“What we do know is that psychedelics have a fundamentally different effect on the brain than highly addictive drugs like alcohol, nicotine, or cocaine.” Cocaine, for example, is thought to elicit a deep, euphoric sensation by temporarily flooding the brain’s reward and motivation centers, which in some people can trigger a cycle of reinforcement and…
“A scientific study in New Zealand has completed trials with the goal of proving that tinnitus, a condition characterized by uncontrollable ringing in the ears, can be cured using MDMA, a common rave and party drug.” Researchers began the study almost two years ago with a limited amount of participants who were placed in small…
“The machine can reveal the quality of the drug and if it’s laced with other substances. The new machines can provide results within minutes and tell users what they would be consuming… Just as important, the public health unit would be able to quickly send out warnings about bad drugs on the streets based on…
‘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…
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…
“In a new paper published in the journal Trends in Neuroscience, a neurobiologist argues that using cannabis for opioid withdrawal and pain relief is a promising area of research that has been largely neglected in the scientific community. And in light of the current opioid epidemic and positive early trials of cannabis, this needs to…
“Research at the University of Wisconsin has recently demonstrated the presence of the DMT-synthesizing enzyme as well as activity of the gene responsible for the enzyme in pineal (and retina). Our new data now establish that the enzyme actively produces DMT in the pineal.” The next step is to determine the presence of DMT in…
“Coffee culture and crack culture follow from the drugs’ effects — one drinks coffee in the morning because it is a stimulant and one becomes homeless and crazy while smoking crack because it is horribly addictive. However, particularly when crafting policy, one must tease out the difference between the culture and the drug…Good science cannot…
“By freezing an LSD molecule bound to a single brain cell receptor as a crystal in a lab, researchers were able to get a 3-D x-ray image of the drug and the protein locked together…It is the first 3-D image of a psychedelic bound to a brain receptor, Roth says.” “My lab has been trying…
“Some research has suggested that opioid use decreased in some states after those states legalized medical marijuana, according to Hurd.” In her review, Hurd looked at previous animal and human studies examining the potential of one particular marijuana compound — called cannabidiol, or CBD — for treating opioid addiction. For example, a study in rats…
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