Alcohol Addiction | +80 articles

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Novel psychoactive molecule MEAI a promising treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder*
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by Adi Zuloff-Shanion | Psychedelic Spotlight | April 8, 2022

Clearmind Medicine CEO Adi Zuloff-Shani, PhD in human biology and immunology, writes this guest blog about how new psychedelic-based technologies, like MEAI, can help in the fight against Alcohol Use Disorder.

Alcohol is now the third-leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing a staggering 95,000 Americans each year, more than those who succumb to other drug overdoses.

In the 1950s, Dr. Humphry Osmond discovered that using several hallucinogenic drugs in controlled doses had a deeply positive effect on patients’ well-being. He realized that psychedelics could do much to help another group of people struggling with a very particular addiction—alcoholism. Among his patients was one Bill W., who, inspired by the experience, went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous.

Thankfully, the state of the science has come a long way since Osmond’s day, and whereas his explorations into using psychedelics to treat alcoholism were met with mixed results, we now know much more about how to do this safely and effectively. As the BBC reported late last year, we now have something in the range of 6,000 studies on more than 40,000 patients, showing psychedelics to be effective in treating a dazzling array of conditions, none more successfully than alcoholism.

Psychedelic pharmaceutical biotech company Clearmind Medicine has developed a novel psychedelic molecule that simulates the euphoric alcohol experience while simultaneously reducing the desire to consume alcohol. Preclinical studies were extremely favorable, demonstrating a high safety profile and promising efficacy.

Early evidence seems to show that MEAI seems to produce the same feeling when it comes to drinking, making the thought of picking up another shot or cocktail physically repulsive.

Adi Zuloff-Shani is the CEO of Clearmind Medicine, which is developing breakthrough treatments for binge behavior and mental health, including alcohol use disorder, binge eating and depression.

*From the articles here :

Drinking to Excess? Psychedelics Can Help

Clearmind Medicine CEO Adi Zuloff-Shani writes this guest blog about how a new psychoactive molecule called MEAI can treat alcoholism.

psychedelicspotlight.com

Clearmind Signs Development and Supply Agreement to Produce Its Drug Candidate MEAI Psychedelic Molecule With Aragen Life Sciences

Output will be used to advance clinical testing of MEAI as a treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder and Binge Drinking...

www.globenewswire.com

 

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Non-hallucinogenic DMT targets alcohol addiction*

Further in vivo studies with PSIL-002 will evaluate its antidepressant, anxiolytic, and anti-addictive properties.

by Emily Jarvie | Psychedelic Spotlight | 9 Dec 2021

Florida-based biotechnology company Psilera Bioscience believes it has created a safe and well-tolerated DMT derivative that maintains the psychedelic’s mood benefits while reducing hallucinations.

Results from the company’s in vivo preclinical study show the derivative, PSIL-002, achieved these benefits with no hallucinogenic effects at all administered dosages between 0.5mg/kg to 100mg/kg in mice.

The study used a head-twitch-response (HTR), which is a well-established and widely used method of assessing hallucinogenic effects in animals, to evaluate PSIL-002. A HTR is a rapid side-to-side rotational head movement that occurs in rats and mice after the administration of hallucinogens and other 5-HT2A agonists. This method is used in preclinical studies because there is evidence that HTR potencies in mice are correlated with hallucinogenic potencies in humans, meaning it can be a useful indicator as to whether a compound is likely to display hallucinogenic activity in humans.

Compared to the positive control, a psilocybin mimic called psilacetin, no dose of PSIL-002 induced a HTR. “Other psychedelics like psilocybin and DMT often produce the HTR at doses from 1mg/kg to 10mg/kg, or as low as 0.05mg/kg to 0.1mg/kg for LSD, further demonstrating the non-hallucinogenic potential of PSIL-002 and broader range for therapeutic dosing,” Psilera Bioscience explained.

