I still don't think we as a society are allowed to completly ban any drugs.
A society might be allowed to have safety mechanism in place but otherwise nothing else.
Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
111–120 of 317 posts
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. I am aphantastic.
(which, not-so-coincidentally, played a major role in all the above)
Could you elaborate?
I'm trying to imagine how it relates from your short summary[1] but I'm confused how Aphantasia plays into that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995645
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#113What's missing from this article is that people are reaching for this because the standard medical treatment for these disorders, SSRIs, are pretty terrible. In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions and sexual dysfunction. So you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer. In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation. Psychedelics also have psy…
Counterpoint: SSRIs were transformative for my depression. Side effects were minor and manageable (eg, Wellbutrin worked well to prevent any sexual dysfunction). I was on them for several years and had no problem tapering off. My understanding is that this is a pretty typical experience. Rhetoric like this was actively harmful in dissuading me for years from trying what ended up being by far the most effective treatm…
Wellbutrin also excarcbates OCD symptoms with typical responses including paranoia, hallucinations, eventually inducing psychosis. The article you post the author admits they don't really understand how SSRIs work. Why should putting such things in your body be any different than psychedelics or heroin or eating chocolate when you are sad? Simply put, it's not. This kind of science is based on collecting the minimum number of people to establish a p value and effect size larger than 0. You do that enough times then you can give your pills to whoever you want. Psychiatry provides a physiological change, i.e. they give you pills, based on a diagnostic criteria that removes all physiological reasons for the presented symptoms. This all seems rather backwards to me. Especially when modern psychology has developed therapies like cognitive behaviour therapy, schema therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, which all basically can be summed up to state "your thoughts and feelings don't matter and probably get in your way. What matters is how you organise your mind and actions." So modern psychology has arrived at stoicism as the answer to a variety of problems such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and personality disorders. This isn't to say that pills don't help. It's just that they are not a panacea nor are they well understood by the psychiatrists who are motivated to give you pills since their training as a medical doctor teaches them peoples problems have physiological solutions.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, we could be saying the same thing about psychedelics in 30 years time. "Wow, everyone knew psychedelics were bad for hundreds of years! What were medical professionals doing recommending them in the 2020s?" I understand that we are not talking about the same specific mechanism (addiction), but I also want to keep my eyes open and not blindly stumble into the same broader category of problem all over again.
Except, we have known for centuries that psylocibe is benign. The Nahua people in Mexico's Central Valley people have been using them for ceremonial purposes for centuries with no addictive side effects ever reported; its use even being described in Spanish colonial codices [0]. They are only "new" to the Western culture. In contrast, we have known for centuries that opioids are extremely addictive. [1] [0] https://w…
A similar story could be told about genus Papaver.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I’m pretty agnostic, but what are you answers to seemingly untraceable questions of life, meaning, and existence? I’m starting to come around to the view that ridicule of religiosity is quite often more vacuous than spirituality.
I'm a flesh automaton created to house a polymer that is capable of propagating itself through time. For what end? Maybe it's emergent behavior from a structured universe, maybe life is meant to converge towards some higher end. Who knows.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#116Here's hoping more accurate dosing will be a side effect of this. Going by rough weight of a plant that includes a lot of water always seemed kind of sketchy to me. I've heard of tinctures made by dissolving them in alcohol, but I don't think even those are measured objectively. No idea what sort of titration/measurement you'd do to determine the mg amount of psilocybin, or if that's even well documented.
> water
Weights you read are dry weights.
> tincture
Tinctures at least homogenize. So a “0.05g” dose of a tincture is consistent within the batch, and more consistent between batches.
This is how medicine worked up to the 19th century.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#117I'm a fairly drug-averse person. I have no qualms about other people using them, but it took us over 30 years to really understand the implications of legalized opioids. And that was after a lengthy and expensive FDA process. So respect to all of the early adopters who have nothing to lose and are willing to put their own sanity at risk. I just don't understand people who in one breath curse the Sackler family but th…
It’s certainly a grand experiment. Going to have some population-level impacts soon.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#118What's missing from this article is that people are reaching for this because the standard medical treatment for these disorders, SSRIs, are pretty terrible. In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions and sexual dysfunction. So you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer. In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation. Psychedelics also have psy…
Counterpoint: SSRIs were transformative for my depression. Side effects were minor and manageable (eg, Wellbutrin worked well to prevent any sexual dysfunction). I was on them for several years and had no problem tapering off. My understanding is that this is a pretty typical experience. Rhetoric like this was actively harmful in dissuading me for years from trying what ended up being by far the most effective treatm…
Wellbutrin is not an SSRI, but a NDRI (norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor). Some people respond better to the latter.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m pretty agnostic, but what are you answers to seemingly untraceable questions of life, meaning, and existence? I’m starting to come around to the view that ridicule of religiosity is quite often more vacuous than spirituality.
I'm a flesh automaton created to house a polymer that is capable of propagating itself through time. For what end? Maybe it's emergent behavior from a structured universe, maybe life is meant to converge towards some higher end. Who knows.
Yeah, that's the thing, who knows?
So who has any right to ridicule anyone else for having a different perspective?
Just choose whatever narrative that floats your boat and live and let live.
Re: Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
#120What's missing from this article is that people are reaching for this because the standard medical treatment for these disorders, SSRIs, are pretty terrible. In the mild case, the common side effects are blunting of your emotions and sexual dysfunction. So you don't have panic attacks, but you live in a gray fog and your relationships suffer. In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation. Psychedelics also have psy…
As someone with Depression that has tried both SSRIs and Shrooms, my experience was badically: SSRIs keep you alive with a host of side effects or you take a shroom trip once a year and feel better without side effects.