By Camille Bromley When Cameron LaBar was a kid, he was a towhead with bright blue eyes and big feelings. He seemed to sense things more strongly than other children. His family lived in Southern California, and when he was at the beach or playing in the yard, they’d put him on a double layer of towels so he wouldn’t scream when he got sand on his hands or was poked by the grass. Susan LaBar, his mother, called him the flip-top baby. He’d build up to a certain pressure, then erupt in tears. Around the age of 5, his face and body began repetitively twitching in ways he couldn’t control. Ms. LaBar bought books on Tourette’s syndrome and started highlighting things she recognized — until she was almost coloring in whole pages. In fourth grade, his teacher called her and said that he had gotten overwhelmed with instructions on an assignment and froze at his desk. She took him to a pediatric neurologist, who diagnosed him with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Of her five children, Ms. LaBar thought, he was the most like her: anxious and sensitive. “He can’t take a deep breath,” she told the doctor. “He’s so knotted up.” The doctor suggested that Paxil, an antidepressant in the category known as S.S.R.I.s, could level things out for him. The doctor told her that Paxil would adjust what was going on in his head so he could do what he needed to do: relax, sit down in class and complete his homework. Giving her son psychiatric medication at 9 years old was not a decision Ms. LaBar took lightly. She thought about it every night for a week, then called the doctor and asked for a prescription at the lowest dose that would help him get unstuck from inside his own head. More than 20 years later, as an adult, Mr. LaBar looks back on that moment with ambivalence and regret. It was the start of a prolonged pharmaceutical spiral that kept him on medication without egress. He believes that the years he spent on antidepressants kept him from feeling the full range of his emotions — from living a full authentic life, even. He was not alone: When he described his experience online, he encountered a multitude of others who had a similar story. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30364 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Alexandra Pattillo It was 2022, and Christina was running out of options. The Londoner, then age 34, was desperate to fix her anorexia nervosa, even as the disease consumed her. After six years of battling the disease, she’d tried various forms of behavioral therapy and months of in-patient care, but nothing stuck. At its worst, the disease was preventing her from sleeping and zapping so much energy that she was unable to climb her stairs or brush her teeth. She needed a radical fix. “You become your anorexia,” says Christina (a pseudonym to protect her privacy). “You have no life around it. You don’t laugh. You don’t smile. You don’t find joy in anything,” she recalls. Her relationships suffered, and she almost lost her job and house. Eventually, a frantic Google search for “cures for anorexia” alerted her to a clinical trial for the psychedelic psilocybin—an active ingredient in magic mushrooms—as a treatment for the disease. She signed up. “I genuinely believe, had I not done that trial, I would either be stuck in a hospital loop, or I wouldn't be here today,” she says. “It saved my life.” Life with an eating disorder can turn the mind and body into a prison. Intrusive, never-ending thought spirals drive compulsive behaviors such as binging, overexercising, purging and restrictive eating. Conventional psychiatric treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or antidepressants, work in only about half of patients. People with anorexia are more than 18 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population—the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30357 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Kristen French Psychedelics get humans high. On this point, there is no question. For centuries, Indigenous shamans, the mystically inclined, and the neuro-curious have been ingesting the trippy stuff to incur strange visions and otherworldly flights. But why psychedelics evolved is less clear and remains the subject of strenuous debate. Tiny amounts of DMT are naturally produced in the brains of humans and other mammals, which has led some neuroscientists and ethnobotanists to argue that hallucination may have some direct evolutionary or therapeutic benefit to humans, that the DMT is there to serve a special visionary or consciousness-related function, and that psychedelic plants may have co-evolved for human spiritual use. But the authors of a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argue that human hallucination is more likely just a side effect, and that psychedelics probably evolved as ecological tools, allowing various animals and plants to defend against predators and herbivores or to help manage symbiotic relationships. After all, hallucinogens like psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT are extremely common in the animal kingdom, appearing independently in numerous unrelated organisms such as mushrooms, cacti, toads, and sponges. “Understanding why evolution produced these molecules doesn’t diminish their therapeutic value,” wrote study author Yibo Wang, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an email. “Instead, it provides a deeper biological framework for discovering better medicines while promoting conservation and sustainable production.” Wang and his team propose that humans hallucinate when we ingest psychedelics because we share ancient brain chemistry with the creatures who were the original targets of the compounds, such as slugs, insects, and sea urchins. The receptors these compounds mess with—serotonin, opioid, and GABA receptors—are also found all over the animal kingdom. So the chemicals that scramble human perception may also deter snails from eating certain plants, the researchers suggest. © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30343 - Posted: 07.25.2026

