Reddit mentions of Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience, Second Edition

That would be highly unusual and unlikely. I won't say it's literally impossible, but there's absolutely no reason to make such an untenable assumption when a clear and solid motivating factor, such as in this case, the separation from a close partner, exists.

"LSD, which is widely abused, does not appear to be addictive." -source

"In contrast to many other abused drugs, hallucinogens
do not engender drug dependence or addiction and are
not considered to be reinforcing substances (O’Brien,
2001)." -source

"There are no literature reports of successful attempts to
train animals to self-administer classical hallucinogens, an
animal model predictive of abuse liability, indicating that
these substances do not possess the necessary pharmacology to either initiate or maintain dependence. Hoffmeister
(1975) has reported that LSD actually had negative
reinforcing properties in rhesus monkeys trained in an
avoidance task." -source

"Several other classes of drugs are categorized as drugs of abuse but rarely produce compulsive use. These include psychedelic agents, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)" -source

I'm not a chemist; I'm currently studying ChemE at university. I'm also the "science mod" over on /r/trees, so I think I can help out a bit with this one.

The science behind cannabis and how it works is extremely interesting, but it won't help you with 99% of Biochemistry.

Everything we know about cannabis can be learned pretty quickly, provided you have the backgrounds in chemistry, biology, and preferably a bit of pharmacology.

What you can is do is study drugs and their functions as a whole to supplement and enhance your studies in biochemistry; I know that it's granted me a new appreciation for the human body and the processes that regulate it. These fields are vast and expanding at an astonishing rate.

The field of pharmacology is huge, but in a nutshell you can break it into pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. They focus on effects and the relations between dosage and response (dose response curves, etc.) as well as the mechanisms through which the drug is processed and how the drug passes through the body, respectively.

In short, pharmacokinetics studies what the body does to a drug, while pharmacodynamics studies what the drug does to your body.

As a Biochemistry major, these topics will likely be right up your alley. You'll still have to do the mundane, but perhaps some background along these lines will provide you with a new perspective on the processes you are studying in class.

If this sounds like your thing, I'd recommend the following text, provided you already have a good grip on molecular biology and a little electrochemistry: Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience

If you like this text or you just want something to supplement it, Caltech, easily one of the top research universities for this field, offers a course taught by Dr. Henry Lester via Coursera, here.

It's a highly informative course that pairs very well with the text I linked above. You'll touch on everything from drug addiction to recreational drugs to the different receptors and how they are activated.

It's not active right now and I'm not sure when the next session will be, but you can go onto Coursera and watch Professor Lester's lectures which are, by far, the most integral part of the course. I went through it last session (January - February) and I was very satisfied with both the material and the way it was presented.

Tl;dr: You can supplement your classroom material with all sorts of interesting studies related to drugs, but if you're not interested in the material you're studying in class at all, it may be time to rethink your field. You can't tie everything to drugs, but you can use the study of drugs to enhance your appreciation for the "macro" systems you're studying.

"Neurology" is a medical discipline, i.e. a department you would find in a hospital, so that would not be appropriate for your case. "Neuroscience", on the other hand, is the name of the scientific study, which is what you should look into, but overall that is too broad of a field.

For what you're trying to learn, I'd just start directly diving into neuropharmacology. Any good resource should give you enough of an overview before things get more complicated; perhaps having a review of high school science might be good, but not necessary.

Here's a recommendation for a good reference textbook: https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundation-Clinical-Neuroscience/dp/0071481273

Supplementing prodrugs is probably better than AChE inhibition in the long term. ACh isn't transported directly back into cell bodies or synaptic vessicles and has to be broken down and reassembled inside the cell. I'd give you a citation, but I read it in Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience, Second Edition.

OP this is what you want I promise you.

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundation-Clinical-Neuroscience/dp/0071481273?tag=coursera-course83-20

> I know you said you have a book or something - PM me about that, I'm interested!

I've sent you a PM about the book. Glad to hear you're interested!

