>> As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens.
Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.
I can't help but notice that this is basically how we got oxycodone, and even stronger opioids such as fentanyl. Would the opiod crisis have been so extreme if the hardest stuff you could get was raw opium? Not that opium's not a hell of a drug itself, but as I understand it, the risks of serious health issues like fatal overdose are not as high compared to synthetic opiates. Jeet Thayil's semi-autobiographical novel Narcopolis touches on this. Set in Bombay, the opium-addicted characters run into problems when dealers start switch from selling opium to heroin.
I'm not sure how this might play out for psychedelics, which are generally not addictive, but the incentives are similar. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, in fact I'm excited to see where those incentives lead things. Will researchers invent a hangover free ecstasy? Acid you can drive to work on? Lovely.
This may be somewhat difficult, however, given the prior art of Shulgin and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL. TIHKAL and PIHKAL cover a lot of ground.
The problem is not that we lack patent unencumbered medicine, the problem is that only patent encumbered medicine has the incentives behind it to fund studies into its safety, and the rest of the FDA process.
There was an NYT article not too long ago whose entire point is that "true" psychedelic drugs are too dangerous to go mainstream, but isolated chemical compounds that provide some of the chemical effects of LSD / Mushrooms / Ketamine without the "trip" were a much better way to go. The reasoning was that they could engineer a way to chemically induce neuroplastic change in the brain without the liability of visual or auditory hallucinations.
Talk about missing the forest from the trees.
The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.
My belief is that the “trip” is us being able to observe more about our brains than we typically access. My personal experience indicates to me that the “trip” is removing filtering processes the brain uses to remove noise and irrelevant information to the task at hand. When in a “trip” then, it’s more like we are seeing what our brain sees—the things that appear auditorilly and visually are due to neural circuits overfitting and subsequently not being able to filter the misreads and “extra data”.
I’ve always thought of it like a self-diagnostic mode/tool where we get exposed to debug data that our brain normally would filter out.
Anyone curious about psychedelic methods of action, particularly based on their personal experience, should read Surfing Uncertainty or at least the SSC review/summary of it.
The predictive processing interpretation of these drugs is that they change the balance between top-down predictive generative models from our "deep" brain and noisy bottom-up sensory percepts from the peripheral brain. When you get super-resolution like experiences of banal everyday textures, that's your peripheral brain failing to filter them out for lacking novelty, when you get psychedelia style visuals that's intermediate "layers" of abstraction running amok, and when you go off on extended narrative experiences fully detached from reality that's the deep generative models doing their own thing unmoored from the error signals your senses would otherwise generate.
It's an awesome book in many other respects, but IMO the best bit is how many plausible mechanistic explanations it offers for psychedelic experience.
These mystical experiences are part of the outcome, not an environmental variable. There maybe anecdotal or some other kind of evidence in the sense of what the effect of the supporting environment is on the long term.
this thread is all about the “trip” ie the mystical experience aspect, that presumably the “plasticity-specific” novel psychedeloids do not occasion because they are not considered part of the physiological outcome but merely a drug experience. that is what the comment I replied was countering: GP claimed more study was needed to say the trip IS the treatment, and I’m saying the research has been done.
No, none of these studies compares drugs that induce the supposed neuroplasticity effect without the trip to normal hallucinogenics. The claim was that the trip is what makes the drugs work, but we haven't investigated that question yet because the new drugs aren't available.
There are good salience-based reasons to think the effect is important too. The trip is what makes these drugs work, at least. It seems implausible to me that the trip is merely some threshhold side effect that gets triggered with higher likelihood at the therapeutic doses. At therapeutic doses you’d expect to see a lot more effective non-mystical trips if the trip was an ancillary addon. But, they’ve modified ibogaine in such a fasion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33299186/. So we will see!
Research on psychotherapeutic use of hallucinogens is done on this premise. At this point I believe it would be unethical to perform such a study. It would risk exposing subjects to psychological harm.
Edit: on the premise that the environment is crucial for the outcome. This means creating a safe comfortable environment.
Maybe with these new drugs will show otherwise in time.
Not at all. There are plenty of ways to study self reported effects. You'd just have to compare reports from those who experienced a trip vs not, or find another clever method of controlling for the trip experience.
Proponents frequently mention things like this, yet _no one_ who publicly admits to psych use is someone I want to be.
