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Comment by entropyneur | Hacker News Reader

So no info on what it actually is. Just some company filing a patent. And the fact that they call it "a neutralizer technology" suggests that it's probably just a bunch of BS combined with previously known drugs to make it patentable.

I'm pretty sure there's at least some published research on using at least one antipsychotic for that and mountains of "folk research" on using benzodiazepines.

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This article suggests it's likely Ketanserin. https://newatlas.com/science/lsd-off-switch-mindmed-liechti-...

So just an already known 5HT2A antagonist.

Probably just benzodiazepines labeled "LSD off switch" to make money off the increasing interest in psychedelics.

I'm curious what would be the market for this? wouldn't that be an extremely niche scenario within the emergency-response medicine where people inexperienced with LSD who suffer a bad trip ask to be taken off it? afaik LSD isn't a drug that one is likely to OD from either.

There is a lot of hearsay off switches, there is just a lot of hearsay in drug communities.

For LSD, anything to get out of the rest of a 14 hour trip and come down would be an option that the market would easily gravitate toward.

Psilocybin (from mushrooms) and MDMA are both fast tracked for FDA approval as adjuncts to therapy. Psychedelics are poised to become the most common psychiatric treatment in the world, with ongoing trials showing huge effects for treating PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Despite a lot of therapeutic promise, LSD has not received as much research attention, primarily because of its duration of effect. Having therapists present for up to 24 hours (compared to 6 for psilocybin) is prohibitively expensive. A true off switch would facilitate its study and use in treatment.

Results from studies that used an antipsychotic across the board would not be generalizeable to traditional experiences. At that point, why use L in the first place if older, faster acting substances are available. Mescaline and psilocybine have been used in spiritual and therapeutic settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Where is the interest in L coming from, if not ease of slipping it past customs and other law enforcement?

I think if one class of drugs has the effect you want (in this case "psychedelics") you'd want to study other drugs in that classification as well.

Since people are studying psilocybine for depression, PTSD, etc, why not others like Mescaline, LSD, or DMT? Why leave something off the table? Maybe LSD is great for a specific type of PTSD and psilocybine for depression? You got to study it to figure out. And who knows, maybe these drugs don't actually help at all. Either way, you have to study them to figure anything out.

> Mescaline and psilocybine have been used in spiritual and therapeutic settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Yes and no. Those are the active ingredients, but these have not been distilled. From my extremely naive understanding, other chemicals here could affect people differently. So to create a safer and more therapeutic drug. Maybe you even need some of those other chemicals. But you can't find out without testing.

One thing is for sure, in a clinical setting you want very controlled dosages. You're not going to get that by ingesting plants/fungi.

People on or approaching a bad trip I assume. Just don't know who will bother having any on hand if this happens.

There seems to be growing interest in using psychedelics for medicine. Just last week I was approached by someone asking to sign for a ballot measure to approve the usage of psychedelics in clinical settings (with a medical professional on hand). If they are going to do that, I think said medical practitioner would be the perfect person to have this on hand.

There's a lot of inconveniences with drugs that have very long half-lives and very low effective doses. Alcohol lasts for an hour or two; with LSD, you're out for 24. You can't just take less, or it won't work. So this would allow for shorter trips.

It might make a little sense for Emergency Rooms to have in response to the "bad trips" that result in people calling an ambulance.

But I think the primary reason they would want to develop this would be to encourage LSD to be used as a therapy drug. A lot of people would be more comfortable experimenting in a controlled/legal setting if they new they had an off switch in case anything went wrong.

> It might make a little sense for Emergency Rooms to have in response to the "bad trips" that result in people calling an ambulance.

Doctors already have a ton drugs with proven efficacy for treating acute reactions to psychedelics. Many of them are cheap, off patent and have minimal side effects if they aren't taken chronically.

There's a weird cottage industry around legalized psychedelics and their use in medicine, so I wouldn't be surprised if some less knowledgeable investors' money is funding this, given that there are hundreds of such drugs already on the market.

The biggest problem with LSD is its unpredictability, and what I think is the main reason why it isn't used therapeutically despite having shown very promising results.

You can't reasonably OD from LSD but you can have bad trips. Some of them can be so overwhelming that they will cause lasting effect not unlike PTSD. If you can stop a trip dead in its tracks, that's one less risk. By having ways to counteract its various potential negative effects, you can improve the safety profile of the drug, and therefore make it more acceptable.

People seem to be saying "just use Risperidone" in the comments, so if there is a new drug that counters LSD, maybe it would be useful as an alternative to Risperidone, which has a variety of side effects when taken long term.

It's probably a serotonin 5-HT2a antagonist, given that most of the psychedelic effects come from 5-HT2a agonism.

Yeah marketing something widely known to make it palatable and "provide liability" isn't new. See e.g. Scott Alexander's piece on literal fish oil: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...

Hah. This article is not only golden, but got me deeply annoyed with all BS machine it exposes

Spoiler alert

> And I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

(though I understand a bit of the issues behind the BRCA gene testing thing and I'm not sure it continues to be banned or merely the results need to be more generic and not just "you have X% of having cancer")

There have been way too many scandals around supplement purity for me to buy into his narrative. Like if someone told me a given brand of fish oil supplements contained 10% of the stated dose, was rancid and full of heavy metals I wouldn't be the least surprised.

But if a fish oil medicine had those issues, I would be shocked, because the consequences for the guilty party would be much bigger, a huge circus of lawsuits and people losing their licenses. That's how I imagine it anyway.

If it's an fda approved drug, I'd be shocked. You see how strictly they're coming down on contamination in the antacid space. If it was a supplement calling itself a medicine with a "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" label, then I'd be surprised if it actually did contain what it says it does, and do what it promises to do

IMO we need the FDA to start caring about supplements. They should at least be allowed to nail companies straight-up lying about dosages. Hell, classify them as food and they probably could.

You can thank Orrin Hatch for the current dumpster fire of a situation we find ourselves in. Lots of "supplement" MLMs and such in Utah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...

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