Lynne Peeples Every heartbeat is choreographed not just by the brain but also by a mysterious nervous system embedded in the heart itself. Now, scientists studying mice have started to unravel how this complex system works to keep the heart beating steadily even at times of extreme stress — findings that challenge the classic view that all cardiac neurons are alike. “The key is to keep the heart functional no matter what happens. Because if the pump function stops, you will die,” says Rui Chang, a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-author of the new paper. The findings, published today in Cell1, could inform better treatments for heart disease. Like the gut’s widely recognized ‘second brain’, the heart contains a mini-brain of its own — known, more formally, as the intrinsic cardiac nervous system. This network of neurons is embedded in the fat pad surrounding the heart. The system’s neurons exchange messages with the brain and with each other, and are the final players in a long chain of neurons that controls cardiac function. But because intrinsic cardiac neurons are exceedingly rare, making up only about 0.01% of the cells in a piece of heart tissue, their precise roles have been hard to pin down, says Chang. Damage from a heart attack comes from brain signals, mouse study suggests To fill that gap, his team genetically engineered mice to label all of the animals’ cardiac neurons. The scientists sequenced genes isolated from these neurons and identified markers for two neuronal subtypes. They then used techniques such as high-resolution imaging to identify the genetically distinct subtypes’ core functions and to map their locations. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 30336 - Posted: 07.22.2026

Christina Jewett The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark. There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies. The C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has been shut down for more than a year, after its staff was laid off as part of the administration’s government downsizing efforts. While hundreds of other federal health employees were eventually rehired, the smoking office staff members have not been. Even after Congress restored the office’s funding late last summer, its employees have remained on paid leave as litigation challenging the firings plays out. In recent weeks, under pressure from Congress, the C.D.C. has given states diminished funding to air ads from the campaign’s archive, but the federal government will not produce new ads or negotiate contracts for them to air nationwide. The ads had prompted millions of smokers to dial state quit lines for help on how to stop smoking. In interviews, people who ran quit lines in several states said that since the ads went off the air, calls have plummeted along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30311 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Simon Makin A new tool makes it possible to probe brain circuit function without the kind of external stimulation required in optogenetics and chemogenetics. The method uses engineered electrical synapses to edit brain circuits. These designer synapses function in living mice, altering activity in cells, circuits and networks, with corresponding effects on behavior. In contrast to tools that involve external stimulation, the result is autonomous. “Here, all the information is completely natural; it’s only how the brain manipulates this information that’s being altered,” says Ithai Rabinowitch, assistant professor of neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in the work. “This is really important, in my view.” The technique, called LinCx (long-term integration of circuits using connexins) could be used to investigate relationships between circuit structure and function, as well as the duties of natural electrical synapses. “It’s potentially a useful tool if it’s used intelligently and thoughtfully to ask questions about the role of electrical synapses in brain circuits,” says Eve Marder, professor of biology at Brandeis University, who was not involved in the study. Electrical synapses consist of gap junctions that, in vertebrates, are composed of connexin proteins, of which there are 21 isoforms in humans. These proteins sit in the membranes of touching cells, docked together to create channels that ions pass through, coupling the cells’ activity. Gap junctions in invertebrates are composed of innexins, which don’t interact with connexins, so expressing a mammalian connexin in Caenorhabditis elegans enabled researchers to rewire an olfactory circuit and flip the worms’ behavior from odor attraction to avoidance, according to a 2014 study. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30293 - Posted: 06.24.2026

