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Texas OK’s $50 Million for Ibogaine Research

By Andrew Jacobs When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas approved legislation this week to spend $50 million in state money researching ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic, he put the spotlight on a promising, still illegal drug that has shown promise in treating opioid addiction, traumatic brain injury and depression. Interest in ibogaine therapy has surged in recent years, driven in large part by veterans who have had to travel to other countries for the treatment. The measure, which passed the Texas Legislature with bipartisan support, seeks to leverage an additional $50 million in private investment to fund clinical trials that supporters hope will provide a pathway for ibogaine therapy to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration, a process that could take years. The legislation directs the state to work with Texas universities and hospitals and tries to ensure that the state retains a financial stake in any revenue from the drug’s development. “You can’t put a price on a human life, but if this is successful and ibogaine becomes commercialized, it will help people all across the country and provide an incredible return on investment for the people of Texas,” said State Senator Tan Parker, a Republican who sponsored the bill. The initiative, one of the largest government investments in psychedelic medicine to date, is a watershed moment for a field that continues to gain mainstream acceptance. Regulated psilocybin clinics have opened in Oregon and Colorado, and ketamine has become widely available across the country as a treatment for depression and anxiety. There have been speed bumps. Last year, the F.D.A. rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, the first psychedelic compound to make it through much of the agency’s rigorous drug review process. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29833 - Posted: 06.18.2025

What to Know About the Effects of Ketamine

By Andrew Jacobs and Jacey Fortin News reports detailing Elon Musk’s drug use have prompted renewed attention to ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that has become increasingly popular as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression and other mental health issues. Although Mr. Musk has acknowledged using ketamine in the past to treat depression, he has denied suggestions that he is currently using ketamine — or any other drug. “I am NOT taking drugs!” he wrote last week in a social media post following the publication of an article in The New York Times that described reports of his use of drugs on the campaign trail last year. Those drugs included ketamine and other psychedelic compounds, among them MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms. Mr. Musk left the White House last week. Since then, he and President Trump have traded barbs on social media over the president’s domestic policy bill and have mentioned government contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and Mr. Musk’s relationship to the White House. Mr. Trump, who was briefed on the article in The Times, has been telling associates in the last day or so that Musk’s “crazy” behavior is linked to his drug use, according to a Times report citing two people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s private conversations. But later on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not want to comment on Mr. Musk’s drug use. The very public feud between the two men has once again drawn unflattering attention to ketamine, a drug that has become increasingly available at legal clinics across the country. It is also used recreationally and can be dangerous when misused. What is ketamine, and is it legal? Ketamine is an injectable, short-acting dissociative anesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects at certain doses. It distorts perceptions of sight and sound and makes users feel detached from pain and their surroundings. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29824 - Posted: 06.07.2025

‘Understudied secret’ in brain dampens nicotine drive in mice

By Lauren Schenkman Addiction may be known as a disease of “more,” but drug-taking also taps a powerful drive for less that can suppress reward in the brain, even at low doses, according to a new study of nicotine responses in mice. The results suggest that the systems of reward and aversion that regulate addiction are more intertwined than previously thought. “That’s absolutely fascinating, because the field has been dominated by this notion of the go, the drive to get drug, but the drive is moderated by the stop,” says Paul Kenny, professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was not involved in the work. A faulty “stop” signal could be one of the culprits in addiction, he adds. Recent studies have begun to explore this stop signal. Intravenous nicotine activates nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on dopamine neurons in the midbrain’s ventral tegmental area (VTA), generating a rewarding effect that promotes more drug consumption. And high doses activate a tiny adjacent area, the interpeduncular nucleus (IPN), which drives aversion, previous studies have suggested. But doses too low to excite the VTA also activate the IPN in mice, the new work shows. In another experiment, the team used fluorescent proteins to find where axons from the IPN terminate and to identify the intermediate player connecting the IPN and the VTA: the laterodorsal tegmental nucleus (LDTg). The findings were published in Neuron in April. “This was very thrilling,” says the study’s principal investigator, Alexandre Mourot, research director in brain plasticity at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). It suggests that at very low doses, the VTA does not respond because the IPN “erases the rewarding properties of the drug,” he says. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Brain drugs can now cross the once impenetrable blood–brain barrier

