Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.
Wonder how Adderall with its fourfold amphetamine recipe can fast-track to market, while psylocibin with all its ancestral approval had not yet been pilled AT ALL. How can a soldier designated pill make it to 60m prescriptions and amazing substantiated illegal use, while psylocibin is still rated as schedule-1 drug alongside heroine, which of course is major offense to possess.
This makes very little sense unless on purpose. I mean, like what, people been doing it for millenniums and still we got where we are now, and not because of downsides of its use, or what?
Modern drug laws came about in the 1970s, at the height of hippies on psychedelics trying to overthrow the government.
People in power fear losing their power, and they saw these drugs as a threat.
The weirdest part of the whole thing to me is that they outlawed Cannabis, Psilocybin, and LSD, but kept cocaine legal with a prescription under schedule 2.
You have to understand that drugs roughly break down into two categories IMO: the touchy-feely stuff that creates empathy and kindness and healing on the one hand. On the other hand you’ve got stuff that makes people “hard-charging” — going off and doing a thing without thinking it through, with a tinge of anger, fury, unstoppable raw power. Think: cocaine, booze, caffeine and any other stimulants. These reduce empathy and create problems for people.
These two camps are pretty wildly opposed! If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the people in power liking and using the hard charging stuff while loathing the touchy feely stuff.
All this feels a bit trite, over-simplified, and maybe even a but concocted on my part. But after a lifetime of being around these drugs, it fits well with my experience.
I’d add, too, that the book “Chasing the Scream” gives a better perspective on drug laws & their origins, which really began much earlier than the 1970s.
It's oversimplified in terms of the drug landscape; fentanyl != meth != alcohol, and the reasons people use them are different. You could simplify it as escapism but you'd be incorrect. Or rather, where do people want to escape to? That has little to do with the racism of the 1970s when interracial marriage was literally illegal though which is when the original drug war and those laws date back to.
Definitely over-simplified for the drug landscape, but I still think that users roughly sort into these two categories.
I also think its incorrect to define this sort of escapism as escaping to something. IME people escape from something — the “to” doesn’t matter as long as the “from” ain’t there.
I’d further agree that it has nothing to do with interracial marriage — not sure where this point came from?
The “War on Drugs” as Nixon named it isn’t the beginning of the story.
it's not the beginning nor is it the end. To go back to the story, you said
> If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the people in power liking and using the hard charging stuff while loathing the touchy feely stuff.
that some people liked the hard charging stuff and were white, and that some people liked the touchy feely stuff and who just so coincidentally some of them happened to be dark skinned, in an era that was racist to the point of having anti-miscegenation laws, isn't some minor coincidence.
> the “to” doesn’t matter as long as the “from” ain’t there.
The "to" matters because after you've gotten high you're there, but where's there? it's that the one where your kids are listening to you? where your wife never left, where your boyfriend wasn't beating you? In that "to", how is life?
Yeah it's a sad history that can't be separated from racism, unfortunately. I think "to" matters most to the sober folks, no? Perhaps I'm simply not getting it. When you're high the pain stops whatever it is. And you're there. In the euphoria. And nothing else matters.
But you eventually come down, and when you're sober again, it all matters! Particularly when you live in a society that criminalizes your escape. I've always thought it excessively cruel to criminalize substance abuse.
When you're high, where you are depends on the drug. They don't all cause the same incapacitating euphoria that fentanyl zombies experience. Alcoholics famously have a problem with driving while intoxicated, which is to say there's a state between sober and being blacked out. Some alcoholics just like a pleasant buzz and don't get to a point of euphoria and nothing else. Of course, cocaine addicts hash together elaborate business schemes while high to (to your point of stimulants being a gogogo drug), but then they're not in blissed out euphoria either, but actively thinking and planning and doing.
> “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.”
The initial war on drugs had nothing to do with the drugs themselves. But then successive governments had to keep running with it because letting the foot off the gas would let the opposition portray them as weak on drug abuse and crime. And then commercial interests got mixed into it too.
Research has proven that mushrooms and LSD are societally and personally the least damaging drug you can take. The top spots go to usual suspects like heroin and crack, and the subtop is alcohol and tobacco.