All the people I've ever met, and friends who didn't but started down that road, aren't "all there" anymore. They'll preach day and night about the "benefits", but from the outside looking in it's obviously a coping mechanism.
While I may not be someone you want to be for specific reasons relating to our individuality, I am a long time psych user and I'm demographically and overall culturally someone that is presented as desirable to be. I'm in a reasonably high income percentile, I lack unsecured debt, I'm happily married, I have a diverse social circle and several personal hobbies, I stay physically active, and I enjoy intellectual pursuits.
I'd be very curious to know what specifically about me, or about something you assume about me, would make me someone you don't want to be?
I can’t really give you a fair shake without meeting you, but I can say that I appreciate your reply.
As a real psych user, you should accept that your post clearly has the subtext:
“I have everything most people want, so you’re wrong”
I, too, have everything most people “want”. Maybe we’re equally well off, maybe we’re not. I’ve still never met anyone on-level who indulges in this habit that kept it, and you should know that at our level it’s about keeping it not having it, at least for very long.
I know alcoholics who are well to do, out of debt, happily married, and have a diverse social circle and several personal hobbies, get exercise, and enjoy thinking. None of that shows the merits of alcoholism. I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I could guess that it's your drug addiction that they have no desire to emulate.
Addicts insisting that their addiction isn't one is cliché for a reason.
Setting aside the hilarious disrespect of assuming that I'm a drug addict from single comment on the internet, you are capable of realizing that taking issue with people who use a drug only because of the mental and social association you have of people who use the drug is a super tight loop of circular logic, aren't you?
The idea of accusing someone of being a drug addict in the context of psychedelic use is absolutely hilarious. You sound completely uninformed and pretty much nobody should take you seriously on this topic.
Many psychedelics are the opposite of addictive: if you take LSD for more than a couple of days, for example, the effect diminishes to nothing, whatever dose you take. You need at least a couple of weeks to re-sensistise.
I challenge you to find someone addicted to psilocybin. I would be impressed if someone managed to do a trip sized dose let’s say… 2x a week for any long duration.
>>necessary condition for addiction.
Necessary, but not sufficient
You might also note that the GP said nothing about frequency of use, only "long time psych user", AND that no one here has defined "high frequency" in terms of an actual threshold for addiction.
The fact is that for all drugs, and especially for the psychedelics, there are far many more people who use occasionally and responsibly than the subset who are addicted. AFAIK, the psychedelics are not considered addictive at all, either physically/physiologically or mentally.
I agree. Traveling expands the mind, but you don't want to be traveling all the time. Is travel addictive? Maybe for some but for most of us probably not
alcohol is neurotoxic and addictive. psychs are neurotrophic and non-addictive, but the purity isn't guaranteed. Impurities are common in blackmarkets.
I publicly, to my peer group at least, state I have enjoyed benefits of psychedelic drugs every five or ten years, I am pretty sure I have my shit together compared to most people. That being said i know the people you are talking about, but they in my experience use drugs much more frequently. Multiple times a year, and regularly also smoke weed etc.
Obviously biased when talking about myself, but I think you can split your judgement into a frequency argument rather than a binary yes or no.
You won’t see benefits if your sample only includes addicts! But some people’s drug habits are objectively not addiction. For example, someone who takes LSD 3 or 4 times a year, with months in between. It seems quite plausible to me that this could be beneficial to them whereas someone taking it say twice a week would see detrimental effects.
Taking it twice a week is a waste of a dose, unless one is microdosing or threshold dosing (where tolerance, in my experience, doesn't quite kick in as hard).
Addiction issues are a totally different animal. Just look up the definition of addiction. I’ll comfortably stand by my statement of use on the order of every few years being wellllllll within the margins of reasonable use.
Your absolutist stance is absurd. Just because all people who don't believe that some substance affects them negatively are wrong because a certain percentage of people who consume that substance are actually wrong. The same goes for certain changes in behavior, they don't automatically mean that a problem exists.
This basic claim is like saying an ocasional drinker who's become more social because alcohol helps them with talking to groups of people in certain specific situations is no different from an alcoholic because both drink and behave differently while drinking. Context, quantity and quality all make defining differences. How tedious it is to be judged harshly by someone who can't see this and takes any example of consuming something as a case of not admitting addiction. Often there really is no addiction.
