Psychedelic medicine, research, culture, and policy from The Alkaloid.
Field Notes
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Field Notes
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?
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A lab in Israel engineered one tobacco plant to make psilocybin, DMT, bufotenin, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin at once. The molecules just left the mushroom and the toad behind. What that means for cost, supply, and a drug law written when the drug and its source were the same thing.
Field Notes
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.
Field Notes
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.
Field Notes
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?
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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.