This recent interview [1] with Jamie Wheal, co-author of Stealing Fire [2] is worth watching if you're interested in this topic.
He's observed the psychedelic "revolution" in recent years, and has both positive and negative things to say about it, but on the whole he's deeply pessimistic about where it seems to be going.
His observations about fashion-driven, Instagram-performative "enlightenment", and the propensity for a little bit of enlightenment to lead one down dangerous paths (including charging big money to lead others down the same dangerous path), are resonant for me, having been through the journey myself and seen it from both sides.
Discretionary uses of mind-altering drugs, especially those that have been prominent in youth culture, pop culture and party culture face massive resistance. Look how long cannabis is taking to reach legalization. Look at the barriers to medical scientists who want to study psychedelics.
In that sort of environment, it's near inevitable that the remaining "torch bearers" lean to the true-believer/fanatic end of the spectrum. The mild-mannered actors just won't put up with that sort of resistance. So, reserved scientists and practitioners who avoid hyperbole are under-represented.
Ultimately everything boils down to use. The details of therapeutic use, spiritual use and such. On the therapeutic end, I think there's room to be hopeful. It's just a good fit for a "talk therapy" approach that the discipline values already, and that many of the "one-a-day" prescriptions are not.
On the spiritual end, most living traditions are highly culturally mitigated. If/When it comes to the modern, apartment-dweller world, there aren't any social institutions that can fill that role (well, churches, religions, but that's unlikely to happen at scale). In tandem with the earlier point (the true believer advocates promoting psychodelics despite resistence), this probably adds up to a lot of quackery.
This is more worrying, or at least it points in the direction of purely "recreational" use.
Depends on your definition of spiritual, I suppose.
I didn't mean anything too semantically specific. I meant the religious/cultural practices using psychodelic which still exist and the new practices similar to them.
I'm not a hard lines type, so I'll concede a ton of grey area between spiritual, therapeutic and recreational... if that's what you're driving at.
Probably use that is intended as general self-improvement and finding better perspective on life in general, as opposed to the same but for something going wrong (therapeutic) or for fun (recreational). Really it could fit under therapeutic use.
Thank you for the video links. I had never heard of Jamie Wheal before - I enjoyed listening to his thoughts.
I also enjoy listening to Terence McKenna and Alan Watts every once in a while ... most of what they say often sounds completely irrational, outrageously verbose, ridiculous and border-line ramblings of "mad men" ... but their words are also powerfully disarming, deeply engaging and resonant and finally emotionally embracing. I don't know how to explain it. I wouldn't want to be caught listening to them!
I'd encourage you to have a listen to Erik Davis' "Expanding Mind" podcast.[1]
Erik Davis is, to my mind, the most interesting and intelligent of the post-McKenna visionaries/psychonauts. He's at the same time much more critical than most of his predecessors, and very open to an interested in extraordinary experiences and what he calls "high weirdness".
Agreed. Techgnosis was a very influential read for me and Expanding Mind is still a very unique program.
A bit late probably, but for anyone reading this I highly recommend tracking down Davis’s interview with McKenna conducted shortly before he passed. It was probably one of the first things I heard from either and became interested for life in both.
I really wonder if anyone ever really does anything for themselves anymore. Every experience, even the most intimate and introspective ones, seem to be telegraphed and advertised as a part of your "branded identity"
How would you even know if the vast majority of things people are doing don't get broadcast regularly if the things these people are doing does not get broadcast regularly?
Yeah, people do things for themselves. I have written, drawn, and programmed many things that I've never shared with anyone, and never intended to share. In some cases I've destroyed the work in such a way that I couldn't reproduce it exactly even if I wanted to. You could argue that I'm putting that on display right now, but I could just as well be lying to you, so I don't think that argument would hold up with regard to my motives. Also, my identity here isn't easy to tie to my identity IRL; if it was intended to be, I would have picked a more professional and socially acceptable name than blotter_paper :)
Some of us are not focussed on building our brand identity. I enjoy photography and back in the day my Flickr portfolio had 500k views. I still take photographs, but don’t now post them online because I want to enjoy the craft of creating them, not help others maximise engagement or similar
I would love to try a psychedelic trip with a trained therapist guiding me toward facing my fears.
I’m generally a pretty anxious person (diagnosed with OCD, managed with ERP therapy), and I feel pretty confident that it would force me to face that part of me. I have no doubt that it’d be a beneficial experience.
