Ah, thanks, very coolio! Great to see this as a feature, haven't quite seen that mechanic well and I think it's a really great way of implementing it! :D :)
While I'm not the biggest fan of companies trying to land grab the psychedelic craze, there are things that would be nice to have, like psychedelics that don't activate 5-HT2B (associated strongly with aortic hypertrophy, i.e., your heart valves grow too big) over time. Sure, we haven't necessarily seen a ton of direct linkage to IRL use, yet, AFAIPK, but still it's something that's been strongly shown, and most 5-HT2A psychedelics also activate 5-HT2B.
Curious about selectivity against 5-HT3 as well as the nausea can be a problem.
Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream. Like, sure, maybe it's technically possible, but are you going to find a compound that selective (likely not) and is it actually going to remove all psychomometic effects (lol no, how do you think these things work)?
There's always tradeoffs, it's like the weirdly detached desire to "reduce hallucinations" in language models but keep the same level of performance. Like, how do you think it's going to learn? You can't just magically make an unbiased perfect estimator with no variance for some limited capacity and data, your variance must live somewhere and in language models it tends to (generally) live in the higher level correlations between concepts.
A good dose of basic mathematics and information theory really could set these fields straight.
In any case, some of the future here looks exciting.
I hadn’t heard of it either but it does seem like there are some studies. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55920-5_... Cardiac valvulopathy is likely not an adverse effect to consider when psychedelics are used occasionally but this may be different for “microdosing” which involves low doses of psychedelics taken daily or multiple times per week.
It's hard for me to understand what is meant by "similar characteristics to psilocybin" without hallucinogenic effects. Is the idea that the hyperreality of the subconscious / inner life would dominate conscious perception, but without the confusing or distressing associated overload of the physical senses, e.g. seeing or hearing things that aren't there?
It's almost impossible to imagine the one aspect of the dreamlike state dominating the mind without the disruption of the other, but even if the senses are perfectly unperturbed I would think the unconstrained and disordered psyche alone could be very upsetting or confusing.
Yes I think this is it right here. Like, at a micro dose (or slightly above) level it maybe makes sense, but the raw characteristics of how psychedelics work will still be there. Maybe there's some way, who knows, but I don't think we're likely to find out up front, somewhat similar to trying to turn lead into gold just because, as it were (at least as best as I understand. :,(((( )
Please read in context with the rest of the post! The idea is that it's very hard to raise the entropy of the brain without psychomometic effects as best as I understand, due to some fundamental informational qualities of those processes.
It's like looking for a flu medicine and judging it by if makes a fever go down because a fever is an arbitrary human-measurable metric. Has some quality of life impacts but is second player to the actual health impacts of conditions including fever (especially ones with long term impacts) and is extremely superficial.
I think that's the idea, maybe you can avoid visual cortex stuff but you can't magically get no psychomometic effects unless somehow the medication is perfectly shooting some kind of entropic gap.
I'm sure it's possible but I feel like it's much better as an accidentally discovered thing or a second or third generation medication thing, not a first priority, if that makes sense.
Ginger is often suggested as well, which is another 5ht3 antagonist.
I wonder if it's linked to susceptibility to motion sickness, which is known to be genetic, as neither psychedelics nor motion give me nausea at all.
Yes, though thankfully ondnanestron has a shockingly good safety profile for a serotonergic antiemetic. That said, reducing that external complexity would be nice.
CBD actual has some mild antiemesis properties as well and can be as immediately effective as Zofran if inhaled. I once backpacked with a dab pen and CBD due to having constant nausea, the crystal CBD isolate was easier to source and refill (since it's hemp derived) and the dab pen meant that I got nausea relief in seconds.
Unfortunately CBD in ultra high doses can contribute to serotonin syndrome IIUC due to 5-HT1A activation (which is how it exerts anti-emetic effects IIUC/IIRC). So that of course is always a big problem and I think can make polypharmacy with it a bit more difficult (though I am of course not a doctor and this is not medical advice).
That said CBD does help w.r.t. some social inhibitions due to autism IIRC and when I was dabbing between 300 mg - 1 g a day I definitely noticed a very calm, warm, low-key "peace" about the world that I very much appreciated. That was very nice indeed.
Also, ginger can be nice for oral nausea as IIRC, however it does not cross the gut barrier as well so it takes more (and sometimes the spiciness can be a problem). It also inhibits a bunch of CYP enzymes as well which is something to consider (I guess many things do, but I tend to use it more as an emergency backup of emergency backups when I don't have anything else available to me. Order generally is Zofran -> CBD (200-300 mg sublingual if not urgent) -> Pepto -> Slightly more Pepto+Ginger depending upon urgency/availability. Refilling prescriptions can be a problem due to the overwhelm of autism for me, so I try to dole/parse it out sparing, at least as I am able to. <3 :'))))
Happy to answer any questions, sorry this was an autistic infodump, really like this topic here.b<3 :'))))
Nausea can also be a result of not having a safe, regulated source of psychedelics. You always end up having to trust some dude (or gal), and not all of them produce product in the same way or to the same standard of quality. If I could buy LSD from the store, then I wouldn't have to worry about getting an upset stomach due to impurities.
I have used pure LSD before (quite regularly for months) and it does not cause me any stomach problems. I'm sure it can for some people, but it's not universal.
Impure LSD, and some RC substitutes, often do cause stomach problems. They can also cause death.
When I was younger, I heard lots of stories about how Margaret Mead was the best anthropologist. Then, later I started hearing about how some rivals were digging up how she just made up half of the stories because she wanted to believe something different. I wonder if there's been any more exploration of her research and whether she applied this wishful thinking to LSD too.
Having myself spent a period of my life thinking that all the world's problems would vanish if only we all took more LSD, MDMA and DMT... and since realizing that there really is no substitute for honesty, self-sacrifice and hard work... I'm reminded of Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing:
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
Most people who try these things briefly entertain these ideas. They are really interesting and have the potential to trigger positive breakthroughs in a person’s thinking. They also have high potential in therapy for things like PTSD and depression.
But all you have to do is spend a little time around drug users or pay attention to the discourse in psychedelic friendly circles (Joe Rogan and Russell Brand anyone?) to see that drugs are not some kind of magic enlightenment in a pill. If they were there’d be more enlightened drug users.
There is also the example of the Canadian psychologist, Elliot Barker, who tried to treat criminal psychopaths with LSD, only for researchers to later learn that it made them more psychopathic and re-offend at higher rates.
Interesting, do you have a good source for this? Based on personal experience, it does seem somewhat intuitive that psychedelics would make you be more comfortable being "you", regardless of who you really are.
It's not necessarily that psychedelics make you more comfortable with yourself. Psychedelics can reinforce the psychopathic way of thinking. I'm not a psychopath (...as far as I can tell), but I can think similarly to one when sober. For me, LSD can intensify that way of thinking. It can intensify everything, to be fair, but the way you think while on it can be... I guess "conducive to psychopathy"? If a psychopath is missing emotion/conscience and is given LSD, then they can end up with far more ways to manipulate their own thoughts in a way that supports their psychopathy, if that makes any sense.
I had a similar phase myself. Though I still genuinely believe that every person should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their lifetime, as well as a talk-session with close friends while on MDMA.
