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The Alkaloid #31: The Leaf and the Label
Kratom leaf and concentrated 7-OH can share a name on the shelf without sharing a chemical profile. The distinction matters for safety, research and regulation.
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Every issue of The Alkaloid — the weekly independent newsletter on cannabis, psychedelics, and plant medicine.
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The Alkaloid #30: The Jobs Behind the Jar
Before a cannabis jar reaches the counter, someone grows, harvests and cures it. Massachusetts' repeal debate is also about those paychecks, the businesses behind them and the limits of promises about what comes next.
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The Alkaloid #29: The Right to Have It. Nowhere Legal to Buy It.
Massachusetts could preserve an adult's right to possess cannabis while closing recreational shops and ending home grows. Who benefits—and what would police be asked to do again?
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The Alkaloid #28: The Medicine Needs More Than a Molecule
The FDA is asking who delivers psychedelic care, how patients are protected, and who pays. The practical work extends well beyond the drug.
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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.
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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.
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The Alkaloid #25: The Deadline That Hasn't Moved
Everyone reported that the federal hemp ban slipped to December 11. It hasn't passed the House, and the delay is narrower than the coverage suggests: it turns on whether a molecule is capable of being naturally produced, not on how it was actually made. What that sorts, and what it strands.
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The Alkaloid #24: The Same Three Grams
Two clinical trials of lion's mane both gave subjects three grams a day. One of them used ten times more mushroom than the other. Seventeen years of research, seven small trials, and still no agreement on what a dose is. Plus Curaleaf goes hostile on Aurora, and Yale prices federal legalization.
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The Alkaloid #23: The Question It Was Asking
PsiDeR was built to answer whether the NHS could run a psilocybin trial at all. It could. The 12.92-point depression result everyone reported is a secondary outcome, and the researchers said so plainly. Their press office left that part out. Plus: the Senate blinks on hemp.
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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.
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The Alkaloid #21: The Honest Third
Researchers pooled 28 studies covering 937 CBD products and found just 31.3 percent contained what the label claimed. Topicals came in at 13.8 percent. Plus undisclosed THC, synthetic cannabinoids, heavy metals, and why the number on the box can be wrong in four different ways.
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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.