Science

Drug testing: dramatic drop in bath salts being sold as MDMA

In a statement, Police National Drug Intelligence Bureau Manager Blair Macdonald said he was pleased with how this summer’s festival season had taken shape. …the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Act, which was passed by Parliament in November 2021, has created a safer environment for people to get their drugs checked before they choose to…

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Science

…patent challenge targets crystallography errors

In the paper, the authors highlight errors they discovered in the patent granted to COMPASS Pathways… COMPASS fell victim to that problem by not distinguishing between different crystalline forms. In other words, COMPASS fell victim to the problem it claimed to solve. The Petition claims that COMPASS Pathways never reported the crystal structure for its…

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Science

…open science approach to… MDMA [& psilocybin]

Instead of holding on tightly to trade secrets… MAPS paper… read as a step-by-step production recipe, the study maps out how MDMA with a purity of 99.4% can be made from non-controlled substances… describes a process of making MDMA according to “current Good Manufacturing Processes” (cGMP), with the end product being 30.000 (167mg) individual doses……

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Science

Now psychedelics are coming to your medicine cabinet

Adding psychedelics to mainstream drugs may seem a bit “out there,” but in fact it’s on trend… Synthetic versions of psychedelic substances are easier to manufacture uniformly according to industry standards, but they may not work as well as natural versions. “We believe there’s a big difference between biological and synthetic molecules, especially in how…

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Science

Magic mushrooms study suggest psilocybin may reverse alcohol-induced brain damage

The consumption of alcoholic beverages is responsible for 5.3 percent of deaths worldwide every year… in both groups of mice that received psilocybin, mGluR2 expression was restored following the treatment. This change was evident in the mice’s behavior, too: The psilocybin group relapsed roughly 45 percent less compared to the control mice. As hypothesized, mGluR2 expression was reduced in the brains…

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Psychedelic psilocybin cuts cravings and boosts key brain functions in rat models of alcohol use disorder

…set out to see whether psilocybin could restore the receptor’s expression and tamp down the desire to seek out alcohol while also restoring flexibility in cognition. The researchers gave the rats one of two different doses of psilocybin to see whether the magic mushroom ingredient was effective at reducing relapses. They found that both doses…

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Science

Safe consumption sites are opening in New York city

…people will be able to obtain sterile syringes and other safer-use supplies, access treatment options and other services, and bring their own drugs to use, with trained staff and naloxone on hand. “This is a watershed milestone in the fight to end overdose deaths in New York,” Melissa Moore, the director of civil systems reform…

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New study suggests SSRI drugs can be used safely with psilocybin to treat depression

For the study, participants either received 10mg of escitalopram daily for seven days followed by 20mg daily for the next seven days, including the day of psilocybin administration, or 14 days of placebo pre-treatment before psilocybin administration.  The researchers found that pre-treatment with escitalopram did not alter the pharmacokinetics of psilocin — the active compound that the…

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…microdosing trials show promise

…successfully obtained government approvals for a doctor to prescribe… to patients to take… unsupervised in the community… …data collected from 80 participants from over the course of 12 months and 1,102 microdoses. The daily questionnaire showed credible evidence of increased ratings from participants in energy, wellness, creativity, happiness and connectedness on the dose days… the…

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Science

The most common pain relief drug in the world induces risky behavior, study finds

Despite the seriousness of those findings, acetaminophen nonetheless remains one of the most used medications in the world, considered an essential medicine by the World Health Organization, and recommended by the CDC for pain relief at home… the findings are reported in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. “Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they…

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