Medetomidine Withdrawal - Psychedelic Scientist - Drug Pipeline - Schizophrenia Mysteries

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/health/medetomidine-withdrawal-symptoms-treatment.html

Powerful New Drug Is Creating a ‘Withdrawal Crisis’ in Philadelphia

By Jan Hoffman

Around 2 a.m., Joseph felt the withdrawal coming on, sudden and hard. He fell to the floor convulsing, vomiting ferociously. The delirium and hallucinations were starting.

He shook awake his friend, who had let him in earlier to shower, wash his clothes and grab some sleep. “Do you have a few dollars?” he pleaded. “I have to get right.”

The friend, a community outreach worker who had been trying for years to get him into treatment, looked up at him standing over her raving and unfocused.

“Either leave or let me call an ambulance,” she demanded.

At 34, Joseph (who, with his friend, recounted the evening in interviews with The New York Times) had been through opioid withdrawals many times — on Philadelphia streets, in jail, in rehab. But he had never experienced anything as terrifyingly all-consuming as this.

A new drug has been saturating the fentanyl supply in Philadelphia and moving to other cities throughout the East and Midwestern United States: medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative that causes almost instantaneous blackouts and, if not used every few hours, brings on life-threatening withdrawal symptoms.

It has created a new type of drug crisis — one that is occasioned not by overdosing on the drug, but by withdrawing from it.

Since the middle of last year, Philadelphia’s hospitals have been strained by patients coming in with what doctors have identified as medetomidine withdrawal. Although the heart rate slows drastically right after use, in withdrawal the opposite occurs: The heart rate and blood pressure become catastrophically high. Patients experience tremors and unstoppable vomiting. Many require intensive care.

    © 2025 The New York Times Company
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https://nautil.us/the-psychedelic-scientist-1254733/

The Psychedelic Scientist

    By Mattha Busby 

Bruce Damer had the audience under his Gandalf spell. He was giving a keynote speech in a grand hall at Breaking Convention, a psychedelic-consciousness conference in Exeter, England, in April 2025. Tall and slender, very much bearded, and sporting two large gold hoop earrings, one on either side, Damer looked exactly like you would expect a sexagenarian psychedelic professor to look. A boyishly enthusiastic speaker, he said a psychedelic trip had transported him through time to face a deep trauma.
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“If you believe in a ‘mother ayahuasca’ or a healing force, I was allowed to experience my conception and birth and be in my mother’s belly,” Damer said. His birth mother had given him up because she and his father were too poor to raise him. Ayahuasca had released him from the pain. “Being in the belly, I could feel her love, and it healed,” he said.

“As a result of the clarity and the opening of the blockage that had been this sort of knot in my belly, my whole system opened wide,” Damer continued. “And I thought for a moment, I could potentially travel through time to a place where I’ve been working on the question of how life began, the birth of us all.”

 In psychedelic science, a field dominated by scientists who are loath to be pigeon-holed as too woo-woo, Damer, 63, has become a cult figure by wearing his woo on his sleeve. His adoptive mother described him as “in his own world” when his new parents brought him home. And he has been his own thinker ever since. His science cred is sound: a Ph.D. in computer science from University College Dublin in Ireland, former relationships with Xerox and NASA, and papers published in journals like Astrobiology. Currently he is a research associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


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https://www.thetransmitter.org/drug-development/how-basic-neuroscience-has-paved-the-path-to-new-drugs/

 How basic neuroscience has paved the path to new drugs

By Alex Kwan

Despite decades of basic research, many neurological and psychiatric conditions lack effective treatments, or at least treatments that work for everyone. For that reason, when I talk with colleagues about the value of research, I often hear the same negative refrain: “Basic neuroscience has not produced new drugs.”

Their argument carries some weight; many of today’s medications trace their origins to long-standing human use or to chance discoveries. The opium poppy, used for thousands of years to ease pain, paved the way for morphine and other opioids that are widely used as analgesics. Ketamine was designed as an anesthetic but was later unexpectedly revealed to be an antidepressant at low doses.

Yet this narrative is incomplete. It overlooks a growing list of medications—including zuranolone for postpartum depression, suzetrigine for pain, and the gepants class of migraine medicines—that exist only because of insights from basic research. These drugs were not stumbled upon or borrowed from traditional remedies. They were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab.

These success stories matter, because they demonstrate that neuroscience research can deliver new medicines. Acknowledging and publicizing such successes is especially important now, as public funding for basic research in the United States faces growing cuts and restrictions.

The development of zuranolone stemmed from an observation about allopregnanolone, a steroid our bodies naturally produce. It has little interaction with steroid receptors and instead acts on GABA receptors in the brain, making neurons less excitable. In the late 1990s, researchers reported that allopregnanolone levels in the rat brain rise dramatically during pregnancy, reaching concentrations of up to three times higher than normal. Just before giving birth, however, the level drops precipitously.
© 2025 Simons Foundation
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/17/the-divided-mind-by-edward-bullmore-review-do-we-now-know-what-causes-schizophrenia

Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore review – do we now know what causes schizophrenia?

David Shariatmadari

In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.

Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients admitted, 20% were deemed suspicious. It was then that Rosenhan revealed this had been a ruse as well: no pseudopatients had been sent to the hospital at all. Not only had doctors failed to spot sane people in their midst; they couldn’t reliably recognise the actually insane.

Rosenhan’s gambit seized the public imagination. Were the men in white suits just quacks? Was mental illness even real? Two years later, the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest added to the sense of reputational meltdown, and the psychiatric establishment responded with a major tightening up of diagnostic criteria, squeezing disparate symptoms into even tighter boxes. A freewheeling challenge to psychiatry ended up provoking a kind of counter-reformation, making the profession more medicalised than it had been for decades.

The whole affair is a neat example of the ideological switchbacks Edward Bullmore maps in his fascinating, personally inflected history of psychiatric ideas. It is all the more mind-boggling – pun intended – when you find out Rosenhan’s paper was largely made up. Research by journalist Susannah Cahalan in 2019 concluded that most of the pseudopatients were invented; one colleague remembered the psychologist as a “bullshitter”.

© 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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