Matéria "fresquinha" do Daily News.
Trata-se de uma pequena entrevista com o químico Hamilton Morris, editor do "caderno" de ciência da VICE, e fala sobre suas experiências com uma nova droga para o tratamento de distúrbios do sono.
Ele relata sua experiência anterior com muscimol, alcalóide da Amanita Muscaria, que inclusive serve de base estrutural da nova e promissora droga: Gaboxadol.
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/08/psychonaut-hamilton-morris-finds-sleep-0
Abraços
AUGUST 7, 2013 9:00 AM
Speaking with Psychonaut Hamilton Morris about sleep
BY LESLEY THULIN
Chemist Hamilton Morris has tripped on mephedrone, picked psychoactive mushrooms in Iceland, and subjected himself to the “anti-drugs” for weed, LSD, and heroin, all in the name of science. Morris is the science editor at VICE, where he’s spoken to Alexander Shulgin — the man who's credited for re-synthesizing MDMA — and shot a video series titled “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia.” Still, he was “slightly nervous” before experimenting with a sleep aid on the gray market called gaboxadol. Luckily for Morris, the drug yielded promising results — he fell asleep three hours before he normally does and slept solidly throughout the night.
Morris, the son of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, wrote an article on the drug for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, which was dedicated to a single question: Are you sleeping? In the article, Morris tests one somnologist's claim that gaboxadol “not only induced sleep effectively but also preserved sleep’s natural architecture.” Harper’s hosted an event last week at McNally Jackson with Morris and some of the issue’s other contributors, including a holistic nutritionist. We chatted with the New School alumnus about his research and his forthcoming book on clandestine chemistry.
Lesley Thulin: Let’s talk about your experience taking gaboxadol. You said it was one of the most powerful hypnotics that you’ve ever tried. Were you nervous to use it?
Hamilton Morris: I was slightly nervous because I had used muscimol in the past, which is the mushroom alkaloid that serves as the basis of gaboxadol’s structure, and my experiences with muscimol have been pretty negative. It was not pure muscimol — it was muscimol in an Amanita muscaria mushroom. It produces a very disorienting delirium that’s not pleasant. That’s one reason that, despite the fact this is an internationally distributed mushroom that grows in great abundance, it’s not a controlled substance or a controlled organism the way that psilocybin-containing mushrooms are — because no one really has that much fun on this mushroom.
LT: How did you get it?
HM: I don’t know if you know about the research chemical industry, but there’s a whole gray market world that exists for the manufacture and distribution of unapproved medicines. And so what you’ll find is a lot of labs that have both a legitimate arm and a gray market arm, especially in India and China. So you might find a lab that produces Ketamine for the purpose of veterinary anesthesia, but they’re also diverting some of that Ketamine stock for recreational use in Europe, or whatever.
I don’t know if that specifically has happened, but you encounter that sort of thing. So this is a lab that — they were a legitimate lab — didn’t serve it to me for the purpose of human consumption or anything like that. But this is also a completely unscheduled compound, as it should be — there’s no history of human abuse of it.
LT: What makes gaboxadol, which you said is pharmacologically distinguished from other hypnotics, a more attractive drug than Ambien?
HM: One problem with evaluating the efficacy of the drug is that, even in phase three clinical trials, clinicians often still don’t detect important adverse effects of the drug. And sometimes certain aspects of the drug won’t become clear until it’s introduced to a much larger population for a much longer period of time. So it’s possible that gaboxadol is not a superior drug to Ambien. It’s less known that Ambien. It’s been used by far fewer people. But if the literature is to be believed, it doesn’t interact synergistically with alcohol, which is a huge, huge advantage over any existing hypnotic drugs. The fact that it doesn’t seem to produce tolerance at the same rate as drugs like Ambien is also an enormous advantage.
LT: You speculated that pharmacological companies won’t turn to gaboxadol because it’s a psychedelic. What sort of mind-altering effects does it have?
