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Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

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Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#151

Post by codetrotter »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #145
codetrotter wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that at least parts of the US government has realised that carrier medium weight should not be used for LSD. > In the case of LSD on a carrier medium (e.g., a sheet of blotter paper), do not use the weight of the LSD/carrier medium. Instead, treat each dose of LSD on the carrier medium as equal to 0.4 mg of LSD for the purposes of the Drug Quantity Table. https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/amendment/488

huh, ok, it seems like things have changed some time in the last 27 years https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/01/23/s...

> brushed aside a U.S. Sentencing Commission rule establishing a uniform presumptive weight of 0.4 milligrams for all doses of LSD, regardless of the carrier.

Oof :(

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#152

Post by shlant »

bozhark wrote: post #52
s1artibartfast wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot more nuance than even that. Many psychedelics can trigger or exacerbate undesirable mental conditions that persist for the rest of your life.

Nah, they don’t cause undesirable mental conditions that persist for the rest of your life. Your “trip” is about 6-8 hours on a typical 3.5g dose.

please top minimizing the real risks of using psychedelics (especially for certain groups of people predisposed to mental health issues). You make normalizing them harder and you do more damage than if you were just honest about it. The war on drugs resulted in a lot of lies being spread about these substances. Don't do the exact same thing just because it's on the other side of the argument.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#153

Post by emptysongglass »

cthalupa wrote: post #138
emptysongglass wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're continuing to make bad claims. I'm taking the time to debunk them because the safety of people reading these comments is important to me. MDMA is far more neurotoxic than alcohol. The oxidative stress put on the brain is potent. When you add elevated body temperature, which most folks on MDMA are likely to find themselves experiencing (dancing, hot club, lots of people), the damage climbs precipitously. In pri…

Would it be possible to provide some of these studies? Whenever I look I can only find reference to long term exposure, and meta-studies reviewing more moderate use seem to show minimal, if any, issues, e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341... To my knowledge, the one study that people held up as showing damage from MDMA usage after a single dose was later retracted, as they had mixed up t…

Sure, happy to. Here's a meta-study [1] that cites another meta-study showing single use harm. [2] This study [3] shows changes in serotonin patterns seven years after administration in primates.

MisterYouAreSoDumb was a legendary Redditor who frequently commented on the topic of harm. This one's a collection of references and a good TL;DR. [4] It's ten years old now but there's still a treasure trove of material here. Another comment from them that is the beginning of a series. [5] And as I mentioned earlier, the safety protocols required to mitigate the damage are extensive. You cannot rely on users going the distance to have a less-harmful experience. You must assume it's being taken under non-ideal conditions, with plenty of redosing, which is multiplicatively more damaging, as the axon terminals involved will simply run dry.

Hope that's helpful.

I'm not here to judge. I've also taken MDMA in my youth and quite a lot of it. But I do wish we had these resources available then as we do now so I could have made a more informed decision.

My personal, anecdotal, experience is I had a bunch of pretty magical experiences with MDMA in my youth which I've never been able to reproduce since. That was personal confirmation that irrevocable changes had occurred due to use. The internet is chock full of similar stories.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181923

[2] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12869661

[3] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/19/12/5096.full.pdf

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/15ix0s/comment/c7mvi...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/comments/13lp0b/mdma_neur...

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#154

Post by jokoon »

the6thwonder wrote: post #110
jokoon wrote: post #56

Whatever you do please don't advocate to replace ssri with psychedelics. Listen to a doctor or psychiatrist, just like it was for vaccines. And avoid personal anecdote, they have little value compared to what a doctor says. Thanks in advance.

> avoid personal anecdote, they have little value compared to what a doctor says. Doctors are like engineers. There is a body of science and research for their field. They were once trained on part of it. But day to day each individual doctor is a practitioners. What they say is often just their own anecdotes. Research on a topic may exist but it's up to personal interest and work style whether they read it.

Doctors are not like engineers.

Human health and biology is far more complex and tricky that whatever engineers deal with.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#155

Post by empyrrhicist »

birdyrooster wrote: post #114
bozhark wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they don’t cause undesirable mental conditions that persist for the rest of your life. Your “trip” is about 6-8 hours on a typical 3.5g dose.

Dude I know people who have had their lifelong schizophrenia start at the same time they started using hallucinogens like LSD and mushrooms. It's not a conspiracy or bullshit. People I have loved have changed in ways they couldn't control and was destructive/scary for them.

I don't disagree that these substances are known triggers for those with predispositions, but be careful with your logic - that's exactly the same format as autism/vax conspiracy folks use, when in reality the common cause is age. Symptoms of autism can start to manifest around the time childhood vaccines are being given, just like schizophrenia and related conditions manifest in teenagers and young adults (also groups known to try drugs). In the latter case we do also have evidence that psychedelics are associated with increased risk/earlier onset, but you wouldn't be able to tell from the timing anecdote.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#156

Post by shlant »

mightyham wrote: post #141

There are already tons of legal forms of escapism, which is exactly what psychedelics are, so I fail to see why it's so imperative that they become more socially accepted. I've also tried my fair share of psychedelics and find it completely laughable that people try to raise them up as these spiritual or therapeutic tools. Just because they make you hallucinate does not mean they "open up your mind" or make you think…

> I've also tried my fair share of psychedelics and find it completely laughable that people try to raise them up as these spiritual or therapeutic tools. Just because they make you hallucinate does not mean they "open up your mind" or make you think any more critically than alcohol or other drugs.

