Don’t go thinking that ecstasy bought on the streets is good for you though, laboratory studies have shown that only pure MDMA has been proven sufficiently safe for human consumption when taken a limited number of times in moderate doses. After extensive research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now confirmed it’s…
One thing you probably don’t think of… [psychedelics] as is an anti-inflammatory medicine. Like aspirin or ibuprofen … It turns out, there may be reason to. The data is unequivocal if you’re a mouse, because the studies have already been conducted. And Dr. Charles Nichols is working on extending this research into humans. But…
At present, it’s difficult to treat PTSD with psychotherapy alone because often the underlying trauma is too difficult for people to relive with a therapist. But previous work suggests that MDMA helps get PTSD patients to a psychological state where they are comfortable working through those memories. In MAPS-sponsored phase II trial including 107 PTSD…
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…
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.…
Although psilocybin has long been regarded with suspicion by law enforcement [in some regions], it has been coming clean on the biosynthetic front. Details of psilocybin’s enzymatic synthesis have been uncovered by scientists based at the University of Jena and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. Starting with 4-hydroxy-L-tryptophan and using…
*BOTH Ayahuasca alkaloids, harmine and THH (Tetrahydroharmine), created increases in young neurons. THH increases pictured here. Researchers placed the most prevalent alkaloids in ayahuasca, harmine and tetrahydroharmine, in a petri dish with hippocampal stem cells and saw that this greatly increased the rate at which these cells were able to develop into fully mature neurons.…
One of the most surprising findings is the simplicity of the process, says David Sherman, a medicinal chemist at the University of Michigan who wasn’t involved in the paper. In only five steps, the mushroom’s enzymes convert tryptophan, a widely occurring amino acid (a building block of protein) into psilocybin. In a study published in…
Janis Fricke, Felix Blei, and Dirk Hoffmeister of Friedrich Schiller University Jena have identified and characterized to the greatest extent so far the four enzymes that the mushrooms use to make psilocybin. The team then developed the first enzymatic synthesis of the compound, setting the stage for its possible commercial production (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.…
Feilding’s study, to be run through the Beckley/Imperial Research Programme, is designed to have 20 participants take a dose of LSD at 10, 20, and 50 micrograms (a typical recreational dose is 100 micrograms) and also a placebo. Microdosing is the phenomenon of taking small, controlled doses of psychedelic drugs — usually just 1/20 to…
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