Purpose Current laws prohibiting access to illicit drugs contribute to drug harms as manufacturers and distributors of illicit substances have variable influence over drug supply and quality. Legislation introduced in New Zealand (NZ) in 2021 aimed to address such harm by enabling licenced drug checking providers to directly analyse samples from consumers. This paper aims to detail the use of...
Laws to control drugs have been progressively introduced since the early twentieth century to reduce non-medical use and drug-associated harm. Restrictions on what are now deemed ‘controlled drugs’ and, in New Zealand, ‘prohibited plants’ unjustly impact both medical care and research. The impact on research has frequently been cited in reference to the use of drugs in clinical research, such...
Major depressive disorder (MDD) affects approximately 5 % of the global population. Classic psychedelics have shown promise in treating various mental health disorders. This study evaluated the feasibility and tolerability of an 8-week regimen of microdosed lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a treatment for major depressive disorder in an open-label phase 2A trial (LSDDEP1). Nineteen...
Major depressive disorder (MDD) poses a significant global health burden with available treatments limited by inconsistent efficacy and notable side effects. Classic psychedelics, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have garnered attention for their potential in treating psychiatric disorders. Microdosing, the repeated consumption of sub-hallucinogenic doses of psychedelics, has emerged...
ABSTRACT “Microdosing,” defined as the consumption of small, sub-hallucinogenic quantities of psychedelic drugs, has gained recent popularity. Microdosing is a relatively new concept, therefore no scientific recommendations exist on how to prepare and consume microdoses. Many consumers obtain microdosing information online. Few studies have investigated the content of this information; thus,...
Globally, an estimated 260 million people suffer from depression [1], and there is a clear need for the development of new, alternative antidepressant therapies. In light of problems with the tolerability and efficacy of available treatments [2], a global trend is emerging for patients to self-treat depression with microdoses of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and...
Microdosing psychedelic drugs is a widespread social phenomenon with diverse benefits claimed for mood and cognition. Randomized controlled trials have failed to support these claims, but the laboratory-based dosing in trials conducted to date may have limited ecological validity. Healthy male volunteers were randomized into lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (n = 40) and placebo (n = 40) groups...
Ketamine is central to one of the most rapidly growing areas of neuroscientific research into novel treatments for depression. Limited research has indicated that the psychedelic properties of ketamine may play a role in its antidepressant effects. The aim of the current study was to explore the psychedelic experiences and sustained impact of ketamine in major depressive disorder. In the...
BACKGROUND: Regular ingestion of sub-hallucinogenic doses of psychedelics, referred to as "microdosing", has gained increasing popularity and attention in the press and in online forums, with reported benefits across multiple cognitive and emotional domains. Rigorously controlled studies to date, however, have been limited in scope and have failed to produce results comparable to those reported...
Major depressive disorder negatively impacts the sensitivity and adaptability of the brain's predictive coding framework. The current electroencephalography study into the antidepressant properties of ketamine investigated the downstream effects of ketamine on predictive coding and short-term plasticity in thirty patients with depression using the auditory roving mismatch negativity (rMMN). The...
The rapid-acting clinical effects of ketamine as a novel treatment for depression along with its complex pharmacology have made it a growing research area. One of the key mechanistic hypotheses for how ketamine works to alleviate depression is by enhancing long-term potentiation (LTP)-mediated neural plasticity. The objective of this study was to investigate the plasticity hypothesis in 30...