In this section of an interview with David Nichols he comments on treating physical conditions with psychedelics.
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Tania: Switching gears to the Iodo compounds, like DOI, did you mention that these are anti-inflammatory?
Dave: Yeah, that's very weird.
Tania: Some guy called in to Sasha's office, saying that he had rheumatoid arthritis, and he took 2C-I, and for two weeks he was pain-free. Which makes me wonder about medical applications for the Iodo compounds...
Dave: My son Chuck discovered that accidentally. He's an associate professor at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He wanted to work with 5-HT2 agonists, because he's looking at serotonin receptors in Drosophila, and doing translational stuff into rats. He asked, "Is there a 5-HT2A agonist that's not a controlled substance that I can use?" Since DOI was not controlled, I sent him the isomers of DOI. His team had been using rat aortic epithelial cells--cells from the inside of a rat's blood vessels--and looking at models of atherosclerosis. The model they'd been using was to take these cells, and put in TNF-alpha (tumor necrosis factor-alpha), a pro-inflammatory substance. If you've seen the advertisements for Enbrel, for arthritis, drugs such as that block TNF-alpha receptors, so they block the pain. What they would do is put TNF-alpha directly into these cells and then they would look at what effect occurred in combination with other compounds--there were four or five compounds that they were looking at.
So his post-doc had some of those cells that were grown up and could be used, and he asked my son, "What if I run a test with one of our compounds in these?" And Chuck said, "Well, I don't have any anti-inflammatory compounds right now." "What about this DOI here?" Chuck laughed and replied, "That's a hallucinogen. That won't do anything." The post-doc said, "Well, I'm going to have to destroy the cells. Can I just go ahead and test it?" And Chuck said, "Yeah, go ahead." The guy came back a week and a half later and said, "The DOI completely blocked TNF-alpha at 20 picomolar." Which is like unbelievable, right?
Chuck said, "Nah. You made a mistake." So Chuck went in, made up his own fresh solutions, took the cells, ran the experiment, and reproduced the guy's data. He wrote me back and asked, "Is there any precedent for this?" And I said, "No, not that I know of." So he published a paper in J PET; it was the featured paper in the issue it was published in. This has extraordinary potency; there's no anti-inflammatory that has potency like that.
Jon: The dose levels you mentioned would not be psychoactive, so perhaps that's something that could be developed into a commercial medication.