My earliest exposure to psychedelics came from growing up near the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, well past the glory days of the Summer of Love. The Haight Street of my youth was a tourist destination for hippiesque consumerism, not a countercultural hub, though I...
HE WASN’T the first person to say it, and he probably won’t be the last, but Tom Insel’s accusation carried extra weight thanks to his job title: director of the US National Institute of Mental Health. Towards the end of his 13-year tenure, Insel began publicly...
When you hear the term “psychedelics,” you might think of hallucinogenic and mystical experiences. Popular psychedelics include LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), magic mushrooms (containing the psychedelic psilocybin), and DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine, part of the...
This is the third article in a series on psychedelic chemistry, and the final article focusing on the tryptamine class. In the previous article we learned that though DMT and 5-MeO-DMT lack oral activity, chemistry wizards are able to change that. By making one of a...
Since the lifting of the irrational 30-year ban on psychedelic research around the turn of the millennium, scientists have been proving once again what researchers in the 50s and 60s had already begun to find: psychedelics are extremely promising treatment tools for...
