Links for Keyword: Drug Abuse

Follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.

Links 1 - 20 of 2019

Efforts to Help Smokers Quit Stall Under Trump

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

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: 30311 - Posted: 07.08.2026

Designer synapses edit brain circuits in living animals

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

How an Addictive Gas Station Drug Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet

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

Her Self-Experiment with Drug Detox Almost Broke Her

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 30241 - Posted: 05.09.2026

Magic mushroom compound shows promise against cocaine addiction

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.

What Happens in the Brain When “Psychedelic Virgins” Trip for the First Time

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

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: 30236 - Posted: 05.06.2026

What to Know About Orphines, a New Class of Deadly Opioids

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

What addiction does to the brain

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

What Trump’s psychedelics executive order means for basic neuroscience

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

Historic decline in U.S. overdose deaths threatened by changing street drug supply

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

The Fast-Changing Chemistry of New, Dangerous Drugs

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

How Psychedelics Affect the Brain

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 30193 - Posted: 04.08.2026

A low dose of psilocybin helps smokers quit in new study

Will Stone The long-running campaign against smoking could find reinforcements from the new wave of research into psychedelics. Though much of the attention around psychedelics has focused on depression and other mental health conditions, researchers believe these substances also hold the potential to transform addiction treatment. A new study makes the strongest case yet for a psychedelic drug's impact on smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. The trial, conducted by a team at Johns Hopkins University, compared nicotine patches to the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, known as psilocybin. At the end of six months, those who had taken just one dose of psilocybin had more than six times greater odds of being abstinent from cigarettes than their counterparts who relied on the nicotine substitute. Everyone in the study also underwent cognitive behavioral therapy for smoking cessation over the course of 13 weeks. "I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the effect," says Matthew Johnson, the study's author and a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. The findings, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open on Tuesday, came from a sample of 82 current smokers, who were randomly separated into two groups. Similar to other psychedelic trials, the participants had support from facilitators to make sure they were comfortable and prepared for their trip. They ingested a relatively high dose of pure psilocybin. © 2026 npr

Weight loss drugs may stop people getting addicted to drugs and alcohol

Denis Campbell Weight loss drugs could help people avoid getting addicted to alcohol, tobacco and drugs such as cannabis and cocaine, a study has found. They could also reduce the risk of people already addicted to illicit substances having an overdose, ending up in hospital or dying, according to research published in the British Medical Journal. Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, such as Mounjaro and Ozempic, are thought to work by influencing the brain’s reward pathways in order to cut cravings. They help people feel fuller by mimicking the natural substance released after eating. The US study analysed 606,434 US veterans with type 2 diabetes, who were monitored for up to three years. It found that GLP-1s reduced the risk of alcohol-related disorders in those with no history of substance use by 18% and of using cannabis (14%), cocaine (20%), nicotine (20%) and opioids (25%), compared with those on other sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 drugs also used to treat diabetes. Weight loss drugs also reduce the risk of people already using substances from overdosing (39%), needing emergency help in A&E (31%) or dying (50%). “This study adds to emerging research exploring whether GLP-1 medicines may influence brain pathways involved in reward and addiction”, said Prof Claire Anderson, the president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which represents 35,500 UK pharmacists. She added: “As this was an observational study, it is important to be clear that it does not show these medicines prevent or treat addiction. Further research, including clinical trials, will be needed to understand whether GLP-1 medicines have a direct effect.” © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

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: 30150 - Posted: 03.07.2026

Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs

By Nick Hilden Since the start of the so-called psychedelic renaissance some 25 years ago, writers have tackled the subject from the vantages of science, politics, mental health, productivity, creativity, spirituality, how-to, and even cooking. With his new book On Drugs, Justin Smith-Ruiu explores these powerful drugs through a philosophical lens, analyzing their effects and implications via thinkers spanning Foucault to Freud, Spinoza to Sartre, and scores of others who over the past 2,000 years have sought to explain the mysteries of the human experience. While authors have applied philosophy to psychedelics before, they have typically done so through the framework of mental health or otherwise medicinal frameworks, while Smith-Ruiu is more interested in treating psychedelics as philosophical objects worthy of examination in and of themselves. At the same time, he follows the drugs down the rabbit hole, sizing up what psychedelics taught him on a personal level, and delving into questions surrounding the scientific prohibition of auto-experimentation, whether the hallucinations conjured by psychedelics are real or imagined, and what they have to teach us about the nature of reality. A professor of history and science, Smith-Ruiu has previously applied philosophical analysis to some of the most pressing issues of our day. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he explored how the internet arose from some of our deepest philosophical yearnings. In Irrationality, he asserted that human irritation is fundamental to the human experience rather than a contextual social aberration. And in Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, he argued that our contemporary conceptions of race are not innate but rather emerged from the modern scientific efforts to classify and systematize. (He also happens to have an asteroid named after him—it doesn’t get much “higher” than that.) © 2026 NautilusNext Inc.,

A couple of teas or coffees a day could lower risk of dementia

Ian Sample Science editor People who have a couple of teas or coffees a day have a lower risk of dementia and marginally better cognitive performance than those who avoid the drinks, researchers say. Health records for more than 130,000 people showed that over 40 years, those who routinely drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of caffeinated tea daily had a 15-20% lower risk of dementia than those who went without. The caffeinated coffee drinkers also reported slightly less cognitive decline than those who opted for decaf and performed better on some objective tests of brain function, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The findings suggest habitual tea and coffee drinking is good for the brain, but the research cannot prove it, as caffeine drinkers may be less prone to dementia for other reasons. A similar link would arise if poor sleepers, who appear to have a greater risk of cognitive decline, steered clear of caffeine to get a better night’s rest. “Our study alone can’t prove causality, but to our knowledge, it is the best evidence to date looking at coffee and tea intake and cognitive health, and it is consistent with plausible biology,” said the lead author, Yu Zhang, who studies nutritional epidemiology at Harvard University. Coffee and tea contain caffeine and polyphenols that may protect against brain ageing by improving vascular health and reducing inflammation and oxidative stress, where harmful atoms and molecules called free radicals damage cells and tissues. Substances in the drinks could also work by improving metabolic health. Caffeine, for example, is linked to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30113 - Posted: 02.11.2026

Powerful New Drug Is Creating a ‘Withdrawal Crisis’ in Philadelphia

By Jan Hoffman Around 2 a.m., Joseph felt the withdrawal coming on, sudden and hard. He fell to the floor convulsing, vomiting ferociously. The delirium and hallucinations were starting. He shook awake his friend, who had let him in earlier to shower, wash his clothes and grab some sleep. “Do you have a few dollars?” he pleaded. “I have to get right.” The friend, a community outreach worker who had been trying for years to get him into treatment, looked up at him standing over her raving and unfocused. “Either leave or let me call an ambulance,” she demanded. At 34, Joseph (who, with his friend, recounted the evening in interviews with The New York Times) had been through opioid withdrawals many times — on Philadelphia streets, in jail, in rehab. But he had never experienced anything as terrifyingly all-consuming as this. A new drug has been saturating the fentanyl supply in Philadelphia and moving to other cities throughout the East and Midwestern United States: medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative that causes almost instantaneous blackouts and, if not used every few hours, brings on life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. It has created a new type of drug crisis — one that is occasioned not by overdosing on the drug, but by withdrawing from it. Since the middle of last year, Philadelphia’s hospitals have been strained by patients coming in with what doctors have identified as medetomidine withdrawal. Although the heart rate slows drastically right after use, in withdrawal the opposite occurs: The heart rate and blood pressure become catastrophically high. Patients experience tremors and unstoppable vomiting. Many require intensive care. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Review of Medical Cannabis Use Finds Little Evidence of Benefit