This is the kind of anecdote that I used to hear about smoking weed. Tripping can be abused as a means of escape like many other things (work etc), but over-use without a proper cool-off/reintegration period can definitely throw one off psychologically. It’s a powerful tool that should be feared and respected (like the ocean) for its ability to fuck you up if you’re reckless.
People who do a bad job of concealing their illegal activities probably make other failures in judgment, too. The most well-adjusted psychedelic users I've met were the ones who only told me after I had known them for years.
as with anything, there is a set of people who are too excited, and they are all evangelists
you know plenty of people who aren't vocal about their experiences because they understand it's not appropriate or acceptable in the situations you have shared.
Read a meta study like https://mindmedicineaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Long.... From section 3.3-3.4, you can see that psychedelic use is beneficial for anxiety and depression and results in improved well-being, increased openness to experience and increased spirituality. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for substance abuse has positive effects. The safety profile shows that they are not risk-free but that there are few negative long-term effects.
> psychedelic use is beneficial for anxiety and depression
The claim is that psychedelic use is beneficial /because/ it's psychedelic, but this isn't necessarily true (because of the rule that the boring outcome is the most likely). You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.
> increased spirituality
Is that a positive effect? Imagine all the people you know turning into Gwyneth Paltrow.
> You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.
Maybe it can be done but the real reason that the companies are working on this is that they can patent these new drugs, and that would increase patients' costs (see esketamine vs ketamine). A better use of money might be to do larger studies of existing psychedelics/dissociatives, since these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most and we won't know long-term effects of new drugs and whether they do much besides what they would get potentially approved for. These companies would then have a big incentive and money to lobby to keep the existing psychedelics/dissociatives illegal.
> these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most
I don't know whether the experience of purple sage counts as psychedelic; I tried it once. The visuals are reminiscent of LSD visuals, but richer. But there's no euphoria at all. Combined with extreme couch-lock, I didn't find it enjoyable.
OTOH I think you'd be surprised at how many people you know in your daily life probably are taking psychedelics these days, especially on the west coast.
The compounds being discussed can have major long term effects from one/few experiences.
If 5 "trips" over the span of as many years in someone's early twenties provided a decade of long term positive changes, would you classify that as a coping mechanism?
There may be confirmation bias. Plenty of people might imbibe psychedelic drugs, but you wouldn't know because they don't talk about it with you and they are "all there".
You do it a few times and move on with your life. The Beatles famously only did it a handful of times during their most productive period and stopped all together eventually.
> The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself.
IMHE, it's not, at least in regards to (racemic) ketamine and depression. The benefit doesn't appear until ~24 hours later, and the effect scales with dosage, but not trip intensity or outcome.
I found taking it almost unpleasant at times, but the subsequent effects uniformly profound. Unfortunately, I developed a rare health issue, or I'd still be taking it.
"In our study, OABSS (overactive bladder symptom score) significantly increased with the combined use of ketamine and marijuana (P = 0.016). Cannabinoids are the active components of marijuana, and select cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2, have been identified in the human detrusor and urothelium."
The problem is that Pharma companies can't patent and sell a full spectrum product. They can only make the big bucks by getting a certain compound approved after going through the full FDA process on that one particular compound. It's the same thing we saw with kratom. The FDA had multiple attempts over the last 7 years to ban it, while kratom is basically as harmless as coffee. It took a massive grassroots effort to stop the ban. Then shortly after it comes out that GlaxoSmithKline, who the FDA head (Scott Gottlieb) at the time of the attempted ban sat on the board for just a year prior, was trying to bring synthetic 7-hydroxy-mitragynine (7hm is thought to be a main active ingredient in kratom) to market, which it has a patent on. Follow the money people
It’s like when med chemists trialled a cannabinoid-blocker as an experimental appetite suppressant. Surprise surprise, it gave the participants depression and suicidality.
> Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.
And I personally know people for whom the exact opposite is the case. I'm very much looking forward to the rise of psychedelic therapy.
And that's a good thing! I am in NO way advocating for a one-size-fits-all approach. There should be many different avenues available for those who wish for different experiences. For people who aren't experienced with psychedelics, doing it in a place they are comfortable in is of utmost importance. The same logic applies to those who are experienced with the substances.
If you want to trip in nature, or on your couch, or in your therapist's office, or wherever else you might find to be the optimal set/setting for your experience, you should be able to do so.
That said, I'm all for taking whatever works in a setting that works for the user.
You mean the isolated subparts right, not actually doing LSD-style drugs in a clinical setting?
