Field Notes — The Alkaloid

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.

A split image: a clinical glass vial and an IV needle on a cold sterile surface on the left, and a clay pot of dark ayahuasca brew surrounded by vines and candlelight on the right

Field Notes

Field Notes #3: The Molecule Without the Ceremony

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?

Vetoed legislation document stamped in red ink, with a gavel and cannabis leaf on a dark wooden desk

Field Notes

Field Notes #2: Five Years in the Gray Market

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.

Clusters of dark chokecherries on branches arranged above a glass petri dish filled with deep burgundy liquid, set on weathered dark wood. A moody, botanical still.

Plant Medicine

Field Notes #1: Chokecherries and Cancer Cells

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.