Category Archives: Psychedelics

Retired MMA fighters Ian McCall and Dean Lister (from left to right, top right corner) attended a ... [+] plant medicine ceremony where they drank tea containing up to five grams of magic mushrooms, in this still image from a recent segment of HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

A segment on a recent episode of HBOs Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel begins with former NHL player Daniel Carcillo describing his plan to kill himself. Hes one of four athletes in the episode who after retiring from full-contact sports had been both physically and mentally traumatized by the long-term effects of repeated concussions, and has now found relief with psychedelics.

Carcillo, former NFL player Kerry Rhodes, and former UFC fighters Ian McCall and Dean Lister are part of a growing movement of people using plant medicines like ayahuasca and magic mushrooms to help heal post-traumatic stress disorder and the symptoms of brain trauma.

On the outside, it seemed like Carcillo, a two-time Stanley Cup winner had it all: a wife and children, a comfortable home, and a successful career in the worlds premiere professional hockey league. But truthfully, Carcillowhose on-ice reputation earned him the nickname car bombtold correspondent David Scott hed never felt more dead inside.

Pierre-Edouard Bellemare of the Philadelphia Flyers fights with Daniel Carcillo of the Chicago ... [+] Blackhawks on March 25, 2015 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Carcillo earned the nickname "car bomb" for his tendency to get in fights.

Depression is just one of multiple symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a condition of the brain that is associated with repeated blows to the head. Other symptoms include memory loss, confusion, personality changes, and erratic behavior. A definitive diagnosis can only be made in an autopsy, but a 2017 study showed CTE was found in 99 percent of former NFL players and 91 percent of college football players studied.

Diagnosed with seven concussions throughout his 12-year professional hockey career Carcillo says he likely experienced hundreds more, and went down multiple avenues trying to improve his mental health. After trying psychotherapy and different SSRIs, he opted for something outside Western medicines realm of treatment: ayahuasca, a South American brew revered by Indigenous cultures as a powerful medicine and containing the psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

Im just trying to look for more peace of mind, less suffering, he says to the cameras from the Peruvian jungle before attending the ceremony. Four hours later, he emerges feeling changed, and calls it the most amazing experience of his life.

Months later when HBOs production team visits Carcillo, he says hes experiencing little to no depression and anxiety, while symptoms including slurred speech, headaches, head pressure, memory issues, concentration, and insomniaare all completely gone.

I didnt see him smile for years, says his wife, Ela. With her husband still symptom-free after five months, she asks Scott, how can you not believe this stuff works?

While the results of Carcillos experience are truly astonishing, Scott says its the way these experiences pair up with existing clinical research that truly makes the story.

Bilal Powell of the New York Jets is tackled by Kerry Rhodes of the Arizona Cardinals on December 2, ... [+] 2012. Rhodes, now retired, experienced many concussions throughout his career and went to Costa Rica to drink ayahuasca to help overcome the symptoms of brain trauma.

Athletes started emerging as potential patients who could benefit from these therapies, he says by phone from the Bronx. Their experience lines up with emerging science. For treatment-resistance depression and PTSD, these drugs can provide relief for a lot of people. Maybe not for everyone, and maybe its not going to fix everything, but better is better, and these guys hadnt found better in anything else.

Whats more, Scott suggests that had the federal government not shut down psychedelic research, which was in full swing before the war on drugs began, generations of people suffering from depression, addiction, and trauma could have been helped.

The segment directed by Jordan Kronick also features psychedelic researcher Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris of the Imperial College London. He says a single dose of psilocybin has been shown to produce enduring results in patients suffering from a multitude of conditions that run the gamut, from depression and anxiety to obsessive compulsive disorder and more.

When former NFL player Rhodes is featured, he gets emotional when recalling his first ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica. Like Carcillo, Rhodes says the experience changed him, eliminating his headaches and pain, bringing back his memory, and even removing his fear around CTE, leading to huge improvements in quality of life.

I hear stories like that a lot, but Im not surprised because thats how these drugs have been used for thousands of years, says Rick Doblin, the founder of the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. Doblin describes what happened in America after the U.S. government shut down psychedelic research as an incredible exercise in cultural amnesia, and advocates for increased study of psychedelics through his organization.

McCall fought in the UFC and other professional MMA leagues for 15 years before finally tapping out. Injury after injury had left him snorting opiate painkillers including fentanyl on a regular basis, turning him into a self-described monster. Experimenting with psychedelics, he says, helped cure him of his addiction and suicidal thoughts.

Yushin Okami (white shorts) on the offensive against Dean Lister (grey/blue shorts) during UFC 92 at ... [+] MGM Grand Garden Arena on December 27, 2008. Lister, revered among grapplers as the godfather of modern leg locks, was defeated in what ended up being his last fight in the UFC.

Today, he is committed to helping improve the mental health of other former fighters by showing them how life-altering regular group experiences with psychedelic medicines can be.

Fighters are good people, McCall says, but theyre tormented. The Real Sports segment takes viewers inside a private ceremony in which a group of fighters including grappler and former UFC star Lister are guided through a psilocybin trip by a shaman.

Like any longtime mixed martial artist, Lister has experienced his fair share of head trauma, and describes the symptoms associated with repeated concussions like being stuck in a prison cell in your own mind. Before taking five grams of mushrooms (with McCall seated to his right), Lister was struggling with alcoholism, drinking up to 20 beers a day and taking Xanax every night.

During the deep journey (the only kind afforded to anyone who consumes five grams, or a heros dose, at one time) Lester experiences the kind of near-death hallucination only psychedelic travellers will be familiar with, and says to himself, If I wake up, Im going to do things different. Since the experience, hes steered clear of all drugs and alcohol.

Its so common with psychedelics, that sense of something really serious happening, maybe even death, says Carhart-Harris. The way it turns around, where people realize, oh, Im not actually dyingthats where the shift happens. Its like survivor euphoria: oh, I do have that second chance.

Continue reading here:

These Four Former Pro Athletes Are Using Psychedelics To Heal Their Brain Injuries - Forbes

When Rick Doblin was in his early 20s, he had a dream in which he was escorted back in time to witness a Holocaust survivors narrow escape from the Nazis.

In his mind, Doblin traveled to Eastern Europe to witness thousands of Jews lined up alongside a mass grave as the gunners open fire, toppling the bodies into the earth. The man spends three days alive underground before emerging and fleeing to the woods, where he survives the war in hiding.

The man then tells Doblin that he survived this horror only to deliver a message that Doblin should devote his life to promoting psychedelics as a cure for human ills and an insurance policy against another Holocaust. Then he expires.

Doblin took the advice to heart. For much of the next four decades, he waged an often frustrating battle to get public health authorities to recognize the value of psychedelics, the perception-shifting compounds popularized in the 1960s that have been a source of both fear and fascination ever since.

Ive always felt that the response to the Holocaust is helping people realize our common humanity, Doblin said. And that there are many ways to do that, and psychedelic mystical experiences are one of the ways. And so I felt like what Im doing is to try to prevent another Holocaust and that thats the deepest motivation.

In the United States, research on these chemicals has been banned since the 1960s because, in the governments judgment, they have no recognized medical value and a high potential for abuse. But a growing body of research has shown their efficacy for a range of mental illnesses that have proven resistant to other treatments, including post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, depression and anxiety. Research underway at Johns Hopkins and New York University is also investigating whether psychedelics can be of use in a wider array of applications, including one study on whether the drugs can induce spiritual experiences among religious clergy.

