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Comment by skate22 | Hacker News Reader

Not calling this post out specifically, but drugs make for good clickbait. Drugs in general are 'in' right now, and i agree that it's pretty forced these days.

I have a very small sample size, but the friends i have who tripped regularly (not just on lsd) went on to have serious mental health issues. I know correlation =! causation, but it scares me how big the drug culture is becoming.

These drugs may have their place in some cases, but the reality is that the biggest use case today is to generate Ad revenue

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Well, if by 'in right now' you mean at least 7k - 9k years you might be right [0][1]. If you believe what ethnobotanist like Terence Mckenna [2] say, then it's much older and has shaped the hominids evolution quite significantly. It seems almost all cultures found local hallucinogens and exploited them heavily for ceremony, healing etc and was strong part of who they were [3].

Anecdotally, I think hallucinogen just highlighted mental issues that were already there. I also know some really smart people who have done their share of it with no problem (that i can see). If I could go back in time, i'd do it all again. We, as humans, were pretty open about all this not too long ago. I am happy to see a small number never stopped and psychonauts [4] though not always scientific, have kept exploring and bringing back ideas and experiences for these alternate states of reality.

Tangentially, Carlos Castaneda's [5] books were some of the best i've read and would recommend it to people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928025-400-earliest...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvqqpj/psilocybin-the-mus...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entheogenic/hallucinog...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda

>If you believe what ethnobotanist like Terence Mckenna Mckenna is interesting and should not be dismissed on principle but I warn people not familiar with his work not to take everything he said at face value, he was pretty "out there" and very mystic at times. He has interesting and thought provoking ideas but I wouldn't quote him out of context in an HN comment as an argument of authority.

This is exactly what we mean by "kind of forced"

For most of history people didn't have the free time to be regularly using drugs the way some people today imply. If your life is farming from sunrise to sunset you're gonna need a lot of sleep and there isn't much time left to be tripping balls. You'll probably only can justify using your available free time to do whatever your local drug is at special occasions, whatever handful of religious holidays your culture has and maybe a handful of other times every year. Yes, there's downtime in the winter and summer but depending on the size of the family you have to support there's still an infinite list of things to do. There's always a leaking butter churn or cracked axle handle that needs fixing or a cart wheel that needs greasing. The time to just sit around and toke it up does not exist excerpt but for the few who prioritize that sort of recreation over improving their material situation. Responsible adults drink a few beers (or toke it up) on Friday night (with the definition of "few" depending on how many responsibilities you have). The vast majority of people weren't sitting around getting baked or drunk every other evening.

That may not be true that people used to have less time. For example this article: http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/american-worker-less-vacati... state that medieval peasant had more free time than actual american worker. Did they use this time to take drug is another topic though.

Farming, at least for your family and not commercially is not all that labor intensive. There are daily chores, a few peak seasonal activities, but outside of harvest its much easier than say an office job.

Baseball and cricket exist to fill the empty days of summer where bees, sun and the occasional down pour automate the bounty. You basically have the whole of winter and most of summer to trip balls.

people used to have a lot more free time than today

can confirm. Same with many of my friends. All heavy weed smokers, all used psychedelics. A worrying % went on to have some mental health issues.

Now I know all the pro-weed people say "yeah but it is those pre-disposed to having schizophrenic episodes". Perhaps, but at the sample rate in my experience and others who have met later on the % is far higher than I would have expected to be.

Same for just weed smoking. I post on a music forum, where near all members used to be heavy smokers . And anecdotally, about 80% had mental problems due to weed smoking. The cycle is clear. Heavy weed smoking for years. Stop enjoying it, but have become dependant. Come home from work. Smoke, freak out for an hour, effects wear off, smoke again, repeat. This goes on for 1-2 years before the realisation hits in, smoking is not good for me any more

------------------ for the record all were also poly-drug users, not exclusively smokers, so it could be caused by other drugs or the combination of. But I have no doubt it saying, this is not only people pre-disposed to mental health issues

Anecdotes are always going to be anecdotes. I can give you the complete opposite experience with my friends, some of them who tackled depression with mushrooms and are nowadays much happier and productive people.

The older I get the more I see people have mental issues, as you are out of your teenage years and a lot of more stressors pop up in your life it's also much easier to trigger or develop mental health problems, so there are bunch of other variables that no anecdote will control for thus making it just a "feel good to tell my story" kind of post, not really enlightening.

You're putting the temporal cart before the causal horse. With or without drugs, mental health issues can be latent or unacknowledged for years. And without defending marijuana use, naïve -- even unconscious -- self-medication is a very simple explanation for what you're describing.

Yeah, I particularly like two counter examples.

Example 1: We have prevalence of schizophrenia of 1-2% both in countries with extremely high use (Australia, 25-30% last year) and extremely low (Japan, <1% last year). Still many schizophrenia cases have been associated with cannabis, but here's the twist: CBD displays antipsychotic properties, whereas THC exacerbates psychosis. That matches both the selfmedication hypothesis, and the trigger hypothesis, but the aggregate data still dispels the causal hypothesis.

Example 2: The countries with the absolute biggest rates of tobacco prevalence are hovering around 40-50%, the US is sitting at around 20%. Among schizophrenics, though, it goes around 75-90%. But funnily enough, you don't see anyone claiming tobacco causes schizophrenia!

The tobacco lobby was quite successful debunking that myth. Cannabis had no lobby yet.

The association is likely tied to self medication. Tobacco contains a low level monoamine inhibitor, these have some uses in psychiatry. (it is the main bit that is addictive - not really nicotine alone - harman and norharman, related to harmaline)

> But funnily enough, you don't see anyone claiming tobacco causes schizophrenia!

We have extensive research on tobacco, so we know it doesn't cause psychosis.

We now know that if you smoke cannabis at 15 you're more likely to develop schizophrenia than people who don't smoke; we know that this is dose dependent; and that the people who smoke will develop illness earlier than people who don't smoke. There are strong reasons to believe that cannabis will cause psychotic illness in some people. Obviously that's not all people. Just as not everyone who drinks heavily will become alcoholic, not everyone who smokes heavily will develop psychosis.

But schizophrenia is sufficiently harmful that we want to provide good warnings to people to take care with cannabis. Avoid use if you're under 21; avoid heavy and prolonged use; seek help early if you're having trouble.

When campaigners claim cannabis is a harmless herb they make it much harder for people like me who are trying to get it legalised and regulated.

As a recovering information addict, I'll simply say this:

Why and how I do something habitually is as important as what I'm doing, whether it's ingesting some substance or spending my days reading the internet.

If someone is chronically doing something to escape from or numb pain (physical or emotional), expect major issues to come from the practice.

> but the reality is that the biggest use case today is to generate Ad revenue

I appreciate your comment overall, but this sentence makes me think you don't know much about drugs or drug culture, or the actual effects of drugs. I'm also slightly worried about the general popularity in current society and media, however.

Drugs have been "in" for centuries.

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