[HN Gopher] Study finds no detrimental effects of psilocybin in ...
___________________________________________________________________
Study finds no detrimental effects of psilocybin in 10mg or 25mg
doses
Author : geox
Score : 293 points
Date : 2022-01-04 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kcl.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kcl.ac.uk)
| 01100011 wrote:
| Just keep in mind you can get a headache the next day.
|
| Psilocybin dose-dependently causes delayed, transient headaches
| in healthy volunteers:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345296/
| [deleted]
| freddymilkovich wrote:
| I would argue that opening the doors of perception in and of
| itself can be a detrimental side effect. They don't close. Live
| without the delusion. forever.
|
| Both are worth it. Its always worth it.
|
| But to act like it hasnt impacted certain areas of my life in a
| negative way, would be a hunka buncha bullshit.
| j4hdufd8 wrote:
| > The remaining 29 participants acted as the control group and
| received a placebo, also with psychological support.
|
| How do you do placebo with psychedelics? Doesn't it quickly
| become obvious that you are tripping (or not)?
| Rastonbury wrote:
| It's obvious, I've participated in a such a study (not
| psilocybin). It has to be done though
| letitbeirie wrote:
| I wonder if the control group being disappointed they're not
| tripping has any effect on these kinds of studies
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Typically they receive something like methylphenidate, and they
| are psilocybin-naive so they don't know which they got.
| _moof wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_placebo
| 542458 wrote:
| Dumb Question: How would you know that you're not just
| measuring that detrimental effects are identical across both
| substances?
| dasv wrote:
| I have read that niacin is used as a placebo, it has a very
| noticeable physical effect but no psychedelic properties.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| you can gain psilocybin benefits without taking enough of it to
| trip
| ruined wrote:
| short answer, no.
|
| longer answer, dose-response varies, subjects don't necessarily
| know what the effects should be, or may not be able to identify
| the experience, and also it's pretty easy to get yourself into
| an autocthonous psychedelic headspace, especially if you expect
| "something" to happen
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Gosh. Judging by the articles that come up so frequently, HN
| seems to want...
|
| - Universal Basic Income
|
| - Psychedelic Drugs
|
| - Suicide Pods
|
| And I can't help but feel all three of these are intricately tied
| together. UBI to pursue legal hedonism, and a "painless" exit
| when the drugs don't do it anymore.
|
| I don't think anyone who advocates for these things explicitly
| wants such a nihilistic view of life. They want the freedom to
| create unbridled, and an end to poverty, hunger, mental anguish,
| and suffering -- but that isn't the outcome they will get.
| yboris wrote:
| I explicitly want all three things you list. I also would like
| to see Open Borders ;) https://openborders.info
|
| For psychedelic drug decriminalization: the alternative is
| status quo, which results in tremendous amount of suffering
| (thousands of people in jail who are then disenfranchised by
| their "criminal" record).
|
| You vaguely gesture at the possible good outcomes people like
| me want, but then boldly claim "that isn't the outcome [we]
| will get". I'm puzzled why _you_ have such a pessimistic view
| of it all.
|
| Portugal decriminalized all drugs 20 years ago and they are
| doing great (by comparison to surrounding countries that have
| not). Assisted suicide has become legal in several countries
| with presumably no negative outcomes you are warning us
| against. UBI has been successful and loved by Alaskans for
| decades. What problems are you worried about?
| dubcanada wrote:
| Those are just popular topics of any discussion. Since other
| "more important" topics are banned via rules (ie politics).
| the-dude wrote:
| You forgot static web blogs.
| Flankk wrote:
| Damn kids and their suicide pods. Back in my day, we hung
| ourselves using a rope and we liked it that way.
| [deleted]
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| my friend had a psychotic break while on it. we later found out
| he was bipolar.
|
| The title seems accurate, but you never know what disease you may
| have until it actually manifests so be careful
| ScoobleDoodle wrote:
| I had a friend in high school who took mushrooms and said they
| never felt like the same person since then. That statement was
| made in high school and reiterated in their late 20s. I don't
| know what dosage they took. I don't know if they had other
| mental health conditions, though it seemed like they had some
| degree of alcoholism.
|
| I have dealt with depression and have my eye on some form of
| Psilocybin treatment as a future option. But am weary due to my
| friend's experience. So I'm waiting for more expertise to be
| developed and the treatment to be validated and consequences
| quantified.
| jabej wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking. "In healthy people"... how do you
| know you don't have latent schizophrenia?
|
| Slightly related https://old.reddit.com/r/HPPD/
| otherme123 wrote:
| Funny how intolerable are those "latent" diagnostics for
| illegal drugs, and meanwhile the totally legal and widely
| prescribed trazodone (an antidepresant) is known to cause,
| among others 1) suicidal thoughts, 2) insomnia, 3)
| hallucinations, 4) and paranoia. Other common drug,
| bromazepan, turns you into a half zombi, loss of ability to
| remember and amnesia, hallucinations... And it has a bad
| widthdrawal.
|
| Of course you have to be careful when taking LSD, psilocybin
| or whatever. But don't replace info with FUD: just study,
| legalize and put the info in the box when sold. They are not
| worse than 95% of widely prescribed drugs. They are illegal
| just because they are also enjoyable.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Psychedelic drugs push anyone towards a psychotic state, and
| really can teach you something about mental illness by giving
| you a view into their world. But yes it can cause psychotic
| break, especially LSD but shrooms too.
| friendly_chap wrote:
| Why did you link that HPPD subreddit? I used to have visual
| snow a lot, does it have anything to do with latent
| schizophrenia?
| jabej wrote:
| No, I linked to it to show how using these drugs can have
| permanent effects on you. Only slightly related to the rest
| of my comment.
| [deleted]
| wrinkl3 wrote:
| Afaik HPPD and schizophrenia are distinct conditions, most
| people with HPPD don't report any symptoms common in
| schizophrenia.
| j4hdufd8 wrote:
| are you sure he was unaware of any mental illnesses?
|
| how did he prepare for the trip? was he familiar with set &
| setting and other such recommendations?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| Definitely nothing officially, however i wouldn't be
| surprised if drugs helped him feel better so it was a form of
| self-medication. With hindsight you could probably find a few
| signs, but nothing that required hospitalization before the
| trip.
|
| I wasn't his first time doing mushrooms, but teens don't
| really use responsibly. I'm definitely not saying that it's
| common enough for people to be scared, but it's not like
| teens do full medical assessments before they start to use
| drugs.
|
| Side note years later he had a seizure due to lsd, but we
| believe that was because he was on lithium for mood
| stabilizers. The drugs while helpful have side effects so
| it's not perfect and we have a long way to go for treatment
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Psychedelics don't cause bipolar. What it can do is reveal
| it. (Or make it worse.)
|
| I didn't get diagnosed until I was 32 after a massive
| psychotic break caused by stress, despite mania, paranoia,
| and depression clearly starting when I was 9-years-old.
|
| My mom suspected but never told me.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Does the reveal make bipolar treatment possible that was
| otherwise not being provided previously? It almost sounds
| like it can be used as a diagnostic tool for surfacing
| certain neurological disorders that otherwise might go
| untreated.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Psychotic breaks can be extremely damaging. I'm still
| recovering from the one I had in August 2018. There are
| less dangerous ways to diagnose possible disorders.
| (Family history is a major red flag.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Good to know. I believe the genetic markers are pretty
| well known for some disorders; perhaps a component in
| diagnostics besides family history (which can be an issue
| if your parent was never diagnosed, died young, you're
| adopted, etc).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Psychedelics don't cause bipolar. What it can do is
| reveal it. (Or make it worse.)
|
| AFAIK, we don't know enough about the mechanics of bipolar
| disorder to rule out anything that causes you to transition
| from not meeting the diagnostic criteria to meeting them as
| being a cause rather than a revelation of some existing
| underlying problem. If it makes you transition to meeting
| the diagnostic criteria, it causes the disorder _as best we
| understand it now_ and anything else is speculation.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of people try to ascribe a causal link from drugs
| to mental illness when it's probably the other way around.
| People undiagnosed but suffering from early stage mental
| illness often self-medicate, combined with the fact that
| there's a lot of overlap in the ages where people experiment
| with drugs and when mental illness typically presents itself
| enough to lead to a diagnosis.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The thing is... all of these happen because excessive drug
| use can cause mental illness.
|
| The problem is people assume drug use is always the cause.
| This isn't helped by many people treating mental illness as a
| character flaw.
| penjelly wrote:
| how do you retroactively determine that he always had it? A
| psychotic break _could_ be the root cause of bipolar disorder,
| couldnt it?
| misc213 wrote:
| Are you able to share the dosage your friend took?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| Probably not, but I assume a recreational dose is greater
| than a therapeutic another friend took the same amount and he
| was perfectly fine, but my friend became really paranoid
| (government hiding people to torture, signals sent through
| TV, people trying to kill him). he was a heavy cannabis and
| alcohol user in high school which could have been a sign of
| self-medication, but that was the first time he really had a
| negative experience.
|
| At the time, we thought he was schizophrenic, but he got a
| bipolar diagnoses later from doctors.
|
| It's been a struggle with sobriety and mental health for over
| a decade. Mushroom didn't cause it, but it was definitely a
| notable moment in his life
| blackowl wrote:
| Similar experience here, but with a different hallucinogen. It
| has forever changed me, so I wanted to share. My close friend
| had a psychotic break due to daily marijuana use and is now on
| psychiatric drugs to control symptoms. She was always creative,
| but she could tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
| During the break, it was like she was rolling constantly and
| couldn't stop. She was hearing voices. Thinking that 2D images
| were alive. For months on end. She was ranting, crying, acting
| uncharacteristically pompous, then crumbling into a heap of
| shame. This is a professional middle-aged person who was living
| a full life.
|
| My understanding is that for folks who are genetically
| predisposed, a life trigger can manifest in a mental health
| condition that likely never would have surfaced. Triggers may
| include in utero trauma, child abuse or chemical imbalance due
| to stress or controlled substances. Hallucinogens can trigger a
| serious mental health condition in an individual who may have
| lived an otherwise mentally stable life. Not unlike needing to
| watch cholesterol in a family who suffers from heart disease,
| perhaps. So, yeah, when I read "... in healthy people" it made
| me go hmmmm.
|
| But still, psilocybin is not marijuana. And this is great news
| for those suffering from treatment-resistant depression and
| PTSD.
| ragnese wrote:
| Right. I'm not anti-recreational-drug-use, but this assertion
| that gets repeated all the time feels damn close to a
| tautology.
|
| "The drug didn't cause you to go crazy. You just had underlying
| craziness that never manifested before using the drug and might
| never have manifested if you never used the drug."
|
| Consider this my raised eyebrow.
|
| Even if it's really technically true, it's _effectively_ a
| vacuous and unfalsifiable statement when it comes to an
| individual person, and one can 't use the information at all
| when estimating the risk of their potential recreational
| activity.
| kmill wrote:
| Yeah, it's sort of like saying "the knife didn't cause them
| to die, they were just an undiagonosed hemophiliac and the
| wound failed to close properly."
|
| However, teasing out the steelman from this, what they mean
| is "becoming crazy is not a necessary effect of recreational
| drug use, but rather a contingent effect."
|
| I've seen studies before trying to study this, for example
| cannabis and latent schizophrenia. One complication is that
| recreational drug use goes hand-in-hand with self-medication
| of undiagnosed issues.
| asdffdsa wrote:
| What kind of foolish arrogance is this?
|
| Though I've never been diagnosed and live a normal life, I've
| had mood swings and extended family history of schizophrenia.
| Because of this, and the knowledge that there are certain
| triggers that can cause lifelong neurological issues, I'll
| never try acid or other hallucinogens.
|
| The value of knowing that "underlying craziness" can exist is
| in inherently reminding us of the actual risk. Let's say
| someone predisposed toward neurological issues is on the
| fence, but ultimately decides to follow the reasoning in the
| comment. What liability are you going to bear for it?
| ajkjk wrote:
| > What liability are you going to bear for it?
|
| What kind of question is that? They said some stuff on the
| internet. None, of course, as it should be.
|
| Their point was that if you weren't gonna go crazy and you
| took a drug and went crazy, then in every sense of the
| word, the drug _caused_ you to go crazy. Whether you had
| some latent condition or not is irrelevant.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Yes one's predisposition does play a role and the environment
| too, with mental issues.
|
| Note that the most common side effect of amphetamine class
| drugs is psychosis, emotional problems, which manifest long
| before physical troubles do.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| I think the key phrase here is "in healthy people" which ought to
| mean both physically and mentally healthy people. Now, of course,
| it becomes complicated. Especially if you are healthy but at-risk
| for certain conditions (say schizoaffective/schizophrenia). I
| have seen this compound work miracles, I have also seen it send
| some very close friends of mine off the deep end. Of course,
| those friends were always a little different, let's say.
| throwawaypkjhg wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have longterm visual side effects from taking
| magic mushrooms once 16 years ago (halos around objects, static
| on the walls, patterns pulsing, etc.) It's possible they were
| there prior but I didn't notice them, but these are not that
| uncommon from what I glean (see HPPD). I also had semi ego death
| for a year or two.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I was terrified of HPPD when I was first dabbling in
| psychedelics. 15 years and many trips later I notice the
| occasional perceptual oddity, but I feel like this is how my
| perception has always worked and pre-drug-use-me was just
| ignoring the debug output.
|
| Not to diminish any accounts of HPPD to the contrary, maybe I'm
| just lucky.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Psilocybin, in 10mg or 25mg doses
|
| How does that translate to illicit recreational doses?
|
| > 89 healthy participants
|
| Not sure how they define healthy... Like others on this thread,
| have witnessed plenty of seemingly 'healthy' cause a lot of
| damage to themselves with Psyches.
|
| > a potential treatment for a range of mental health conditions,
| including treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and PTSD.
|
| Are they going to test if it has detrimental effects on people
| with TRD or PTSD? I would imagine they'd be substantially more at
| risk for adverse effects.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| From my casual reading of these journal articles over the past
| several years, it's easy to make such statements about
| "healthy" people. Any underlying psychiatric disease discovered
| _after_ psilocybin can be retroactively applied to the
| participant.
|
| "Oh, that guy had underlying bipolar disorder and therefore
| wasn't healthy."
