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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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On November 12, 2026, the federal government will effectively ban most hemp-derived THC products — delta-8 gummies, THCA flower, HHC vapes. Buried in the shutdown spending bill, the provision affects 95% of products on the market. Seven months to adapt.
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Trump's executive order on psychedelics is the most consequential federal policy shift in the field's history. It directs the FDA to fast-track psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA, allocates $50M for state research, and expands Right to Try — via the medical pathway, not scheduling reform.