Doblin has funded some of this research as the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit he runs from his home here in suburban Boston. And after years of effort and $100 million raised, he now stands on the cusp of a major victory.

In late October, Doblin received preliminary results from a MAPS-funded phase 3 study of the effects of MDMA better known as the club drug Ecstasy on PTSD. Phase 3 trials are typically the final hurdle before the Food and Drug Administration authorizes a drug for public use. Those preliminary results showed MDMA surpassed the FDAs threshold for statistical significance in treating PTSD.

A formal scientific paper is due early next year and Doblin expects government authorization for prescription use will eventually follow. If it does, it would be the first time the federal government has ever approved a psychedelic to assist in psychotherapy.

Its enormously satisfying because it was something that Ive basically been devoted to for the last 48 years, Doblin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It was just ecstatic, you could say.

Legalization of medical MDMA would represent the culmination of a journey that Doblin often traces back to his bar mitzvah.

Born in Chicago in 1953, Doblin was raised in suburban Skokie, a heavily Jewish area home to a large number of Holocaust survivors. The family later moved to Winnetka, an affluent suburb where they lived in a house designed by an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright that had a tree growing in the middle of it. His father, Morton, was a pediatrician and his mother, Arline, a schoolteacher.

I grew up thinking the whole world was Jewish, Doblin said. That was my education. All my parents friends were Jewish. The neighbors were all Jewish. We went to temple. Youre a little kid, you think your whole world is the universe.

Though his family had arrived in America before the war, the Holocaust loomed large in Doblins childhood imagination. The irrational hatred, the othering of minorities and the potentially lethal consequences terrified him. Psychedelics offered him a way to turn that fear into something useful.

It also showed him a way to invigorate his inner life in a way that Judaism had failed to, a fact that came home to him in dramatic fashion as he lay in bed the morning after his bar mitzvah and was disappointed to discover nothing had changed. This rite of passage that Jewish boys had undergone for centuries had failed to turn him into a man.

I just felt like my bar mitzvah was a massively disappointing rite of passage that didnt engage me at the levels that I needed to be engaged in, that I was hungry for, he said. So four years later, when I first started taking LSD, I was like, this is what my bar mitzvah should have done. This is engaging me at the existential, spiritual, emotional levels that really can produce a rite of passage, that this is what I was missing.

Doblin enrolled at New College in Sarasota, Florida, then an experimental school that he recalls as a four-year bacchanal where students lounged poolside in the nude by day and danced all night under the influence of psychedelics. It took him 16 years to earn his degree.

He first tried LSD in his freshman year. And though the effects were not the full-blown mystical experience many report under the drugs influence, it was enough to convince him that this chemical synthesized in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 held enormous potential for human transformation.

In the first, Id say, 10 LSD trips, what they were doing for me was putting me in touch with my emotions and also helping me think more about kind of this inner energy, and also these intimations of connectivity with the history of evolution, with other people, with nature, he said.

At the time, a community of psychedelic enthusiasts, driven underground by the governments ban on LSD research, was quietly developing methods to harness the drugs power for psychic healing and spiritual growth. Doblin fell in with this crowd, which included Dr. Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychiatrist who had done some of the earliest research with LSD.

As Doblin pursued his ambition of becoming a psychedelic therapist, he undertook various passion projects in Florida, including building a handball court for the college and starting a construction business. In Sarasota, he lived in a fanciful cedar house he built himself as a venue for tripping, including a massage room, a soaring 20-foot ceiling, stained glass panels, floors made of river gravel but no television.

TV, Doblin told the Miami Herald in 1985, causes brain damage.

By the mid-1980s, Doblin had become a nationally recognized evangelist for MDMA, then just emerging into the public consciousness as a trendy new club drug. Around that time, at the urging of a top U.N. official with whom he shared the belief that a global spiritual awakening was the key to world peace, Doblin sent an MDMA sample to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the New Age rabbi and father of the Jewish Renewal movement.

Schachter-Shalomi was famously interested in psychedelics, having done LSD with Timothy Leary in the 1960s and reporting on the experience to his colleagues. Helater told The Washington Post, anonymously, that MDMA was a delight akin to the Jewish Sabbath. Doblin wound up visiting Schachter-Shalomis Philadelphia synagogue several years later, where he attended Yom Kippur services under the influence of MDMA.

It was amazing, Doblin said. It really opened my heart. MDMA and Yom Kippur go together great.

Doblin established MAPS in 1986, the year after the Drug Enforcement Administration declared MDMA a Schedule I narcotic, the governments most restrictive designation. For most of the next three decades, Doblin waged what seemed at times like a hopeless battle to pry open the door to psychedelic research, even earning a doctorate from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to get the skills to confront the government bureaucracy.

He found particularly fertile ground for these efforts in Israel, where he has extensive family ties and where decades of war and terrorism had made PTSD an urgent public health concern. (His great-grandparents house is aTel Aviv landmarkthat is now home to the Heseg Foundation.) MAPS held a conference by the Dead Sea in 1999 in an attempt to push Israeli regulators to approve a study of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. Among the attendees was Raphael Mechoulam, the legendary Israeli researcher best known for identifying THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Israel later became the first country in the world to approve a compassionate use program for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD (the United States followed several months later) and provide public support for MDMA research, to the tune of $500,000 approved in February 2019. Israel is now one of just three countries where phase 3 trials are underway. (The United States and Canada are the others.)

Doblin declined to provide specifics about the preliminary results of the phase 3 trials, pending the publication of a formal paper. But preliminary results from phase 2 trials conducted partly in Israel found that out of 107 patients who had suffered from PTSD for an average of nearly 18 years, 68 percent reported no symptoms one year after MDMA-assisted therapy an extraordinary rate of success. Those results led the FDA in 2017 to declare MDMA a breakthrough therapy and to green-light phase 3 trials, which began the following year.

I think that what happens with MDMA, because of its pharmacological profile increased dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin it creates a sense of well-being, said Keren Tzarfaty, a therapist who directs Israeli projects for MAPS. The person is getting regulated and has a very beautiful experience of safety. And from this place, they can look and be with the trauma they have experienced. Then we can help them to process it.

The phase 3 results are landing in an environment newly receptive to these chemicals long demonized as tools of the counterculture.

At Johns Hopkins, a psychedelic research unit has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers investigating not only the potential to treat disease with psychedelics, but also their effects on healthy subjects. Investors are flocking to a nascent psychedelics industry, anticipating a boom similar to the one that accompanied the rise of medical marijuana a decade ago. The Harvard Divinity School is currently hosting a lecture series about psychedelics and the future of religion. And earlier this month, Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, in therapeutic settings. Michael Pollans 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, which surveyed this landscape, topped The New York Times best-seller list.

Doblin is naturally thrilled about this shift in the zeitgeist, one he had no small part in creating. But unlike many proponents of research into formerly forbidden drugs, Doblin is candid that his endgame is broad legalization. In his view, the ideal scenario is a regime called licensed legalization in which the right to use psychedelics is akin to driving a car: After taking the drug in a supervised setting, users are granted a license to use that can be taken away in response to misbehavior.

Doblin predicts a system of this nature could be a reality by 2035, after a decade or so in which controlled therapeutic use accustoms the public to the value of these chemicals. In Doblins ideal world, the system also would allow parents to make private decisions about giving psychedelics to their children.