Alison Abbott Daiza Gordon watched her two younger brothers die when they were adolescents. They had Hunter syndrome, a rare, incurable disease — predominantly affecting boys — in which a gene for an important enzyme is missing. Guilt compounded her grief when her attempts to resuscitate her youngest brother failed. She was just 19 years old. Gordon went on to discover how merciless genetics can be. Her own three sons were all born with the condition. When her two eldest hit their second birthdays, the symptoms started to emerge: a thickening of facial features, loss of language, hearing and movement and other impacts to mental and physical development. But she sees hope for her sons that was denied to her brothers. Her children are enrolled in a clinical trial testing a technology to carry a replacement for the missing enzyme, called iduronate-2-sulfatase (IDS), into the brain. Early results indicate improvement in some of the condition’s cognitive and physical symptoms. Gordon’s eldest sons are no longer deaf and they have started to run around. They are meeting developmental milestones she’d never dared to hope for. Her two-year-old, who started the therapy when he was just three months old, is showing none of the early symptoms. “When I look at them, I realize they have a chance of an actual future,” says Gordon. Regular infusions of replacement IDS has been the standard of care for the past two decades, and it protects important organs such as the liver and kidneys from damage. But without help, the large enzyme can’t make it through the protective barrier that separates the blood from one of the most important organs — the brain. For Gordon’s children, that help comes from an innovative molecular transport system, a chemical tag attached to IDS that shuttles it through the tightly joined cells that make up the blood–brain barrier. Several such shuttles, which take advantage of natural transport systems in the brain, are now being developed. With the ability to move large biological drugs — including antibodies, proteins and the viruses used in gene therapy — these shuttles promise to revolutionize neuropharmacology. And that’s not just for rare diseases such as Hunter syndrome, but also for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other common brain disorders. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

When They Couldn’t Get Benzos Anymore, Quitting Was Torture

By Christina Caron Tasha Hedges took Xanax for 20 years to treat her anxiety and panic attacks, exactly as a psychiatrist had prescribed it. Then in 2022, that doctor unexpectedly died. A general practitioner continued her prescription but retired shortly afterward. The next doctor moved to Canada. Finally, Ms. Hedges found a new psychiatrist. “The first thing he did was start yelling at me that I had been on Xanax too long,” said Ms. Hedges, 41, who lives in Falling Waters, W.Va. “He ripped me off my meds.” Discontinuing the drug typically requires decreasing the dose slowly over months or even years, a process called tapering. Ms. Hedges stopped cold turkey. Debilitating withdrawal symptoms followed: hot flashes, cold sweats, restless legs, the shakes and teeth grinding. “It was a nightmare,” she said. Two years after discontinuing the medication, she is still dealing with the fallout. “My brain has not been the same.” In social media groups and websites such as BenzoBuddies, people like Ms. Hedges say they have become physically dependent on benzodiazepines. Many then get cut off from their medication or taper too quickly, and face dangerous and potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms that can linger long after the drugs are discontinued. Some doctors, fearful of the risks and stigma associated with these drugs, refuse to prescribe them at all. “Benzos generate as much anxiety in the prescriber as they do in the patient,” said Dr. Ronald M. Winchel, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. “Do I start it? Is it the right context? Is it safe? Is my patient going to abuse it? What will my colleagues think/ © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29789 - Posted: 05.17.2025

Psychoactive drugs found in mysterious temple may have helped ancient Peruvians cement power

