Citation: Thompson WE (2017) In Summary: A High by Any Other Name: Exploring the Motivations for Consumption of ‘Legal Highs’. J Drug Abuse. Vol. 3 No. 2:10 A large number of legal, semi-legal, synthetic, and organic drugs are sold online and through commercial vendors as novelties, often bearing the label “not for human consumption.” This qualitative field study was based on extensive...
From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with a team of pharmacologists experimenting with psilocybin, an illegal psychoactive compound found in psychedelic mushrooms. The team had conducted an open-label clinical trial with long-term cigarette smokers, using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to help them quit. The smoking outcomes were very promising, occurring alongside...
An eighteen-year-old female patient of the Caucasian ethnicity from Australasia presented with a persistently dilated pupil causing her discomfort and occasional burning sensation when she is outdoors due to oversensitivity to sunlight. However, her pupillary reaction to light (pupillary light reflex) was intact. The patient is a known user of psychedelic substances (entheogens) including LSD,...
Background: The States of Consciousness Questionnaire (SOCQ) was developed to assess the occurrence features of the change in consciousness induced by psilocybin, and includes the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), developed to assess the ocurrence of mystical experiences in altered states of consciousness. Objective: To translate the SOCQ to Brazilian Portuguese and validate the 30-item...
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a strong role in the execution of executive tasks such as working memory. It is thought to exert top-down control over sensory regions, and integrate information from both external stimuli, and internal computation, such as choice and expectation (1-3). The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a region of the PFC known to receive strong projections from...
Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 50(11) A recent review in Pharmacological Reviews highlights that over the last decade, a renaissance has occurred in psychedelic drug research in North America and Europe as investigators at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), New York University and Imperial College London have embarked on studies that...
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic drug that alters cognition in a characteristic way. It has been suggested that psychedelics expand the breadth of cognition via actions on the central nervous system. Previous work has shown changes in semantic processing under psilocybin (a related psychedelic to LSD) that are consistent with an increased spread of semantic activation....
Authors : Varsha Dutta Publisher : Narosa Publishing House Pvt. Ltd. ISBN : 978-81-8487-570-6 Price : 1000rs/- Year of Publication : 2016 Pages : 108 pp Among the diseases that afflict the mind, depression is one of the most forbidding, a scourge that ranks very much on a par with Alzheimer's disease or with fulminant schizophrenia for its calamitous effects. It can at times descend on its...
Antidepressant, atypical antipsychotic, and hallucinogen drugs mediate their actions in part by interactions with the serotonin-2A (5HT2A) receptor. Serotonergic hallucinogen drugs, such as psilocybin, bind most potently as agonists at the 5HT2A receptor, producing profound changes in perception, mood, and cognition. Some of these drugs have been or are currently being investigated in small...
Psilocybin, a classical tryptamine hallucinogen, serves as a model of acute psychosis in humans.Intoxication with this compound induces significant alterations in perception, thought disturbance and emotional processing, effects that mimic psychotic symptoms.The neurochemical basis of its effects is related to the stimulation of serotonin 5-HT 1A a 5-HT 2A/C receptors.Disconnection is one of...