Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

The potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.— Stanislav Grof

Research on psychedelics — a word that comes from the Greek roots "psyche," or soul, and "delos," or manifest — has been heating up in recent years. The drugs appear to have a unique ability to treat conditions that fail to respond to even the best current treatments. Oftentimes, all that's required to see those effects is a single dose, or "trip," in a supervised medical setting.

The power of psychedelics is that they can reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. Psychedelics help to accelerate a maturation process, where we can see that we’re not operating within silos. Instead, we’re operating as part of a larger collective and part of a larger community. Thanks to the revival of psychedelic science, we’ve (re)discovered that psychedelic therapy can benefit sufferers of severely debilitating conditions where current treatments fail. We’ve started to develop an understanding of what psychedelics do to the brain, and how psychedelics can have such transformative power.

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Shrooms Are the Safest Drug You Can Take

Magic mushrooms, the psychedelic drug that can help treat anxiety and depression and could help with addiction, are the safest recreational drug you can take. That's according to the annual Global Drug Survey, which polled close to 120,000 people in 50 countries about their drug and alcohol use.
More than 12,000 people said they did shrooms in 2016 and just 0.2 percent of them said they needed emergency medical care afterward, a rate that was five to six times lower than LSD, cocaine, MDMA, and alcohol, and three times lower than weed.

The Push to Legalize Magic Mushrooms for Depression and PTSD

Todd says there have been clear benefits from psilocybin with few side effects. He hasn’t had a single PTSD episode since he began taking it. His depression evaporated. The mushrooms even help ease the pain—agony that feels like being “shot in the back”—from the nerve-crushing tumors in his spine and skull.
“It’s knocked that out, it’s wiped that slate clean,” Todd says. The day before we talked, he’d eaten eight grams of fungus. A heavy dose is considered five grams, so this was no psychedelic snack—but Todd ingests this much about every week.

Denver Will Vote on Psilocybin Decriminalization in May

Decriminalize Denver has been trying for close to a year to get on the ballot. The group first tried to get on the November 2018 ballot, but failed to make it to the signature-gathering stage. Proponents regrouped and went all in for May 2019.
If the Denver Psilocybin Initiative passes, personal use, possession and growth of psilocybin mushrooms for adults 21 and over would become the city's "lowest law-enforcement priority." Additionally, the initiative would "prohibit the city from spending resources to impose criminal penalties" for personal use, possession, and growth. And the initiative would establish the "psilocybin mushroom policy review panel to assess and report on the effects of the ordinance." This panel would be similar to the already-existing panel for marijuana and would comprise eleven members, including two from city council. Psilocybin decriminalization would be similar to what Denver did in 2005 for marijuana.

GOP Lawmaker’s Bill Would Legalize Psychedelic Mushrooms And MDMA For Medical Use

The first proposal would empower the state board of pharmacy “to reclassify such controlled substances for medicinal purposes” and repeal penalties associated with the various psychedelic drugs “when such substances are utilized for medicinal purposes pursuant to the rules of the board of pharmacy.”
The other piece of legislation would simply remove psilocybin and psilocyn, the psychedelic compounds found in some species of mushrooms, from schedule I of Iowa’s controlled substances act.
“Exploring these issues are paramount to solving the healthcare crisis,” Shipley told Marijuana Moment in an email. “There’s so much potential for research and clinical applications. I hope we can empower and trust patients to make their own best decisions.”

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Does microdosing improve your mood and performance? Here’s what the research say

This complex set of findings is not what’s typically reported in media stories and online discussions of microdosing. There are promising indications of possible benefits of microdosing here, but also indications of some potential negative impacts, which should be taken seriously.
It’s important to remember this was an observational study that relied heavily on the accuracy and honesty of participants in their reports. As such, these results need to be treated cautiously.
It’s early days for microdosing research and this work shows that we need to look more carefully at the effects of low dose psychedelics on mental health, attention, and neuroticism.

Why More and More People Are Leaning Toward Microdosing for Depression

Microdosing, until now the province of trendy Silicon Valley biohackers and Reddit users, is taking on a shiny new respectability as serious scientists and researchers take notice. Over the past few years, some of the most respectable journals of science — hello, The Lancet — have published studies looking into the practice of microdosing mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, and other psychedelics. The findings are no surprise to those who have been paying attention to the anecdotal evidence. Here’s a look at some of the purported benefits of mushroom microdosing for depression.

MDMA users more empathetic than people who take other drugs, study finds

Long-term users of MDMA are more empathetic than people who take other recreational drugs, according to a study.
Compared to users of cannabis, cocaine and ketamine, people who take ecstasy report feeling “significantly greater emotional empathy” and are better at identifying others’ emotions, researchers at the University of Exeter found.
MDMA is known to increase empathy for a short period, but the researchers said their findings could point to longer-term effects with implications for possible medical uses.

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LSD allows more information to flood into the brain by altering activity in the thalamus

“LSD and other psychedelics induce unique effects on perception and emotion. These effects could on the one hand be interesting to understand certain symptoms in psychiatric patients (for example schizophrenia), but they could also be clinically beneficial for the treatment of other illnesses (for example depression),” said study author Katrin Preller of the University of Zurich.

This is what psychedelic mainstreaming looks like…in Arizona

Traditionally, psychedelic conferences have been hosted by well-known people and groups within psychedelic spaces. As psychedelic medicalization and the potential profits of a “virgin market” loom large, new organizations are increasingly looking to gain legitimacy within the field. Mainstreaming means the doors of this field are being thrown wide open. It’s everyone’s responsibility to hold people and institutions to the highest standards when publicly disseminating psychedelic information.

Antisocial Species Of Octopus Becomes Friendlier On MDMA, Study Finds

When humans take MDMA, our brains are flooded with high levels of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, producing feelings of euphoria and emotional closeness, making individuals more prone to wanting to connect with one another. Researchers with several different universities across the U.S. found that the loner two-spot octopus responds to ecstasy in a similar way to humans.
“Despite anatomical differences between octopus and human brain, we’ve shown that there are molecular similarities in the serotonin transporter gene,” explains Gul Dolen of Johns Hopkins University in media release, noting that this gene encodes a transmembrane protein that becomes the primary binding site for MDMA. “These molecular similarities are sufficient to enable MDMA to induce prosocial behaviors in octopuses.”