You may know the chemical 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine by its more common name, psilocybin. Long used as a sacrament among indigenous peoples in the Americas — and more recently branded as an illicit party drug — in recent years, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms has received a lot of attention from scientists for potential to treat […]
Dinah Bazer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the spring of 2010. The Brooklyn resident, an ice skating teacher and former bank IT programmer in her 60s, was devastated. Luckily, doctors were able to successfully treat her disease with chemotherapy, but the dread of a reoccurrence just wouldn’t go away. It was like waiting for […]
The profound impact of LSD on the brain has been laid bare by the first modern scans of people high on the drug. The images, taken from volunteers who agreed to take a trip in the name of science, have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the neural basis for effects produced by one of […]
Results raise hopes that active substance in class 1 drug could be used to treat mental health conditions in future. Magic mushrooms have lifted severe depression in a dozen volunteers in a clinical trial, raising scientists’ hopes that the psychedelic experiences beloved of the Aztecs and the hippy counter-culture of the 1970s could one day […]
Psilocybin is one of the great unknown medicines of modern society. It has been used for millennia by tribes and societies around the world for spiritual practice; in fact, there are 6,000 year old cave paintings of mushrooms found in the Selva Pascuala cave, Spain, as well as Saharan cave paintings dated back to 7,000 […]
Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — are powerful, able to transform the way that people who use them perceive the world. Because of that, after years of prohibition, psychiatric researchers in the US are hoping to take advantage of that power to transform mental health treatment. And as […]
Psilocybin. It’s the psychoactive substance in those “sacred mushrooms” that causes hallucinations and other novel mental experiences. The effects of those mushrooms have been explored and appreciated by members of the ancient Capsian culture in North Africa, Aztec shamans, and modern college students. But they’re now the subject of serious study by scientists. A team […]
For most of the 1950s and 1960s, researchers enthusiastically studied the psychological properties — and potential — of hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms. “Psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal cancer patients, and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists […]
We’ve come a long way from doctors endorsing cigarettes and authority figures saying that nicotine is perfectly safe, but even in this day and age when we know that tobacco is the single leading cause of preventable death,1 millions of people still smoke and many of them are struggling to quit. Finding ways to help […]