Links involving MDMA, LSD, and shrooms often get upvoted to the top of HN. Is there anywhere to read the consensus on news, both legal and scientific, on what’s the current status of psychedelics and recreational drugs worldwide?
One of the most educative ones for drug users as well. Trip reports were always an interesting read, being aware of dosage and effects, reading from others' bad experiences to be avoided.
Erowid is massively educational if you got any interest in psychedelics or mind-altering substances in general.
there's a large venn diagram overlap between some of the earliest members there at the WELL (and, for instance, the people who founded burning man), and the california tech industry.
Also not on the scientific end, but if you search Reddit within specefic sub's dedicated toward the mental difficulties they are aiming to change, you'll find healthy discussion of the developments and personal experiances. Avoid /r/drugs and all those.
Any specific subs you’d recommend? I enjoy /r/drugs occasionally because of the interesting stories that I can live vicariously through, but I’m interested in learning more.
Yeah not all subjects responded negatively, but I do believe a majority did, in the lesser happy sessions.
I do think they took care of creating 'set and setting' more.
I use mushrooms sometimes (rarely, very carefully) while meditating.
They tend to stimulate the area around the vagus nerve - and since meditation is partly frustration, that in turn triggers “uncomfortable” memories.
Also, they seem to smoothen nervous activity? Meditating with closed eyes, often the “black net if colored dots” i see when im sober gets a new more fluid attribute, less choppy.
More often than not, intense crying ensues, and quite a bit of unconscious material surfaces and get confronted.
One drawback to “scoring mushrooms” for emotional healing is quality is inconsistent -
I imagine consistent quality and able hands could greatly help traumatized individuals .. its not a trip in the hedonistic sense, its quite frankly aching to a religious experience
I am bo no means an expert, but from what I have established clinical use is no where near 'tripping' - they use 'micro dosages' which results in a very light amount of cognitive change. You would be as tripped out as you would be getting into a nice warm bath with some smelly salts. A feeling of all is well in the world.
From what I've read/listened to this is generally not the case. The kind of psychedelic-assisted research that's happening today uses full doses that induce a "spirtual" experience, not microdoses. I'll see if I can dig up actual links but a big source of information I have on this topic is from the fascinating and highly recommended Drug Science podcast:
I remember hearing a conversation in one episode where microdose research was discussed and David Nutt, the UK's foremost neuropsychopharmacologist, said that studying full doses is more efficient from a process perspective. With such stringent rules around scheduled substances any research means a ton of red tape, keeping people under observation for ages, and so on. It's more effective to study administration of a small number of full doses than run a program to analyse a longer course of microdoses. Of course, you could probably study a one-off microdose but given the subtlety of the effects it's probably hard to distinguish the drug effects from other factors. Given the difficulty of studying this stuff at all and the belief that a full dose is necessary it makes sense to try that ahead of microdose research.
"The extensive use of microdosing psychedelics to putatively improve wellbeing and creativity (Kuypers et al., 2019) raises the question of whether a full psychedelic experience is needed. Microdosing involves taking—usually on a regular basis, e.g., 3 times a week—a low dose of a psychedelic that is devoid of subjective psychoactive effects. As yet there have been no trials of microdosing for any psychiatric disorder, and it seems improbable that a single microdose of psilocybin would have as big an effect in depression as the 25 mg psilocybin “macrodose” usually used. Growing evidence suggests the best outcomes from psilocybin are in patients experiencing the most powerful psychedelic effects, variously called breakthrough, peak, or mystical experiences (Roseman et al., 2018b
). [..]"
Also, Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" goes into a lot of detail re: the therapeutic process. I'd imagine most clinical processes to be similar to the kind of stuff that happens underground now — full doses, a guide present, care on set/setting etc.
no, microdosing is being researched to treat moderate to severe depression, schizophrenia and epilepsy. a microdose vs a full dose is likened to feeling tipsy vs full blown paralysis, with alcohol. to give a mentally fragile person a mind altering out of body experience is a bad idea
John Hopkins is investigating this. The ethics boards will pretty much require that people be monitored during the intoxication. So yes, probably something along the lines of getting high in a therapist's office.
>allowing them to possess and use psilocybin for personal training without fear of prosecution under the country's drug laws.
There are literally hundreds of websites that will mail you magic mushroom spores, live magic mushroom mycelium, magic mushroom growing kits where you just add water and wait, and dried magic mushrooms.
