Field Notes — The Alkaloid

Comic spread of a caller on a sofa and a headset-wearing listener at a laptop, joined by an amber line. Anonymous record cards overlap across the foreground.

Field Notes

Field Notes #15: What a Support Line Can Tell Us

A new database describes 25,419 Fireside peer-support interactions. It offers a view of help-seeking, not a league table of drug risk or proof that support works.

Comic illustration of a person sitting awake on a bed, looking toward a moonlit window. Moonlight crosses scattered papers beside a notebook with a cannabis-leaf motif.

Field Notes

Field Notes #14: Cannabis and Sleep, Still an Evidence Gap

Nine studies, 537 adults, and a very uncertain answer. A Cochrane review on cannabis for insomnia shows why feeling sleepy and treating insomnia need separate evidence.

Comic illustration of a participant with a shoulder bag and a clinic staff member reviewing a map with home, peer-group and office icons beside an open doorway leading to a tree-lined path.

Field Notes

Field Notes #13: When the Trial Ends

Four former psychedelic-trial participants describe life after the final visit. Their accounts raise questions about aftercare, with company involvement disclosed.

Comic illustration of newspapers beneath a blank speech balloon, beside a research notebook, a magnifying glass over a dot grid and response-card stacks of different heights.

Field Notes

Field Notes #12: Beyond the Breakthrough Headlines

A new US survey records health changes people attribute to five psychoactive drugs. Its small subgroups and different recall windows matter as much as the headlines.

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.

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.

Field Notes

Field Notes #7: Five Doors, One Room

Psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline, ayahuasca — five different molecules. A Nature Medicine mega-analysis of 267 people and 500+ brain scans found they all leave the same fingerprint: they don't quiet the brain, they connect it.

Two different wild mushrooms on a dark forest floor, each with a faint glowing path of light that curves up and meets at a single point between them.

Field Notes

Field Notes #6: Two Roads to the Same Molecule

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 single red-and-white Amanita muscaria mushroom on a dark, snow-dusted forest floor in low evening light.

Field Notes

Field Notes #5: The Animals That Get High on Purpose

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.

A dried psilocybin mushroom against a dark green background, with a faint molecular diagram and immune-cell illustrations behind it.

Field Notes

Field Notes #4: The Anti-Inflammatory Trip You Can't Feel

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.