Entries Tagged 'Drugs' ↓

Scientific American posted an article entitled “Psychedelic Healing?” about the potential medical and psychiatric benefits of a number of different psychedelics. While the staff of humemes does not support the widespread, unrestricted use of any psychedelic compounds, psychedelic research has been going for for nearly 50 years and has shown incredible signs of being effective in helping to curb or stop many different mental ailments. As discussed in Dr. Rick Strassman’s book DMT: The Spirit Molecule it has become increasingly hard for researchers to get their hands on a number of these compounds due to their legal status. It strikes me as odd that we allow our war on drugs to extend to only a certain number of compounds while so many others are left open to scrutiny and testing.

An excerpt from the article:

The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs. In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine and ketamine.

Much remains unclear about the precise neural mechanisms governing how these drugs produce their mind-bending results, but they often produce somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential therapeutic tools. Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off.

A post over at Distributed Neuron points to a journal article at Public Library of Science regarding research on THC, the most active mind-altering chemical in the marijuana.

From the journal article:

The fact that cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug has motivated a great deal of research aimed at understanding how it produces its psychoactive effects. Here I use the term psychoactive to describe the mild euphoria, altered perceptions, sense of relaxation, and sociability that often, but not always, accompany recreational cannabis use. Despite the difficulties inherent in working with lipophilic cannabinoids such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the primary psychoactive component of cannabis, our understanding of the mechanism of action of these compounds at the cellular level has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. However, a complete understanding of how cannabis elicits its psychoactive effects would include an appreciation of its actions at the cellular and network level as well as an identification of the neural circuits perturbed. The cannabinoid field has now matured to the point where investigators can begin to relate the cellular mechanisms of THC action to the behavioral effects of cannabis.

THC research has been seriously inhibited by its legal status and while I don’t personally believe it will become legal in the US anytime soon, more research needs to be done. I think there is a possibility that more research may lead to some interesting findings and perhaps a new perspectives on what we classify as illegal, addictive, and unhealthy compounds.