I couldn't agree more. In fact, the trip itself is not a nice side effect, it's the precondition to get measurable, long-term positive changes.
I’ve always thought of it like a self-diagnostic mode/tool where we get exposed to debug data that our brain normally would filter out.
The predictive processing interpretation of these drugs is that they change the balance between top-down predictive generative models from our "deep" brain and noisy bottom-up sensory percepts from the peripheral brain. When you get super-resolution like experiences of banal everyday textures, that's your peripheral brain failing to filter them out for lacking novelty, when you get psychedelia style visuals that's intermediate "layers" of abstraction running amok, and when you go off on extended narrative experiences fully detached from reality that's the deep generative models doing their own thing unmoored from the error signals your senses would otherwise generate.
It's an awesome book in many other respects, but IMO the best bit is how many plausible mechanistic explanations it offers for psychedelic experience.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
Here is the first one I am aware of: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050654/. So 14 years of evidence backing up this claim.
Edit: on the premise that the environment is crucial for the outcome. This means creating a safe comfortable environment. Maybe with these new drugs will show otherwise in time.
Anyone asking either doesn't have any or needs help.
Proponents frequently mention things like this, yet _no one_ who publicly admits to psych use is someone I want to be.
All the people I've ever met, and friends who didn't but started down that road, aren't "all there" anymore. They'll preach day and night about the "benefits", but from the outside looking in it's obviously a coping mechanism.
I'd be very curious to know what specifically about me, or about something you assume about me, would make me someone you don't want to be?
As a real psych user, you should accept that your post clearly has the subtext:
“I have everything most people want, so you’re wrong”
I, too, have everything most people “want”. Maybe we’re equally well off, maybe we’re not. I’ve still never met anyone on-level who indulges in this habit that kept it, and you should know that at our level it’s about keeping it not having it, at least for very long.
Addicts insisting that their addiction isn't one is cliché for a reason.
You might also note that the GP said nothing about frequency of use, only "long time psych user", AND that no one here has defined "high frequency" in terms of an actual threshold for addiction.
The fact is that for all drugs, and especially for the psychedelics, there are far many more people who use occasionally and responsibly than the subset who are addicted. AFAIK, the psychedelics are not considered addictive at all, either physically/physiologically or mentally.
Obviously biased when talking about myself, but I think you can split your judgement into a frequency argument rather than a binary yes or no.
They all believe it doesn’t affect them negativity, that people can’t tell.
They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.
The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.
I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.
My 2 cents
> They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.
Well the post you replied to didn't address being able to tell.
> The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.
5 years is a while, surely?
> I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.
Do they still claim that after 5 years of non-use?
This basic claim is like saying an ocasional drinker who's become more social because alcohol helps them with talking to groups of people in certain specific situations is no different from an alcoholic because both drink and behave differently while drinking. Context, quantity and quality all make defining differences. How tedious it is to be judged harshly by someone who can't see this and takes any example of consuming something as a case of not admitting addiction. Often there really is no addiction.
Remember how gay activists used to be the craziest fringe gay people you could find, back when there was a serious stigma around it?
Now most gay people I encounter or hear about ar just as boring and sensible as the straights.
This doesn't prove that the same will happen with psychedelics. But it tells you why treating the outspoken minority as representative is not right.
you know plenty of people who aren't vocal about their experiences because they understand it's not appropriate or acceptable in the situations you have shared.
The claim is that psychedelic use is beneficial /because/ it's psychedelic, but this isn't necessarily true (because of the rule that the boring outcome is the most likely). You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.
> increased spirituality
Is that a positive effect? Imagine all the people you know turning into Gwyneth Paltrow.
Maybe it can be done but the real reason that the companies are working on this is that they can patent these new drugs, and that would increase patients' costs (see esketamine vs ketamine). A better use of money might be to do larger studies of existing psychedelics/dissociatives, since these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most and we won't know long-term effects of new drugs and whether they do much besides what they would get potentially approved for. These companies would then have a big incentive and money to lobby to keep the existing psychedelics/dissociatives illegal.
I don't know whether the experience of purple sage counts as psychedelic; I tried it once. The visuals are reminiscent of LSD visuals, but richer. But there's no euphoria at all. Combined with extreme couch-lock, I didn't find it enjoyable.
The compounds being discussed can have major long term effects from one/few experiences.
If 5 "trips" over the span of as many years in someone's early twenties provided a decade of long term positive changes, would you classify that as a coping mechanism?
IMHE, it's not, at least in regards to (racemic) ketamine and depression. The benefit doesn't appear until ~24 hours later, and the effect scales with dosage, but not trip intensity or outcome.
I found taking it almost unpleasant at times, but the subsequent effects uniformly profound. Unfortunately, I developed a rare health issue, or I'd still be taking it.
"In our study, OABSS (overactive bladder symptom score) significantly increased with the combined use of ketamine and marijuana (P = 0.016). Cannabinoids are the active components of marijuana, and select cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2, have been identified in the human detrusor and urothelium."
