Remember, before they hit the street and became politicized, many drugs (MDMA, LSD, and a variety of other psychoactives) were produced by major pharmaceutical companies and used by therapists at major universities.
There is no legitimate reason for that research to have ever stopped. In humans.
It could as easily be said: before they hit the street and became politicized, many drugs like Cocaine and Heroin were used in over the counter medicine and even consumer products like Coca Cola to treat a variety of ailments.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching these chemical's potential benefits to humanity now, but it's not like these drugs were clamped down on for no good reason. We saw what many of these drugs were doing to society, completely banned them to try and counter that, including Universities in the process, and over time we've begun to develop an understanding and different perspective on these drugs, and now the pendulum starts to swing in the opposite direction.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
— John Erlichman, domestic policy advisor to Richard M. Nixon
> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
I'm curious, and haven't seen it mentioned, how mdma affected the octopus's color-changing and signaling abilities. It causes human eyes to dilate, but octopuses don't use their eyes for color-changing (many are color-blind).
I don't know if there'd be a biochemical change that limited the octopus' ability to change color or a psychological change that changed the octopus's desired signaling. Could be both!
Edit: there's a note about the dosing, in the "pharmacology" section. It indicates that higher doses produce unusual skin patterns.
IIRC there was a study on octopuses which blinded newborns and the blinded newborns could not change their color/patterns to match their background, the blind octopuses did what appeared to be random color/patterns so they do need their eyes for something in the process even if its just training. Also the recent Atlantic article talked about too high a MDMA does caused the colors/patterns to go haywire.
I don't understand how they can say this shows an evolutionary link between human and octopuses at the neuronal level and not something that evolved independently in both genetic lines. How did they eliminate the possibility of convergent evolution? It doesn't seem reasonable they exclude convergence as a possibility.
I was thinking the same thing. Our last common ancestor might have been something like [0] (the sister clade to Nephrozoa which is the latest common clade between us and octopuses). They just have sortof a nerve-net spread out over their body, nothing like a brain. The nerotransmitters affected existed before the split, but anything complex like social behavior affected by them seems like it must have been the result of convergent evolution.
Dölen designed an experiment with three connected water chambers: one empty, one with a plastic action figure under a cage and one with a female or male laboratory-bred octopus under a cage.
Four male and female octopuses were exposed to MDMA by putting them into a beaker containing a liquefied version of the drug, which is absorbed by the octopuses through their gills. Then, they were placed in the experimental chambers for 30 minutes. All four tended to spend more time in the chamber where a male octopus was caged than the other two chambers.
"It's not just quantitatively more time, but qualitative. They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage," says Dölen. "This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently."
Under normal conditions, without MDMA, five male and female octopuses avoided only male, caged octopuses.
Personally, I think they should extend the experiment to see what effect a stack of underwater transducers emitting a structured arrangement of audio signals combined with rapidly changing patterns of lighting, would have on the octopus behaviour.
Should a scientist accidentally fall into the mdma infused tank full of octupuses, I think the damage to their academic career could be substantial due to these kinds of childish attitudes. And that is the only reason all of the security footage is being encrypted and streamed to an offsite technology partner.
Yea, this whole study was possible because octopuses don't really like being that close to others. It seems cruel to trap a sober one in a cage with one they got high on drugs who is trying to get all up in the sober one's business.
It would be fascinating to test the behaviour of two male octopus on MDMA. Will they fight or connect? I’d love to see a video of the difference in behaviour.
Probably the least interesting part of the entire article, but if you want to go there -
"Although it is often supposed that octopi is the ‘correct’ plural of octopus, and it has been in use for longer than the usual Anglicized plural octopuses, it in fact originates as an error. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous, and its ‘correct’ plural would logically be octopodes."
but in all seriousness, language is a social construct. If someone says “octopuses” and everyone understands that they mean “more than one octopus”, then the communication was successful. And if enough people use it, then we’re looking at a successful new word. For better or worse.
Also, we are writing modern english, not ancient latin or greek, so the anglicanised form is fine anyway, as it isn't a sudden neologism looking to find widespread use. Rather it is the common natural pluralisation of octopus in english.
There is no legitimate reason for that research to have ever stopped. In humans.