I think that psychedelics are great for rites of passage, Doblin said. I think that when you are 12, or 13, you are ready for trying to figure out your place in the world. So I think that we would have psychedelic bar and bat mitzvahs.

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz of Berkeley, the founder and CEO of Shefa, a new group that advocates for psychedelic therapies in the Jewish community, says that Doblins twin objectives of healing the wounds of past atrocities and infusing contemporary life with deeper meaning is an echo of the question Rabbi David Hartman posed in his seminal 1982 essayAuschwitz or Sinai.

Rick might not think of himself as a Jewish theologian, and maybe hes not, Kamenetz said. But he happens to be in a position of recasting the question: Is the Jewish agenda for the next 1,000 years going to be in the pain and trauma of Auschwitz, or are we doing to drop anchor and reach back to the moment thats always been the moment, the moment of revelation at Sinai? Do we want to reach into something that is transcendent, that exists within the human mind and heart? And that for Rick and for me is made completely available through the use of psychedelic therapy.

Such ideas, and Doblins fearlessness in promoting them, havent always endeared him to psychedelic researchers, who have sought to bring along risk-averse institutions by presenting their work as a scientifically sound approach to treating previously intractable illnesses not as a Trojan horse in the culture wars. To some ears, Doblins rhetoric about ending genocide and enlightening humanity through widespread use harkens back to Leary, the Harvard professor whose promiscuous dispensation of LSD led to his firing in 1963.

But Doblins success in bringing the fight for MDMA therapy to the cusp of fruition may go a long way toward silencing the naysayers, who have warned that potential blowback to a broad legalization effort would result in another crackdown like the one that squashed Learys early research. At least for now, those fears appear unfounded.

Im completely vindicated, Doblin said, breaking into a broad smile.

Medicalization leads to legalization because youve got fear and misinformation and people thinking that one dose, brain damage, functional consequences, addiction, stay away, he added. Theres just such decades and decades and decades of propaganda and fear. And how do you overcome that? Thats where medicalization comes in. If you can show that the benefits outweigh the risks, it causes people to start thinking.

Link:

How his lifelong psychedelic journey may lead to the legalization of MDMA - The Jewish News of Northern California

Article content continued

This year, Canadas health minister Patty Hajdu granted 12 terminally ill Canadians Section 56 exemption to the Controlled Drug and Substances Act so they may legally access psilocybin therapy.

Earlier this month, the first non-palliative Canadian,Mona Strelaeff,was also granted an exemption.Strelaeff, 67, said she has struggled with anxiety, depression and addiction for years, but following her psilocybin treatment, her depression and anxiety seem to be gone.

For the first time, I feel like I have won the battle in my mind, she said.

Levy, who alsoco-founded CanadianCannabisClinics, a national medical cannabis access and education service, credits cannabis legalization for helping challenge perceptions and opinions about the plant, including in the medical field.

Years ago, he says, if he attended a medical conference to speak about cannabis, physicians would pass his booth with a wide berth. They would walk around and not even engage with us to avoid a conversation, he says. And within a couple of years, it changed rapidly.

Field Trips medical director, Dr. Michael Verbora, has noticed the same thing. While, five years ago, some of his colleagues worried that he might be harming his patients by giving them microdoses of THC and weaning them off anti-psychotics, he says colleagues now approach him about prescribing cannabis for a variety of conditions, even where theres a lack of supporting evidence.

So the tide has completely changed there, Dr. Verbora says. And I think its going to happen with psychedelics, as well.

He says that one of the great benefits of psychedelics is that they can introduce neuroplasticity in the brain. That really just means flexibility in the brain, he says an ability to relearn and reframe old ways of thinking.

You get this period of time, he explains, where we can rewrite some of the narratives that we tell ourselves and, perhaps, shift that into a more positive setting.

Link:

People are increasingly open to psychedelic therapies. Whats driving that change? - The GrowthOp

Its not uncommon to find cannabis consumers who also use psychoactive mushrooms, and vice versa. The internet is full of articles about self-administering psilocybin and marijuana together, with anecdotal reports from people who perceive an enhanced effect from the combination.

What does the science say about how these two substances affect the consumer when taken together?

People have combined the two compounds for decadesif not centuries. One 2006 study that looked into polysubstance use among university students found that of the 149 students surveyed, nearly 60% regularly co-administered cannabis and psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms).

That co-administration remained mostly limited to the experimentation of younger adults, though, until recently. In the past few years, mainstream interest in psilocybin has exploded, driven by promising research into its therapeutic use.

That growing interest resulted in a historic vote in Oregon and Washington, DC, earlier this month, in which the state and the district both decriminalized the possession and use of psilocybin.

It will soon be legal to use both substances together in those jurisdictions. But is that a good idea? What does the science say about how these two substances affect the consumer when taken together? Heres what we know.

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Most of what we know about the pairing comes from anecdotal reports. The experience provoked by ingesting a psychedelic substancelet alone the combination of two different psychedelics like psilocybin and cannabisis highly subjective. It can be affected by a persons mindset and their social environment, often referred to as set and setting. This makes the effects of these drugs difficult to study in a controlled way.

That said, cannabis can augment the effect of psilocybin, particularly when paired with a heroic dose of psilocybin.

Michelle Janikian, author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, wrote about What You Need to Know About Smoking Weed While Tripping for Double Blind last year. The main concern, she wrote, is the consumers mental and spiritual well-being, because cannabis can have an unpredictably strong effect when mixed with psychedelics.

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How to prepare for your first psychedelic mushroom trip

Its not uncommon to hear that cannabis intensified someones experience with heroic dose of psilocybinand not necessarily in a good way.

I personally find mixing cannabis and mushrooms together can be a bit intense for me, reported Janelle Lassalle, a Leafly contributor who writes about the psychedelic world at her website, The Full Spectrum Revolution. It depends on how Ive been feeling, but if Im not doing well emotionally and Ive taken mushrooms, theyll bring those thoughts to the forefront. This kind of volatile emotional state, then, doesnt always mix well with larger doses of cannabis.

A 2019 literature review published in the Journal of Addictive Diseases also mentioned the increased emotional intensity mentioned by Lassalle. Russian researchers noted a clinical presentation of hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a condition characterized by recurrent hallucinations while on and off of substances, in three subjects who paired cannabis with psilocybin with additional substances.

The subjects described the experiences as stressful and frightening. That HPPD event was a single clinical presentation, however, and not a common reaction found in a full clinical studyin other words, its a tiny sample size and should not be taken as conclusive evidence.

Lassalle said she generally finds mushrooms to be more enjoyable on their own, but she and her partner occasionally use cannabis with micro-doses of psilocybin, which she says is much more enjoyableand popular, according others who partake in this pairing.

A microdose with cannabis feels like youre having a wonderful day, plain and simple, said Lasalle. I have higher energy levels, but not at a racy level. Im more alert, focused, creative. I can fall asleep more easily at the end of the night. Colors look a little brighter and everything feels more vivid.

According to a 2017 report by the Global Drug Survey, psilocybin sends the fewest people to the emergency room of any drug on the market. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about psychedelic mushrooms, noted Popular Science, is that theyre easily confused for the poisonous kind.

Cannabis has a well-known track record with regard to lethality: No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. It simply doesnt affect the mind and body in the same way as opioids and other potentially deadly drugs.

Dr. Evan Wood is a physician and epidemiologist whos spent most of his career studying substance use clinically. Many patients in his own clinical practice have used psilocybin and cannabis. But there are few published studies on the combined effects of using both compounds together.