These two things radically shifted my life perspective and resolved a lot of inner issues, both after just a single time.
Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.
I don't think that's true. Even if someone doesn't explicitly hold those views, one can still be complacent, ignorant, or subtly enabling of them. Seeing things from a different perspective can provide insight into how relevant certain ideas are to the larger picture of humanity.
You’re saying the mindset one would have going into it is one of “I’m not personally hateful, xenophobic, or racist, but I can see how those are all logical and productive things to be”?
I think that’s exactly the mindset of most people because they don’t think they’re being racist, xenophobic, etc.
If someone were to grow up in an economy built on coal mining with 13 year old miners, and you’re really effective at organizing 13 year old coal miners, then you’re gonna be very productive.
Even though everything that you’re doing is existentially bad for everybody, they are all ignorant of it’s harms. So even if temporally coal mining with miners might be the only thing that anyone is aware of to do that is “productive.”
You can make no “mistakes” and still lose just from ignorance
Your anecdote does nothing to address the root complaint; which is that if one is to make extraordinary claims (LSD is “great for” dismantling hated, etc.), they should have some actual extraordinary experience to support it. Something like a personal experience. Otherwise it’s just more “LSD is so good, it solved problems I didn’t even have” nonsense.
No, that's not what I said at all. I think someone could believe that they're not personally hateful, xenophobic, or racist while still being unconsciously complacent, ignorant, or subtly enabling of those attitudes in themselves and others. I can see how a psychedelic trip could show someone a different perspective, causing them to change their beliefs and behavior in significant ways.
That may be true, but if someone is to make a claim that it is “great for showing hatred…”, I think more proof should be offered than some other person saying “I could see how…”.
I don't think I understand your argument. Your claim was that if someone wasn't already racist and xenophobic, then their epiphanies about that subject on psychedelics is irrelevant. However, a very common experience people have on psychedelics is the feeling that everything, including the entirety of humanity, is part of the same thing, and that anything other than love for all of it comes from an artificially limited perspective. I think that's extremely relevant to having a different perspective on racism and xenophobia and their absurdity, even if the person wasn't racist and xenophobic going in.
If someone who wasn’t racist says they took LSD and found themselves one with all races, and ended up continuing to not be racist, that doesn’t tell me in any way that LSD is “great” for dismantling racism.
All I’m saying is that if someone is to make extraordinary claims “this drug is great against racism”, they should be able to back it up with more than “well I wasn’t racist before, and I’m still not, and besides we’re all one so why would someone else be?”
You should go back and re-read gavinray's post. I don't think they were making a claim anywhere near as strong as the claim that LSD is great for dismantling racism.
> Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.
I’m well aware of the claim. I’m the one who protested it to begin with. And I still have found no evidence that the parent hadn’t realized any of those beforehand.
I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of what they said, and not how I interpreted it, but ok. It seems like I'm not going to convince you otherwise.
If you Ctrl+F for my other responses in the thread, you'll see that I'm not advocating for psychs-solve-everything. I think a reasonable interpretation is that gavinray was giving their personal experience, not making a sweeping scientific claim. It would be like if I read a book that gave me a perspective on racism I had never thought of before, and I said "this book is great at showing you how racism is absurd!" It's not the kind of claim you would jump on and ask for a scientific study. In general, it's a good idea to take the most charitable version of what someone says, because people aren't always perfectly precise in their language.
Wow, I'd love to witness something like that one day. My circle doesn't include a lot of these people, and maybe that in itself is part of the more general problem.
And if they wanted to talk about it, I’d listen. Where I protest is when people make grandiose claims like “this solved so many problems for me, it even solved problems that I didn’t have!”, which only serve to perpetuate the modern hippie-dippie stereotype.
We were both tripping. Fairly recent acquaintances, I had no idea about his views, until it came up during conversation. We ended up talking about it for several hours. I stayed non-judgemental and just kept probing with questions about why he feels this way. Eventually he realised he was really just angry about the failures in his own life and the local community he was from. He'd picked up a bad media diet(neocon youtube...) and found some kind of relief I suppose in directing his anger at others. There was a lot of crying. He even thanked me the next day.
I think that's about as detailed as I can get without revealing private information.
It was a remarkable experience and fundamentally changed the way I think about the human mind, extreme political views, political dialogue, and most of all how therapy should work.
YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't. The only life changing thing was I was down some cash which I could have spent on something else. A friend at the time took it and killed themselves a month later.
Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science. But it's difficult to be anything but subjective about it if you have experienced it. I suspect any critical thinking becomes biased and that relationship requires some analysis as well.
Boring take I know but to pose a question: at the level of society if it is normalised, does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
>A friend at the time took it [LSD] and killed themselves a month later.
Do you think the two events could be otherwise related?
As you then say "Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science."
>...does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
It's a great question, but banning it, so the quality of the chemical supplied then may be suspect, and the dosages may be wildly different - and seeing what happens over 60+ years was an incorrect move.
>> does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
If everyone took them in a context conducive to healing/therapy it would be positive. Unfortunately that's rarely the case (though it's becoming more common).
Well that's not how you need to test it really and is not an objective measure. That's a badly posed question. It should be compared to other forms of therapy. And the criteria for entering therapy needs to be understood.
> YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't.
For me, despite regularly taking high doses of psychedelics (so far LSD and psilocybin), none of them have been huge life-shattering trips. They're just recreational experiences.
Maybe I'm just neurodivergent in a very specific way that isn't easily impacted by psychedelics. They're still my favorite substances and I still enjoy them, but it hasn't made that big of an impact on my life, other than being something to spend my money on, like you say.
Or maybe people with self-proclaimed life-shattering experiences are just extrapolating more out of their trip than what actually happened.
I'm sure plenty of people have legitimately improved their lives this way, but I don't believe the hype.
> YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't. The only life changing thing was I was down some cash which I could have spent on something else. A friend at the time took it and killed themselves a month later.
I remember one trip I was reading this book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Very new-agey, acid culture type thing. A very spiritually intense book
I remember having this lingering feeling of "I probably shouldn't be doing these" because of some mental health history on my mother's side of the family. I remember there was this part of it about how people go insane off of psychedelics, turning the page and seeing this lightning bolt hitting a giant tower and seeing a bunch of people falling to the ground out of it. And right when I saw that, I heard the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my entire life (it was raining outside). Like it shook the whole fucking house
Afterwards I looked up the dude who wrote the book, saw he was a "new age" guy with a white robe on and sort of felt like I was tricked, and that the lightning was some type of coincidence. In hindsight I see this as pride from my part. Also that was the last time I did a psychedelic. There's this saying with them where "you get the message and hang up the phone", that was my cue
I was an atheist up to this point but that scared this fear into me that there's something out there. You can rationalize and come up with reasons to deny that (it isn't hard), but I'd rather not personally. At least, I feel more at peace now after accepting that there is
MDMA in particular has such obvious usefulness for relationship/marriage counseling therapy.
After many years of experimenting with pretty much every conventional and 'research' drug, MDMA is the only one that stands out to me personally as having a lasting impact on how I view the world.
That's a needlessly pessimistic way of looking at this.
