Jim Grigsby in the library at his home in the Colorado foothills near Ward, May 9, 2024. The University of Colorado is the latest mainstream university to create a dedicated center for the study of psychedelic drugs, and its leaders are already dreaming up new experiments.
The CU Denver Center for Psychedelic Research will be based in university offices in downtown Denver. The center is starting small, but its creation signals the university is committed to researching the potential benefits and effects of psychedelics as a medicine, as well as the legal and social aspects of Colorado’s emerging psychedelic industry.
But what exactly will they study?
In an interview, neuroscientist and center director Jim Grigsby shared some of his early ideas and plans. MDMA for dogs
Researchers have been asking if MDMA, a drug sometimes known as ecstasy or Molly,, could help people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Grigsby suspects that it could be beneficial for traumatized dogs, too.
Previously, Grigsby was part of a 2019 study on the effect of MDMA on rats. The study tested whether MDMA could help rats unlearn their fear of a setting where they had experienced a mild shock.
“Our idea was that the memory of the fear itself can be reduced or eliminated,” Grigsby said. That experiment showed further support for the effectiveness of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, he said. The study showed that MDMA might disrupt the “reconsolidation” of traumatic memories — the process by which they are accessed and then stored again in the brain.
“Every time a memory comes into awareness, it becomes, in a way, fragile, and susceptible to being changed. You can actually change the neural network [that stores the memory],,” Grigsby said. In short, MDMA and other psychedelics may affect the memory rewriting process in a way that edits or eliminates the traumatic memory itself.
Grigsby’s plan for an experiment with dogs would build on that research, but with a different setup — instead of intentionally creating a fear or trauma, it would focus on helping dogs who were previously neglected or abused.“I’m working with a group of local veterinarians who are pretty interested in […]
MDMA for dogs? 4 ideas (and one big concern) from CU Denver’s new psychedelic research center
