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Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

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Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#201

Post by anonymouswacker »

Using Magic Mushrooms and Ayahuasca both made me more in touch with my body, and pushed me to take care of myself more. I noticed, while on Ayahuasca, that much of my anxiety was due to physical pain (or vice versa!), and that self-medicating with alcohol & tobacco were ultimately causing me more pain and dependence.

I was addicted to smoking, but not addicted to alcohol. Now, trying either leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Although, for health reasons, ironically, I am trying to pick up drinking Pinot Noir on occasion!

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#202

Post by carapace »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #170
carapace wrote: post #164

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.

I never said that drugs don't work. I said they do work as amplifiers and "convincers". Combined with a good set and setting lots of people, myself included, have had "good trips" that include mental emotional and spiritual healing.

My concern is when people get confused and think that the "magic" is in the mushroom.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#203

Post by carapace »

taurath wrote: post #186
carapace wrote: post #164

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…

> I'm not against drugs per se I'm just against using them in therapy. It's irresponsible. I think it’s appropriate to try something else when you’ve tried therapy, support groups, etc. Sometimes the best thing one needs especially when they’ve been focused on changing their mind and habits for a long while is something to open up all the calcified pathways.

Yes, absolutely. If you have exhausted the better options, get high.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#204

Post by pshc »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #157
krsdcbl wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tldr; it quite literally "killed my ego" for a short time and allowed for an unclouded view onto what was going on with me. And that way of reflecting my emotional state stayed with me ever since

A lot of the people using them mention killing the ego, I've never done anything like that and wonder what do you think under the word ego? I know the literal term obviously.

Way I see it, the ego manifests as a bunch of defense mechanisms that seek to preserve the status quo of one's existing personality, by distorting one's perception and generating sometimes-intrusive thoughts. The ego is also the thing that always wants more... more adulation, attention, money, etc.

As an example: given that you have free will, at any moment you could say to yourself, "hey, there are X and Y habits/traits I have, let's not do those anymore and do Z instead." Maybe it's smoking, eating badly, you don't treat people the way they deserve, being a doormat, whatever. You could absolutely choose to become an entirely different person overnight. You might also change your career/lifestyle overnight (not everyone is so lucky though).

Now the ego swoops in and says, "Hold on, let's not do anything crazy, it'll be scary and embarrassing if I suddenly act differently, what will my friends think? It's easier to keep on keeping on. These habits are just things that I would do. It's okay when I do these things because I'm me." and so on like this.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#205

Post by tasty_freeze »

cat199 wrote: post #59

good news, but: where is the control group for 'going into a special place with the expectation of a spiritual/transformative experience and spending several hours meditating on letting go of the problem'? pretty sure that might also have a nonzero statistical success correlate.

I don't have a citation on hand, but I know one of the early psilocybin experiments (of seminary students, so probably prone to spiritual response) used niacin as the control compound. These were drug-naive test subjects so having no response at all would have unblinded the experiment. Niacin, in enough of a dose, causes tingling, flushing, and heart rate changes.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#206

Post by TaylorAlexander »

magic_beans wrote: post #163
devmunchies wrote: post #132

I've been learning more about these psychedelics and they seem to have good medical benefits but if anyone is looking for a psychedelic or spiritual breakthrough, similar breakthroughs have been achieved through things like kundalini yoga. Its the same as weight training vs steroids, but of course you can do both. You might not be ready or even know how to process your experience if you just take a drug. (I'm not tal…

Kundalini awakenings can be just as harmful (if not MORE) as psychedelics awakenings without proper integration work. It always helps to work with a teacher or guide when traveling through a shadowy psyche.

Not disagreeing but clarifying that the big psychedelic medical studies also rely on integration work as it dramatically increases the value of the treatment. This I am paraphrasing from what I have learned from the Psychonauts podcast.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#207

Post by AnthonBerg »

carapace wrote: post #164

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…

In MAPS’ completed Phase 2 trials with 107 participants, 61% no longer qualified for PTSD after three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy two months following treatment. At the 12-month follow-up, 68% no longer had PTSD. All participants had chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD, and had suffered from PTSD for an average of 17.8 years.

https://maps.org/research/mdma/ptsd/phase3

Drugs used in therapy can resolve decades of treatment-resistant PTSD. Would you reconsider your position against drugs in therapy?

Would you be willing to look at the scientific results? Would you take a chance on closing your eyes momentarily to the word "drug"? This is therapy. Therapy is scientific results applied to the betterment of mankind.

To me, it would be deeply unethical to stop or ignore this work.

I've actually seen the results of "street therapy" for PTSD using MDMA by responsible adults. It was ... staggering. It's hard to express the boundless privilege of seeing PTSD melt off a person you love in an evening. And stay gone. Treatment-resistant PTSD. Decades of it. Gone. Because a substance was ingested. After endless therapy and doing all the right things. Sure, therapy worked. Glacially. There was constant pain. Constant anxiety. Gone. Just like in the studies. Rigorous, careful studies, taking decades of careful preparation in all spheres, political and medical.

But the anecdote doesn't matter. We have the studies.

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#208

Post by carapace »

dwaltrip wrote: post #190
carapace wrote: post #164

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…

That's a lot of words without much analysis. Can you please explain precisely how these studies are bad science?

It would take too long to do the subject justice, but I'll try to sketch it:

The idea that psilocybin "cures" smoking addiction is like the "Virtus dormitiua"

> I am asked by the learned doctor the cause and reason why opium causes sleep. To which I reply, because it has a dormitive property, whose nature is to lull the senses to sleep.

We have no idea why magic mushroom do what they do, nor any solid scientific idea of how they do what they do. The best we can say is, "By breaking down those networks, there's a chance they won't re-form." and "It seemed to work..."

A neuroscientist friend of mine likes to say, "Psychiatry is not a branch of medicine." This still isn't it. For example: at any point were the subjects of the study given a blood test?

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#209

Post by anonymouswacker »

npo9 wrote: 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…

Large, centralized bureaucracies routinely make mistakes with sweeping reforms intended to improve quality of life at the cost of freedom -- and then rarely if ever apologize or make corrections. They lack "skin in the game", and work on an asymmetry in power and information and almost always a lack of consequences [0].

This is why many industries & sytems in US are broken: medical (including psychiatric), educational, drug & criminal justice, etc.

[0] - Skin in the Game (book), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)

Re: Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit

#210

Post by 09bjb »

aidos wrote: post #156
eyegor wrote: post #100

To anyone curious, this was studied at a small scale with promising results across several psychedelics. Most notably lsd and mdma (in addition to mushrooms and dmt). I can't seem to locate links to studies at the moment, but I'd suggest reading How to change your mind by Michael Pollan if you're interested in this stuff.

I went to a talk last week by Robin carhart-harris who does deep research in this area. The talk itself was pretty complicated but he was saying (I think!) that they believe these drugs cause the brain to go into a state where it becomes more susceptible to change. The same thing happens under extreme stress / trauma. The context of the experience itself then determines how that’s encoded. It’s like it opens the brai…

Yes. I've done a lot of reading on the subject trying to explain and begin to understand how the incredibly positive changes I've experienced come about...and "reverse PTSD" seems remarkably close. A guided, safe psychedelic session is similar in that it's a one-time, extremely powerful event that causes a lasting change in the brain--except in this case it's positive and intentional* whereas PTSD is negative and wasn't sought out.

* There seems to be a large degree of choice in which changes one wants to take away from the experience but this is a highly subjective, personal conclusion.

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