Some marriages last decades, and over decades of life severe strains in interpersonal relationships let alone ones as intense as marriage can arise.
MDMA has been proven helpful in breaking down barriers of communication and allowing people to talk about difficult things, and allows people to develop stronger empathy for the people in their lives.
If it can help people who want to stay together actually stay together I think that's a great thing and is something that we should promote in the context of couples counselling.
Perhaps yours is a needlessly optimistic way to look at things. Lasting for decades might not be a good thing.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, and it is absolutely fine by me for others to do exactly as they see fit, but I really do think that if you have to change yourself, via the use of drugs, this can only be a wrong answer. Perhaps it is acceptable in an emergency as a short term solution.
The reason I say this, is that if you really have made structural errors with your life, or have simply changed, it is fine to admit the failure and move on. There's no point in accommodating yourself to a relationship that is broken, via the use of drugs. You are simply prolonging the pain you inflict on yourself and on the other person in the relationship. Relationships can end, and that's ok. Better for everyone probably, in the long run.
The takes are neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but simplistic IMHO. MDMA is researched for instance to treat war veterans with PTSD. If that works and now your marriage works too, what’s wrong with that?
(I too, strongly believe there are times for cutting your losses instead of molding yourself into someone else’s preferred shape. But not all relational problems are like that!)
No doubt there are exceptional cases for taking a drug. But promotion of mdma as a solution to relationship problems seems unhinged. That's what I object to. Downvote away!
Right. Is it the case that two broken people are just numbing themselves and staying in a broken relationship with the help of drugs, or is it the case that MDMA is able to heal people and their relationships, so the people and relationships are healed from past traumas and they're not staying in something that doesn't serve them anymore. If you have to be high to stay together because you hate each other, that's unhealthy and the drugs aren't helping. If the drugs let you see past the bullshit and that you really do love each other, I say take those drugs.
But it's also fine to want to stay and fix these things.
> There's no point in accommodating yourself to a relationship that is broken, via the use of drugs.
How do you feel about drug use in general? It seems to me that it isn't so much that you're critical of therapeutic drug use in a couples counselling context so much as you're opposed to drug use entirely? Is that accurate?
No. I'm fine for people do drugs, if that's what they want to do. Their life, their choice. As long as they aren't harming anyone else. Do drugs recreationally if you like, with the person you're in a relationship with - no problem.
I'm saying you shouldn't take drugs to change yourself to accommodate something that you already know makes you unhappy. To me, it sounds (roughly) equivalent to getting drunk to deal with a broken arm - it's not really a solution that is going to work in the long run.
Re fixing things, of course one should try this! But if the fix is to take drugs... either you don't know what 'fixing' means (and, imo, it's 'talking things through') or, if you have tried talking and that failed, the relationship is probably already irredeemably broken. No need to contort yourself further, take your loss.
Put simply, I think you need to concentrate yourself, not dilute yourself for the benefit of others. You should do what makes you stronger. And happiness is your guide, or in reverse, unhappiness is your guide of what not to do. Buying happiness in a pill is not the long term answer.
Certain drugs, amongst them MDMA, can help with talking things through. Both in relationship with others and with oneself (self-reflection). GP never encouraged couples to numb themselves (opiates would be more conducive to that).
> proven helpful in breaking down barriers of communication and allowing people to talk about difficult things, and allows people to develop stronger empathy for the people in their lives.
If this sounds good to anyone here but you don't want to do anything illegal, drink kava instead. It's a food that's legal in the US (regulated as a dietary supplement), but it's perfect for open communication and empathy. r/kava is a great resource for anyone interested.
Interesting take. I’ve mixed a couple of times and thought it was enjoyable, but I didn’t feel like it was much more than a pleasant but subtle buzz. Comparing it to MDMA feels like a stretch
I agree. I wasn't really comparing it to MDMA. I was pointing out that what GP commenter was looking for can be found with kava:
> helpful in breaking down barriers of communication and allowing people to talk about difficult things, and allows people to develop stronger empathy for the people in their lives.
I had the same experience, minus MDMA (never had the chance) and the racism stuff. Completely changed my mental shape at age 47 when I tried mushrooms for the first time (also my first psychedelic). Not a do-frequently thing but genuinely mind opening.
The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well... good grief.
> The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well… good grief.
I think this is overly dismissive. I don’t think we should all be taking drugs to squeeze every bit out of ourselves out into the next jira ticket, but elsewhere in the thread there’s a comment discussing fundamental breakthroughs in networking technology that came about after an LSD trip. If someone believes that microdosing improves the creativity and overall satisfaction with their job, is that a bad thing?
MDMA may also be the only, or among the few, things that really work in and for couples therapy (it's also not a panacea). Banning it is a travesty.
There's an interesting alternative world chronicled in part by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, and by others, in which psychedelics are integrated into therapy, psychiatry, and other forms of medicine and improvement.
The effects of LSD and psilocybin can still sometimes result in some degree of psychological addiction, just not physical dependence.
MDMA can cause permanent tolerance and brain damage, and even though there has been plenty of research and testing by harm-reduction communities (like Bluelight), it's still not fully understood how this works or how to guarantee the substance's safety. This is probably why it should stay banned, at least for now.
LSD and psilocybin are much safer, in my opinion. I would probably say LSD is the safest, since high doses of psilocybin can render me unconscious, but that could just be me.
I'm not sure what good comes from "banning". The people who want to do it are going to do it anyway, but now you have a lot of folks taking unknown substances at unknown doses, and sometimes getting arrested and ending up with a record. Bad all around.
Simply unbanning MDMA with no further action though wouldn't be very productive right now when it still is quite unknown. I hope more research and clinical trials can be done in the future, with all sorts of things and not just MDMA.
Set and setting are critical factors in the outcome of any use of psychedelics, particularly for naive users unfamiliar with the effects. Practically speaking, this means LSD could plausibly be used in both cult brainwashing and cult deprogramming activities. That's why the CIA thought it could be used as a mind control / interrogation tool in the early 1950s (e.g. MKULTRA), while others adopted it as a liberating creative tool for artists (indeed, I once met a classically trained flutist who reported that they found it impossible to improvise over a jazz chord progression until they tried LSD).
Personally I think a great many of the problem outcomes with psychedelics is related to consumerism and the desire for quick fixes. A society blanketed with pharmaceutical advertising and indoctrinated with the notion that pills fix health problems will tend to generate individuals who think taking some drug will 'fix' them. A typical outcome for such people is that they try some psychedelic, have a great time, and then run back to the well for another taste, and then have a horrible grim experience, reliving some past personal trauma or consumed with morbid thoughts of death and darkness, etc. - the so-called 'bad trip'. Let alone people who take so much they completely dissociate with sensory reality, a very dangerous situation as they may fall off cliffs, walk into traffic, etc.
More often than not, people indoctrinated into consumerist drug use will instead turn to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzos, etc. - all drugs with fairly predictable feel-good effects, a variety of negative health effects, and high addiction potential - but not much risk of a 'bad trip'. In contrast, psychedelics have potential for combatting addiction to such drugs because they lead to introspection, self-reflection, and the realization that the short-term feel-good effects of addictive drugs are not worth the long-term consequences - the degradation of ones' mental and physical capabilities, degraded social relationships, loss of emotional control and so on.