Buuuuut... part of me is super nervous about what I might also find. It’s like part of my mind wants to explore it, and the other part doesn’t, which creates a lot of inner conflict. I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do with two parts of my brain fighting with itself.
Side note: How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan is a fantastic book and worth a read.
You are right to be cautious. Don't let people oversell the benefits and minimize the risk. Yes, Johns Hopkins and some other places have early promising results, but these subjects were given counseling before, during, and after their trip. I'm sure for some people a lightbulb goes off and suddenly they can see the problems in their life which had been invisible to them and the benefit is immediate. Most of the time the message isn't so clear, and the benefit comes from actual hard work and changes that come as the result of your insights.
For example, I know I'm getting older, time is limited, and I'm mortal. Taking LSD and looking in the mirror and really seeing myself more objectively, all the wrinkles and saggy skin, the meat of my body hanging off my bones, makes my aging far more tangible and immediate than I can normally conjure. The trick is afterward maintaining that feeling and using it to make decisions about health, prioritizing things that are important, and dropping things that won't matter to me in 20 years.
If I had anxiety issues or deep trauma to work through, I'd absolutely want to use psychedelics in concert with a trained professional to minimize the risk of having things go wrong and to get help in figuring out what the trip meant to me (or "integrating" in the parlance).
There was a part in Pollan's book where he talks about how an experienced guide will remind you to face the things in your trip that are scaring you. And that running away is what turns a trip into a bad one.
My personality would naturally want to run away, where perhaps the point of the "scary thing" is to face it and deal with it in a suggestible state of consciousness. As an example, I have a lot of health-related OCD triggers. Perhaps it would be a positive experience to "see" these things during a trip and recognize that 1) I have no true control over them 2) sitting around and worrying about them won't do me any good.
I know that those two things are true, but my brain is pretty hard-wired to worry about whatever the current flavor of the week is.
ERP therapy has been great in sort of numbing the associated anxiety, but I'd love to push it a step further.
At the risk of overselling the benefits and downplaying the risk, I'll say this: even the trips I've had that were hell in the moment have (at least seemed to) teach me something about myself, and I don't regret them in the least. This isn't to say that a bad trip is something to be sought after, and you should definitely read up on set and setting before tripping (I would recommend being outdoors in the country on private land with good friends, daylight, and a source of upbeat instrumental music), but if it happens, just let go of all control, lay back, and remember that what feels like an eternity in the moment will be over before you know it. If you follow best practices, you'll probably have a wonderful time. If you don't have a wonderful time, you might still find it a useful experience.
Edit: oh, and bring some paint. Even if you aren't normally visually artistic, some paint and a canvas -- even a piece of plywood -- is an incredible thing to have while you're tripping.
Just to add my own experience. I am an experienced user of psychedelics with a lot of trips under my belt. The last time I took LSD I wound up thinking that my existence on earth was part of a universe that I myself had generated as the totality of subjective consciousness and thought I had control over it.
In a fit of excitable mania I ran around my sitter's home and leapt off their second story balcony. I'm still recovering from a broken heel, fractured T10 and fractured collar bone.
I had spent weeks planning and determining how best to organise the experience. I am now confident that no matter how much you try to minimise negative outcomes, they _can_ happen. Though they're probably rare.
That's an interesting perspective, and I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I was under the impression that those "jumping out of a window" stories were urban legends. I've definitely had psychedelics affect my beliefs about the universe in crazy ways (I briefly believed in god during a mushroom trip), and seen it in other people (a friend who normally has very down-to-earth beliefs about the universe once believed he could communicate with me psychically), but never in any dangerous ways.
Thanks. I also thought that they were urban legends. I do still think it's rare enough to not worry too much about, but at the same time I think the common narrative among psychedelic proponents that "if anything, it makes you _more_ alert/aware/whatever" is unrealistic.
As a community, though, psychedelic users have a pragmatic mindset about preparation and are generally sensible.
Hah! I suspect though that had I not debilitated myself it could have been worse. Before I jumped I attempted to run out to the stairwell, which would have resulted in me alone and running around London. I'm just glad I didn't hurt anyone else in the process.
OK, I wasn't going to share this again. But now I must.
So I'd introduced a friend to LSD. They liked it a lot, and wanted to trip again the next day. I advised against it, because tolerance would reduce effects.
