While there is plenty of anecdotal support for the longer term benefits of etheogens, the road to a better understanding of yourself and place in the universe is strewn with people hiding in their beds or under a table. The psychonaughts experience isn't exactly a piece of cake and shouldn't be taken lightly. Likewise, the 'why' of why these things help with issues like depression are obvious to any one who has taken the trip. These kinds of altered states force you to confront demons. They help you because they are >hard< and you have to deal with things. The experience helps with depression because it specifically brings to light the issues and causes of ones depression and you have to deal with them.
I'm concerned about the idea of boiling the positive benefits of something like mushrooms into a single compound.
But as earlier post pointed out, we don't really know why they do these things, why should they be so beneficial to us?. Let's say they are poison to thwart off plant-eaters. Then why do they work towards GOOD in small doses? Have humans evolved the capability for psychedelic experiences meaning experiences of unity which is a trait that helps survival of the specific species which experiences it?
Like humans can be outright killed by touching some jellyfish, while turtles just eat them. I wonder if to turtles, jellyfish taste pleasurably spicy due to what chemical poisons us, like onions taste for us, which poisons insects. Overall, they're still good deals for the jellyfish and onions, since the traits are preserved.
Why does St. John’s Wort, passionflower etc have antidepressant effects? Why does penicillin mold produce an antibiotic? Why does gingerols act as anti-emetics? Why do coca leaves, coffee beans give a buzz?
There is nothing magical with an active compound to have a specific dose-response curve either.
I don't know what listing a bunch of similar mysteries does to make the question less mysterious. Are you implying that these questions can't have answers and everything is unknowable? Is this one of the arguments where someone says that we can't answer your question until we answer every other question first? I don't get it.
The question is why do psychedelic drugs hit our brains in the peculiar way they do, which also has a therapeutic effect.
First why do they cause the experience that they do, and secondly why is that experience therapeutic? I think these are interesting questions without clear answers as of yet.
It has been speculated that mushrooms caused religion. Religion is spread all over the world so there must be something "fit" about it. It is as if mushrooms and human societies are in some kind of symbiotic relationship.
Those are the easier effects to explain. Much harder is why these compounds cure/treat depression or addiction, make people see infinite beauty or god, enhance their creativity, etc... Not much analogy to poison there.
Psychedelics in that sense may be distracting poisons rather than harmful poisons
Nevertheless, it still seems quite remarkable that such a molecule could coincidentally send a big mammal on a trip through the doors of perception.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450481...
Perhaps at first thought, yes, because mammals, insects and mushrooms are such different things.
To put it in perspective though, they share more than 2 billion years of evolutionary history when you look past their last common ancestor.
That M1 CPU in your new MacBook is a much mightier beast than the little black ICs in your grandfathers transistor radio, but they both rely on the same fundamental NPN silicone junction property. And that’s only 60 years of evolution.
Capsaicin triggers the heat-sensing nerves in mammals specifically. Scientists think this is because birds disperse the seeds well after consumption, while us mammals tend to crush the seeds with our grinding teeth. Peppers don't want to kill us, they just want to hurt as real bad ;)
There are also compounds that are toxic to basically every animal species for low-level common-animal-ancestor reasons, but which exist in the plants/fungi they exist in, in concentrations dictated by what’s required to kill/ward off the particular predators that plant/fungus had in its evolutionary environment. Aspirin, caffeine, nicotine, cocaine — these are all effective pesticides. They kill or severely harm insects. But we’re orders of magnitude larger than insects, so they have orders-of-magnitude less effect on us (unless we make orders-of-magnitude more concentrated doses of them, of course). That change in quantity, is reflected by a change in quality — i.e. having “a little bit” of caffeine does very different things to a body than having a lethal dose of caffeine.