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It's varies in strength but that corresponds to about 1-2.5g of
| dried mushrooms. So a normal amount.
| loveJesus wrote:
| misc213 wrote:
| Does anyone know of a resource to help convert from the MG they
| report to the dried product?
| mycobuble wrote:
| You can look at the default values in the Shroomery Dosage
| Calculator
|
| https://www.shroomery.org/6257/Magic-Mushroom-Dosage-Calcula...
| theli0nheart wrote:
| There's no surefire way to estimate the actual weight of
| psilocybin save for extracting it chemically. It can vary
| widely between species, between flushes, and even between
| individual fruits.
| clsec wrote:
| Dried product varies pretty widely in strength, even from stem
| to cap. Things like strain and spore lineage also contribute to
| strength of the dried product.
|
| A good place to find more info is here:
| https://www.shroomery.org/
| [deleted]
| james_burden wrote:
| They are using synthetic psilocybin. It would be impossible to
| make a translation between grams of dried vs. synthetic.
| Different species have diff content, liberty cap vs. penis envy
| etc. also stalks vs. caps typically differ in str.
| misc213 wrote:
| Dosage guides for dried shrooms are already universal in
| recommendation of dosage typically speaking in terms of grams
| without bringing up the individual strain. This leads me to
| believe that a generally close conversion should be
| reasonable from the dried natural to that MG number.
| emteycz wrote:
| It's more like the measurement is off so much the
| differences don't even matter.
| theptip wrote:
| Just to be clear, the title is incorrectly editorializing the
| article. Lots of people in this thread are correctly objecting to
| the unsupported overly-broad claim that there are no long-term
| effects.
|
| What the paper actually tested:
|
| > The trial is the first of its kind to thoroughly investigate
| the simultaneous administration of psilocybin. 89 healthy
| participants with no recent (within 1 year) use of psilocybin
| were recruited. 60 individuals were randomly picked to receive
| either a 10mg or 25mg dose of psilocybin in a controlled
| environment. In addition, all participants were provided with
| one-to-one support from trained psychotherapists. The remaining
| 29 participants acted as the control group and received a
| placebo, also with psychological support.
|
| > Participants were closely monitored for six to eight hours
| following administration of psilocybin and then followed up for
| 12 weeks. During this time, they were assessed for a number of
| possible changes, including sustained attention, memory, and
| planning, as well as their ability to process emotions.
|
| So the study did not find any deleterious effects in N=89, from
| _one_ dose, in a supportive environment, over a fairly short
| follow-up period. This not surprising to me and I'm not updating
| my model of the world in any way.
|
| This does _not_ prove that Psilocybin has no detrimental long-
| term effects. It just suggests that if they occur, they probably
| don't occur frequently enough to show up in the cursory glance
| that this study gave to the issue.
|
| Psilocybin is an exciting treatment for mental health issues;
| it's great that it's being destigmatized. It should be
| decriminalized, and it is much safer than alcohol and many other
| recreational drugs. However, like any drug, it has risks and can
| be misused. We need to be honest about the risks, understand that
| nothing is safe, and particularly, understand how to detect and
| respond to those risks when they do occur.
|
| edit: The title has now been changed, so this comment will read
| weirdly.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've revised the title above to try to make it more
| accurate about what's being reported here.
| theptip wrote:
| Thanks @dang!
| 71a54xd wrote:
| This article and the study it's drawing from is certainly
| cherrypicked or naive. There's been significant research to
| investigate the _known cardiotoxicity of Psilocin_ [0][1].
| Basically, for some unknown reason, micro-dosing too often or for
| too long with non-perceptive (very small doses, small enough to
| not elicit any perceptible effects) doses of psilocybin can lead
| to the degeneration of critical heart muscle tissues
| (specifically observed in heart valves).
|
| 0 -
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287756303_Psilocin_...
|
| 1 - https://drbillsukala.com/psilocybin-heart-valve-damage/
| superfamicom wrote:
| A few comments pointing out the correlation to spiritual /
| mystical communities. I know many engineers who use or have used
| and have fallen deeper into their hustle life style. I would say
| that it helps you explore yourself, be that chakras or crypto.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I find it honestly strange that 12 weeks is deemed "long-term",
| or am I missing something?
| worik wrote:
| Psilocybin is very safe.
|
| It is short acting so the distress that often accompanies major
| psychedelics is short and wears off quickly (unlike, say,
| mescaline which drags on for hours)
|
| There does seem to be a effect where taking magic mushrooms
| several days in a row produces deleterious effects, I am not sure
| that is due to the psilocybin but it is unpleasant physical side
| effects that are not apparent if doses are spaced.
|
| Repeated use (even when spaced enough to avoid the above physical
| effects) usually resulted (in my anecdotal observations of other
| people) in sever paranoia developing. That faded as quickly as
| the effects of the drug.
|
| It should be available and it should be widely used. Psychedelic
| drugs are good for the mind, which is why people take them.
| pengaru wrote:
| Psychedelic/"breakthrough" doses of psilocybin seem like non-
| lethal overdoses to me, based on some experience.
|
| It seems both useful and consistently safe/predictable consumed
| more as a supplement/vitamin, as one already can with OTC Lions
| Mane. If they legalized psilocybin I'm 100% certain we'd have
| Lions Mane+Psilocybin combo supplements on store shelves
| practically overnight. And like Nutmeg, nobody would be reporting
| ill effects unless deliberately swallowing an excess of them,
| something we don't bother preventing with Nutmeg or Dramamine
| despite some pretty nasty potential outcomes.
| whilestanding wrote:
| I definitely think Psilocybin gave me negative long term effects.
| I wish I would have never taken Psilocybin. I didn't even have a
| bad trip, it was the ideal kind of experience a lot of people
| seem to strive for. I had the cliche "spiritual awakening" type
| of experience. It make me incredibly narcissistic and allowed my
| brain to think in a very "the universe is on my side" kind of
| way, and I was open to a lot of magical thinking and woo woo
| after the trip. I made a lot of goofy choices with too much
| idealism and gusto and not much of a plan and it set my life and
| career back when it didn't work out. It took almost ten years to
| slowly realize what was obvious to me before the mushrooms which
| is that I am not the center of the universe, and the world is a
| harsh place that doesn't owe anyone anything.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yeah I think it's really important to use psychedelics with a
| therapist. I've seen a number of friends go down this path.
| Having a therapist can help ground you and understand what the
| experience means to your emotional body.
|
| That being said due to subjectivity you are quite literally the
| center of your universe =P
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I definitely think Psilocybin gave me negative long term
| effects.
|
| I think it's extremely bizarre that the public narrative has
| become that psilocybin will:
|
| 1) Create an openness to new ideas and flood you with different
| thoughts and feelings
|
| 2) _Only_ create positive changes, thoughts, and feelings.
|
| There's a big push in online comment sections to deny,
| downplay, or otherwise dismiss negative experiences.
| Psychedelic enthusiasts will come out of the woodwork and try
| to argue away any anecdotes that aren't purely positive,
| blaming them on everything from vague underlying mental health
| conditions to a misuse of the drugs. But it's almost always
| victim-blaming.
|
| I'm glad you were able to process your experience and undo the
| unhealthy changes. Thanks for helping spread awareness that
| psychedelic-induced changes aren't automatically good or
| positive.
| notch656a wrote:
| The public narrative is not that at all. Go ask a few typical
| midwestern grandmas what she thinks about her grandaughter
| dropping acid and report back.
| Siira wrote:
| Since when grandmas represent the trendy narratives?
| hristov wrote:
| That is a very good example, and thank you for sharing your
| experience. It should be noted that in the original article the
| test subjects (1) take Psilocybin only once and (2) are
| followed from this dose by hours of therapy by a professional
| psychologist.
|
| If that is what you did you probably would have been more
| grounded. But it is absolutely crazy to deduce from this very
| controlled experiment with a very limited single dose of
| Psilocybin and a lot of therapy after that, that recreational
| use is ok. This experiment was designed to allow for further
| controlled experiments to check for Psilocybin potential for
| treatment of depression and the like. That is all it should be
| used for.
| notch656a wrote:
| I'm glad they've taken precautions and first of all it seems
| they went very far to make sure everyone was safe. That is
| paramount.
|
| That said, the obsession with profession psychologist or
| psychiatrist as some sort of necessary therapy or guidance in
| use with psychedelics is just baffling to me. I've tripped a
| lot, the first several of times of which were completely on
| my own with no one else around. I'm sure there are people out
| there who would benefit from these sort of professional
| guidance but it borders on naive gate-keeping to believe
| these people are somehow necessary for experiencing altered
| mental states. I fear some suffered not being able to have
| the chance to explore psychedelics on their own, but instead
| influenced by the long traditioned history that
| medical/mental professionals introduce. It's like they're
| forcing their own color on the experience.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It should be noted that in the original article the test
| subjects (1) take Psilocybin only once and (2) are followed
| from this dose by hours of therapy by a professional
| psychologist.
|
| Virtually every modern psychedelic study includes huge
| amounts of therapy. I actually don't know if review boards
| would even approve a study which didn't have a significant
| therapy component right now.
|
| This makes the study results non-portable to recreational
| use. Many of the depression studies use upwards of 20 therapy
| sessions around the 1 or 2 psychedelic sessions, which is
| nothing like what happens when taking psychedelics
| recreationally.
| notch656a wrote:
| But I think you'd also be quite hard pressed to find any
| peer-reviewed study that shows a professional therapist
| yields better results regarding long-term detriment after
| exposure to psychedelics than mere access to health care
| when needed along with friends or whatever circumstance
| people find most enjoyable to take psychedelics in.
|
| There's scant evidence that mandatory therapy sessions are
| the determining factor of whether or not psychedelics can
| be taken safely.
|
| This is simply a poorly understood area, scientifically,
| due in part to government restriction on research. The
| intertwining of the therapy could mean psychedelics
| counteracted bad therapy, or the inverse, or neither.
|
| I am going to offer a piece of opinion here that will
| offend the psychiatrists, psychedelics enthusiasts, and
| many of those with more conservative views about drug use:
| what if psychedelic drugs are just another form of
| entertainment for the mind, like television. What if our
| ancestors in places like indigenous communities in present-
| day Mexico actually first started taking them because it
| GAVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO and a reprieve from boredom, and
| the spiritual interpretations later just added to the
| entertainment. What if therapists and psychiatrists,
| lawmakers, doctors, parents, shaman are making much ado
| about nothing while injecting their own influence into the
| mix, particularly for the relatively low risk drugs.
| colordrops wrote:
| Sorry to be blunt, but this sounds like an issue with your
| thinking, rather than an issue with psilocybin. You were
| already vulnerable to woo woo and narcissistic thinking, and
| psilocybin just awakened these traits in you. It's analogous to
| how hallucinogens can cause snaps in people with undiagnosed
| schizophrenia. In fact it could be said that it helped you
| because you became aware of them and flushed them out of your
| system.
| mountainriver wrote:
| I'm not sure I totally buy this. Yes psychedelics illuminate
| your mind but they also induce spiritual experiences in most
| people that take them.
|
| For folks who have little real spiritual understanding (most
| Americans), this can seem very enticing
| colordrops wrote:
| It sounds like you mostly agree with me, and that most
| Americans are prone to woo woo and narcissism, which sounds
| pretty accurate.
| mettamage wrote:
| I disagree with this.
|
| When people are vulnerable to something that doesn't mean
| they should have to go through it. There are many examples
| where it will make a human weaker in the end. There are also
| many examples where it will make a human stronger, but I
| think in his story it made him weaker because he lost 10
| years that he otherwise presumably wouldn't have.
|
| Not only did he lost 10 years, he lost 10 relatively
| foundational years (i.e. it's less bad to "lose 10 years" in
| your 60s to 70s compared to your 20s to 30s due to the
| compound interest effect that early "good years" have).
| colordrops wrote:
| The reason I posted this is because I went through a very
| similar experience, in fact for about the same length of
| time. I did this with a half dozen other people that also
| had "spiritual" experiences, but didn't fall into the same
| way of thinking as myself, so there's 7-8 data points that
| fed into my comment.
| notch656a wrote:
| Genuinely curious, but how did you all come to this
| conclusion, are your friends similar? As an engineer with
| friends who were engineers and scientists, most of us
| just thought "wow our brain sure is an interesting
| machine when you manipulate the chemicals" and went on
| with your lives virtually unchanged.
|
| When I look back at those years I used psychedelics my
| only real takeaway from use is that the mind is an
| interesting machine and drugs make me dance funny. Maybe
| it's because I don't know a spiritual crowd but even my
| old buddies from rural working class places just found
| them entertaining, I never heard a single story about
| spiritual breakthroughs.
| colordrops wrote:
| No, I'm saying I fell to the woo, but my other friends
| did not, despite having spiritual experiences. We are all
| engineers btw.
| notch656a wrote:
| Thank you for your sharing your experience.
| rb2k_ wrote:
| Interesting. That almost sounds like mania/hypomania.
|
| (Not saying that it induced a hypomanic episode, just that all
| of those fit the description)
| worik wrote:
| > . I made a lot of goofy choices with too much idealism and
| gusto and not much of a plan and it set my life and career back
| when it didn't work out
|
| You are blaming the drugs? I think you should take
| responsibility yourself!
| threatofrain wrote:
| Causal attribution is different from the assignment of
| responsibilities, notwithstanding whether this attribution is
| correct. Maybe some drug did cause somebody problems, but
| from the social perspective they may still be "on the hook"
| and thus "responsible" for all their problems.
