I was in the MAPS MDMA for PTSD study
psymposia.com
psymposia.com
MAPS is just entering into their Stage III research process after being granted a "breakthrough therapy" by the FDA (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-designates-mdma-as-breakthr...) and need all the funds they can muster. The tech community can really step up here. If you have it in you, donate what you can: https://store.maps.org/np/clients/maps/donation.jsp?campaign...
In the US, access to research funding is a far larger issue than scheduling. The main benefit of rescheduling would likely be through its indirect benefits on access to funding.
Source: I’ve talked with multiple researchers who are studying psychedelics.
Also, I recommend reading or listening to the book Acid Test if anyone here would like to learn more.
I've accidentally done as much myself with close friends instead of therapists: I started partying with Molly during a period in my life where I was already starting to recognize and work through some issues from my entire childhood: the wee hours of the morning after having an amazing night dancing is a pretty ideal setting to open up mental blocks and be honest with yourself and others. (It also made me almost instantly closer to those people, whom I consider some of the most important people in my life at this point).
Beginners usually need a trainer and a guide to at least get started and to not end up in a life risking situation.
In medical science those professionals are often called doctors and nurses.
What I was wondering is more along the lines of: is the therapy appreciably different to complement the MDMA, or is it simply the increased openness etc that makes normal modes of therapy more effective?
I didn't intend to suggest that people _should_ take MDMA before therapy, but it was just a thought experiment to get at the above question. I only wondered about it because, as I said, I've incidentally done as much while talking with friends.
There are plenty of psychoactive drugs that people don't think twice about managing themselves (weed, caffeine, alcohol), and I was just curious whether MDMA would fall into that category squarely enough (it's certainly easier to manage than alcohol is, for example).
See this from earlier research results http://www.mdmaptsd.org/research-category.html
> A long-term follow-up of patients who received MDMA-assisted psychotherapy revealed that overall benefits were maintained an average of 3.8 years later.
The issue is that they may or may not be actual MDMA - and the unscrupulous label general amphetamines as either molly or MDMA and people unfamiliar dont know it....
The clinical studies should, presumably, be also, setting a standard for the purity, dosage, quality etc around the tested substance...
So to go "off grid" as it were, to test this has risks..
That being said - the efficacy of any therapy session, even when the introspection and emotional response is deliberately induced, could still result in benefits.
The problem with any drugs, beit alcohol, weed, whatever - is that environment (situational and historically) play a large part in the response.
The mental state can be associative to a great degree, and as such - if one has had a tool such as MDMA in the past - but in a really poor environment, the response could be poor.
Read up on it - but never trust anything off the street to be what they claim...
That being said, I am pretty sure I can find the drug, I know some people that I can trust. Preferably it would be administered by the therapist, though.
Thanks, too, for the caution. I have already found someone in my native country who is a psychologist who also does AI stuff with Tensorflow, so I trust them already. ;)
"87% of “Molly” analyzed by the DEA between 2009 and 2013 contained 0% MDMA, instead mostly containing “bath salts” like methylone.3"
I’d venture to guess that half the people buying MDMA-less molly would say the same thing.
If your friend isn’t sitting in the lab while it’s being made or not doing mass spec on it the product, it’s all someone’s word.
This is one of the great tragedies of the war on drugs: UN member states are bound to the convention under law, so until this unjust (and unscientific) barrier is torn down it will always be dangerous and difficult to acquire for therapeutic purposes. But things, thankfully, are changing for the better.
You can mess up your serotonin levels for an extended period of time through MDMA abuse.
I guess that might be a direct effect rather than a side effect, but that doesn't seem to be your point.
You can do that with SSRIs too. You can also kill yourself with opioids. The problem is that MDMA isn't even available by prescription. The first I heard of it was on a TV special covering its use in therapy sessions - that was in the 1980s prior to the whole ecstasy fad. Why is this useful substance totally illegal, while much more harmful and addictive things are legal, available, and causing problems?
But abuse of anything can be harmful, that's kind of a defining qualification of the whole concept of abuse, isn't it?
No, really, I am interested. Please share. Thanks.
Switzerland rocks in many ways.
It's such an enjoyable and useful process that most everyone chooses to take the booster dose.
It also is a nice safety check, if the person happens to freak out or really doesn't want to continue, they can pass and come back down. But as I Said, in practice no one passes.
It's also not boring or tedious as most therapies can be, it's a lovely place you want to explore.
It's a pretty normal dose.
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Chief-Revealed-Myron-Stolaroff...
So many people wonder when science will let us do things. When will we land on the moon, when will we cure cancer (most cancer anyway, a handful have been effectively cured), when will all of mankind benefit from the next great insights? We ask this yet in a lot of ways, we won’t even open our minds enough to give it our best shot.
