"I've seen it work"
"I've also seen it fail"
I've tried many of these substances, and know people who have gone a lot further, so I'm not speaking out of ignorance here. There are risks to these things, and it's not a positive experience for everyone. Giving people a warning about that is entirely reasonable.
It's like saying "driving in a car is dangerous, and many people art hurt every year doing so." Okay, so what? Are you saying everyone should stop driving? It's just not useful - compare it to something like telling people to wear a seatbelt or pointing out that driving in particular conditions is especially dangerous. Those are things that we can use to drive more safely. Saying vaguely that driving can be dangerous doesn't serve any useful purpose.
Be conservative with dosage, don't do multiple doses in the same session & don't use with other drugs
You seem so laser focused on the promising side of things that you completely “forget” each substance is different and it’s use has serious consequences if abused, if not then do heroine.
On the subject of heroin, what about more dangerous psychoactive substance - ethanol? See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210 and https://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/News%20stories/dnutt-lanc...
Unless psilocybin is thoroughly tested and validated as a treatment that is as safe as SSRI, I don't think it's really worthwhile to jump into the psilocybin train.
They definitely don't deserve to be Class A in the UK and Schedule I in the US. Even more so, they shouldn't be classified as Schedule I by the United Nations.
I'm not sure about using it regularly, but people have been using these for ceremonies for centuries. I personally believe the choice should be left with an individual.
Should we also compare the risk of addiction/dependence? Oh, yes, lets do!
Hey, while we are at it, shall we also compare effectiveness? 2 doses vs 6 weeks? Oh, wait, that's what the study did.
I wonder how many different types of psilocybin they had to test to find the effect one for these particular patients. Because, you know, getting the "right" SSRI based coctail is actual quite hard, many people go through three or four different variants before finding the one which they think works.
Yes, I'll bet they had to compare at least as many types of psylocybin before they found the combo that worked. Right?
It won't kill you for sure. But a 100% loss in sex drive isn't really something people actually want. Took a year after stopping SSRIs to get back.
Apart from that, there's the massive list of side-effects, many of them extremely common.
Complete loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, or worse, your libido is unchanged but you completely lose the ability to orgasm.
Insomnia, cause that's what a depressed person needs, even less sleep and more time for rumination in bed.
Akathisia, which is an uncontrollable need to move your body, think restless leg syndrome but it's your entire body. You literally cannot sit still.
Less life-destroying but still very obnoxious: increased sweating, dry mouth (which can ruin your teeth if you don't manage it with biotene or gum or something), blurred vision, headaches, the list goes on.
This is without even mentioning the risk of serotonin syndrome yet, which can straight up literally kill you if you don't make it to a hospital. It happens when your serotonin level is too high, and can cause seizures, fever, arrhythmia, or death.
I used to macrodose and get immensely creative over a week or so. With a happy outlook on nature and all things uncontrollable around me.
But then the high died some day. Lethargy came back. Lack of actual structure and the 'happy go lucky' attitude derailed whatever tied my past with plans for the future.
Microdosing seemed to help from time to time, but mostly I just get distracted with random consumption instead of planned, structured and thought through creation.
Be pro-shrooms but don't act like they're safe in every case. Education is required before partaking in anything, let alone shrooms.
Because generally speaking, unless something is concretely documented as dangerous we don't just assume it is dangerous "because". Especially when that "because" is because of a well-documented, decades-long propaganda campaign by the federal government.
As far as danger, I think that, as with many things, it's about maturity, education and harm reduction.
I had a single bad experience with mushrooms, and it put me off ever taking them again. I was too young and immature (something like 15/16), and took about 5x more than I'd ever taken before. I can see now that it was obviously very stupid. If I'd been in a different location at the time, god only knows what could have happened to me - I'd say that, if abused, mushrooms can be far, far more dangerous than driving a car.
But - if the science backs it up, psylocilin could do amazing things for those with depression. And furthermore, sensible people can have amazing experiences. So as long as education and harm reduction is in place, I'm all for it.
Did you have a point to make?
People who are not well are known to 'self medicate'.
For example: Increase of alcohol use among people with preexisting problems is well documented. Link between tobacco use and schizophrenia is also well documented. See: "Smoking and schizophrenia" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19794359/ "It has been suggested that smoking may be an attempt by schizophrenic patients to alleviate cognitive deficits and to reduce extrapyramidal side-effects induced by antipsychotic medication."
Psychedelics are not the type of drug people keep using if it harms them. If they don't work for you, you really don't want to do them again.
