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singular_me
20th June 2017, 05:52 AM
about time. Not for everybody but psychedelics must get rid of the "drug" label, they are medicine

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Ayahuasca: Coming to a Clinic Near You?

June 16, 2017,

The psychedelic South American concoction is exciting the interest of medical researchers, even as debate over set and setting continues.


Oh, how the times they are a changin’. Twenty years ago, traveling from the U.S. to the jungle to take ayahuasca was mostly reserved for the wildly adventurous, the earthy hippie, or those on a quest with a purpose.

Today, going to the jungle to take the “medicine” is a featured “dream trip” in luxury travel magazines like Afar.

Which means, of course, there is work being done in the U.S. to take the jungle and the travel out of the equation (as a sign of the times, not by causation).

For example, Jessica Nielson, a research faculty member at University of California-San Francisco, and a neurobiologist and trauma researcher by training, is devoted to making ayahuasca available in the U.S. as medicine. Inspired after she received her PhD, she went to Peru where she saw first hand the use of the tea to treat post-traumatic stress disorder on U.S. veterans. She’s been working to fold ayahuasca research in to her post doc ever since, especially work on developing a protocol to get ayahuasca research moved forward to reschedule it—ayahuasca is considered Schedule I, with no recognized therapeutic value and considered at high risk for abuse—the same Federal class of drug as marijuana and LSD.

Nielson says the ayahuasca concoction, a tea made of the two common Amazon jungle plants Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, does, in fact, have increasingly recognized therapeutic value. “There are indications out of Brazil it is useful [for treating] depression, and out of Canada for drug addiction, and [there’s] research out of UCLA on alcoholism.” She says there is also evidence that the tea is useful in treating cognitive decline and diabetes.

What makes the research into ayahuasca unique is that the scientific research is actually taking place using the plants, unlike, for example, psychedelic mushrooms, where research is being conducted on synthetic psilocybin.

With mushrooms, “even though you might have a certain weight, you don’t know how much psilocybin is there.” Consistency in dosage is key. “But with ayahuasca tea, you can determine the concentration of the tea.”

“In Brazil, they’re [researching] the tea, where they cut the two plants, boil them together, and get a tea they administer,” she explains. “They can standardize that, so you know the actual concentrations.”

Other researchers are producing a freeze-dried pill version of ayahuasca, of which Nielson says there is “some debate if it’s ayahuasca,” as it is possible the body metabolizes it differently in pill form.

Peter Gorman, an investigative journalist and someone who has spent more than 30 years working with plant medicines in South America, says the plants are key. “Ayahuasca is a part of the jungle experience, not apart from it.”

“I’m a scientist, but I’m a spiritual person,” says Nielson. “The shamans have a deep connection to the plant and the spirit world. They can communicate to figure out how to make ayahuasca and how to administer it. It’s been a deep-seated tradition they’ve had for a long time. As a western white researcher, I don’t want to step on the toes of all this tradition. There’s things these communities have been doing for a long time that work.”

Nielson stresses the safety of the concoction, when proper protocol is followed, referencing a tragic case of a young man from Sebastopol, California, who died during an ayahuasca experience.

“People don’t die of ayahuasca, they die of improper support,” she says. Something happened and they hit their head, she says, or sometimes a purgative taken before hand can poison them. Or, “somebody has underlying psychosis, and someone stabbed someone else in the ceremony. They’re not ODing—something about the set or the setting caused the fatality.”


................... To me, plants are sentient,” he continues, comparing ayahuasca’s preparation by a curandero to that of a good chef: Say you have six cooks using the same equipment and ingredients. The carrot has to give up itself, he says, and “as a sentient being, it does not have to give up its spirit. But if the chef invokes, talks to, coaxes those plants to give the extra juices, it’ll be juicier.”

“If you go to a traditional setting, it’s going to take you out of where you are in the world. It slows you down, and allows your body to forget the nonsense of your life. In the more traditional setting, you get quiet enough to see … and get rid of those bags of potatoes around your neck. If your brain is full of nonsense, how are you going to hear the spirits if they happen to whisper?”

Ayahuasca, he says, “doesn’t solve the problem. It gives you hints on how to solve your own problems.”

And if all goes well for Nielson and MAPS, although still a lot of work and approvals and money away, those hints might be coming to a clinic near you in the foreseeable future.


more
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/ayahuasca-coming-clinic-near-you

milehi
20th June 2017, 11:02 AM
There's scheduled weekend retreats for this within a half days drive. I'll be going later this summer.

singular_me
20th June 2017, 02:37 PM
Good for you! I am planning a trip to costa rica where there are many retreats. I could stay up to 2 months as I also will volunteer in the permaculture garden. Its a trade. 6hrs/day 7 days/week. I just pay for the fly ticket.



There's scheduled weekend retreats for this within a half days drive. I'll be going later this summer.

singular_me
22nd June 2017, 02:37 AM
seems like the Number 11 finds another scientific explanation.