By Lizzie Wade As John Rick excavated one of the many underground chambers at the ancient Peruvian site of Chavín de Huántar in 2017 his trowel hit something intriguing, and exceedingly delicate. It was a cigarette-size tube made of animal bone and packed full of sediment. The following year, his team found almost two dozen more. Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University, suspected these bone tubes were pieces of ancient drug paraphernalia. Now, a chemical analysis of plant material preserved inside the bone tubes confirms ancient people used them to inhale snuffs made of tobacco and a hallucinogenic plant known as vilca. Rick and colleagues say the rituals involving these drugs may have helped the people of Chavín consolidate their power and influence some 2500 years ago, a time when complex social and political hierarchies were first taking shape in Peru. Although researchers have long suspected rituals at Chavín involved hallucinogenic drugs, “What’s exciting about this paper is that, for first time, we have actual evidence,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn’t involved in the research but has studied psychoactive drugs used by ancient people. Chavín de Huántar, which was occupied in the first millennium B.C.E., is renowned for its intricate stone carvings, often depicting animal-human hybrids or transformations of human into beast, and an extensive network of underground chambers. It also had a broad cultural reach. The site in Peru’s north-central highlands abounds with seashells and obsidian, neither found locally, and Chavín-style art shows up in many places throughout the Andes and on the Peruvian coast. “Chavín was part of the first big moment in Andean prehistory when people, ideas, and goods were circulating quite extensively,” says Dan Contreras, an archaeologist at the University of Florida and a co-author of the new paper.

My fight to unlock cannabis and psychedelic drugs for use in medical research

Robin Berghaus This article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests. From the earliest days of her career, physician Sue Sisley has been passionate about caring for US military veterans. Back then, many of the people she treated were self-medicating with black-market cannabis because, unlike prescription drugs, marijuana allayed nightmares and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A few puffs helped them to fall asleep. “Initially, I discouraged them and rolled my eyes thinking about it,” says Sisley, whose training taught her to view only approved drugs as medicines. “I lacked sympathy for their claims and thought they were drug seekers.” But over time, Sisley saw how the ineffectiveness of mental-health treatments could fuel hopelessness. Currently, 17 US veterans die by suicide daily, on average. The cannabis users among Sisley’s patients were often the ones who maintained a will to live. “It made me realize that I was very misled, by the government and our training programmes, to believe that cannabis was dangerous,” she says. “I didn’t learn about any medical benefits.” The early lessons from her patients influenced Sisley. Over the next two decades, she challenged US federal agencies, navigated a legal and regulatory maze and creatively secured funding to investigate and develop treatments, based on cannabis and psychedelics, that the US government had blocked for decades. A physician-researcher is born After the US Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, cannabis was made illegal and classified as a Schedule I drug, defined as having no accepted medical use. That put marijuana in the same category as heroin and most psychedelic drugs: possession or use of the drug, and growing cannabis without a Schedule I research licence, could land someone in prison. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

What to Know About Today’s Meth

By Jan Hoffman Fentanyl overdoses have finally begun to decline over the past year, but that good news has obscured a troubling shift in illicit drug use: a nationwide surge in methamphetamine, a powerful, highly addictive stimulant. This isn’t the ’90s club drug or even the blue-white tinged crystals cooked up in “Breaking Bad.” As cartels keep revising lab formulas to make their product more addictive and potent, often using hazardous chemicals, many experts on addiction think that today’s meth is more dangerous than older versions. Here is what to know. What is meth? Meth, short for methamphetamine, is a stimulant, a category of drugs that includes cocaine. Meth is far stronger than coke, with effects that last many hours longer. It comes in pill, powder or paste form and is smoked, snorted, swallowed or injected. Meth jolts the central nervous system and prompts the brain to release exorbitant amounts of reinforcing, feel-good neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which help people experience euphoria and drive them to keep seeking it. Meth is an amphetamine, a category of stimulant drugs perhaps best known to the public as the A.D.H.D. prescription medications Adderall and Vyvanse. Those stimulants are milder and shorter-lasting than meth but, if misused, they too can be addictive. What are meth’s negative side effects? They vary, depending on the tolerance of the person taking it and the means of ingestion. After the drug’s rush has abated, many users keep bingeing it. They forget to drink water and are usually unable to sleep or eat for days. In this phase, known as “tweaking,” users can become hyper-focused on activities such as taking apart bicycles — which they forget to reassemble — or spending hours collecting things like pebbles and shiny gum wrappers. They may become agitated and aggressive. Paranoia, hallucinations and psychosis can set in. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Study links heavy drinking to brain injuries, Alzheimer’s

