Politics

Oregon moves to protect marijuana buyers’ personal info

The committee that crafts Oregon’s pot policies has proposed legislation that requires marijuana businesses to destroy customers’ personal information, such as names, addresses and birth dates, gathered for marketing purposes, within 48 hours. ​ The measure is scheduled for its first hearing Tuesday. It must pass the full Legislature and be signed by the Democratic…

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Science

What LSD tells us about human nature

‘The Higgs boson of neuroscience’… Not all drugs are created equal, and I would never encourage anyone to soothe their existential discomfort with heroin or amphetamine, both of which I have taken. But psychedelics have a value I can’t help but admire. And now we understand more about how they do what they do. A…

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Psychology

Evidence of altered consciousness when using psychedelic drugs

Evidence that psychedelic drugs may offer some benefit has caused some psychiatrists to call for a reclassification of the drugs. A reclassification would make it easier to research potential benefits of these drugs. The role of psychedelic drugs in mental health, and especially in mental health treatment, continues to be controversial. Previous research suggests some…

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Psychology

People use drugs…

During… [the] tragic opioid crisis, many have written some variation of the sentence, “The war on drugs has failed.” It’s true. Decriminalizing drug use is required to solve this problem. But accompanying a policy shift will need to be a major attitude adjustment, including among us bleeding hearts…. In other words, our imposition of “help”…

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Anthropology

The link between drug policy and access to medicines

Harmful drug use is certainly a public health problem, but in many countries, drug control policies lean too heavily towards limiting access to medicines for which patients have a legitimate and urgent need. Drug policy can undermine research that could uncover the medical value of many substances. For example, cannabis and related compounds known as…

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Biography/Memoir

Meet the people’s champion for psychedelic drugs

“It’s only in recent years that studying the positive effects of psychedelics has gained traction in mainstream media after several well-known studies emerged following a decades’ long ban of its use in labs and clinical trials since 1970.” “He’s been one of the most intelligent champions for psychedelics as medicine,” says Alex Grey, a visionary…

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Modern Culture

…the war on weed culture

*Blue: LegalOrange: Illegal but decriminalizedPink: Illegal but often unenforcedRed: IllegalGrey: No information “It is widely regarded that the opioid crisis was spurred by big pharmaceutical companies that liberally prescribed the addictive drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin, not marijuana consumers.” A 2014 report from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that in states…

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Science

Psychedelic drugs might actually tap into a higher power

Just this month, scientists applied cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to find out what exactly LSD does to the human brain, in hopes that research on the drug will regain credence in the scientific community that Hofmann himself proudly represented. The stigma leftover from the 1960s remains hard to shake, but LSD has slowly been undergoing a…

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