I think the one thing that can be inferred from the lack of studies is probably that [taking the two compounds together is] not remotely toxic, because we know that cannabis isnt particularly toxic on its own, and neither is psilocybin, Wood told Leafly.

If you look at ibogaine for instance, a lot of literature exists that stems from the toxicology literature, he added. So thats just from people doing it in the community and showing up in hospitals and poison control centers, or investigators doing research, studying these effects. So, if there was a toxic, synergistic effect of cannabis and psilocybin, we would know about it.

While many people use psychedelics purely for the experience, some are pairing psilocybin and cannabis for potential health benefits. The reported success of psychedelic-assisted therapies is so compelling that experts project psychedelics will one day pose a threat to the booming market for anti-depressants and other pharmaceutical drugs.

Likewise, cannabisparticularly CBDhas become a popular alternative to traditional pharmaceuticals, especially for pain relief.

Ophelia Chong, a longtime cannabis entrepreneur, said she frequently micro-doses psilocybin for its world-changing mental health effects. But Chong keeps the two substances separate. She told Leafly she believes that the introduction of cannabis would likely take away from the benefit of psilocybin.

Its like a car and a horse, Chong said. Psilocybin and cannabis are two different things. If youre going to do psilocybin, I would do it first to experience the journey and really answer the questions you want. Then add cannabis later to come downbecause cannabis, I believe, mutes a lot of your questions. Using cannabis on top of psilocybin, she added, is putting blinders on when you should have them off.

Evan Wood confirmed that hes heard of patients using cannabis on the latter end of a psilocybin trip, to facilitate a soft comedown from the energizing effects of psilocybin.I think we know from just use in a naturalistic context of psychedelic substances people commonly use cannabis alongside different drugs including psychedelics, and at least anecdotally people will commonly use cannabis to support the come-down or to synergistically augment the experience, said Wood.

Though some users find the benefits of psilocybin and cannabis are better reaped individually, anecdotal reports from others claim that using the drugs in tandem has been a key to their health and wellness.

I have never consumed mushrooms without cannabis, said one consumer who spoke to Leafly but asked to remain anonymous because the legal status of the substances. I consider mushrooms [to be] cannabis older bigger brother, which complete my medicinal needs.Cannabis for physical ailments.Mushrooms for my soul. The combination being the apex of healing.

Its unclear exactly if or how cannabis and psilocybin can be taken together to augment therapeutic benefits. Nonetheless, Evan Wood is eager to understand this synergy, especially because drug synergies are common and often leveraged to improve a patients overall health.

From my perspective as an internal medicine physician its very common for two medications to be included together for synergistic effects, said Wood. I see patients all the time who are on a combination ACE inhibitor diuretic pill for their high blood pressure. You dont want to give too much diuretic or someones electrolytes might go out of whack. But we can give some diuretic and we can give some ACE inhibitor and we can get this great synergistic effect on blood pressure.

I think we know [taking psilocybin and cannabis together] appears to be safe. I think we know that its happening naturalistically in the community and probably has been for centuries. As we go into the modern era, wed be silly to put blinders on and ignore the fact that these types of things are going to occurand we should be exploring what it means.

Wood isnt alone in this thinking. The University of Miami medical school just received funding from a Toronto-based company, Tassili, to study the effects of combining psilocybin and CBD in treating traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. Researchers wonder if the entourage effectthe synergistic interplay between the many cannabinoids and terpenes found in cannabismight also happen when CBD is paired with psilocybin.

That University of Miami study will enter a human clinical trial phase in early 2021. If the two compounds are found to work well together, they may offer relief to military veterans who suffer disproportionately from traumatic brain injuries and PTSD.

Dr. Michael Hoffer, the chief scientist leading the study, said: Our goal is to develop a prescription pill with these ingredients that treat mTBI [mild traumatic brain injury] and PTSD. This is a new and increasingly exciting area.

Psychedelics and your head

Alexa Peters

Alexa Peters is a freelance writer who covers music, writing, travel, feminism, and self-help. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Paste, the Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, and Amy Poehler's Smart Girls.

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Combining cannabis with psychedelic mushrooms: Recipe for mind expansion or a bad trip? - Leafly

The industry is on the cusp of delivering a new age of healthcare and will need capital. Can it retain its idealism through that process?

Follow the sector closely and youll start to notice an underlying theme in the new age of psychedelics a deep-rooted ambition to do good for others. Not every industry is able to deliver on that promise, but the business of psychedelics wants to be different.

Although 2020 served as a launching pad for psychedelics investing, decades of work and activism have gone largely unnoticed by players in the capital markets.

Now that theres money to be made and lots of it by even the most conservative estimates investors will have to grapple with the altruistic interests of the players shaping the industry. Those same players may have to get accustomed to the realities of the capital markets.

In the pursuit of capital for such a compassionate industry, which interests will win out? One industry insider believes it could be possible to have both.

Liana Gillooly is a development officer at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a research group working on one of the most advanced drug development studies for a psychedelic substance. MAPS is investigating the use of MDMA as a method of psychotherapy for patients with PTSD.

In 2017, this psychedelics-based method was granted a breakthrough therapy designation by the US Food and Drug Administration in a move that represented the drug authoritys changing perspective. MAPS has said in the past that it expects its Phase 3 trials sometime in 2021.

Gillooly told the Investing News Network (INN) that existential questions about how a business and its purpose can help the world at large arent so radical anymore, and psychedelics can help push that even further without compromising capital needs.

The expert is no newcomer to the investment landscape, especially drug-related businesses. Gillooly previously worked with the Arcview Group, a cannabis policy advocacy group and investment network.

The group tracks and advocates for the legalization of cannabis across jurisdictions. But while noble in its intention, the experience of trying to push the social awareness platform into the cannabis investment space eventuallybegan to feel hollow for Gillooly.

I started feeling like our words were empty, because I was looking around the industry and I was seeing that a certain demographic of people was making cash hand over fist, millions of dollars, while another demographic of people was still serving time behind bars for minor cannabis offenses, she said.

The legalization trend for cannabis has highlighted the disparity in opportunities the industry has brought. A report from Vice on a recent study shows white men represent the leading demographic in cannabis companies leadership positions. The studys findings echo a report from the Financial Post showing an absence of minorities in leadership positions in the space.

Gillooly said the stakes are even higher when it comes to social responsibility for the psychedelics industry, since these drugs, if approved, will likely become part of a patients life.

I think the set and setting and the context from which these medicines are received matters, not just, you know, in the immediate environment, but the cultural context. I think it really impacts what a person can get out of these experiences, she noted.

When asked about the entrance of parties interested in psychedelics only for the potential end-game gains, Gillooly recognized that this is already happening in Canada.

She also pointed out that when it comes to the growth factor for the psychedelics stock market, there are very few legitimate opportunities at the moment since the trend is heading towards drug development.

In a previous interview with INN, Richard Carleton, CEO of the Canadian Securities Exchange, said investors should be realistic about the time proposition attached to the investment story of psychedelics.

Even so, the welcoming nature of the Canadian markets has attracted a new rush of listings from various companies trying to capture the attention of investors interested in the psychedelics business proposal.

While Gillooly said this natural, she thinks a critical few are capable of dictating the path for this industry.

I do think that theres enough people and theres enough entrepreneurs and enough funders that recognize that this is a really precious and critical moment and opportunity, and are genuinely desiring to put their money where their mouth is, and to be a little bit more experimental and to see what we can make happen, she said.