A family friend who was an ophthalmic surgeon once explained to me the cocaine was long the default anesthetic for eye surgery, and thus it had an accepted medical use (which was the criterion for Schedule 2). Sounds at least plausible to me.
But those modern drug laws picked up where the older drug laws petered out, and in both cases they were intended to punish their users, not protect them.
To bang a fairly weathered drum, this is largely a matter of conservative policy. Psychedelics were far more common in leftist circles (some might argue that this is cause as opposed to effect - mind-expanding experiences tend to shift politics towards that end of the spectrum).
This means that if you wanted to use the law as a political cudgel without being accused of thought-policing, you could outlaw psychedelics and be confident that the blast zone would exclude the politically faithful while locking up loads of political undesirables; like hippies, panthers, etc.
Of course, these days you have right-wing podcasters discussing DMT with billionaire CEOs, so it's a little trickier. Thus the tentative steps toward legalization.
This is an incredible take. The first SSRI was introduced in 1982 by a Swedish pharmaceutical company. The US congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. Not even Big SSRI has lobbyists who are time travelers.
sure, fair point but what is the reason mushrooms, which are factually and scientifically proven less harmful than say, ethanol on all measurable indices still scheduled? its all just money in the end. they need to get theirs in scam tax structures like say, colorado etc
I mean, the scheduling alone put research behind by decades, helping to stifle competition for more recent and less effective (in some cases ofc) pharmaceuticals
It's politics and optics. But as someone taking a schedule 3 medication that is really a schedule 1 in disguise (sodium oxybate) I wonder why they couldn't use the same tap dance for psylocibin or MDMA. Slight chemical modification to adjust absorption rate but same active ingredient. I think we only get away with this because it's prescribed so rarely and out of public consciousness. It's incredibly effective at treating a pernicious condition.
You'd think, yet I get it sent to me legally anyway. It is under a very restrictive REMS program, but it you're formally diagnosed with the very short list of applicable conditions, it's not that difficult to get.
Not enough money in it. It's not something that is taken regularly for long term like ADHD meds, or something that pretty much everyone uses at some point like antibiotics. If psilocybin came in a pill, it'd be targeted to a relatively small group of people for occasional use.
The simple answer seems sufficiently explanatory. Psilocybin is burended by its history as a recreational drug. That creates pockets of motivated advocates against it in a way that doesn't materialise for most drug candidates.
Adderall is just speed, which also has a long history of recreational usage. It was a widely used recreational drug decades before it began being used for ADHD.
Psychedelics sometimes makes people wake up to the abuses of government, so they are pretty scary to governments.
But there's also the issue that not everyone should take psychedelics. They can have lasting negative effects on certain people that may already be experiencing issues with mental stability, or they may trigger such effects in people that don't necessarily know about their own mental wellbeing or how the psychedelic will affect them. These, like every drug, should be used with caution.
Simple - there is no real lasting money in psylocibin as most people really only need 2 or 3 good sessions.
Whereas adderall is not technically addictive, but if you can function on it, you do become dependent on it.
You also really don't need it to become a prescription, shrooms just need to get legalized. The risks that come from overuse are far and few in between to the point where normal over the counter meds carry much more danger in abuse than shrooms do.
I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that Adderall isn't addictive.
> use of amphetamines and stimulants such as Adderall can result in tolerance and physiological dependence and can lead to the development of a substance use disorder. Misuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall for any reason (e.g., to improve academic performance, reduce the effects of other drugs, etc.) is associated with both substance use disorders and use of other substances.
Through direct experience, I do not think 2 or 3 good sessions and you're done is really true. Maybe with experience even that goes - you learned what you needed to learn and there's nothing more to it.
But IMHO psilocin is a strong anti-inflammatory which may in and of itself be some (not all) of the mechanism for alleviating depression (the link between inflammation and depression is strong). That will almost never be lasting.
So we may be in the case where the real breakthroughs are, as you say, in the first two or three sessions. I think most people who took mushrooms out of desperation would agree with that - by the end of the third session many of the things they needed to accept are, in fact, front of mind for awhile. But ongoing maintenance is probably useful.