I have never heard of any of them so much as being hassled let alone prosecuted for selling any of those products.
It's pretty safe to say magic mushrooms are quasi decriminalized in Canada right now.
I just hope the older generations who adamantly and mindlessly insisted that "all drugs are bad" live long enough to feel the deep shame they deserve for causing so much harm and preventing so much joy and much-needed help to so many millions and millions of people.
But what information was accessible to them to change their mind? They wouldn't have seen headlines like this unless their local newspaper chose to run the article. They wouldn't have been able to go searching for this information without going to a library.
I'm not defending their stance, but I think it's easy to forget that we have a lot more information thrown at us in a given day than they probably had in a decade.
True, but we are not talking about 100% of the over 60 crowd. We're talking about maybe 65% give or take. There were opportunities for people to expand their perspectives. Many took those opportunities, most did not, and as the evidence mounted over the decades, the rate at which those generations shifted their opinions was embarrassingly slow (and came at a tremendous cost of human suffering, while conferring them no benefit).
There was a lot of scientific information about psychedelics from the 50s and 60s. Illegalization and stigmatization of psychedelics was largely political and antagonistic towards the scientific community that was doing actual research. Also anyone curious enough to try out psychedelics will realize they're very different from narcotics. In the US there was always a subculture that accepted use of psychedelics, information passing through books, writings, unofficial journals etc. So to say the information wasn't accessible just isn't true. It may have been hidden, but if it was it was in plain sight and to anyone curious this world was easily accessible and accepting.
Your vindictiveness harshes my mellow. Forgive them.
The magic isn't in the mushroom, it's in the love, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude that [can] emerge naturally when the mushroom god addles your brain chemistry.
Yes yes, wishing shame on another is beyond the pale.
Seriously, wishing someone feels regret, shame, embarrassment isn't incompatible with forgiveness. Learning difficult lessons, especially from harmful mistakes, is the only way society makes progress.
You can't deny there is a certain vindictiveness to that comment. Being a little vindictive is fine, it's unreasonable to expect saintly purity from people, but it's good to admit such mindsets to yourself at least.
I'll point you to my follow-up comment. These same people continue to support the direct pain and suffering of millions of other people by their insistence on taking only the smallest steps towards an evidence-oriented approach to drug laws. I'll forgive those who repent, the rest I'll leave to Jesus.
That's a justification for your vindictiveness (which I did not ask nor expect you to justify.) I am suggesting that you recognize your vindictiveness for what it is, not that you deny yourself feelings of vindictiveness.
I don't exactly understand your obsession with "vindictiveness". I'm not saying we should have a policy of rounding these people up and throwing them in prison. This is my emotional response, not a proposed policy response. They, however, literally did support a policy of rounding people up and throwing them in prison.
Why do you say that I'm obsessed with vindictiveness? Note that I am not the GP, I left only two comments concerning it. I happen to think that your feelings vindictiveness are justified. I'm just saying you shouldn't deceive yourself into thinking your feelings of vindictiveness are something else. There is nothing wrong with an emotional response and I've not insinuated otherwise. Feeling vindictive is healthy, but self-deception harms yourself. I hope my position is now clear to you.
Please realize that the cohort of people we're talking about have supported policies of enslaving "others" through laws for decades and that they continue to do this today.
These policies have and are destroying communities, families, careers, lives, and to some extent, the fabric of the nation.
It's also not a coincidence these are the same people that just lost an election and are trying to overturn the result by any means.
Remember that story about raiding the home of a scientist in Florida a few days ago for doing science? That's the same people as the "anti-drug" people.
It turns out that the anti-drug, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-environmentalist, anti-healthcare, anti-mask, pro-police, pro-prison, pro-corporation, pro-pollution, pro-inequality, pro-torture, pro-religion group are all the same people.
The anti-drug laws are just a symptom of a much wider societal corruption.
We can't be handing out forgiveness to our oppressors while they are still actively oppressing.
There's a lot of ignorance about drugs among the general public, and they tended to buy in to the anti-drug propaganda coming at them from all sides -- from the media, from anti-drug scientists, from the DEA and various anti-drug organizations, and from society at large.
It's hard to blame them, when they're surrounded by such propaganda, and (as usual) very few people were independent enough to actually dig deep in to this themselves and find out what was really going on in respect to drug safety, benefits, and policy.