By Erin Blakemore Consuming more than eight alcoholic drinks a week is associated with brain injuries linked to Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, a recent study in the journal Neurology suggests. The analysis looked for links between heavy drinking and brain health. Researchers used autopsy data from the Biobank for Aging Studies at the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil collected between 2004 and 2024. The team analyzed data from 1,781 people ages 50 or older at death. The average age at death was 74.9. With the help of surveys of the deceased’s next of kin, researchers gathered information about the deceased’s cognitive function and alcohol consumption in the three months before their death. Among participants, 965 never drank, 319 drank up to seven drinks per week (moderate drinking), and 129 had eight or more drinks per week (heavy drinking). Another 368 were former heavy drinkers who had stopped drinking before their last three months of life. The analysis showed that heavy drinkers and former heavy drinkers, respectively, had 41 percent and 31 percent higher odds of neurofibrillary tangles — clumps of the protein tau that accumulate inside brain neurons and have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Moderate, heavy and former heavy drinkers also had a higher risk of hyaline arteriolosclerosis, which thickens the walls of small blood vessels in the brain, impeding blood flow and causing brain damage over time. Though 40 percent of those who never drank had vascular brain lesions, they were more common in moderate (44.6 percent), heavy (44.1 percent) and former heavy drinkers (50.2 percent), the study found.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29749 - Posted: 04.19.2025

Faces From a Meth Surge

The devastating stimulant has been hitting Portland, Maine hard, even competing with fentanyl as the street drug of choice. Although a fentanyl overdose can be reversed with Narcan, no medicine can reverse a meth overdose. Nor has any been approved to treat meth addiction. Unlike fentanyl, which sedates users, meth can make people anxious and violent. Its effects can overwhelm not just users but community residents and emergency responders. John once fielded customer complaints for a telecommunications company. Now he usually hangs out with friends in the courtyard of a center offering services to help people who use drugs, hitting his pipe, or as he calls it, “getting methicated.” He usually lives outdoors, though he can sometimes handle a few days at a shelter. By noon, he tries to stop smoking meth, so he can get to sleep later that night. Quitting is not on his radar: meth rules his life. “We cannot ride on the railroad, the railroad rides upon us,” he said, with a nod to Henry David Thoreau. Most weekdays, Bill Burns, an addiction and mental health specialist with the Portland police, walks the Bayside neighborhood, checking in on folks. On Thursdays, he rewards the regulars he drives to addiction treatment clinics with his own homemade jolts of dopamine: sugar-dense, Rice Krispie-style treats. Recently, he encountered a young man in full meth psychosis, wild-eyed, bare-chested and bleeding, flinging himself against concrete barriers in an alley. Mr. Burns slipped between the man and a brick wall and wrapped his arms protectively around him. Even as the man flailed uncontrollably, smacking Mr. Burns and smearing blood on his shirt, he managed to stammer, “Sorry!” Speaking softly, Mr. Burns kept repeating, “You’re going to be safe. You’re OK. We’re here because we just want to make sure you’re safe. No, you’re not in trouble. Nobody wants to hurt you. ” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Don’t Underestimate the Risks of Benzodiazepines

By Christina Caron Victoria Ratliff, the wealthy financier’s wife on season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” has a problem: She keeps popping pills. And her drug of choice, the anti-anxiety medication lorazepam, has left her a little loopy. In the show, which follows guests vacationing at a fictional resort, Victoria pairs her medication with wine, which leads her to nod off at the dinner table. Sometimes she slurs her words. When she notices that her pill supply is mysteriously dwindling, she asks her children if they’re stealing them. “You don’t have enough lorazepam to get through one week at a wellness spa?” her daughter, Piper, asks “The White Lotus” is not the only show to recently feature these drugs. The new Max series “The Pitt,” which takes place in an emergency department, includes a story line about a benzodiazepine called Librium. This isn’t a case of Hollywood taking dramatic liberties. Benzodiazepines such as lorazepam and chlordiazepoxide are notorious for having the potential to be highly addictive. They may also come with difficult — sometimes fatal — withdrawal symptoms. The characters’ misuse of benzodiazepine drugs is not uncommon, said Dr. Ian C. Neel, a geriatrician at UC San Diego Health. “We definitely see that a lot in real life as well.” And in recent years, he added, studies have shown that it’s a bigger problem than doctors initially realized. The drugs, which are often called benzos or downers, are commonly used to treat anxiety, panic attacks and sleep disorders like restless leg syndrome. But they can also be used for other reasons, such as to help people manage alcohol withdrawal. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29705 - Posted: 03.15.2025

