Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was first synthesised in 1938 by Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz AG Pharmaceutical Company in Basel, Switzerland LSD was the 25th lysergic acid derivative developed by Hoffman during a discovery project for pharmacologically active derivatives of lysergic acid which would act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant LSD became widely used …
Authors Anne K Schlag, Jacob Aday, Iram Salam, Jo C Neill, David J Nutt Published February 3, 2022 Psychedelic medicines are a rapidly developing area of clinical research and public health policy. Despite an increasing body of studies highlighting their efficacy to treat a broad range of medical conditions, psychedelic drugs remain a controversial issue …
Who is James Fadiman? James Fadiman is a true man of many talents. Wikipedia calls him an ‘American writer’, but actually, he’s worked in multiple fields, from psychology, through to IT and, finally, to psychedelic research. He studied Psychology at Harvard University and obtained a PhD from Stanford University. As a graduate student at Stanford, …
In this webinar from the Student Psychedelic Conference, we hear from two groups doing amazing harm reduction work! PsyCare Amanda Guzinska started working with PsyCare since 2013 having discovered them at a festival a couple of years prior while helping a friend through a difficult experience. Among her friends or even strangers in need, …
Dosing in psychoactive drugs Dosing represents one of the three critical elements that determine the quality of a drug experience, alongside set and setting. Determining appropriate dosages can be difficult due to ambiguity in drug purity, drug experience of the individual, tolerance, and the aforementioned set and setting. While these represent general guidelines, experience, variability …
Today’s episode features Dr Peter Gasser, the president of the Swiss Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy. Professor Nutt and Dr Gasser talk about the rather unusual and innovative attitude to psychedelic research in Switzerland. How can Britain learn from the Swiss? What are the drug policies in the Albert Hofmann’s – the discoverer of LSD – …
In this Drug Science webinar, Dr Balázs Szigeti explains the current science of microdosing as he presents the results from his self-blinded microdosing research, the largest placebo-controlled microdosing study in the world! Dr Szigeti also explains how participants created their microdoses with a placebo control as part of the revolutionary methodology he developed to reduce …
Laura Kaertner – Insights on psychedelic microdosing Laura Kaertner is a research assistant at the Centre of Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London where she researches the effects of psychedelic microdosing. Her primary role is in the organisation and set-up of a large-scale observational microdosing study. Microdosing has gained significant media interest, with media reports …
Professor David Nutt begins season two of the Drug Science Podcast by taking a deep dive into entheogenic plants with a legend of the psychedelic renaissance – Dennis McKenna. Dennis deliberates on his life’s work, ethnobotany, innovation within psychedelic industry, the therapeutic potential of DMT and the indigenous use of ayahuasca. Dennis McKenna’s research has …
Professor David Nutt’s recent comment in ‘The Times‘ addresses how the ‘Law on psychedelic drugs blocks vital medical research‘. In the 1950s, psychedelics — LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) in particular — were seen as the great breakthrough in psychiatry, offering effective treatments for hitherto untreatable disorders. For 15 years, while they were the subject …
Underground psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has persisted in Europe despite the banning of the substances LSD and MDMA in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively. This article describes the work of a Zurich-based psychotherapist providing individual and group psycholytic psychotherapy, whose practice persisted for several years before she was arrested in 2009. The article provides commentary on the …