A Psychedelic Renaissance

Thank you for the video links. I had never heard of Jamie Wheal before - I enjoyed listening to his thoughts.

I also enjoy listening to Terence McKenna and Alan Watts every once in a while ... most of what they say often sounds completely irrational, outrageously verbose, ridiculous and border-line ramblings of "mad men" ... but their words are also powerfully disarming, deeply engaging and resonant and finally emotionally embracing. I don't know how to explain it. I wouldn't want to be caught listening to them!

I really wonder if anyone ever really does anything for themselves anymore. Every experience, even the most intimate and introspective ones, seem to be telegraphed and advertised as a part of your "branded identity"

I think there's a Hegelian-esque pendulum to it.

Discretionary uses of mind-altering drugs, especially those that have been prominent in youth culture, pop culture and party culture face massive resistance. Look how long cannabis is taking to reach legalization. Look at the barriers to medical scientists who want to study psychedelics.

In that sort of environment, it's near inevitable that the remaining "torch bearers" lean to the true-believer/fanatic end of the spectrum. The mild-mannered actors just won't put up with that sort of resistance. So, reserved scientists and practitioners who avoid hyperbole are under-represented.

Ultimately everything boils down to use. The details of therapeutic use, spiritual use and such. On the therapeutic end, I think there's room to be hopeful. It's just a good fit for a "talk therapy" approach that the discipline values already, and that many of the "one-a-day" prescriptions are not.

On the spiritual end, most living traditions are highly culturally mitigated. If/When it comes to the modern, apartment-dweller world, there aren't any social institutions that can fill that role (well, churches, religions, but that's unlikely to happen at scale). In tandem with the earlier point (the true believer advocates promoting psychodelics despite resistence), this probably adds up to a lot of quackery.

This is more worrying, or at least it points in the direction of purely "recreational" use.

There are a few therapy modalities that can help, check them out and see if any resonate with you: core transformation (my fave), feeding your demons (buddhist), internal family systems, focusing (eugene gendlin), coherence therapy. All are predicated around the same few core concepts of having different parts of yourself that view the world in different ways, acknowledging and accepting that each of those parts has some positive contribution to our well being even though they get into conflicts with each other about their proper 'domains' of applicability sometimes. In this case, it sounds like one part is worried that you'll label it as bad and try to change it without acknowledging the ways in which it might be protecting or helping you. If you read the wikipedia page on coherence therapy for instance you'll see the steps around needing to address those parts needs before they're willing to compromise.

Happy travels.

Trained therapist? Nah. Good, trusted friend. Someone who will be willing to clean up embarrassing bodily functions for you type of friend.

You can't pay somebody to discover you, you're going to have to do that yourself. Having a companion is just to help keep things from getting messy.

You are right to be cautious. Don't let people oversell the benefits and minimize the risk. Yes, Johns Hopkins and some other places have early promising results, but these subjects were given counseling before, during, and after their trip. I'm sure for some people a lightbulb goes off and suddenly they can see the problems in their life which had been invisible to them and the benefit is immediate. Most of the time the message isn't so clear, and the benefit comes from actual hard work and changes that come as the result of your insights.

For example, I know I'm getting older, time is limited, and I'm mortal. Taking LSD and looking in the mirror and really seeing myself more objectively, all the wrinkles and saggy skin, the meat of my body hanging off my bones, makes my aging far more tangible and immediate than I can normally conjure. The trick is afterward maintaining that feeling and using it to make decisions about health, prioritizing things that are important, and dropping things that won't matter to me in 20 years.

If I had anxiety issues or deep trauma to work through, I'd absolutely want to use psychedelics in concert with a trained professional to minimize the risk of having things go wrong and to get help in figuring out what the trip meant to me (or "integrating" in the parlance).

The problem with make or break solutions is they sometimes break you. Instead, be patient and overcome your anxiety step by step.

Be careful because psychedelics are all about letting go of control and that can be hard for control freaks.

I'm not saying you are a control freak but OCD leads me to believe you're not far removed.

I know that I am one, so speaking from personal experience psychedelics can be frightening to a person who must control everything. You just have to tell yourself that you've taken a drug and there is a halflife of every drug.

It can't make you do anything, it can only change your perspective of what you want to do.

As a step in that direction, have you considered propanalol with a trained therapist? It's non-narcotic

Meditation can lead to similar insights over time, with practice. And because it doesn’t happen “all at once” (unless you jump into the deep end of a silent retreat or something) it might alleviate some of your anxiety.

> the psychological benefits are well-established and powerful if used in the right mindset, and the health risks are also well-established and rare or minor if used carefully.

> I hope everyone involved understands whether they're doing Science or Advocacy.

The data (science) gives creditably to the activist and lobbyist hoping to change policy (advocacy). I think everyone is clear on what side they are on.

There is plenty of space for science to expand our understanding. What is the probability of a bad outcome of psychedelics? How does dose effect the probability of a bad outcome? Is Mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA the most effective treatment for PTSD? For end of life anxiety? For major depression? What conditions are these substances helpful for (I don't think we have a complete list)? When should a medical provider recommend psychedelics? Can psychedelics be used on everyone, or just those with certain conditions? How does repeated long term exposure adjust the risk profile? What is the optimal microdosing schedule? What are the objective benefits of microdosing? What is optimal microdosing dose? Who should be microdosing?

There are a lot of unanswered questions to answer, and probably even more questions we don't have enough data to know to ask. The studies that we have are with low sample sizes, so larger studies would be scientifically significant. What we have with psychedelics are a few recent studies done with modern scientific rigor that all conclude there is a lot of potential in this space. We have more historical studies done, but without modern scientific rigor and need to be recreated before being reliable data.

Lets not forget that while these human trials are taking place real people are legally being given life changing help. That's enough to make the entire thing worth it.