How much can x, mushrooms, ketamine et al really change devastated lives for the better under the right conditions? We may never know.
I fully respect the opinion of people who say these drugs shouldn’t ever be used, or that disagree with me on any issue in general. But I will never respect someone who doesn’t want to know the answers and the data.
It happens with drugs, gun control, so many political issues, people actually do not want, and even work against collection of, objective data. Of course of any given data set can be biased or flawed, and that has nothing to do with getting the best data you can, iterating, and improving it.
If we are opposed to something, it’s ostensibly for a reason right? Why would we ever not want to strengthen our argument, or discard it, based on better understanding of our “reason”?
In the US. One wonders why such a study wasn't carried out in a less puritan country.
The synthetic opioids that drug companies are dumping on the population these days are many times more dangerous, but they make a profit for big companies, so they are legal.
Powerful drug companies influence research worldwide. They want no competition from drugs that would be generic from day one.
edit: missing words
In fields where solid research can't be done by a single part-time person (e.g. a teaching professor), research happens only to the extent and in the direction where there's available funding. Even putting a couple grad students on a project for a year (i.e., a very small project) requires external funding, much less the extensive studies needed to prove that a particular chemical is safe for human use and has a therapeutic effect.
However the effective research ban is by far the bigger limiting factor in this case, because it rules out most options before even getting started.
For example, it’s not unusual for unpatentable substances to be studied, in the hope that understanding the fundamental mechanism could allow a (sometimes) improved alternative to be developed that could be profitable.
There is also at least some research not controlled by big pharma that could have conceivably targeted these areas 40 years ago.
Would they not be able to profit from the stability of lab-produced drugs? Would the generic market not want to produce these? After all, some of the drug manufacturers produce both brand-name and generic drugs [1].
Regardless of patent, I'm pretty sure some players would happily get into the prescription market. On top of this, I'm going to guess since it seems some of these drugs out-perform the available prescription drugs and is cheaper in the long run, insurance companies and governments alike (since some places have universal care and even the US is invested in some forms of healthcare) stand to profit from having this sort of thing be the first line of treatment when possible.
[1] http://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurethe...
[1]https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/examination-clinical-trial-costs...
Having worked for a few drug companies I can assure you most don't even know what MDMA is.
What happened was that a lot of the promise of them didn't pan out. Then the laws changed and it made it much harder to do research.
So in essence, it's not just one reason why psychedelic research pretty much disappeared. Unmet expectations, lack of funding and stringent laws all contributed to it.
Nowadays, our country is very different. There is a widespread sense that there is no right or wrong way to live your life, and anyone who goes against multiculturalist viewpoints is labeled as ignorant or a racist. I think in this environment, the introspective, antiauthoritarian thought processes that psychedelic use brings about wouldn't have nearly the kind of social impact that they had in the 70's.
Incredibly reductionist. There is no such thing as "no right or wrong way" everyone either chooses a way or falls into a default way of living. Everyone ought to get more introspective and conscious about their philosophies and assumptions.
We have built a saturated information dystopia, taking time away from it to focus on the self is even more important and impactful.
This quote will stick with me for years to come. Cheers.
Substances have been banned in cultures for thousands of years. In the US - long before psychedelics came under scrutiny - opium, cocaine, and other drugs had been made illegal, but not before the 60s was actual basic research by scientists and physicians also banned.
FYI, opium and cocaine were banned for overtly racist reasons:
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fie...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-o...
So I am not sure those are the best examples to prove the point that banning drug research is a greater crime than banning recreational drugs.
Actually, in America nationwide drug laws began in the 20th century, and it had nothing to do with health or unknown effects. Opium was outlawed as part of a general effort to "protect America" from Chinese immigrants. Heroin was outlawed because a German company held a patent on it. Cocaine was outlawed because, according to the people in Congress at the time, it drove black men crazy and made it impossible to kill them with standard police-issue sidearms (also, according to an article from the New York Times just before cocaine was banned, Jews were selling it). Marijuana prohibition was principally driven by racism and as a form of regulatory capture by industries that competed with hemp.
LSD was discovered decades before it was outlawed and the effects were well understood before it was banned. LSD happens to be one of the safest recreational drugs; in fact, the biggest danger is the poorly regulated supply chain i.e. most "LSD" on the market today is not actually LSD (as with most drugs, the ban poses a greater health risk than the drug itself). The government conducted its own extremely unethical LSD study to determine if it could be used as a mind control drug (it cannot) and knew the safety profile long before the ban. LSD was banned because of concerns that it was contributing to the moral corruption of American youth (i.e. think of all those white teenagers out partying with hippies); in other words, it was viewed as a threat to the prevailing social order (probably not a coincidence that this coincided with the civil rights movement, which was a direct challenge to that social order).
