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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

IMO the difference between a drug, a medicine, and a psychedelic is behavioral more than substantive, although different substances do have more or less tendency for abuse.

Morphine is a medicine until you take like a drug. MDMA is a psychedelic at a rave and a medicine on a therapist's couch. By all reports, there's no possible way to abuse ayahuasca.

You will have more mileage with someone experienced, and more still with a professional, just like you would with other therapy practices that you can teach yourself, like meditation and yoga.

AFAIK addiction is mostly about a person's life, and not the things they ingest. That's why rehab clinic success is so heavily dependent on the support network (or lack thereof) the person returns to. You have to have something to avoid in the first place to turn to substances to avoid them.

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"By all reports, there's no possible way to abuse ayahuasca."

I don't know where you heard this, but this is a highly dubious assertion.

I know people who have in fact abused ayahuasca, take it compulsively, and have had negative impacts on their life from taking it.

There's a long and sad history of various drugs being claimed to be harmless or even beneficial, only to have it revealed later that they aren't.

Cocaine was such a drug, with Freud being a huge fan of it, claiming it as a miracle cure with no potential for abuse. In fact it was used to treat morphine addiction.

Heroin was also initially used as a treatment for morphine addiction.

The methadone came around, and was used to treat heroin addiction. But, surprise! It turns out that just like heroin and cocaine, methadone itself can be addictive.

Marijuana was widely hyped as completely harmless, but it turns out that some people can get (psychologically) addicted to it, abuse it, and suffer negative effects.

Anything (whether drug, activity, object, or food) that is highly desirable can be abused.

> I know people who have in fact abused ayahuasca

I am super interested in hearing more details. Can you share?

I haven't heard of it either, but it's mostly a proglonged, enhanced DMT trip, and I know people who got addicted to DMT, so I could believe it?

You could argue that people who are microdosing are abusing strong psychoactive drugs. It's interesting that you can take a full dose of such drugs, and have no desire to repeat the experience for some time (months, years), yet small functional doses is something that you would look forward to repeating every few days.

Speaking from personal experience, microdosing was something that I wanted to push to the limits of being a microdose until it became a "minidose". I was a bit relieved when I lost my stash (due to my own drugged up incompetence), it was becoming a way to just slightly trip out two times a week. As strong as a full blown DMT experience can be, people abuse all sorts of substances with scary effects from solvents, to cough syrup, to Salvia.

I know of two cases that aquitances were involved in. One person was suicidal, and doing it multiple times per month. I don't want to get into details but the shortest way to explain it is the person was psychotic and believed they were part of a cult of dead people and Ayahuasca kept them "alive".

The other person was a compulsive liar and kept on jumping from cult to cult until they landed in an Ayahuasca christian sect saying they were very experienced trip guides. After a few months of "secretly" doing it I assume to understand how it worked to be able to deliver on their promises they got discovered and kicked out.

Psychedelic mania or psychedelic psychosis is a thing. I don't think any substance that affects your perception in such a way will ever be free from that nasty side effect. There's people that actually binge smoke DMT multiple times per week because they really believe they are in contact with spirits and start acting that narrative with life changing consequences. The incorrect social circle or antisocial tendencies will turn that person into a monster living in hell. And if you don't know about smoking DMT let's say that making sense of the experience requires a great deal of... interpretation. Of the psychedelics it's one of the ones that will on most cases hardly create anything that is even mildly similar to reality in the "breakthrough" world.

>The methadone came around, and was used to treat heroin addiction. But, surprise! It turns out that just like heroin and cocaine, methadone itself can be addictive.

That's a little unfair to methadone. It is less addictive than heroin and morphine. But users figured out how to combine it with other drugs to get a stronger high, which led to some recreational abuse. It's sad that these maintenance programs are so widely disparaged when they are in fact valuable treatments for opioid use disorder supported by extensive medical evidence that are underutilized due to popular misconceptions and paranoia.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/18289...

Unfortunately (and I am a fan of psychedelics when used in the 'right' way) I think it is indeed possible to abuse psychedelic drugs, not perhaps in the sense of addiction, but it can still be a habit (with negative consequences) of sorts for some people, either alone or as a part of polysubstance abuse, or be used to manipulate people who are more susceptible under the influence. I have seen some examples of this.

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