I could be just in a bitter mood, but somehow all of these articles decrying what a terrible job we did by shutting down psychedelic research in favor of a war on drugs... Don't make me feel optimistic that we've moved on or improved as a species.
Like, this attitude of "oh NOW we see, we were just dumb 40 years ago! Everything will be better because NOW we get it" strikes me as exactly the same attitude that caused this problem in the first place.
The regulators etc thought they knew better and "fixed" the errors of the past by starting the war on drugs.
I guess to me, like, just focus on science and principles like free speech and the funding of interesting hypotheses. I feel like we're just demonizing a new group here and not learning the lesson of: "stop demonizing."
Sure, it can feel that way if you believe that the war on drugs was started to keep people safe. However, if it was started as a means to persecute "undesireables" or political opponents the current trend seems less questionable.
I mean this sincerely: I think you’re right about this coming from your mood. You haven’t engaged with the actual argument much. It’s pretty reasonable to say things people did in the past were wrong. You can do things from first principles, but that also gets real abstract. Eventually, people need to be for or against specific policies.
I think we actually did learn things that we didn't know the first time around. We know that it's dangerous when influential researchers go around promoting psychedelics as a panacea like Timothy Leary did. The current wave of researchers seem to be much more responsible in emphasizing an evidence-based approach, the importance of screening for risk factors, and limiting the use of psychedelics to a controlled therapeutic setting.
> and limiting the use of psychedelics to a controlled therapeutic setting.
Your other points I understand. This particular one I find controversial as one of the unkowns is what is an ideal setting?
I've got friends that will drop a tab, and go for a beer - just as impossible for me as sitting in a 'controlled environment' [therapeutic setting] with a shrink, or a Man-retreat for ex-military types.
I'd like to just have easy access to a known quality, and strength of chemical, that I can happily take, wheresoever I prefer.
There are well known risks of psychosis and schizophrenia associated with psychedelics. Just because your friend can drop a tab and go to the bar doesn't mean that it's a good idea for everyone to be doing so.
I'm fairly libertarian on drugs, but I do think there is a big difference when it comes to psychedelics. The potential harms aren't only to the person doing it, but for people around them who might be victims of their psychotic break. It's safest if there is someone around to administer a benzodiazepine or antipsychotic if necessary.
>The potential harms aren't only to the person doing it, but for people around them who might be victims of their psychotic break
Fyi research apparently shows that mentally unwell people are more likely to be physically harmful to others as compared with the average. Sounded weird to me but apparently there's some data.
Knew that name sounded familiar.. Margaret Mead was one of the 'core group' members of the Macy Conference(s) in Cybernetics [0], whose other members included such people as John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch..
Also a wonderful anaecdote, WRT LSD and Tech - when Hoffman's 100th birthday happened they had an interview with one of the founders/first employees of Cisco, and he stated they were against drug testing, because they discovered the logic for BGP and RIP routing protocols in epiphanies due to LSD.
>>>BASEL, Switzerland – When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool – LSD-25.
"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead – who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.
"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.
I still wish that there were legal, regulated sources of these substances, so that those who choose to use them anyway can do so safely. There are some people who do appreciate altered perceptions/experiences from time to time, even if it's not a substitute for a sober daily life. People can get burned badly by a contaminated or adulterated supply.
Harm reduction is better than fearmongering and imprisonment.
One man's fearmongering is another's "that's objectively going to inhibit your ability to be long-term functional at a basic level, and more so the lower your socioeconomic status".
>People can get burned badly by a contaminated or adulterated supply.
> One man's fearmongering is another's "that's objectively going to inhibit your ability to be long-term functional at a basic level, and more so the lower your socioeconomic status".
That's not the kind of fearmongering I'm talking about. I'm talking about withholding information about drugs, talking only about the risks they pose and all the reasons why nobody should ever take them. The "war on drugs" isn't just about telling people about the very real risks of drugs, it's about convincing people that these risks are all drugs are, and that if they want to take them, they are on their own and will face criminal charges or imprisonment. That is trying to scare people so much about drugs that they avoid them purely on the basis that they are scary and risky and illegal.
While this works on a lot of people, it does not work on everyone, and those that want to try a substance anyway are left completely on their own. They do not have a safe supply, they do not have reliable sources of information about the substance they plan to take, they do not have instructions or help to take it in a way that is safe.
It's not a good justification to say that this is okay because nobody should be taking these substances in the first place. You can't just prevent all drug use. Plus, some people legitimately have brain chemistries that would benefit from things like psychedelic trips or microdosing, even outside of a clinical environment under the supervision of a medical professional. There is little reason to make it difficult for them to take a substance like LSD safely and responsibly if it is a substance that can be used that way.
To be clear, I'm not talking about junkies or drug addicts here. There are communities of people who seek mind-altering experiences as a form of curiosity and adventure, and not as a coping mechanism to escape reality or generate endless pleasure. It can be a recreational activity that doesn't deserve the stigma that it has gotten.
> It's almost like it isn't worth the risk.
The problem is that risk is artificially created. That risk does not have to exist. People could have access to safe, regulated supplies of drugs, just like pharmacies have access to safe regulated supplies of potentially life-altering medication for things like ADHD. Just like you can buy cough medicine from the store and not be afraid that it has fentanyl in it and that you could get sick and die from touching the package. (Fentanyl isn't anything like that by the way, that's such ridiculous exaggeration on the part of the media.)
>I'm talking about withholding information about drugs, talking only about the risks they pose and all the reasons why nobody should ever take them.
And yet, I've never wtinessed a pro-drug speaker attach the caveat that any given street drug will damage neural architecture in a manner that makes it more difficult to function long-term.
>isn't just about telling people about the very real risks of drugs, it's about convincing people that these risks are all drugs are
In the wide world of warning labels, what other example can you give where the warning includes subjective benefits that users advertise?
The world does not have to cater to the psychology and perceptions of addicts that use substances that unquestionably lead to disaster on a consistent basis, anymore than it is morally compelled to advertise the benefits of anything else that it warns against for the good of society and the individual.
>That is trying to scare people so much about drugs that they avoid them purely on the basis that they are scary and risky and illegal.
Yes
>those that want to try a substance anyway are left completely on their own. They do not have a safe supply, they do not have reliable sources of information about the substance they plan to take, they do not have instructions or help to take it in a way that is safe.
Sounds like a good advertisement to not take street drugs.
> It can be a recreational activity that doesn't deserve the stigma that it has gotten.
No
>People could have access to safe,
Nothing is safe that damages neural architecture, at minimum.
> just like pharmacies have access to safe regulated supplies of potentially life-altering medication for things like ADHD.
Its not just like that. In people with true ADHD, meds make them feel more "sober "than without. Thee isn't a street drug in existence that does the same for anyone, aside from someone with ADHD taking a clinical dose of street methamphetamine. But that is already available via prescription.
People do have issues. They should get them prescribed for, especially if considering a regimen of street drugs as an alternative treatment plan.
> And yet, I've never wtinessed a pro-drug speaker attach the caveat that any given street drug will damage neural architecture in a manner that makes it more difficult to function long-term.