| mmacvicarprett wrote:
| This is a great insight of a consequence that is unlikely to be
| considered.
| temp00345 wrote:
| However you turn it around, you are the Universe experiencing
| itself subjectively. That's easy to understand without any
| drugs.
|
| Having felt that during your trip might have led you to the
| wrong conclusion that your social life will somehow magically
| be improved by this knowledge alone. It could be, but not
| without a lot of good old work and effort. Even after all of
| that, there's no guarantee that you'll get what you want and
| won't get what you don't want.
|
| A lot of people waste their lives with or without the drugs, so
| maybe it wasn't just this substance that led to those setbacks.
| tillmannhgl wrote:
| > and the world is a harsh place that doesn't owe anyone
| anything.
|
| Which is just another subjective view...
|
| Not sure if your comment concludes actually the opposite: You
| should do Psilocybin if you want to have a happy idalistic life
| with less career struggles.
| scarby2 wrote:
| That's probably outside the scope of this study. You were
| probably not in a regulated setting or under the care of a
| psychiatrist at the time. I'd imagine there's some guidance
| involved in the whole process that recreational users would
| miss.
| colordrops wrote:
| BTW, "the world is a harsh place that doesn't owe anyone
| anything" is just as much as a subjective value judgement of
| reality as "the universe is on my side".
| Siira wrote:
| Not at all. One is the null hypothesis that is also supported
| by evidence, and the other is also known as having delusions
| of grandeur.
| colordrops wrote:
| Flippantly dismissing it as "the null hypothesis" is
| covering up an entire tradition of ideas around secular
| society's beliefs about the nature of reality. The evidence
| points to consciousness/subjective experience being the
| fundamental "matter" of reality, and this is beginning to
| gain traction again with scientists and philosophers. The
| "null hypothesis" in your context is built upon the logical
| positivist framework of the dualist belief that the mind
| and body are separate, and the objective world can be full
| apprehended rationally, which involves many a priori
| assumptions itself and is not a given. Most people are
| ignorant of the millennia of metaphysics that led to modern
| ways of looking at the world and just assume it to be
| ground truth rather than a complex mental construction just
| like the rest.
| notch656a wrote:
| You're right, the kids on youtube slowly dying of rabies
| unable to drink and convulsing in their bed are dying
| because they deserve it. The world is not a harsh place
| for them, and they were owed rabies.
|
| It's pretty clear there are people that the universe in
| practice has offered a shit sandwich. That may not be
| true for everyone but it could be true to the commenter.
| Your view is just some self-centered objectivism.
| colordrops wrote:
| Another flippant dismissal that doesn't address what I
| said. I said nothing of anyone deserving suffering. Your
| snap judgement on the nature or reality based on a
| YouTube video doesn't mean that deep threads and
| traditions exploring the nature of reality completely
| ignore the existence of suffering.
|
| > Your view is just some self-centered objectivism.
|
| the irony of projection right here. Sneering at someone
| to prove your point is an effective technique to convince
| weaker minds to agree with you, I'll give you that, but
| it doesn't make you correct.
| notch656a wrote:
| So you're willing to entertain then that someone could
| have the objective view that the world isn't on their
| side? With feelings and a priori opinion removed,
| factually dying a horrible death of rabies in childhood
| before reaching even reproductive age cannot possibly be
| seen as the world/universe being on your side.
|
| BTW, I didn't actually believe you thought people deserve
| to die of rabies, it was an inflammatory example to drive
| out how you can possibly defend this viewpoint
| necessarily being subjective and not objective.
| colordrops wrote:
| Anyone can have any view they wish about the world. What
| I'm saying is that it's very easy to take a superficial
| analysis of the nature of the reality built on gut
| feelings, personal anecdotes, and "i happen to be born in
| the right place at the right time in the right cultural
| tradition that has lock on truth" syndrome, and replace
| it with another superficial analysis of the reality built
| on gut feelings and personal anecdotes and "i happen to
| be born in the right place at the right time in the right
| cultural tradition that has a lock on truth" syndrome.
| Flapping from one superficial belief to another doesn't
| make the latter more true.
| notch656a wrote:
| I'm not sure deciding that "the world is on my side" is
| objectively false for some people is a superficial
| belief.
| notch656a wrote:
| Do you think it was psilocybin that gave you those thoughts or
| do you think the idea of psilocybin gave you good cover to
| experiment in idealism of youth? Your realism and experience
| sound more like the practical wisdom a lot of people gain over
| the 10 years of their 20s.
| diatomaceous_ wrote:
| This is the correct answer; psychedelics enhance aspects of
| your personality that were already quite present
| shrimpx wrote:
| Yes, I agree it's quite possible to retrospectively mistake
| the effects of psilocybin for the psychological evolution
| that happens naturally.
| gfody wrote:
| it's interesting to turn the question around: is it possible to
| fuck someone up for life w/25mg of psilocybin? with the right
| set and setting maybe
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| > that I am not the center of the universe, and the world is a
| harsh place that doesn't owe anyone anything
|
| that's usually what I take from a trip on mushrooms - seriously
| 0000011111 wrote:
| Psychedelics are the opposite of additive. In general, when a
| healthy person does a higher dose with the correct set and
| setting they do not want to do a high dose again for months and
| sometimes years and in some cases ever.
|
| Do not take my word for it. Research drug addiction statics.
| Compare Synthetic Opioid overdoes to Psilocybin overdoes.
|
| Look at how the drug war has fueled the industrial prison complex
| and the expense of POC.
|
| With a broader frame, of the risk profile, it's clear that
| Psilocybin is low on the list for healthy people.
|
| And that the drug war has manifested as a modern cast system
| within the united states.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There was in interesting UK study done that attempted to quantify
| how harmful various drugs were to the user and also to others.
|
| Psilocybin was found to be the least harmful drug that they
| considered.
|
| >The study involved 16 criteria, including a drug's affects on
| users' physical and mental health, social harms including crime,
| "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and
| "international damage".
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| And yet it's still class A. The study has been ignored entirely
| by the government
| bserge wrote:
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I doubt this, and I think it's detrimental to state so in the
| long run.
|
| I used Psilocybin, and it was worth it. I would recommand people
| to give it a try, and I helped people around me, including one
| parent, to take it.
|
| Yet.
|
| Every time I took it, I could feel my speech ability to decline
| for a while. The side effects faded slowly, and disapeared
| eventually every time. But traces of it are noticeable after even
| a month or two sometimes.
|
| It's like when people claimed that marijuana was not addictive.
| The deny didn't help at all. I know of several people that are
| addicted to smoking pot now. It's a negative side effect on their
| life.
|
| There is no such thing as a free lunch. Powerful products have
| powerful effects, and this means some harm can exist.
|
| Yes, psilocybin is way safer than the reputation is has been
| given in the 70'. Yes, taking it (in the right conditions) can
| benefit you a lot.
|
| But pretending there is zero detrimental effects is wishful
| thinking and will lead to people abusing the thing, believing
| it's just funny candy, and they may end up damaged.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > marijuana was not addictive
|
| It's "not addictive" in the sense that physical withdrawal
| symptoms are minimal compared to booze, nicotine, and other
| drugs. But you can make a daily habit out of anything
| pleasurable and ruin your life around it. I've seen people ruin
| their lives with both gaming and gambling habits.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > It's like when people claimed that marijuana was not
| addictive.
|
| I quit both weed and nicotine and only the nicotine was the
| problem to shift. Weed can be habitual, sure but there's a huge
| difference in physical and habitual addiction.
| tudelo wrote:
| Quitting nicotine is absurdly overblown. I'm sure me saying
| this will annoy somebody, but I think it's much more of a
| habit than a physical addiction and people hide behind the
| physical addiction as an excuse. Maybe if you smoke a pack a
| day it is a different beast but daily smoking is really not
| hard to kick.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Maybe it is overblown, I can generally go a while without a
| smoke, and could probably quit with relative ease if I
| wanted to. Surely it's no heroin withdraw and certainly not
| as bad as alcohol withdraw, but it's the quickest I've ever
| come to developing any physical addiction symptoms. The
| withdraw is real too, but mostly bearable.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| well it took me ~four years to comfortably quit nicotine
| from wanting to, to absolute zero. Weed is considerably
| easier to turn on and off whenever. I get that we're all
| weird but for some people there is a significant difference
| here.
| notch656a wrote:
| I wonder how much of that is addiction and how much is
| just forgetting what something is like. I have 1 cigar a
| month (never more, occasionally less) and have done so
| for about 12 years. I suppose some may say that means I'm
| addicted. Or does it mean I simply enjoy a cigar? I
| honestly don't know the threshold. When I see a cigar I'm
| usually reminded of the enjoyment; I guess that is some
| addiction in and of itself. It calls into question, what
| is a memory in and of itself -- and if memories and the
| desire to relive them are just an incarnation of
| addiction.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _But pretending there is zero detrimental effects is wishful
| thinking and will lead to people abusing the thing, believing
| it 's just funny candy, and they may end up damaged._
|
| I think you're mostly reacting to the framing of this headline,
| which isn't accurately stating the finding of the study.
|
| It would be more accurate to say the study "did not find any
| short or long term negative effects" which is _not_ the same as
| a positive assertion that such effects do not exist. This is a
| similar level of safety as you might find with aspirin or
| acetaminophen - both of which could be fairly described as not
| having short or long term negative effects and which can have
| serious health consequences if used incorrectly [edit: I said
| "if abused" which is the wrong way to put it].
|
| > _There is no such thing as a free lunch. Powerful products
| have powerful effects, and this means some harm can exist._
|
| There's nothing in this study that contradicts this idea -
| because studies like this don't claim to detect every form of
| harm. Instead, they look for particular forms of relatively
| objective harm. Another example to consider would be SSRIs:
| they tend to increase suicide attempts when patients start
| taking them. That's the kind of harm this study would find! But
| - even if a patient doesn't experience suicidal ideation - no
| doctor would suggest that it logically follows that patient
| should certainly go on SSRIs. The choice is always more complex
| than that.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > did not find any short or long term negative effects
|
| I think what the original comment refers to is that measuring
| long term side effects is kind of impossible without waiting
| a long time and wishful thinking.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I mean, I understand why someone might say that, but I
| think that's actually a critique of western medicine in
| general rather than this study in particular. In that I
| think it's understood that studies like this are measuring
| harms with commonly understood (but hard to rigorously
| define because you don't know what you don't know) limits.
|
| We've found new harms for medicines or treatments many
| times, and in each case we generally had previous studies
| that missed those harms. It's always possible, so calling
| it out about mushrooms in particular feels odd because the
| same critique applies to the western approach to every
| other medicine.
| Natsu wrote:
| You keep saying 'western' medicine. Is this to imply that
| some other method exists to study long term harms? I
| suppose long traditional use might, but this doesn't seem
| meaningfully different from running medical testing over
| a long period of time.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Is this to imply that some other method exists to
| study long term harms?_
|
| Not that I trust? But I think it's important to note that
| this study has epistemological value within a certain set
| of axioms and not everyone in the world agrees with those
| axioms.
|
| The reason it's important to say is that, to some degree,
| I feel like BiteCode_dev could be questioning an
| underlying axiom of western medicine (i.e. how to think
| about anecdotal harms we can't find in population
| studies). The western tradition has an opinion about the
| question, but none of us have to accept that opinion, but
| if we don't we should be honest that we disagree with the
| tradition in general as opposed to finding a flaw in this
| particular study.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'd read the study conclusions again, in particular the dosages
| and circumstances:
|
| > "Psilocybin, in 10mg or 25mg doses, has no short-term or
| long-term detrimental effects in healthy people... The
| research, published in The Journal of Psychopharmacology, is an
| essential first step in demonstrating the safety and
| feasibility of psilocybin - a psychedelic drug isolated from
| the Psilocybe mushroom - for use within controlled settings
| alongside talking therapy as a potential treatment for a range
| of mental health conditions, including treatment-resistant
| depression (TRD) and PTSD.'
|
| Notice that very large doses were not studied, and the studies
| were conducted under controlled settings, with one-on-one
| support from a trained psychotherapist, in groups of up to six
| people simultaneously.
|
| As the study was not flawed, then, under these conditions,
| psilocybin certainly seems like a safe and effective option for
| treatment.
| druadh wrote:
| I'd be curious to know how many mg's an average sized magic
| mushroom contains. I've taken a stem and had an enjoyable
| couple hours. I've taken several mushrooms 3.5-7g and had a
| rather intense set of experiences that I'll never forget,
| along with some very dark and scary moments -- And I can see
| how these moments would permanently change someone (even a
| 'healthy' person).
|
| Ultimately, how many mg's of psilocybin does an average magic
| mushroom contain? The very first line of text in a google
| search said 10mg psilocybin per 1g of mushroom. 35-70mg
| psilocybin for the two standard street dosages - so on the
| street, your minimum suggested dosage is, at minimum, like
| 40% stronger than this study looked into? Could make for some
| less than favorable experiences for people hearing about this
| 2nd hand and not looking into it.
|
| I wonder if the researchers in this study had people consume
| mushrooms on an empty or full stomach, as well. Also makes a
| big difference in terms of intensity and duration (in my
| experience).
|
| And like you mentioned, those in the study also had 1-on-1
| support from a trained professional.. On the street, you've
| got your goofball friends and maybe one wise, old trip-sitter
| if you're lucky. And honestly, I'd prefer a seasoned trip-
| sitter whose taken the drug many times over a trained
| professional who has is much less likely to have that kind of
| firsthand experience. The company you keep can have just as
| much of an impact as the potency of the hallucinogen (again,
| in my experience).