I know we're largely talking about hypothetical people, but if people were just going with the flow, I'm not sure that explains the inability to swallow the new official line.
"I'm not sure that explains the inability to swallow the new official line."
How official is it?
In the US, at least, the government spent many millions of dollars (hundreds of millions? billions?) on anti-drug education campaigns for decades, and there was mass media hysteria against drugs for decades.
There are still no comparable pro-drug education campaigns, and while there have been some positive research results and positive media coverage on some drugs, the message overall is pretty mixed, and there's still plenty of anti-drug hysteria in the media and anti-drug messages from the government today.
It's probably going to take a long time to change the minds of most people who grew up soaked in anti-drug propaganda.
Sure, a sliver of the Baby Boomer generation has been given vastly too much attention for doing some drugs. Meanwhile, the bulk of that generation are responsible for the largest per capita prison population in the developed world and the ruin of millions of young lives.
I'm late to this comment but please do not post unsubstantive flamebait like this, and especially not generational flamewar, which is one of the last things we need here.
I'm native indigenous from Oaxaca, Mexico, home of several sacred ceremonies with magic mushrooms and other plants from millennia. I'd like to share that our Native Nations do not give permission for scientific research of magic mushrooms outside our culture. This is not an egoistic stand, but it is for your own safety. Sacred plants on pharma and marketing industries hands will only create more damage than good. If you are interested to learn about sacred plants you must learn respect from native nations and come, live here and share for a time, then a request to research can be asked to the community.
Growing anywhere is not enough reason to use something. A lot of things are available anywhere but not all of these will be safe for your community. Sacred plants are more complex than the individual impact. It has consequences on your society and this is why its management is by law restricted to native nations.
There is wisdom in communities that use sacred plants. I hope one day western culture will realize this respect for communities such as yours but also across the world. So much of western culture is based on money and consumption. It really is the root of western ills.
The factors contributing to the rise of psychadelics are due to the "push" away from western practice of treating mental illness with books like "Anatomy of an epidemic" by Whitaker and screenings like https://medicatingnormal.com/watch/.
I did 3 sessions of MDMA therapy with a therapist in the underground community in Santa Cruz in the 90's, which later became the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) https://maps.org/ who now work with veterans with PTSD. I had experience with psychedelics, but none with MDMA. All I can say is ymmv. I was underwhelmed by the experience. Later I would go on to do CBT, DBT and Wisemind, and CPT [1] for PTSD and those actually worked really well. I think MDMA combined with those therapies might have been even better. CPT was particularly helpful to confront the abuse I suffered.
[1] Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectic Behavioral Therapy & Wisemind, Cognitive Processing Therapy
68 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadErowid is massively educational if you got any interest in psychedelics or mind-altering substances in general.
- Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
there's a large venn diagram overlap between some of the earliest members there at the WELL (and, for instance, the people who founded burning man), and the california tech industry.
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/divisi...
https://elearning.rcpsych.ac.uk/learningmodules/psychedelicd...
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/s...
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/events/present...
I'm imagining tripping in a therapist's office. Doesn't sound very pleasant.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on his exact points, but the clinical setting was definitely found to have a detrimental effect on the experience.
Therapy while "tripping" is very different then the "recreational way". Remember, set and setting are important.
I use mushrooms sometimes (rarely, very carefully) while meditating.
They tend to stimulate the area around the vagus nerve - and since meditation is partly frustration, that in turn triggers “uncomfortable” memories.
Also, they seem to smoothen nervous activity? Meditating with closed eyes, often the “black net if colored dots” i see when im sober gets a new more fluid attribute, less choppy.
More often than not, intense crying ensues, and quite a bit of unconscious material surfaces and get confronted.
One drawback to “scoring mushrooms” for emotional healing is quality is inconsistent -
I imagine consistent quality and able hands could greatly help traumatized individuals .. its not a trip in the hedonistic sense, its quite frankly aching to a religious experience
This is just wrong. They use full doses, just not "heroic doses".
https://www.drugscience.org.uk/introducing-the-drug-science-...