By Jan Hoffman To treat their pain, anxiety and sleep problems, millions of Americans turn to cannabis, which is now legal in 40 states for medical use. But a new review of 15 years of research concludes that the evidence of its benefits is often weak or inconclusive, and that nearly 30 percent of medical cannabis patients meet criteria for cannabis use disorder. “The evidence does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids at this point for most of the indications that folks are using it for,” said Dr. Michael Hsu, an addiction psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the review, which was published last month in the medical journal JAMA. (Cannabis refers to the entire plant; cannabinoids are its many compounds.) The analysis arrives amid a surging acceptance and normalization of cannabis products, a $32 billion industry. For the review, addiction experts at academic medical centers across the country studied more than 2,500 clinical trials, guidelines and surveys conducted mostly in the United States and Canada. They found a wide gulf between the health purposes for which the public seeks out cannabis and what gold-standard science shows about its effectiveness. The researchers distinguished between medical cannabis, sold at dispensaries, and pharmaceutical-grade cannabinoids — the handful of medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration with formulations containing either low-grade THC, a psychoactive compound, or CBD, a nonintoxicating compound. Those medicines, including Marinol, Syndros and Cesamet, are available by prescription at conventional pharmacies and have had good results in easing chemotherapy-related nausea, stimulating the appetite of patients with debilitating illnesses like H.I.V./AIDS, and easing some pediatric seizure disorders. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 30045 - Posted: 12.13.2025

Psilocybin rewires specific mouse cortical networks in lasting ways

By Siddhant Pusdekar A single dose of psilocybin leads to widespread network-specific changes to cortical circuitry in mice, according to a new study published today in Cell. The results help explain how psilocybin can bring about lasting changes in behavior, and they pinpoint “the neurons that are most affected,” says Andrea Gomez, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Specifically, the psychedelic strengthens cortical inputs from sensory brain areas and weakens inputs into cortico-cortical recurrent loops. Overall, these network changes suggest that psychedelics reroute information in a way that enhances responses to the outside world and reduces rumination, says study investigator Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. “This study provides some more mechanistic insight for why the drug may be a good antidepressant.” And the rewiring itself is not static, Kwan adds: “It can be influenced by manipulating neural activity” during psychedelic treatment. With this locus of psychedelic-induced changes identified, researchers can unpack how these neuronal ensembles coordinate “to create particular percepts or particular cognitions,” Gomez says. Kwan’s team focused on the mouse dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which includes the anterior cingulate cortex—an important hub for the serotonin receptors that psilocybin targets. One dose of psilocybin increases dendritic spine growth in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice, an effect that lasts for at least a month, according to a 2021 study by Kwan’s team. And the treatment reduces the animals’ learned stress-related behaviors, but only if pyramidal tract neurons—one of the major types of excitatory neurons in the dmPFC—are active, Kwan’s group reported in April. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Will blockbuster obesity drugs revolutionize addiction treatment?

Elie Dolgin Last April, neuroscientist Sue Grigson received an e-mail from a man detailing his years-long struggle to kick addiction — first to opioids, and then to the very medication meant to help him quit. The man had stumbled on research by Grigson, suggesting that certain anti-obesity medications could help to reduce rats’ addiction to drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. He decided to try quitting again, this time while taking semaglutide, the blockbuster GLP-1 drug better known as Ozempic. “That’s when he wrote to me,” says Grigson, who works at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey. “He said that he was drug- and alcohol-free for the first time in his adult life.” Stories like this have been spreading fast in the past few years, through online forums, weight-loss clinics and news headlines. They describe people taking diabetes and weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide (also marketed as Wegovy) and tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound) who find themselves suddenly able to shake long-standing addictions to cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs. And now, clinical data are starting to back them up. Earlier this year, a team led by Christian Hendershot, a psychologist now at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, reported in a landmark randomized trial that weekly injections of semaglutide cut alcohol consumption1 — a key demonstration that GLP-1 drugs can alter addictive behaviour in people with a substance-use disorder. More than a dozen randomized clinical studies testing GLP-1 drugs for addiction are now under way worldwide, with some results expected in the next few months. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Links By Chapter:

Links for Keyword: Drug Abuse