Research
Daily Field Notes on emerging psychedelic clinical trials and pharmacology — N,N-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and related tryptamines. Coverage of preprints, peer-reviewed papers from PubMed, and the major research centres (Imperial, MAPS, Beckley, Cybin, Usona). Receptor pharmacology, biased agonism, deuterated analogues, and the translation of psychedelic compounds from bench to clinic. Independent, evidence-led, primary sources cited.
The Room and the Record
There is a claim in psychedelic research that has been repeated for sixty years without being tied convincingly to a lasting biological measurement. It goes like this: the drug is not the whole story.
Can a therapist guide you somewhere they've never been?
The medicine opens the door. Whether the person sitting beside you can actually help you walk through it — and how you'd even know — is the question the field hasn't reckoned with yet.
Holding the Door Open
DMT is not exotic in the sense of being rare. It is one of the most widely distributed psychedelics in nature, produced by a great many plants and animals — and, importantly, by mammals, including, in trace amounts, us. (We will come back to that startling fact in Part VII.)
The Net That Holds the Brake: How One Dose of Psilocybin Quiets the Brain's Drive Toward Reward
A single injection, two days of silence, and then a measurable change in how much rats wanted what they used to want most — traced down to one inhibitory cell type wrapped in structural netting in the prefrontal cortex.
Who Owns a Molecule That Has Never Existed in Nature?
In April 2026, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science announced they had engineered a single, unglamorous relative of tobacco to produce five different natural psychedelics at once: psilocybin and psilocin, the mushroom compounds; DMT,
β-Carbolines and the MAO-A barrier: how ayahuasca makes oral DMT possible
In 1928, when Lewin catalogued mescaline among his Phantastica, he noted something curious about ayahuasca: the brew required two plants, not one. A single plant supplied the visions,
Why 0.4 mg/kg: Strassman's dose-finding logic and its thirty-year hold
Strassman's dose-finding study, published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 1994, employed a double-blind design with four intravenous dose levels — 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.4 mg/kg of DMT fumarate
Deuterating DMT: how two neutrons reshape a pharmacokinetic profile
When Cybin Inc. filed its patent family around CYB003 — later redesignated SPL028 — the core chemical manoeuvre was, on its face, almost comically modest.
Shulgin's tryptamine notebooks: the cartography DMT research still navigates by
The relevance of Shulgin's tryptamine work to present-day DMT research is not merely historical. Several active lines of enquiry trace their intellectual ancestry directly to his structure-activity observations.
Speech biomarkers after 5-MeO-DMT: can how you talk reveal what changed?
Kuc, McAlpine, Sellers, Blackburne, Lametti, and Skipper, writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, report on what they term "speech markers of psychological change"
Machine learning validates indigenous folk taxonomy of the ayahuasca vine
A machine learning study quietly validates indigenous taxonomy of Banisteriopsis caapi — and raises a harder question about what counts as scientific knowledge.
Endogenous DMT from Axelrod to Borjigin: what sixty years have settled and what they have not
The story begins, as so many stories in psychedelic pharmacology do, with Julius Axelrod. In 1961, working at the National Institute of Mental Health, Axelrod demonstrated that rabbit lung tissue contained an enzyme capable of methylating tryptamine to form DMT.