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The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

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Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#131

Post by temp0826 »

cannaceo wrote: post #103
throw819352119 wrote: post #66

I have a friend who has severe depression, including self harm and thoughts of suicide. So far guided meditation sessions and antidepressants have had little effect. I have read that some illicit drugs can be effective in treating depression, even after just one or two uses. Can anyone suggest what might be the best option out of ketamine, shrooms, LSD or MDMA?

Ayahuasca, then MDMA.

Would not recommend ayahuasca to someone with suicidal thoughts or a history of self-harm. Especially if they have not done any prior work/therapy as to the cause. (Disclaimer, not a doctor or any kind of therapist, but have drank it myself 150+ times and worked at an ayahuasca retreat where I've seen this situation).

Ketamine seems to be fast-acting for depression. A proper MDMA session with a therapist and follow up support is looking like a great way to work on things like this. (This is not advice: please don't take advice concerning illegal drugs from random people on the internet)

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#133

Post by jseliger »

phkahler wrote: post #4

>> As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.

This may be somewhat difficult, however, given the prior art of Shulgin and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL. TIHKAL and PIHKAL cover a lot of ground.

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#134

Post by labrador »

Gatsky wrote: post #128
labrador wrote: post #2

It's sad that the only way to legalize is to force people to see a qualified therapist and take patented psychedelics in order to benefit from the experience, but that's what the normies want. I've taken them with a therapist and it was meh because the doctor/patient relationship became weird under the influence. On the other hand I've had peak experiences by myself alone in a redwood forest on a fresh clear morning.

These drugs clearly have risks. I know a case who took LSD and amputated his genitals during the trip (heard this first hand from the urologist who reattached said genitals). Sure, many or even most people will be fine, but some clearly won’t. Sure, he has a mental illness and took too much and was alone, but that’s exactly the issue. Do you have any suggestions how to make these drugs broadly safe without giving in…

From a reply I made later to a self-professed normie: I'm excited by what you describe [successful therapy] and glad for it, but my sadness is that I could still be arrested by possessing mushrooms I picked for myself in a forest. I've been confronted by the authorities over this issue and believe me it is not a pleasant or healing experience.

A list off the top of my head mentally ill people should avoid: hand guns, rifles, poison, rope strong enough to hang oneself with, enough narcotics to go to sleep forever, dynamite, poison gas, large quantities of alcohol, religious cults, LSD...

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#135

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #107
stocknoob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could possibly go wrong with a society full of people living unexamined lives?

Mostly they end up kind of boring or being jerks. That is a very well known outcome.

and none of that should be criminalised

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#136

Post by nicoburns »

treeman79 wrote: post #59
recyclelater wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I publicly, to my peer group at least, state I have enjoyed benefits of psychedelic drugs every five or ten years, I am pretty sure I have my shit together compared to most people. That being said i know the people you are talking about, but they in my experience use drugs much more frequently. Multiple times a year, and regularly also smoke weed etc. Obviously biased when talking about myself, but I think you can sp…

35 years of dealing with friends and family addiction issues. 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 otherwi…

You won’t see benefits if your sample only includes addicts! But some people’s drug habits are objectively not addiction. For example, someone who takes LSD 3 or 4 times a year, with months in between. It seems quite plausible to me that this could be beneficial to them whereas someone taking it say twice a week would see detrimental effects.

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#137

Post by babyshake »

zionic wrote: post #37
heap_perms wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Talk about missing the forest from the trees. The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. " 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.

>long-term positive changes. 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.

There may be confirmation bias. Plenty of people might imbibe psychedelic drugs, but you wouldn't know because they don't talk about it with you and they are "all there".

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#138

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

nickparker wrote: post #64
sharklazer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My belief is that the “trip” is us being able to observe more about our brains than we typically access. My personal experience indicates to me that the “trip” is removing filtering processes the brain uses to remove noise and irrelevant information to the task at hand. When in a “trip” then, it’s more like we are seeing what our brain sees—the things that appear auditorilly and visually are due to neural circuits ov…

Anyone curious about psychedelic methods of action, particularly based on their personal experience, should read Surfing Uncertainty or at least the SSC review/summary of it. 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-resolu…

This smells like a just-so theory…

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#139

Post by gavinray »

mysore wrote: post #28
kodah wrote: post #10

I recently did LSD. It wasn't my first encounter with psychedelics but none have done what LSD did. I have a good bit of trauma that I'd attempted to work through throughout my life. The thing is, many of those things are settled. I cannot change them, I've course corrected my life away from my actions being influenced by these things, and on the exterior I think most people would find me well adapted. I was pretty m…

mdma is generally even more powerful for healing trauma. Or rather MDMA can accelerate healing by released "stored unprocessed memories" LSD can help you by showing you a possibility of whats possible by dissolving the prision of identity and seeing the world from a non-local perspective.

I think they're very different and both unique.

MDMA with the right group of people a few times completely changed me for the better. Lot of anger and resentment out the window.

I've had positive experiences with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and a dozen other things with alphabet -soup names but I also have PTSD and HPPD from them.

On MDMA the worst experience you can have is feeling sad, which is nigh impossible.

I'm still pro-psychedelics but it's important to recognize how powerful they are, and that a bent reality isn't always a pleasant place.

Re: The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

#140

Post by BurningFrog »

zionic wrote: post #37
heap_perms wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Talk about missing the forest from the trees. The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. " 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.

>long-term positive changes. 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.

It's still illegal, so most sensible adults don't mention their usage.

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.

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