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > I doubt this, and I think
|
| Wow man, can't wait to read your peer reviewed study on the
| topic!
|
| I'm going to give this thread a few more hours before decide to
| quit reading Hacker News comments forever.
| cjohansson wrote:
| Do you have a peer reviewed study to support your opinion
| about Hacker News comments?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Ah shit, you got me!
| zepto wrote:
| > I'm going to give this thread a few more hours before
| decide to quit reading Hacker News comments forever.
|
| What do you anticipate happening in those few hours?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Better comments at the top, worse comments at the bottom.
| As of my response this was the highest rated comment.
| zepto wrote:
| It may not have been.
|
| As far as I know comments aren't just ordered by rating,
| but also by recency so that new comments have at least
| some visibility.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I wonder what you think the point of HN is? Do you think that
| this is a community for sharing peer-reviewed studies?
|
| If you're not interested in reading opinions and comments
| from an open forum that anyone can join, then maybe it is
| better for you to stop reading these comments.
|
| For me, I think OP's comment was completely reasonable, and
| at any rate, the headline with which the conclusions of this
| study appears is at best incomplete, and deserves to be
| criticised.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I don't think the point of HN is for people to share
| scientific articles and then for the comments section to be
| like "I disagree because of my personal experiences."
|
| Where does a conversation that uses personal anecdotes to
| refute scientific evidence even go? That's not adding
| anything to the conversation _at all_.
|
| Hacker News is where I go for intelligent discussion.
| Literally anyone can hop on the internet and say "hmm...I
| disagree because this one time..." and I tend to stay away
| from places that foster those kinds of value-less
| conversations.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I don't agree. I've never taken psilocybin, and I'm
| interested to hear the subjective experiences of folks
| who have, in addition to reading scientific studies, so
| this does add to the conversation. If I only wanted to
| read the study, then I'd subscribe to the Journal of
| Psychopharmacology.
|
| However, there are some (in my opinion) huge flaws in
| this study and its presentation:
|
| 1. This study was conducted on a small sample (60 people
| who received the psilocybin, and addition 29 who received
| the placebo - of whom 4 did not actually complete the
| study).
|
| 2. The study looked at short term effects and followed up
| at '29 _or_ 85 days ', (my emphasis). I'm not sure that I
| would be comfortable saying there had been 'no
| detrimental effects' after less than a month.
|
| 3. The study limits the scope of 'detrimental effects' to
| cognitive functioning or emotional processing.
|
| 4. The study was supervised and all participants took
| part in mandatory preparation and therapy sessions.
|
| 5. All of the participants were self-selected, and 35
| participants _had already taken_ psilocybin out of the 89
| total participants (including those who had taken the
| placebo), which is about 13 times higher than the
| estimated population lifetime use in the UK.
|
| 6. Importantly in conjunction with point 5, participants
| were screened for pre-existing medical and psychiatric
| conditions, meaning a highly significant proportion of
| participants had already taken psilocybin _without
| detrimental effect_ at least once before, and other non-
| first time users who had experienced detrimental effects
| previously would have been excluded from the study.
|
| 7. Four participants in the placebo arm did not complete
| the study, meaning the control group was only 25 people.
|
| 8. Efficacy of blinding was not assessed, and given the
| nature of psilocybin and the fact that up to 41% of the
| people who completed the study had taken psilocybin
| before, it seems quite likely that a significant
| proportion of the participants were unblinded.
|
| 9. Particularly worrying in the study is the statement:
| "An AE [Adverse Event] of substance induced psychotic
| disorder was reported for a participant who became
| behaviourally disinhibited during the acute drug
| experience. After a medical assessment, 2.5 mg oromucosal
| midazolam was administered. This event was not considered
| to be an SAE [Serious Adverse Event]." It would be
| unusual to administer buccal midazolam to someone who was
| not experiencing any 'detrimental effects'.
|
| In a study which is potentially only looking at 25 people
| taking psilocybin for the first time[0] at low doses, I
| don't think we can really discount personal anecdotes,
| especially when they're clearly and properly presented as
| such.
|
| [0]: Admittedly worst-case scenario where all of the
| placebo group turn out to have never taken psilocybin
| before.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > I'm interested to hear the subjective experiences of
| folks who have
|
| Okay, I have taken psilocybin and I agree with the study
| wholeheartedly.
|
| Thanks for the second part of your comment which is much
| more of what I go to Hacker News for but not really
| relevant to my comment. Plus, since my personal
| experiences reaffirm the study, I'm going to ignore all
| of those critiques and just stick to my personal opinion.
| perth wrote:
| I think what most people are referring to with cannabis, in
| terms of it not being addictive, is physiological dependence.
| Cannabis has very little in terms of withdrawal symptoms, and
| thus has low propensity towards physiological dependence. I've
| heard people state depression for a few days as one of the few
| withdrawal symptoms for heavy users. So while the people you
| may know may be addicted, it's not because of a physiological
| dependence but a mental one.
| pishpash wrote:
| Depression and mental issues are physiological (in the
| brain). Otherwise there would be no psychiatric medication.
| Madmallard wrote:
| It's not that simple.
| gspr wrote:
| > It's like when people claimed that marijuana was not
| addictive.
|
| Marijuana is not _physically_ addictive. That was and is also
| the reasonable claim made by reasonable people. Then lots of
| people seems to have conflated this claim with _psychological_
| addictiveness.
|
| I claim that HN isn't physically addictive. The fact that it is
| psychologically addictive doesn't amount to me "pretending".
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| If you smoke daily, and frequently and then quit, you do
| experience intense cravings and unpleasant physical side
| effects.
| chefandy wrote:
| As does gambling addiction. The chemicals being internally
| generated by a psychological process doesn't mean there
| aren't severe withdrawal effects. Panic attacks and
| depression can have severe physical side effects. That
| doesn't make any of those things chemically addictive
| substances.
| gspr wrote:
| The former is psychological. On the latter: citation
| needed.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| As a personal anecdote: been smoking for 10 years and
| everytime I take a break I have huge night sweats for 3
| or 4 days until I become normal again. I'm talking like
| waking up twice in the middle of the night to change bed
| sheets and t-shirt so I'm not sleeping in a pool of
| sweat.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_use_disorder
|
| Prolonged cannabis use produces both pharmacokinetic
| changes (how the drug is absorbed, distributed,
| metabolized, and excreted) and pharmacodynamic changes
| (how the drug interacts with target cells) to the body.
| These changes require the user to consume higher doses of
| the drug to achieve a common desirable effect (known as a
| higher tolerance), reinforcing the body's metabolic
| systems for eliminating the drug more efficiently and
| further down-regulating cannabinoid receptors in the
| brain.[7]
|
| Cannabis users have shown decreased reactivity to
| dopamine, suggesting a possible link to a dampening of
| the reward system of the brain and an increase in
| negative emotion and addiction severity.[8]
|
| (...)
|
| Cannabis withdrawal symptoms occur in one-half of people
| in treatment for cannabis use disorders.[15] Symptoms may
| include dysphoria (anxiety, irritability, depression,
| restlessness), disturbed sleep, gastrointestinal
| symptoms, and decreased appetite. It is often paired with
| rhythmic movement disorder. Most symptoms begin during
| the first week of abstinence and resolve after a few
| weeks.
| haswell wrote:
| For some scholarly exploration, see [0].
|
| Whether or not there is strong evidence of _physical_
| addiction, the withdrawal experience is very real, and
| often unpleasant. Couple this with psychological
| dependence, and quitting can feel quite daunting.
|
| The main issues right away:
|
| - Problems sleeping due to REM rebound (vivid disruptive
| dreams or nightmares)
|
| - Appetite issues
|
| - General irritability
|
| - Heightened anxiety (especially if using cannabis to
| treat anxiety)
|
| If you're using semi-medicinally, it's extremely easy to
| hit these roadblocks, conclude "see I shouldn't quit,
| weed isn't so bad anyway", and fall back into the habit.
|
| I'm convinced that the reality of cannabis
| addiction/withdrawal is aggressively glossed over by the
| community of users who are very invested in what they're
| doing being just fine. The truth is a bit murkier/darker.
|
| I say this as a recreational-bordering-medical user (it
| does help calm down my PTSD) who enjoys using it, but who
| dislikes the inconvenient reality of trying to take a
| tolerance break.
|
| - [0]
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5414724/
| convolvatron wrote:
| I recently quit a pretty heavy constant background dose
| of THC (which I used to leverage myself off a pretty
| heavy constant background dose of alcohol).
|
| sleeping is a big one
|
| piercing headaches
|
| similar effect to quitting alcohol - heightened
| sensitivity to light and noise
|
| its also quite an adjustment to be dumped back out into
| the world again after living for years in your little
| blanket of quiet satisfaction.
|
| its not the worst, and I've quit weed before without
| going through anything..but its not nothin
| wswope wrote:
| "Physical addiction" isn't really an academic term - but
| you are misinformed: physical dependence on cannabis is a
| very well-established phenomenon.
|
| Dozens and dozens of citations for you: https://scholar.g
| oogle.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&q=physi...
| gspr wrote:
| Ah, there does seem to be some relating to appetite -
| interesting. The rest is again _psychological_ , or from
| the 80s.
|
| Got anything from this millenium and clearly physical?
| wswope wrote:
| Sure, from the same search, filtered by date:
|
| > Flawed drug awareness campaigns of the 1990s claimed
| that cannabis could be psychologically addictive but not
| physically addictive like other drugs. However, cannabis
| does predictably cause physical dependence--the hallmarks
| of which are tolerance and withdrawal--and heavy users
| may have great difficulty in attempting to reduce or end
| their use, leading to compulsive, continued use and
| related consequences
|
| https://focus.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.
| foc...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > tolerance and withdrawal
|
| I think they mean _truly_ physical, like DTs for alcohol,
| and dope sickness for heroin. You don 't get those types
| of symptoms from MJ withdrawals.
| gspr wrote:
| Physiological! This is a psychiatry journal!
| leesalminen wrote:
| Anecdotally, I spent ~10 years as a daily pot smoker. I
| then moved to another country where it's illegal, so I
| stopped cold turkey in one day. I didn't experience any
| physical side effects or cravings. YMMV, but at least for
| me, it was a psychological condition. Once I told myself
| that I wanted to live in a place where it was illegal, and
| I wasn't willing to break the law of my new country of
| residence, that was it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Marijuana is not physically addictive. That was and is also
| the reasonable claim made by reasonable people.
|
| That's not true at all. Heavy marijuana dependency and
| withdrawals definitely produce physical withdrawal effects.
|
| They're not equivalent to, say, alcohol withdrawal, but they
| will exist.
|
| There's actually a lot of research into various adjunct
| medications to dampen the physical withdrawal to help
| addicted marijuana users quit.
|
| But regardless, if you have to qualify the type of addiction,
| you're not escaping the fact that something is addictive. Too
| many people have used this false physical/psychological
| dichotomy to talk themselves into marijuana dependencies,
| psychological or otherwise.
| zepto wrote:
| If people say marijuana is not addictive, this is a false
| claim.
|
| Psychological addition is just as real as physiological
| addiction.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| Isn't the idea of distinguishing between physical and
| psychological addiction outdated?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| No.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| Based on what? I believed it was common sense that our
| mental state was a product of the neurochemical
| interactions going on our brains. If you get addicted to
| gaming, are you really addicted to gaming, or are you
| addicted to the huge amounts of hormones like dopamine
| and serotonin flooding your brain when you win a match?
| Is this really "psychological" addiction? If the answer
| is yes, should I decide to inject serotonin
| intravenously, is it still psychological addiction?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I believe human beings have agency, and therefore I find
| that self control can contribute to curing a mental or
| emotional addiction.
|
| No amount of self control is going to save you from organ
| failure when going cold turkey off of heroin. There must
| be a distinction.
| zepto wrote:
| True, but the idea that physiological addiction is more
| real than psychological addiction is certainly outdated.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Physiological addiction _is_ more real in that your body
| forms a physical dependency on something that can kill
| you if you don 't have it. This is CRUCIAL to
| understanding why we need stuff like Methadone or Kratom
| to help ween people off of Heroin/opioids.
|
| Mental addiction is treated entirely differently and is
| far less severe.
| zepto wrote:
| > Physiological addiction is more real
|
| No it isn't.
|
| > in that your body forms a physical dependency on
| something that can kill you if you don't have it.
|
| Yes, sometimes it can kill to withdraw without support.
| But that isn't what makes something real or not.
|
| > Mental addiction is treated entirely differently and is
| far less severe.
|
| Is it? Can you support that claim? I've seen pot addicts
| ruin their lives and die. That doesn't seem 'far less
| severe' to me.
| notch656a wrote:
| Both are real? Of course. However: Psychological
| addiction can drive you to kill yourself but except in
| the most extreme of corner cases can I imagine how you
| could involuntarily die. Physiological addiction can
| straight up execute you (see alcohol or benzo
| withdrawal).
| zepto wrote:
| Most people who stop drinking alcohol are not 'straight
| up executed', so that seems like that's a corner case
| too.
| notch656a wrote:
| "Most" seems like a high bar. Corner case I guess is
| unfair wording because it's totally undefinable. The DTs
| does choose to execute some people, especially if they
| can't reach treatment. I guess psychological stress can
| as well in rare events, although for an otherwise healthy
| person I would always pick the most crushing
| psychological stress over suffering untreated DT.
| zepto wrote:
| Why does it have to be untreated? That seems like a
| bizarre criterion. It's much easier to treat DTs than it
| is to treat a psychological addiction.
| notch656a wrote:
| Well for one because alcohol and alcoholics are virtually
| all over the world and it isn't clear to me that the
| majority of alcoholics in the world both know about the
| risks of DT and have access to treatment. But it is my
| understanding even with EARLY appropriate treatment there
| is an expectation 1+% of those suffering DT will die.
| haswell wrote:
| Focusing too much on the distinction can lead to false
| conclusions like "I can use cannabis without any concerns
| about addiction.
|
| Ignoring the distinction can falsely equate the severity
| of dependence with harder drugs.