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The human brain sees the world as an 11-dimensional multiverse
June 13, 2017

New research suggests that the human brain is almost beyond comprehension because it doesn’t process the world in two dimensions or even three. No, the human brain understands the visual world in up to 11 different dimensions.

The astonishing discovery helps explain why even cutting-edge technologies like functional MRIs have such a hard time explaining what is going on inside our noggins. In a functional MRI, brain activity is monitored and represented as a three-dimensional image that changes over time. However, if the brain is actually working in 11 dimensions, looking at a 3D functional MRI and saying that it explains brain activity would be like looking at the shadow of a head of a pin and saying that it explains the entire universe, plus a multitude of other dimensions.

The team of scientists led by a group from Scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland detected the previously unknown complexities of the brain while working on the Blue Brain Project. The project’s goal is to create a biologically accurate recreation of the human brain.

During their research, the scientists created simulations of the brain and applied an advanced form of mathematics, called algebraic topology, to their computer-generated models.

“Algebraic topology is like a telescope and microscope at the same time. It can zoom into networks to find hidden structures — the trees in the forest — and see the empty spaces — the clearings — all at the same time,” said study author Kathryn Hess.

What Hess and her colleagues found was that the brain processes visual information by creating multi-dimensional neurological structures, called cliques, which disintegrate the instant they are understood, according to Newsweek who first reported on the research that was published in the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.

The cliques have up to 11 different dimensions and form in holes of space, called cavities. Once the brain understands the visual information, both the clique and cavity disappear.

more
http://nypost.com/2017/06/13/the-human-brain-sees-the-world-as-an-11-dimensional-multiverse/

singular_me
24th June 2017, 02:42 AM
MORE GOOD NEWS
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Magic Mushrooms Cure Depression, Only Scientists Are Surprised
24 June 2017 GMT

After decades of a drug war, authoritarianism and hundreds of billions of dollars, scientists are finally starting to discover what 20-year-old hippie kids bouncing from festival to festival could have told them all along: magic mushrooms help with depression.

A study that was published in the Lancet details an experiment that involved 12 human volunteers who had been struggling with depression for over 17 years on average. None of the participants had found relief with standard treatments such as SSRIs even if they had undergone multiple rounds. Psilocybin mushrooms, however, were able to lift that severe depression in every single one of the volunteers.

“This is the first time that psilocybin has been investigated as a potential treatment for major depression,” says lead study author Dr Robin Carhart-Harris of the Imperial College London, where the study took place. “Treatment-resistant depression is common, disabling and extremely difficult to treat. New treatments are urgently needed, and our study shows that psilocybin is a promising area of future research.”’

For a majority of the participants, the mushrooms’ antidepressant effects were still in effect three months after the dose. Five of the participants were in complete remission from depression three months after the study despite the fact that they were not following any other treatment plan.

“Previous animal and human brain imaging studies have suggested that psilocybin may have effects similar to other antidepressant treatments,” says Professor David Nutt, co-author of the study. “Psilocybin targets the serotonin receptors in the brain, just as most antidepressants do, but it has a very different chemical structure to currently available antidepressants and acts faster than traditional antidepressants.”

As Ocean Malandra writes for Reset.me:

Depression is usually treated with selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which not only have a long list of negative side effects associated with them, including dizziness, insomnia, headaches, and even lower birth weights in infants, but need to be taken on a daily basis as well.

Psilocybin mushrooms, on the other hand, are entirely natural and do not need to be taken every day in order for one to experience their profound anti-depressive properties. They can be consumed when needed, and their benefit can last for weeks, months, or even years after each session.

Professor Philip Cowen, a clinical scientist at the University of Oxford, adds:

The key observation that might eventually justify the use of a drug like psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression is demonstration of sustained benefit in patients who previously have experienced years of symptoms despite conventional treatments, which makes longer-term outcomes particularly important.

In other words, after decades of criminalizing nature, and throwing peaceful people into cages simply from possessing or consuming a mushroom and acting as puritanical takfiris, the government and the medical establishment are being revealed as the tyrannical liars that they are. There’s no legitimate reason that a law should be made regarding psilocybin mushrooms. That is unless the government’s goal is to give future generations plenty of material for their stand-up comics.

MORE
http://www.naturalblaze.com/2017/06/magic-mushrooms-cure-depression.html

singular_me
9th July 2017, 09:20 AM
will watch many of these videos myself within the week ahead
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April 19-24, 2017 — Oakland, California
At Psychedelic Science 2017, the international scientific community came together at the Oakland Marriott City Center in Oakland, Calif., to explore new research into the benefits and risks of MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, ibogaine, medical marijuana, and more.

The historic six-day global gathering featured three days of conference presentations, three days of workshops, a Sunset Cruise on the San Francisco Bay, the Psychedelic Comedy Banquet, and much more.


VIDEOS
http://psychedelicscience.org/videos