Like, what did you expect?
And I personally know people for whom the exact opposite is the case. I'm very much looking forward to the rise of psychedelic therapy.
If you want to trip in nature, or on your couch, or in your therapist's office, or wherever else you might find to be the optimal set/setting for your experience, you should be able to do so.
That said, I'm all for taking whatever works in a setting that works for the user.
Every person I know who had a 'bad trip' did so at a concert or some place they weren't alone or in a quiet area outdoors with close friends (not that there aren't rare exceptions to this rule).
I've only really done LSD once tho and it was interesting, and seemed more low key than shrooms, so maybe I should try that again.
The right way to dose shrooms IMO is not eating 4 hours prior, ground up fine (and optionally put into gel capsules if you can't stand the taste), and taken with OJ. This gives you a very strong and peaky trip at minimal doses, but the peak lasts for 2-3 hours, whereas LSD is generally a whole day affair event at lower dosages.
Its also worth while imo to grow your own shrooms. There is this philosophical meta element of taking charge and creating your own medicine which then you take can better your own life, which can be a very positive thought during the trip.
Especially for such a short duration in consensus time (my trip was about 45 minutes, a bit on the long side but again I smoked a cigarette directly before consuming DMT, which I understand has MAOI properties and thus can extend the duration of DMT), DMT is one of the most powerful substances known to mankind. Perhaps 5-MeO-DMT might be more powerful, but there is physical risk involved there in such a way that isn't present with N,N-DMT.
Also, LSD is not lower key than shrooms; maybe you took a smaller dose or personally have a tolerance. But with high doses they can both be very intense.
You could determine if the benifit(s) arise from the the process, experience, and dis/associations of the trip or simply the subconscious biochemical fuckery.
Set and setting are what create the good or bad experience. The therapist prepares the person for the journey while walking them out of any bad paths while on the journey. Layout and design of where the journey takes places must be soothing and relaxing.
Fun fact. Fungi growing closer to humans has higher potency in psilocybin than ones growing deeper in nature.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36613747-how-to-change-y...
Edit: wording
Anti-drug hysteria has caused far more human destruction than all the bad trips and psychotic episodes put together. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in prison right now for illegal drugs. In some cases they had their lives ruined over nothing worse than a few grams of weed.
The visual/audio effects aren't what gets you on a trip, though. It's the headspace, the distortion of "automatic self-recognition", and to some extent, the role of the crucial 5-ht2a receptor in the sleep-wake cycle: all 5-ht2a antagonists are soporific, and almost all psychedelics produce insomnia as a side effect. A bad trip leading to worse after-effects practically always proceeds through a sleepless night.
Also people tend to describe their trips as being subjectively less pleasant.
And please, if you have to resort to dealers, invest in a cheap testing kit. You might be lucky and find a nearby non-profit that can not only do a cheap reactive test, but also a purity test.
Stay safe out there.
EDIT: Sibling comments also mention compounds like 1P-LSD sold online. I'd still test those even if bought from reputable vendors.
Anyways, their safety profiles aren't really that well understood either. They're suspected to be just metabolized into LSD and therefore pretty safe, but they're very new (~2015) and after all they're research chemicals (or rather, not-yet-researched chemicals). In comparison LSD had been known for decades and it's pretty well understood.
I guess this is what prohibition leads to...
I would suggest you learn how to use Tor and surf to some of the many dark net marketplaces that are around.
You can buy an entire sheet of LSD blotter for like $220 atm.
"1P-LSD - PsychonautWiki" https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/1P-LSD
If you had a bad trip, you might feel differently about it.
Today, in therapeutic contexts, they use "easy trip" and "difficult trip" to give patients a sense of what to expect, and some context for how to interpret the experience they're about to have.
Some trips are like tropical vacations; peaceful respites. But others feel closer to climbing a perilous mountain, or trekking through endless desert, or slogging through dark marshlands.
Some of the most fulfilling journeys in life can be quite uncomfortable and hard, and notably, 70% of people that have bad/difficult trips do not regret the experience.
What makes the trip is worthwhile is if it causes you to learn and grow in a meaningful way.
Oh, you said might
The only interesting one that was impressive was tabernanthalog but even though it didn't produce a twitch response in mice it clearly had a psychadelic effect
There are a lot of other substances as well just recently we were able to procure very cheap rapamycin for people with autoimmune issues
If you are interested in joining or just look around reply to me here
After a group buy the admin has his own site where he sells it as well. We had another chemist but he was in Ukraine and is missing currently . He had a huge selection of compounds on his own site .
Admin site : nootropicsfrontline.com
The whole point of the article is that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity within the brain, and that pharma companies are trying to synthesize a molecule that does exactly that, but without the hallucinations.
Here's the article in question - perhaps there's something I missed that you might understand better than I do: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/opinion/hallucinations-ps...
Talk about missing the forest from the trees.
The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.