Get the latest tech news
The Promise of 5-MeO-DMT
The compound stands out for its quick and potent psychedelic effects. Can lab formulations help improve mental health?
That changed in 2011, after Octavio Rettig, a self-described pioneer of toad medicine and a controversial figure, introduced the psychoactive to an Indigenous tribe in the Mexican state of Sonora, Arizona’s southern neighbor, as a treatment for addiction among members of the fishing community. For the past three years, biologists Karla Montaño Pérez and Jesús Salvador Jáuregui Santacruz, through an environmental government agency in Mexico’s Sonora state, have conducted research on the toad and its habitat, as well as launched public education campaigns. Meanwhile, much of the early research enthusiasm into the molecule’s therapeutic properties is based on animal or small human studies with limited or no follow-up — uncertainties that also linger around other psychedelics, including MDMA, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering approving as a treatment for PTSD.
Or read this on Hacker News
