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Don't know why you are being down-voted. You make interesting philosophical points.

If something change your values in a way that the old you would not accept, are you still you?

Maybe it’s not “something changes your values” but you learn to view them from a different perspective.

But is it not your values your perspective about the world?

I'd say one must be very mindful of the complex (and not well understood at all) implementation of such things with respect to the conscious vs subconscious mind.

I think they can probably evaluate that. The general pattern is a loosening of rigid characteristics driven by belief. What that means is depends on what you believed. If you mostly just believed the world is a terrible place, that's quite a relief. Subjectively, we know that it often feels better, perhaps the way no longer straining or exerting a muscle does...I think it lifts compulsions made of psychological knots rather than from physical causes, but it doesn't distinguish between a compulsion that drove you to physical fitness or alcoholism. So if they find the probable external changes to get that better inner state abhorrent enough, then they should avoid that drug.

This works for the lobotomy example as well, if they have their memories in tact from before. You can assume there's a decent chance you'd feel better if others with similar problems felt better, and you have to weigh that against fairly objective external changes which you might find abhorrent, fairly obvious in the case of a lobotomy.

Perhaps medical ethics should make a point that the type of changes you could experience should be outlined, but there's a general pattern that I think can be defined and understood enough for informed consent to be given or withheld. Like most medical treatments, it would get defined in terms of risks and probabilities rather than certainties. You risk coming out with weakened religious beliefs, etc.

There are much more fundamental issues with doing any research on drugs like this.

First there's a huge selection issue, many won't ever want to take it.

Since the drug has a strong effect you cannot easily design a placebo study - people would still know if they got a sugar pill or the real deal [0].

Anything that's a highly unusual experience is likely to be rated as significant.

Very hard to design a good study.

I believe the reported efficacy would greatly go down with increased availability. If alcohol was a mostly illegal schedule 1 drug in most of the world I could see similar narratives forming around it.

[0] btw I think that's a very underappreciated factor across all kinds of research. Even with regular medical drugs. Don't see it brought up too much.

99% People dont change THAT much with mdma. You should try.

Thank you for this comment! I suspect most people would do far worse than you in the mental exercise of explaining views they don't actually hold. As a conservative,

"This scary pill out there that could make me give [strong values that I'm happy with] up, destroying what meaning my life had previously. It's not much consolation that I'd later self-report it as a positive change."

summarizes my thoughts about MDMA perfectly.

I think the scariest thing about MDMA is that it's not really the pill that can do that, the pill is just a shortcut to the type of high-intensity scenario in your brain which can lead to that sort of change. There are plenty of both good and bad other scenarios that could lead to a similar result. Falling in love, meditation, near-death experiences. Where does your brain go when you take the bumpers off?

I think the biggest problem with how many people see MDMA and psychedelics is uncritically accepting the first things that come to mind after taking them, that feel oh-so-true, or that they "give" you insight. It's still you, you're not God, you just have a whole lot more feelings for a bit. (But, depending on what walls you have up intellectually or emotionally, having those feelings take them down for a bit can be very productive.)

If you generalise this, it sums up the difference between the mindsets perfectly.

Conservatives aren't scared of change, they're scared that they themselves, and others around them, would come to fully accept it. The fear is that this completely invalidates their current worldview rendering existence meaningless. It's the fear of being wrong about life on an emotional level.

So a non-conservative, not having these fears, would willingly take the serial killer pill discussed above.

No, they won't too but for different reasons (instead of the fear of being wrong).

If your mental model of conservatives says that they would not take the serial killer pill because they fear being wrong about serial killers, then I don't think it's a particularly good model.

Hence the reason why that's not a contentious topic in politics.

It's only applying to current political charged issues.