Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Little known fact:

Bill Wilson[1], co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, believed LSD could help alcoholics achieve a "spiritual experience" that was crucial to them attaining sobriety[2] (incidentally, that a spiritual experience could help alcoholics was an idea he got from Carl Jung[3]). Wilson's own experiences with LSD are discussed in detail here: [4]

In the 50's and 60's there was research in to using LSD to treat alcoholism, with promising results:

"Osmond treated more than 700 chronically alcoholic patients with LSD and ended up with around a 50 percent overall success rate. One of Osmond's most compelling studies took place in the late 1950s with a cohort of subjects from the group Alcoholics Anonymous. This cohort was comprised of individuals that had failed the famous 12-step program, and again Osmond hit his 50 percent success rate, this time with a 12-month follow-up period."[5]

In 2012 a meta-analysis of studies with a total of 536 participants found "evidence for a beneficial effect of LSD on alcohol misuse".[6]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_W.

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alc...

[3] - http://barefootsworld.org/wilsonletter.html

[4] - https://aaagnostica.org/2015/05/10/bill-wilsons-experience-w...

[5] - [6] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22406913

I just finished Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind and found this bit of history to be one of the most interesting pieces of an overall super interesting book. So frustrating that a moral panic essentially wound up locking away this research for 50 years.

Ibduilast, which is a drug that has been on the market in Japan and safely used for 30 years, has also been used to treat alcohol and opioid addiction.[1][2]

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201710?draft\\u003dcollec... [2]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/adb.12261

Not even to speak about Ayahuasca (DMT) and Ibogaine. They seem to have even more of these therapeutic properties.

Ibogaine is amazing at dealing with addiction, considering that it can blow away a serious Heroin addiction after one good trip.

Isn't ibogaine that one drug where you have to go to West Africa to find it due to its being illegal and inaccessible everywhere else and trips last for literal days?

tis indeed.

as distinguished from iocaine, which is merely inconceivable.

But which cup is it in?

it occupies both cups until observed

Also after it's observed

surprise! it also occupies both cups after consumed!

It is available in Brazil, at least in a research capacity. I almost tried it to work on an alcohol addiction but regrettably decided against it at the time.

Whoops, looks like I forgot to add the link in footnote 5:

[5] - https://newatlas.com/psychedelic-medicine-lsd-psilocybin-alc...

A year ago, for two weeks, I binged on five grams of some drug. It seems it saturated the NMDA receptors (my own uninformed explanation) so for six months alcohol was same as water to me. Cannabis and benzos were also useless.

Now alcohol does make its effect again, but I just drink some beer occasionaly, no more hard liquors. I haven't had any mj in a year, the best part. Oh, and the drug in question... I tried it again a month ago and found it unpleasant, and keeps building that crappy cross-tolerance.

I won't name the drug because I wouldn't like to encourage anyone to try this kind of "treatment", I'm pretty sure my reaction is not typical at all. But it would be nice if there was research about this.

Jungian psychology (shadow work) and the occult have been absolutely critical for me to work through the internal contradictions that led me to seek out drugs in the first place.

Funny! I can't do acid without some wine, the changed world is too scary then.

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