That's because you can't just make that assumption about every "street drug". I believe Desoxyn is still sometimes prescribed to help overeating disorders by reducing hunger.
Most of the danger comes when you abuse them recreationally, taking more than you are supposed to, more often than you are supposed to. According to at least one study, meth can actually be neuroprotective at lower doses [0] - but it can also get extremely neurotoxic at higher doses [1].
Of course, another huge chunk of the danger comes with the fact that when sourcing illegal substances, you're not guaranteed the supply will be pure or even that it will be what you ordered in the first place. Reagent test kits [2] are a very helpful harm-reduction measure here, I just wish that they were cheaper.
> Nothing is safe that damages neural architecture, at minimum.
Almost anything can damage neural architecture. In fact, you can damage it without any "street drugs" at all. Trauma, neglect, bad routine, bad hygiene, bad diet etc. can all cause certain degrees of neurodegeneration. Some people just don't know any better (like me) or are in situations where they can't prevent it (like abuse victims).
This is a completely normal and expected side effect of neuroplasticity, and almost all substances (even the ones that doctors prescribe that aren't "street drugs") have the capability to negatively affect cognitive development. There's a reason why the term "maladaptive" exists.
IOW, by "safe" I didn't mean that a substance would be unquestionably safe to use. I mean that it would be safe to trust that you are getting a pure and unadulterated product, because production would be regulated just like legal OTC medicines are today.
Nothing is perfectly safe, even standing up too fast can be dangerous for some people. Some people even die from rolling out of bed in their sleep. Requiring perfect safety is unrealistic - obviously, usage of each drug has to be considered rationally.
Prescriptions are usually how this is done, don't get me wrong! Hell, I even talked to my doctor about magic mushrooms and he said that microdosing psilocybin should be OK for me, even though he's not allowed to prescribe it since pharmacies don't provide it here. YMMV, of course.
> In people with true ADHD, meds make them feel more "sober "than without.
This sounds like it's almost a No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if "true" ADHD were a thing, a diagnosis of ADHD can still be caused by all sorts of underlying conditions. Someone using stimulants to treat ADHD will still be different than someone who simply doesn't have ADHD and doesn't use stimulants, because stimulants have extra side effects that don't have to do with treating ADHD.
You have to weigh the positive effects against the negative effects and only then see if the tradeoff is worth it. There are very few, if any, "miracle drugs". Even drugs that can be miracles, can only work that way under very specific circumstances, for very specific brain chemistries.
> reposted without comment
Fentanyl will not instantly kill you just from touching an imperceptibly small amount. It is extremely potent, but it's not just going to di...
Case in point: the situationally inapporpriate emotional outburst indicative of damaged prefrontal control of emotions. You're life must be hell. Here's to getting some help.
The idea that everything is a grand conspiracy is a clear indication of lack of knowledge in critical thinking. You don't have the information necessary to make these conclusions, yet you say it anyway. This demonstrates a lack of intellectual honesty and serves nothing other than personal feelings of superiority often associated with narcissism and ego.
The psychedelics you are against would show you what it feels like to live without the emotional factors you use to think. Giving you control of yourself to persue truth seeking.
That you make the tired and incorrect "free your emotions man" point of a run of-the mill addict and write the rest as if you have a deprived intellect?
I tried to quote specific parts of your post where this is the case, but the entire thing makes my "case in point" (the correct phrase, over your incorrect "case and point").
I think you're assuming that popular culture is a lot more directed than it is in reality. The Grateful Dead (the archetypal band for countercultural LSD use) for example weren't making the music they did as some sort of shady propaganda to encourage people to take drugs, they did what they did because the experience of the early LSD-fuelled counterculture genuinely moved them to make their music.
UCSC should also have a psychedelics studies program (is there any better place?), particularly on account of their already unique (and wonderful) History of Consciousness program.
I remember an old and dear chemist friend of mine there who made me aware of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). I still have his copy of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History he lent me after taking a sociology course on drugs in society, if I recall correctly.
Mushrooms have had a profound positive impact on my life so I'm drawn read anything in the orbit of psychedelics, but I'm even more interested after this interview! I pre-ordered a copy.
It was cool to see your mention of Ginsberg and the Beats, my wife and I just stopped through City Lights and the small, but pretty neat, Beat museum that's nearby.
Anyway, congrats on the book, I look forward to reading it!
I always find it interesting that whenever an article about psychedelics gets posted, the comments are always “We don’t know yet if this is positive, we need much more evidence and science!”
Yet the standard of rigor for alcohol, weed, SSRIs and tiktok is somehow not as stringent.
I don't. None of those things completely mess with your perspective of reality like psychedelics. Idk it's like comparing code correctness for a calculator vs a control module for a spaceship. Totally different ballparks.
Only one of these is conventionally understood to confer a net benefit in its most common use cases, and the SSRIs have been subject to extensive testing and approval processes.
I disagree with the sibling commenter that alcohol does not dramatically alter your perception of reality. He simply isn't drinking enough. Likewise it is more than possible to limit the psychedelic dose so that it does not lead to heedlessness; Shulgin noted that many users prefer what he called a "plus-two" instead of the highly disorienting "plus-three".
While the medical application of psychedelics is probably going to be subject to the same rigorous approval process that characterizes the medical application of other things, the primary benefits attributed to conventional psychedelics are not easily reconciled with the usual endpoints of contemporary medicine. People claim to have experienced improvements in moral character, reasoning about certain problems, interpersonal trust, and other behavior changes which are not considered targets of treatment by contemporary medicine. There have been a few limited studies looking at psychedelics for depression and anxiety, but the improvements are just OK, though the prospect of just taking a drug once instead of daily is certainly attractive.
Meanwhile, the non-prescription use of psychedelics has been "experimented" with in a few cases, particularly in the Netherlands, Oregon, and Florida. Unfortunately, while incidents of psychedelic-influenced misbehavior are rare in general, they seem to become more common when the availability of these drugs is decriminalized. My hypothesis is that people are more likely to be reckless when they are not afraid of getting caught. A system of licensure for users would hopefully help prevent this.
Are you saying that people are insufficiently critical of alcohol, SSRIs, and tiktok? That's been far from my experience.
Weed, you might have a point, but it's also fairly evidently far more benign than alcohol and tobacco, and has been pretty clearly unjustly demonized for decades in an attempt to target specific populations, so it's not unreasonable for the pendulum to overcorrect a bit before we find a comfortable equilibrium.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadCurious about selectivity against 5-HT3 as well as the nausea can be a problem.
Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream. Like, sure, maybe it's technically possible, but are you going to find a compound that selective (likely not) and is it actually going to remove all psychomometic effects (lol no, how do you think these things work)?
There's always tradeoffs, it's like the weirdly detached desire to "reduce hallucinations" in language models but keep the same level of performance. Like, how do you think it's going to learn? You can't just magically make an unbiased perfect estimator with no variance for some limited capacity and data, your variance must live somewhere and in language models it tends to (generally) live in the higher level correlations between concepts.
A good dose of basic mathematics and information theory really could set these fields straight.
In any case, some of the future here looks exciting.
Do you have a source for that? I'm a cardiac sonographer and I've never heard of aortic hypertrophy.
https://psychedelichealth.co.uk/2023/06/13/non-hallucinogeni...
