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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

#151

Post by klyrs »

babyshake wrote: post #149
klyrs wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I've met who use ketamine at all are addicted to ketamine, and long-term heavy usage has severe negative consequences. It has therapeutic uses and can be used to treat otherwise untreatable depression, but the risks are severe if somebody seeks it out on their own. MDMA is a good trip, but damn the hangover: I wouldn't suggest your friend endure "suicide Tuesday." Shrooms and LSD can be effective, but a b…

After one "normal" dose of MDMA without doing a bunch of doses over a weekend or something, the hangover tends to not be any worse than a typical alcohol hangover.

Sounds like best-case analysis to me. Speaking as somebody who experiences depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts, it's a pretty bad idea to expect somebody to make rational choices while stuck in a pit.

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

#152

Post by carapace »

NickC25 wrote: post #5

There was an NYT article not too long ago whose entire point is that "true" psychedelic drugs are too dangerous to go mainstream, but isolated chemical compounds that provide some of the chemical effects of LSD / Mushrooms / Ketamine without the "trip" were a much better way to go. The reasoning was that they could engineer a way to chemically induce neuroplastic change in the brain without the liability of visual or…

The thing that bothers me is that anyone who thinks they should decide for other people what (non-poisonous) chemicals they should put in their body is obviously so crazy that their opinion should be excluded from serious consideration on the matter. (This goes double if the person hasn't ever even tried the chemical(s) in question!)

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.

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

#154

Post by TaupeRanger »

thrown_22 wrote: post #117
TaupeRanger wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a claim that would require a study to confirm. No such study has been done to my knowledge.

This is like asking for a study to prove you really love your children. Anyone asking either doesn't have any or needs help.

Not at all. There are plenty of ways to study self reported effects. You'd just have to compare reports from those who experienced a trip vs not, or find another clever method of controlling for the trip experience.

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

#155

Post by Gatsky »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #148
Gatsky wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I have a different perspective working in healthcare. People with mental illness tend to self-medicate with whatever is available, so you can’t lump dynamite and rope together with psychoactive drugs as the degree of actual harm is a different order of magnitude. As always, with any libertarian approach to regulation, it’s vulnerable people who suffer (mentally ill, poor, children) for the ideals of others. I f…

The alternative is throwing people in prison. Which seems to me to be a much worse deal.

This is one alternative the USA has chosen, but obviously not the only one.

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

#156

Post by xyzwave »

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.

May be different for a drug company, but I believe a lot of those molecules would still be illegal under the Federal Analogue Act [0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

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

#157

Post by notjulianjaynes »

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.

I can't help but notice that this is basically how we got oxycodone, and even stronger opioids such as fentanyl. Would the opiod crisis have been so extreme if the hardest stuff you could get was raw opium? Not that opium's not a hell of a drug itself, but as I understand it, the risks of serious health issues like fatal overdose are not as high compared to synthetic opiates. Jeet Thayil's semi-autobiographical novel Narcopolis touches on this. Set in Bombay, the opium-addicted characters run into problems when dealers start switch from selling opium to heroin.

I'm not sure how this might play out for psychedelics, which are generally not addictive, but the incentives are similar. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, in fact I'm excited to see where those incentives lead things. Will researchers invent a hangover free ecstasy? Acid you can drive to work on? Lovely.

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

#158

Post by papascrubs »

vorpalhex wrote: post #102
tastyfreeze wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shamanic rituals have been the cornerstone of many of the great civilizations of the past. Why are substances that induce introspection and a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself banned?

Sometimes they cause psychotic breaks and Timmy eats off Becca's ear or runs buck naked into the woods and dies. You know, that sorta stuff.

Citation needed?

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

#160

Post by teeray »

sharklazer wrote: post #30
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.

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…

If the brain is a filter, the trip is all about increasing the bandwidth
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