The use of the drugs in treating low mood has sparked debate, not least about the necessity of a hallucinogenic experience. But a new discovery may provide an answer

Robitussin has been a staple of American pharmacies since the late 1940s – but since the 1960s, people have swigged bottles of the cough medicine recreationally because, at a high enough dose, its active ingredient, dextromethorphan, can cause hallucinations (so-called “robotripping”). Now, that ingredient, common to many cough medications, has a potential new use – as an antidepressant.

In recent years, studies have found that conventional antidepressants are only marginally more effective than biologically inactive placebos. Meanwhile, big pharmaceutical companies conduct very little research into mental health drugs. So researchers and sufferers have instead placed their hopes in psychedelic drugs usually considered hallucinatory, such as psilocybin or LSD. Yet the evidence of their effectiveness as an antidepressant comes from small trials, one of the largest involving just 233 people – and no national government medicine regulator has formally approved them for this use. Against this backdrop, a legitimate drug company has quietly moved dextromethorphan beyond robotripping into a, legally approved depression treatment – but with an important twist.

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© Photograph: Microgen Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

No life-threatening injuries reported, but news follows spate of drug-related deaths at privately-run HMP Parc

Three prisoners have been taken to hospital and an air ambulance was dispatched after disorder at a privately-run prison where 10 inmates have died in the past three months.

Security firm G4S, which runs HMP Parc in Bridgend, Wales, said there were two short-lived incidents at the prison on Friday, one of which involved 20 prisoners. The second incident, which was unrelated, involved an altercation between three prisoners, who required hospital treatment.

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© Photograph: Mike Abrahams/Alamy

The agency’s staff analysis suggests that approval of the illegal drug known as Ecstasy for treatment of PTSD is far from certain, with advisers meeting next week to consider the proposed therapy.

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More than half of patients with advanced forms of disease who took lorlatinib were still alive after five years with no progression

Doctors are hailing “off the chart” trial results that show a new drug stopped lung cancer advancing for longer than any other treatment in medical history.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

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© Photograph: da-kuk/Getty Images

The golden state legalised marijuana production in 2016, but strict curbs have led to a thriving black market. Its hub is in Siskiyou county, where the environmental damage is clear to see

In the shadow of Mount Shasta in northern California, a sea of makeshift greenhouses and plywood huts sprawls between the conifer trees of the high desert. From the air, many of the polytunnels look in bad shape, their plastic covers torn by the wind to reveal what’s inside: hundreds of cannabis plants packet tightly together, their distinctive green leaves easily identifiable against the volcanic soil.

This remote area of Siskiyou county is known for its goldrush history, black bears and returning grey wolves, but in the last few years it has also become a hub for California’s parallel market in cannabis production. More than 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) of illicit cannabis farms cover the Republic-leaning county, which voted not to legalise commercial farming despite the statewide vote for legalisation in November 2016.

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© Photograph: Brian van der Brug/Getty Images

Regular drug use – from caffeine to psychedelics – has become a fundamental part of modern life. A first-person Guardian US series explores America’s shifting relationship with mind-altering substances

• Smoking weed every day makes me less presentable and less productive. I love it

There are plenty of fanciful, far-out theories of how the whole of civilization emerged from drug use – like the theory that the consumption of proto-LSD in ancient Greek cults catalyzed modern philosophy; or the theory that various religious traditions have their roots in revelations occasioned by the body processing stores of endogenous DMT; or the theory that the evolution of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens, and the corresponding emergence of consciousness as a phenomenon, was driven, some hundred thousand years ago, by the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.

But you don’t need to delve that deep into the nether regions of the psychedelic dark web to believe that the world as we know it – where we think and feel and transact business and eat and sleep and read the newspaper – is built, at a fundamental, inextricable level, on a drug. That drug is caffeine.