What to Know About Buprenorphine, a Proven Treatment for Opioid Addiction

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff When President Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, one of his stated rationales was to force those countries to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In fiscal year 2024, United States Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 22,000 pounds of pills, powders and other products containing fentanyl, down from 27,000 pounds in the previous fiscal year. More than 105,000 people died from overdoses, three-quarters of them from fentanyl and other opioids, in 2023. It doesn’t take much illicit fentanyl — said to be about 50 times as powerful as heroin and 100 times as powerful as morphine — to cause a fatal overdose. In my article for the magazine, I note that one of the many tragedies of the opioid epidemic is that a proven treatment for opioid addiction, a drug called buprenorphine, has been available in the United States for more than two decades yet has been drastically underprescribed. Tens of thousands of lives might have been saved if it had been more widely used earlier. In his actions and rhetoric, Trump seems to emphasize the reduction of supply as the answer to the fentanyl crisis. But Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has pointed to American demand as a driver of the problem. Indeed, if enough opioid users in the United States ended up receiving buprenorphine and other effective medication-based treatments, perhaps that demand for illicit opioids like fentanyl could be reduced. Devastating losses. Drug overdose deaths, largely caused by the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl, reached record highs in the United States in 2021. Here’s what you should know to keep your loved ones safe: Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose. Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy. © 2025 The New York Times Company

How a Leftist Activist Group Helped Torpedo a Psychedelic Therapy

By Andrew Jacobs and Rachel Nuwer After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in. Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments. At a pivotal public hearing last summer, two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans. Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events. “The most significant harms in Lykos’s clinical trials were not caused by MDMA, but by the people who were entrusted to supervise its administration,” Neşe Devenot, one of the speakers opposed to Lykos’s treatment and a writing instructor at Johns Hopkins University, told the committee. Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. The critics did not provide evidence to back their claims of systematic wrongdoing, but when the votes were counted that day, the panel overwhelmingly rejected Lykos’s application. Before voting, panelists cited a number of concerns, among them MDMA’s potential effects on the heart and liver, and whether trial results were influenced by the fact that most study participants correctly guessed they had received the drug and not a placebo. © 2025 The New York Times Company

The Race for All-Powerful Pot

By Katie J.M. BakerMegan TwoheyDanielle Ivory and Jeremy Singer-Vine At Stiiizy, the best-selling cannabis brand in America, the goal is explicit: producing powerful and cheap marijuana. Inside its Los Angeles headquarters, crews dust joints with concentrated THC, the intoxicating component of cannabis. They package pocket-size vape cartridges that promise “the highest potency possible.” On its website, the company declares that “it has never been easier (or quicker) to get silly high for an affordable price.” Dispensaries operating under the brand of another leading company, Cookies, have promoted “powerful medical benefits,” including “cancer fighting” qualities. A cannabis-infused chocolate bar was, until recently, described as containing properties “beneficial to those suffering” from glaucoma, bacterial infections and Huntington’s disease, a devastating genetic illness. More than a decade after states began legalizing recreational marijuana, businesses are enticing customers with unproven health claims, while largely escaping rigorous oversight. A New York Times review of 20 of the largest brands found that most were selling products with such claims, potentially violating federal and state regulations. And as companies compete, potency has gone up — with some products advertised as having as much as 99 percent THC — and prices have gone down. “What we’re seeing is really a race to the bottom,” said Matt Zehner, a senior analyst at Brightfield Group, which tracks the legal cannabis industry. Some executives said their companies are trying to navigate complex rules while satisfying their customers. Stiiizy’s co-founder and chief executive, James Kim, said in an interview that many are heavy users in search of a good deal, something he had sought as a broke “pothead” in his early 20s. “This is why I believe we’re very successful,” he said. But in a $32 billion industry that has been volatile — only about a quarter of businesses turned a profit last year, one survey found — companies say they also face pressure to do whatever they can to survive. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Cigarettes with less nicotine may help some smokers quit