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett For years, federal health officials have warned about the risks associated with a supplement derived from the leaves of kratom trees that adherents say can kill pain or boost energy. Sold in gas stations across America, kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths. Powerful figures close to President Trump, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, pushed to downplay those concerns. Mr. Mullin, until recently a Republican senator from Oklahoma, played a key role in a sprawling influence campaign spearheaded by the kratom industry that courted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President JD Vance, among others in the Trump administration, an investigation by The New York Times found. Only when he was nominated by Mr. Trump in March to lead the Homeland Security Department did it become clear that Mr. Mullin had a financial connection to the supplement. In a disclosure statement, he listed an investment worth as much as $1 million in a kratom company, Botanic Tonics, that could benefit from the changes he has sought. The company’s founder, Jerry W. Ross — who had been an energy executive in Mr. Mullin’s home state before pleading guilty to a financial crime — is a leading player in the influence campaign that was devised to benefit kratom at the expense of its rivals in the marketplace. The kratom campaign underscores how corporations in the growing wellness industry can gain traction in Mr. Trump’s government by casting risky products as aligned with the administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda championed by Mr. Kennedy, who has sometimes prioritized unproven remedies over science. In July, while still a senator, Mr. Mullin showed up at a Food and Drug Administration news conference and endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30281 - Posted: 06.17.2026

By Ellen Barry Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy. This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants. A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.” “We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.” But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants. In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.” © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30256 - Posted: 05.27.2026

By Matt Richtel A 27-year-old woman began an experiment on herself early one morning in December 2024. Her laboratory was her childhood bedroom, tucked into a second-floor corner of a pale yellow house in the Boston suburbs. On a bookshelf behind her sat a small stuffed sloth and some favorite books, including “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. Her parents were asleep in the room next door. Her name is Rebecca, but she goes by Becks. Sitting at her desk in a gray T-shirt, she opened a small plastic bag filled with white powder. The bag was stamped “SR-17018,” and “NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.” She extracted some powder with a red microscooper, poured it onto a digital scale and carefully weighed out 25 milligrams. She gathered this into a blue and white pill capsule and sealed it, and then swallowed the capsule with water. It was 4:27 a.m. “It’s my turn to be a guinea pig,” Becks wrote in the online diary she was keeping of her experience. In sharing her story with The New York Times, she asked that her last name not be used so potential employers don’t discover her drug history. Becks had joined the vanguard of a dangerous, highly speculative do-it-yourself approach to getting sober. For a decade, on and off, she had been addicted to various drugs, most recently kratom, an opiate-like substance, which cleared her head and covered up her pain but required constant dosing. She feared the call of fentanyl, which she’d tried a few times. “Every morning, I woke drenched in sweat from overnight withdrawals. It was a grim existence,” she wrote of her kratom use. She tried various methods to get sober, including three short inpatient detox stays and one monthlong rehabilitation treatment. She had periods of sobriety but couldn’t sustain it. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30241 - Posted: 05.09.2026

