Science

Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation

A recent open-label pilot study (N = 15) found that two to three moderate to high doses (20 and 30 mg/70 kg) of the serotonin 2A receptor agonist, psilocybin, in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for smoking cessation, resulted in substantially higher 6-month smoking abstinence rates than are typically observed with other medications or…

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Psychology

People who have taken psychedelics are more likely to be environmentally friendly

*Cascadia wildfires of Summer 2017 ​ Psychologists from Yale University and the University of Innsbruck in Austria asked 1,487 people about their experience with psychedelics and other hallucinogens. However, the relationship between taking psychedelics and being green is only a correlation and the eco-friendly behaviors in the study were all self-reported. This begs the question:…

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Politics

What can Australia [and the world] learn from Portugal’s approach to drugs?

*China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore —routinely execute drug offenders. An Australian politician has called for the decriminalisation of drugs in the Northern Territory, which has already decriminalised cannabis, after witnessing the successes of Portugal’s drug policy. Jeff Collins, the Assistant Minister for Police, Fire and Emergency Services in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT),…

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Medicine/Healing

Your new anti-depression medication: LSD

This study is particularly interesting in that it investigates the role of the human brain’s default-mode network in mental time travel. As it turns out, those of us with an active DMN are more likely to reflect on the past and hence wax romantic about what is not present, a reliable marker of depressed states.…

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Politics

Psychedelics can treat depression: why outlawing psychedelics is the worst censorship of medicine in human history

stereotypical SSRI ​ Dennis argues that today’s most common antidepressant medications—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—are a kind of “Band-Aid solution.” He describes how psychedelics (or, “ecodelics“) can be used as an alternative treatmentfor depression and discusses why the pharmaceutical industry may not want psychedelic medicines to become a viable option for people suffering from conditions…

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Science

Of molecules and minds: the science of ayahuasca

We’ve talked about serotonin receptors like they’re all mostly the same and broadly, that’s true (they’re all looking for serotonin, after all). But that doesn’t make them identical, and scientists have found enough differences to classify serotonin receptors into seven types, which are then broken down into 17 subtypes with a wide variety of functions.…

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Modern Culture

Can 9/20 become the 4/20 of magic mushrooms?

*Gastón Guzmán Huerta (August 26, 1932 – January 12, 2016), a Mexican mycologist and anthropologist, was an authority on the genus Psilocybe. Unlike 4/20, 9/20 events aren’t intended as gatherings for people to get high together. Instead, they’re mostly lectures, salons, or meetups that prioritize the goals of research and policy rather than the joys…

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