Your brain on psilocybin; Massachusetts to vote on psychedelic ballot initiative in November; and two new species of Psilocybe mushrooms discovered
Plus: Interrupting the psychedelic experience and California legislators pass bill to break up research bottleneck
Happy Friday and welcome back to The Microdose, an independent journalism newsletter brought to you by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Your brain on psilocybin
Recent studies suggest psilocybin can help with mental health issues such as depression and PTSD, but the mechanics of just how those changes happen in the brain are not yet well understood. A new paper published in Nature this week adds to the growing body of work documenting how psilocybin affects brain activity.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recorded the brain activity of seven adults in around 18 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans before, during, and after taking a 25 mg dose of psilocybin or 40 mg of methylphenidate (also known as Ritalin). Methylphenidate, commonly used to treat ADHD, can cause side effects that mimic some elements of a psychedelic experience, including increased heart rate and dizziness. The 33 researchers from multiple U.S. universities who authored the study report that psilocybin reduced functional connectivity in the brain, particularly in what’s called the “default mode network,” a cluster of brain regions thought to be responsible for higher-level cognition, including self-reflection and sense of self. According to the study, psilocybin caused more than a threefold greater change in functional connectivity across the brain than methylphenidate.
When participants came back to the lab weeks or even months later, their brains had mostly returned to normal but still showed some lasting changes in connectivity. In a thread on X about the study, lead author Joshua Siegel wrote that decreased connectivity between the anterior hippocampus and the default mode network persisted, describing it as “a reset of circuits critical to the sense of self.”
Massachusetts to vote on psychedelic ballot initiative in November
Last week, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin certified four ballot questions to be included in the state’s November election. One of those is “Limited Legalization and Regulation of Certain Natural Psychedelic Substances,” a ballot initiative proposed by Massachusetts for Mental Health Options, a political committee formed to support the initiative and sponsored by New Approach PAC. The New Approach PAC has also been instrumental in developing and funding psychedelics-related ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon.
If passed, the initiative would establish a state-regulated program where people could use certain psychedelics including psilocybin, ibogaine, mescaline, and DMT. It would also allow people in the state to possess, ingest, obtain, transport, and cultivate less than two grams of those drugs, although those substances remain illegal federally.
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Two new species of Psilocybe mushrooms discovered
Psilocybe mushrooms are known for their psychedelic effects — and in a paper published recently in the journal Mycologia, researchers in South Africa report having discovered two new species. Psilocybe maluti was discovered growing on cow manure in the Kingdom of Lesotho, while Psilocybe ingeli was found in “bovine manure-enriched grasslands.” There are currently around 140 known species of Psilocybe, and P. maluti and P. ingeli are only the second and third species to be discovered on the continent of Africa. This is “unsurprising,” the authors write, “considering the lack of studies in mycology on the African continent.”
The paper also includes accounts of local use and knowledge about the mushroom. Basotho healers mix P. maluti and Boophone disticha, another hallucinogenic plant, into a brew that is used for divination. Many locals also say they’ve witnessed crows eating the mushrooms, which may contribute to propagation of the mushroom’s spores.
Interrupting the psychedelic experience
In clinical trials of psychedelics, it can be difficult for researchers to understand how much of the results to attribute to the drug versus the overall experience of taking the drug, which can include therapeutic support as well as participants’ expectations about the treatment. In a letter published in JAMA Network Open this week, researchers affiliated with the University of Exeter and Imperial College London suggest a new methodology that could help researchers disambiguate the two: interrupting the psychedelic experience.
Their work analyzes data from 20 participants in studies whose main outcomes have already previously been published. Those participants were given DMT in two testing sessions, in which they underwent brain scans. Of the 20 participants in the researchers’ analysis, 12 were asked every minute of their DMT session to verbally rate how intense the drug’s effects were, while the other eight were not asked to rate their experience while it was occurring.
After the drug’s effects subsided, they filled out questionnaires about the intensity of their trip and their depressive symptoms. In their responses, participants who were asked to give minute-by-minute ratings gave lower overall scores to their trip’s intensity and showed a smaller decrease in depressive symptoms. The researchers theorize that the process of rating in real time served as an interruption to the psychedelic experience and that such interruptions could be used to further investigate the role of the psychedelic experience in the drugs’ therapeutic effects.
California legislators pass bill to break up research bottleneck
Last week, California senators voted to pass AB 2841, which allows the state’s Research Advisory Panel to hold closed sessions. Researchers in California must obtain approval from the panel in order to conduct certain research projects involving Schedule I and II opioid, stimulant, and hallucinogenic drugs. The panel used to meet privately, but after concerns arose last year that the panel was subject to state public meetings laws, the panel stopped meeting out of fear that private meetings would violate the updated law, while public meetings would reveal applicants’ trade secrets or research ideas. The bill now heads to Governor Newsom’s desk.
In The Conversation, anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi writes about “entheogen tourism” and what happens as more non-Indigenous tourists seek out experiences with ayahuasca.
The hype around ketamine therapy has reached a backlash phase, writes Vanity Fair contributor David Ewing Duncan, who has previously published an essay about how the drug helped him through his Long COVID symptoms. “What’s missing in this discussion are the large, long-term studies of how ketamine impacts users, including risky side effects,” Duncan writes. “They would go a long way in countering the hype-and-backlash cycle that, in the absence of long-term research, exists in a kind of information vacuum.”
The 2020 Netflix docuseries (Un)Well includes an episode featuring Soul Quest, an ayahuasca church and retreat center in Florida at which a young man named Brandon Begley died in 2018. For DoubleBlind, journalist Mattha Busby spoke with former Soul Quest employees, volunteers, or and guests about the organization, as well as Begley’s family, who say the show “never contacted [the] family or their legal team.”
The Economist explores Mexico’s booming psychedelic therapy tourism scene.
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