Word: psilocybin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Amsterdam police found a disoriented French tourist in his van last month with his slain dog beside him, he told them he had wanted to free the animal's mind. He also said he had ingested magic mushrooms, which contain the hallucinogen psilocybin. The incident played into a running debate over whether the Netherlands' famously liberal drug laws are too lax with psychedelic mushrooms. Also in July, a Danish tourist raced his car through a campsite, and a 19-year old man from Iceland jumped out of a window; both had taken magic mushrooms, known in Dutch as "paddos...
...most parties in the Dutch parliament have been calling for a clampdown on magic mushrooms. In dried form, the fungi are already prohibited, but fresh mushrooms can still be legally sold in the Netherlands. The country's public health minister, Ab Klink, has so far steered clear of banning psilocybin mushrooms altogether, in part because his ministry considers it legally problematic to ban a product that grows naturally. But in May he commissioned fresh research into the risks of "paddo" use, and has said he would consider the results, due next month, in deciding...
...Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will...
...them. For Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31 psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room...
...half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after ordinary treatment...