By Aimee Cunningham If cigarettes contained very little of the chemical that keeps people smoking, it could help smokers move away from these deadly products. That’s the rationale behind a new rule proposed on January 15 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which seeks to limit the amount of the addictive chemical nicotine in cigarettes. The reduced-nicotine cigarettes would have less than 5 percent of the amount of nicotine that’s generally found in regular cigarettes. The rule would also cap the nicotine in certain other products in which the tobacco leaves are burned. The FDA rule is just one step toward reduced-nicotine cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products becoming the standard. This process would probably take many years, depending on the priorities of future administrations and whether the tobacco industry challenges the rule in court, as it has the FDA’s rule placing graphic warning labels on their products. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control gave the FDA the authority to require graphic warning labels and to reduce nicotine in tobacco products. The idea for a nicotine limit has been around for decades. And the evidence supporting drastically lowering the amount of nicotine in combusted tobacco products has grown during that time. Randomized controlled trials of reduced-nicotine cigarettes report that people using them end up smoking fewer cigarettes per day. That’s also the case for studies that focused on groups at higher risk for smoking, including people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and people with mental health conditions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Psychedelic drug DMT to be trialled on UK volunteers to tackle alcohol misuse

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent A powerful psychedelic that is used in healing ceremonies by Indigenous groups in the Amazon is being trialled as a pioneering approach to reduce problematic alcohol consumption. Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew that has been used for thousands of years by shamans in South America. Scientists based at University College London are testing whether a one-off dose of the drug could help hazardous drinkers who want to reduce their alcohol intake. Alcohol addiction is notoriously difficult to overcome and there are few effective therapies available. “The current treatments really don’t work for a large proportion of people. For alcohol addiction, 50% of people relapse within three months and around 60-70% within three years,” said Prof Ravi Das, who is co-leading the trial at University College London with Prof Jeremy Skipper. “Treatment itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in 70 years, so there’s a desperate need for new drugs and treatment approaches. To the extent that DMT might provide a more effective treatment approach, it is worth exploring.” In its pure form, DMT is one of the most powerful psychoactive substances found in nature. “The dose we chose reliably produces strong effects,” said Dr Greg Cooper, a research fellow at UCL, adding that this included total out-of-body experiences, fully immersive hallucinations and entering colourful geometric landscapes. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warnings on Alcohol

By Roni Caryn Rabin Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label as packs of cigarettes do, the U.S. surgeon general said on Friday. It is the latest salvo in a fierce debate about the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades, moderate drinking was said to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. That perception has been embedded in the dietary advice given to Americans. But growing research has linked drinking, sometimes even within the recommended limits, to various types of cancer. Labels currently affixed to bottles and cans of alcoholic beverages warn about drinking while pregnant or before driving and operating other machinery, and about general “health risks.” But alcohol directly contributes to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said. He called for updating the labels to include a heightened risk of breast cancer, colon cancer and at least five other malignancies now linked by scientific studies to alcohol consumption. “Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview. “The data does not bear that out for cancer risk.” Only Congress can mandate new warning labels of the sort Dr. Murthy recommended, and it’s not clear that the incoming administration would support the change. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Could Ozempic treat addiction?

