The study referenced material dating back as far as the 1950’s and accumulates six major psychedelic studies done in the 20th century. It found that, of the 536 participants, throughout all the studies, 59 percent of them showed “reliable improvements” in their drinking up to six months after testing. This, compared to a 38 percent…
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…
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.…
The ‘goal’ of pharmaceutical anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications is to inhibit brain activity that leads to negativity and fear. Unfortunately, these medications really only serve as a band-aid and sadly, can even amplify the problem if someone is to become dependent and then abstain. Researchers at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Zurich have looked into…
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