But no, it had to be. So we took maybe twice as much, and it was still disappointing. And then, being a total dumbass, I suggested that we smoke some marijuana.
Now my friend was impressed. Indeed, they were totally panicked, and convinced that it would never end. Because their short-term memory had become maybe 30 seconds.
So I spent the next three hours saying "It’s just the drugs, it will pass."
I've experienced that exact bad trip, at it was horrible enough that I have never done psychedelics since. The one time in my life I thought I was dead. Not worth the risk to try again.
Plenty of other drugs that have real benefits without as much potential for a bad trip. MDMA is much more my speed.
MDMA is a lovely drug, but has it's own risks. I honestly don't think I would have gotten into programming if a friend hadn't suggested it while I was under the effects of MDMA (he had suggested it many times before without me taking the suggestion seriously, but I ordered a copy of Think Python the next day). I'm very thankful for the impact that drug has had on my life. The friend who prompted me to start programming had two months of severe anxiety after that bean drop. He had previously taken MDA about a week prior, which is something of an analog; my understanding is that they both dump your built-up serotonin, and if you dump too much serotonin at once you can have a rough time of life once the bliss wears off. Also, the literature seems to be mixed concerning the neurotoxicity of MDMA IIRC.
There is no running away from the trip. I mean, it's all in your head, so what could "away" mean? Except for some haloperidol, perhaps. And that is something that professional guides might have available.
But mainly it's fear that causes bad trips. So it helps a lot to have someone around who can reassure you, if you start feeling afraid. I've known people who freaked, and called 911. And that didn't turn out well.
Also, in my experience, Psilocybe spp. are much gentler than LSD, even at doses with comparable hallucinogenic effects. There's more "body trip" than withg LSD. It's almost like "pleasantly drunk" or effects of muscle relaxants.
Everybody's different and perhaps having someone do that role is a good thing. I'm not so sure. If you set out to discover yourself with someone else, then thats what you get, yourself with someone else. When they leave are you still the same? We're social animals, expecting to interact with someone is a different state. (yeah I'm not expressing this well but its been nagging at me for hours so I'm trying)
Personally my favorite mushroom experiences involve a full moon spring night, a coon hound, and square miles of wild woods. That's the trip I recommend; but so few people are blessed with good coon hounds now.
Maybe not, but there are therapists who specialize in guided psychedelic trips who encourage exploration and fear facing. Seems like they'd know how to guide the discovery process.
We need scientific clinical trials conducted without any therapist intervention in order to understand what good these drugs do on their own. All the BS about talk-therapy being necessary for them to work is going to keep them out of the reach of most people. The reality is that psychedelics will quickly put psychiatrists out of business unless the public is convinced they can't take psychedelics safely without a shrink watching over them.
The reality is that they’re currently out of reach for most people, and the only shot at increasing adoption comes with legally sanctioned institutions to help deploy them safely.
There are a few therapy modalities that can help, check them out and see if any resonate with you: core transformation (my fave), feeding your demons (buddhist), internal family systems, focusing (eugene gendlin), coherence therapy. All are predicated around the same few core concepts of having different parts of yourself that view the world in different ways, acknowledging and accepting that each of those parts has some positive contribution to our well being even though they get into conflicts with each other about their proper 'domains' of applicability sometimes.
In this case, it sounds like one part is worried that you'll label it as bad and try to change it without acknowledging the ways in which it might be protecting or helping you. If you read the wikipedia page on coherence therapy for instance you'll see the steps around needing to address those parts needs before they're willing to compromise.
Be careful because psychedelics are all about letting go of control and that can be hard for control freaks.
I'm not saying you are a control freak but OCD leads me to believe you're not far removed.
I know that I am one, so speaking from personal experience psychedelics can be frightening to a person who must control everything. You just have to tell yourself that you've taken a drug and there is a halflife of every drug.
It can't make you do anything, it can only change your perspective of what you want to do.
Meditation can lead to similar insights over time, with practice. And because it doesn’t happen “all at once” (unless you jump into the deep end of a silent retreat or something) it might alleviate some of your anxiety.
The funding discussed here is for scientific studies. But it's not clear what important question is still open and needs further study. From what I've read [1, 2, 3, 4], the psychological benefits are well-established and powerful if used in the right mindset, and the health risks are also well-established and rare or minor if used carefully.
