What Would Happen If The Entire Bethel Family At Governing Body Central Was MicroDosed With Magic Mushrooms Over A One Year Period?
by frankiespeakin 60 Replies latest admin removed
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frankiespeakin
New research out of Norway shows that taking LSD, "magic mushrooms," and peyote -- so-called psychedelic drugs -- won't raise risk for mental health problems as previously thought.
Published in the Aug. 19 issue of PLoS One, the study says that some psychedelic drugs may even reduce risk for psychological problems.
"After adjusting for other risk factors, lifetime use of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline or peyote, or past year use of LSD was not associated with a higher rate of mental health problems or receiving mental health treatment," study author Pal-Orjan Johansen, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, said in a statement.
Psychedelic drugs have similar structures to naturally-occurring neurotransmitters, which are chemical messengers found in the brain, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The exact way they work is unclear, but they're thought to temporarily interfere with neurotransmitter action, leading to rapid emotional swings and hallucinogenic "trips" that can last hours (on average six hours for magic mushrooms, or psilocybin, and up to 12 hours for peyote and LSD).
A 2007 government survey found about 1.1 million people aged 12 and older had used a psychedelic drug for the first time in the year prior to being surveyed, NIDA reported.
There haven't been properly controlled studies on these drugs, according to the government drug agency, but some case reports and smaller studies suggest there could be long-term effects like flashbacks, impaired memory, and risk of psychiatric illness.
For the new study, researchers analyzed data on more than 130,000 randomly chosen Americans who took a drug use survey between 2001 and 2004, including 22,000 who had used a psychedelic drug at least once. They were also asked about any mental health symptoms and treatments that took place in the year prior to being surveyed. The symptoms in the survey were associated with mental health woes including psychological distress, anxiety disorders, psychosis and mood disorders......
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/magic-mushrooms-may-help-treat-depression-how/
CBS) Feeling blue? Two new studies suggest taking a trip might help - but we're not talking vacations.
PICTURES - Depression nation: 16 saddest states
Tripping on "magic mushrooms" appears to change the brain in ways similar to antidepressants, the study found.
"We're not saying go out there and eat magic mushrooms," Professor David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology researcher at Imperial College London and senior author of both studies, told Reuters. "But...this drug has such a fundamental impact on the brain that it's got to be meaningful - it's got to be telling us something about how the brain works."
The first of these studies, published in the Jan. 23 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, took 30 healthy volunteers and infused the shrooms' active ingredient - called psilocybin - into their bloodstreams while they were lying in an MRI machine. The researchers looked at the volunteers' brain scans, which showed decreased levels of activity in "hub" regions of the brain that connect areas responsible for consciousness, self-identity, and organizing sensory information that constantly floods the brain.
The second study - to be published in the Jan. 25 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry - gave 10 volunteers in MRI machines written cues to look at that would prompt them to think about their memories. Then the researchers gave the volunteers psilocybin, and found it enhanced their recollections of personal memories. Their brain scans also reflected these changes in areas of the brain that process vision and sensory information
The researchers say psilocybin might be an effective supplement to psychotherapy.
"Psychedelics are thought of as 'mind-expanding' drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity, but surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas," Nutt said in a written statement. "These hubs constrain our experience of the world and keep it orderly. We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange."
The study raises several questions - aside from who would want to volunteer to go in an MRI machine while on magic mushrooms. Can psychedelic mushrooms conceivably be used to treat people's depression?
The researchers said the brain's biology might provide some clues. One of the brain hubs that were shown to be affected in the study - the medial prefrontal cortex - is found to be hyperactive in people with depression. So psilocybin's affects on this area could cause mimic antidepressants' effects. Also, psilocybin was found to slow blood flow to the brain's hypothalamus. When blood flow is increased to the hypothalamus, people typically experience cluster headaches, so this might explain why some volunteers reported feeling better after "shrooming."....
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frankiespeakin
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychedelics-may-help-treat-depression/
Ketamine —a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K—delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression.
"We were trying to figure out what ketamine was doing to produce this rapid response," which can take as little as two hours to begin to act, says neuroscientist Ron Duman of the Yale University School of Medicine. So Duman and his colleagues gave a small amount of ketamine (10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) to rats and watched the drug literally transform the animals' brains . "Ketamine… can induce a rapid increase in connections in the brain, the synapses by which neurons interact and communicate with each other, " Duman says. "You can visually see this response that occurs in response to ketamine."........But ketamine is not alone among psychedelics in having potentially therapeutic effects. A review, published August 18 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience , of research on this grouping of drugs generally—ranging from dissociative anesthetics such as ketamine to naturally occurring hallucinogenic compounds such as the psilocybin in "magic mushrooms" — shows their efficacy at treating obsessive-compulsive disorders and addiction as well as depression and anxiety, among other disorders. ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.)
In fact, ketamine has shown promise at reducing the risk of suicide and is currently being tested in humans for effectiveness in treating bipolar disorder and addiction. Psilocybin can decrease obsessive-compulsive behaviors, or even eliminate them entirely, for as long as a full day after treatment and is being tested to reduce anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients. And even LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide-25—can combat inflammation, among other potential therapeutic uses. "The potency is about 300 times more potent than steroidal anti-inflammatories," says pharmacologist Charles Nichols of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, who is working with the drug. "My lab is currently studying the ability of it to block or prevent inflammation in models of human inflammatory disorders, and the results are very promising so far."