By Shane O’Neill In 2018, Matt Christensen kicked heroin by replacing drugs with drinking. When he stopped drinking in 2022, he turned to food. He put on 95 pounds. His doctor recommended he try Wegovy, part of a class of drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, to help him lose weight. Eventually he switched to a different drug called Zepbound, which targets both GLP-1 and GIP agonists. The drugs worked. Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI. But a funny thing happened on his weight-loss journey: His cravings for food had diminished but so had his cravings for drugs and alcohol. Christensen, 42, started drinking at age 9 and using heroin at 17. For decades, catching a cold meant reaching for a hot toddy. Work stress meant numbing out with Xanax. Even passing through certain neighborhoods in Chicago where he used to buy drugs would lead to cravings. But after he started taking GLP-1 agonists, those triggers became, well, less triggering. “It was the weirdest thing,” he said. “It was just quiet. I just found it really easy all of a sudden.” More than that, Christensen noticed that an unease he had always felt in his body — a discomfort he perpetually tried to quell with fidgeting, food or drugs — was diminishing. “That’s a feeling that I’ve had my entire life,” he said. “Taking these drugs has toned that down. “There’s no silver bullet for addiction or mental illness, but for me, in concert with the other treatments, it has been an absolute game changer,” he said. Matt Christensen says weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound have been “an absolute game changer” when it comes to his addiction struggles.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 29589 - Posted: 12.07.2024

This Drinking Habit Is More Dangerous Than Bingeing

By Christina Caron The holidays offer an excuse to gather with loved ones, let loose and indulge: Plates loaded with comfort foods. Unapologetic napping. All the pie. And, for some, plenty of alcohol. But heavy drinking is not limited to the holiday season. Nor is it mainly the pastime of college students. Overall binge drinking rates are now equivalent among young adults and those in midlife. That’s because young people, especially young men, are bingeing less — while middle-aged adults are throwing back more alcohol in a single session than they previously did. We’ve long been warned about the risks of binge drinking, usually defined as having four or five drinks in a two-hour span. And now researchers are increasingly focused on a more dangerous pattern of alcohol use that they call high-intensity drinking: consuming eight or more drinks in a row for women and 10 or more drinks in a row for men. High-intensity drinking is even riskier than binge drinking, and it’s on the rise among certain segments of the population. How does high-intensity drinking differ from binge drinking? The definition of binge drinking stems from the work of Henry Wechsler, a social psychologist at Harvard University who in 1993 tracked alcohol use among college students across the country. He found that young women who reported consuming at least four drinks in a night and men who consumed at least five experienced the most drinking-related problems. But other researchers noticed that some of the worst consequences associated with binge drinking, such as blackouts and alcohol poisoning, tended to happen when people had much more than four or five drinks. Over the years, experts have referred to heavier levels of binge drinking in different ways, including “extreme drinking” and the far less catchy “extreme ritualistic alcohol consumption.” In recent years they settled on “high-intensity drinking.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Alcohol Deaths Have More Than Doubled in Two Decades

By Roni Caryn Rabin The number of deaths caused by alcohol-related diseases more than doubled among Americans between 1999 and 2020, according to new research. Alcohol was involved in nearly 50,000 deaths among adults ages 25 to 85 in 2020, up from just under 20,000 in 1999. The increases were in all age groups. The biggest spike was observed among adults ages 25 to 34, whose fatality rate increased nearly fourfold between 1999 and 2020. Women are still far less likely than men to die of an illness caused by alcohol, but they also experienced a steep surge, with rates rising 2.5-fold over 20 years. The new study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, drew on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths related to alcohol included those caused by certain forms of heart disease, liver disease, nerve damage, muscle damage, pancreatitis and alcohol poisoning, as well as related mental and behavioral disorders. The study did not include other deaths influenced by alcohol, such as accidents. “The totality of the evidence indicates that people who consume moderate to large amounts of alcohol have a markedly increased incidence of premature deaths and disability,” said Dr. Charles Hennekens, a professor of medicine at Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University and one of the study’s authors. The increase at the onset of the pandemic appears to have persisted. Adults reported more heavy drinking and binge drinking in 2022, another recent study found. Some 48,870 alcohol-related deaths were reported in 2020, up from 19,356 in 1999, the new study found. The mortality rate rose to 21.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2020, an increase from 10.7 deaths per 100,000 in 1999. © 2024 The New York Times Company

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