New Clinical Trial Investigates Administering MDMA Alongside LSD

Psilocybin Alpha:

It’s not hard to imagine why a bad trip may result in a net disbenefit to a patient seeking to resolve PTSD. Acute anxiety has also been linked to less favourable long-term outcomes in patients treated with LSD (in experimental settings) for depression.

With this in mind, a new Clinical Trial, registered yesterday with ClinicalTrials.gov, seeks to reduce the risk of negative psychedelic effects when taking LSD. The Trial hypothesises that co-administering MDMA with LSD may mitigate the negative psychedelic effects, due to MDMA’s observed ability to reliably induce positive mood.

A clinical trial looking at candyflipping? Simply incredible. And who is behind this, you ask? We don’t know for sure at this point, but Psilocybin Alpha has a hunch:

We believe this Clinical Trial, and its results, belong to MindMed. MindMed holds a licence to 8 Clinical Trials related to LSD with the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, and recently set-up a European subsidiary in the same country.

Recruitment of the 24 participants has yet to begin. We will keep you updated on the progress and results of this exciting study.

It’s inspiring to see psychedelic research expanding into places that psychonauts have been exploring for decades, like drug combining. Personally, I have found candyflipping to be extremely beneficial for my own entheogenic journeying and am excited to see what sort of results come out of this trial. Assuming MindMed shares the data, that is.

However, I’m not entirely sure that combining MDMA with LSD will be successful at reducing the chance of having a bad trip. While my own experiences with candyflipping have been overwhelmingly positive, I have also been witness to some bad trips that other people went through that involved combining these two drugs. But—to be fair—those particular disasters could have probably been avoided if the set, setting, and dosage had been more carefully planned out, and I do think there is a chance that candyflipping might help mitigate the negative effects of LSD for some people, especially in a controlled clinical setting.

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Oakland Activists Share Plan for Legalizing Psychedelic Healing Ceremonies

Kyle Jaeger, writing for Marijuana Moment:

Psychedelics activists recently released guidelines for safely and effectively participating in healing ceremonies using entheogenic substances as they await legislative action to legalize the practice in Oakland.

The guidelines focus on preparation (including the importance of education), the psychedelic experience itself, integration after the trip is over, and nurturing long-term and community growth via reciprocity. It’s a good jumping off place; hopefully Oakland will be successful in passing this later this year.

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Maine Marijuana Sales Can Finally Begin Four Years After Voters Legalized It

Kyle Jaeger, writing for Marijuana Moment:

Marijuana businesses in Maine can begin recreational sales on October 9, the state’s cannabis regulatory body announced on Friday.

This comes nearly four years after voters approved a legalization ballot measure—a significant delay in implementation compared to California, Massachusetts and Nevada, which also legalized for adult-use on the same day in 2016.

The first round of cannabis business licenses will be issued on September 8, giving licensees about a month to begin harvesting, processing and ensuring quality control for their marijuana products. It’s not clear how many licenses will be initially approved.

Four years after voters legalized cannabis, Maine is expected to start selling it in a couple months.

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New Company to Put Psilocybin on Dissolvable Sublingual Strips to Help Treat Depression

Celia Gorman, writing for Leafly:

Cybin Corporation, one of many companies pursing [sic] psilocybin treatments, is throwing another factor into its clinical trials: drug delivery method. Existing research has focused on oral treatments, or pills, but Cybin is conducting trials with dissolvable films remarkably similar to minty breath strips. Cybin has partnered with pharmaceutical manufacturer IntelGenx to make the films, which may end up with a cherry flavor.

IntelGenx’s sublingual films can deliver a pharmaceutical ingredient directly into the bloodstream when placed under the tongue, as opposed to the long path through the gastrointestinal system and the liver when a pill is swallowed. With other pharmaceuticals, medication films have been shown to kick in faster and pack a harder punch with a lower dose.

In theory, the same will hold for psilocybin, and Cybin hopes to deliver 25 milligram (mg) results with a much smaller amount.

Sounds tastier than munching down a bag of shrooms or brewing a batch of lemon tek tea, but is it actually better in any other way? The psychonaut in me wants to try these from an exploratory standpoint but the purist in me thinks that people should just consume actual magic mushrooms. I’m glad to see more and more innovative options being explored, though.

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William Leonard Pickard Has Been Released From Prison

Another update on Pickard’s release from Psymposia:

Update: (July 27, 2020 / 9:41PM) A source has informed Psymposia that William Leonard Pickard was officially released from prison today, July 27, at 3PM PST. Pickard will be free from prison, but will be under supervised release for the next five years.

He’s out!

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