Every person I know who had a 'bad trip' did so at a concert or some place they weren't alone or in a quiet area outdoors with close friends (not that there aren't rare exceptions to this rule).
Well, I love my therapist, and research suggests that psychedelic assisted therapy is effective. I've never taken a large dose of mushrooms because I am nervous about where it would take me, so personally doing that with my therapist could be pretty nice. Tho expensive lol.
I've only really done LSD once tho and it was interesting, and seemed more low key than shrooms, so maybe I should try that again.
You likely did a starter dose of LSD. Also, it doesn't depend on stomach processing to activate, which means its not diet dependent - shrooms very much are. Plenty of people make a mistake of taking shrooms after eating a meal, not getting anything after an hour, taking more thinking their shrooms are weak, and then when it hits they are taken for quite a ride.
The right way to dose shrooms IMO is not eating 4 hours prior, ground up fine (and optionally put into gel capsules if you can't stand the taste), and taken with OJ. This gives you a very strong and peaky trip at minimal doses, but the peak lasts for 2-3 hours, whereas LSD is generally a whole day affair event at lower dosages.
Its also worth while imo to grow your own shrooms. There is this philosophical meta element of taking charge and creating your own medicine which then you take can better your own life, which can be a very positive thought during the trip.
Oh sure. Yeah I've done all that, including growing them. And I always take them on an empty stomach. The thing is that shrooms bring up a lot of deep emotions for me which can be hard to handle. I don't have much experience with LSD but that trip was more cerebral and easier to deal with than the emotional roller coaster of shroom trips I've had. Maybe it was just the dosage, I don't know.
I'm sure your LSD dose must have been low. A good dose of LSD creates the most powerful experience I've ever had, and it's not really controllable. Shrooms are much more gentle; it's much easier to "look away" from the experience.
N,N-DMT is my preferred psychedelic when my intent is a strong, "reset" trip. It's given me the absolute highest amount of focus control and seems to diminish the effects of my dopamine deficiency almost entirely for the better part of a couple of months, and the positive effects are still very slow to fade from there. Even today, three years after my last deep DMT trip, I find I still pull personal philosophy from it that guide me in the direction of kindness and warmth towards others.
Especially for such a short duration in consensus time (my trip was about 45 minutes, a bit on the long side but again I smoked a cigarette directly before consuming DMT, which I understand has MAOI properties and thus can extend the duration of DMT), DMT is one of the most powerful substances known to mankind. Perhaps 5-MeO-DMT might be more powerful, but there is physical risk involved there in such a way that isn't present with N,N-DMT.
It’s not more low key it’s actually much more intense, or rather can be depending on dosage. Easier to exact dose with LSD. Mushrooms are over quicker and as a result can be more pleasant.
Well you can get a guide (or just an experienced friend) for less than a therapist.
Also, LSD is not lower key than shrooms; maybe you took a smaller dose or personally have a tolerance. But with high doses they can both be very intense.
Shrooms bring up a lot of emotions for me, while LSD felt more cerebral. I found the LSD easier to deal with. But then, I have less experience with it.
Seems pretty testable. Co administer the LSD with something to knock out the individual, and ideally prevent them from dreaming.
You could determine if the benifit(s) arise from the the process, experience, and dis/associations of the trip or simply the subconscious biochemical fuckery.
Bad trips are not caused by the drug, they're caused by set and setting. You just have to let go and accept whatever's happening to enjoy the trip. Unfortunately, letting go is easier said than done. The Ego is very good at self preservation and it invariably prevents the letting go process.
Good book about the subject matter is [0] How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan.
Set and setting are what create the good or bad experience. The therapist prepares the person for the journey while walking them out of any bad paths while on the journey. Layout and design of where the journey takes places must be soothing and relaxing.
Fun fact. Fungi growing closer to humans has higher potency in psilocybin than ones growing deeper in nature.
The thing that bothers me is that anyone who thinks they should decide for other people what (non-poisonous) chemicals they should put in their body is obviously so crazy that their opinion should be excluded from serious consideration on the matter. (This goes double if the person hasn't ever even tried the chemical(s) in question!)
Anti-drug hysteria has caused far more human destruction than all the bad trips and psychotic episodes put together. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in prison right now for illegal drugs. In some cases they had their lives ruined over nothing worse than a few grams of weed.
>the liability of visual or auditory hallucinations.
