A small clinical trial involving 34 people found that psychedelic-assisted therapy prompted a swift reduction in depressive symptoms that endured long after the drug had worn off, with some still feeling the benefits six months later.

Although preliminary, the results add to a growing body of evidence that psychedelic drugs, when coupled with psychotherapy, could help to alleviate depression in the millions of people worldwide who do not respond to existing antidepressants or therapies.

The trial, reported in Nature Medicine, focused on people with moderate to severe treatment-resistant depression. One half received a single 21.5mg dose of DMT infused into a vein over 10 minutes. The other half received a placebo infused the same way. All of the participants had psychotherapy and follow-up assessments.

Patients given DMT improved significantly compared with the placebo group, as measured by scores on a standard depression questionnaire, with the antidepressant effects lasting from three to six months.

In the second stage of the trial, all participants received a dose of DMT with therapy, but the researchers found no additional benefit in those who had two doses in total, suggesting a single dose may suffice. The trial was designed, funded and sponsored by Cybin UK, a neuropsychiatric firm.

The study follows a positive trial with psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, which has raised hopes for the drug being approved for treatment of depression later this year.

At doses used in the trials, DMT induces a shorter but more intense trip than psilocybin, with the experience lasting about 25 minutes compared with a couple of hours for psilocybin. That could make DMT-assisted therapy easier for clinics to deliver, although patients may need more support to recover from particularly intense DMT trips.

If regulators were to approve psychedelics for treating depression in the UK, researchers expect them to become available only through private clinics, said Dr James Rucker, a consultant psychiatrist at King’s College London who worked on the psilocybin trial.

Last year the Feilding commission was set up to guide the safe, ethical and equitable rollout of psychedelic-assisted therapies amid concerns that commercial pressures at private clinics could undermine safety, leading to patient harm.

Rucker said: “Quite how these drugs will fit in this world of financial austerity, stigma and opprobrium towards anything that has the word psychoactive in it, I don’t know. It’s interesting to be a part of, but I can’t call it.”

The big bag of meth will get weighed out into individual doses and put into tiny cardboard boxes, labeled with its contents, purity, and the logo of Dulf – the Drug User Liberation Front.

The office’s location is not on any maps or findable by any search engines, but it is not exactly secret. Vancouver’s government, the cops, drug users and maybe even dealers all know where it is, and it turns out that has been pretty much fine, despite the fact that the people inside it are buying and selling felony-level quantities of drugs every week.

Such is life in Vancouver, where the drug problem has been so bad for so long that the authorities here have, reluctantly and with a lot of pressure, begun to allow for a kind of radical experimentation not really going on anywhere else.

She envisions a future in which heroin and every other drug are handled similarly to alcohol: regulated, free from impurities, legal and available to the public. She does not see any other way out of the crisis. Everything else people have tried has simply not worked.

Non-paywalled: https://archive.is/JpdEO

h/t https://9gag.com/gag/avyvmzd

The deal – which will grant EU fishers access to British waters for an additional 12 years – will remove checks on a significant number of food products as well as a deeper defence partnership and agreements on carbon taxes.

The UK said the deal would make “food cheaper, slash red tape, open up access to the EU market”. But the trade-off for the deal was fishing access and rights for an additional 12 years – more than the UK had offered – which is likely to lead to cries of betrayal from the industry.

The two sides will also begin talks for a “youth experience scheme”, first reported in the Guardian, which could allow young people to work and travel freely in Europe again and mirror existing schemes the UK has with countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

The government said it would put £360m of modernisation support back into coastal communities as part of the deal, a tacit acknowledgment of the concession.

The largest ever study investigating medical cannabis as a treatment for cancer, published this week in Frontiers in Oncology, found overwhelming scientific support for cannabis’s potential to treat cancer symptoms and potentially fight the course of the disease itself.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20676198

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/21414090

The memo, shared with The Grocer, warns food businesses are woefully unprepared for challenges including soil degradation, extreme weather events, global heating and water scarcity and that yield, quality and predictability of food supply are all at severe risk.

It goes on to claim that companies’ risk mitigation strategies are being assured by major audit and assurance firms and giving false confidence to investors, whereas the true threat to the supply chain is far greater than companies have acknowledged.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2025/apr/07/backstage-olivier-awards-2025-in-pictures

The former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has been taken into custody after the international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest for his so-called “war on drugs”.

The former leader, who will turn 80 this month, is accused by ICC prosecutors of crimes against humanity over his anti-drugs crackdowns, in which as many as 30,000 people were killed. Most of the victims were men in poor, urban areas, who were gunned down in the streets.

Leila de Lima, one of the fiercest critics of Duterte and the “war on drugs” who was jailed for more than six years on baseless charges under his former government, said: “Today, Duterte is being made to answer – not to me, but to the victims, to their families, to a world that refuses to forget. This is not about vengeance. This is about justice finally taking its course.”

Josalee S Deinla, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, which represents the victims of the war on drugs, said that justice was “finally catching up” with the former leader.

Rights groups urged the government of the Phillipine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, to swiftly surrender him to the ICC.

Marcos, who was previously allied with Sara Duterte, had in the past refused to cooperate with the ICC investigation. However, his stance shifted after the two families became embroiled in a feud, and his government said more recently that it would cooperate if the ICC asked international police to take the former president into custody.

Duterte became president in 2016 after promising a merciless, bloody crackdown that would rid the country of drugs. On the campaign trail he once said there would be so many bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish would grow fat from feeding on them. After taking office, he publicly stated he would kill suspected drug dealers and urged the public to kill addicts.

Since his election, between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in connection with anti-drugs operations, according to data cited by the ICC.

Even as his crackdowns provoked international horror, he remained highly popular at home throughout his presidency.

Police reports often sought to justify killings, saying that officers had acted in self-defence, despite witnesses stating otherwise. Rights groups documenting the crackdowns allege police routinely planted evidence, including guns, spent ammunition and drugs. An independent forensic pathologist investigating the killings has also uncovered serious irregularities in how postmortems were performed, including multiple death certificates that wrongly attributed fatalities to natural causes.

Duterte, who appeared before a senate inquiry into the drugs war killings in 2024, said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his policies, saying: “I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country.” During the same hearing, he told senators that he had ordered officers to encourage criminals to fight back and resist arrest, so that police could then justify killing them – but also denied authorising police to kill suspects.

Duterte also told the hearing that he kept a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals while serving as a mayor of Davao, prior to becoming president.

Human rights groups welcomed his arrest as a major breakthrough for families whose loved ones were killed. Human Rights Watch called it “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines” that “could bring victims and their families closer to justice”.