Mode of Action
Mescaline is produced when products of natural mammalian catecholamine-based neuronal signaling such as dopamine and serotonin are subjected to additional metabolism via methylation, and its hallucinogenic properties stem from these very structural similarities. In plants, this compound may be the end product of a pathway utilizing catecholamines as a method of stress response, similar to how animals may release compounds such as cortisol when stressed. The in vivo function of catecholamines have not been investigated, but they may function as antioxidants, as developmental signals, and as integral cell wall components that resist degradation from pathogens. The deactivation of catecholamines via methylation produces alkaloids such as mescaline.
Mescaline acts similarly to other psychedelic agents. It binds to and activates the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor with a high affinity as a partial agonist. How activating the 5-HT2A receptor leads to psychedelia is still unknown, but it likely somehow involves excitation of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. Mescaline is also known to bind to and activate the serotonin 5-HT2C receptor.
In addition to serotonin receptor activity, mescaline also stimulates the dopamine receptors. Whether mescaline possesses dopamine receptor agonist properties or initiates the release of dopamine remains unclear.
Difluoro and trifluoromescaline have shown to be more potent than their unfluorinated analogue.
Read more about this topic: Mescaline
Famous quotes containing the words mode of, mode and/or action:
“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech, and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)