There are several advantages of reducing the hallucinogenic effects of psychedelics such as DMT, for example, the development of therapeutics that can be administered outside of a clinical setting, such as medications that can be self-administered.

“Compounds like PSIL-002 have the potential to reach new patient populations in need with greater access than current models, especially for those suffering from conditions where hallucinations may be undesirable,” explained Psilera Bioscience CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Chris Witowski.

“This biological data is key to our vision of reducing side effects such as hallucinations while further optimizing classical psychedelics into next-generation drugs.”

The company now plans to conduct further in vivo studies with PSIL-002 to evaluate its antidepressant, anxiolytic, and anti-addictive properties, specifically targeting alcohol consumption.

PSIL-002 is part of Psilera Bioscience’s patent-pending new chemical entity (NCE) library, all of which are compounds designed to maintain the positive effects of current psychedelics while eliminating hallucinations and other adverse effects such as cardiotoxicity. “New formulations tailoring the therapeutic effects of DMT will improve treatment scalability and patient compliance, further expanding addressable markets,” Psilera Bioscience said.

The company has selected its NCEs with the help of its proprietary BRAIN technology platform, which can be used to identify new compounds that may have a therapeutic effect on mood, cognitive, and substance-use disorders. This platform virtually screens and filers compounds for their psychedelic potential at multiple receptors, specifically the 5-HT2A receptor.

*From the article here :

Non-Hallucinogenic DMT? Psilera Bioscience Makes Progress

DMT has a reputation for short but powerful hallucinogenic trips, but this derivative maintains mood benefits while reducing hallucinations.

psychedelicspotlight.com

 

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Treating alcoholism with psychedelics*

While there is more and more work on psychedelics to treat people for drug and tobacco addiction, it’s treating alcoholism that is gaining new interest.

by Dave Hodes | Green Market Report | 15 Feb 2022

While there is more and more work on psychedelics to treat people for drug and tobacco addiction, it’s treating alcoholism that is gaining new interest from psychedelics researchers today. But finding that specific psychedelics treatment to slow down alcoholism, or even stop it completely, continues to be a head-scratcher for psychedelics researchers.

Help is desperately needed. Alcoholism is more destructive than ever today. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, there are 95,000 alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. each year, making alcohol the third-leading preventable cause of death in the U. S. (the first is tobacco).

More concerning is an emerging trend to high-intensity drinking—drinking alcohol at levels that are two or more times the gender-specific binge drinking thresholds.

As evidence of this growing alcoholism problem continues to pile up, a number of new studies and surveys on psychedelics and alcoholism have emerged over the last few years.

One recent study that examined the role ketamine plays as an effective treatment in alcoholism has caught the attention of psychedelics researchers everywhere.

It’s one of the first studies in the world to explore the effects of serial ketamine infusions in combination with psychotherapy to treat alcohol use disorder (AUD) over a 6 month follow up period, sponsored by Awakn Life Sciences (OTC: AWKNF) and led by Celia Morgan at the University of Exeter. The study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in January, 2022.

The Phase II study involved 96 participants with severe AUD who were required to abstain from alcohol for at least 24 hours prior to undergoing the randomization process, which allowed the researchers to examine the effects of ketamine on prolonging abstinence.

In a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, the patients were randomly assigned to different ketamine infusions combined with therapy. They were able to abstain from using alcohol for a set period of time—before relapsing.

This ketamine research supports the belief that psychedelics can absolutely play a role in successfully treating alcoholism.

Researchers have also found that psilocybin may reduce alcohol use, and that perhaps ibogaine and ayahuasca can help as well since they have shown promise in the treatment of various addictions through observational studies. But exactly how they work and what they can do is still not known.

Psychedelics researchers have been circling the alcoholism treatment issue for years, dating back to 2013, when the potential of psychedelics to treat addictions was first considered.

One of the first clinical trials with psilocybin, for instance, was a proof-of-concept study done in 2015 to quantify the effects of psilocybin in alcohol-dependent participants, and to provide preliminary outcome and safety data.