|
| I think it's important to leave room for both: 1) Yes,
| there's a difference between physical/psychological
| addiction and 2) Sometimes the end result is still
| addiction, with all of the negatives that come with it.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Mushroom drawl is a pretty classical tell of usage, but I
| wouldn't consider it a de facto detriment.
|
| For some people, being a little slower to speak means they're
| more careful with their thoughts, less likely to be carried
| away by engagement or perpetuate useless ideas, and more prone
| to patient reflection.
|
| Mushrooms can't magically confer any of those skills, but some
| things are easier to learn when we're not leaning on only what
| comes most naturally to us.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Mushroom drawl is a pretty classical tell of usage, but I
| wouldn't consider it a de facto detriment.
|
| > For some people, being a little slower to speak means
| they're more careful with their thoughts,
|
| It takes some wild mental gymnastics to try to flip a drug-
| induced speech impediment into a _good thing_.
|
| It's also fascinating to watch how some of the psychedelic
| enthusiasts will vehemently dismiss the idea of mushroom-
| induced speech issues, while others will readily acknowledge
| that "mushroom drawl" is a classic, well-known phenomenon but
| it's okay because it's good actually.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Marijuana is addictive, I know that many people will deny it,
| just like they say it's not unhealthy to smoke, it is, there is
| definitely harm done.
|
| That said it's almost impossible to abuse mushrooms, there just
| isn't a desire to redo them often and it doesn't work well
| anyway. I've never heard of someone being addicted to
| psilocybin.
|
| Sure while you're on them it can be very intoxicating, and
| temporary loss of speech abilities and all kinds of horrible
| feelings might occur, particularly in the beginning. Usually
| you feel better about it later.
|
| I think it has been shown to be the least harmful drug in
| studies and has proven itself to be not very harmful to people
| or society.
| brnt wrote:
| If tourists drown in the canals of Amsterdam, they often did
| mushrooms (and came from France!).
| habeebtc wrote:
| Agree that the pro-legalization movement likes to claim "not
| addictive" but what they always have meant (which if pressed,
| they generally will acknowledge) is that it is not
| _physically_ addictive.
|
| It is, of course, psychologically addictive because literally
| anything can be.
| filoleg wrote:
| Surprised i had to scroll so far down the comments to see
| this reply among the sea of "but weed is addictive, despite
| everyone claiming otherwise".
|
| You are fully correct, people talk only about the physical
| component of addiction when it comes to drugs, because, as
| you said, literally anything can be psychologically
| addicting. Videogames, movies, tv shows, work, etc., all of
| those. If it is an activity or something you interact with,
| it can be psychologically addictive.
|
| In light of that, I am confused by all those "but weed is
| addicting" comments. It is kind of obvious that the article
| is talking about physical addiction exclusively.
| yhorawu8 wrote:
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Marijuana is addictive, I know that many people will deny
| it, just like they say it's not unhealthy to smoke, it is,
| there is definitely harm done."_
|
| I agree with this, but I think some of the pushback may be
| coming from people in recovery from alcohol, meth, cocaine,
| opiates, etc. We only have so many words to choose from, and
| those "addictions" more often drive death, divorce,
| abandonment, insane decisions, and so on. So adding marijuana
| to the list feels like it might dilute the message, or
| diminish someone's view of the dangers, etc.
|
| _" almost impossible to abuse mushrooms"_
|
| No personal experience with that, but I can attest to how
| different people's experiences with anything are. There's
| plenty of heavy users of my list of substances above that
| never seem to slip into the kind of hell that other people
| do.
| [deleted]
| emptyfile wrote:
| >That said it's almost impossible to abuse mushrooms
|
| nonsense
|
| >there just isn't a desire to redo them often and it doesn't
| work well anyway.
|
| please don't talk about your anecdotes as if they were facts.
| go to any psytrance festival in europe and marvel at people
| tripping for a week straight
|
| >I've never heard of someone being addicted to psilocybin.
|
| and I've met bucket loads of people "addicted" to living in
| the unreality of psychedelics. I guess that's not being
| "addicted to psilocybin" but if the end result is eating
| mushrooms x times per week then the effect is the same
| Murfalo wrote:
| IIRC tolerance builds extremely quickly (after just one
| use) and is cross-tolerant with most other 5-HT2A agonists
| so I think tripping a week straight is not really possible.
| emptyfile wrote:
| Tolerance just means you double the dose each day. People
| do it with LSD. Folks do crazy shit with drugs, in all
| honesty I think most people could hardly believe what
| kind of stuff drug users get up to.
|
| I appreciate the newfound silicon valley, positive,
| scientific approach to drugs, but over here on the party
| continent it's a lot different.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Its been proven that repeated use of psilocybin quickly
| builds up a tolerance to it, along with cross tolerance to
| LSD. Your statement about festivals in Europe is just plain
| false, by the end of the week you have to consume
| significant amount of mushrooms to get the same effect.
| Festivals feature a wide variety of drug use and taking
| small dosages of mushrooms for recreation for recreation
| isn't abuse.
|
| As far as addiction, there is chemical addiction, and
| psychological addition. The former isn't present for a lot
| of drugs. The latter is very hard to control for, because
| it really depends on the individual. People can definitely
| find comfort in escape from reality that psychedelics
| offer, which can lead to dependence.
|
| However, given an addictive personality, psilocybin use is
| still safer than comparable drugs, including weed. First,
| the method of intake through digestive tract is generally
| better for health than smoking. Secondly, there are no
| negative withdrawal symptoms from stopping, even with
| micro-dosing (so in the case of your festival goers, the
| supposed straight week of use produces no negative
| withdrawal effects). Thirdly, the desire to get a stronger
| escape from reality will involve someone taking a higher
| dose, which isn't a euphoric experience like weed or MDMA
| can produce - its fairly exhausting even when you are
| having a good time.
|
| So in the end, given the society view to alcohol and its
| comparable effects, psilocybin should absolutely be
| decriminalized and promoted as medicine for use, especially
| with therapy.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > Your statement about festivals in Europe is just plain
| false, by the end of the week you have to consume
| significant amount of mushrooms to get the same effect.
|
| You think it's impossible that people at festivals are
| consuming significant amounts of mushrooms by the end of
| the week..?
|
| That being said, the vast majority of even the heaviest
| users probably take a break after the festival.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| This is kinda anecdotal, but if you have ever done
| shrooms/LSD, you would understand how extremely unlikely
| this is. I generally should never say "false" with
| absolutism, since it is plausible, but in this case,
| given the users previous statements, I would bet
| significant money that he has no evidence of festival
| goers doing this with mushrooms.
|
| A good trip is usually around the 3.5 gram mark based on
| average experiences. If you do this, you are going to be
| fairly "fucked up" as people say. Its not gonna be a
| purely positive experience like MDMA, where once the
| effects wear off, you are going to want to do more to get
| back to your happy place. Most reality warping trips end
| up with person wanting it over because its so exhausting.
|
| The next day, if you really want to have the experience
| again, you have to do something like 5 grams to get the
| effect. The next day its going to be like 8 grams. Over a
| week, you are going to be ingesting something like 30
| grams - in many places where shrooms are illegal,
| bringing that much to the festival is likely going to get
| you involved with security as intent to sell/distribute.
|
| LSD is way easier to do this with, as dosages last longer
| (12 hours on the average), and multiple tabs or it in
| liquid form is way easier to sneak in. However, again,
| the reality warping trips are not exactly pleasurable and
| quite exhausting, and you still have to do a boatload
| towards the end of the week, to get the same effect,
| which costs money and is a waste of a drug (and money).
|
| The way people consume psychedelics at festivals is
| usually in smaller dosages, where they are certainly not
| disassociated even remotely Doing this for a week is
| arguably less harmless than drinking enough beers to get
| a buzz every day.
|
| Weed/alcohol/mdma are much more common things that get
| used on a repetitive basis since the effects are
| pleasurable and you can redose to get back to euphoric
| state.
|
| There are definitely people that abuse psychs in general,
| but this is more of a personality issue than a drug
| issue. People can abuse generally harmless things like
| video games, and ruin their lives.
| emptyfile wrote:
| As I said in another comment, tolerance just means a
| higher dose each day. It would probably be hard to do
| with mushrooms for any serious dose, but with LSD it
| would work.
|
| The point isn't that taking drugs on festivals is abuse,
| but rather that on festivals I've met people who've been
| taking psychedelic drugs on a weekly basis for years and
| their perception of reality is so twisted you have to
| wonder if they will ever "come back". They are willing
| participants in all of that, but I have to wonder if its
| healthy or morally sound to wave them off on their trip
| with no return.
|
| >So in the end, given the society view to alcohol and its
| comparable effects, psilocybin should absolutely be
| decriminalized and promoted as medicine for use,
| especially with therapy.
|
| Disagree, decriminalisation is not enough, all drugs
| should be legal.
|
| But that is completely beside the point of our topic of
| danger.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >but rather that on festivals I've met people who've been
| taking psychedelic drugs on a weekly basis for years and
| their perception of reality is so twisted you have to
| wonder if they will ever "come back".
|
| Research shows that there is a likelihood that if they
| stop, they will generally be fine.
|
| Andrew Callaghan of the youtube series All Gas No Brakes
| used psilocybin heavily in his young teenage years, which
| is dangerous because it affects the brain development,
| and as a result he suffers from PPD, however he is able
| to carry on life and have a job, especially one that
| involves being self employed and producing content.
|
| Like I said, there are personalities for which ordinary
| common things like video games are "dangerous", but we
| don't consider video games dangerous as a qualifier.
| Psilocybin should be viewed in the same way.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > please don't talk about your anecdotes as if they were
| facts.
|
| Followed by multiple anecdotes...
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The point being that you can easily summon anecdotes for
| or against virtually any proposition, so they tell you
| very little about the incidence of a phenomenon.
| Emptyfile also pointed out a venue where it would be easy
| to find counterexamples to Synaesthesia's claim.
| adsfoiu1 wrote:
| I think their point is that anecdotes are not very
| valuable and then gave examples of anecdotes that differ
| as a way to show that individual experiences /
| perceptions can be vastly different, which isn't at odds
| with their original point.
| leesalminen wrote:
| > I've met bucket loads of people addicted to living in the
| unreality of psychedelics.
|
| Same here. I used to be good friends with one person in
| particular who couldn't go more than a couple days without
| using psilocybin or LSD to change their reality. That's
| when we drifted paths. But, I heard a year ago that he had
| switched to heroin and died due to a fentanyl overdose.
| Getting addicted to altering your perception of reality is
| dangerous.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Yeah MDMA is addictive, not very but it is. You can use 2cb
| and speed quite frequently. I know about that. But with
| shrooms taking a dose the next day or two hardly works at
| all, there is extreme short term tolerance. Trying to do it
| frequently was not pleasant in my experience, you just dont
| have a magical or interesting trip.
| alexnewman wrote:
| I have met people emotionally addicted to microdosing
| psylicin. Negative withdrawal symptoms involved extreme
| emotional symptoms
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I've been curious about what are people experiencing when
| microdosing it?
|
| My understanding is that - nothing, there's no
| perceivable difference.
|
| If this is the case, what is the addiction to?
| cj wrote:
| > what is the addiction to?
|
| Perhaps psychological addiction to the habit? Fear,
| anxiety, uncertainty about what might happen if you stop
| the habit?
| actusual wrote:
| There is no such thing as "emotional addiction" or
| "physical addiction". There is addiction, and some
| substances have withdrawal symptoms when discontinued.
| mansoon wrote:
| As is the case when someone discontinues SSRIs.
| neom wrote:
| Careful with 2cb though, it's gotten me into some sticky
| situations more than once.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > That said it's almost impossible to abuse mushrooms
|
| Untrue. People can and do get hooked on the deliriant and
| escapist effects. Some people get addicted to the idea that
| the trip is revealing important information that they need to
| continue receiving.
|
| It may not be _common_ , but it's very much possible.
| kubb wrote:
| That's what OP said - almost impossible, not impossible.
| It's also possible to get hooked on eating paint or clay,
| but not many people do.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Ok fine I suppose in rare cases it is possible.
| pault wrote:
| It's important to use precise language when talking about
| addiction. It sounds like you're interpreting "addiction"
| as "habit forming", whereas I believe GP means "physical
| dependency". I see a lot of people talking past each other
| in this thread.
| greyface- wrote:
| > It's important to use precise language when talking
| about addiction.
|
| Agreed. Adding to this: GP characterized psilocybin's
| effects as "deliriant". This word has a specific meaning,
| and psilocybin doesn't fit -- it's a psychedelic, not a
| deliriant. There _are_ some mushrooms that produce
| deliriants (e.g. Amanita muscaria / muscimol), but these
| are not typically consumed in the same context as
| psilocybin mushrooms.
| ggm wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| The canadian report into the misuse of drugs (a pelican
| book from the 70s) drew a distinction between addiction
| and habituation which I think has stood the test of time.
| Addictive things cause change in the bodies own
| processes, such as the replacement of ?dopamine? by opiod
| drugs, and a decline in the bodys own production due to
| homeostasis: this means the withdrawal is a real
| physiological effect, lack of dopamine until the body
| restarts production.
|
| Some drugs (I mean drugs in the wider sense not
| recreational drugs) can cause PERMANENT change in the
| bodys own hormone cycle and so you cease production of a
| function entirely. Menopause is an instance of this but
| there are others I believe, the endocrine system is
| fantastically complex. I believe some bone anti-
| demineralisation drugs have this side effect and so
| deciding to take them has huge longterm consequences
| (again unsure I have the right background drug issue
| here)
|
| Habituation is the mental binding of pleasure or some
| other desired state (numbing, dissociation) to the
| repeated effect (as I understand it) and is a different
| thing: It feels good because you've learned the response,
| might be the way to put it. This is NOT the same as a
| homeostatic change in body function.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It's important to use precise language when talking
| about addiction. It sounds like you're interpreting
| "addiction" as "habit forming", whereas I believe GP
| means "physical dependency". I see a lot of people
| talking past each other in this thread.