It's almost impossible to imagine the one aspect of the dreamlike state dominating the mind without the disruption of the other, but even if the senses are perfectly unperturbed I would think the unconstrained and disordered psyche alone could be very upsetting or confusing.
It's like looking for a flu medicine and judging it by if makes a fever go down because a fever is an arbitrary human-measurable metric. Has some quality of life impacts but is second player to the actual health impacts of conditions including fever (especially ones with long term impacts) and is extremely superficial.
I think that's the idea, maybe you can avoid visual cortex stuff but you can't magically get no psychomometic effects unless somehow the medication is perfectly shooting some kind of entropic gap.
I'm sure it's possible but I feel like it's much better as an accidentally discovered thing or a second or third generation medication thing, not a first priority, if that makes sense.
That would be a nice feature aiui; some people I know got into the habit of always taking psychedelics with ondansetron to try to avoid the nausea.
CBD actual has some mild antiemesis properties as well and can be as immediately effective as Zofran if inhaled. I once backpacked with a dab pen and CBD due to having constant nausea, the crystal CBD isolate was easier to source and refill (since it's hemp derived) and the dab pen meant that I got nausea relief in seconds.
Unfortunately CBD in ultra high doses can contribute to serotonin syndrome IIUC due to 5-HT1A activation (which is how it exerts anti-emetic effects IIUC/IIRC). So that of course is always a big problem and I think can make polypharmacy with it a bit more difficult (though I am of course not a doctor and this is not medical advice).
That said CBD does help w.r.t. some social inhibitions due to autism IIRC and when I was dabbing between 300 mg - 1 g a day I definitely noticed a very calm, warm, low-key "peace" about the world that I very much appreciated. That was very nice indeed.
Also, ginger can be nice for oral nausea as IIRC, however it does not cross the gut barrier as well so it takes more (and sometimes the spiciness can be a problem). It also inhibits a bunch of CYP enzymes as well which is something to consider (I guess many things do, but I tend to use it more as an emergency backup of emergency backups when I don't have anything else available to me. Order generally is Zofran -> CBD (200-300 mg sublingual if not urgent) -> Pepto -> Slightly more Pepto+Ginger depending upon urgency/availability. Refilling prescriptions can be a problem due to the overwhelm of autism for me, so I try to dole/parse it out sparing, at least as I am able to. <3 :'))))
Happy to answer any questions, sorry this was an autistic infodump, really like this topic here.b<3 :'))))
Impure LSD, and some RC substitutes, often do cause stomach problems. They can also cause death.
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
But all you have to do is spend a little time around drug users or pay attention to the discourse in psychedelic friendly circles (Joe Rogan and Russell Brand anyone?) to see that drugs are not some kind of magic enlightenment in a pill. If they were there’d be more enlightened drug users.
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02352266
You can code a game, a database, an OS, a framework, a LLM etc. with one tool.
These two things radically shifted my life perspective and resolved a lot of inner issues, both after just a single time.
Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.
I don’t believe that mindset exists.
If someone were to grow up in an economy built on coal mining with 13 year old miners, and you’re really effective at organizing 13 year old coal miners, then you’re gonna be very productive.
Even though everything that you’re doing is existentially bad for everybody, they are all ignorant of it’s harms. So even if temporally coal mining with miners might be the only thing that anyone is aware of to do that is “productive.”
You can make no “mistakes” and still lose just from ignorance
All I’m saying is that if someone is to make extraordinary claims “this drug is great against racism”, they should be able to back it up with more than “well I wasn’t racist before, and I’m still not, and besides we’re all one so why would someone else be?”
I’m well aware of the claim. I’m the one who protested it to begin with. And I still have found no evidence that the parent hadn’t realized any of those beforehand.
This is the exact kind of behavior that gets the psychs-solve-everything crowd dismissed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
I think that's about as detailed as I can get without revealing private information.
It was a remarkable experience and fundamentally changed the way I think about the human mind, extreme political views, political dialogue, and most of all how therapy should work.
I had a chip on my shoulder, so to speak.
Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science. But it's difficult to be anything but subjective about it if you have experienced it. I suspect any critical thinking becomes biased and that relationship requires some analysis as well.
Boring take I know but to pose a question: at the level of society if it is normalised, does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
Do you think the two events could be otherwise related?
As you then say "Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science."
>...does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
It's a great question, but banning it, so the quality of the chemical supplied then may be suspect, and the dosages may be wildly different - and seeing what happens over 60+ years was an incorrect move.
If everyone took them in a context conducive to healing/therapy it would be positive. Unfortunately that's rarely the case (though it's becoming more common).
For me, despite regularly taking high doses of psychedelics (so far LSD and psilocybin), none of them have been huge life-shattering trips. They're just recreational experiences.
Maybe I'm just neurodivergent in a very specific way that isn't easily impacted by psychedelics. They're still my favorite substances and I still enjoy them, but it hasn't made that big of an impact on my life, other than being something to spend my money on, like you say.
Or maybe people with self-proclaimed life-shattering experiences are just extrapolating more out of their trip than what actually happened.
I'm sure plenty of people have legitimately improved their lives this way, but I don't believe the hype.
> when we need science.
Do SSRIs beat placebo?
That was absolutely unexpected effect. I still don't know what to think about it.
I'm not a psychodelic enthusiast
After LSD he just "forgot" to take them
I remember one trip I was reading this book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Very new-agey, acid culture type thing. A very spiritually intense book
I remember having this lingering feeling of "I probably shouldn't be doing these" because of some mental health history on my mother's side of the family. I remember there was this part of it about how people go insane off of psychedelics, turning the page and seeing this lightning bolt hitting a giant tower and seeing a bunch of people falling to the ground out of it. And right when I saw that, I heard the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my entire life (it was raining outside). Like it shook the whole fucking house
Afterwards I looked up the dude who wrote the book, saw he was a "new age" guy with a white robe on and sort of felt like I was tricked, and that the lightning was some type of coincidence. In hindsight I see this as pride from my part. Also that was the last time I did a psychedelic. There's this saying with them where "you get the message and hang up the phone", that was my cue
I was an atheist up to this point but that scared this fear into me that there's something out there. You can rationalize and come up with reasons to deny that (it isn't hard), but I'd rather not personally. At least, I feel more at peace now after accepting that there is
After many years of experimenting with pretty much every conventional and 'research' drug, MDMA is the only one that stands out to me personally as having a lasting impact on how I view the world.
Some marriages last decades, and over decades of life severe strains in interpersonal relationships let alone ones as intense as marriage can arise.
MDMA has been proven helpful in breaking down barriers of communication and allowing people to talk about difficult things, and allows people to develop stronger empathy for the people in their lives.
If it can help people who want to stay together actually stay together I think that's a great thing and is something that we should promote in the context of couples counselling.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, and it is absolutely fine by me for others to do exactly as they see fit, but I really do think that if you have to change yourself, via the use of drugs, this can only be a wrong answer. Perhaps it is acceptable in an emergency as a short term solution.