Ten volunteers were given psilocybin in one or two supervised sessions, in addition to therapy sessions devoted to preparation for and debriefing from the psilocybin sessions.

Abstinence from drinking alcohol increased significantly following psilocybin administration. But the study’s authors admitted this was just the beginning. “These preliminary findings provide a strong rationale for controlled trials with larger samples to investigate efficacy and mechanisms,” the study authors concluded.

More controlled trials on using psilocybin to treat alcoholism have been done over the last four years than during any other period before. Researchers hope they are zeroing in how it can help.

In one study, participants said that psilocybin helped them with “acute and lasting alterations in their perceptions of self, in the quality of their baseline consciousness, and in their relationship with alcohol and drinking.”

A recent study with lab rats used psilocybin to lower the cravings for alcohol, lessen alcohol-seeking behavior, and reduce the risk of relapse.

LSD has also been considered as a treatment for alcoholism as well. An anonymous online survey by Johns Hopkins researchers in 2019 of 343 people with drinking problems who took LSD on their own found that it helped them slow down their alcohol consumption or stop it altogether. “These results suggest that naturalistic psychedelic use may lead to cessation or reduction in problematic alcohol use, supporting further investigation of psychedelic-assisted treatment for alcohol use disorder,” the survey authors concluded.

Experiments with zebra fish and microdosing LSD to treat alcoholism are also showing promise. And mescaline was recently discovered as another psychedelic that could help.

But for now, psychedelics researchers admit they are stumped. They can’t say for sure what characteristics of a psychedelic experience can or should lead to the changes in alcohol addiction, even calling for using machine learning to analyze written reports of psychedelic experiences that may allow for accurate prediction of alcohol-quit outcomes within psychedelic therapy.

*From the article here :

The Holy Grail of Psychedelics Research: Treating Alcoholism

While there is more and more work on psychedelics to treat people for drug and tobacco addiction, it’s treating alcoholism that is gaining new interest from psychedelics researchers today. But finding that specific psychedelics treatment to slow down alcoholism, or even stop it completely...

www.greenmarketreport.com

 

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Drinking to excess? Psychedelics can help

by Adi Zuloff-Shani | Psychedelic Spotlight | 8 Apr 2022​

Clearmind Medicine CEO Adi Zuloff-Shani, PhD in human biology and immunology, writes this guest blog about how new psychedelic-based technologies, like MEAI, can help in the fight against alcoholism.​

Warmer weather isn’t officially connected with drinking to excess, but with summertime and holidays, like upcoming 4th of July, being linked to inebriated revelries across the United States, it might as well be.

It’s easy to dismiss these merriments as good, light-hearted fun, but, alas, the statistics tell a different, and much grimmer story. In 2019, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism conducted an extensive survey on the drinking habits of Americans. The results were chilling: According to the survey, a full quarter of all Americans older than 18 said they’d engaged in binge drinking in the previous month, and many admitted to high-intensity drinking, or consuming alcohol at levels that are two or more times the specified binge drinking thresholds.
And COVID-19, sadly, only exacerbated these habits: Since the advent of the pandemic, alcohol consumption increased by a whopping 39 percent, with one in four adults reporting they were now drinking much more than they used to, largely to manage their stress and anxiety as reflected in the latest Stress in America poll.

These behaviors come at a cost: Alcohol is now the third-leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing a staggering 95,000 Americans each year, more than those who succumb to other drug overdoses. And yet, while drug use is rarely glamorized these days, movies, television shows, and pop songs are still more likely than not to present binge drinking as an innocent pastime, and those who engage with it as desirable and fun. This, in part, helps explain why we hear so much of the opioid addiction epidemic, but relatively little about the ravages of alcoholism.

It’s time we took a different approach: treating alcohol abuse as the serious scourge it is. And luckily for us, we’ve a secret and surprising weapon in our arsenal: Psychedelics.

