How LSD Almost Became the 13th Step (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How LSD Almost Became the 13th Step (2019)

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80 pointspmoriarty16 comments

Anecdotally during a period of 3 or 4 months when I had gone to numerous Ayahuasca ceremonies here in Canada, I saw the progression of a self-proclaimed alcoholic who felt like she was going to die soon from the illness - and physically she was very pale and unwell looking; so much so that she was seeking and willing to try anything including Ayahuasca, which is an entheogen similar to but different than LSD - and arguably being done in a ceremony setting provides a different container as well.

There's an opportunity after a ceremony to share during a talking circle. I can't remember if the woman shared during then or to me afterward, however she told me in the morning that she could feel like alcohol no longer had a hold over her. I saw her 3 or 4 more times over a 3 to 4 month period at ceremonies - and by the end she looked very healthy, her skin had a healthy pink tone to it - and she was beaming with energy compared to before.

Another experience to share related to alcohol and Ayahuasca: an ex-girlfriend of mine had gone to a few ceremonies with me. After her first ceremony she shared two notable things. The first was an insight from her family dynamics that she could see from a holistic level looking down at the structure, which seemed to give her great comfort, reducing her baseline stress. The second was she was presented or saw simultaneously two separate "objects": she saw alcohol and she saw social situations. She's Russian so perhaps the deep cultural aspect of alcohol that seems to go with her background, along with her family always immediately offering a drink to her as their greeting when she'd visit are examples of how deeply engrained alcohol and socializing were for her. After her experiencing that division separating alcohol consumption and social situations, she roughly said she no longer felt the need to drink when socializing - though she never had a problem with alcohol - she felt like whatever association and connection to alcohol simply diminished, arguably due to the clear division of the contexts; unlinking the healthy engagement of socializing from alcohol consumption.

Entheogens increase your consciousness. High consciousness gets us closer to the truth of what reality is, which allows us to break our self-deceptions.

Indeed, they temporarily eliminate the ego and its bias from the equation of the mind, allowing the rest of the mind an unfiltered view and clear understanding based on whatever intellectual capabilities one inherently has; ego death, ego dissolution.

I have also experienced the elimination of my ego with MDMA use. I suspect this is the explanation that MDMA works as a treatment for PTSD.

In my opinion, the reason it works well for PTSD, is because it temporarily suppresses feelings of fear, shame and embarrassment. It also makes you more trusting of other people, which can be good in a therapeutic setting, as it might make it easier to open up. On MDMA, you can look at your own past without any judgment. That makes it easier to look at things in a way that's more detached, and begin to process what actually happened without being flooded by negative thoughts.

I'm uncertain if that would impact ego directly though I imagine it perhaps could through helping heal/process/remove past trauma and its associated emotion and stress, which then potentially will allow ego mind guard/coping mechanisms to dissipate.

My annoyance is that we aren't taught about alcoholism or that alcohol (and caffeine) are drugs.

Once your brain chemistry is changed, it takes significant pain to get it back. And according to the book Power of Habit, it never goes away.

Then alcoholics have the need to make everyone else drink. It's a cycle.

I'm glad I was addicted to alcohol and weed, easier to break. But I still relapse.

A cure for alcoholism that works fifty percent of the time is ground breaking. How could doctors not be impressed? The success rate for AA itself is about 2%. What has a better rate of success than 50%?

As a country, we are just BARELY getting to the point where people are willing to be public in their support of marijuana legalization. We have a long way to go before entheogens are legalized federally. But I think if there is any way to achieve that, it would be through doctors attesting to their efficacy in treating various illnesses. It's the same thing we went through with marijuana -- show the people there ARE medical uses, that the world is not ending because of it, and then they accept a wider use.

I think it would make sense to start by legalizing mushrooms. The fact that they are very prevalent in nature will make it easier for people to accept them. They're also very safe, probably less addictive than marijuana (do you know anyone who takes mushrooms daily?), and there are already a number of studies showing therapeutic benefits.

I could find no credible source with a precise success rate for AA, but all my reading suggested much higher than 2%. This Scientific American article[1]explains why it’s hard to measure and suggests the success rate is probably somewhere between 20 and 60%.

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-alcoholics-a...

I wonder if there was any influence or interference by the alcohol industry - there are certainly enough examples of tobacco, sugar, and other industries that we could assume there was shenanigans.

> The medical community of the early 1960s wasn’t impressed either, and citing various procedural issues with the study, it was largely ignored at the time.

LSD helped me give up nicotine and consuming animal flesh. It was very clear to me that I didn’t need either in my life. Why harm myself or other beings for such mundane pleasure when I could now access the transcendent (now through meditation).

Misleading article title.

> Wilson later distanced himself from AA, as many other influential members of the program took issue with the idea of incorporating a psychoactive drug into a system of steps designed to end drug use.

> But, according to Pass It On, published in 1984 by AA World Services in New York, the movement was totally against his suggestions. "As word of Bill's activities reached the fellowship there were inevitable repercussions. Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance. LSD was then totally unfamiliar, poorly researched, and entirely experimental – and Bill was taking it."

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

What's funny is that the AA I'm in doesn't oppose any treatment where you are under a doctor's care. I honestly don't know where that line is drawn in clinical or medical trials or experiments. I will say that personally, if this can help eliminate or prevent addiction, I'm all for it.

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