Culture — The Alkaloid

Comic illustration linking an orange-fruited iboga shrub, a basket of roots, a shipping crate and a laboratory vial.

Field Notes

Field Notes #11: Who Gets Paid for the Root?

Gabon wants a share of the ibogaine boom. New reporting exposes the distance between paying for bark and sharing the value created afterward.

nk-and-watercolor illustration of a host welcoming a guest into a cannabis-friendly lounge, with an empty armchair and three adults playing a board game inside.

Field Notes

Field Notes #10: A Room of Their Own

Cannabis-friendly social spaces need more than a place to consume. St. Louis offers a look at the work of hosting.

Ink-and-watercolor illustration of three adults talking at an outdoor café at dusk, with sparkling water, beer and a can labeled THC on the table.

Field Notes

Field Notes #9: The New Social Drink

THC drinks borrow the rituals of a night out. Familiar packaging does not make the intoxicant familiar.

Ink-and-watercolor illustration of a singer, acoustic guitarist and cajón player on a warmly lit outdoor stage at dusk, with an audience and a cannabis-leaf banner.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #27: From the Parking Lot to the Poster

Cannabis gets an official place in the event program. What two upcoming events promise, and what a small music study can actually tell us.

An illustrated cannabis flower conducts six color-coded botanical orchestras—brass, strings, percussion, woodwinds, harps, and basses—beneath flowing scent ribbons, musical notes.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #26: The 227 Smells of Cannabis

A new cannabis genetics paper cataloged 227 volatile terpenes across six cultivars. The fun part is what those compounds reveal about flower, genes, and why your nose keeps finding more than a THC label can say.

A three-panel 1980s-style comic. In the first, three alarmed people haul on a rope to ring an enormous bell in a stone tower, with the sound effect BONGG. In the second, the word LEGALIZED in

newsletter

The Alkaloid #22: The Alarm That Didn't Ring

Past-month cannabis use among Minnesota teens fell from 13% to 5% across twelve years of steadily looser law, and the predicted spike never came. The decline also never reached Native, LGBTQ+ or low-income students, who were three times more likely to use in 2013 and still are today.

Three-panel comic: mushrooms growing on a log, the same mushrooms as products on a store shelf, and a giant mushroom-shaped cloud rising over climbing bar graphs.

Field Notes

Field Notes #8: The Other Mushroom Boom

While psychedelic mushrooms fight for legal status, their boring cousins quietly became a near-$85 billion wellness industry. What the science on lion's mane and reishi actually shows — and where the marketing gets ahead of it.

Three-panel comic strip: a peyote cactus in the desert, a brain in an MRI scanner with the cerebellum glowing, and that glow spreading connection lines across the brain.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #20: The Oldest Trip

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.

Early-90s comic strip: a spore jar labeled Natal Super Strength; a scientist startled by a phylogenetic tree; the same mushroom in an ancient grassland at dusk with grazing animals.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #19: The Strain That Was a Species

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.

Early-90s-style comic: a person in an eye mask amid swirling psychedelic colors, then the same person calmly taking a pill at a kitchen table, then a glowing neuron sprouting new branches.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #18: The Trip Is Optional

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.

"Set, snacks, and the brain circuit in between. (Illustration)"

newsletter

The Alkaloid #17: The Munchies, Decoded

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.

Early-90s-style comic: an older woman in an eye mask in a research lab, then her face amid a starlit redwood forest, then a brain drawn as a tree leafing out with sparks of light.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #16: The Grandparent Trip

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.