Good news, ladies: your biological makeup makes you more prone to having your brain splattered across the expanse of the universe when you take psychedelic drugs. A study recently published in bioRxiv found that women tend to feel the effects of psychedelics like magic mushrooms more intensely, experiencing a more vivid perception of color and reporting their thoughts shooting off in more unfamiliar directions than men tend to report.
Why this happens is still unclear.
Researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands pooled data from two clinical trials involving 40 women and 32 men. These healthy volunteers were given fixed doses of lab-made psilocybin, LSD, 2C-B, or a placebo.
Women Experience More Intense Psychedelic Trips Than Men, New Study Finds
Female participants generally reported a stronger sense of intoxication along with a drop in alertness and a harder time preventing their thoughts from spinning wildly out of control. The disparity was the most obvious while under the influence of psilocybin.
At first, the researchers just assumed that the women were getting rocketed into another dimension because they weighed less or maybe received a higher dose relative to their size. But blood tests stomped all over that theory. Peak drug concentrations and overall exposure in the bloodstream were virtually identical between men and women, meaning that despite factors like height and weight, both men and women should have felt the effects in roughly the same way.
The researchers don’t yet know why women feel it more strongly than men, but one theory suggests that estrogen’s interplay with the brain’s serotonin system could have something to do with it. One thing to note is that the researchers didn’t track any of the female participants’ menstrual cycles or baseline hormone levels, which may or may not ultimately influence psilocybin’s intensity.
These are just preliminary findings that open up an interesting new avenue in drug research, especially now that psilocybin is being used to treat severe depression and PTSD. Information like this could be vital to fine-tuning dosages for female patients, since understanding who gets blasted into the cosmic beyond more than others could be good for establishing safety guidelines.
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