Psychology

Eating mushrooms isn’t [just] like smoking a joint

“Under legalization, you would have big companies not just making mushrooms available but aggressively marketing them to people, as we’re seeing with cannabis,” said Michael Pollan. Under decriminalization, Oakland police will now put enforcement down among its lowest priorities (which means it won’t be a priority at all), and the city is forbidden from prosecuting…

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Politics

The heady, thorny journey to decriminalize… [psilocybin containing] mushrooms

How quickly is the push to decriminalize psilocybin progressing, exactly? So quickly that it’s even surprised psychedelics advocates. “The fact that it’s happening so fast is kind of amazing,” says Brad Burge, spokesperson for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which leads studies of psychedelic therapies, including the aforementioned MDMA trial. “Here we have…

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Anthropology

Oregon House passes bill to transport cannabis across State lines

It’s a very strong statement by the Oregon Legislature that will reverberate across the country. “There are serious environmental, patient access, public safety, regulatory compliance, economic and social justice issues that would be solved or ameliorated by allowing interstate commerce in cannabis.  This issue is important to us all.” Original Article (OPB and Adam Smith):Oregon House…

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Medicine/Healing

CBD shows some potential for treating opioid addiction

This anti-addictive effect lasted for a week after the CBD was administered. A study in rats published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that CBD decreased heroin cravings in rats that had previously been trained to self-administer heroin. And a small study conducted in humans, published in the journal Neurotherapeutics, showed that taking CBD seemed…

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Biography/Memoir

Pushes to make it easier to study [psilocybin-containing] mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs

Legislation [was introduced] on Friday, June 10, 2019 to remove a legal barrier that scientists say makes it unnecessarily difficult for them to study the medical benefits of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and MDMA. “Academics and scientists report that provisions like this create [stigma] and insurmountable logistical hurdles to researching schedule I drugs,” the summary…

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Psychology

[Is it]… time to legalize psilocybin mushrooms?

While… [some] initiatives, including the “medicalization”… are an important step in the right direction… it is time to go further. In contrast to “legalization,” “decriminalization” involves the loosening of criminal penalties… [for the use of the natural variety found in over one hundred species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms that grow worldwide] and, as in the case…

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Psychology

They broke my mental shackles’: could magic mushrooms be the answer to depression?

If common antidepressants dull emotions to help people cope… psilocybin [containing mushrooms] work… on our serotonin system to heighten emotional responses and encourage people to actively confront their depression, which can prompt enduring shifts in mind-set. Much about the neuroscience of psychedelics remains unknown, but fMRI scans of patients’ brains after taking psilocybin showed reduced…

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Science

Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’

Electric cars and power tools could harness this hemp technology, the US researchers say. The waste fibres from hemp crops can be transformed into high-performance energy storage devices, scientists say. They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard. Original Article…

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Biography/Memoir

Leading U.S. prosecutors visit Portugal to learn about drug decriminalization

Twenty prosecutors from major cities across the U.S. are touring Portugal this month to learn about the successful implementation of the country’s drug decriminalization law. In Portugal, where all drugs were decriminalized in 2001, the prosecutors will observe the impacts of that nationwide policy, which according to research has reduced incarceration rates and improved public health…

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