By Rachel Nuwer Despite billions of dollars spent on potential drug treatments for cocaine addiction, none have proved effective—and cocaine use is increasing in the United States and around the world. But one class of possible remedy has remained untested: psychedelics, which have shown promise for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcohol use disorder, smoking, and more. Now, the results of a pioneering randomized trial—more than a decade in the making—reveal a single dose of psilocybin, the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms, brought significant relief for people addicted to cocaine. The study of 40 people, described today in JAMA Network Open, showed that 180 days after treatment, 30% of the psilocybin group was completely abstaining from cocaine, versus none of the placebo group—and those who continued using the drug did so less frequently. “This is significantly better than any medication ever tested to treat cocaine use disorder,” says Stephen Ross, a professor of psychiatry at New York University who was not involved in the work. He called results “remarkable,” and the magnitude of the effects “highly substantial.” The study, funded by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the nonprofit Heffter Research Institute, was also notable for its participant pool. Of the 40 people who took part, more than 80% were Black and 65% earned less than $20,000 a year. “Although the study was small, one strength is that most participants had lower than average income and education, which are associated with barriers to addiction treatment,” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not involved in the trial. More research will be needed to replicate the findings, she says, but the study provides evidence “that psilocybin has promise for treating addiction to cocaine and potentially other illicit stimulants.” © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30240 - Posted: 05.09.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can induce anatomical changes in the brain, according to research among people who took the psychedelic compound for the first time. Scientists spotted apparent changes in the brain’s structure which were still apparent a month after healthy volunteers took the drug. If confirmed, they may help explain the therapeutic effects that psychedelics can have on anxiety, depression and addiction, researchers said. Evidence for the changes came from specialised scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia. “It’s remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug,” said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. “We don’t yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility.” Scientists have long sought to understand how psychedelics affect the brain and the work has gained fresh impetus in the wake of trials and studies that suggest the compounds could be used to treat a range of mental health disorders. The drugs are thought to help by boosting flexible thinking and allowing people to escape destructive cognitive ruts. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30237 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Jake Currie Psychedelics are getting a renewed boost of interest lately. The FDA recently announced they were fast-tracking research investigating psilocybin, the compound that gives magic mushrooms their magic, as a treatment for depression. Now, new research published in Nature Communications is showing just how powerful a single dose of this psychedelic compound can be. Neuropsychopharmacologists from the University of California, San Francisco recruited 28 physically and mentally healthy people who had never taken psychedelics before and gave them their inaugural magic mushroom trip. But first, they administered a single placebo dose of 1 milligram of the magic mushroom compound. Most of the subjects reported the experience was “no more unusual than an everyday state of consciousness,” which was backed up by EEG readings. After the preview, it was time for the main event. The research team fitted the participants with EEG electrodes and administered a 25-milligram dose of psilocybin. An hour into their trip, the EEGs showed a surge of entropy (or diverse neural activity), indicating they were processing more complex information. The next day all of the subjects (except one) rated the experience as the “single most unusual state of consciousness” they’d experienced in their lives (the lone holdout rated it in the top five). During the following few weeks, the newly minted psychonauts reported experiencing more insight as well as an increased sense of well-being. A full month after their first trip, they performed better on assessments of their cognitive flexibility. “Psilocybin seems to loosen up stereotyped patterns of brain activity and give people the ability to revise entrenched patterns of thought,” study author Taylor Lyons said in a statement. “The fact that these changes track with insight and improved well‑being is especially exciting.” © 2026 Nautilus

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30236 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Jan Hoffman Since last fall, new and deadly synthetic opioids called orphines have begun appearing in street drugs in the United States. They are far more potent than fentanyl but cannot be detected by standard toxicology tests. Orphines are still much less common than fentanyl, but they are proliferating quickly. As of last month, they have been found in 14 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest. Law enforcement officials and public health officials are trying to assess the gravity and endurance of the threat they pose. Here are answers to some basic questions. What are orphines? They are a class of opioids that was created in the 1960s by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor and pharmacologist, whose teams investigated rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery. As part of that effort, they also developed fentanyl. Dr. Janssen and others discovered that orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive. Within a few years, the research on them was halted. Researchers characterize orphines as 10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains. They can be lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid. Sometimes the classic signature of overdose, “the foam cone” — froth from the nostrils and mouth — does not even have time to bubble up. Still, it is possible for people overdosing on orphines to be revived with naloxone, the opioid reversal medication. But numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30234 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Ellen Barry As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sets out to rein in the use of psychiatric medications, a group of prominent psychiatrists are developing guidance for helping patients to stop taking them, noting that providers sometimes “park” patients on medications that are no longer necessary or effective. The experts, whose first recommendations appeared in JAMA Network Open and the British Journal of Psychiatry, identify structural problems that may lead to overprescribing: There are few clinical trials showing when it is advisable to stop a medication; many providers do not regularly review whether a prescription is still needed; and psychiatry residents receive more training in starting drug prescriptions than stopping them. “We have not really taught our trainees to think about, what is the logical endpoint?” said Dr. Joseph F. Goldberg, a past president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology, which convened a group of 45 psychiatrists to agree on basic principles for “deprescribing,” as supervised drug tapering is sometimes called. “You’ll see a patient in consultation who has been parked on a medication which seems to be ineffective for years, and you’ll ask, ‘Why are you still on this medicine?’” he said. “We’ve got a bugaboo going about passive re-prescribing, and I hope we’ll see much less of that.” The new recommendations come amid rising pressure from Mr. Kennedy and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement, who have long made the case that Americans overuse psychiatric medications. The Department of Health and Human Services will convene expert panels on deprescribing the main class of medication used to treat depression — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s — this summer, with an eye toward developing official guidance. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30228 - Posted: 05.02.2026

