MDMA used in treating PTSD | Hacker News Reader

MDMA used in treating PTSD

scientificamerican.com

24 pointsstuntgoat8 comments

This doesn't surprise me at all, and actually this sort of study has been done before MDMA was made illegal, to similar effect. Used correctly, it's a profoundly effective drug for working through emotions.

Indeed. I'm not sure why everyone is afraid of drugs that people enjoy taking.

(Is there a stigma to putting cancer patients on morphine? No. But yet there is a stigma when someone wants to give them THC, or when psychologists want to use MDMA or LSD. Considering I can buy highly psychoactive drugs at Starbucks, I don't really understand it...)

The interesting thing is that, if people took morphine recreationally, there would be a stigma to putting cancer patients on it.

From an ev-psych standpoint, medicine is considered to be a "gift" from a society to an individual, and yet certain drugs also lower the status of people who consume them, because of their association with "unproductive behavior." We don't want to allow, as a rule, gifts to lower the recipient's status, because we can be on the receiving end of a gift without being aware of it, and we have to act like we like it as part of a certain social dance. Thus, we ban potentially status-lowering gifts.

Note that alcohol, caffeine and other such "consumed as part of eating ritual" drugs, even if they did lower status, aren't part of the gift culture of medicine—that's why relatively few suggest banning them.

While I agree that drugs such as cannabis or morphine can be status lowering, others such MDMA or LSD have a powerful one off effect and don't usually lead to addiction. So I am not sure that these drugs fall under the "gift protocol".

Where I am, on one of the many tips of Europe, the argument against drugs seems to revolve around risks, for example the potential long term effects of taking MDMA as it has been linked decreased cognitive performance, Parkinson (this later one has been disproven), etc...

Recreational drugs aren't status-lowering because of their effects, they're status-lowering simply because they're mostly used by people of low status. Perhaps the difference in Europe is that recreational drug use is associated with people of high status?

It has a lot more to do initially with how children are conditioned at a young age to think that drugs are bad, a message that is repeated throughout our lives.

In the US there is a huge stigma associated with weed, but in Canada people don't really care. The difference there comes from the official US government message that weed makes people insane and murderous, and the subsequent war on drugs. A good documentary to watch is "The History of Marijuana", which covers much of the post World War II period of the US government campaigning against Marijuana.

A list of all current research underway using psychadelics: http://www.maps.org/research/

The Psylocibin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psylocibin )category is worth expanding, it has had the biggest resurgence in research.

Really cute!

"After the therapy, he vacationed in Jamaica, began dating a local woman and bought a house on the island. "I'm happy and well adjusted now," he says. "It's a good fairy-tale ending. As soon as we get some little Bob Marley kids it'll be even better.""

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