So science seems to have answered the questions it can answer. The obstacle to wider use is policy and regulation.
Is funding scientific studies where the answers are already known an effective way to change government and social policy? It could be, but I hope everyone involved understands whether they're doing Science or Advocacy.
[1] Michael Pollan, _How to Change your Mind_
[2] James Fadiman, _The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide_
> the psychological benefits are well-established and powerful if used in the right mindset, and the health risks are also well-established and rare or minor if used carefully.
> I hope everyone involved understands whether they're doing Science or Advocacy.
The data (science) gives creditably to the activist and lobbyist hoping to change policy (advocacy). I think everyone is clear on what side they are on.
There is plenty of space for science to expand our understanding. What is the probability of a bad outcome of psychedelics? How does dose effect the probability of a bad outcome? Is Mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA the most effective treatment for PTSD? For end of life anxiety? For major depression? What conditions are these substances helpful for (I don't think we have a complete list)? When should a medical provider recommend psychedelics? Can psychedelics be used on everyone, or just those with certain conditions? How does repeated long term exposure adjust the risk profile? What is the optimal microdosing schedule? What are the objective benefits of microdosing? What is optimal microdosing dose? Who should be microdosing?
There are a lot of unanswered questions to answer, and probably even more questions we don't have enough data to know to ask. The studies that we have are with low sample sizes, so larger studies would be scientifically significant. What we have with psychedelics are a few recent studies done with modern scientific rigor that all conclude there is a lot of potential in this space. We have more historical studies done, but without modern scientific rigor and need to be recreated before being reliable data.
Lets not forget that while these human trials are taking place real people are legally being given life changing help. That's enough to make the entire thing worth it.
Yes, the obstacle to wider use is policy and regulation.
For those interested, some thoughts:
There are two types of users from a policy perspective. People with specific diagnoses/diseases, and "healthy" people.
For people with specific diagnoses and diseases, the most important work is FDA approval of MDMA and psilocybin. MAPS, COMPASS Pathways, and Usona are working on this and they require a bunch of money to get through to a successful FDA approval. Funding this research is a very high leverage way to enable policy change, because the FDA has a relatively clear process to approving a drug for medical use for patients with relevant medical diagnoses.
For "healthy people," there needs to be another route. Some people are working on ballot initiatives and legislation that will impact this (see Oregon, Denver, Oakland, Iowa) and that may be a high leverage route. But the path here is less clear. As you note in some cases, some types of research can be helpful for boosting political change, whereas others aren't going to be an efficient use of capital for that goal.
Here's one scientific question I'd like to see answered: If a patient is currently taking anti-depressants (or other meds) for the treatment of PTSD, depression, or addiction, and if a physician thinks a psychedelic treatment might help, how should they understand the interaction between the psych meds and the hallucinogen?
Since we're dealing with ill people, a larger amount of care is warranted.
It depends on the meds. MAOIs have a strengthening effect with every psychedelic, as far as I’ve read.
Anyone going for an ayahuasca treatment needs to know that an MAOI is part of that brew, so they’d have to stop their medication some weeks beforehand or risk potential death if already taking one.
The places running medical studies like Johns Hopkins probably have good info on interactions, unless they’re turning away study participants who take medication. Since they’re specifically looking at treating depression, anxiety, addiction, I suspect they’re accepting people who are already on a variety of medications.
> Is funding scientific studies where the answers are already known an effective way to change government and social policy?
A lot of the science had to be re-done because there were methodological issues in the original research, and no one was really sure whether or not the data was faked. I think it was Rick Doblin who discovered that one of the folks in either Leary's or Pahnke's studies actually ran away during the study, but because the researcher never reported this as a possible adverse event it opened up other questions about the validity of the data. It turned out the original data was basically accurate, but it wasn't necessarily a given.
From my experience, everything mentioned in the article can be "treated" with meditation. I say treated in quotes because all this is self-caused and treatment is only to realize that it's actually me is the one who is causing stress and anxiety to myself. Once this is realized these things disappear in a matter of days.
Meditation is long-established, safe, legal, available to everyone regardless of any status or condition (excluding only severe damage in brain/spine areas) and does not require billion dollar research.
Have you tried it? Perhaps there words aren't doing justice to the experience and what you're writing off as the same as some other act might be missing the target.
For example, having never tried meditation nor psychedelics, both yours and ops experiences seem barely believable. But I haven't tried either so I wouldn't go out and say that.