(ps. I would not recommend _regular_ drug use of any kind)
It is a crime that they've been locked away for so long due to Nixon and scare mongers. So many people in jail because of it. Legalize it already, sheesh.
What I am saying is that it is depressing that we are only just seeing reports from formal sources that psychedelics could be useful for some people.
Also disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. Personally I believe they should not be criminalised, but people should be cautious using them.
I went from depressed and basically dropping off the edge of the world to traveling across the world and starting a startup with new friends in a different continent, which was just now recently acquired.
What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.
They are both illegal where I live (Poland). The government maintains a huge list of forbidden substances (link only in polish: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wykaz_%C5%9Brodk%C3%B3w_odurza...). This is in response to a big designer drugs crisis that started over decade ago. Which most likely than not was caused by tightening of the drug laws happened around two decades ago. It's a bad situation that will take another decade to improve, I suppose.
Having been loosely affiliated with the Goa/Psytrance scene, I too, have met some individuals who seemed to have "fried" their brains.
If those "different priorities", how you call it, also include being almost dysfunctional and therefore dependent on constant external support, paranoid and frequently incoherent then, yes, it made me judgmental too.
And this isn't even speaking of phenomena like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD)[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
If they had been in the midwestern USA would they also be dysfunctional but taking prescription painkillers? Mental health problems are common, and confirmation bias is real.
There is also the danger of reverse causation — and this may apply to cannabis. The epidemiology there suggests psychosis may cause people to take cannabis at higher rates, rather than the reverse.
Finally... I've also often wondered what partying so hard would do without the drugs. I've experienced festivals both with and without recreational drugs and it often feels like the sleep deprivation and over-stimulation have as large an effect on my subsequent mood as the drugs did.
I wondered about this myself.
I think it is hard to pinpoint exactly since festival-goers often also consume a mix of different substances (the infamous "candy flipping") including alcohol instead of just straight mushrooms or LSD.
what you’re describing sounds like psychosis which is entirely different
Some disassociatives are often put into the "psychedelic," and they can cause addiction. Ketamine begin an example. People begin chasing the previous high, which often means higher doses and more money.
Some more ignorant people put MDMA (and family) of drugs into this category as well. These drugs are highly neurotoxic, and require a lot of "prep" to take to reduce their neurotoxicity (it's arguable to what degree this prep helps). Moreover frequent user of this can in some people (ie people succeptible to depression) cause a long-term disbalance in their serotonin system (some people take weeks to recover from even one usage).
People who have some mental "precondition" (eg such as psychosis, etc) can have some extremely severe response and permanent "side effects" (for a lackeof better expressions) from psychedelics, and never recover.
An extremely small percentage of people have what's called Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). Some people find it fun, some don't mind it, while some can't function because of it.
Quality of substance you acquire can also vary. On the black market things are often mislabelled or cut with other substances that are easier/cheaper to produce. One notable examples is NBOMe being sold as LSD. NBOMe is more dangerous for a few reasons that I won't be getting into in this post. Always test your stuff with test kits, or if you're not comfortable with that, sense a small bit of your batch to a testing lab (there's a few anonymous/free ones in Europe).
Lastly, there's always ignorance or risk of being too "casual" about taking psychedelic due to familiarity with them. This leads to accidental drug combinations (eg some antidepressants + some psychedelics) don't combined well. Aimee just diminished the other, but people reported more severe symptoms. People also combine things recreationally without researching things properly, which can be a bad combo. Speaking of antidepressants and psychedelics: a notable thing to mention is that Lithium salts and LSD have been reported to lead to terors, seizures, and maybe even death (as reported on erowid).
I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. In my personal experience, they can be wonderful and provide healing experiences. However, we need to always be careful when using them, because they have such a profound effect on our minds, and we still understand so little about the mind itself. With that in mind (no pun intended), treat them with respect they deserve!
No source, just anecdata, the circles I run in.
When you add all the other scheduled drugs that have no state level recreational framework, then you no studies and you also have a compounded supply chain problem where nobody knows what they’re actually consuming
There are molecule combinations out there which can cause instant parkinson’s disease
nobody can give a real case about “the friend of friend” who went crazy because of the illegality and imagined or real liability
and its not fair to say “this drug is perfectly safe stop fearmongering, oh wait you should have known about your family history of schizophrenia never mind then lol too late, but everyone else dont listen to that person” this isn’t directed at you, just a collection of things said in the psychadelic community pretty reliably
bothersome.
This is a very good point. I'm not going to suggest that the commonly cited anecdotes are all wrong or misguided, but a lot of well meaning people throw around anecdotes but just like a discussion about flat earthers, everyone knows about them but virtually nobody seems to actually know any personally.