The visual/audio effects aren't what gets you on a trip, though. It's the headspace, the distortion of "automatic self-recognition", and to some extent, the role of the crucial 5-ht2a receptor in the sleep-wake cycle: all 5-ht2a antagonists are soporific, and almost all psychedelics produce insomnia as a side effect. A bad trip leading to worse after-effects practically always proceeds through a sleepless night.
Where does one buy LSD this day and age. Doesn’t seem very popular in my neck of the woods and have not heard anyone having it since I was in high school 20 years ago.
I recommend staying away from street dealers. There was a huge influx of NBOx compounds sold as LSD blotters since 2017 (apparently there was a global LSD shortage around that year, and IIRC they're cheaper to produce?) Their safety profile is not well-understood but it looks like it's riskier than the (very safe) LSD due to their vasoconstriction effects, and fatal doses aren't that high compared to active doses, unlike LSD which has a huge buffer.
Also people tend to describe their trips as being subjectively less pleasant.
And please, if you have to resort to dealers, invest in a cheap testing kit. You might be lucky and find a nearby non-profit that can not only do a cheap reactive test, but also a purity test.
Stay safe out there.
EDIT: Sibling comments also mention compounds like 1P-LSD sold online. I'd still test those even if bought from reputable vendors.
Anyways, their safety profiles aren't really that well understood either. They're suspected to be just metabolized into LSD and therefore pretty safe, but they're very new (~2015) and after all they're research chemicals (or rather, not-yet-researched chemicals). In comparison LSD had been known for decades and it's pretty well understood.
It's been at least decade since I did LSD or it's derivatives but I still read about them and I known that if you live in Canada a search for indole lysergamine and ALD-52[1] should lead you to a shop!
"Good trip" and "bad trip" are older terms created by recreational drug users who wanted to get high and have a good time.
Today, in therapeutic contexts, they use "easy trip" and "difficult trip" to give patients a sense of what to expect, and some context for how to interpret the experience they're about to have.
Some trips are like tropical vacations; peaceful respites. But others feel closer to climbing a perilous mountain, or trekking through endless desert, or slogging through dark marshlands.
Some of the most fulfilling journeys in life can be quite uncomfortable and hard, and notably, 70% of people that have bad/difficult trips do not regret the experience.
What makes the trip is worthwhile is if it causes you to learn and grow in a meaningful way.
I have had good trips and bad trips on a variety of highly psychedelic substances, and I've had a lot of those trips. Trying to engineer the trip out of the drug to get a desired psychoactive result free from pesky side effects like not being as grounded to reality for a while is absolutely missing the forest for the trees. Not to say that it can't produce some benefit but it's leaving a lot of unexplored potential on the table, largely in deference to failed puritanical ideals about recreational drug use.
I’ve had several bad trips in my life. I think they are the most impactful and clarifying. Uncomfortable for sure. Good trips let me know I’m comfortable with myself. Bad trips usually lead to uncovering or bringing to the front things that need to be addressed in my life.
It's not that simple at all. Bad trips can be more therapeutic than good ones. If you have tripless neuroplasticity, (a possibility I doubt) then what's your feedback mechanism? You might wind up selecting for shitty or dysfunctional behavior.
I've had many bad trips throughout my life, and they have always been the most educational. Learning about your shortcomings and confronting your demons and traumas isn't supposed to be a pleasant experience.
i have tried all the psychadelics that dont provide "trips" . all of them were complete failures yet they show effects on mice for some reason but when did that ever matter.
The only interesting one that was impressive was tabernanthalog but even though it didn't produce a twitch response in mice it clearly had a psychadelic effect
I belong to a group where we group our money together to either get the required precursors to make them or hire chemists over seas . It's quite easy but larger quantities are required to bring down the cost
There are a lot of other substances as well just recently we were able to procure very cheap rapamycin for people with autoimmune issues
If you are interested in joining or just look around reply to me here
After a group buy the admin has his own site where he sells it as well. We had another chemist but he was in Ukraine and is missing currently . He had a huge selection of compounds on his own site .
The whole point of the article is that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity within the brain, and that pharma companies are trying to synthesize a molecule that does exactly that, but without the hallucinations.
Do we really need new ones? Maybe, we just need to decriminalize nature and let a shamanic class arise to guide us on a spiritual journey of self-awareness.