I dont think we need everyone, I just think we need a critical mass of people to do that.

Why is psychedelics raising these questions more than other industries?

Saad Shah, managing partner with Noetic Psychedelics, thinks its because the psychedelics business is uniquely positioned to directly help peoples mental health. Thats the main purpose put forth by those directly involved in the sector.

JR Rahn, co-founder and co-CEO of Mind Medicine (MindMed) (NEO:MMED,OTCQB:MMEDF), previously told INN he wants to see this industry completely change the approach to mental health.

Watch the full interview with Rahn above.

MindMed was one of the first firms to publicly listbased on the psychedelics business proposition.

The industry, which has seen a steady rush of new listings and existing public companies rejigging their approaches to pursue opportunities in psychedelics, has received votes of confidence from significant investors with large sway on the motivation of investors.

Arguably chief among them is Shark Tank investor Kevin OLeary. The celebrity businessman politician hasnt shied away from his support of psychedelics with the public launch of MindMed back in February.

Since then, OLeary has continued to voice his enthusiasm for the investment possibility with psychedelics. Most recently he re-emphasized his opinion via Business Insider.

Such high-profile connections have only added to questions about how an industry based on grassroots activism can deal with heavy interest from commercial and investment opportunities as they bubble up.

This discussion recently reached one of the leading drug policy events. At the latest edition of the online Prohibition Partners LIVE event, a panel featuring non-profit psychedelics experts expressed hesitation about the general idea of commercializing plant-based medicines.

The panelists were skeptical about who benefits from introducing commercial concepts to an industry otherwise known for grassroots activism.

Dr. Victoria Hale, a board director for MAPS, said the industry has to be careful and conscientious as commercial interest is only set to grow from hereon out.

The possible benefit of commercialization is broader access, and I think we all would agree that there are many people in the world who would benefit from these medicines, Dr. Hale said.

Alongside the interest from the capital markets comes the question of if that level of attention will affect the focus or direction of the psychedelics industry. One industry observer with plenty of experience in the cannabis space doesnt think so.

Stephen Murphy, co-founder and managing director of drug research firm Prohibition Partners, said capital interest doesnt necessarily mean there isnt an inherent desire to help people otherwise, he said, Theres money to be made in gold and oil and 1,001 other areas.

Prohibition Partners prepares and publishes market insights on the global cannabis industry and has been taking a closer look at the rise of psychedelics, issuing its first report earlier this year.

I think it is the challenge of psychedelics that is attracting a lot of interest, Murphy told INN. There is more information on this now more than ever, yet its just getting the light of day, which is why I think we are seeing this wave of interest.

Murphy called on investors to ask smarter questions when it comes to this sector and for those at the management level at companies in the space to get psychedelics into the mainstream in a responsible and ethical way.

While its clear the psychedelics industry will have to grapple with continued interest from the investment community, one investment group partner previously told INN hes hoping for a marketplace focused on principles and doing good for others.

I think the interesting thing about these substances is that beyond the obvious therapeutic and medical applications that were seeing, I think on a personal level they have this kind of tremendous capacity to (create) personal development and empathy, said Michael Hoyos, co-founding partner, Americas, with the Conscious Fund.

I think thats helped a lot of folks that Ive spoken to feel almost like a certain responsibility to help this industry flourish and develop in the right way.

Dont forget to follow us@INN_LifeSciencefor real-time news updates!

Securities Disclosure: I, Bryan Mc Govern, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.

Editorial Disclosure: The Investing News Network does not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the information reported in the interviews it conducts. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not reflect the opinions of the Investing News Network and do not constitute investment advice. All readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence.

See the article here:

As Psychedelics Go Mainstream, Can the Industry Keep its Heart? | INN - Investing News Network

A first-of-its-kind exploratory study, led by researchers from Yale School of Medicine, has found a single dose of the psychedelic psilocybin can reduce migraine frequency by 50 percent for a least two weeks. The preliminary trial was small, with follow-up work necessary to validate the results, but the promising findings suggest great potential for psychedelics to treat migraines and cluster headaches.

Back in the 1960s, during the height of the first wave of psychedelic science, one of the more compelling research avenues was the potential for drugs such as LSD and psilocybin to treat headaches. Initial studies at the time seemed to suggest psychedelic drugs that activate 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HT2A) receptors could significantly reduce headache burden in chronic migraine sufferers.

Of course, all this research froze by the early 1970s as psychedelic drugs were criminalized and rendered taboo. It wasnt really until the early years of the 21st century that the research restarted, and most modern psychedelic research has primarily focused on the drugs as adjuncts to psychotherapy, targeting conditions such as depression, addiction and PTSD.

Although official psychedelic investigations were in a state of deep freeze, out in the real world people continued to experiment with these drugs, self-treating for a number of conditions. Several surveys of these real-world applications revealed an abundance of cluster headache and migraine patients experimenting with LSD and psilocybin.

A new study, published in the journal Neurotherapeutics, is offering the first double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study on the effects of a moderate psilocybin dose on migraine frequency and severity. The research is only preliminary and small but its results are deeply encouraging.

Ten migraine sufferers were recruited for the trial. Each subject completed two sessions, one with a placebo and one with a moderate psilocybin dose. Headache diaries were used to track headache frequency and severity in the two weeks leading up to, and following, each experimental session.

Compared to placebo, a single administration of psilocybin reduced migraine frequency by about half over the two weeks measured, explains corresponding author on the new study Emmanuelle Schindler, in an email to New Atlas. In addition, when migraine attacks did occur in those two weeks, pain intensity and functional impairment during attacks were reduced by approximately 30 percent each.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding from this small study was the lack of any correlation between the subjective strength of the psychedelic experience and the therapeutic effect. Prior trials using psilocybin to treat depression or addiction have suggested the overwhelming magnitude of a psychedelic experience seems to be fundamentally entwined with its therapeutic efficacy. So essentially, the more powerful the experience the better the result.

But unexpectedly, this migraine/psilocybin trial did not detect that association. In fact, those subjects reporting the highest scores on a self-reported altered state of consciousness scale showed some of the smaller reductions in migraine burden.

What this intriguingly suggests is that, in the case of psilocybin for migraine, it may be possible to separate out the drug's psychotropic effects from its therapeutic effects. This could be achieved either by exploring microdoses and sub-hallucinogenic doses, or even homing in on the mechanism by which the drug is helping prevent migraines and finding a new way to pharmacologically target it.

This is definitely a finding were interested in exploring further, says Schindler. If these outcomes are confirmed to be independent, it suggests that the migraine-suppressing effects do not involve the same systems that cause the acute changes in sensation and perception. Psilocybin has some chemical and pharmacological similarities to existing migraine medications that are not psychedelic, so we plan to investigate its therapeutic effect in this context.

It is important to understand the limitations of these new findings. This is a small exploratory study, designed to uncover potential signals that are worthy of more robust investigation. The two-week follow up, for example, offers no indication as to the long-term efficacy of this kind of therapy. This is something Schindler suggests will be closely studied in future research.

Moving forward, Schindler is cautious not to overstate her teams findings but she does say the results are exciting. Not only does this research offer signals psychedelic compounds could meaningfully help those suffering from debilitating migraines, but the study offers novel insights into the still-unexplained physiological causes of chronic headache disorders.

Lots of questions still need to be resolved before any kind of clinical treatment can come from this research but Schindler and colleagues are already working on the next steps, with longer follow-up periods and greater focus on different dose effects.