Purely anecdotal, but have you ever met someone that has taken large doses of LSD over the course of a few years? They are almost always permanently changed
I also agree that the U.S. is much less of a monoculture now and people generally agree that others should be able to live, think, and believe whatever and however they want.
What do you mean by "valid" here? Do you mean they are afraid for society, or themselves?
The benign physical effects of plants like cannabis were well established by the government's own studies. The science was purposefully ignored because it did not align with the political goals of the Nixon administration.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
Or maybe they're wound too tightly, I could be wildly optimistic.
They use things like religion, scapegoats, and wars (on drugs, terrorism, communism, etc) to whip up support. But it's just a tool. Absolute power for themselves is all they believe in. Many of them are drug users, I'm sure.
I should have specified a psychedelic or empathogenic drug I guess. You're probably right that they're knee-deep in depressants and stimulants.
The problem is that many times the data collected is not objective at all. Statistics can be twisted by even just the definitions of words used. For example, a CDC study on rape considered forced penetration, but not being forced to penetrate, as rape. This data was then used in a report that, among other conclusions, concluded that women almost never rape men. All the cases of women forcing a man to have sex were defined as not being rape, twisting the results of the study.
When you see someone against data collection, are they against using good objective data, or do they have reason to believe the data won't be objective and manipulated to push one side or the other?
All this being said, I think drugs like MDMA should be legal for recreational use, much less therapeutic use.
I don’t think that has anything to do with it. If it were the case the demands would be for better data, not no data.
And yes, some in Congress advocate against collecting data full stop on certain issues.
I would agree it’s always been true thst data will sometimes be flawed and biased, and always will be.
The question is what do you do about it? Stop science, or improve standards in good faith?
For an extreme example, consider a country where homosexuality is punished by long prison sentences (or worse). Would you trust any data that such a government produced? If they produced data showing something negative about homosexuality, would you even spend the time to look at their methodologies? Or would it be dismissed as inherently biased as the source would be seen as being incapable of being trusted? For me it would be the latter.
I'm of the firm opinion that we'll always be slow to do those Big Things while we are dragged-down by the welfare/nanny state. So many lives and generations are subsidized into oblivion for a net societal loss.
So, if a drug like MDMA helps someone see a memory from a fresh perspective, maybe it could help? But otherwise, the general advice above seems useful.
There is brain-interfacing equipment at my desk worth 1000 USD tops. I buy MDMA, shrooms and similair substances for a couple of EUR per Gram and don't fear the possible consequences. What I desire though, is people who responsibly join me on my venture for science and humanity since I lack the knowledge and intellect to do a significant contribution on my own.
The good news is that there is many like me working with people unlike me and the sharing of information is still mostly free. The tides are in our favour, but only for as long as people invest in it.
So, functionally, it's pro-police PR sold to parents and voters as an anti-drug program.
And there will most likely be a MAPS event on Saturday night as well. I'm not going this year, but in previous years they've always been good.
I know a lot of pretty responsible users of MDMA (most use during festivals). It’s also best to not do it more than once a month as it’ll significantly decrease the effects.
It’s also important to be mindful that in days following the high may come a low where you feel more depressed than usual. This is due to the low seratonin levels your brain will have after you increased them to levels you’ve likely never reached before.
I also wouldn’t consider MDMA a “trip” per se. At doses like 80-120mg you will be fully mentally able, you’ll just have rose colored glasses on (a fondness for everyone and everything).
Otherwise some other tips are to chew gum as most people have an oral fixation on MDMA and you don’t want to grind your teeth. I hear taking Magnesium before helps as well though I haven’t personally researched that.
Magnesium helps w/ lockjaw/teeth grinding.
I sometimes take a tums as well to help w/ the minor upset stomach.
Also, those don't really seem like the effects that I have observed others experience which are:
- Hypersensitivity to others' emotions
- Euphoria
- Relaxation and reduced anxiety
- Sense of inner peace
But, during my divorce, I was on boatloads of prescription drugs for a medical crisis. I basically used that as an excuse to do things I would not have done stone cold sober and to learn how to get my needs met and put down my childhood baggage. It was more effective than the therapy I did years earlier.
Based on that, the general idea seems sound to me and is not necessarily specific to MDMA.
I remember as a medical student on placement asking a palliative care physician about whether they had considered the use of MDMA in end of life care to provide dying people and their families with a potential method of spending some really incredible time together. She scoffed at the idea and continued prescribing the same old crap. 10 years later psychiatrists are saying the currently MDMA, ketamine and the psychedelics are providing the most exciting breakthroughs in modern psychiatric drugs in decades.
Or, for a shorter view, the article Trip Treatment by Michael Pollan: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment
It features the history, politics, science and first hand accounts of 40 people who used MDMA for healing PTSD and trauma in an underground practice.
Very powerful book.
