Keep those hearts open to differing emotions triggered by corporate psychedelia. And watch our for N-BOMes

DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency AKA the US military, have funded UNC’s Dr Bryan Roth to the tune of $26 million for development of a non-psychedelic anti-depressant.

This jars with many in the space who prefer their medicines to not only come from plants but look like them too. The ketamine crew were jumping skyclad through bonfires at sunrise when they found out a fungus generated it (to kill worms) earlier this year. 

I don’t entirely blame them. Breaking up nature’s gifts feels hubristic. ‘Pharmahuasca’ contains only the big guns, DMT and MAO-inhibitors, of ayahuasca the jungle brew, which contains as many as 28 different ingredients in total. 

“Is this bullshit thing started by this random company going to replace psilocybin for example? I don’t think so,” Empath Ventures founder Brom Rector told Psychedelics Today recently, “In business you need to make a big improvement, otherwise no one really cares.”

The anecdote that rings true with me the most in this argument is ‘In hospital they could give you morphine that doesn’t make you high, but the proper stuff works best.’ THC in marijuana is thought to increase the efficacy of CBD, while the latter makes the former safer.

Pioneering psychedelic scientists like Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols’ dad David, Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD, and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin reviver of MDMA are lionised in the space. 

Indeed Charles follows in the footsteps of his father Dr David Nichols: who coined the term ‘entactogen’ for MDMA, first synthesised pharmaceutical DMT for The Strass’ 1990s experiments. He also made the MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins. 

Dr David Nichols is still working. Considered a leading expert in research into the neurotransmitter dopamine, his recent discoveries are already being trialled on Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Charles inherited a library of over 100 new chemicals from his father upon beginning his own research.

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires”

Compass Pathways, not satisfied with supposedly trying to patent psilocybin, have developed 150 new psychedelics with the assistance of committed scientist Professor Jason Wallach. Wired ran a gushing profile of Wallach, who fits its brand image of the passionate inventor in its summer 2022 feature ‘The Race to Develop new Psychedelic Drugs'.

Wired journalist John Semley got less copy from Pathways CEO George Goldsmith and cofounder Lars Wilde: “Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health,” wrote the frustrated hack.

Modern-day chemists and their backers get a far harder rap than the old guard, let alone more colourful contemporaries like billionaire Tyringham Initiative sponsor Anton Bilton, and Tokyo-based neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore whose book Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds, on how to learn from DMT hyperspace visits lands very soon. 

Humanity’s developed a love-hate relationship with pharmacology. Sometimes we can’t get enough of its magic beans; later we become deeply suspicious of what it’s up to in its windowless labs. 

That’s not just a projection of our own shame. Several high-profile incidents over the decades have stoked the embers of misgiving. It was the Thalidomide scandal, where a generation of noticeably deformed children resulted from  a less than rigorous safety testing program, that put the kibosh on early LSD research. 

The chemical generation’s complex relationship with drug use, and a preference for talk therapy amongst… talk therapists that veers into militancy haven’t helped.

The pharma sector’s also deeply partial to bureaucracy in its many forms, and that rarely goes down well with those seeking caring and compassion. Anecdotally, there’s also the feeling that the corporadelic guys, with their lanyards and anodyne PR-speak are not really one of us.

Corpos drew groans at London’s Psych Symposium when a panel on decriminalisation was told we can’t be trusted to grow and eat our own magic mushrooms, because we can’t rate the dosage accurately enough. 

Besides, where are all these revolutionary new psychedelic-derived medicines? 

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires,” says Dr Nichols during his Vital lecture that opens the course’s Medical Overview of Psychedelics and Clinical Evaluation core module.

But it’s that level of investigation and learning that often yields major discoveries. In scientific circles LSD is noted for the knowledge about serotonin studying it led to.

Frankly why should everyone with asthma have to take a trip? Not everybody likes metaphysical poetry, ambient music, plus discovering the inner secrets of the universe… maybe the effing Death Door.

Besides space explorers are already enjoying the fruits of next-generation psychedelic research. And citizen scientists in the front line of consciousness exploration make for finer subjects than lab rats. 

Designer drugs combining psychedelic and empathogen (entactogen) effects are not your regular liberty cap and MDMA punch though. ’N-bombs’ or NBOMes to give them their scientific name are described as ‘ultra potent’ by the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

There’s a niche for the ambitious space holder.