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Comment by otterpop | Hacker News Reader

gosh i've heard so much about how good psychedelics are for treating depression, but they're obviously illegal to get a hold of.

hopefully we can see some clinical trials and find a theraputic use for them within my lifetime.

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There are places where they are legal and you have the option of planning a vacation around a psychedelic experience.

My first experience with ayahuasca was in Netherlands and the afterglow of the experience was a good 3 months. The first month my depression was significantly better, the next 2 months noticeable better. After 3 months I remained on a plateau that was higher than the one I was on before the experience. The experience permanently removed my (arguably light) PTSD symptoms (I would get tensed every time I crossed the street due to an accident on the pedestrian crossway) and a particular "dark heaviness" that was part of my days from time to time.

If legality is your concern and you live in europe, it's quite easy to get legal LSD derivatives like 1p-LSD [1] that are legal in most EU countries.

[1] https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/1P-LSD

Here is a depression study carried out at Imperial College London https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13282-7

It is in Clinical Trails

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03866252

To get most of the therapeutic effect you need to do that in a controlled environment, there is no reason for psychedelics to be legalised the way weed or alcohol is. The difference between a "neat it cured my ptsd" (/s) trip and a "oh shit I'm going to die this is the worse thing I experimented in my life" trip isn't that big (dose, settings, &c.)

It can cure your PTSD but it in the wrong place at the wrong time it could also give you PTSD. Your mind is very impressionable under the influence.

I believe shrooms are not illegal on most western countries

They're most certainly illegal in the U.S.A.!

I did a lot of street acid as a teenager and it caused me a lot of problems it seems. Only did some half decent psilocybin shrooms once, more recently (but years ago), but I liked the fact that I actually came down, acid seemed to just linger and linger long after the main trip was over.

Psilocybin mushrooms are decriminalized in Denver.

> I did a lot of street acid as a teenager and it caused me a lot of problems it seems

Can you expand on that?

One year I did about 40 hits of acid, often multiple hits at a time, and started stuttering and just felt like I had less going on mentally. It really seemed like I had permanent brain damage. I'm not sure exactly what was going on, there were definitely extenuating factors (e.g. family dysfunction, depression etc.) but it took years for me to recover.

Mushrooms were illegalized in NL recently, but truffles, a way of growing the same thing but underground, remain legal. It's possible to buy them legally there and semi-legally ordering them online from many other EU countries.

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