In 2016 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) cited 37,461 people died due to automobile accidents. Those are easily traceable numbers because they create a tremendous amount of paperwork and news articles.
But with psychedelics there is a very odd disconnect between the perception of their danger and the extreme lack of actual medical/scientific evidence that actually gets cited.
Is this real or exaggeration for effect? It sounds implausible...
Simulatable in primates and mice by giving them this drug.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000360.htm
Be careful out there, test your drugs.
It's not instant but it's very scary stuff and 100% incurable.
It's actually pretty annoying, as I have a health condition that it might help with, and furthermore I used to really enjoy recreational use.
ever notice how all these stories lack that?
all?
look, don’t respond to why that might be, but lets just all push for the study and a legal framework that allows for said studies to exist
no studies found.
Some of the worst outcomes I've seen have come when one drug is believed to be another, and this is something that decriminalisation would definitely help with.
That being said, psychedelics have traditionally been combined with ritual, and the lack of said rituals can be a big impediment to useful results.
no only recreational legalization would do that
Legalization would allow the government to create a testing infrastructure so drugs can be tested/validated before they're sold, that's arguably better. But it's definitely possible to create a safer drug environment with decriminalisation only.
Decriminalization is just marginally safer. Testing is a huge waste of resources unless its a stopgap towards recreational legalization with a reliable supply chain.
Won't we repeat the history where companies make billions from this products, put them into ads to spread the use and addict people, suppress research into bad side effects etc,.
Personally I think there are some good applications for mushrooms or marijuana but my instinct is that the greedy people would do what they do best, sucker people and make big money.
But psychedelics are very different. They're really, genuinely not addictive -- probably because they're not "fun." In fact, they're exhausting. You may feel a lot better after, the experience may be fascinating, but you're in absolutely no hurry to do it again. The whole thing lasts a few hours, but literally feels like months, with numerous epochs along the way.
It's not like the kind of hollow calories of a bag of Cheetos, it's more like a long, difficult workout. That's hard to productize in that way.
You've been doing it wrong ;-) I'm not sure I've ever laughed so much or felt so connected to people. Just thinking about it is making me nostalgic.
Your body will actually build a tolerance to them and they'll stop working if you use too regularly.
You also don't establish a physiological addiction like you do with drugs like nicotine and sugar.
Finally, the dosage required is absurdly small and would be extremely cheap to mass produce. You can grow mushrooms relatively easy in your damn closet. It's not like it's a patented designer drug.
Will people created patented designer psychedelics? Certainly. But it seems to me like it would be a similar kind of problem to people buying Fiji water when nearly the same stuff is flowing out the tap for damn near free.
Why would you take micro doses of mushrooms rather then use an approved anti-depressant treatment? Your home grown mushrooms might differ in concentrations, the one you buy might be low quality...
I have nothing against the product, I am just anxious that it will be promoted as a miracle , "text mushrooms and your anxiety will be gone, your creativity is 10X better, see Joe the developer wrote this cool Rust project fueled just with weed and mushrooms in 48 hours" - I have a bias, I do not trust companies and capitalistic societies, they fuck the society for profit, we need to keep our eyes open on this studies, make impartial ones and maybe do something about misleading ads and posts promoting unsafe stuff.
Abuse is a person problem, not a chemical problem.
I think the magic comes when you discover that something your default mindset was filtering out as noise is actually signal. With that insight, you can more easily make changes to your sober mindset.
What you described sounds very similar to the effects of mindfulness meditation. The idea in a sense is to increase awareness - that is, sensing the world as is, without the filters or influence of mental objects. The theory is that meditation can then help you free yourself of past negative conditioning that is no longer relevant and to be more present.
It would be interesting to see more studies on both, but I understand that many things to do with the mind and subjective experiences are difficult to measure and therefore to study.
In it, he talks about how his early experiences with psychedelics turned him on to the fact there was something real worth pursuing in meditation and mindfulness beyond the superstitious bullshit. Most of the book is about using meditation as a tool for spirituality without religious baggage or supernatural explanations.
The way he and others talk about it, is that psychedelics effectively force any mind into an objectively different state of consciousness. Even though it doesn't last long and the memory of it fades, just the awareness that radical mind shifts are possible is enough to help people take mindfulness practice seriously.
At a cellular level, it temporarily vastly increases the connections between the synapses. A lot of what your brain does is travel along well worn synaptic pathways, like running on autopilot. This is when you feel like you're in a rut, it's because your brain for efficiency reasons is just doing what it always does. The temporary frenzy of increased synaptic connections allows people to break out of those ruts
check it out
Regarding microdosing (as described by the OP) this begs the question: Are there perhaps unwanted side effects for running your brain on permanent "debug mode"?