|
| I directly quoted the part I disagreed with. They very
| specifically said:
|
| > That said it's almost impossible to abuse mushrooms,
|
| Trying to change the topic to specifically physical
| dependency is a straw-man argument. The topic was
| literally about "abuse".
| spidersouris wrote:
| > Yes, taking it (in the right conditions) can benefit you a
| lot.
|
| What are these benefits?
| paraph1n wrote:
| Preliminary clinical research shows that it can help with
| depression and drug addiction, among other ailments.
|
| Anecdotal benefits I've experienced (as a typically healthy
| person):
|
| - Improved mood for a least a couple months (happier, more
| awake/aware, calmer, less fatigue, more motivated)
|
| - Reduced feelings of stress and anxiety
|
| - Increased empathy for others
|
| - Increased self-awareness, in particular of bad habits. This
| in turn helps me improve my diet as well as keep good
| physical/mental exercise habits.
|
| - Increased creativity and openness to new ideas.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Preliminary clinical research shows that it can help with
| depression and drug addiction, among other ailments.
|
| Virtually all of the clinical trials and robust research
| studies psilocybin in conjunction with 10 or more non-
| psychedelic therapy sessions.
|
| It's a mistake to think that you can ignore the intense
| therapy that goes into these studies and focus only on the
| psilocybin.
| craftinator wrote:
| > Virtually all of the clinical trials and robust
| research studies psilocybin in conjunction with 10 or
| more non-psychedelic therapy sessions.
|
| Tangential, but I've noticed that all the psilocybin
| trials I've read about are combined with therapy as well;
| my knee jerk assumption is that there are
| legal/moral/funding powers at play causing that. Not sure
| a study would get funded if it consisted of "we're going
| to get a bunch of depressed people to take shrooms and
| see what happens!".
|
| The more scientific approach would be to separate the
| therapy group from the shroom group.
| paraph1n wrote:
| I agree completely and did not mean to imply otherwise
| (hence my phrasing of "it can help with" rather than "it
| can cure"). Yes, that research involved combination
| treatment of psilocybin alongside psychotherapy.
|
| That said, the anecdotal effects I listed are just from
| personal use without psychotherapy. But of course they're
| anecdotal :)
| inlined wrote:
| I assume that, like in this article, control groups also
| get therapy
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Massive neurogenesis for one. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012
| 800...
| quocanh wrote:
| Anecdotally:
|
| It's a drug that sort of shakes up your mind. It lets you
| make all sorts of connections that you aren't going to sober,
| unless you spend a ton of time reflecting. At the end, you
| gain this incredible emotional clarity which helps you
| regulate your emotions. This is probably why it's being
| studied for use with depression and anxiety.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| From brain scans regarding psychedelic mushroom use, it shows
| a huge increase of brain activity, indicating a lot more
| neural activations, which is why visuals usually involve
| seeing resemblance of things you know in things like wall or
| carpet textures. There are also some reports that the blood
| flow to the region that is responsible for parsing reality is
| decreased and increased to other areas, which makes your
| internal thoughts feel more like reality.
|
| If you think about it in terms of neural networks, your day
| to day life is a set of standard inputs that result in
| predictable emotions/outcomes. However, on a shroom trip with
| significant dosage, both the outside effects and internal
| thoughts get enhanced in both strength and with additional
| features, which can be enough to start moving your internal
| synaptic weights enough to effect different thoughts or
| behaviors.
|
| This is analogous to something like going to a different
| country with a different culture, and living there, which in
| turn will change your perspectives opinions and behaviors
| based on experiencing life differently - after about a month
| or so you will likely be doing things slightly differently
| and thinking about concepts in a slightly different way.
| Magic mushrooms essentially condenses this process in a
| shorter timeframe.
|
| So given the right setting, this process can provide positive
| effects. Of course, the trip could also exaggerate negative
| emotions and thoughts, however, because of no withdrawal
| symptoms or long lasting effects, people generally just
| remember it as a bad trip and don't wanna do it again. Even
| there, sometimes the meta effect is experiencing the bad
| feeling strong enough during the trip that it doesn't seem as
| bad when you are sober.
|
| In general, the argument for use is that the probability for
| negative effects is low, but probability for positive effects
| is significant. So rationally it makes sense to go through
| the experience.
| buddhistdude wrote:
| I don't have data but first hand experience and for me it is
| truer to say: it enhances your level of consciousness and it
| allows you to experience reality from beyond your mental-
| emotional conditioning. Which are two things that may sound
| very cryptic to many people reading this, as it cannot really
| be described in words. It is a explaining an orgasms to a
| person who has never had it kind of thing.
| diatomaceous_ wrote:
| It obviously needs more formal research, but anecdotal
| reports of tryptamine-based psychedelics indicate strong
| potential for stress management and/or general mental health
| recovery.
|
| https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms
| nimbius wrote:
| an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of abject confusion in
| this realm as fifty mind numbing years of the US Drug War
| sponsored by RAID Shadow Legends has rendered any independent
| attempt at scientific validation of the conditions applications
| and hazards of most recreational narcotics a fever dream of
| retraction, deflection, and outright lies.
|
| For 50 years psychedelic drugs were the devils dingaling and
| always accompanied by a well-wishing naysayer who insisted the
| other shoe was filled with the cloven hoof of Mephistopheles
| himself. This is quality peer-reviewed research, the same kind
| used to ostensibly validate things like hydrocodone and
| Flintstones vitamins...but this sort of thing is happening
| alongside the haggard burro of western drug policy which makes
| it all the more precious. Any knowledge of the conditions and
| terms related to something like this as it pertains to PTSD is
| invaluable as 30 years ago such seditious mumblings would get
| you branded a communist hippie.
|
| so yeah, terms and conditions apply and just as with everything
| else, theres a ladder of risk, but castigating the machine shop
| for their nefarious chainsaw sure to rain terror upon the good
| fae of the woods is a little silly.
| [deleted]
| diatomaceous_ wrote:
| Your experience is an anecdotal exception, not the norm.
|
| I encourage you to actually read up on the pharmacology of
| psilocybin:
| https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms.
| aeternum wrote:
| It only takes a single but valid 'anecdote' to disprove a
| thesis as strong as 'Psilocybin has no short or long term
| detrimental effects'
|
| There is no exception allowed for a statement like that.
| mansoon wrote:
| Breathing has the long term negative effect of exposing
| your DNA to oxygen radicals.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > There is no such thing as a free lunch.
|
| This doesn't mean anything. It's not evidence of anything. You
| can't go to court and argue there's no such thing as a free
| lunch.
|
| There's free lunches out there, literally, somebody puts a
| literal free lunch out next to the dumpster for the less
| fortunate all the time. There's losers and winners with no
| reason to be found for why. Some guy buys Bitcoin at 5 bucks,
| becomes a billionaire and _doesn 't_ turn into the archetypal
| power-mad lunatic burning his fortunes on lambos.
|
| Here's the actual woo: desperate attempts to overlay patterns
| of meaning to a universe that does not subscribe to Abrahamic
| values.
|
| Some people will take psychedelics and have enduring negative
| impressions, sometimes for the rest of their life. Others, like
| myself, will use it to shapechange out of a history of abuse by
| their parents. _No one can know_ which of the cards they 'll
| pick.
|
| But I can tell you, from the many I have directly known to take
| it, a fraction succumbed to permanent, negative, distorted
| beliefs. Some got a free lunch, some few did not.
| Stupulous wrote:
| No free lunch carries some weight in this context. If there
| is a chemical that has a very positive effect in humans,
| there is probably a reason that humans didn't evolve to
| produce that chemical or exist in the state that the chemical
| induces.
|
| That reason could be related to what you suggest, that the
| actual effect is a mixed bag and doesn't wind up worth it. It
| could be that our environment has changed to make it
| beneficial and evolution hasn't caught up. It could be that
| dreams are already the same thing and we're not sleeping
| enough or the right way, so psychadelics are filling the gap.
| In general, though, it's that the benefits are outweighed by
| costs. No free lunch is a reasonable prior in biology.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think there are some other rare side effects, like vision
| abnormalities.
|
| The proper way to phrase their findings is that psilocybin has
| a favorable safety profile and should be studied in more detail
| with larger numbers of participants.
| alexnewman wrote:
| Totally agree. No free lunch especially in psychedelics. That
| being said , great to see the research
| smk_ wrote:
| Among the people I've talked to that has taken psilocybin, it
| seems common to believe in nonsense such as reincarnation. That's
| why I'll never take it, it seems as if you lose grip with
| reality.
| mettamage wrote:
| I've taken it multiple times. Science is still the basis for my
| beliefs. I know I'm n=1, but I'm also a counter example.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I never took any drugs until my mid 50s. Part of the motivation
| was to experience this spirituality that others report that
| I've never experienced. I'm a cautious person by nature, so I
| did a series of stepped doses, spaced a few weeks apart, of
| various lysergimides and tryptamines. In short: LSD was quite
| interesting and not at all spiritual for me. 4-aco-dmt (a close
| relative to psilocybin) was entirely different: much more
| dreamy, confusing, and it gave me a brief taste of that
| spiritual feeling. All in all, over a couple years, I did about
| 20 experiments, and have done only small doses twice in the
| past two years. I'm not sure if I'll do either again, as I
| probably have found all I care to see from them.
|
| Experiencing things first-hand has only reinforced my prior
| beliefs in a material world. If a simple, small molecule can to
| drastically change your mood and perception, it seems all the
| more clear that there is no magic. On the flip side, people who
| were prone to believe in the woo experience the same things I
| did, but because of their prior framing found confirmation of
| their own prior beliefs as well.
|
| I don't think you have anything to fear should the opportunity
| present itself to you.
|
| The main benefit for me was this: I'm very good, too good, at
| compartmentalizing my emotions. My wife suffers from anxiety
| and depression. Having experienced hours-long states where my
| emotions ran loose that my intellect was unable to reign in, I
| can now empathize, and not just sympathize, a bit with my
| wife's experiences.
| yboris wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! A related experience I had was when I
| took LSD and smoked weed for the first time. At the time weed
| would sometimes give me paranoid thoughts (I've only smoked
| about a dozen times at this point) - and the LSD exacerbated
| the effects. I had almost an hour of severe paranoia, but as
| time went on I realized how irrational it was (and discovered
| useful a strategy of "make a prediction, and if it doesn't
| happen, stop being afraid - rather than keep thinking the
| scary thing is just behind the _next_ corner ").
|
| The takeaway for me was similar to yours: a better empathy
| for people who may (without psychedelics) have a higher
| tendency to be worried/anxious. A realization that despite
| all the rational thoughts you can have, the fears can persist
| (as they are irrational - and continue to have force even
| when the rational side of the brain insists so).
|
| Since then I've been continuing to enjoy both drugs
| separately and together - now-a-days it's mostly bliss and
| joy. I particularly recommend LSD & MDMA -- candy flipping ;)
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Meh. People have all sorts of beliefs about the afterlife.
| Nobody knows what's going to happen. Unless you know somebody
| who came back from the dead and reported on it?
| yboris wrote:
| Sorry you have such a reference class. I think the "lose grip
| with reality" is only temporary - the next day (and even
| earlier) you have memories of what went on, but your mind is
| back to "normal". I've had numerous psychedelic experiences
| (blissful, terrifying, etc) with both LSD and mushrooms, and
| none have fundamentally changed what I think about the world
| (believing the general scientific consensus about atoms, etc).
|
| What drugs like this can do is make you more empathetic and
| understanding, less rigid/dogmatic. I strongly recommend people
| (with no history of mental problems) try low-dose psychedelics
| (after careful research, with a great set and setting, and a
| trip-sitter) and then consider standard-dose psychedelic
| amounts.
|
| I'm a psychonaut, so I enjoy weird states of mind as
| experiences. I feel like there is a lot to learn from having
| had them. An excellent book you could read on this topic is
| _How to Change Your Mind_ : What the New Science of
| Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction,
| Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/How-to-Change-Your-Mind-audiobook/dp/...
| sethammons wrote:
| I grew up in a house that loosely held to beliefs that taking
| hallucinogenic substances could follow you into subsequent lives
| (reincarnation type thing). You could literally stain your
| immortal soul by taking it. That was a scary prohibition. I don't
| follow those views really any longer, but the worry lingers.
| Humans are strange.
| standardUser wrote:
| From what I'm reading, there are 5-20mg of psilocybin in a gram
| of mushrooms. So the 10mg and 25mg doses from the study are
| around 1-2 grams worth of mushrooms. The average recreational
| dose (in my experience) is usually between 1.75 and 7 grams (so
| anywhere from 10-140mg). But potency varies significantly in real
| world scenarios.
| detritus wrote:
| It really does depend upon what strain and type you're talking
| about.
|
| There's a fundamental world of difference between a gram of
| dried Cyanescens and a gram of fresh Cubensis, for instance.
| dntrkv wrote:
| I don't know who came up with the idea that an eighth should be
| considered a "standard dose", but whoever it was, is an idiot.
| So many people I know have had way too intense of experiences
| and were turned off from mushrooms.
|
| I've had ego death, where I had no idea who "I" was, from an
| 8th of good mushrooms. That's generally not the experience most
| people are looking for. It's like saying 50mg of edibles is a
| standard dose (as opposed to 10).
|
| Nowadays, I, along with most people I know, take like 1-2 grams
| at most. Usually I stay around the 1.5g mark.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| I'd always thought 1g was a single dose. Maybe the people
| around me are lightweights...
|
| (legalization so we can accurately dose these things yada yada)
| tpfour wrote:
| Minimum I've seen was 1.5g. Usually between 2 and 3.5.