By Emma Yasinski “Relapse is a part of recovery”: That’s a common refrain among professionals who treat substance use disorders. Many people who have completed treatment programs return to substance use and reenter treatment multiple times, after days, weeks or even years of sobriety. Marina Wolf, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Oregon Health & Science University, studies how cells in the brain respond to drug exposure in ways that can lead people to develop powerful cravings even months after they stop using drugs such as cocaine, opioids or alcohol. Specifically, she has focused on an aspect of this problem called cue-induced craving, in which people’s brains come to associate a cue — such as seeing a certain location where they previously used drugs — with the desire to use that drug. These learned associations, as she described in the 2025 Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology, are caused by structural changes to the brain — neuroplasticity — as a result of drug use, including the strengthening of connections, called synapses, between specific nerve cells. These changes don’t disappear as soon as a person, or animal, stops using a drug. Cravings, in fact, can strengthen after abstinence, leaving a person vulnerable to resume using. How did you become interested in neuroplasticity and addiction? I never had any formal training in synaptic plasticity or addiction. As a graduate student and then a postdoctoral fellow, I worked on how neurons are regulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, but we studied dopamine’s role in antipsychotic drug effects, not addiction. But when I was setting up my own lab in the early 1990s, I had a friend from graduate school who was involved in groundbreaking studies to work out synaptic plasticity mechanisms in the brain’s hippocampus, a region of the brain responsible for encoding memories. This was fascinating work that helped demonstrate a critical role for a neurotransmitter called glutamate in synaptic plasticity, so I followed it closely. © 2026 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30222 - Posted: 04.29.2026

By Calli McMurray Last Saturday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order outlining regulatory tweaks intended to “accelerate” U.S. research on and increase access to psychedelic drugs for mental health treatments. The measures target clinical research, not basic studies on how the drugs work. “This may not be the breakthrough the basic research community has been looking for,” says Shawn Lockery, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon. The order directs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed up review of psychedelic drugs and allots “at least $50 million” from the Department of Health and Human Services for state governments’ own psychedelics research programs. One section of the order, however, could eventually make it easier for basic researchers to access psychedelics for their work. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) classifies most psychedelics—including psilocybin, MDMA and LSD—as Schedule I, meaning they have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Trump’s order calls for the U.S. attorney general to review “any product containing a Schedule I substance that has successfully completed Phase 3 clinical trials for a serious mental health disorder” and consider it for rescheduling to the less restrictive Schedule III. To study a Schedule I drug, researchers must apply for a license and, if approved, follow strict storage and security requirements. Approval can take up to a year, says Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, who studies psilocybin’s mechanism of action in the brain. “It’s a decent bar to get it. It’s not easy.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30217 - Posted: 04.26.2026