If the thought of fighting one consciousness altering substance with another strikes you as strange, you may want to read up on one Dr. Humphry Osmond. Born in Surrey, England at the tail end of World War I, Osmond trained as an architect but was diverted to medicine by the Second World War, specializing in psychiatry. Observing his patients, he posited the theory that some mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. Today, we know this to be true and consider it a staple of treating depression, anxiety, and a host of other conditions; back in the 1940s, it was a radical and deeply controversial assertion, and Osmond was equally celebrated and denounced.

His insight, however, didn’t end there. Searching for a way to treat these chemical imbalances, he discovered that using several hallucinogenic drugs in controlled doses had a deeply positive effect on patients’ well-being. He even came up with a term for these substances: Psychedelics, a term we still use today. And by the early 1950s, he realized that psychedelics could do much to help another group of people struggling with a very particular addiction—alcoholism. Among his patients was one Bill W., who, inspired by the experience, went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous.

Thankfully, the state of the science has come a long way since Osmond’s day, and whereas his explorations into using psychedelics to treat alcoholism were met with mixed results, we now know much more about how to do this safely and effectively. As the BBC reported late last year, we now have something in the range of 6,000 studies on more than 40,000 patients, showing psychedelics to be effective in treating a dazzling array of conditions, none more successfully than alcoholism.

And new psychedelic-based technologies are making this fight against excessive drinking even more successful: A new psychoactive molecule called MEAI, for example, is already showing strong signs of producing the same euphoria-like experience you get from a few stiff drinks, while significantly reducing the desire to consume actual alcoholic beverages.

If this sounds implausible to you, imagine the following scenario: Say you’re fond of cheesecake and had just finished gobbling up two slices of the finest, goopiest stuff you could find. If someone offered you a third, you’d likely say no, not because you didn’t want to eat more cheesecake, but because your mind would report feeling completely satiated and inform your body that consuming more sweetness was ill-advised. Early evidence seems to show that MEAI seems to produce the same feeling when it comes to drinking, making the thought of picking up another shot or cocktail physically repulsive.

Let us seize this moment and get serious about helping to curb alcoholism. We have the psychedelic tools we need to make headway in this crucial fight, so let’s hope that this April soon becomes known as the month we got serious about offering those who suffer from alcoholism the help they need.

Adi Zuloff-Shani is the CEO of Clearmind Medicine, which is developing breakthrough treatments for binge behavor and mental health, including alcohol use disorder, binge eating and depression.

https://psychedelicspotlight.com/drinking-to-excess-alcoholism-psychedelics-can-help-clearmind/​

 

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Journey Colab to develop Mescaline as an FDA-approved treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder

Louis Metzger IV, Ph.D. | 24 May 2022​

• Alcohol use disorder (AUD) has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic
• Conventional therapies for AUD have limited effectiveness in ensuring long-term remission and harm reduction
• Journey Colab will test mescaline, a long-acting psychedelic found in peyote, as an adjuvant to conventional treatments for AUD
• Journey Colab gives co-founder equity to the Indigenous communities that inspire its work

Pushed to the periphery of public awareness during Covid-19 pandemic, the disease of substance addiction continues to ravage humanity. Substance abuse deaths are often “deaths of despair,” as addiction is a brain disease that is often coincident with other mental illnesses, such as anxiety and depression. The need for new ways to treat substance use disorder has never been greater, yet medicine possesses few pharmacological tools with which to combat this pernicious disease. In addition to the burgeoning opioid epidemic, addiction to alcohol has been increasing, driven in part by the stresses of pandemic life and by the economic disparities made worse in the wake of Covid-19.