They're tools to achieve altered states of consciousness that can help you change the way you view yourself or your experiences. I meditate daily and have also used psychedelics recreationally in the past (this was a couple years ago, before I really took meditation seriously). I have problems with paranoia and OCD, and meditation has been incredibly helpful for learning healthier ways to deal with my emotions, along with improving my ability to focus in general.
With that said, I'm skeptical of the way the article approaches psychedelics as something of a cure-all for mental health problems, rather than a way to change your perspective. The Silicon Valley techie approach seems very narcissitic and performative, and I'm not sure that mass production by pharmaceutical companies will be a good thing.
Yes, I'm saying this only because last 1.5 years I'm doing my kriya practice which includes meditation, breathing technic and few other things and it has been working wonderfully - since I "got it" I never had a single bad day. I am comparing this to having occasional bursts of depression, loneliness, self-doubt for a few years before.
I did not try strong psychedelics but the problem with them as with any kind of drug is the effect wears off inevitably. If you feel great for some time, going back becomes even more terrible than staying there, because now you know there are better states. What sets meditation apart is that it is a process which (at a certain level) lasts through the day and even becomes permanent. This is something you can not get with outside help because you will just become dependent on the source of that help.
>I did not try strong psychedelics but the problem with them as with any kind of drug is the effect wears off inevitably. If you feel great for some time, going back becomes even more terrible than staying there, because now you know there are better states.
This is hard to claim if you've never tried it. Personally when I do a shroom trip I don't even feel like doing it again until months later. I've done it like 8 times in my whole life, usually for fun with friends but it always ends up enlightening and spiritual. The effects are permanent in a very good way. It's a trip, same as you travel to a different exotic country and explore a different world, the memories, the feelings you experienced and the knowledge you gained will stay with you.
>The effects are permanent in a very good way. It's a trip, same as you travel to a different exotic country and explore a different world, the memories, the feelings you experienced and the knowledge you gained will stay with you.
You just said yourself that effect is not permanent
As a long-time meditator and psychedelic user, I disagree. People can get attached to beautiful states in both cases, and both can trigger permanent insights. I haven't felt the need to use psychedelics in years, but the realizations are still there, as strong as any I've had from meditation.
First, I've never heard of anyone feeling "terrible" because the effects of mushrooms wore off. Second, if one does meditation for its effects, trying to make them permanent, then one is still just chasing highs. States always wear off. At least, this is the Buddhist perspective. Having been raised Hindu, I know their take is different.
Treatment that is 100% effective when properly administered but has a 5% chance at being properly administered is still not a very good treatment. These two routes are not mutually exclusive.
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any link between the melted art visual neural networks produce and the visuals that are reported during various psychedelic sessions? how plausible is the theory that what is occurring is just various networks in the brain deteriorating while the drug is being flushed through the system?
a type of audio-visual anesthesia experienced in an otherwise conscious semi-lucid waking state.
I think this is pretty accurate. I think psychedelics are basically like the electrical box in your house, but for your brain. You can flip the breakers and see what happens with different circuits disabled. Since normally everything in your brain operates simultaneously this can be very instructive for learning what's happening.
Once you come back to sobriety, you can then use what you saw to start training yourself to move your attention between those circuits, giving you basically better brain control.
Neural nets are trained on the tiniest tiniest slices of human experiences so their feedback has a similar character to partly disabled brains.
"Modern" mentality seems to be that everything is illegal unless government specifically approves. Any substance that emerges and becomes popular enough gets banned immediately (unless there's a huge backlash; I can only recall one case like that, kratom. Don't know much about that substance though). Meanwhile invasive questionable medical treatments and supplements are marketed as safe (government stamp of approval) all the time.
I recall how green tea extract destroyed someone's liver because the dosage was just crazy high. But it's green tea, so must be good for you? Or how about alcohol or tobacco or opioids which are literally killing people?
I think psychedelics should be unbanned first, because it's the right thing to do. The need for more research to treat specific conditions is a separate manner.
At the very least this should apply to mushrooms and perhaps LSD. MDMA can be great even in self-administered setting but I think it has more potential for (unintentional) abuse.
But mushrooms can be abused right? Sure. What about people who died in water drinking or hot-dog eating contents then? Are we going to ban those?
