Live data from Hacker News

Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

npr.org

171–180 of 299 posts

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#171
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I'm of two minds about that. While I agree that I ought to have full autonomy over my own body, at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable mem…

You might be interested to learn that heroin is actually quite a safe drug and safer to self-administer than paracetamol [0]. While you're right that the state has a duty to protect its citizens the war on drugs, all drugs, has the opposite effect. Drugs are a public health problem not a criminal one. People are taking things like heroin primarily due to other factors in their life, which the state should address. Fo…

> the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation

This is something of an exaggeration; heroin withdrawal can happen even without criminalization, for example, and is profoundly unpleasant, and constipation can dramatically reduce your quality of life. But certainly those negative "impacts" pale compared to the epidemic of drug-overdose deaths caused by prohibition, or even prohibition-induced unplanned withdrawal experiences.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#172

Awesome. So the last two years I have asked people if they know anyone with shrooms, I really wanted to quit dipping (Copenhagen tobacco), been dipping for 15 years, and heard this really works. No one I knew had any leads, not really shocked by that. But I quit dipping anyways, about 6 months ago. Moral of the story: sometimes your friends don't have illegal drugs and you have to suck it up and do right things the h…

I like how a lot of the comments assumed you are European since you chew Copenhagen, a US smokeless tobacco company brand.

Defiantly not European and if I where the profiling type I would almost bet money on a) that it's a him and b) him living in my region of the US. If I, am wrong on the second follow-up guess would be northwest plains states. But the stuff was really popular in the South, and in some places for a time more popular than smoking. I grew up on a farm and the cowboys at the feed store would always give me some when I was a kid. It started a life long love-affair that I wish I would have never started. In those cowboys defense, in the 70's Big Tobacco was still convincing people that tobacco was totally safe.

In European Snus is more popular and funny enough due to being water cured has less carcinogenics in it.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#173
This is like saying "I had a problem with a small chimney fire so I poured ten gallons of gasoline on it and now I don't have a chimney or a fire problem anymore because everything burned down"

Seriously no. This is not science. Hallucinogenic drugs also make people psychotic on occasion. Please don't take them, you'll be better off. Take the word of someone who's worked with recovering acid addicts. This shit ruins real lives.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#174

Set and setting. The drug just rattles your cage. I quoted Leary on 'set and setting' the other day on an LSD history thread and mentioned Leonard Orr used to get great results with nothing more exotic than oxygen, so rather than repeat that ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264919 ) I'll say this: If you have a modality of therapy that works, it will work without the drug (which, at best, serves as an amplifi…

Except initial trials of MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin in combination with guided therapy show outcomes that the therapy alone just isn't getting.

And if they work it is a whole lot safer than taking symptom management medication.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#175
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not go and pick them where you are? I thought liberty caps were pretty widespread over Europe

Just delete this comment. If you're not an expert on mushrooms, picking mushrooms is basically playing Russian roulette. Telling people to do so is wildly irresponsible.

While I tend to agree with you, it also depends on your region. In the US south you can take one look at the psychedelic mushroom picture that grows here and pretty readily identify it. It also only grows in cow poop, so if you see one that looks like the picture, and it's growing in cow poop it's a magic mushroom.

In other areas it may not be that simple, that being said, it's pretty sage advice to not just go out and pick mushrooms to eat.

Personally I never did them or any other hallucinogen, but helped gather them for my friends when I was a kid. My dad is slightly schizophrenic and everyone says he was never the same after they scored some LSD in the 60's. While I am fine, save some depression and ADD, I figured with the family history why risk it, and with the anxiety disorder that comes from depression the thought of having a panic attack while hallucinating pretty much guarantees that it would happen. The one time I tried pot, was an absolute nightmare and that's not even a true hallucinogenic, just has some properties.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#176
post #20

I think it’s clear that there is a push for magic mushrooms to follow the same path as Cannabis has. It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for…

I think legalization is good. I also think universal healthcare is good. Unfortunately healthcare is super expensive and enabling certain behaviors increases costs a lot. Different estimates seem to suggest that (back in 2015) the opioid epidemic had had an economic cost somewhere between a half a trillion and a trillion dollars, and it's increasing [0, 1]. Full-on prohibition is bad, but maybe there's still lots of…

I think you are confusing several matters.

If I understand your comment right, you are saying that the opiod crisis shows that people do choose drugs if they can and if there was univ. healthcare, then the system would go down under the costs.

The problem with this, as I see it: A good chunk of people addicted in this opiod crisis didn't choose to get addicted. They were all too readily prescribed hard painkillers for ailments that did by no means require such a treatment (e.g. backpain of various degrees). This is fentanyl as a gateway drug, so to speak. Those people would not have been addicts otherwise. But they got hooked on the medication and when their prescriptions comes to an end, then they would seek a replacement.

That is why doctors and pharmaceutical companies are getting sued - and are losing.

Further: If psychedelic drugs are indeed this helpful with issues like smoking and depression, like recent research suggests, then controlled administration would surely be a great relief to an overwhelmed healthcare system: saving e.g. on expensive anti-depression drugs or on cancer treatments, where the cancer was caused by smoking.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#177

Set and setting. The drug just rattles your cage. I quoted Leary on 'set and setting' the other day on an LSD history thread and mentioned Leonard Orr used to get great results with nothing more exotic than oxygen, so rather than repeat that ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264919 ) I'll say this: If you have a modality of therapy that works, it will work without the drug (which, at best, serves as an amplifi…

Sure! The olotrophic breathwork developed by Grof for example is a great substitute to LSD therapy.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#178

Set and setting. The drug just rattles your cage. I quoted Leary on 'set and setting' the other day on an LSD history thread and mentioned Leonard Orr used to get great results with nothing more exotic than oxygen, so rather than repeat that ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264919 ) I'll say this: If you have a modality of therapy that works, it will work without the drug (which, at best, serves as an amplifi…

If hypnosis is so effective for quitting smoking, how do you explain that studies fail to find much effect? E.g., this 2019 meta-analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31198991

From the conclusion: "If a benefit is present, current evidence suggests the benefit is small at most."

The effect size and certainty with mushrooms seem much greater.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#179

This is like saying "I had a problem with a small chimney fire so I poured ten gallons of gasoline on it and now I don't have a chimney or a fire problem anymore because everything burned down" Seriously no. This is not science. Hallucinogenic drugs also make people psychotic on occasion. Please don't take them, you'll be better off. Take the word of someone who's worked with recovering acid addicts. This shit ruins…

> Hallucinogenic drugs also make people psychotic on occasion.

its like if prozac was a lab made compound where the anecdotes were that some people experienced cognitive benefits and some people wanted to commit suicide. except thats exactly what happened and instead of keeping this a mystery with a few dismissive anecdotes from people with good experiences and people with bad experiences, many trials were done and it came out with warning labels for some people to objectively avoid it.

hallucinogenic drugs can be treated with the same standard.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#180
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. I think it’s really easy to have a different stance based upon the actual drug. I have no issues with marijuana and at no point in my life have feared of being robbed by someone trying to score money for a joint. But change that to heroin or meth and it’s a whole different situation.

If heroin and meth were "legal" in the sense of they being freely dispensed in special places and surely taken under supervision, you'd see a lot less violence caused by its users. That could be the starting point to get people off drugs, the same places could have get off drugs programs. The problem is that nobody really cares and the war on drugs causes more problems than it creates.

This has been tried with safe injection sites to mixed results. There seems to be a reduction in overdoses but also a rise in crime in the areas. Given the choice, it’s rationale that non-users in the area wouldn’t want that bargain.
Post reply on HN