Faithful readers will notice that we had a long hiatus here as I completed my dissertation and then recovered from the resulting snake-fight injuries. Meanwhile, the year 2010 saw a number of landmark papers and subtle shifts in the scientific terrain.
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Please allow me to indulge in a little self-promotion: My colleagues and I have a new paper out on the effects of MDA in healthy volunteers, published in the open access online journal PLoS One. This study was NIH-supported, although I received some important early support from The Beckley Foundation. This is the first study of MDA in people in over 30 years. It is also the second study I know of to measure mystical-type experiences with a validated measure in volunteers receiving a psychedelic in a controlled clinical setting. Because the paper is published in a Public Library of Science journal, anyone can read it at the official journal website:
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014074
One interesting point that we don’t discuss in the article is that this dose of racemic MDA clearly lasts longer than an equivalent dose of MDMA, which has been discussed on erowid. We are preparing a second paper that will address in more detail some of the similarities and differences of MDA and MDMA. One could also compare MDA to a classical hallucinogen, such as psilocybin. Here is a plot comparing average ratings made by our participants after placebo (black circles) and MDA (green circles) to psilocybin data (blue shapes) from other groups’ studies. (Click to see the full image.)
The top box shows scores from the Hood Mysticism Scale. The middle box shows scores from Dittrich’s Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire (ASC, or APZ-OAV, or sometimes just OAV), which was recently the topic of this interesting paper in PLOS One. The bottom box shows scores from the traditional clusters of the ASC Visionary Changes (commonly called “Visionary Restructuralization” in the literature) scale. For more information on these measures, you can read our paper or the other one in PLOS one. This figure is similar to one of the figures in the article, but I have added data from these two papers:
1) (blue squares) R. R. Griffiths, W. A. Richards, U. McCann, R. Jesse. Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained
personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 2006. 187:268-283.
2) (blue triangles) F. Hasler, U. Grimberg, M.A. Benz, T. Huber, F.X. Vollenweider. Acute psychological and physiological effects of psilocybin in healthy humans: a double-blind, placebo-controlled dose–effect study. Psychopharmacology, 2004. 172:145-156.
I should note that it is a little risky to compare our participants to those of the Griffiths study because those individuals were hallucinogen-naïve and all had some type of spiritual practice. In addition they wore blindfolds throughout much of the drug administration session.
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.
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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!
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Pål Johansen and Teri Krebs have published a short Perspective paper hypothesizing three potential mechanisms by which MDMA might be helpful in anxiety disorders.
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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.
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Here are two human psychedelic studies that are currently no longer recruiting participants healthy psychedelic-experienced volunteers. (Full disclosure: I am involved in conducting both of these studies.) In a separate entry, I list the studies that are seeking people with specific illnesses who can be psychedelic-naive. Most of the details on these other studies were obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov and maps.org
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Dumont and colleagues have published a paper in which they describe the physiological effects of giving MDMA along with alcohol to people. One of the interesting things about this paper is that they measured plasma concentrations of antidiuretic hormone (ADH). (ADH is the hormone that causes the kidneys to conserve water, thus regulating the water balance in the body.)
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