The reason I say this, is that if you really have made structural errors with your life, or have simply changed, it is fine to admit the failure and move on. There's no point in accommodating yourself to a relationship that is broken, via the use of drugs. You are simply prolonging the pain you inflict on yourself and on the other person in the relationship. Relationships can end, and that's ok. Better for everyone probably, in the long run.
(I too, strongly believe there are times for cutting your losses instead of molding yourself into someone else’s preferred shape. But not all relational problems are like that!)
But it's also fine to want to stay and fix these things.
> There's no point in accommodating yourself to a relationship that is broken, via the use of drugs.
How do you feel about drug use in general? It seems to me that it isn't so much that you're critical of therapeutic drug use in a couples counselling context so much as you're opposed to drug use entirely? Is that accurate?
I'm saying you shouldn't take drugs to change yourself to accommodate something that you already know makes you unhappy. To me, it sounds (roughly) equivalent to getting drunk to deal with a broken arm - it's not really a solution that is going to work in the long run.
Re fixing things, of course one should try this! But if the fix is to take drugs... either you don't know what 'fixing' means (and, imo, it's 'talking things through') or, if you have tried talking and that failed, the relationship is probably already irredeemably broken. No need to contort yourself further, take your loss.
Put simply, I think you need to concentrate yourself, not dilute yourself for the benefit of others. You should do what makes you stronger. And happiness is your guide, or in reverse, unhappiness is your guide of what not to do. Buying happiness in a pill is not the long term answer.
If this sounds good to anyone here but you don't want to do anything illegal, drink kava instead. It's a food that's legal in the US (regulated as a dietary supplement), but it's perfect for open communication and empathy. r/kava is a great resource for anyone interested.
I agree. I wasn't really comparing it to MDMA. I was pointing out that what GP commenter was looking for can be found with kava:
> helpful in breaking down barriers of communication and allowing people to talk about difficult things, and allows people to develop stronger empathy for the people in their lives.
The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well... good grief.
I think this is overly dismissive. I don’t think we should all be taking drugs to squeeze every bit out of ourselves out into the next jira ticket, but elsewhere in the thread there’s a comment discussing fundamental breakthroughs in networking technology that came about after an LSD trip. If someone believes that microdosing improves the creativity and overall satisfaction with their job, is that a bad thing?
Objectively, those people are normalizing performance-enhancing drugs and the usual vicious cycle that goes with it.
Less objectively, they also tend to be the typically soul-less nerds who have made the technology industry so malicious.
You should run for office with that platform and see how far it carries you.
MDMA may also be the only, or among the few, things that really work in and for couples therapy (it's also not a panacea). Banning it is a travesty.
There's an interesting alternative world chronicled in part by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, and by others, in which psychedelics are integrated into therapy, psychiatry, and other forms of medicine and improvement.
MDMA can cause permanent tolerance and brain damage, and even though there has been plenty of research and testing by harm-reduction communities (like Bluelight), it's still not fully understood how this works or how to guarantee the substance's safety. This is probably why it should stay banned, at least for now.
LSD and psilocybin are much safer, in my opinion. I would probably say LSD is the safest, since high doses of psilocybin can render me unconscious, but that could just be me.
Simply unbanning MDMA with no further action though wouldn't be very productive right now when it still is quite unknown. I hope more research and clinical trials can be done in the future, with all sorts of things and not just MDMA.
Personally I think a great many of the problem outcomes with psychedelics is related to consumerism and the desire for quick fixes. A society blanketed with pharmaceutical advertising and indoctrinated with the notion that pills fix health problems will tend to generate individuals who think taking some drug will 'fix' them. A typical outcome for such people is that they try some psychedelic, have a great time, and then run back to the well for another taste, and then have a horrible grim experience, reliving some past personal trauma or consumed with morbid thoughts of death and darkness, etc. - the so-called 'bad trip'. Let alone people who take so much they completely dissociate with sensory reality, a very dangerous situation as they may fall off cliffs, walk into traffic, etc.
More often than not, people indoctrinated into consumerist drug use will instead turn to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzos, etc. - all drugs with fairly predictable feel-good effects, a variety of negative health effects, and high addiction potential - but not much risk of a 'bad trip'. In contrast, psychedelics have potential for combatting addiction to such drugs because they lead to introspection, self-reflection, and the realization that the short-term feel-good effects of addictive drugs are not worth the long-term consequences - the degradation of ones' mental and physical capabilities, degraded social relationships, loss of emotional control and so on.
Like, this attitude of "oh NOW we see, we were just dumb 40 years ago! Everything will be better because NOW we get it" strikes me as exactly the same attitude that caused this problem in the first place.
The regulators etc thought they knew better and "fixed" the errors of the past by starting the war on drugs.
I guess to me, like, just focus on science and principles like free speech and the funding of interesting hypotheses. I feel like we're just demonizing a new group here and not learning the lesson of: "stop demonizing."
Your other points I understand. This particular one I find controversial as one of the unkowns is what is an ideal setting? I've got friends that will drop a tab, and go for a beer - just as impossible for me as sitting in a 'controlled environment' [therapeutic setting] with a shrink, or a Man-retreat for ex-military types. I'd like to just have easy access to a known quality, and strength of chemical, that I can happily take, wheresoever I prefer.
I'm fairly libertarian on drugs, but I do think there is a big difference when it comes to psychedelics. The potential harms aren't only to the person doing it, but for people around them who might be victims of their psychotic break. It's safest if there is someone around to administer a benzodiazepine or antipsychotic if necessary.
Fyi research apparently shows that mentally unwell people are more likely to be physically harmful to others as compared with the average. Sounded weird to me but apparently there's some data.
[0] https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeople.h...
Also, there is this letter from Hoffman to Jobs:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/read-the-never-before-pub_b_2...
Do you have a source or any additional keywords I might be able to use to search for it?
"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead – who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.
"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180223065640/https://www.wired...
---
Kevin Herbert - https://maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf
Harm reduction is better than fearmongering and imprisonment.
>People can get burned badly by a contaminated or adulterated supply.
It's almost like it isn't worth the risk.
That's not the kind of fearmongering I'm talking about. I'm talking about withholding information about drugs, talking only about the risks they pose and all the reasons why nobody should ever take them. The "war on drugs" isn't just about telling people about the very real risks of drugs, it's about convincing people that these risks are all drugs are, and that if they want to take them, they are on their own and will face criminal charges or imprisonment. That is trying to scare people so much about drugs that they avoid them purely on the basis that they are scary and risky and illegal.
While this works on a lot of people, it does not work on everyone, and those that want to try a substance anyway are left completely on their own. They do not have a safe supply, they do not have reliable sources of information about the substance they plan to take, they do not have instructions or help to take it in a way that is safe.
It's not a good justification to say that this is okay because nobody should be taking these substances in the first place. You can't just prevent all drug use. Plus, some people legitimately have brain chemistries that would benefit from things like psychedelic trips or microdosing, even outside of a clinical environment under the supervision of a medical professional. There is little reason to make it difficult for them to take a substance like LSD safely and responsibly if it is a substance that can be used that way.
To be clear, I'm not talking about junkies or drug addicts here. There are communities of people who seek mind-altering experiences as a form of curiosity and adventure, and not as a coping mechanism to escape reality or generate endless pleasure. It can be a recreational activity that doesn't deserve the stigma that it has gotten.