I remember hearing a conversation in one episode where microdose research was discussed and David Nutt, the UK's foremost neuropsychopharmacologist, said that studying full doses is more efficient from a process perspective. With such stringent rules around scheduled substances any research means a ton of red tape, keeping people under observation for ages, and so on. It's more effective to study administration of a small number of full doses than run a program to analyse a longer course of microdoses. Of course, you could probably study a one-off microdose but given the subtlety of the effects it's probably hard to distinguish the drug effects from other factors. Given the difficulty of studying this stuff at all and the belief that a full dose is necessary it makes sense to try that ahead of microdose research.
Edit: oh, quote from https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30282-8:
"The extensive use of microdosing psychedelics to putatively improve wellbeing and creativity (Kuypers et al., 2019) raises the question of whether a full psychedelic experience is needed. Microdosing involves taking—usually on a regular basis, e.g., 3 times a week—a low dose of a psychedelic that is devoid of subjective psychoactive effects. As yet there have been no trials of microdosing for any psychiatric disorder, and it seems improbable that a single microdose of psilocybin would have as big an effect in depression as the 25 mg psilocybin “macrodose” usually used. Growing evidence suggests the best outcomes from psilocybin are in patients experiencing the most powerful psychedelic effects, variously called breakthrough, peak, or mystical experiences (Roseman et al., 2018b ). [..]"
Also, Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" goes into a lot of detail re: the therapeutic process. I'd imagine most clinical processes to be similar to the kind of stuff that happens underground now — full doses, a guide present, care on set/setting etc.
There was some early research which reported success in using LSD and psilocybin to treat schizophrenia in children:
https://maps.org/news-letters/v07n3/07318fis.html
https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/
John Hopkins is investigating this. The ethics boards will pretty much require that people be monitored during the intoxication. So yes, probably something along the lines of getting high in a therapist's office.
Checkout YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaccx89LbpXYV9biInO1OUA?vie...
https://ibogaineclinic.com
There are literally hundreds of websites that will mail you magic mushroom spores, live magic mushroom mycelium, magic mushroom growing kits where you just add water and wait, and dried magic mushrooms.
I have never heard of any of them so much as being hassled let alone prosecuted for selling any of those products.
It's pretty safe to say magic mushrooms are quasi decriminalized in Canada right now.
Is that what 'dried mushrooms' means in Canada?
Many (non legal) mail or marijuana websites now offer dried mushrooms. Legit real psilocybin mushrooms, not synthetic.
I'm not defending their stance, but I think it's easy to forget that we have a lot more information thrown at us in a given day than they probably had in a decade.
The magic isn't in the mushroom, it's in the love, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude that [can] emerge naturally when the mushroom god addles your brain chemistry.
Seriously, wishing someone feels regret, shame, embarrassment isn't incompatible with forgiveness. Learning difficult lessons, especially from harmful mistakes, is the only way society makes progress.
Please realize that the cohort of people we're talking about have supported policies of enslaving "others" through laws for decades and that they continue to do this today.
These policies have and are destroying communities, families, careers, lives, and to some extent, the fabric of the nation.
It's also not a coincidence these are the same people that just lost an election and are trying to overturn the result by any means.
Remember that story about raiding the home of a scientist in Florida a few days ago for doing science? That's the same people as the "anti-drug" people.
It turns out that the anti-drug, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-environmentalist, anti-healthcare, anti-mask, pro-police, pro-prison, pro-corporation, pro-pollution, pro-inequality, pro-torture, pro-religion group are all the same people.
The anti-drug laws are just a symptom of a much wider societal corruption.
We can't be handing out forgiveness to our oppressors while they are still actively oppressing.
It's hard to blame them, when they're surrounded by such propaganda, and (as usual) very few people were independent enough to actually dig deep in to this themselves and find out what was really going on in respect to drug safety, benefits, and policy.
Most just swallowed the official line.
I know we're largely talking about hypothetical people, but if people were just going with the flow, I'm not sure that explains the inability to swallow the new official line.
How official is it?
In the US, at least, the government spent many millions of dollars (hundreds of millions? billions?) on anti-drug education campaigns for decades, and there was mass media hysteria against drugs for decades.
There are still no comparable pro-drug education campaigns, and while there have been some positive research results and positive media coverage on some drugs, the message overall is pretty mixed, and there's still plenty of anti-drug hysteria in the media and anti-drug messages from the government today.
It's probably going to take a long time to change the minds of most people who grew up soaked in anti-drug propaganda.
"all drugs are bad" was a "greatest generation" attitude and I'm afraid they are mostly beyond caring
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Doesn’t that type of mushroom grow in fields where cattle poop?