I have a new migraine study starting soon and Im also currently studying post-concussion headache, which often resembles migraine, adds Schindler. Im not aware of any other groups investigating psilocybin or related compounds in migraine, though cluster headache is currently being studied, not only by my group, but also Swiss and Danish researchers.

The new study was published in the journal Neurotherapeutics.

See more here:

Psilocybin & migraine: First of its kind trial reports promising results - New Atlas

Its autumn, the best season for mushroom pickers. And mushrooms specifically magic ones are in the spotlight. A growing body of research is showing that psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, has potential in treating psychological disorders like depression, addiction and PTSD. The state of Oregon just voted to legalise the mushrooms for therapeutic use a US first.

Of the nearly 200 species of psychedelic mushrooms that have been identified worldwide, only one Psilocybe semilanceata grows in any abundance in northern Europe. Like many mushrooms, Psilocybe semilanceata is generally known not by its scientific designation, but by its common or folk name, the liberty cap mushroom.

For years, this bothered me. As a Roman historian, I know the liberty cap (the pileus, in Latin) as a hat given to a Roman slave on the occasion of their being freed. It was a conical felt cap, shaped like that of a smurf, and which undeniably bears a clear resemblance to Psilocybe semilanceatas distinctive pointy cap.

But how on earth did an obscure Roman social practice end up lending its name to a modern psychedelic? As I soon discovered, the answer takes us through an assassination, a number of revolutions, a bit of poetry, a dash of xenophobia, and a very unusual scientific discovery.

The original liberty cap was an actual hat, worn by freed slaves in the Roman world to mark their status: no longer property, but never truly free, tainted by their history. For the freedman, it was a symbol both of pride and shame.

But in the year 44 BC, the hat gained a new cultural currency after Julius Caesar was famously murdered on the Ides of March (March 15). To advertise his part in the deed, Marcus Junius Brutus (of et tu, Brute fame) minted coins, the obverse of which bore the legend EID MAR beneath a pair of daggers and the distinctive liberty cap. Brutuss meaning was clear: Rome herself had been freed from Caesars tyranny.

Brutuss use of this symbol translated it from a low status social marker into an elite political symbol, and one that enjoyed a considerably longer life than the short-lived Brutus himself. Throughout the remainder of the Roman period the goddess Libertas and the liberty cap were a commonly employed shorthand by emperors keen to stress the freedom that their absolute rule bought.

With the collapse of Roman power in Europe in the fifth century AD, the liberty cap was forgotten. But then, during the 16th century, as interest in and explicit emulation of Roman antiquity began to spread through the countries of Europe, the liberty cap again reached public consciousness.

Books like Cesare Ripas Iconologia (1593) described the hat and its symbolism for educated audiences, and it again began to be used as a political symbol. When the Dutch drove the Spanish from Holland in 1577, coins bearing the liberty cap were minted, and William of Orange likewise minted liberty cap coins to commemorate his bloodless seizure of the English throne in 1688.

But it was in two of the great republican revolutions of the 18th century the French and American revolutions that it became a truly popular icon. Now blended with the visual form of the ancient Phrygian cap, the liberty cap (bonnet rougue in French) appeared no longer merely as a representational device but as an actual item of headwear or decoration.

In France, on June 20 1790, an armed mob stormed the royal apartments in the Tuileries and forced Louis XVI (later to be executed by the revolutionaries) to don the liberty cap. In America, revolutionary groups declared their rebellion against British rule by raising a liberty cap upon a pole in the public squares of their towns. In 1781 a medal, designed by no less than Benjamin Franklin to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Libertas Americana (the personification of American Liberty) is depicted with wild, free flowing hair, the pole and cap of liberty slung across her shoulder.

The revolutions of France and America were viewed with considerable disquiet from Britain. But the pole and cap of liberty clearly made an impact on a young poet by the name of James Woodhouse, whose 1803 poem, Autumn and the Redbreast, an Ode, paid a striking tribute to the varied beauty of mushrooms:

Whose tapering stems, robust, or light,Like columns catch the searching sight,To claim remark where eer I roam;Supporting each a shapely dome;Like fair umbrellas, furld, or spread,Display their many-colourd head;Grey, purple, yellow, white, or brown,Shapd like Wars shield, or Prelates crownLike Freedoms cap, or Friars cowl,Or Chinas bright inverted bowl

This seems to be the first ever connection of the physical cap of liberty and the distinctive pixie cap of the mushroom. It was clearly not used because it was an established name (note his inventive imagery with the other shapes he describes), but rather coined by Woodhouse as a poetic flourish.

This metaphor caught the attention of a famous reader, Robert Southey, who had reviewed the volume in which the poem appeared in 1804. In 1812, Southey, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published Omniana, a two volume collection of table talk and miscellaneous musings intended to educated and inform the would-be conversationalist. Nestled in among attacks upon Catholic traditions and notes upon early English metre was the following observation on the Cap of Liberty:

There is a common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of liberty, that it seems offered by nature herself as the appropriate emblem of Gallic republicanism, mushroom patriots, with a mushroom cap of liberty.

Neither Woodhouse nor Southey and Coleridge identified the precise mushroom they had in mind with the cap of liberty metaphor. But as the discipline of mycology the study of fungi began to cement itself in the 19th century, a field driven by precisely the kind of gentleman scholars that would have kept a copy of Omniana on their shelves, the name was clearly and universally associated with Psilocybe semilanceata.

At that time, this was an utterly obscure and unremarkable little mushroom below the notice of any but devoted mycologists. As common names for mushrooms began to be included in mycological handbooks, Psilocybe semilanceata was routinely identified as the liberty cap.

Perhaps the earliest such example was in Mordecai Cookes 1871 Handbook of British Fungi. In 1894, Cooke published his Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms, which tellingly referred to Psilocybe semilanceata, within quotation marks, as cap of liberty, exactly the phrasing used by Coleridge, whom it would appear that Cooke was consciously quoting. By the 20th century, the name was firmly established.

The story could, perhaps, end there, but it has a delightful coda, in which the liberty cap mushroom was propelled from total obscurity as merely one of literally hundreds of innocuous LBMs (little brown mushrooms) known only by scientific specialists to perhaps one of the best known members of Europes mycological fauna.

Throughout the literature written by Europeans on the customs and religions of the peoples of Central America, there existed rumours of a magical food that the Aztecs called teonancatl (the divine mushroom). These rumours had long been discounted as superstitious mythologising, no more deserving of serious consideration than the shapeshifters of Norse and Icelandic saga. But in the early part of the 20th century, the divine mushroom captured the imagination of seemingly the most unlikely man on the planet, Robert Gordon Wasson, the vice president of the Wall Street banking firm JP Morgan.

Since the 1920s, Wasson had been obsessed with ethnomycology (the study of human cultural interactions with mushrooms). In the course of research that would lead to a voluminous bibliography, Wasson travelled to Mexico and there, after a long and frustrating search, finally found a woman who was willing to initiate him in the secrets of the sacred mushroom. He became (perhaps) the first white man to intentionally ingest a hallucinogenic fungus and published his experience in a 1957 Life article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom.

Wassons discovery was a sensation. In 1958 a team led by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann the man who first synthesised (and ingested) LSD was able to isolate the main psychoactive compound in the mushrooms, which was named psilocybin as a nod to the fact that it was primarily mushrooms of the genus Psilocybe that possessed the chemical. Though species of the hallucinogen fungi were most concentrated in Central America, they began to be found worldwide. In 1969, an article in Transactions of the British Mycological Society established that none other than the innocuous little liberty cap contained psilocybin.