Http://bit.ly/mdmabook
Lots and lots of seemingly benign things have a serious effect on a person's sense of time. Some examples:
* Sleep
* Travel
* Cannabis
* Caffeine
* Turkey and red wine
* Video games or other intense visual engagement
* Scuba diving
* Intense cardio workouts
Now, MDMA isn't particularly prone to causing addiction. It is prone to causing lasting changes in how people relate to themselves and others, and a combination of personal anecdotes and studies suggest it's for the better.
> A long-term follow-up of patients who received MDMA-assisted psychotherapy revealed that overall benefits were maintained an average of 3.8 years later.
(This is after 2 total sessions)
See here for more http://www.mdmaptsd.org/infographic.html
I am not saying that there is no benefit, especially for an extreme case like this. That relief these people get, a chance to exist without the confusion and pain, and just feel like love.
But the high you get is a distraction from the pain you are feeling. It's not the taking of MDMA or Psilocybin that fixes the issues. It's the integration. It's the "lessons" you learn from your experience.
But are you learning, or are you just finally looking at what you didn't want to all these years? Do you need to take psychedelics to look?
I think we should keep researching, because we should see what is at the end of this tunnel.
I'd liken it to having a hazmat suit to perform a cleanup. You don't get anything by putting on the hazmat suit. You get something by not having to stay in the room with a toxic chemical spill anymore that you couldn't get close enough to clean up without the suit.
It's a vehicle, not a destination. Yeah, if you get in and rev the accelerator without putting the car in gear, you're not going anywhere. The benefits should largely come in conjunction with therapy.
And psychedelic use has been deeply ingrained in various human cultures all over the world for thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of years. Taking psychedelics as part of a religious ceremony or ritual to rid oneself of suffering is part of indigenous traditions in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia/Oceania.
I'd say the historical traditions and these new studies should convince even you that there is no fad involved in human psychotropic use.
Could you link me to some research about this? I have heard this talked about, but I haven't found anything reliable.
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survi...
> the high you get is a distraction from the pain you are feeling
Sort of. The feeling is of an assurance, a joyful security that releases you to be able to confront the pain without (as much) fear. There's also a shift in perspective that let's you know that a different way of feeling is possible. That's surprisingly powerful.
> are you just finally looking at what you didn't want to all these years?
Yes, exactly this.
> Do you need to take psychedelics to look?
Perhaps not, but anecdotal evidence and a growing amount of research suggests it helps tremendously, especially in cases where it is very hard for people to look at themselves whilst sober.
> I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that psychedelics was just a fad.
I don't see how this follows from anything you've said.
It doesn't matter what the culture behind these substances is. They work for the people that need them. The results should speak for themselves.
The best analogy I can give is like you're playing a NES game, and it's glitching all over parts of the screen. You're still able to play, but there's interference that you just eventually learn to ignore, even though it is wearing on your experience. MDMA is like hitting the reset button and the glitches are gone. You realize there's a beauty that you've been missing this entire time, because you grew to view life through this filter.
Again, this isn't true of everyone's experience but studies are starting to show it's able to help certain people that can use it.
I realize that's a pretty extreme statement to make. But from what I understand, we hardly realize how the mind works. I am not saying don't dismiss the research. I just wonder if we are trying to sell psychedelics as a magic pill, when maybe just awareness is all you need.
What about people who have bad trips on these drugs? Do we dismiss them as people who aren't just suppose to take psychedelics?
Often the most important thing to reassure people who are having a bad trip is that this too will end, and they will feel normal again soon. The fear that the trip will be the new normal is a big fear.
Sometimes people are having bad trips because they are performing the introspection they've long avoided--- they're facing trauma. And in that respect, I think that having a bad trip is actually a _good thing_. Sure, you aren't avoiding what's in your subconscious, you're facing it head on. You might have a bad time in the moment, but it helps the healing process overall.
---
The idea that trips are just a beautiful illusion is... kind of flawed. Our brains are weird, and our thoughts can re-wire how our brains work. If someone is living is the cognitive distortion that they are unloved, but a trip of MDMA reminds them that there is love and unity in the world, then it doesn't really matter whether it's an illusion. Going through life with the belief that everyone is capable and deserve of love and unity and respect _fundamentally makes your life better_, especially if you compare it to the opposite distortion, where you are paranoid and wondering how people are out to take advantage or humiliate you.
I think that MDMA is more about breaking down cognitive distortions with a temporary "well what if PLUR??" thought experiment than it is about just creating an illusion.
Psychedelics are an effective means of clearing the filter of all the constraints a person accumulates in the course of life. Culture, society, education, religion, it all serves to build the filters up.
If one finds beauty in the world under the influence of psychedelics, in my experience it tends to persist long after the drugs have left the system.
No downvotes from me, I can't speak to that.