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    Progress Toward A Safer Psychedelic Drug To Treat Depression And Addiction

    A synthetic version of the psychedelic drug ibogaine appears to relieve depression and addiction without producing hallucinations or other dangerous side effects — at least in rodents.
    by Jon Hamilton Dec 09, 2020 2 minutes
    Root extracts from the African shrub Iboga, have long been used in traditional healing rituals, and more recently as an experimental treatment for depression and to reduce drug cravings in addiction. Scientists now are working on a version of the extract that doesn't cause heart attacks or hallucinations as side effects.

    A chemically tweaked version of the psychedelic drug ibogaine appears to relieve depression and addiction symptoms without producing hallucinations or other dangerous side effects.

    The results of a study in rodents suggest it may be possible to make psychedelic drugs safe enough to become mainstream treatments for psychiatric disorders, the authors report Wednesday in the journal Nature.

    "What we need is a medicine that is so safe that, the paper's senior author and an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. "And that's really what we were trying to achieve."

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