Cannabis and psychedelic science coverage from The Alkaloid.
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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The DOJ just rescheduled medical cannabis to Schedule III after fifty-six years. Billions in tax relief, new research access, and zero relief for the people prohibition harmed most. What the April 22 order changed, and what it deliberately left untouched.
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For as long as cannabis has been cultivated, the leaves have been an afterthought — biomass, waste, compost. A team of analytical chemists at Stellenbosch University just identified 79 phenolic compounds in those leaves, 25 never reported before, including 16 rare flavoalkaloids.
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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.
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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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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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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.