Deep-dives into psilocybin, LSD, DMT, MDMA, and other psychedelic compounds - their chemistry, effects, history, and science.
A short-acting tryptamine, pharmacology-distinct from N,N-DMT, with twenty to forty five minute inhaled duration and an effect profile regularly described as total ego dissolution, often non-visual, often without remembered narrative content. 5-MeO-DMT lives at the convergence of synthetic chemistry, Sonoran desert toad conservation, and a ceremony culture that has outrun most of its careful study.
Read article →A dissociative anesthetic since 1970, a club drug in the 1990s, and the first genuinely new antidepressant mechanism the FDA has approved in thirty years. Ketamine occupies a strange and consequential niche in modern medicine.
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Somewhere in the Amazon basin, people have been drinking a bitter vine brew for at least a thousand years. Today, that same brew is showing up in clinical trials for depression and PTSD. Here is everything the science knows about ayahuasca.
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In 1976, a chemist named Alexander Shulgin synthesized a molecule that had been sitting in a patent filing since 1912 and decided to try it himself. What he experienced over the next several hours would eventually reshape psychiatric medicine.
Read article →On April 19, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann climbed onto his bicycle and began the most consequential commute in pharmacological history. This is the full story of LSD, from ergot fungus to CIA mind control to Johns Hopkins.
Read article →In 1990, Rick Strassman injected DMT into volunteers under a federal research approval at the University of New Mexico. The subjects reported interdimensional beings, alternate realities, and experiences more vivid than waking life, then ate lunch. The complete story of the spirit molecule.
Read article →A Wall Street banker, a healer in Oaxaca, and a mushroom growing guide written under fake names. The complete story of psilocybin, history, brain chemistry, effects, and what the science actually says.
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