Shamanic rituals have been the cornerstone of many of the great civilizations of the past. Why are substances that induce introspection and a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself banned?
I recently did LSD. It wasn't my first encounter with psychedelics but none have done what LSD did. I have a good bit of trauma that I'd attempted to work through throughout my life. The thing is, many of those things are settled. I cannot change them, I've course corrected my life away from my actions being influenced by these things, and on the exterior I think most people would find me well adapted. I was pretty miserable on the inside though; those traumas hue the depths of your soul in ways that intentional and advertent action cannot rectify, only mask.
LSD gave me the power to set those things to sea and give them the burial they needed. Not all of them are gone, but I'm in a much better place because of it.
There is nothing different that I need, just make it so I don't have to order it on the dark web.
Edit: Happy to answer questions about my experiences. Can also be reached on Libera if public questions are not what you want.
I think most of us are desperate to see ourselves from a different perspective (whether we realize it or not), but that's really hard to do when success in our day-to-day lives depends on us having a stable vision of ourselves and our place in the world. I think a lot of experiences, including a lot of drugs, can help either provide a temporary new perspective, or even shift our everyday view of ourselves and our lives more permanently. LSD seems to be one of the most effective.
mdma is generally even more powerful for healing trauma.
Or rather MDMA can accelerate healing by released "stored unprocessed memories"
LSD can help you by showing you a possibility of whats possible by dissolving the prision of identity and seeing the world from a non-local perspective.
I’ll second this. LSD provides a huge paradigm shift in a way mdma absolutely doesn’t, but if you already know your trauma causes irrational emotions or ones you’d prefer to go away mdma is where to look.
Personally LSD was an eye opening experience, but mdma is the only trip I’ve taken that I can say lead to changes in my perception that I still have to this day.
My experience was a little different. I knew my traumas, I had really already reckoned with them - I just needed to let them go, but that hinged on some things that I was having trouble accepting at a deeper level. LSD let me do that. My MDMA experience was fun, but I think that's what MDMA did for me - it taught me what it was like to have fun again, maybe even to feel truly happy and content with the world again.
These things are less rigid as people put in text, I think. At a certain level of LSD it's very like MDMA, but past that level it's very different.
Between LSD and mushrooms, I'll quote one of my friends, "LSD puts you in the drivers seat; mushrooms make you a passenger."
With the collapse of the SSRI hypothesis, I feel like there was a missed opportunity to interrogate what it is about the affluent, technological society that makes such a staggering number of people so depressed.
It seems that we will instead (characteristically) plow forward with even more powerful drugs.
Nothing new has happened with SSRIs. Everyone always knew perfectly well they don't work by "raising serotonin levels", but they do still seem to work.
Yeah, I saw a lot of bad takes on Twitter related to the "debunking of the serotonin myth" with the insinuation that they'd finally proven that serotonin itself has absolutely no involvement in depression or anxiety, and it was all just a big hoax perpetrated by Big Pharma.
And then you read an article like this:
> The receptor has proven crucial to understanding the neuropharmacology of the psychedelic experience induced by classical hallucinogens. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin—they all interact with 5-HT2A. (In certain circles, the phrase “5-HT2A agonist” has supplanted “psychedelic”...
5-HT2A receptors, of course, bind to serotonin (or at least that's our primitive theory of what's going on).
We've known for 70 years now that monoamines like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, etc. greatly influence mood. But our model of the brain is primitive, though that doesn't mean our current theories regarding these neurotransmitters like serotonin aren't on the right track.
Just because it hit the news last week doesn't mean the window has closed. You jsut have to be willing to get in arguments/break up with people who dislike hearing their assumptions questioned.
It's sad that the only way to legalize is to force people to see a qualified therapist and take patented psychedelics in order to benefit from the experience, but that's what the normies want.
I've taken them with a therapist and it was meh because the doctor/patient relationship became weird under the influence. On the other hand I've had peak experiences by myself alone in a redwood forest on a fresh clear morning.
Probably a mix of both. People who have some experience with drugs might want the benefit of the trip, but people who are a little more hesitant of the idea of mind-altering substances that last 8+ hours, such as LSD, might be more comfortable with some sort of watered-down experience backed by a major pharma brand and delivered by a licensed therapist.
Of course, drug companies and lobbyists also dream of such outcomes.
what of the insurance companies though? if they no longer have to pay for recurring treatments, then more of the customer’s monthly premium can go to the shareholder. Wall Street gets their recurring revenue one way or another.
