health systems, insurers, health-care professionals, and—most importantly—patients,” said George Goldsmith, the former CEO of McKinsey & Company’s TomorrowLab, and an advocate for the kind of therapeutic innovation psychedelic researchers are hoping to achieve. “That’s the next community that actually needs to be engaged here.” For Doblin, it represents a life’s effort,…

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Psychology

Psychedelics and virtual reality make a trendy but illegal therapy

…eating psychedelic mushrooms to heighten or otherwise enhance… experience of virtual reality. “I think the use of VR to help cultivate a therapeutic setting could be quite valuable in the applications of psychedelic medicine,” Merete Christiansen, executive associate at MAPS, tells Inverse. Original Article (Leafly):Psychedelics and Virtual Reality Make a Trendy but Illegal TherapyArtwork Fair…

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Psychology

Live every day like you’re on mushrooms

According to Johnson, depression and addiction both involve a narrowing of vision—a tunnel that it takes a profound experience to suck someone out of. Psilocybin, he says, can foster something called cross-talk between regions of the brain that don’t normally communicate. Cross-talk, in turn, is associated with novel ways of looking at problems. They’re “dealing…

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Politics

The myth of the place where the war on drugs worked

*Agents destroying a[n] alcohol still in San Francisco during [alcohol] prohibition Most defenders of the drug war can name nowhere were it has succeeded, yet they insist it must be intensified nonetheless. It is true that if you construct a totalitarian police state, you can briefly reduce drug use – although the moment you relax…

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Science

A drug-by-drug guide to a rational UK drugs policy

“Using drugs can be a rational choice, a bad choice, or in cases of addiction, a very constrained choice. It is never a crime. Therefore, no criminal sanctions for drug possession and use.” -David Nutt of Drug Science But it can’t just be a free-for-all. Just because you’re not throwing drug users in prison doesn’t…

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Anthropology

Here is the full [Mexico legalization] Supreme Court ruling

When Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled… that consuming marijuana was constitutionally legal, it left the world shocked and somewhat confused … In a 4-1 vote … in Mexico City, the five-justice panel declared the personal recreational use of marijuana legal under the right of “free development of personality. In the same paragraph, however, the Court cautioned…

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