The parsimonious explanation is that amphetamine was basically grandfathered in over a historical period where shrooms/acid were cultural and political pariahs and they still have to overcome the residue of that a half century later.
Has nothing to do with being a one shot solution vs subscription.
Even economically the conspiracy theory against one shot cures makes no sense. As your shitty subscription solutions all go generic, I enter the market with my low risk one shot cure and eat all of your lunch.
That the guy that was on Adderall was able to pay attention to endless meetings and fill out forms and stick with it, while the guy on mushrooms was not, is surprising to you?
This is super unsubstantiated, even small children know amphet impairs creativity while shrooms do the opposite.
I can surely see great benefit in someone thinking out of the box at meetings. While I also see the benefit of zombies blindly following commands, which is where Adderall gets u.
Small children believe in a magic being that lives at the North Pole and brings them presents through the chimney every year o. Christmas, I'm not sure I'd base anything on their beliefs about "amphet" when they can't even describe its MoA. Thinking Adderall turns you into a zombie is fallacious thinking. No one's forcing you to take it, but unbridled creativity is great for getting nothing done. Pushing rope, as it were.
The traditional HN way is to make up some "It's Just That They Hate Us"[0] teenage conspiracy. The reality is this: amphetamine was widely used medically for decades by the time the Controlled Substances Act was passed. When these acts are passed, governments are usually under pressure to not remove access to things that people commonly use. Therefore, it was scheduled in a category that recognized medical use. This allowed the subsequent development of associated clinical trials and so on. It is much harder to work with Schedule I drugs than Schedule II drugs. So an accident of historical timing is what caused the difference.
0: This game is really tiresome. It's "capitalism". "They just don't want to lose power". "There's no money in it". Thought-terminating cliches. LLM-grade.
I don't have depression, but the first time I used psychedelics was so emotional helpful that I strongly suggested for depressed friends. I corrected that mistake hours later, after realizing that the risks are low, but life changing if it happens. However, I will never forget that feeling. I've used it again in the following years, but the results faded and it became boring for me.
Basically it hyper-connects your brain. When people talk about seeing shapes, its not that they are hallucinating, its that when they look at the random fuzz pattern on a rug, and pick out the particles of fuzz that make a creature face, its looks like someone purposefully put those pieces there to make that face.
As such, if you are "surfing" thoughts and find an association of something, that association can become very prominent. If you don't have the context to understand why you are making that association, especially after the trip, you can get stuck with beliefs about yourself that could be non optimal.
On the flip side this hyperconnectivity also allows you to see things like a completely different person would see them, which is where the true healing power lies. Its like you can be disugsted with a particular food when you are sober, but on shrooms you can truly feel what it would be like to enjoy that food. Once you have that context, you are able to move forward after the trip into right directions.
This is why set and setting are EXTREMELY important for significant trips. You want to be with someone who a) has done psychedelics, b) is in a very good mental state, and c) has a low ego not to project their own personality onto you. The best trip sitters are those that encourage exploration - they take everything you communicate to them and ask you questions about it without imparting any bias.
Exacerbation (and possibly development) of mental illness like psychosis, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia is entirely possible.
Along with two other blokes, I got interested in psychedelics in high school. Took one medium high dose and wasn't right for a few months. Never in my life did i ever experienced paranoia, delusions, or hallucinations that are genuinely hard to separate from reality, but I did after that.
Intense psychedelic experiences can fracture what you once knew as "reality" allows all sorts of ideas to float into your mind, with equal possibility. This might be helpful and give you more flexible thinking (helpful for depression) but it also leaves you incredible vulnerable to all sorts of garbage ideas that you never would have considered otherwise. ie conspiracy theories or straight up delusions about the supernatural. Remember: It's not paranoia if you genuinely believe they really are out to get you!
Fighting these garbage ideas is a lot of work once they take hold, but you'll only know too late if you were vulnerable, and worse, if you can successfully align your understanding of reality with most other people.