Insurance is regulated. Typically they can only hold on to about 20% of the premium. If they collect too much money, you will get a rebate check mailed to you.
In America we live in a democracy (last I checked) so it's the mainstream public who decides in the end. The people in various western states were the first to decide that marijuana should be legal. So by normies I mean mainstream voters who worry about their children having uncontrolled access to psychedelics. Normies believe rules are made to be followed and laws are there for a reason.
Legalization would decrease underage availability, if anything.
To quote an older friend who grew up in a dry county in Alabama: “The bootleggers didn’t care how old you were which was a good thing because I liked to drink and when I was 16 I looked 13”
I think at least some normies want that. I'm pretty much as normie as it gets and I've been watching Michael Pollan's series on Netflix How to Change Your Mind. One day I might want to try LSD, psilocybin, or MDMA (those are the episodes I've watched) but probably wouldn't until I could buy from an FDA regulated company. I don't trust dark web sources or the neighborhood guy who knows a guy.
You can test what you buy with multiple reagent tests to make sure what you have is what you think it is. You can even send to labs if your extra paranoid. Also the dw runs on reviews. Some one selling something fake won't last long. Some have reputations from years of selling.
Reach out to a friend and explain your situation, I'm sure you can find what you're looking for. These substances are ubiquitous. You might benefit from having a friend around while you're tripping, anyway.
Mushrooms are being lightly legalized in some cities and states. And while a lot of that is under the umbrella of mental health or spirituality, it is not being confined to medical environments. The normies appear to be losing that particular battle. And I think they're set to lose a lot more.
I think utopia would be to have both. That would mean legalization, and free distribution, but you can still take it in a therapy setting if you want to.
These drugs clearly have risks. I know a case who took LSD and amputated his genitals during the trip (heard this first hand from the urologist who reattached said genitals). Sure, many or even most people will be fine, but some clearly won’t. Sure, he has a mental illness and took too much and was alone, but that’s exactly the issue. Do you have any suggestions how to make these drugs broadly safe without giving in to the supposedly unreasonable demands of the ‘normies’?
From a reply I made later to a self-professed normie: I'm excited by what you describe [successful therapy] and glad for it, but my sadness is that I could still be arrested by possessing mushrooms I picked for myself in a forest. I've been confronted by the authorities over this issue and believe me it is not a pleasant or healing experience.
A list off the top of my head mentally ill people should avoid: hand guns, rifles, poison, rope strong enough to hang oneself with, enough narcotics to go to sleep forever, dynamite, poison gas, large quantities of alcohol, religious cults, LSD...
Maybe I have a different perspective working in healthcare. People with mental illness tend to self-medicate with whatever is available, so you can’t lump dynamite and rope together with psychoactive drugs as the degree of actual harm is a different order of magnitude. As always, with any libertarian approach to regulation, it’s vulnerable people who suffer (mentally ill, poor, children) for the ideals of others. I find this is rarely a good deal in the final analysis.
I have a couple of psychiatric diagnoses so I am not unaware of the concerns of the mentally ill. People like me know to be very cautious with medicine, prescribed or otherwise. It should have a say in whether I should be locked up or what substances I feel I can safely use.
I think there's a problem that we can agree on and that is early detection and treatment of mental illness in teens before they get their hands on an AR-15 or LSD. As a culture, America is very neglectful in this regard.
I’m not sure what other options there are. Illegal: people go to jail. Legal: people who shouldn’t take these drugs will have access. I’m certainly open to suggestions though.
I'm in favour of drug decriminalisation. And I had good experiences with LSD; but for many years, my attitude was that LSD specifically should remain illegal, because for people who are prone to schizophrenia-like illnesses, even if they've never before shown symptoms, LSD can provoke an extreme episode.
I suspect that psychedelics maybe appeal particularly to people who are psychiatrically marginal. In my youth I tripped a lot, and a surprising proportion of the people I knew turned out to be schizophrenic or bipolar. But maybe it's just that I found the company of people who were psychiatrically marginal engaging...
How many thousands of cases of alcohol-related injury are there in ERs every day? If we're pointing fingers at drugs where the consequences include self-inflicted physical harm, there's a much more relevant drug that society has firmly decided is fine to legalize, and your single anecdote doesn't change that.