HM: Ambien is actually also a deliriant or psychedelic, which is interesting. It’s a pretty potent one. It’s not the sort of substance that you need to take a dose higher than the therapeutic dose to experience that effect. The Ambien-naïve user takes 10 milligrams and does not immediately go to sleep. They almost certainly will experience hallucinations or some sort of bizarre delirious state.
Gaboxadol is probably about equally hallucinogenic, but it doesn’t produce the same sort of amnesia that Ambien tends to. So, maybe that in and of itself makes it appear as if it’s a more potent hallucinogen, simply because you can remember the effects a little bit better than you could with Ambien. But I would say that the therapeutic dose, which is considered between 15 and 20 milligrams of the hydrochloride salt — it’s minimally hallucinogenic. If you increase the dose to 30 or 40 milligrams, then it begins to exert a little bit of a weirdness — certainly nothing as dramatic as consuming psilocybin-containing mushrooms at a high dose or anything like that, but you can tell that something is happening beyond what you would feel with a conventional sedative. And then if you go further beyond that, people experience extremely dramatic hallucinations.
LT: Yikes. So what sorts of risks does gaboxadol pose?
HM: It’s very unclear. All biologically active substances carry some degree of risk. It would seem that it’s a very well-tolerated, safe drug, based on the current literature. It was actually attempted to be used as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
One problem that I had writing the article is that it ultimately wasn’t entirely clear to me why developments continued. It may have been, as I claimed in the article, that it was just that specific time period around 2006 that there was so much fear surrounding the adverse effects of Ambien, but I really don’t know. A pharmacokineticist at Merck emailed me after the article came out to say that he was equally mystified and that a lot of employees at Merck also had no idea what had happened.
LT: Tell me about the book you’re working on that gaboxadol plays into.
HM: I am working on a book about clandestine chemistry that is just — at this point — is largely made up of interviews with chemists who are in prison for various organic chemistry-related crimes. It’s still going to require a lot of work, but I’m trying to look at the international drug synthesis market. I was in China a year ago, interviewing a chemist there who produced materials like gaboxadol for the gray market. I guess the main thing I’m trying to look at is the way the culture of domestic clandestine synthesis has migrated to China.
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Trata-se de uma pequena entrevista com o químico Hamilton Morris, editor do "caderno" de ciência da VICE, e fala sobre suas experiências com uma nova droga para o tratamento de distúrbios do sono.
Ele relata sua experiência anterior com muscimol, alcalóide da Amanita Muscaria, que inclusive serve de base estrutural da nova e promissora droga: Gaboxadol.
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/08/psychonaut-hamilton-morris-finds-sleep-0
Abraços
AUGUST 7, 2013 9:00 AM
Speaking with Psychonaut Hamilton Morris about sleep
BY LESLEY THULIN
Chemist Hamilton Morris has tripped on mephedrone, picked psychoactive mushrooms in Iceland, and subjected himself to the “anti-drugs” for weed, LSD, and heroin, all in the name of science. Morris is the science editor at VICE, where he’s spoken to Alexander Shulgin — the man who's credited for re-synthesizing MDMA — and shot a video series titled “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia.” Still, he was “slightly nervous” before experimenting with a sleep aid on the gray market called gaboxadol. Luckily for Morris, the drug yielded promising results — he fell asleep three hours before he normally does and slept solidly throughout the night.
Morris, the son of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, wrote an article on the drug for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, which was dedicated to a single question: Are you sleeping? In the article, Morris tests one somnologist's claim that gaboxadol “not only induced sleep effectively but also preserved sleep’s natural architecture.” Harper’s hosted an event last week at McNally Jackson with Morris and some of the issue’s other contributors, including a holistic nutritionist. We chatted with the New School alumnus about his research and his forthcoming book on clandestine chemistry.
Lesley Thulin: Let’s talk about your experience taking gaboxadol. You said it was one of the most powerful hypnotics that you’ve ever tried. Were you nervous to use it?
