Psychedelic medicine, research, culture, and policy from The Alkaloid.
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Why do psychedelics produce such elaborate visual experiences? Neuroscientists at Ruhr-University Bochum have published the clearest answer the field has produced. The psychedelic visual experience is, literally, the brain dreaming while awake — 5-Hz oscillations gating memory.
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In a high mountain valley at 10,000 feet, archaeologists found 23 snuff tubes carrying residue of vilca, a DMT-bearing plant, used 2,800 years ago in hidden chambers at Chavín de Huántar. The findings complicate every popular framing of psychedelics as inherently liberatory.
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For nearly ninety years, one of psychedelic chemistry's great unsolved mysteries was hiding in plain sight. Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1938, searched morning glory plants for a fungus he was sure existed. A WVU undergraduate found it on a seed coat.
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Eleven million American adults used psilocybin in the past year — more than the populations of Pennsylvania or Illinois. Past-year use among adults 30 and over rose 188% in four years. It happened almost entirely without legal frameworks or medical infrastructure catching up.
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Why do psychedelics with different chemistries — psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline, ayahuasca — produce experiences described in such similar terms? An international consortium published the largest psychedelic brain imaging study ever. The answer rewrites the dominant theory.
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Trump's executive order on psychedelics is the most consequential federal policy shift in the field's history. It directs the FDA to fast-track psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA, allocates $50M for state research, and expands Right to Try — via the medical pathway, not scheduling reform.