I got extremely lucky that I stabilized. I'm convinced part of this was only doing it one time. My two co-experimenters took many trips with various doses are still in and out of mental hospitals years later. Psychedelics are incredibly potent and nobody really understands them very well. A lot of what is written on the internet ignores, downplays, or denies the very serious risks to your philosophy of mind and mental function. Its like playing with fire when you don't have heat sensation in your hands.
Several other comments on this page echo these warnings. One even claims there is an 18% chance you could go from depressed to schizophrenic. I have no idea where that figure came from, but the risk is certainly not 0%
Anectodically, this is pretty rare. I know quite a lot of people who used psychedelics, and they are fine.
I think some important safety points is to know family history of mental illness and not do then until later in life.
Anecdotally I know so many people thrashing their lives and this of loved ones with alcohol and antidepressants while I can’t immediately think up of even a single one, okay I know one guy who was doing everything altogether, who went so badly down the spiral thanks to acid. And this one guy actually had a horrendous childhood with lotta abuse so perhaps was already scheduled for a cathartic experience.
need another dose to take it to the next level: I found that love is an action not a feeling, perhaps I never loved my husband and I should now begin to
The risk is that it’s a false idea triggered by the psychedelic.
Maybe a better example would be my friend who took psychedelics and then believed he was in communication with Elon Musk. This one is more obviously a false idea, but nevertheless he was convinced it was real for a period after the psychedelic experience.
There’s a mystical concept that psychedelics open your third eye to see the world as it really is or something, but psychedelics are notorious for giving false ideas and making them seem like revelations. It’s obvious when it’s nonsense (like telepathy with Elon Musk) but it’s less obvious when the implanted idea is something like “your husband secretly doesn’t love you”. Another strangely common report is the belief that people around you have been replaced by clones, which can get scary very fast if the person can’t separate the idea from reality.
It sounds like your friend had a predilection for psychosis. I feel like the nice things about psychedelics is that they don't alter my processing too much (as compared with other drugs), moreso they just give me different 'inputs' into my senses / experiences, and then I process those.
> It sounds like your friend had a predilection for psychosis.
No prior history of any mental illness in him nor any of his family.
This is a common excuse: Blame some hidden susceptibility, not the drug. It doesn’t matter what it was, though. The drug caused it and there were no warning signs. Fine before the drug. Not fine after the drug.
> a common excuse: Blame some hidden susceptibility, not the drug
It's the interaction between that person and the drug.
I have a crustacean allergy. That doesn't mean crustaceans are bad, or other people shouldn't eat shrimp. It just means it's a bad mix for me.
One of the benefits of administering psychedelics in a clinical setting is that telepathic nonsense is more likely to be noticed early and corrected for, whether by reducing dosage or suspending treatement. (And treating it as medicine allows us to study those people who react negatively to it, further reducing harm.)
Yeah I agree with you 100%. it's interesting folks immediately taking the experience and result at face value when we understand so little about what's happening, even without psychedelics is most cases.
In the referenced anecdote it could be as simple as an excuse needed for someone who's been thinking about it for years. Though maybe that's enough to be a benefit
Anyway I like your example and look forward to what is learned about using psychedelics to help people :)
HPPD and .. honestly, some people have bad trips, and while it is popular in psychedelic circles to say "There is no such thing as a bad trip just the way you interpret it" that isn't really true. Even Terrence McKenna stopped taking mushrooms for a decade after a bad experience.
That said, I _do_ recommend mushrooms to everyone I know with depression or anger issues.
I had a panic attack one time, not sure how I should “interpret” that one. I’ve get anxiety since childhood for context. That said I’d love to do a session with a professional rather than by myself. Self medication for mental health issues is a bit of a gamble. I’ve also had good experiences even at higher doses so it’s a bit random
> after realizing that the risks are low, but life changing if it happens.
I think these risks are more common than was previously discussed on the internet. For a long time reports of very negative experiences were dismissed, laughed at, downplayed, waved away as symptoms of something else, or excused as something positive but mysterious.
It’s becoming more acceptable for people to discuss their negative experiences and not get downvoted or attacked for sharing them.