So what it does is that it allows you to use as many drugs as possible when you're something like a high-income professional and sort of criminalizes drug use among working class people.
Your "test" for being a safe drug user is to have a lot to lose.
Drug use is rampant in SF for instance. And I know lots of drug users: cocaine, MDMA, psychedelics.
I used to think "why doesn't society just make you post a bond that lets you act in a slightly more unrestrained manner" and now I've realized society does! You just have to constantly be in a state of having too much to lose.
Personally, I use shrooms frequently (I have some in my fridge right now) and LSD less frequently and MDMA rarely. All of these have been amazing eye opening experiences and I am a much better person for them. Thank God.
All a coastal California perspective of course.
I'd like for us to make psychedelics accessible to all, but since lots of people don't want that, I think I'll settle for keeping psychedelics accessible to me.
Practically, microdosing is often in the 20 - 100 mg range, and the lower threshold of a 'normal' psychoactive dose would be 600 - 800 mg (depending on the individual, eg. their weight, of course).
It got banned because it wasn't understood in the best case, to curb the counterculture movement from the 60s in the worst, but it's always been hard to justify it with medical reasons; it's been just tagged along with cocaine or heroin and made bad by association.
1. Medical consensus say it's bad, but it's kept legal: tobacco, alcohol, drinking bleach.
2. There's no medical consensus, but it's forbidden anyway: LSD, mushrooms, DMT...
3. Medical consensus say it's bad, and it's forbidden: cocaine, heroin, meth...
4. Medical consensus say it's good, but we ban it anyway: MDMA in the context of psychotherapy [0].
5. There's no medical consensus, but we ban some yet not others that have an identical mechanism of action: poppers
That's without getting into the fact that the federal schedule system is seemingly impermeable, and cocaine or heroin have accepted medical uses, but somehow weed doesn't, despite all the evidence it does.
[0] Linking because maybe not many are aware: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20503245187674...
So far so good.
Should there be studies? Sure. Are we pretty sure it's safe? Yep. Safe enough to legalize? Oh most definitely. Certainly until proven otherwise.
For the record I think they should be legalized.
[edit] I don't think that producing a study that shows a lack of harm is going to change anyone's mind. The prohibition is puritanical and ideological, no amount of evidence is going to change that. I think if this was based on a genuine fear, the study would have preceded the prohibition. This feels more like running ourselves in circles to collect evidence, Lucy and the football style.
We already know the LD-50 of mushrooms is 17kg of fresh mushroom for an average size human lol.
The prohibition is puritanical and ideological, no amount of evidence is going to change that
Your insistence that this is the case is itself ideological.
Haha, ok, well, in that case, on what basis were drugs banned? Specifically psychedelics.
> We’re talking about current attitudes, not the reasons why they were banned in the first place.
The current attitude is "drugs are bad" because of childhood education programs. Drugs are bad because they're illegal. You've seen the PSAs. It was never evidence based to begin with, then the "puritans" (DARE) switched to youth indoctrination. It's been so long now that there "must be a good reason."
It was never logical, or evidence based, and it remains illogical, and not evidence based. Bringing evidence to an illogical conversation IMO is like bringing an inflatable flamingo to a fancy dinner. People will look quizzically, and you won't change minds.
But hey, here's hoping I'm wrong.
After all when Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 all the negative health factors and societal factors associated with drug use fell off a cliff -- and usage did not increase. That's all the evidence I need to follow suit.
We’re talking about current attitudes, not the reasons why they were banned in the first place.
Curious as to how we know... has anyone ever OD'd on psylocibin?
Britain, drug harm score https://www.economist.com/img/b/600/916/90/sites/default/fil...
Reddit is a good source of anecdotal information:
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/7fv5oj/beginner...
https://www.reddit.com/r/microdosing/
This is also good:
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/microdosing-guide-and-explain...
Fast forward 10 years and that same friend felt low during lockdown over the past 12 months. After reading up online she decided to try microdosing mushrooms rather than the mainstream route her doctor would prescribe - anti depressants.
She has been taking a tiny dose every other day and feels immeasurably better. More optimistic about the future. More energy. More focus. Less sad.
To say it's frustrating to read these official press releases about the positive impact of mushrooms nearly 20 years after she discovered them for the first time is the understatement of a lifetime.
I'm convinced we'll look back at this era as a form of prohibition on drugs that governments threw down as a wide blanket and ultimately society was worse off for.