"I didn't have the experience some people talk about so I will ridicule and discount all those perspectives"

Cool. Great contribution, thanks. It's too bad you didn't have those experiences people talk about because maybe it would have helped check your ego.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#157

Post by cthalupa »

emptysongglass wrote: post #153
cthalupa wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to provide some of these studies? Whenever I look I can only find reference to long term exposure, and meta-studies reviewing more moderate use seem to show minimal, if any, issues, e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341... To my knowledge, the one study that people held up as showing damage from MDMA usage after a single dose was later retracted, as they had mixed up t…

Sure, happy to. Here's a meta-study [1] that cites another meta-study showing single use harm. [2] This study [3] shows changes in serotonin patterns seven years after administration in primates. MisterYouAreSoDumb was a legendary Redditor who frequently commented on the topic of harm. This one's a collection of references and a good TL;DR. [4] It's ten years old now but there's still a treasure trove of material her…

Thanks! These are interesting.

Couple of notes I made from my first perusal.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181923

They point out that they showed neurotoxicity in animal studies with doses higher than those typically for recreational users. In studies of human users, they did find evidence of brain structural alteration, but no large-scale cognitive impairment of clinically relevant proportions. Fairly significant evidence of impact to memory.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/19/12/5096.full.pdf

They chose dosages for MDMA here that are extremely high. 80-120mg is the standard recreational dose with anything above 150mg being considered high, but the dosage they chose would be the by-weight equivalent of a 160lb person taking 340mg of MDMA. This looks intentional - they say in the study the selected a dosage that was known to cause brain lesions. The sci-hub study references a species-specific dose scaling chart that explains some of this, but it also disclaims that the science of the dose scaling is disputed. I'm not super sure what to make of it - it stands to reason that too much of anything can be dangerous, but it doesn't seem like the science is close to being settled on whether or not these dosing differences make sense.

I haven't yet had a chance to go through all the references from the reddit post, but I'll work through them.

I think it's pretty compelling evidence that there is risk in taking MDMA long term, or in very high dosages on more acute timescales. I don't know that what I have read so far counters the science in the meta-study I linked around more moderate use, since that did draw primarily on observational studies that included imaging of human users. I'm no expert, though, and hopefully no one reading this is taking my understanding of the science as anything resembling authoritative.

It does further highlight a lot of the potential risks in taking street drugs, though - you never know the actual potency or chemical composition of what you're being sold.

>My personal, anecdotal, experience is I had a bunch of pretty magical experiences with MDMA in my youth which I've never been able to reproduce since. That was personal confirmation that irrevocable changes had occurred due to use. The internet is chock full of similar stories.

Hmm. There's a lot of experiences I found magical at one point in time that I've never been able to reproduce, none of them related to drugs. I think it's hard for humans to disentangle their perceptions from the novelty of new experiences, the impact of their mental state, point in life, etc. etc.

At any rate, thank you again for the wealth of information.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#158

Post by chiefalchemist »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #109
ecshafer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reverse seems much much more likely. The abusive political system pushes drug legalization as an opiate of the masses so they are more content to deal with the abusive political system. A weekend of legal drug use to make the pain go away and disrupt solidarity.

Opiates are quite a different animal. A weekend of psychedelics with your friends is not going to help you ignore anything.

re: opiate of the masses

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+opiate+of+the+masse...

In short, it's not to be read literally.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#159

Post by chiefalchemist »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #102
chiefalchemist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’ve got a crisis of unhappiness in this country and psychedelic therapies are absolutely a powerful tool we could use to help people find themselves. While I agree with everything else you said, this bit concerns me. I'm certainly in favor of using these tools to help anyone who needs help. But maybe we should start with a mirror, and collectively ask, "Why are so many so unhappy?" These psychedelics can help res…

> These psychedelics can help resolve the symptoms My experience with psychedelic-assisted insight is not consistent with this. You have the right trip, identify some root-causes that you've been overlooking, and then sober-you has the rest of your life to do something with that new awareness. They're not painkillers. If anything, they're the opposite. There are all of these rumors about LSD causing back pain because…

> They're not painkillers

In the traditional sense (e.g., alcohol, Oxycodine, etc) no they are not. But they are mind altering, literally. And that alteration is an opportunity to break patterns, unhealthy patterns. Being in that other state of mind shows you another state of mind can exist. You experienced it. So you take that away with you and ideally build new healthier paths.

Re: Shifting views about psychedelic drugs require a new category for them

#160

Post by chiefalchemist »

golergka wrote: post #41
chiefalchemist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’ve got a crisis of unhappiness in this country and psychedelic therapies are absolutely a powerful tool we could use to help people find themselves. While I agree with everything else you said, this bit concerns me. I'm certainly in favor of using these tools to help anyone who needs help. But maybe we should start with a mirror, and collectively ask, "Why are so many so unhappy?" These psychedelics can help res…

> But maybe we should start with a mirror, and collectively ask, "Why are so many so unhappy?" Because that's the default.. People haven't evolved to be happy; we have evolved to barely survive to have kids and care for them so that a few become adults. Being happy is the exception, you should ask how anyone manages that.

The default is resorting to drugs, alcohol, other destructive behaviour, and even suicide?

Maybe.

But this isn't a universal default. These escapes at this level isn't happening everywhere in every culture, is it?

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