The treatment of alcohol use disorder (AUD), in particular, has limited pharmaceutical options with which to augment non-pharmacological therapies. Among the few drugs approved in the US for treatment of AUD, disulfiram, green-lit by the FDA in 1949, causes patients to experience swift and powerful hangover symptoms if they consume alcohol, thereby acting as a deterrent. More recently-approved naltrexone blunts the pleasure derived from alcohol consumption, while acamprosate helps to protect against the neurotoxicity that can occur during alcohol withdrawal. While these pharmaceuticals can be used to treat AUD, each has limitations and drawbacks. There is therefore a high unmet medical need for additional FDA-approved therapeutics targeting this disease.​

 

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Humphry Osmond

Alcoholism as a Biochemical Illness*

by Erika Dyck | MAPS | 8 Jun 2022

In the early 1950s, clinical researchers exploring the therapeutic value of LSD achieved intriguing results with subjects suffering from alcoholism. Spiritual or transcendental experiences produced by the drug were a powerful adjunct to rehabilitative psychotherapy for alcoholics. They provided a profound and chemically-induced awakening or enlightenment that often led to sobriety. This article investigates LSD as a treatment for alcoholism. The increased focus on drug therapies brought changes in treatment options and ushered in new theoretical explanations for the causation of alcohol abuse as a disease.

The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond was one of the key figures in the development of LSD treatments for alcoholism. Osmond was a Senior Registrar at the psychiatric unit at St George's Hospital in London, England in 1950, where he worked closely with his colleague John Smythies and cultivated a keen interest in chemically induced reactions in the human body. Smythies and Osmond examined the properties of mescaline, the active agent in the peyote cactus. Nearly 2 years of research led them to conclude that mescaline produced reactions in volunteers that resembled the symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations, delusions, disorganised thoughts and behaviour.

Further work suggested that mescaline's chemical structure was remarkably similar to adrenaline. These findings led to the theory that schizophrenia resulted from a biochemical imbalance in the sufferer. These findings led to the theory that schizophrenia resulted from a biochemical imbalance in the sufferer. This tantalizing hypothesis captivated Osmond's interest for the next 2 decades and inspired him to embark on a variety of experiments.

Osmond and Smythies colleagues at St George's Hospital were not particularly interested in their biochemical research, but Osmond was intent on continuing the work. After responding to an advertisement for a deputy director of psychiatry at a Canadian Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, he and his family moved to Canada in October 1951. In the prairie province of Saskatchewan he established a biochemical research programme. Within a year, Osmond met Abram Hoffer. Hoffer had graduated from the provincial university in Saskatoon with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in agricultural chemistry. He later graduated with a Ph.D. in agriculture before beginning a medical degree the following year. In medical school, Hoffer developed a particular interest in psychiatry. On 1 July 1950, the Saskatchewan Department of Public Health hired the recently graduated Hoffer to establish a provincial research program in psychiatry.

Hoffer and Osmond soon joined forces and began collaborating on their mutual research interests in biochemical experimentation. Osmonds curiosity about mescaline soon introduced him to d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which, he discovered, produced similar reactions to those observed with mescaline. However, LSD was a much more powerful drug. As in the case of mescaline, early trials with LSD, too, seemed to substantiate their theory that mental illness had biochemical roots.

During their initial LSD experiments, Hoffer and Osmond hypothesized that the drug might possess therapeutic benefits. In 1953 they began introducing the drug to a new set of subjects: diagnosed alcoholics. They wanted to test its curative effects on individuals for whom temperance reformers advocated the development of more will power and self-actualisation. Perhaps, they reasoned, the LSD reaction would cultivate precisely that kind of strength and insight. Early trials with LSD seemed to substantiate their theory that mental illness had biochemical roots. Osmond reasoned that it would not be difficult to convince lay people that excessive drinking or alcoholism, as a disease, constituted a meaningful concept.

In Saskatchewan in the 1950s, LSD played a prominent role in reconstructing alcoholism as a disease. The growing public perception of drunkenness as a physiological condition reinforced the need for medical attention and, moreover, redefined problem drinking behavior as something that could be cured.

*From the article here :
http://www.maps.org/research-archive...ck_22866_1.pdf​