Psychopharmacology
April 1, 2011
John Mendelson, Jeremy Coyle, Juan Carlos Lopez et al.
40 citations
Salvinorin A (SA), the psychoactive compound in the hallucinogenic plant Salvia divinorum, was administered sublingually at doses up to 4 mg to eight experienced users in a placebo-controlled ascending-dose study. No dose produced significantly greater physiological or subjective effects than placebo, and the effects did not resemble those of smoked Salvia divinorum. SA was detectable in plasma and urine but mostly below the reliable quantification limit of 0.5 ng/mL. The results suggest that sublingual bioavailability of SA is low, indicating that higher doses, alternate formulations, or other routes of administration are needed to study its effects in humans.
PLoS One
December 2, 2010
Gantt P. Galloway, Jennifer D. Siegrist, Lynn C. Robertson et al.
22 citations
A double-blind placebo-controlled study found that the hallucinogen MDA increases closed-eye visions and mystical-type experiences. People who had more intense visions tended to perform worse on tests of contour integration and object recognition, suggesting that drug-induced hallucinations may be stronger in individuals with poorer perceptual processing. This points to possible shared mechanisms with hallucinations in psychiatric and neurological conditions.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 23, 2015
Matthew J. Baggott, Jeremy Coyle, Jennifer D. Siegrist et al.
21 citations
preprint
MDMA produces a prosocial syndrome that facilitates emotional disclosure by increasing feelings of authenticity and decreasing concerns about negative evaluation by others. In a within-subjects double-blind placebo controlled study of 1.5 mg/kg oral MDMA, the drug showed both sedative- and stimulant-like effects, including increased self-report anxiety, but positively altered self-evaluation and reduced social anxiety. MDMA also increased how comfortable participants felt describing emotional memories, consistent with the suggestion that it represents a novel pharmacological class.
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
March 15, 2019
Matthew J. Baggott, Kathleen J. Garrison, Jeremy Coyle et al.
20 citations
The drug MDA, an entactogen similar to MDMA (ecstasy), produces longer-lasting emotional and physiological effects than MDMA. In a controlled experiment with healthy volunteers, a single oral dose of 1.4 mg/kg MDA increased heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones (cortisol and prolactin) to levels comparable to those from a 1.5 mg/kg dose of MDMA. However, participants' self-reported drug effects from MDA remained elevated for at least 8 hours, whereas MDMA effects subsided by 6 hours. Blood measurements showed that MDA and its metabolite HMA reached peak concentrations of about 229 µg/L and 92 µg/L, respectively. Because the two drugs had similar blood-level profiles, the longer duration of MDA's effects likely stems from differences in how it acts on the brain rather than from slower elimination.
arXiv Preprint Archive
June 1, 2012
Jeremy Coyle, David E. Presti, Matthew J. Baggott
Machine learning applied to 1000 written reports of 10 different drugs from the Erowid website identified distinct patterns in how people describe their experiences with each drug. A random-forest classifier using just 110 key words achieved 51.1% accuracy in identifying which drug a report described, far above the 10% expected by chance. Reports of MDMA were most distinctive (86.9% accuracy), while those for DPT were hardest to classify (20.1%). Hierarchical clustering revealed similarities between certain drugs, such as DMT and Salvia divinorum. The findings suggest that automated text analysis can uncover consistent, drug-specific features in subjective experience reports, potentially aiding hypothesis generation about new or poorly understood compounds.