Since childhood, Rachael Petersen had lived with an unexplainable sense of grief that no drug or talk therapy could entirely ease. So in 2017 she volunteered for a small clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University that was testing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for chronic depression. "I was so depressed," Ms. Petersen, 29, said recently. "I felt that the world had abandoned me, that I'd lost the right to exist on this planet. Really, it was like my thoughts were so stuck, I felt isolated." [continues 1258 words]
The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels. "Psychiatry is one of the most conservative specialties in medicine," said David Nichols, a medicinal chemist who founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund psychedelic research. "We haven't really had new drugs for years, and the drug industry has quit the field because they don't have new targets" in the brain. "The field was basically stagnant, and we needed to try something different." [continues 1127 words]
Marijuana use did not increase among teenagers in the states in which medical marijuana has become legal, researchers reported Monday. The new analysis is the most comprehensive effort to date to answer a much-debated question: Does decriminalization of marijuana lead more adolescents to begin using it? The study found that states that had legalized medical use had higher prevailing rates of teenage marijuana use before enacting the laws, compared with states where the drug remains illegal. Those higher levels were unaffected by the changes in the law, the study found. [continues 618 words]
He heard about the drug trial from a friend in Switzerland and decided it was worth volunteering, even if it meant long, painful train journeys from his native Austria and the real possibility of a mental meltdown. He didn't have much time, after all, and traditional medicine had done nothing to relieve his degenerative spine condition. "I'd never taken the drug before, so I was feeling - well, I think the proper word for it, in English, is dread," said Peter, 50, an Austrian social worker, in a telephone interview; he asked that his last name be omitted to protect his identity. "There was this fear that it could all go wrong, that it could turn into a bad trip." [continues 803 words]
Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it. The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and '90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes. [continues 1270 words]
The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form, researchers are reporting after the first rigorous test of the approach performed in North America. For years, European countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands have allowed doctors to provide some addicts with prescription heroin as an alternative to buying drugs on the street. The treatment is safe and keeps addicts out of trouble, studies have found, but it is controversial -- not only because the drug is illegal but also because policy makers worry that treating with heroin may exacerbate the habit. [continues 433 words]
ROSEBURG, Ore. - Their first love might be the rum or vodka or gin and juice that is going around the bonfire. Or maybe the smoke, the potent marijuana that grows in the misted hills here like moss on a wet stone. But it hardly matters. Here as elsewhere in the country, some users start early, fall fast and in their reckless prime can swallow, snort, inject or smoke anything available, from crystal meth to prescription pills to heroin and ecstasy. And treatment, if they get it at all, can seem like a joke. [continues 1863 words]
ON the afternoon of Jan. 11, Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, had about a dozen friends and family up to his glass-walled home in the mountains near Basel, Switzerland, for a party. It was his 102nd birthday and, in an important sense, also a homecoming. Dr. Hofmann, who died last week, spent the latter part of his life consulting with scientists around the world who wanted to bring his "problem child," as he called the drug, back into the lab to study as a therapeutic agent. Not long before his last birthday, he learned that health officials in his native Switzerland had approved what will be the first known medical trial of LSD anywhere in more than 35 years -- to test whether the drug can help relieve distress at end of life. [continues 1009 words]
Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting today that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, "forgot the urge to smoke." The finding, which appears in the journal Science, is based on a small study. But experts say it is likely to alter the course of addiction research, pointing researchers toward new ideas for treatment. [continues 1027 words]
The results of two new studies may signal a substantial shift in the way psychiatrists and researchers think about treatment for severely depressed patients. In one, government researchers found that an injection of a powerful anesthetic drug dissolved feelings of despair in a small group of severely depressed patients in a matter of hours, and that the effect lasted for up to a week in some participants. Doctors cautioned that the study was very small, and that the drug, ketamine, is a tightly controlled substance sometimes used as a club drug that can cause hallucinations, confusion and dangerous reactions, especially when ingested in unknown doses. [continues 572 words]
