What's that you're smoking? Incense is psychoactive

[mdlbear]

Incense is psychoactive: Scientists identify the biology behind the ceremony

Bethesda, MD—Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

(from this post by gmcdavid.)

Comments

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Huh. So that's why that spaced out guy was trying to buy Frankincense from me today.

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Whoah, I didn't remember that icon.

[mdlbear]

You know what they say about remembering the 1960's...

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's what keeps people going back to churches that use the stuff, eh?

[raindrops.livejournal.com]

And now we just have to wait for Big Pharm to patent it so they can sell us what we already had...

Oh, right, that's why marijuana is illegal, because they can't patent it.

[mdlbear]

Actually, it's because hemp is too good for making paper, and the Hearst family owned a pulpwood plantation...

Different monopoly, same game.