Humans have used peyote for 5,700 years, yet mescaline is the psychedelic neuroscience knows least. A new Northeastern brain scan shows the oldest trip has a signature all its own — and Big Pharma just bet up to $3.8B on its molecular cousins.
For years, home growers prized a potent magic mushroom called Natal Super Strength. Nobody had ever named it. New DNA work shows it is a separate species, and its family tree pushes the origins of the world's favorite psychedelic mushroom back more than a million years.
What if the trip was never the point? A new class of compounds promises the brain-rewiring of psychedelics without the hallucination, and the first non-tripping antidepressant is heading for trials you can run from your own couch.
Scientists finally caught the munchies in the act. A new study shows cannabis turns up the brain's reward for food, spikes the hunger hormone, and sharpens taste. The same circuit could feed people who can't eat.
Psychedelic science spent sixty years studying the young. A new UC Berkeley study finally hands the eye mask to people between 60 and 85 — and asks whether an old brain can still change its mind.
Psilocybin makes a magic mushroom magic. A new study shows two unrelated mushroom groups evolved it separately, by completely different chemical routes that meet only near the finish. Which raises the question decades of human fascination still can't answer: what is psilocybin actually for?
A lab in Israel engineered one tobacco plant to make psilocybin, DMT, bufotenin, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin at once. The molecules just left the mushroom and the toad behind. What that means for cost, supply, and a drug law written when the drug and its source were the same thing.
Jaguars roll in the ayahuasca vine. Reindeer hunt psychedelic mushrooms in the snow. Wallabies leave crop circles in Tasmania's poppy fields. The urge to get high isn't uniquely human — one researcher called it a fourth drive, as deep as hunger and thirst.
Last fall Congress redefined hemp and capped legal products at 0.4 milligrams of THC. The rule erases an estimated 95 percent of the market by November. Now the same White House that signed it is asking Congress to carve out an exception before the deadline it created.
The FDA lost its commissioner in May. Four weeks from now, the agency is supposed to help decide whether all marijuana moves to Schedule III. The most powerful job in American drug policy is being done by a caretaker, and almost nobody is talking about it.
People are searching for "microdose therapy for chronic inflammation" and finding wellness sites that promise more than the science can back. Psychedelics show real anti-inflammatory promise in the lab. Whether a microdose delivers it in a human body is a different, much shakier question.
A London lab gave 34 depressed people a single IV dose of DMT, the compound in ayahuasca, and saw depression scores fall for up to six months. No ceremony, no all-night vigil, no nausea. Just the molecule. Which raises a question the trial can't answer: how much was ever the chemical alone?
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In April, the DOJ rescheduled medical cannabis to Schedule III — handing operators billions in tax relief. It opened zero prison cells. Now 29 members of Congress want Trump to commute the sentences of roughly 3,000 people still serving federal time for a drug the government just reclassified.
Field Notes
Virginia just vetoed the bill that would have launched legal cannabis sales. The political story is small. The larger one — five years of legal possession without legal sales has produced the country's most documented case of what gray markets actually cost.
Plant Medicine
A Shoshone and Paiute student named Destany Pete tested her tribe's traditional chokecherry pudding against uterine sarcoma cancer cells — and only the traditional preparation worked. The science is preliminary. The story is worth understanding.
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The DOJ just rescheduled medical cannabis to Schedule III after fifty-six years. Billions in tax relief, new research access, and zero relief for the people prohibition harmed most. What the April 22 order changed, and what it deliberately left untouched.
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For as long as cannabis has been cultivated, the leaves have been an afterthought — biomass, waste, compost. A team of analytical chemists at Stellenbosch University just identified 79 phenolic compounds in those leaves, 25 never reported before, including 16 rare flavoalkaloids.
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A quiet line of psychedelic research has almost nothing to do with depression or expanded consciousness. Psychedelics may turn out to be among the most promising anti-inflammatory medicines developed in decades — working at doses far below those that are psychoactive.
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Walk into a high-end dispensary in Brooklyn, Toronto, or West Hollywood and try to find a marijuana leaf on the wall. You probably won't. Cannabis legalization has produced something almost no one predicted — a design renaissance. What gets left out is its own kind of statement.
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Why do psychedelics produce such elaborate visual experiences? Neuroscientists at Ruhr-University Bochum have published the clearest answer the field has produced. The psychedelic visual experience is, literally, the brain dreaming while awake — 5-Hz oscillations gating memory.
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In a high mountain valley at 10,000 feet, archaeologists found 23 snuff tubes carrying residue of vilca, a DMT-bearing plant, used 2,800 years ago in hidden chambers at Chavín de Huántar. The findings complicate every popular framing of psychedelics as inherently liberatory.
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For nearly ninety years, one of psychedelic chemistry's great unsolved mysteries was hiding in plain sight. Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1938, searched morning glory plants for a fungus he was sure existed. A WVU undergraduate found it on a seed coat.
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Eleven million American adults used psilocybin in the past year — more than the populations of Pennsylvania or Illinois. Past-year use among adults 30 and over rose 188% in four years. It happened almost entirely without legal frameworks or medical infrastructure catching up.
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Why do psychedelics with different chemistries — psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline, ayahuasca — produce experiences described in such similar terms? An international consortium published the largest psychedelic brain imaging study ever. The answer rewrites the dominant theory.