> What about this theory that floats around on the internet and that celebrities like Joe Rogan talk about that the pineal gland produces DMT, especially during sleep.

There is some evidence of DMT production in the pineal gland, but it's very scant at this stage. One study, last year (2013), showed trace amounts of DMT in the pineal glands of rats. This could mean that DMT is produced there, or somewhere else in the body and then stored/used there; however the amounts were far too limited to have any kind of psychedelic effect.

It's not extremely surprising, as DMT is chemically quite similar to the likes of serotonin and melatonin, so for it to form naturally in the brain isn't a huge jump biochemically speaking... it's also however not terribly interesting or useful until we know more about how much, when, why, and so on.

It could also however simply have been a freak occurrence. I'd like to see more studies being done to confirm it - especially with multiple species and animals of different ages (which may make a very large difference as well given the possible relationship between the pineal gland and the parietal eye that I mentioned).

> How did you learn as much as you know specifically about LSD?

It helps being old ;)

More seriously - I've simply read a lot and studied a lot with a critical mind. I'm a software developer professionally, but I've spent around 15 years of my free time learning and researching psychedelics and associated fields. I have no formal training, but I read university level textbooks on neuroscience, biochemistry, pharmacology and so on for fun.

Mostly, I'm just the kind of person that's both passionately curious about the world as well as being the kind of person that likes to critically analyse things. This helps to steer away from the mystical side of things (all very interesting, but lacking in anything even remotely similar to evidence) and keep me searching in more productive lines of enquiry.

> Any other books or references you'd be willing to share?

Hmmm... quite a lot.

"LSD" by Otto Snow is a good general purpose LSD book, with pretty detailed synthesis information that helps you understand the chemistry even if you're not actually planning on synthesising it yourself.

I'm not sure of your current level of skill, but if you need an intro, or refresher in to the basics of the right kind of chemistry, then Organic Chemistry I for Dummies is a great book according to my wife (who went from "no knowledge" to "able to at least understand what I'm talking about" just from this book).

For a "step-up" from there and getting to looking at the brain specifically, I'd start with (and continually go back to) Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience.

Aside from that, every research paper you can find dealing with related material. There's some good review papers as well for "summing up" a lot of others. One I really liked was "The Pharmacology of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: A Review" by Passie et al.

I also found some online courses to be really good. I recently did "Drugs and the Brain" on Coursera; it was definitely a good refresher for me, and would be excellent for anyone with a basic grounding but wanting to learn more in general. There's another on Coursera called "Medical Neuroscience", which I unfortunately missed, but will catch the next time around; and one coming up really soon titled "Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life" which I'll be doing but expect to be a somewhat simpler course than the others (I'll take it anyway - re-covering basics is always good because you do find things you've managed to miss no matter how long you've been learning).

Edit: One additional thing I should have mentioned... here on reddit, check out /r/drugnerds and maybe also /r/rationalpsychonaut

This is a great list so far, and I'd love to see it added to the sidebar.

I'd suggest adding "Neuroethics" by Martha J Farah under "Other". It gives an interesting perspective on the influence of neuroscience on law and society.

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroethics-Introduction-Readings-Basic-Bioethics/dp/0262514605

"The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams" is good for anyone interested in neuroanatomy. I've only used the 3rd edition- there is an updated edition, but I can't speak to how useful it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Brain-Photographs-Diagrams-CD-ROM/dp/0323045731/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411223019&sr=1-2&keywords=the+human+brain+in+photographs+and+diagrams

"Structure of the Human Brain" is a very comprehensive section-by-section atlas of the brain.

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Human-Brain-Photographic-Atlas/dp/019504357X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223434&sr=8-1&keywords=structure+of+the+human+brain+a+photographic+atlas

"Molecular Neuropharmacology" is a good advanced text for anyone interested in drug development.

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundation-Clinical-Neuroscience/dp/0071481273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223180&sr=8-1&keywords=molecular+neuropharmacology

I've mentioned these because they seem to fill gaps that are currently in the library. If anybody knows of better anatomical texts, though, I'd be interested to know about them!