As a normie for whom ketamine treatment was a life changer, I can attest I would never ever have taken it without specialist supervision. And by specialist, I mean someone qualified, not some dude who has done plenty and has a K dealer.
I would hazard there’s a large contingent of normies for whom the difference between supervised medical treatments that happen to be psychedelics and just the act of taking psychedelics is too large a leap.
I personally hate the experience. The hate is part of the goal of being able to stop being in control all the time, but it doesn’t mean I like it. I also hate the hangover feeling afterwards, but the neuroplasticy benefits have been profound and so I keep doing the treatment.
TL;DR benefits are there, normies should be allowed them too, non-normies I assume can still do black market work.
>non-normies I assume can still do black market work.
Why do you want non-normies to have gun toting government thugs put them in a concrete box for 20 years because they don't want to get a permission slip to do the same thing you did?
I'm excited by what you describe and glad for it, but my sadness is that I could still be arrested by possessing mushrooms I picked for myself in a forest. I've been confronted by the authorities over this issue and believe me it is not a pleasant or healing experience.
I have a friend who has severe depression, including self harm and thoughts of suicide. So far guided meditation sessions and antidepressants have had little effect.
I have read that some illicit drugs can be effective in treating depression, even after just one or two uses. Can anyone suggest what might be the best option out of ketamine, shrooms, LSD or MDMA?
Please don't give your severely depressed friend random street drugs in hopes it will magically help them.
You are not equipped to purity test them, severely depressed people can become more suicidal on rebounds, and you are almost certainly not equipped to care for them if they hit a major health issue.
Most people I've met who use ketamine at all are addicted to ketamine, and long-term heavy usage has severe negative consequences. It has therapeutic uses and can be used to treat otherwise untreatable depression, but the risks are severe if somebody seeks it out on their own.
MDMA is a good trip, but damn the hangover: I wouldn't suggest your friend endure "suicide Tuesday."
Shrooms and LSD can be effective, but a bad trip can aggravate depression and anxiety.
There are no silver bullets. Therapeutic uses involve therapists. The only advice I can give is that your friend seek out a competent therapist.
After one "normal" dose of MDMA without doing a bunch of doses over a weekend or something, the hangover tends to not be any worse than a typical alcohol hangover.
Sounds like best-case analysis to me. Speaking as somebody who experiences depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts, it's a pretty bad idea to expect somebody to make rational choices while stuck in a pit.
Speaking very broadly, ketamine has shown positive effects on depression, MDMA on PTSD, and psychedelics on grief and to some extent anxiety. So it really depends on what your friend is dealing with in their personal life.
Would not recommend ayahuasca to someone with suicidal thoughts or a history of self-harm. Especially if they have not done any prior work/therapy as to the cause. (Disclaimer, not a doctor or any kind of therapist, but have drank it myself 150+ times and worked at an ayahuasca retreat where I've seen this situation).
Ketamine seems to be fast-acting for depression. A proper MDMA session with a therapist and follow up support is looking like a great way to work on things like this. (This is not advice: please don't take advice concerning illegal drugs from random people on the internet)
What about ayahuasca do you see as risky for someone with suicidal thoughts or a history of self-harm? Why does that risk not apply to these other compounds?
>Major findings were (a) adolescents who had been physically assaulted, who had been sexually assaulted, who had witnessed violence, or who had family members with alcohol or drug use problems had increased risk for current substance abuse/dependence; (b) posttraumatic stress disorder independently increased risk of marijuana and hard drug abuse/dependence; and (c) when effects of other variables were controlled, African Americans, but not Hispanics or Native Americans, were at approximately 1/3 the risk of substance abuse/dependence as Caucasians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
It seems like we should find ways to excite people about life and discovery rather than drum about the worker bee life. That's why people want drugs so much.
Go build something interesting - physical, not on the computer, stop doing drugs.
Sad really. As this headline might as well be: "Big Pharma: Patents Equal Profits."
There are plenty of cultures and associated history to support using what we already have available.
The only reason to invent anything new would be to control access and make a buck. We're going through that with the Covid vaccine. What does it take for us to learn from our mistakes?
> The line tops out at a dose of 10 mg/kg, or “mig per kig,” as chemists pronounce it.
So that would make the sweet-spot dose for someone my weight about 800mg, which doesn't sound very 'potent' to me. I haven't read PIHKAL, perhaps that dosage is in line with the kind of substances Shulgin tested.
Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.