Play hooky, disappear for the weekend, have a fling, binge-shop like a Wall Street divorcee. Spontaneity can be a healthy defiance of routine, an expression of starved desire, some psychologists say. Yet for scientists who study mental illness and addiction, impulsive behavior -- the tendency to act or react with little thought -- has emerged as an all-purpose plague. In recent years, studies have linked impulsiveness to higher risks of smoking, drinking and drug abuse. People who attempt suicide score highly on measures of impulsivity, as do adolescents with eating problems. Aggression, compulsive gambling, severe personality disorders and attention deficit problems are all associated with high impulsiveness, a problem that affects an estimated 9 percent of Americans, according to a nationwide mental health survey completed last year. [continues 1552 words]
If there's a drug for social phobia, maybe there could be one to help us relax in the company of death. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead to a Harvard University plan to study the recreational drug "ecstasy" as a treatment for anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Elsewhere, researchers in California are studying the effect of psilocybin - the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms - in similar patients. Both teams hope to learn whether the drugs, which can induce effusiveness and heightened awareness, will help people express and manage their fears in a therapeutic setting. [continues 718 words]
Government Data Shows Drug's Potency Higher Than In Past The high-potency marijuana now widely available in cities and some small towns is causing an increasing number of teenagers -- and some preteens -- to land in drug treatment centers or emergency rooms, recent government statistics suggest. The numbers are not conclusive, experts say, but have renewed scientific interest in and debate about the risks of marijuana use. "The stereotypes of marijuana smoking are way out of date," said Michael Dennis, a research psychologist in Bloomington, Ill. "The kids we see are not only smoking stronger stuff at a younger age but their pattern of use might be three to six blunts -- the equivalent of three or four joints each - -- just for themselves, in a day. That's got nothing to do with what mom or dad did in high school. It might as well be a different drug." [continues 374 words]
Stronger Marijuana Has Scientists Concerned For Young People The high-potency marijuana now widely available in cities and some small towns is causing an increasing number of teenagers, and some preteens, to land in drug treatment centers or emergency rooms, recent government statistics suggest. The numbers are not conclusive, experts say, but have renewed scientific interest in and debate about the risks of marijuana use. "The stereotypes of marijuana smoking are way out of date," said Michael Dennis, a research psychologist in Bloomington, Ill. "The kids we see are not only smoking stronger stuff at a younger age, but their pattern of use might be three to six blunts -- the equivalent of three or four joints each - -- just for themselves, in a day. That's got nothing to do with what mom or dad did in high school. It might as well be a different drug." [continues 498 words]
Use of Highly Potent Types of Pot Appears to Be Sending More Youths To the ER and into Rehab Programs. The high-potency marijuana now widely available in cities and some small towns is causing an increasing number of teenagers -- and some preteens -- to land in drug treatment centers or emergency rooms, recent government statistics suggest. The numbers are not conclusive, experts say, but have renewed scientific interest in and debate about the risks of marijuana use. "The stereotypes of marijuana smoking are way out of date," said Michael Dennis, a research psychologist in Bloomington, Ill. "The kids we see are not only smoking stronger stuff at a younger age but their pattern of use might be three to six blunts -- the equivalent of three or four joints each -- just for themselves, in a day. That's got nothing to do with what Mom or Dad did in high school. It might as well be a different drug." [continues 1029 words]
They're nutritious and full of fiber. Yet because cereals, snack bars and other foods made with hempseed and hemp oil contain trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, the Bush administration has been trying to ban these products - increasingly popular with health enthusiasts - for about a year. The products will remain on retailers' shelves for now after a U.S. Appeals Court in San Francisco said last month that it would review a federal ruling that such products are illegal. Under a 1970 federal law known as the Controlled Substance Act, marijuana is listed as a controlled substance, along with heroin, ecstasy, LSD and other drugs of abuse, said Will Glaspy, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, whose ruling would prohibit the sale of hemp products. "There seems to be an increase in food products with hemp lately," he said, "and the agency wanted to clarify what the law says." [continues 366 words]
Be punctual, dress nicely, look people in the eye--and make sure your urine is clean. So many employers now demand a cup of the yellow stuff as part of a job screening for new workers that products with names like Urine Luck! and Klear have found a market; the solutions flood the urine with chemicals that can obscure the results of urine tests. But now a team of Tennessee researchers has demonstrated that a test used to analyze contaminated water can detect and identify those chemicals. The new application, they say, should add one more screen for employers to use when checking for drug use. Workplace drug testing has become increasingly popular over the past decade, in part because the federal government requires testing programs of some of its contractors. [continues 71 words]
