Why LSD Trips Last Forever, What Happens When You Inject Psilocybin

Posted: April 27, 2017 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Education, Health and Social Issues, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: Ayahuasca, Baystate Health, Consciousness, Homer, Lysergic acid diethylamide, Psychedelic drug |Leave a comment

And other fun notes from the world’s largest gathering of psychedelic researchers.

Mike Riggs reports: The world’s leading researchers of psychedelic drugs met in Oakland, Calif., this past weekend at Psychedelic Science 2017, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Science (MAPS). I attended for for a story I’m working on about MDMA-assisted therapy, and thought I’d share some items from my notebook.

Why do LSD trips last so long? Psilocybin and MDMA are both active in the body for two to three hours when administered in tens of milligrams. LSD, meanwhile, is administered in micrograms (1 mcg is .001 mg) and yet the drug experience can exceed eight hours.

UNC-Chapel Hill‘s Dave Nichols, a medicinal chemist who’s been studying psychedelics for decades, shared some new research that explains why. Imagine a carnivorous pitcher plant. That’s the 5-HT2B serotonin receptor. Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, is a fly. Instead of attaching to the top of the receptor, the LSD molecule gets pulled inside and the top of the receptor closes around it. Basically, LSD trips last forever because the drug gets trapped in a brain cage. (Nichols’ team published their findings in January. You can read more about them here.)

What happens when you inject psilocybin? The psilocybin-assisted therapy study conducted by Johns Hopkins University—which found that moderate and high doses of psilocybin, in conjunction with psychotherapy, reduced anxiety and depression in cancer patients–used gel caps as the method of administration.

[Read the full story here, at Reason.com]

Most recreational users just eat the mushrooms or brew them into tea. Over in Europe, however, researchers have experimented with intravenous administration. Apparently, it’s like “rocketing [someone] out of a cannon”; the come-up takes place over roughly a minute, rather than half an hour. Well, duh. Except, at a Q&A later in the day, Nichols revealed LSD doesn’t work any quicker when administered via IV. It truly is the Good Friday mass of psychedelic drugs.

Prohibition makes this kind of research stupidly expensive: The Imperial College of London pays 1,500 British Pounds per dose of UK Home Office-approved psilocybin, according to researcher Leor Roseman, who noted that street prices are a fraction of that. (The ICL is currently doing a ton of interesting psychedlelic research right now.)

I’m not sure how easy it is to obtain isolated psilocybin on the black market, but the mushrooms themselves grow on cow shit and dead plant matter. Stateside, dried psilocybin shrooms go for about $5-$10 per gram, according to various mycophile message boards and my own independent research. The most common … (read more)

Source: Reason.com