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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Well, to provide a different opinion, I've never experienced anything lasting from it. I maybe had one realization, once, which is that everything in life is so silly I should just not get upset about it. Though on one of the 6 times I tried it I also had a very bad panic attack. To me, it's just that a drug is a drug, not a panacea.

There is nothing magic about it, and lots of drugs make you think you're smarter than you really are.

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I agree with this. I mean, a lot of psychedelic trips made me feel that I was "one with the universe", a transcended higher being or something bizarre like that, but at the end of the day they were still just trips. I also imagine that a lot of my views back then were shaped by excessive obsession with people like Terrence McKenna and other thinkers like that. Maybe I would've tripped differently otherwise.

I honestly preferred the predictable nature of opiates/meth or the other prescription medication I was on. Drugs in these class are pretty honest about what they're offering.

In any case, you're right about the "lots of drugs make you think you're smarter than you really are" bit.

Yeah, I've thought that the reputation on psychedelics regarding enlightenment and such things is a bit overblown by culture and different promoters. I'm skeptical that anything of that nature would reveal itself if you didn't have prior expectations of it.

That's not to say the experience isn't worth having though. At the very least, it shows how fickle our brains and our perception of the world around us is. Also, I've never laughed so hard in my life, so that's good.

You and the parent are both "right." Psychedelics are notoriously unpredictable YMMV things, which is part of why they haven't been mainstreamed as a treatment for anything. For mainstream drugs we usually want something as predictable as possible.

Maybe for general medicine. In modern psychiatry, however, the standard approach is to throw psych drugs at the patient until one works. Some of those have horrible side effects, too.

Since psychedelics would mostly be used for treating psych disorders, I hardly see a difference.

I think it’s silly that we have to medicalize mind altering drugs. Why does it have to be a treatment for something?

Because it is a treatment for some things and we should treat it that way so those that can be helped get the medicine they need

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