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A Safe, Simple, Reliable Painkiller For Use While Giving Birth? Ketamine

You know what hurts? Words. There are some things you just can't take back.

Oh wait, you know what hurts worse? Giving birth.

Sure, there are breathing techniques, mental focusing tricks, and good old-fashioned yelling to try to cope with the pain, but those don't work for everyone. And in those cases, pain relief drugs aren't merely useful; they are the business.

Now, obviously, whatever drug you use can't pose any threat to the baby's health. And the mother needs to stay lucid and responsive to ensure labor proceeds normally. Those two conditions rule out a whole bunch of drugs, including just about anything served in a tumbler with ice. There are more advanced procedures, like epidurals, but those require highly specialized doctors to insert a needle into the spine while their patient thrashes about and screams a hole through time itself.

BruceBlaus/Wiki Commons"AHHH, KEEP GOING! I NEED TO YELL A WARNING TO PAST ME ABOUT REFILLING HER BIRTH CONTROL!"

So basically, epidurals aren't an option in developing countries. And that's where ketamine comes in. That's right, ketamine! Good ol' Special K, the '90s club drug famously sourced from horse tranquilizers. Ketamine was in fact meant to be human surgical anesthesia all along -- it was used extensively during the Vietnam War for anesthetizing wounded soldiers. It was effective, safe, and relatively easy to use, which also makes it super useful during labor in developing countries. Studies have shown that ketamine provides significant, measurable pain relief to women in labor, with no adverse effects to the baby or mother.

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MDMA Helps Traumatized Patients Cope With PTSD

MDMA is the drug of choice for anybody who likes dancing for eight straight hours. Bobbleheads, wacky waving inflatable arm guys, all those guys? Serious, crippling MDMA addictions. Just sad.

But the very things that make MDMA appealing to neon werewolves may also make it useful in therapeutic settings. MDMA makes its users feel safe and content. Which, yes, leads to you unwisely hugging guys named PentaGraham in a dank warehouse, but it could also help a patient open up to their therapist. This is particularly useful for treating patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some of whom aren't able to discuss the traumas that are still killing them.

Study after study on MDMA-assisted therapy has shown positive effects, and it doesn't lead to dependencies on the drug. In fact, MDMA was studied for this exact purpose in the U.S. way back in the 1970s, well before the drug was made illegal and the glow sticks kicked in.

Legal pressures on the drug are slowly easing up, though. The FDA has recently allowed it to be studied in well-defined trials. The only downside being their cost. Because the point isn't to take MDMA forever and ever and dance your problems away, drug companies aren't that keen to finance the therapy.

So if any of you has several million dollars and a closet full of finger-painted JNCOs, have we got an investment opportunity for you ...

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Psilocybin Helps The Terminally Ill Cope With Their Fate

Magic mushrooms do not actually grant their users magical abilities. They mainly help you be weird in the woods with friends. But recently, researchers have come up with another, possibly more useful purpose for them: treating people with depression.

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Want A Better Depression Treatment? Try LSD

LSD used to be legal back in the bad old days, when people went around lickin' stuff for fun and profit. See, back in the '50s and '60s, researchers were beginning to uncover LSD's potential for treating depression and addiction, so it seemed like a useful thing. Then the great drug crackdown came, and LSD was relegated to stoners who were bad at finding mushrooms.

The old research was never completely shut down, though. It's just that after LSD became illegal, any scientist wanting to work with it had to jump through endless hoops to do so. So what should have taken years instead took decades, but it still got done. One study used MRIs to scan people who were scientifically tripping balls and found that while LSD was inhibiting synapses in certain parts of the brain, it was also causing connectivity between other areas that don't normally talk to each other.

Imperial College LondonPictured: the galaxy brain meme, but, like, real.

Another recent study supported this, suggesting that LSD induces a sort of "mental looseness" -- an ability to make connections that the human mind normally doesn't. Subjects also reported a heightened sense of curiosity and psychological well-being. Taken to an extreme, this kind of "mental loosening" could lead to psychosis, but with mild doses, that doesn't appear to be a risk. Two weeks after dosing, subjects showed no particular signs of delusion.

Given the potential benefits and controllable (usually wholly absent) side effects, this feels like research well worth pursuing. Let's have more therapeutic methods that involve licking.

Oh, they inject it intravenously now? What a waste.

You're still totally welcome to adopt your own wacky waving inflatable arms guy.

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