Brian Mann Earlier this year, Naida Rutherford, the coroner in Richland County, South Carolina, was helping investigate what appeared to be a mysterious overdose. The case had many of the hallmarks of a typical fentanyl death. "Every sort of physical manifestation, like the foam coming from the mouth and nose, as if they had an overdose," Rutherford said. "Their blood tested negative for any substance, which was very odd." Her team was stumped, so Rutherford expanded the testing, looking for new compounds. "That's where we found the cychlorphine," she told NPR, referring to one of the incredibly potent synthetic opioids spreading fast in the U.S. street drug supply. Sponsor Message The state of Virginia has seen drug overdose deaths plunge by more than 40% in a single year. Many other states are seeing improvements above 30%. Why is this happening? Researchers say it may be a combination of factors, some hopeful and some painful. "This is the first time we've seen it in South Carolina, which is very scary because none of us knew to test for it." Experts say the U.S. addiction crisis is evolving fast, in ways that appear both hopeful and incredibly dangerous. The peril comes from a street drug supply that chemists now describe as a "synthetic soup." Where once most drug users mostly consumed plant-based substances such as cocaine and heroin, drug gangs and cartels have shifted to producing and selling synthetic substances made from industrial chemicals. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30199 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Jonathan Corum and Matt Richtel Illicit labs are creating new synthetic drugs at breakneck speed. Dangerous, untested compounds are reaching users long before health agencies know they exist. Older drugs are regularly modified to create novel threats. Ecstasy is a prime example. The party drug MDMA has been illegal since 1985. Its molecular structure can be drawn like this: But what if you could add one atom to this molecule to change both the experience of taking the drug and its legal status? You can. A single oxygen atom changes the molecule to methylone, which provides an Ecstasy-like euphoria. The discovery of what this simple change could do has had a profound consequence. When methylone reached the U.S. market in 2010 the drug could be sold legally in corner stores and smoke shops as “bath salts.” But methylone wasn’t the end of the story. Illicit chemists now use methylone’s structure as a template for modern-day alchemy. New drug laws push them to invent new variants, which emerge in the illicit drug market with untested potencies and effects — a vicious cycle that has been impossible to contain. These chemists are located in unregulated labs around the globe, from big enterprises in China and India that produce drugs and their precursor compounds in huge volumes, to single-person and small domestic operations that cut and package drugs for retail sale. Some of the most-used drugs, such as fentanyl, are mixed in Mexico and exported north. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30197 - Posted: 04.11.2026

By Andrew Jacobs As researchers have sought to demonstrate the therapeutic benefits of mind-altering drugs like LSD and psilocybin “magic mushrooms,” many have struggled to explain exactly how these compounds work on the human brain. One way scientists have tried to show what these compounds do is by using functional M.R.I. machines to peer into the brains of research participants in the midst of a psychedelic experience. This has produced evocative color images that show a maelstrom of activity as the drugs disrupt patterns of connectivity between brain regions and networks. But the interpretations of those scans, published in scientific journals, have been inconsistent and even contradictory. Over the past five years, an international consortium of researchers has tried to make sense of the divergent results by bringing together the data from nearly a dozen brain imaging studies in five countries that have been published since 2012. The studies included more than 500 scans of 267 research participants on five substances: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT and ayahuasca. Their findings, published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, suggest that psychedelics prompt a welter of activity between regions of the brain that normally operate somewhat independently: the areas that process sensory information like vision, hearing and touch, and those involved with abstract thinking and self-reflection. The research suggests that psychedelic compounds temporarily reduce the separation between how we think and how we perceive, which could explain the neurological mechanics behind the sensory distortions, mystical experiences and ego dissolution that patients report during sessions. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 30193 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Catherine Offord For most people, Oktoberfest means guzzling liters of beer inside a giant tent. But for one research group in Denmark, it’s a chance to study how our bodies know when we’ve had enough. In a preprint posted on bioRxiv last week, researchers combined a small study of people at Germany’s fall beer festival with mouse experiments, genetic analyses, and blood tests from drunk medical students as well as people with alcohol dependence. Their findings, though preliminary, hint that a hormone commonly associated with morning sickness might also have a role in limiting humans’ alcohol consumption. “I found it fascinating,” says Marlena Fejzo, a women’s health scientist at the University of Southern California who has studied GDF15, the hormone involved. Though the study relies mostly on associations and can’t prove cause and effect, it “lends support” to the idea that GDF15 stops us from overconsuming harmful substances, she adds. GDF15 rises sharply during early pregnancy and is thought to contribute to vomiting and feelings of sickness. Some researchers think it evolved as a protective mechanism: Nausea may help an expectant parent avoid unfamiliar or spoiled food that could harm the fetus. But GDF15 is also present in people who aren’t pregnant and has been linked to appetite suppression. It has even attracted interest from the pharmaceutical industry as a potential antiobesity drug. Matthew Gillum, an endocrinologist at the University of Copenhagen, began to wonder about the hormone’s effect on alcohol intake after collaborating on a study of revelers at the Roskilde music festival. That research measured blood hormone levels in young men who’d spent a week binge drinking and eating junk food and found multiple changes—including a rise in GDF15. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30168 - Posted: 03.21.2026