I just don't buy it, sorry. One thing that I learned about the internet is that most online opinions are from extremes: excellent or horrible experiences. Just search about any surgery. You will probably find a lot of bad experiences for anything. However, if you look at the data for the big picture, psilocybin is one of the safest drugs out there. There are risks, but they are nowhere near what you see in these conversations.
We don't have to rely on anecdotes, we have large amounts of empirical research. Just hop over to pubmed and search for yourself - the connection between psychedelics and psychosis is really weak, unless you have a known family history of schizophrenia etc. Yes, it exists, but it really isn't that common.
Not that rare, anyone with predisposition to psychosis/schizophrenia has a high risk of permanent effects, and that’s not that small of a segment of people, and nearly unknowable beforehand.
Many people say the first time they use Prozac that it was so helpful they recommended to their friends but then after a while it wore off.
How do you think psychedelics work? They activate the serotonin 2a receptor. It’s nothing but a different drug that effects serotonin. Except it does it more intensely but like all these drugs that act on receptors they wear off because of something what’s called receptor density changes.
For 70 years, we’ve been trying to manipulate receptors into making people feel good. It’s a losing proposition and it’s time to. We changed our thinking. For instance, if these people do have serotonin deficiencies, which is still possibly the case, what is it? That’s causing these deficiencies? Is it low, zinc, low B6, genetics, infection? There’s so many other things that we know that this could be, but we don’t try it.
I think this is naive. A mushroom trip is fully metabolized and cleared in approximately 6-12 hours. Despite the similar levels of reduction in depressive symptoms for the subsequent weeks, the psilocin has been cleared on the day of, unlike prozac, and hasn't been stimulating 5HT2* at all for that afterglow and post-exposure period.
Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density and those people are putting themselves at risk of valvopathy due to 5HT2a restructuring of the heart valves (which, as an aside, is turning out to be a problem for people on prozac and other long-term SSRIs).
A drug that is very occasional, point use, with no ongoing use, which has long term treatment results, is absolutely, utterly unlike prozac.
That aside, let's say for the sake of argument that the mechanism is similar for prozac; I think that's wrong (one additional explanation may actually be: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675... ) but whatever. If so, then psilocin is vastly superior to prozac because you are not required to have continuous exposure for the benefits, as the corresponding cost, withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, heart issues, etc. are removed.
> Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density
This is so frustrating to me. Why not just google it before you think you know more about this than someone studying it for ten years? Two things can change receptor density: time and dose.
A Single Dose of Psilocybin Increases Synaptic Density and Decreases 5-HT2A Receptor Density in the Pig Brain
This is exactly why psychedelics last longer than prozac. It has less to do with half life and more to do with dose.
How is the mechanism not at least comparative to prozac since it is well know they both effect serotonin? The risk with psilocin is exactly the dose, as many people find out. And you thing there are not cardiac side effects from psychedelics?
A Case of Prolonged Mania, Psychosis, and Severe Depression After Psilocybin Use: Implications of Increased Psychedelic Drug Availability
Worsening suicidal ideation and prolonged adverse event following psilocybin administration in a clinical setting: case report and thematic analysis of one participant's experience
You've studied it for ten years and didn't notice that the pig brain receptor changes were only measured at +7 days and are replying to a comment about long term effectiveness vs. prozac (which takes weeks to really show impact)?
I have previously read that study. You should put it in context: for example, how quickly does the brain add A1 and A2 receptors for caffeine? (I already know the answer, but you might want to use it to contextualize that study).
The study about the woman co-administering venlafaxine (Effexor) which is an SNRI might be worth considering as non-representative.
Worsening suicidal ideation .. is not unique to _any_ antidepressant. Are you trying to suggest that this is somehow unique to psilocin? We were discussing prozac which is _well known to have this problem_. They got black box warnings for this reason.
To be clear they absolutely do regularly provide short to medium term depression relief (up to a few months). I also know someone who had severe treatment resistant depression that was cured long-term (at least years) from one dose.
- The FDA recognized psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for treatment-resistant depression: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...
- Some more studies, such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909164/
- More widespread use in medical treatment, such as approval in Australia (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66072427) and limited approval in Switzerland
Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.