Also, psychedelics make you face your inner demons. Perhaps not right away because the wonders of the experience can be captivating, for a while. But sooner or later they will. Many people I talked to tried something like LSD once or twice and while they enjoyed the fun part they didn't like what they've seen once the party was over and they were left alone with their own thoughts. This is where the benefits are but it's work and it's not easy.
Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.
But then who'd gobble up those anxiety or depression or ADHD or sleeping^` pills?
^1 Wasn't there a severe warning issued by FDA on sleeping pills just few days ago? Risk of injury or death? I had some Ambien to sleep on a plane but I thrown that stuff away.
> Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member.
And it’s a fantastic artistic environment where they’ll help you pick which strain of mushrooms (well, actually truffles, but same active ingredient) and offer a trip area in back in which to enjoy them while enjoying the nearby canals. Highly recommend Amsterdam, and not as a “party city,” but as a wonderfully tolerant and beautiful city.
LSD can be a incredible eye opener. But if the part it opens your eyes to is bad and you are not ready, you will have a bad time.
If you are a stable and reflected person, it could be one of the most valuable experiences in your life.
When I took LSD for the first (and only) time, I gained an incredibly valuable insight into my whole beeing that stayee with me forever. Also I was sure there was no real need to do LSD again for at least half a decade.
If you take LSD to escape from something, you arw doing it wrong
>Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.
I believe the type of person you are referring to has historically been referred to as shaman.
I'm glad someone brought this up, more than anything - and before anything we need shamans and sitters. Without these people basically dedicating their time to making sure that people are safe and feel safe.
I want to be a shaman. I feel a real calling to it. When my friends are having a bad time on substances I really enjoy helping them out of it. I wish there was a way to receive a formal training in this art, but learning on my own has been productive.
>Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.
I like idea of this, but I don't think I'd like to do mushrooms in a place like that. I tend to alternate between getting strong urges to wander and urges to just sit and do nothing and i'm not a big fan having people around not also on mushrooms. I couldn't hand sitting in a cafe like that for the duration of a trip. That would probably make it worse for me.
Yeah and I don't think talking to a stranger, trained staff or not, is going to be anyone's cup of tea when they're on mushrooms. It should be an experience for friends whose company you truly enjoy - and trust to keep you cool if you get anxious.
The whole bit about needing other people around is leftover hype from anti-drug propaganda films. Nobody really takes a psychedelic and leaps out of a window or fries their child in a pan.
Ehh, I have enjoyed taking psychedelics alone many times, but I think it's probably clever to start with somebody more experienced who can keep their cool enough to remember where the towels are and help guide you to another area if something in the environment is overwhelming. Once you've been there a few times you can pretty much do this yourself, but without understanding how much set and setting affect the experience it can be difficult to remember that walking into the next room over can change everything. It's not about keeping you from jumping out of a window, it's about managing messes and mood.
There's someone in this very thread talking about a time they (an experienced user) took LSD and jumped out of a window. More precisely, off a balcony. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847655
(I suppose they might be lying, but it doesn't look that way to me. Especially as the lesson they say to learn is "be careful", not "don't take psychedelics".)
Personally, I feel like non-tripping people are fine if they've been there before. It's frustrating when you have somebody who has never dosed asking you what it's like, and you have to suddenly explain color to this blind person who thinks you're a gibbering idiot (because you are, kind of).
ADHD medication includes Ritalin and Adderall. Both have stimulant/amphetamine like effects to those without ADHD.
You can see the window for abuse and addiction here is pretty huge.
Children misdiagnosed with ADHD can get hooked on this stuff (I don't have a source for that, but its what I've heard).
More commonly, college/highschool students can get them pretty easily to cram for an exam or finish an assignment in one night, or at least that's what they're told by movies and TV (but I'm told by a friend that it really is effective in getting a lot of work done in a small timeframe).
Not sure about ADHD but there have been several anecdotal evidence of magic mushrooms helping reduce or in some cases eliminate Autism symptoms. Bear in mind that Autism is a spectrum and not everyone will react the same way
I've read that it would be incredibly difficult to abuse psilocybin mushroom because humans quickly build up a tolerance. It's also impossible for a human to consume enough psilocybin to kill them.
You should be able to take any chemicals you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Even if certain drugs are potentially dangerous and they have associated risks, as a responsible well-informed adult you should have the freedom to decide.