|
| The issue with psychedelics is not that their ingestion might
| kill you, but rather what you will do to yourself or others
| while on them. No amount of reading and Youtube videos can
| prepare you for a strong psychedelic experience. Once in it,
| you have to go through it, and accidents do happen.
|
| I've found that people who do psychedelics in repetition
| usually _think_ they are some sort of key to their problems,
| they'll help them fix themselves, yada yada yada. One trip is
| enough for people for whom that is true. If you have to do
| them repeatedly, the issue is elsewhere. I am against full-on
| prohibition, but also skeptical about the "pro-psychedelic"
| sentiment in vogue.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Highly highly doubt this. Anyone who has spent significant time
| around people who have done alot of mushrooms knows that they
| have cognitive "peculiarities". The shift towards peace, love,
| and hippie-ish personality traits is clearly a neurogloical
| effect of mushrooms. Its clearly a deterministic effect that
| nearly everyone who has done them alot converges on.
|
| EDIT:
|
| I assert it is detrimental. There is a "mystic" "spiritual" shift
| as well, that I really dont think is grounded in reality. Just
| because current science cant measure these changes dont mean they
| dont happen.
|
| I would also describe the effect as "loopy"
|
| One last piece of information, I really dont believe anyone
| claiming these effects as purely positive have spent time around
| heavy mushroom users. My evidence is anecdotal, but spans years
| and tens of people. I was involved in a community that had alot
| of experience with this. The effects to me were clear, and I am
| skeptical of anyone, including researchers, who have not seen
| this first hand. I first hand witnessed the mental changes in
| friends who went down that path, and really dont think they were
| the same person at the end.
| alexk307 wrote:
| Oh no! Not peace and love!
|
| You assert evidence of a clear neurological affect, and then
| edit your post to say that science can't measure it, and it
| must be "mystic" or "spiritual".
| hristov wrote:
| Except the ones that go on murder sprees. I guess they converge
| somewhere else.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Lee_Loughner
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Hmm definitely the shrooms that made him do it, not the
| alcohol, or cocaine... That couldn't be it
| [deleted]
| neuro_image2 wrote:
| It's an unfortunate feature of our culture that a shift towards
| peace, love and empathy is perceived as detrimental.
| quotemstr wrote:
| If you tell someone "this pill will cure your depression"
| without telling him "by turning you into a hippie", you're
| doing him a disservice. The zeitgeist right now is that
| psychedelics _cure_ a broad range of mental illnesses without
| any downsides whatsoever. That 's far, far from true.
|
| It's my right not to be turned into a hippie.
| snikeris wrote:
| A hippie is a caricature, it is not a sub-species of human
| being. You can't be turned into a hippy. You'll still be
| yourself w/ some traits tweaked. For example, maybe you'll
| be more open to new experiences than you were before.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > For example, maybe you'll be more open to new
| experiences than you were before.
|
| Maybe so. Maybe that version of myself would even approve
| of that change. My _current_ self, however, very much
| does not want that change. I 'm sure I'm not the only one
| who feels this way. Unwanted personality shifts _are_
| negative drug side effects and the people running around
| pitching psychedelics as miracle cures without downsides
| are harming people.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Do you think it's common that psychedelice change people
| who don't want change?
|
| It's all anecdotal of course but I've seen quite a few
| life-course-changes inspired by psychedelics (most of
| them non-spiritual: change jobs, go to college, break up,
| quit smoking, that sort of thing) and in most cases the
| openness to that possibility is why people were taking
| them in the first place.
|
| From what I've seen, people who take them without a
| willingness to change don't typically find the experience
| to be meaningful or transformative.
| snikeris wrote:
| Yeah so hypothetically, if you were depressed and no
| other treatments worked, your current self would have to
| decide if the "negative" side effect of altered traits is
| worth a shot at making your life worth living again.
| Perhaps some of those traits are even implicated in the
| depression and they need to be changed for it to lift.
|
| I do agree that patients should be briefed about trait
| changes, but again, perhaps that's exactly what they
| need.
| alexk307 wrote:
| No one asked you to take any drugs? No one is forcing you
| to take drugs or be a hippie, what does that have to do
| with anything?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Nothing that you have said here defends the claim of that
| the effects themselves are detrimental. You just claimed
| that _not telling someone the effects_ is a disservice.
| Which, while I agree, is irrelevant to the original claim.
| Having effects and having detrimental effects are two
| different things.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The claim in the article is _categorical_. The claim is
| that there are _no_ detrimental side effects. In order
| for that to be true, it must be the case that everyone
| prefers his personality to be shifted towards being a
| peace and love hippie. If I don 't want my personality
| shifted that way (and I certainly don't), then that
| effect of psilocybin counts as detrimental _for me_ , and
| therefore, the categorical claim being made is simply
| false.
|
| This recent fad for "fixing" people by taking them on
| psychedelic trips is creepy.
| snikeris wrote:
| It's not a fad, this is ancient medicine that is finally
| being accepted by modern medicine.
| diatomaceous_ wrote:
| Your paranoia of "hippies", denigration of people who are
| "too peaceful", and basic understanding of psychedelic
| pharmacology are wholly subjective, unscientific, and
| warped by media portrayals
|
| https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms
| tharne wrote:
| > The claim in the article is categorical. The claim is
| that there are no detrimental side effects.
|
| That is not the claim made in the article. The article
| claims that no _detrimental_ side effects were found
| _over the course of the study_ , which had participants
| take small dosages of psilocybin in a clinical setting.
| That's a very specific scenario and is a world away from
| habitual recreational use.
|
| > This recent fad for "fixing" people by taking them on
| psychedelic trips is creepy.
|
| When looked at in isolation, yes, it can appear creepy.
| However when you look at the known side effects of other
| pharmaceuticals commonly used to treat mental illness,
| the case for psychedelics becomes a lot more compelling.
| Right now, most pysch medication really sucks, so if
| something sucks a little bit less, that's a win.
| easymodex wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm sure there will be a DISCLAIMER: Might
| cause joy, positive thinking, happiness and love for one
| another.
|
| Be very careful with it.
| qaq wrote:
| detrimental to crushing it!
| MAGZine wrote:
| You think that peace and love is detrimental? I assert we could
| use more of it.
|
| Note, I wouldn't say that such peace and love is blind--people
| are still very much grounded in reality--but the ability for
| compassion and empathy is increased. Perhaps you see compassion
| as a weakness?
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| misc213 wrote:
| I think that's the point.
|
| Isn't the high level plan for this treatment: 1)The psilocybin
| breaks down the patients ego and 2) the psycho therapist molds
| it hopefully for the better?
|
| "people who have done a lot of mushrooms..." In my experience
| those people also take just about anything. How could one say
| it was the psilocybin
| snikeris wrote:
| I believe the therapist is mostly there for support. E.g.
| hold your hand and assure you that everything is fine. The
| mind/body heals itself.
| rileyphone wrote:
| The Aztecs were very fond of mushrooms but definitely not
| hippies. You're describing a mimetic cultural phenomenon
| facilitated by the neuroplasticity the drug confers.
| diatomaceous_ wrote:
| This is the correct answer; people whose only understanding
| of psychedelics draws from media portrayals of the 60s have a
| dramatically warped and puritanical perspective on what is a
| pharmacological effect vs a cultural effect
| gspr wrote:
| Purely anecdotal. Have you controlled for the correlation
| between those personality traits and the wish to explore drugs
| like psilocybin?
| seabird wrote:
| A lot of sibling comments here questioning the parent comment's
| definition of detrimental. Psychedelic drugs can absolutely
| have a permanent detrimental effect on people.
|
| There is a difference between a positive emotional experience
| and a warped "revelation" that gives somebody the impression
| that they're privy to some universal truth or meaning. If the
| latter happens enough, the results range from the person being
| pretty fundamentally changed (less like depressed vs. not
| depressed, more like somebody is wearing a skinsuit of somebody
| you used to know) to them being almost completely
| fried/detached from reality. These people may be happy in their
| own reality, but it's very painful to watch it happen to them.
|
| Headlines like this article's are best left unsaid. A single
| (or rarely administered) 10-25mg dose in a highly controlled
| environment may be reasonably safe, and the headline may be
| true in the strictest sense, but it's going to work out about
| as well as the "marijuana is not addictive" line of thinking
| has.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I think you articulated my point much better. The spiritual
| effect I was describing is definitely also:
|
| "to them being almost completely fried/detached from reality"
|
| What these researchers are doing in a lab on well adjusted
| humans with no psychedelic experience, and what happens when
| people take doses recreationally are two completely different
| things. Its like doing cocaine one time with a small dose and
| claiming it has no negative effects.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Agreed. It would be a terrible crime to market a substance that
| causes permanent personality shifts in a direction not
| necessarily wanted as a "magic cure" for depression, anxiety,
| and whatever other manifestation of unpleasantness in life. And
| that's exactly what we're doing now.
|
| Lobotomy was marketed as a magic cure for all sorts of
| psychological problems too. There is no free lunch. There's no
| quick and easy way to "fix" someone.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| As a theoretical: perhaps personality shifts are _exactly_
| what is required to treat depression and anxiety.
| mwattsun wrote:
| I'm a fan of Psilocybin but anyone who has been around for
| awhile in a psychedelic culture like my home town knows people
| who did too many mushrooms. LSD is a thing in itself: acid
| casualties are a real thing.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| This is my point, I think these academic researchers and
| common people have no idea what they are getting into. There
| are clearly positives to the drugs, but alot of these
| articles are very naive
| mwattsun wrote:
| Did you ever notice how the shroomers have a different look
| in their eyes than the acid heads? There's a lot more
| warmth to the former as you noted, but there's a tendency
| to believe really far out things. One friend of mine was
| convinced she was immortal so she worried a lot about how
| she was going to replenish the sun with hydrogen so it
| didn't burn out. The acid heads have a look in their eyes
| like they are lost in a void and are struggling to get
| back.
|
| Edit: I should note I'm talking about people who do a lot
| of mushrooms. For example, my friend lived on a commune in
| England for several years that did high doses of mushrooms
| on a weekly basis as a community bonding thing (like a
| Sunday church ritual)
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think the articles are similar to most articles on a
| "new" pharmaceutical. They overblow the benefits,
| misinterpret the underlying study, and just generally want
| to seduce the reader.
|
| In this case, the phase 1 trial found that psilocybin has a
| favorable safety profile in a small study, clearing it for
| larger studies to find rarer side-effects and evaluate
| efficacy as a treatment. That's basically it. They can't
| legitimately claim "psilocybin has no short- or long-term
| detrimental effects" in a study that small. But it's
| commonly done for this and other pharmaceuticals.
| tharne wrote:
| > This is my point, I think these academic researchers and
| common people have no idea what they are getting into.
|
| I don't think that's true. Most people knew smoking was bad
| for you long before the medical establish said so, ditto
| for opiates. The only folks who "don't know what they are
| getting into", are recreational users lying to themselves.
| That's no reason to dismiss a whole class of drugs that
| could potentially help people.
| mwattsun wrote:
| I'd be the last person to dismiss the benefits, but as
| the old adage goes "all things in moderation" and there's
| also no reason to dismiss long-term effects because you
| did a small study. You could run this study exactly as is
| except with low doses of alcohol and also find there are
| no short of long-term detrimental effects.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Thinking reality makes sense is pretty loopy too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| slibhb wrote:
| It's hard to estimate effects like this based on your personal
| experiences. People who do drugs like mushrooms tend to be a
| certain way: hippies, left-wing, creative and "open". Unless
| you're performing rigorous experiments with large samples, it's
| hard to separate that out as a confounder.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| > "Anyone who has spent significant time around people who have
| done a lot of mushrooms knows..."
|
| As someone in this group, I strongly disagree. The "consensus"
| you're appealing to doesn't exist.
|
| > I assert it is detrimental. There is a "mystic" "spiritual"
| shift as well, that I really dont think is grounded in reality.
| Just because current science cant measure these changes dont
| mean they dont happen.
|
| The effects of both psilocybin and spiritual beliefs on
| individual health outcomes is an active, ongoing topic of
| research. The assertion that there's something intangibly wrong
| with the mental lives of (of whom exactly? people who do
| shrooms? Or do you include people who do yoga or practice
| meditation in this group? What about people who attend Catholic
| mass?) that "current science can't measure" is precisely the
| sort of baseless nonsense well-operationalized research is
| designed to eliminate, so we can rationalize our laws and
| healthcare policies.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| It is slightly ironic to look down on people who believe
| "loopy" things while admitting it's not a scientific way to
| measure people. Sounds kinda loopy to me.
| monopoledance wrote:
| Possibly a heavy selection bias, don't you think?
|
| Shrooms are illegal almost everywhere, or at least not very
| popular. I assume there is a very significant filter on which
| type of personalities seek these experiences (unlike e.g.
| trying alcohol or cannabis, as those are accessible and
| culturally integrated everywhere).
| Jaepa wrote:
| The plural of anecdote is not data. What you are saying is that
| there is a correlation, but the causation could be any number
| of tangentially related things. e.g. a self re-enforcing
| subculture, predisposition for substance abuse, or tainted
| sourcing.
| basch wrote:
| Even with causation something is amiss with the
| generalization as presented. If a chemical amplifies an
| experience, and a person experiences a peaceful hippie
| experience, that doesnt mean the drug made them a hippie, it
| means the experience did. The same chemical in a violent
| experience could exasperate violent tendencies. Pinning "I
| know some people that fell into a culture" on a chemical is
| very much on the wrong side of nature/nurture and ignores
| set/setting.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| The dose makes the poison.
|
| The study was testing at 10mg and 25mg which are TINY
| (microdoses)
|
| Your experience appears to be with people who take macrodoses
| repeatedly.
|
| I'm not sure these two situations are comparable.