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© Illustration: Mona Chalabi/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Mona Chalabi/The Guardian

Every morning, I put on some coffee and finish last night’s joint. It keeps me comfortable, cuts my anxiety and boosts my appetite

• Americans have demonized drugs for decades. Now we’re doing them every day

When the pandemic came, I moved back in with my parents in Los Angeles. It was extremely boring. One night we had completely run out of things to do so they decided to go to a local dispensary and pick up. Obviously weed is legal in California, and they’d never tried it before, so they were like: “Well, why not!”

They came back with some pre-rolled joints, which I found really endearing. I come from a Reform Jewish California family, so it almost felt cultural for all of us to be smoking weed together. It’s what I imagine Seth Rogen does when he goes home to visit his parents.

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© Illustration: Marta Parszeniew/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Marta Parszeniew/The Guardian

TYENDINAGA — Four people were charged by Ontario Provincial Police with more than 500 weapons- and drug-related offences after a search of a residence Friday. Read More

Scandalous behavior that has dogged the Catholic church is becoming increasingly common in shamanic healing circles

Shamanic healing or opportunity for ritualized abuse? A lawsuit filed in New Mexico last week alleged that a “shamanic master” assaulted a woman during an “energy medicine” training session in March.

The claim, which is being investigated, could shed more light on what some say is a dark side of some trends in modern spirituality, especially those that involve the ceremonial use of often intense psychedelic treatments.

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© Photograph: Beata Predko/Alamy

Models suggest deaths in poorer countries could be cut by 18% – or about 750,000 a year – with preventive measures

Every year 750,000 deaths linked to drug-resistant superbugs could be prevented through better access to clean water and sanitation, infection control and childhood vaccinations, research suggests.

Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is a huge global challenge, with the evolution of drug-resistant superbugs, driven by factors including inappropriate and excessive antibiotic use, raising the prospect of a future where modern medicine fails.

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© Photograph: nobeastsofierce Science/Alamy

The legislation would make possession of the drugs without a prescription a crime in Louisiana, punishable with jail time.

© Jackie Molloy for The New York Times

A bill that is expected to pass would impose prison time and thousands of dollars in fines on people possessing the pills without a prescription.

© Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Source: www.bitdefender.com – Author: Graham Cluley The United States Department of Justice has dealt a blow to dark web drug traffickers by arresting a man alleged to operate the dark web drugs marketplace Incognito Market. According to a DOJ press release, the alleged operator of a darknet platform sold over $100 million worth of narcotics […]

La entrada 23-year-old alleged founder of dark web Incognito Market arrested after FBI tracks cryptocurrency payments – Source: www.bitdefender.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

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Patients are already dying as wonder drugs lose their effectiveness. International action is urgently needed

As apocalyptic horror stories go, it’s up there with the scariest. Yet it’s not fiction writers but top scientists who are warning of how the world could look once superbugs develop resistance to the remaining drugs against them in our hospital pharmacies. Patients will die who can currently be cured; routine surgery will become dangerous or impossible. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – it happens not only with bacteria but also viruses, fungi and parasites – is one of the top global public health threats facing humanity, says the World Health Organization (WHO). It kills 1.3 million people and contributes to 5 million deaths every year, predicted to be 10 million by 2050. In addition to the appalling human toll, it will increase the strain on and costs of health services. But is it high enough up the agenda? Covid-19 knocked it off, and the climate crisis gets more attention. AMR does not so often get top billing.

This week efforts have been made to change that, with talks at the UN triggering wider coverage chronicling the sorry plight we are in. From the pharmaceutical industry to the WHO to NHS England, the same tune is being played: we are not doing enough to avert disaster.

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© Photograph: Julien Behal/PA

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© Photograph: Julien Behal/PA

Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated ('perfed') and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and '90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD's spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as 'commercial tokens'. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]

Millions in Sackler donations sat dormant, rising in value as the opioid epidemic raged and as other institutions distanced themselves from the makers of a notorious painkiller.

© Shuran Huang for The New York Times