Hamilton Morris: I was slightly nervous because I had used muscimol in the past, which is the mushroom alkaloid that serves as the basis of gaboxadol’s structure, and my experiences with muscimol have been pretty negative. It was not pure muscimol — it was muscimol in an Amanita muscaria mushroom. It produces a very disorienting delirium that’s not pleasant. That’s one reason that, despite the fact this is an internationally distributed mushroom that grows in great abundance, it’s not a controlled substance or a controlled organism the way that psilocybin-containing mushrooms are — because no one really has that much fun on this mushroom.
LT: How did you get it?
HM: I don’t know if you know about the research chemical industry, but there’s a whole gray market world that exists for the manufacture and distribution of unapproved medicines. And so what you’ll find is a lot of labs that have both a legitimate arm and a gray market arm, especially in India and China. So you might find a lab that produces Ketamine for the purpose of veterinary anesthesia, but they’re also diverting some of that Ketamine stock for recreational use in Europe, or whatever.
I don’t know if that specifically has happened, but you encounter that sort of thing. So this is a lab that — they were a legitimate lab — didn’t serve it to me for the purpose of human consumption or anything like that. But this is also a completely unscheduled compound, as it should be — there’s no history of human abuse of it.
LT: What makes gaboxadol, which you said is pharmacologically distinguished from other hypnotics, a more attractive drug than Ambien?
HM: One problem with evaluating the efficacy of the drug is that, even in phase three clinical trials, clinicians often still don’t detect important adverse effects of the drug. And sometimes certain aspects of the drug won’t become clear until it’s introduced to a much larger population for a much longer period of time. So it’s possible that gaboxadol is not a superior drug to Ambien. It’s less known that Ambien. It’s been used by far fewer people. But if the literature is to be believed, it doesn’t interact synergistically with alcohol, which is a huge, huge advantage over any existing hypnotic drugs. The fact that it doesn’t seem to produce tolerance at the same rate as drugs like Ambien is also an enormous advantage.
LT: You speculated that pharmacological companies won’t turn to gaboxadol because it’s a psychedelic. What sort of mind-altering effects does it have?
HM: Ambien is actually also a deliriant or psychedelic, which is interesting. It’s a pretty potent one. It’s not the sort of substance that you need to take a dose higher than the therapeutic dose to experience that effect. The Ambien-naïve user takes 10 milligrams and does not immediately go to sleep. They almost certainly will experience hallucinations or some sort of bizarre delirious state.
Gaboxadol is probably about equally hallucinogenic, but it doesn’t produce the same sort of amnesia that Ambien tends to. So, maybe that in and of itself makes it appear as if it’s a more potent hallucinogen, simply because you can remember the effects a little bit better than you could with Ambien. But I would say that the therapeutic dose, which is considered between 15 and 20 milligrams of the hydrochloride salt — it’s minimally hallucinogenic. If you increase the dose to 30 or 40 milligrams, then it begins to exert a little bit of a weirdness — certainly nothing as dramatic as consuming psilocybin-containing mushrooms at a high dose or anything like that, but you can tell that something is happening beyond what you would feel with a conventional sedative. And then if you go further beyond that, people experience extremely dramatic hallucinations.
LT: Yikes. So what sorts of risks does gaboxadol pose?
HM: It’s very unclear. All biologically active substances carry some degree of risk. It would seem that it’s a very well-tolerated, safe drug, based on the current literature. It was actually attempted to be used as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
One problem that I had writing the article is that it ultimately wasn’t entirely clear to me why developments continued. It may have been, as I claimed in the article, that it was just that specific time period around 2006 that there was so much fear surrounding the adverse effects of Ambien, but I really don’t know. A pharmacokineticist at Merck emailed me after the article came out to say that he was equally mystified and that a lot of employees at Merck also had no idea what had happened.
LT: Tell me about the book you’re working on that gaboxadol plays into.
HM: I am working on a book about clandestine chemistry that is just — at this point — is largely made up of interviews with chemists who are in prison for various organic chemistry-related crimes. It’s still going to require a lot of work, but I’m trying to look at the international drug synthesis market. I was in China a year ago, interviewing a chemist there who produced materials like gaboxadol for the gray market. I guess the main thing I’m trying to look at is the way the culture of domestic clandestine synthesis has migrated to China.
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