> It's almost like it isn't worth the risk.
The problem is that risk is artificially created. That risk does not have to exist. People could have access to safe, regulated supplies of drugs, just like pharmacies have access to safe regulated supplies of potentially life-altering medication for things like ADHD. Just like you can buy cough medicine from the store and not be afraid that it has fentanyl in it and that you could get sick and die from touching the package. (Fentanyl isn't anything like that by the way, that's such ridiculous exaggeration on the part of the media.)
And yet, I've never wtinessed a pro-drug speaker attach the caveat that any given street drug will damage neural architecture in a manner that makes it more difficult to function long-term.
>isn't just about telling people about the very real risks of drugs, it's about convincing people that these risks are all drugs are
In the wide world of warning labels, what other example can you give where the warning includes subjective benefits that users advertise?
The world does not have to cater to the psychology and perceptions of addicts that use substances that unquestionably lead to disaster on a consistent basis, anymore than it is morally compelled to advertise the benefits of anything else that it warns against for the good of society and the individual.
>That is trying to scare people so much about drugs that they avoid them purely on the basis that they are scary and risky and illegal.
Yes
>those that want to try a substance anyway are left completely on their own. They do not have a safe supply, they do not have reliable sources of information about the substance they plan to take, they do not have instructions or help to take it in a way that is safe.
Sounds like a good advertisement to not take street drugs.
> It can be a recreational activity that doesn't deserve the stigma that it has gotten.
No
>People could have access to safe,
Nothing is safe that damages neural architecture, at minimum.
> just like pharmacies have access to safe regulated supplies of potentially life-altering medication for things like ADHD.
Its not just like that. In people with true ADHD, meds make them feel more "sober "than without. Thee isn't a street drug in existence that does the same for anyone, aside from someone with ADHD taking a clinical dose of street methamphetamine. But that is already available via prescription.
People do have issues. They should get them prescribed for, especially if considering a regimen of street drugs as an alternative treatment plan.
>Fentanyl isn't anything like that by the way,
reposted without comment
That's because you can't just make that assumption about every "street drug". I believe Desoxyn is still sometimes prescribed to help overeating disorders by reducing hunger.
Most of the danger comes when you abuse them recreationally, taking more than you are supposed to, more often than you are supposed to. According to at least one study, meth can actually be neuroprotective at lower doses [0] - but it can also get extremely neurotoxic at higher doses [1].
Of course, another huge chunk of the danger comes with the fact that when sourcing illegal substances, you're not guaranteed the supply will be pure or even that it will be what you ordered in the first place. Reagent test kits [2] are a very helpful harm-reduction measure here, I just wish that they were cheaper.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25724762/
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870191/
[2]: https://dancesafe.org/shop/
> Nothing is safe that damages neural architecture, at minimum.
Almost anything can damage neural architecture. In fact, you can damage it without any "street drugs" at all. Trauma, neglect, bad routine, bad hygiene, bad diet etc. can all cause certain degrees of neurodegeneration. Some people just don't know any better (like me) or are in situations where they can't prevent it (like abuse victims).
This is a completely normal and expected side effect of neuroplasticity, and almost all substances (even the ones that doctors prescribe that aren't "street drugs") have the capability to negatively affect cognitive development. There's a reason why the term "maladaptive" exists.
IOW, by "safe" I didn't mean that a substance would be unquestionably safe to use. I mean that it would be safe to trust that you are getting a pure and unadulterated product, because production would be regulated just like legal OTC medicines are today.
Nothing is perfectly safe, even standing up too fast can be dangerous for some people. Some people even die from rolling out of bed in their sleep. Requiring perfect safety is unrealistic - obviously, usage of each drug has to be considered rationally.
Prescriptions are usually how this is done, don't get me wrong! Hell, I even talked to my doctor about magic mushrooms and he said that microdosing psilocybin should be OK for me, even though he's not allowed to prescribe it since pharmacies don't provide it here. YMMV, of course.
> In people with true ADHD, meds make them feel more "sober "than without.
This sounds like it's almost a No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if "true" ADHD were a thing, a diagnosis of ADHD can still be caused by all sorts of underlying conditions. Someone using stimulants to treat ADHD will still be different than someone who simply doesn't have ADHD and doesn't use stimulants, because stimulants have extra side effects that don't have to do with treating ADHD.
You have to weigh the positive effects against the negative effects and only then see if the tradeoff is worth it. There are very few, if any, "miracle drugs". Even drugs that can be miracles, can only work that way under very specific circumstances, for very specific brain chemistries.
> reposted without comment
Fentanyl will not instantly kill you just from touching an imperceptibly small amount. It is extremely potent, but it's not just going to di...
The psychedelics you are against would show you what it feels like to live without the emotional factors you use to think. Giving you control of yourself to persue truth seeking.
I tried to quote specific parts of your post where this is the case, but the entire thing makes my "case in point" (the correct phrase, over your incorrect "case and point").
I remember an old and dear chemist friend of mine there who made me aware of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). I still have his copy of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History he lent me after taking a sociology course on drugs in society, if I recall correctly.
It was cool to see your mention of Ginsberg and the Beats, my wife and I just stopped through City Lights and the small, but pretty neat, Beat museum that's nearby.
Anyway, congrats on the book, I look forward to reading it!
Yet the standard of rigor for alcohol, weed, SSRIs and tiktok is somehow not as stringent.
Only one of these is conventionally understood to confer a net benefit in its most common use cases, and the SSRIs have been subject to extensive testing and approval processes.
I disagree with the sibling commenter that alcohol does not dramatically alter your perception of reality. He simply isn't drinking enough. Likewise it is more than possible to limit the psychedelic dose so that it does not lead to heedlessness; Shulgin noted that many users prefer what he called a "plus-two" instead of the highly disorienting "plus-three".
While the medical application of psychedelics is probably going to be subject to the same rigorous approval process that characterizes the medical application of other things, the primary benefits attributed to conventional psychedelics are not easily reconciled with the usual endpoints of contemporary medicine. People claim to have experienced improvements in moral character, reasoning about certain problems, interpersonal trust, and other behavior changes which are not considered targets of treatment by contemporary medicine. There have been a few limited studies looking at psychedelics for depression and anxiety, but the improvements are just OK, though the prospect of just taking a drug once instead of daily is certainly attractive.
Meanwhile, the non-prescription use of psychedelics has been "experimented" with in a few cases, particularly in the Netherlands, Oregon, and Florida. Unfortunately, while incidents of psychedelic-influenced misbehavior are rare in general, they seem to become more common when the availability of these drugs is decriminalized. My hypothesis is that people are more likely to be reckless when they are not afraid of getting caught. A system of licensure for users would hopefully help prevent this.
SSRIs barely beat placebo and have a significant side effect profile
We keep using them because they sorta work a little, which is better than placebos, even if marginally, and we don't really have better tools.
Seems we might have now. Psilocybin and ketamine research is looking very promising
Weed, you might have a point, but it's also fairly evidently far more benign than alcohol and tobacco, and has been pretty clearly unjustly demonized for decades in an attempt to target specific populations, so it's not unreasonable for the pendulum to overcorrect a bit before we find a comfortable equilibrium.