> Is funding scientific studies where the answers are already known an effective way to change government and social policy?

A lot of the science had to be re-done because there were methodological issues in the original research, and no one was really sure whether or not the data was faked. I think it was Rick Doblin who discovered that one of the folks in either Leary's or Pahnke's studies actually ran away during the study, but because the researcher never reported this as a possible adverse event it opened up other questions about the validity of the data. It turned out the original data was basically accurate, but it wasn't necessarily a given.

Yes, the obstacle to wider use is policy and regulation.

For those interested, some thoughts:

There are two types of users from a policy perspective. People with specific diagnoses/diseases, and "healthy" people.

For people with specific diagnoses and diseases, the most important work is FDA approval of MDMA and psilocybin. MAPS, COMPASS Pathways, and Usona are working on this and they require a bunch of money to get through to a successful FDA approval. Funding this research is a very high leverage way to enable policy change, because the FDA has a relatively clear process to approving a drug for medical use for patients with relevant medical diagnoses.

For "healthy people," there needs to be another route. Some people are working on ballot initiatives and legislation that will impact this (see Oregon, Denver, Oakland, Iowa) and that may be a high leverage route. But the path here is less clear. As you note in some cases, some types of research can be helpful for boosting political change, whereas others aren't going to be an efficient use of capital for that goal.

Here's one scientific question I'd like to see answered: If a patient is currently taking anti-depressants (or other meds) for the treatment of PTSD, depression, or addiction, and if a physician thinks a psychedelic treatment might help, how should they understand the interaction between the psych meds and the hallucinogen?

Since we're dealing with ill people, a larger amount of care is warranted.

Have you tried it? Perhaps there words aren't doing justice to the experience and what you're writing off as the same as some other act might be missing the target.

For example, having never tried meditation nor psychedelics, both yours and ops experiences seem barely believable. But I haven't tried either so I wouldn't go out and say that.

Treatment that is 100% effective when properly administered but has a 5% chance at being properly administered is still not a very good treatment. These two routes are not mutually exclusive.

I think this is pretty accurate. I think psychedelics are basically like the electrical box in your house, but for your brain. You can flip the breakers and see what happens with different circuits disabled. Since normally everything in your brain operates simultaneously this can be very instructive for learning what's happening.

Once you come back to sobriety, you can then use what you saw to start training yourself to move your attention between those circuits, giving you basically better brain control.

Neural nets are trained on the tiniest tiniest slices of human experiences so their feedback has a similar character to partly disabled brains.

Also, psychedelics make you face your inner demons. Perhaps not right away because the wonders of the experience can be captivating, for a while. But sooner or later they will. Many people I talked to tried something like LSD once or twice and while they enjoyed the fun part they didn't like what they've seen once the party was over and they were left alone with their own thoughts. This is where the benefits are but it's work and it's not easy.

Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.

But then who'd gobble up those anxiety or depression or ADHD or sleeping^` pills?

^1 Wasn't there a severe warning issued by FDA on sleeping pills just few days ago? Risk of injury or death? I had some Ambien to sleep on a plane but I thrown that stuff away.

Not to mention this passage:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Unless your definition of "religion" is so narrow and legalistic that you don't consider non-institutionalized forms of belief to be protected under this statement.

> When did we forgo

>> Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Right about the time we started screaming for government regulation every single instace we saw something we didn’t like/agree with in the world around us.

"It’s for your own good" and "Think of the children" were such convenient excuses to shift our responsibility from us to an ever growing government more than happy to protect us from ourselves.

I've read that it would be incredibly difficult to abuse psilocybin mushroom because humans quickly build up a tolerance. It's also impossible for a human to consume enough psilocybin to kill them.

You should be able to take any chemicals you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Even if certain drugs are potentially dangerous and they have associated risks, as a responsible well-informed adult you should have the freedom to decide.

Besides, humans do dangerous and risky things all the time! Bungee jumping, rock climbing, and sky-diving are some examples that immediately come to mind. In those situations even a small failure or mistake could easily end a life.

Legalizing it will actually make it safer, since anyone will be able to buy their drugs from a reputable store with strong quality guarantees. We've already seen this happen with marijuana.

Since we're on the topic, I also want to mention that there is ongoing work to legalize psilocybin in California. A few years back there was an initial attempt to get it on the ballot, but it failed to get enough signatures. Check out California Psilocybin Decriminalization & Research Initiative 2020 [0] if you're interested.

[0] https://decrimca.org

> when did we forgo

For certain parts of the population it was a very long time ago.

Our current drug war is just an extension of despotic laws that kept them subjugated.

That it’s been extended to a wider part of the population is a statistical error.

Another argument for legalizing psychedelics is that they might actually be useful for treating illness. For example there is some evidence that ibogaine [0] can help reduce or even reverse some symptoms of Parkinson's disease [1].

There were some formal studies done on ibogaine in the early 90's, I believe, but were shut down after the cardiotoxicity of the compound came into question at certain dosages.

Now I have no idea if ibogaine is truly a useful treatment for disease and I'm not promoting it as such, but the point is no one does. And as long as it remains a scheduled substance we won't be able to gain any formal answer to the question of it's usefulness.

Further, how many other scheduled substances have medical properties beyond more well known use cases (ie, psychotherapy, addiction treatment)? We don't know and we may never know, sadly.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine

[1] https://www.ibogainealliance.org/ibogaine/therapy/parkinsons...

> "Modern" mentality seems to be that everything is illegal unless government specifically approves

The Anglo-American legal tradition of everything being permitted unless explicitly prohibited was actually an huge abberation and always had been. Unfortunately there is nowhere left in the world where that tradition still holds.

>I think psychedelics should be unbanned first, because it's the right thing to do.

It's good that you think, but it's not enough to call it the right thing