| pizzeriafrida wrote:
| I wouldn't say those doses are micro. 25mg of psilocybin is
| equivalent to almost 3 grams of mushrooms.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Whoops - thanks for letting me know
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| There was an interesting article in slatestarcodex that statet
| that the prime effekt of psychodelics is reducing primers. This
| can have negativ consequenz on healthy people that take
| psyhcodelics. A) because primers are your past so somehow they
| are you. If the primers get erased your personality is gettig
| erased. B) if primers are reduced they are near primers that
| arent that evolved and those primers could suck. Usualy there
| is filter in our brain that prohibits us from thinking dumb
| shit like the world is flat. But if those primers are reduced,
| how should one know that the world doesnt end at the horizont?
|
| I have friends that take ketamin lsd mushrooms etc regulary and
| they dont seem to have a classical paychosis but something
| else... the superb ability to believe every shit someone posts
| on social media. Honestly they are gone and thats this primer
| effect.
|
| Btw did some shrooms 2 times and it was great
| wincy wrote:
| For those curious, here's the article
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-
| relax...
| monopoledance wrote:
| True or not, great read and interesting idea.
|
| The concept of "flattening an energy landscape" resonates a
| lot with me. I feel like the filter on which internal and
| external impressions make it into the consciousness varies
| in people, like an island's extend depending on sea levels.
| I always thought of it as a uniform, plane threshold, so
| the idea of a "rule based" filter of priors is inspiring to
| me. However, the article extends this to other things than
| just the "event horizon" of the unconsciousness, while my
| intuitive understanding relates more to the experience, but
| not quality, of cognition.
|
| When I close my eyes, I can usually "see my brain
| thinking/sorting/searching" (closed eye hallucinations), a
| visual soup of (random) associations, patterns and
| transformations, and experience visual snow in dim light,
| most of the time. Although I got used to it, I do suffer
| from that "meta experience", when gravely exhausted and
| stressed - makes reality a bit unreal at times. According
| to wikipedia, closed eye hallucinations occur to most
| people only when tripping, so, assuming I am not psychotic,
| I guess the threshold/prior-filtering varies.
|
| I had this as long as I can remember, but I fear smoking
| weed in my youth didn't help (HPPD). Not sure, if I should
| experiment with psychedelics... I see a possible benefit
| and great danger, too.
| winnit wrote:
| I think they refer to 'priors' rather than 'primers' but
| otherwise enjoyed your comment :)
| srcreigh wrote:
| For what it's worth, spiritual teachers believe psychedelics
| open people up to spiritual realities. That's pretty much the
| life story Ram Das (ex psych professor). Orthodox Christian
| priests tend to say it's spiritually dangerous akin to using a
| Ouija board or something - they would prefer people use safe
| methods like prayer to explore the spiritual world.
|
| Scientists could probably measure negative psychological
| effects, anyways, as you say.
| jchw wrote:
| Headline reader here but it does say "detrimental" which I
| admit may include said personality traits in some eyes but I
| would expect "detrimental" to mean side-effects that actually
| negatively impact quality of life.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I'm sure there are correlations between some life risks and
| being a hippie vs not being a hippie. Stereotypes say hippies
| are more care-free, so that may make them more prone to risk
| taking, and more likely to die of (fun example) ziplining
| accidents.
|
| If something has detrimental effects (dyeing on ziplines)
| that are outweighed by positive effects (lower blood
| pressure), it is not fair to say it has no detrimental
| effects whatsoever.
|
| However I would say the biggest issue with the title is that
| it doesn't mention the number receiving psilocybin. 60 people
| is not a lot to say it has no detrimental effects, even if it
| weren't turning people into hippies.
| usmannk wrote:
| is that a detrimental effect?
| wombat-man wrote:
| As described no. But I think it can affect ones attachment to
| reality.
|
| It's not going to affect you like smoking cigarettes, or how
| drinking can hit the liver. But it definitely has some effect
| on ones thinking. Is this detrimental? I think that's a more
| subjective question.
|
| Personally though, I consider Psychedelics to be pretty safe
| unless one starts playing games with high frequency usage, or
| high dosage. There are also outliers, for example Brian
| Wilson ended up having a pretty bad time with LSD.
| alexk307 wrote:
| Brian Wilson has Schizophrenia. Not a healthy participant.
| vkou wrote:
| It is in the Terran Federation.
| blamestross wrote:
| > Psilocybin has no short- or long-term __detrimental__ effects
| in healthy people
| relaunched wrote:
| Can you help me connect the dots on how these are "clearly a
| neurological effect"?
| echlebek wrote:
| Your personal anecdotes, no matter how significant or varied,
| don't meaningfully contradict this research. This research
| happened in a controlled environment. Your friends doing
| mushrooms and likely other drugs in a recreational setting is
| different. Science can measure the changes you're talking
| about, but your friends weren't doing science.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Uh, they did say "detrimental effects." Those don't sound
| detrimental to me.
|
| In fact, knowing as we do that psilocybin has a significant
| impact on reducing depression for months after a single dose -
| including for otherwise untreatable major depression - it
| sounds like those folks may have had some low-level baseline
| depressive symptoms. [edit] Not to the point of being clinical
| of course. [1]
|
| > I assert it is detrimental. There is a "mystic" "spiritual"
| shift as well, that I really dont think is grounded in reality.
| Just because current science cant measure these changes dont
| mean they dont happen.
|
| I hate to break this to you, but mysticism and spirituality
| isn't grounded in reality no matter what.
|
| [edit] > I would also describe the effect as "loopy"
|
| While high, totes. After, no so much.
|
| [1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-
| releases/...
| mistermann wrote:
| > I hate to break this to you, but mysticism and spirituality
| isn't grounded in reality no matter what.
|
| Who among us determines what "reality" is and is not? Science
| is quite excellent at measuring the materialistic subset of
| it, but when one gets into the subjective, phenomenological
| aspects of it (including complex matters like causality,
| human psychology, emergence, etc), science is not much help
| (and is even a hindrance to some degree I'd say, since a lot
| of people (but not all) seem to believe that science is the
| only lens through which reality can be viewed, and that it
| sees all of reality, or that which it does not see is
| irrelevant).
| snikeris wrote:
| > I hate to break this to you, but mysticism and spirituality
| isn't grounded in reality no matter what.
|
| Some spiritual practices aim at direct experience of the true
| nature of reality. They're about sharpening your mind such
| that it is capable of intuiting such insights.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| Is it possible the people who regularly use shrooms are already
| predisposed to those traits?
| actusual wrote:
| Or that the culture surrounding them pushes people in that
| direction?
|
| I do shrooms with people who work in tech (just did them last
| Wednesday). We talked about the intersection of
| "intelligence" and "emotional vulnerability", and why are
| group of friends gravitates toward and attracts people who
| have a healthy dose of both. No woo-woo love chants...just
| some deeper conversations, below surface level that provided
| insight into who we are.
| usaphp wrote:
| 10-25mg is nothing, it's like 5-10x lower than people usually
| take
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| The study used synthetic psilocybin. In some estimate I've
| found online (I don't know how accurate) it claims 10mg is
| about 1.5 grams of dried shrooms of common varieties.
| [deleted]
| yboris wrote:
| I suspect you're thinking of 3.5g amount - which is a typical
| amount of _magic mushrooms_ to consume. The study is using
| psilocybin directly.
|
| Wikipedia states "The concentrations of psilocin and psilocybin
| ... [is] 0.37-1.30% (dry weight) in the whole mushroom".
|
| Assuming about 0.5% concentration, 3.5g of dry mushrooms is
| about 18mg of psilocybin/psilocin.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Nope.
| brailsafe wrote:
| The effects to those around you are that they have to hear the
| same story that everyone else has told them about your profound
| ego-destroying trip and how everyone should try psychedelics for
| x reason.
|
| /s (truth though amiright)
| stevebmark wrote:
| This smells like when society generally thought weed had no long-
| term effects and wasn't addictive. Mushrooms anecdotally seem to
| have dose dependent long term effects, including disconnecting
| from reality, sometimes in destructive ways.
| stanislavb wrote:
| There should be more studies on micro-dosing as well. Many of the
| modern drugs that one can buy from the pharmacy would have
| serious bad effects if you take 10-20 pills at the same time.
| Yet, you take take a small dose from a package, and you are OK.
| i.e. micro-dosing (1/20 => 1/10 of a "regular dose") could give
| one all the benefits of Psilocybin without any detrimental
| effects - at all.
|
| p.s. most probably you won't be "converted" into a hippie (as
| some people are worried about it) if you are micro-dosing.
| umvi wrote:
| > no short- or long-term detrimental effects
|
| And yet, all my friends who started using mushrooms now post
| pseudo-spiritual/pseudo-philosophical/pseudo-mystical yet
| completely nonsensical thoughts on social media. You can tell
| they think it's super deep and meaningful, but for us sober folk
| it just seems a little nutty. Stuff like: "We are the UNIVERSE.
| For the universe is within us." or "The Matrix is a system. That
| system is our enemy. The very minds of the people that need to be
| saved are not ready to be unplugged. They will fight to protect
| their truth, as they should. The saving can only come from
| within." From my sober perspective, it seems like psilocybin
| causes some users to lose a degree of grip on reality/rationality
| which I consider "detrimental" (though the users themselves claim
| it's "enlightening")
| aqme28 wrote:
| And anecdotally i've found shroom use more common among my
| smartest friends.
|
| And the people posting antivax facebook memes or whatever are a
| totally different set of people.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > You can tell they think it's super deep and meaningful, but
| for us sober folk it just seems a little nutty. Stuff like: "We
| are the UNIVERSE. For the universe is within us." or "The
| Matrix is a system. That system is our enemy. The very minds of
| the people that need to be saved are not ready to be unplugged.
| They will fight to protect their truth, as they should. The
| saving can only come from within."
|
| Sounds exactly like what "us sober folks" would say after an
| intensive meditation retreat in the Vipassana tradition. Maybe
| the entheogen users are just taking a convenient shortcut.
| literalsunbear wrote:
| Do you reject the idea that you and I are both the universe
| experiencing itself? You seem overly concerned with how often
| people decide to engage in the positive and apparently harmless
| practice of indulging in the idea. Are you this scrutinizing
| toward other spiritual practices such as Christianity or Islam?
| Not trying to do a whataboutism or anything, just trying to get
| a good read on exactly how humorless you are.
| handsaway wrote:
| "In healthy people" seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting
| here. I've done mushrooms three times and the first two were fun
| (but not enlightening or life-changing) experiences. The third
| time I had a bad trip. It was "my fault" in that in retrospect I
| did not have the right set/setting to take them, but it triggered
| a massive panic attack that spiraled me pretty severely into a
| months long anxiety episode. Before the mushrooms I was fine and
| after them I was having nightly panic attacks that lasted hours.
| I have a panic disorder but it was "in remission" previously.
|
| Now having a panic disorder may disqualify me as a "healthy
| person" but given that the study is analyzing it as a treatment
| for mental disorders it seems that that's not what they mean. I
| don't know if panic/anxiety is included in "a range of mental
| health conditions, including treatment-resistant depression (TRD)
| and PTSD". I'm just saying that it definitely _can_ be harmful to
| your mental health based on my experience. I don't know whether
| or not complementary talk therapy would have changed my outcome.
| fdwizard wrote:
| As someone who invests in psychedelic-assisted therapy companies
| and follows the space pretty closely, I am shaking my head at
| some of the comments here. A lot of anecdotal stories wrapped up
| as "wise" warnings against psychedelic use. Recreational use does
| not apply in this clinical setting context, at all. Nor can it be
| extrapolated back to a recreational scenario. Granted, the title
| of this article reads click bait-y and I can see why there were
| visceral reactions. Additionally, the article lacks some context
| which I'll try to provide.
|
| I've been following Compass Pathways for about a year now, and
| what I can tell you is this:
|
| 1. The purpose of this study was NOT to prove psilocybin has no
| deleterious effects in healthy subjects. It's purpose is as a
| supplementary/complementary study to their ongoing clinical
| trials for treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic
| stress disorder. Basically, the more "ammo" they have surrounding
| psilocybin's safety the better, as they are headed into meetings
| with the FDA on their upcoming phase 3 trials.
|
| 2. The second purpose of this study was to prove that one
| therapist can administer doses to multiple patients at the same
| time. Cost is a huge, ongoing concern for commercialization in
| this space. To have a therapist watch over one patient for a 6-8
| hour trip makes this treatment difficult to scale, and this gives
| Compass possibly a little more leeway and broadening in their
| treatment protocol.
|
| 3. Mystical type experiences are currently believed to bring
| about a greater chance of positive outcome in patients treated
| with psychedelic-assisted therapy. This is NOT dictated by what
| you thought was a "mystical" experience - it is determined by the
| MEQ (Mystical Experience Questionnaire) that is sometimes
| administers in these studies.
|
| 4. "Healthy" subjects - please keep in mind that in this context,
| the definition is narrow and shouldn't be interpreted in any way
| other than what the trials' inclusion/exclusion criteria listed.
| In these studies, it usually means no history of mental illness,
| ESPECIALLY schizophrenia. Beware of applying "healthy" to any
| other marker.
|
| 5. I urge people here to read Compass' recently completed phase
| IIb study on treatment-resistant depression (= patients who've
| failed at least 2 antidepressants). There absolutely are mild
| adverse - serious adverse events that occur, even in controlled
| and supportive settings. Please take this current studies
| statement as strictly as it reads "The results also showed there
| were no short or long term detrimental effects on thinking
| patterns or processing of emotions".
| gringoDan wrote:
| This study lasted 12 weeks. That is not a good definition of
| "long-term".
|
| I'm reminded of this recent ACX post about the phrase "No
| Evidence". It means 2 very distinct things:
|
| > _1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely
| true, but we haven't checked yet, so we can't be sure._
|
| > _2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop
| repeating this easily debunked lie._
|
| Different people will read the same article and choose their
| interpretation based on their previous bias.
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
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