Besides, humans do dangerous and risky things all the time! Bungee jumping, rock climbing, and sky-diving are some examples that immediately come to mind. In those situations even a small failure or mistake could easily end a life.
Legalizing it will actually make it safer, since anyone will be able to buy their drugs from a reputable store with strong quality guarantees. We've already seen this happen with marijuana.
Since we're on the topic, I also want to mention that there is ongoing work to legalize psilocybin in California. A few years back there was an initial attempt to get it on the ballot, but it failed to get enough signatures. Check out California Psilocybin Decriminalization & Research Initiative 2020 [0] if you're interested.
> I've read that it would be incredibly difficult to abuse psilocybin mushroom because humans quickly build up a tolerance. It's also impossible for a human to consume enough psilocybin to kill them.
"Abuse" has a much larger definition than daily use or fatal overdose. Someone ignorant of the effects or with poor judgment might take psilocybin while operating a gas stove, taking care of children, or operating machinery. It's also possible to take too much, take it too frequently, or take it in inappropriate settings and cause real harm to the user. All of which behaviors probably fall under substance abuse.
EDIT: I'm pro-legalization, but I think statements understating risk are just as harmful to society and statements overstating risk.
Agreed -- I would never try to claim that psychedelics are anything other than powerful substances that needed to be treated with respect and caution.
Additionally, contemporary academic discussion surrounding psychotropic substances has used terminology focusing on use. Not abuse, not addiction, not anything else -- just use.
Right about the time we started screaming for government regulation every single instace we saw something we didn’t like/agree with in the world around us.
"It’s for your own good" and "Think of the children" were such convenient excuses to shift our responsibility from us to an ever growing government more than happy to protect us from ourselves.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
It's too bad this quote was published by Dan Baum in Harper's 22 years after Ehrlichman might have said it and after Ehrlichman was not alive to confirm. I would say the quotes around the text are not really appropriate for this most important of historical memories. It is not like something recorded on the Nixon tapes.
From the same CNN article we have the Ehrlichman children saying: "The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him," the Ehrlichman family wrote. "We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that's because we were not raised that way."
One can not be the kind of racist that raises their children to hate, while still being the kind that leverages the racism in the broader culture against social and political movements that run counter to your own.
I'm not sure which is worse: one directly teaches hatred; the other takes advantage of that taught hatred to pursue its own ends, at the cost of fomenting and entrenching it.
The Ehrlichman quote was first published by Dan Baum in his 1997 book, Smoke and Mirrors. This book came out before Ehrlichman died, and it included other interviews with Nixon staffers that supported the Ehrlichman quote. The book was reviewed by the New York Times.
I believe that this quote was not published in that book, and instead he "remembered" the quote years after the book was published to put in a Harper's article. He chose not to publish it in the book because he was focused on first hand accounts of the time period, not people's statements in retrospect.
Do you know the page number this quote appears on?
Another argument for legalizing psychedelics is that they might actually be useful for treating illness. For example there is some evidence that ibogaine [0] can help reduce or even reverse some symptoms of Parkinson's disease [1].
There were some formal studies done on ibogaine in the early 90's, I believe, but were shut down after the cardiotoxicity of the compound came into question at certain dosages.
Now I have no idea if ibogaine is truly a useful treatment for disease and I'm not promoting it as such, but the point is no one does. And as long as it remains a scheduled substance we won't be able to gain any formal answer to the question of it's usefulness.
Further, how many other scheduled substances have medical properties beyond more well known use cases (ie, psychotherapy, addiction treatment)? We don't know and we may never know, sadly.
> "Modern" mentality seems to be that everything is illegal unless government specifically approves
The Anglo-American legal tradition of everything being permitted unless explicitly prohibited was actually an huge abberation and always had been. Unfortunately there is nowhere left in the world where that tradition still holds.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Unless your definition of "religion" is so narrow and legalistic that you don't consider non-institutionalized forms of belief to be protected under this statement.
He's observed the psychedelic "revolution" in recent years, and has both positive and negative things to say about it, but on the whole he's deeply pessimistic about where it seems to be going.
His observations about fashion-driven, Instagram-performative "enlightenment", and the propensity for a little bit of enlightenment to lead one down dangerous paths (including charging big money to lead others down the same dangerous path), are resonant for me, having been through the journey myself and seen it from both sides.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkPB33bD3hQ
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Fire-Maverick-Scientists-Rev...