Modern Culture

People have a right to use LSD and magic mushrooms

“Scientists in medicine and health have a responsibility to inform the public when drug regulations are not based on science, especially if they violate human rights…” “In the same way that climate researchers have a responsibility to discuss environmental policy, scientists in medicine and health have a responsibility to inform the public when drug regulations…

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Biography/Memoir

LSD Archive Has Been on a Long, Strange Trip

Roger Liggenstorfer, a friend of Dr. Hofmann’s, says the late chemist wanted researchers flocking to his archive. The current situation is “not really the wish of Albert,” he says. ​The archive’s tortuous path, from Switzerland to Los Angeles, to the suburbs of San Francisco, and then back to Europe for an anticlimactic ending, reflects the…

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Science

The Peace Drug

Bilmes, who has studied the ongoing costs of the wars, estimates that treating Iraq vets with PTSD over the next 50 years will cost taxpayers $100 billion. Vets with PTSD are particularly costly to the [Veterans Affairs] system,” says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They constitute 8…

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Politics

Taking Control: Pathways to Drug Policies that Work

The obstacles to drug policy reform are both daunting and diverse. Powerful and established drug control bureaucracies, both national and international, staunchly defend status quo policies. They seldom question whether their involvement and tactics in enforcing drug policy are doing more harm than good. Meanwhile, there is often a tendency to sensationalize each new “drug…

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Medicine/Healing

LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

The new publication marks the latest in a series of baby steps by a loose coalition of researchers and fund-raisers who are working to bring hallucinogens back into the fold of mainstream psychiatry. ​Before research was effectively banned in 1966 in the United States, doctors tested LSD’s effect for a variety of conditions, including end-of-life…

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Psychology

So what happens when teen pot smokers get older?

“There were no differences in any of the mental or physical health outcomes that we measured regardless of the amount or frequency of marijuana used during adolescence.” After tracking more than 400 men from their teenage years to their mid-30s, the scientists say chronic marijuana use does not lead to later physical and mental health…

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