The August 18 review, by psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider and neuropsychologist Michael Kometer of the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Zurich, proposes that various psychedelics' interaction with the receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin may prove key to understanding their beneficial—and mind-bending—effects. "Psychedelics activate neuronal networks and the glutamate system that are implicated in the regulation of emotion," Vollenweider says, noting that their hallucinogenic effects can be impeded by blocking specific serotonin receptors in the brain (known as 5-HT2A). Psychedelics typically boost serotonin and may also boost the release of glutamate, according to the review authors, another neurotransmitter that has been linked to short-term but long-lasting brain functions such as learning and memory. More glutamate also has an impact on synapses. "This might result in an increased number and function of spine synapses in the prefrontal cortex," Vollenweider says. -
frankiespeakin
http://www.dddmag.com/news/2013/10/new-target-inflammatory-disorder-treatments
The research team found that activation of serotonin 5-HT2A receptor proteins potently blocks TNF-alpha induced inflammation. The serotonin 5-HT2A receptor is the main target of classic hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, and the drug the researchers used to activate the receptor protein is itself a member of this class. In the study, the researchers activated serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, and then administered TNF-alpha to mice to produce an inflammatory response. In mice when 5-HT2A receptors were activated before TNF-alpha was administered, there was a near complete blockade of inflammation compared to mice where the 5-HT2A receptors were not activated that had a full inflammatory response. The effects were most powerful in vascular tissues like the aorta, and the intestine. In the intestine, inflammation was blocked with an extremely low dose of the drug – 300 times lower than required for any behavioral effects of the drug. "Our results potentially represent a breakthrough of a new first in class orally available small molecule-based therapeutic strategy to treat inflammatory diseases involving TNF-alpha," notes Charles Nichols, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. "Although the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor is the primary target for certain drugs, including LSD, to mediate their behavioral effects, the dose of drug necessary for anti-inflammatory effects is orders of magnitude lower than intoxicating doses, and future therapies may target directly the relevant cellular processes activated by the 5-HT2A receptor rather than the receptor itself."
Researchers in the US have developed a potentially promising technique to support the development of a new class of convenient oral therapies for inflammatory diseases.
A team from the Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Sciences Center in New Orleans have outlined a powerful new anti-inflammatory mechanism in the PLOS One journal that could be used as the basis for new oral medications for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis , atherosclerosis and inflammatory bowel disorders.
Diseases of this kind are associated with heavy production of tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), one of the master inflammatory molecules in the body, which in turns stimulates an excessive immune response that damages healthy tissue in various ways.
It has now been found that activating serotonin 5-HT2A receptor proteins - which happen to be the main biological target of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD - has the added effect of blocking TNF-alpha induced inflammation.
- See more at: http://www.arthritisresearchuk.org/news/general-news/2013/october/potential-new-means-of-developing-anti-inflammatory-drugs-revealed.aspx#sthash.Zs6AGias.dpuf...Although these new treatments target the same biological processes as LSD, the researchers noted that the dosage necessary for anti-inflammatory effects is many times lower than an intoxicating dose.
Dr Charles Nichols, associate professor of pharmacology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, said: "Our results potentially represent a breakthrough of a new first-in-class orally available small molecule-based therapeutic strategy to treat inflammatory diseases involving TNF-alpha." - See more at: http://www.arthritisresearchuk.org/news/general-news/2013/october/potential-new-means-of-developing-anti-inflammatory-drugs-revealed.aspx#sthash.Zs6AGias.dpufff
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frankiespeakin
http://chronicle.com/article/Psychedelic-Academe/139509/
Y ou don't have to spend much time at the six-day second international Psychedelic Science conference in downtown Oakland to learn that not all its 1,900 attendees are academic scientists, and that few are strangers to the power of mind-bending drugs.
On my first day, boarding the conference's sunset cruise of San Francisco Bay, I meet Chad, a middle-aged man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, who says his trips with magic mushrooms have reawakened him to the beauty of existence. "I am here out of curiosity," he explains, adding that he has a desire to understand what he has experienced. "It is just really nice to know they are breaking through some of the barriers with formal research. God knows there is a lot of informal research."
As the sun sets behind the Golden Gate Bridge, I meet Seabrook. Wearing rings in both ears and a flower badge pinned to his cap, he says he has never had a bad trip in more than 20 LSD experiences. "The main thing I love about this is it is a reunion—I have so many old friends here it is like a family," he says.
At least half the attendees on the cruise disembark early in San Francisco to join a celebration of Bicycle Day, commemorating the day in April 1943 that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofman sampled the lysergic acid diethylamide compound that he'd discovered and then rode his bike home.
But dotted among the conference's psychedelic aficionados, who along with healers, artists, and activists make up the bulk of attendees, are members of another tribe. Researchers in psychiatry and psychology are here presenting their latest findings on the use of psychedelics to help treat anxiety disorders and addictions for which conventional treatments don't always work.
Distinguished by their suits and business dress, the researchers are for the most part keeping to themselves any personal experiences with the drugs. They stress the drugs' dangers as well as potential benefits. And I see none disembark for Bicycle Day. "We are a bunch of serious, sober academics," Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles medical school, told me on the phone before the conference. Grob is presenting the published results of his study using psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat severe anxiety in advanced-stage cancer patients.
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besty
the article titles in the publications would gradually become long and meaningless - just my guess...
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frankiespeakin
the article titles in the publications would gradually become long and meaningless - just my guess...
Good a guess as any, I guess. The articles would definately be changing that's for sure. They are already meaningless, longer titles would be a hoot and indicadive of something happening with their neural pathway habits and the neural network hub.