Psychedelic Research

On July 16th 1969, Apollo 11 set off for the Moon. On July 16th 1930, thirty-nine years earlier, humanity first encountered an MDMA-like drug as Gordon Alles began his self-experiments with MDA. Even though it appears in several percent of illicit ‘ecstasy’ tablets, MDA has received little attention in recent years. That just changed. This month, we finished collecting data in the first human study of MDA in over 30 years.
Read the rest…

Glenn Dumont and colleagues have an excellent new paper in social neuroscience showing that 100 mg MDMA increases oxytocin and prosocial feelings in people a controlled laboratory setting. It’s about time someone properly confirmed this theory!
Read the rest…

My pace of posting has slowed as I am deep in dissertation writing.  So I have been remiss in failing to celebrate several good new articles, including a study of MDMA-cannabis interactions from Dumont and colleagues and an exciting article that considers one of my favorite topics: hallucinogens from a Bayesian perspective.  However, my primary motivation for this entry is to note the death of psychedelic researcher Abraham Hoffer.
Read the rest…

Pål Johansen and Teri Krebs have published a short Perspective paper hypothesizing three potential mechanisms by which MDMA might be helpful in anxiety disorders.
Read the rest…

In the UK, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has written a review of MDMA (’ecstasy’), its harms and its legal classification.
Read the rest…

In a paper in the latest issue of Science, Dominique Fontanilla and colleages have just reported that the psychedelic DMT acts as a regulator at the sigma-1 receptor. (Previously, research on the mechanisms of tryptamine psychedelics has focused primarily on serotonin receptors.) Among other things, they show that mice who have no sigma-1 receptor fail to show increased motor activity after DMT injection. This is fascinating for many reasons. The Sigma-1 receptor does not have a known endogenous neurotransmitter. Because DMT has been detected in human biofluids a couple times, the authors suggest DMT might be an endogenous modulator of the receptor. Whether DMT and related compounds turn out to have a significant biological role in mammals, this finding undeniably opens new vistas for understanding the mechanisms of psychedelics and may ultimately lead to novel treatments for mental illness.
Read the rest…

Here is a list of four human psychedelic studies that are currently recruiting participants. These are all seeking people with specific illnesses. Most of these details were obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov and maps.org
Read the rest…

The philosophically inclined may be interested to know that Jerry Fodor has published a review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension in the London Review of Books. A response to Fodor’s article can be found on David Chalmers’ blog. Chalmers also makes available a pdf of the introduction he wrote to Clark’s book.