Though there are other psychedelic species that grow in Britain (including the distinctive red and white Amanita muscaria fly agaric which contains muscimol not psilocybin), the liberty cap has secured a reputation as the poster-child for Britains domestically growing psychedelic fungi. Modern shroomers cant resist punning on the liberty cap name with its associations to the transcendental liberation afforded by psychedelics and grassroots organisations such as the Shroom Liberation Front attest to this fact.

But in origin, the liberty caps name has nothing to do with psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary (turn on, tune in, drop out) or the 1960s counter culture. Rather and somewhat improbably it traces a path back through the political revolutions of the early modern period, via the murder of the tyrant Julius Caesar, to a conical cap worn by Romes former slaves.

To place the cap on their heads was a sign of their liberation. To pluck the modern liberty cap from the ground could see you spending a cool seven years in jail.

Read more:

Liberty cap: the surprising tale of how Europe's magic mushroom got its name - The Conversation UK

Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that historically have attracted exaggerations of benefits as well as alarmism. As with most subjects that bring out extreme views, the scientific data provide a more grounded perspective. Sometimes, the scientific data require further clarification. We are responding to a thought-provoking opinion piece by Eddie Jacobs published on October 11, 2020 entitled What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs? Some could mistakenly take away from the piece an unrealistic impression that is not supported by the scientific data. We worry that this may lead to alarmist reactions.

Jacobs piece raises ethical questions regarding emerging research suggesting psychedelics may be effective psychiatric treatments. Specifically, the concern is that psychedelic therapy could shift patients political beliefs in one direction along the political spectrum or change [their] religious beliefs. We agree that as with any emerging medical treatment, psychedelic therapy prompts important ethical considerations; however, we believe that the possibility implied in the headlinethat psychedelics prompt substantial change in political and religious beliefs or affiliationsis not supported by the current scientific data.

To be clear, Jacobs did not mention affiliations, but we believe readers might reasonably take away this interpretation. We suggest that there is no evidence that people change political or religious affiliations from psychedelic treatments, and current evidence for other kinds of belief changes is weak. Below, we address the three major studies mentioned in the original article.

The concern about political beliefs largely rests on evidence from a small pilot study of psilocybin for treating depression. The study showed an average reduction on a measure of authoritarianism from baseline to one week after psilocybin in seven people. Authoritarianism, as it is operationalized here using five questions that were reduced from the original version of the scale, likely does not fit neatly into a particular political party. Many people, for example, would likely disagree with the scale item The law should always be obeyed, even if a particular law is wrong, regardless of political affiliation.

It is also not clear that a reduction in authoritarianism (or increase in libertarianism or social/moral liberalism, the other end of the scale spectrum) holds a relation to present political affiliations. There are abundant historical examples of both left-wing and right-wing authoritarian governments (for example, communism and fascism, respectively). Moreover, in a country such as the United States, the major left-and right-leaning parties have generally had no universal leaning toward either individual freedom or state control. The position taken along this continuum is highly dependent on the subject (for example, business regulation, abortion, gun control, social constraints on sexual behavior). In fact, the developers of the scale in question preferred not to use the term liberal in reference to the scale because that term had a political meaning in the United States that went beyond what the scale measures.

Beyond the theoretical issues with mapping authoritarianism onto present political parties, there are also statistical concerns with this study. The finding about reduced authoritarianism barely met the threshold of significance and with a one-tailed t-test. A one-tailed test provides a lower standard for achieving significance compared to the much more common two-tailed test. It is unclear if the reduction would have been significant with a two-tailed test. In any case, the effect did not last. At the 712 month follow-up the decrease was not significant, even according to the lower standards of the one-tailed test.

Jacobs piece alluded to another study about political beliefs, a 1971 study exploring the association between LSD increased liberalism. This study compared three groups: 1) people who had taken LSD as a medical treatment, 2) people who had taken LSD on their own, and 3) people who had not used LSD. Only those who had taken LSD on their own indicated more support for policies like individual freedom and foreign policy liberalism compared to those who had not taken LSD.

It is possible that those who were willing to take LSD outside of medical treatment may have already been more influenced by the liberal hippie movement that encouraged these beliefs at that time (Jacobs notes that this is correlational and not causal data). Importantly, no differences were found in this study between the political beliefs of those who received LSD under medical treatment compared to those who did not take LSD. Therefore, this study actually suggests that medical psychedelic treatments do not alter political beliefs!

In terms of religious beliefs, Jacobs piece points to a concern about belief change on the basis of a survey study by our group at Johns Hopkins. This survey specifically recruited individuals who had a God encounter experience after taking a psychedelic outside of a research context. Before having such an experience during their psychedelic session, 21 percent retrospectively identified as atheist, whereas only 8 percent did after the experience. This decrease was accompanied by a decrease in identification with major religions, alongside increases in spiritual types of self-identification.

Crucially though, this study was in no way representative of the general public, as only people who reported encountering God or a similar phenomenon were included in the study. This was a very specific sample of people reporting a special kind of experience or interpretation of experience. The study cannot provide an estimate of population rates. Belief changes of a religious type would, of course, be massively inflated in this sample, and it is therefore not appropriate to draw generalized conclusions about belief change from psychedelic treatments based on these data.

Lastly, the piece cites the observation that under clinical conditions psychedelics increase, on average, a personality trait called openness to experience, a finding first reported by our group at Johns Hopkins and now replicated by others. Unlike the political and religious effects, this phenomenon appears more robust. However, while psychedelics might be unique in their ability to prompt a change in a personality trait with a short-term clinical procedure, they are not the only clinical intervention that can cause changes in personality traits. A large meta-analysis of over 200 published studies examining the effect of psychiatric treatments on personality traits found that personality was indeed changed.

Regardless of whether the intervention was a psychotherapy or a medication such as a traditional antidepressant drug, these changes reached a moderate effect size for increases in the trait of emotional stability, similar to the effect size observed for the increase in personality openness to experience from psilocybin. Lastly, the correlation between openness to experience and liberal political views is small, accounting for only around 2 percent of the relationship between the two variables. In other words, the pathway from psychedelics through openness to experience to political belief change is, for all practical purposes, negligible.

While data from studies are always paramount, we note that in the first authors experience interacting with hundreds of psilocybin study participants, he does not recall any spontaneous claims of changed political or religious affiliation in either direction.

Our primary point here is that that existing data do not suggest that meaningful changes in religious or political beliefs are likely from psychedelic therapyand certainly not changes in political or religious affiliation. There is some evidence that psychedelic therapy can prompt changes in ones sense of spirituality, but this term is so broadly and variously defined that it does not even necessarily relate to supernatural beliefs, and it can refer to things like ones values or sense of connection.

As with many interventions, there are cases in which individuals change in their values, attitudes and/or beliefs after a psychedelic experience. The frequency and magnitude of these occurrences are empirical questions for future research to address, but the current data simply do not support the idea that psychedelic treatments result in meaningful changes in political or religious beliefs or affiliation.

Psychedelic medicine, like any new treatment, no doubt raises important and challenging ethical issues. Consent procedures in psychedelic trials by our research group (and by other groups to our knowledge) already warn that personality and attitude changes are a possibility. Of course, this should also be done with patients if psychedelics are approved as medicine. Psychedelic experiences are sometimes held as among the most meaningful in ones life, and may be interpreted to have philosophical or spiritual import, likely depending on the orientation of the participant. Such effects present the opportunity for ethical pitfalls by clinicians.

