

MDMA used in treating PTSD - stuntgoat
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mdma-drug-ptsd-trauma-psychedelic&print=true

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pmichaud
This doesn't surprise me at all, and actually this sort of study has been done
before MDMA was made illegal, to similar effect. Used correctly, it's a
profoundly effective drug for working through emotions.

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jrockway
Indeed. I'm not sure why everyone is afraid of drugs that people enjoy taking.

(Is there a stigma to putting cancer patients on morphine? No. But yet there
is a stigma when someone wants to give them THC, or when psychologists want to
use MDMA or LSD. Considering I can buy highly psychoactive drugs at Starbucks,
I don't really understand it...)

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derefr
The interesting thing is that, if people took morphine recreationally, there
_would_ be a stigma to putting cancer patients on it.

From an ev-psych standpoint, medicine is considered to be a "gift" from a
society to an individual, and yet certain drugs also lower the status of
people who consume them, because of their association with "unproductive
behavior." We don't want to allow, as a rule, gifts to lower the recipient's
status, because we can be on the receiving end of a gift without being aware
of it, and we have to act like we like it as part of a certain social dance.
Thus, we ban potentially status-lowering gifts.

Note that alcohol, caffeine and other such "consumed as part of eating ritual"
drugs, even if they _did_ lower status, aren't part of the gift culture of
medicine—that's why relatively few suggest banning them.

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semiChoatic
While I agree that drugs such as cannabis or morphine can be status lowering,
others such MDMA or LSD have a powerful one off effect and don't usually lead
to addiction. So I am not sure that these drugs fall under the "gift
protocol".

Where I am, on one of the many tips of Europe, the argument against drugs
seems to revolve around risks, for example the potential long term effects of
taking MDMA as it has been linked decreased cognitive performance, Parkinson
(this later one has been disproven), etc...

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derefr
Recreational drugs aren't status-lowering because of their _effects_ , they're
status-lowering simply because they're mostly used by people of low status.
Perhaps the difference in Europe is that recreational drug use is associated
with people of _high_ status?

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nhooey
It has a lot more to do initially with how children are conditioned at a young
age to think that drugs are bad, a message that is repeated throughout our
lives.

In the US there is a huge stigma associated with weed, but in Canada people
don't really care. The difference there comes from the official US government
message that weed makes people insane and murderous, and the subsequent war on
drugs. A good documentary to watch is "The History of Marijuana", which covers
much of the post World War II period of the US government campaigning against
Marijuana.

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metamemetics
A list of all current research underway using psychadelics:
<http://www.maps.org/research/>

The Psylocibin ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psylocibin> )category is worth
expanding, it has had the biggest resurgence in research.

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cemregr
Really cute!

"After the therapy, he vacationed in Jamaica, began dating a local woman and
bought a house on the island. "I'm happy and well adjusted now," he says.
"It's a good fairy-tale ending. As soon as we get some little Bob Marley kids
it'll be even better.""