These and other challenges will call for important contributions from ethicists. However, we must also be careful to keep any given concern in perspective and convey realistic risks to the public and patients. From this perspective, we believe, based on the data, that major shifts in political or religious orientation or beliefs are not among the likely risks associated with this treatment. As psychedelic researchers, we believe it is important to remain vigilant against excesses in enthusiasm as well as alarmism.

Read the rest here:

There's No Good Evidence That Psychedelics Can Change Your Politics or Religion - Scientific American

A growing number of companies are asking investors to try psychedelic drugs. You may flash back to the 1960s, or to the cannabis stock bubble of 2018, but theres nothing recreational about the current interest in psychedelics, at least among psychiatrists and their most desperate patients.

I do believe that psychedelics hold significant promise as therapeutics, says Jordan Sloshower, a psychiatrist at Yale Medical School who is studying the mushroom ingredient psilocybin as a depression treatment. A number of psychiatric patients get no relief from existing drugs, and the industry has had little new to offer them. So some patients turned to the oldest psychoactive substances knownmagic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and ibogaine. Encouraging anecdotes inspired researchers like Sloshower to test the claims of these drugs, as well as newer ones like MDMA, the effective ingredient in the party drug Ecstasy. On Tuesday, voters in Oregon and the District of Columbia decriminalized adult use of psilocybin mushrooms.

Now, entrepreneurs are tapping public markets. In September, U.K.-based Compass Pathways (ticker: CMPS) debuted on the Nasdaq at $17 per depositary share. Its stock has since doubled to $36, for a market value of $1.2 billion. Compass is testing a proprietary formulation of psilocybin in patients whose depression wasnt helped by standard treatments.

Mind Medicine (MMED.Canada), or MindMed, went public in March on Canadas NEO exchange. At a recent price of 1.21 Canadian dollars, it has a market cap of C$340 million ($260 million) and plans to develop drugs derived from ibogaine and ayahuasca. Field Trip Health (FTRP.Canada) started trading in October on the Canadian Securities Exchange, where its stock now goes for C$2.90, valuing it at about C$150 million. Field Trip is setting up clinics to administer ketamine, a legal anesthetic that has antidepressant and psychedelic properties in low doses. Trials on safety and effectiveness have just begun.

It isnt yet clear whether businesses like Compass or Field Trip will be clinics or drugmakers. Asked about that, Compass chief executive George Goldsmith said the question was premature. Investing in these stocks is probably premature, too.

Mood disorders like depression affect more people than any other psychiatric illnesses. Most patients are helped by generic antidepressants and psychotherapy, but those treatments dont work for the several million Americans with treatment-resistant depression. Psychiatrists also struggle to help patients whose brain injuries have left them with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Research on psychedelics screeched to a halt after Congress banned the drugs in 1970. But stories circulated of patients who claimed long-lasting relief using psilocybin or LSD. In the past decade, psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and New York University conducted small studies. The results were promising, so nonprofit groups got the governments blessing to sponsor larger trials.

Usona Institute, a nonprofit, is testing psilocybin for depression, while the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, is in Phase 3 trials of MDMA for PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration designated both studies as Breakthrough Therapies.

Dozens of U.S. clinics are using ketamine therapy to treat depression. Conventional antidepressants take weeks to start working, but a ketamine infusion gives quick relief that lasts a few days or weeks. Higher doses have a psychedelic-like effect that can help patients achieve psychotherapeutic breakthroughs and long-lasting relief, says Veronika Gold, a co-founder of San Franciscos Polaris Insight Center.

Properly run psychedelic-assisted sessions are time consuming, Gold says, and therapists require training. Just being a regular doctor or therapist does not give you the knowledge to use these medicines, she warns.

Generic ketamine can be had for a few dollars a shot. But last year, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) got FDA approval for Spravato, a kind of ketamine delivered as a nasal spray. It lists for $850 a dose. J&J has said Spravatos approval required eight years of clinical trials, but clinicians like Gold and Sloshower note that those trials didnt prove it was more effective than generic ketamine.

The psychedelic community has a collective ethos that honors open science and the native cultures that first used these drugs. It is wary of proprietary products like Spravato.

But investors have another reason to be wary: Its unclear how the newly public companies will make a profit.

Field Trip plans ketamine clinics, but executive chairman Ronan Levy has his hopes on a proprietary psychedelic he aims to have in Phase 1 trials by 2022. In its Canadian listing statement, Field Trip estimated it will need $12 million to get through the next year, which is a little less than what it had in its coffers. Levy tells Barrons Field Trip will be the Home Depot for mental health and personal growth.

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Like Field Trip, MindMed has no revenue. Through June, MindMed had a deficit of $14 million, but a stock offering last month left it with $38 million in cash to fund early studies of LSD, MDMA, and other psychedelics.

After its IPO, Compass has $175 million in cash. The FDA designated COMP360, its psilocybin product, a Breakthrough Therapy for treatment-resistant depression, and Compass is conducting a trial. But if COMP360 makes it to market, it could find itself competing with psilocybin from Usona. Such nonprofits may be willing to provide psilocybin-based products at cost or for free, undermining our potential market for COMP360, notes Compass prospectus.

Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com

The rest is here:

Psychedelics Take a Trip to the Market. Its a Long Road. - Barron's

UPDATE: Both Oregon and DC voted to loosen restrictions on psychedelic drugs, as part of a major rejection of the war on drugs seen on Election Day.

The US has a near-total criminal prohibition of psychedelic drugs. In Oregon and Washington, DC, voters are being asked if theyd like to change that.

Oregons Measure 109 asks voters whether psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms, should be allowed for medical purposes.

In Washington, DC, voters are being presented with Initiative 81, which could decriminalize a range of psychedelic plants and fungi.

The measures are seen by many activists as the next stage in scaling back Americas war on drugs, now that marijuana legalization has already reached 11 states and could be legalized in four more in the November election.

Polls show strong support for marijuana legalization, but its unclear how much public backing there is for measures decriminalizing psychedelics or legalizing them for medicinal purposes. Denver became the first US city to vote to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, but no state has decriminalized or legalized psychedelic substances for medical use.

But activists may have an advantage in Oregon and Washington, DC both of which are very liberal, and were among the first jurisdictions to legalize cannabis for recreational use (although DC, due to a bill passed by Congress, still prohibits sales).

The Oregon and DC measures will likely set the stage for future drug policy reform efforts. If two progressive places move forward with their measures, that may signal a wider public appetite for expanding access to psychedelic drugs. If the measures fail especially in an election year that seems very favorable to more progressive causes drug policy reformers almost certainly have their work cut out for them.

A yes vote would effectively decriminalize the non-commercial cultivation, distribution, possession, and use of entheogenic plants and fungi, and ask prosecutors to drop cases related to these substances. Commercial sales wouldnt be allowed.

A no vote would mean DC would not deprioritize the enforcement of anti-psychedelic laws.

A yes on Measure 109 would allow patients 21 and older to buy, possess, and consume psychedelic drugs at psilocybin service centers, under the supervision of trained facilitators.

A no vote would mean patients would not have legal, supervised access to these drugs.

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Live results: Oregon Measure 109 and Washington DC Initiative 81 on psychedelic drugs - Vox.com