Some doctors, therapists get Health Canada permission to use magic mushrooms
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
I'm imagining tripping in a therapist's office. Doesn't sound very pleasant.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on his exact points, but the clinical setting was definitely found to have a detrimental effect on the experience.
Therapy while "tripping" is very different then the "recreational way". Remember, set and setting are important.
I use mushrooms sometimes (rarely, very carefully) while meditating.
They tend to stimulate the area around the vagus nerve - and since meditation is partly frustration, that in turn triggers “uncomfortable” memories.
Also, they seem to smoothen nervous activity? Meditating with closed eyes, often the “black net if colored dots” i see when im sober gets a new more fluid attribute, less choppy.
More often than not, intense crying ensues, and quite a bit of unconscious material surfaces and get confronted.
One drawback to “scoring mushrooms” for emotional healing is quality is inconsistent -
I imagine consistent quality and able hands could greatly help traumatized individuals .. its not a trip in the hedonistic sense, its quite frankly aching to a religious experience
This is just wrong. They use full doses, just not "heroic doses".
https://www.drugscience.org.uk/introducing-the-drug-science-...
I remember hearing a conversation in one episode where microdose research was discussed and David Nutt, the UK's foremost neuropsychopharmacologist, said that studying full doses is more efficient from a process perspective. With such stringent rules around scheduled substances any research means a ton of red tape, keeping people under observation for ages, and so on. It's more effective to study administration of a small number of full doses than run a program to analyse a longer course of microdoses. Of course, you could probably study a one-off microdose but given the subtlety of the effects it's probably hard to distinguish the drug effects from other factors. Given the difficulty of studying this stuff at all and the belief that a full dose is necessary it makes sense to try that ahead of microdose research.
Edit: oh, quote from https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30282-8:
"The extensive use of microdosing psychedelics to putatively improve wellbeing and creativity (Kuypers et al., 2019) raises the question of whether a full psychedelic experience is needed. Microdosing involves taking—usually on a regular basis, e.g., 3 times a week—a low dose of a psychedelic that is devoid of subjective psychoactive effects. As yet there have been no trials of microdosing for any psychiatric disorder, and it seems improbable that a single microdose of psilocybin would have as big an effect in depression as the 25 mg psilocybin “macrodose” usually used. Growing evidence suggests the best outcomes from psilocybin are in patients experiencing the most powerful psychedelic effects, variously called breakthrough, peak, or mystical experiences (Roseman et al., 2018b ). [..]"
Also, Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" goes into a lot of detail re: the therapeutic process. I'd imagine most clinical processes to be similar to the kind of stuff that happens underground now — full doses, a guide present, care on set/setting etc.
There was some early research which reported success in using LSD and psilocybin to treat schizophrenia in children:
John Hopkins is investigating this. The ethics boards will pretty much require that people be monitored during the intoxication. So yes, probably something along the lines of getting high in a therapist's office.
There are literally hundreds of websites that will mail you magic mushroom spores, live magic mushroom mycelium, magic mushroom growing kits where you just add water and wait, and dried magic mushrooms.
I have never heard of any of them so much as being hassled let alone prosecuted for selling any of those products.
It's pretty safe to say magic mushrooms are quasi decriminalized in Canada right now.
Is that what 'dried mushrooms' means in Canada?
Many (non legal) mail or marijuana websites now offer dried mushrooms. Legit real psilocybin mushrooms, not synthetic.
Erowid is massively educational if you got any interest in psychedelics or mind-altering substances in general.
- Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
there's a large venn diagram overlap between some of the earliest members there at the WELL (and, for instance, the people who founded burning man), and the california tech industry.
I'm not defending their stance, but I think it's easy to forget that we have a lot more information thrown at us in a given day than they probably had in a decade.
The magic isn't in the mushroom, it's in the love, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude that [can] emerge naturally when the mushroom god addles your brain chemistry.
Seriously, wishing someone feels regret, shame, embarrassment isn't incompatible with forgiveness. Learning difficult lessons, especially from harmful mistakes, is the only way society makes progress.
Please realize that the cohort of people we're talking about have supported policies of enslaving "others" through laws for decades and that they continue to do this today.
These policies have and are destroying communities, families, careers, lives, and to some extent, the fabric of the nation.
It's also not a coincidence these are the same people that just lost an election and are trying to overturn the result by any means.
Remember that story about raiding the home of a scientist in Florida a few days ago for doing science? That's the same people as the "anti-drug" people.
It turns out that the anti-drug, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-environmentalist, anti-healthcare, anti-mask, pro-police, pro-prison, pro-corporation, pro-pollution, pro-inequality, pro-torture, pro-religion group are all the same people.
The anti-drug laws are just a symptom of a much wider societal corruption.
We can't be handing out forgiveness to our oppressors while they are still actively oppressing.
It's hard to blame them, when they're surrounded by such propaganda, and (as usual) very few people were independent enough to actually dig deep in to this themselves and find out what was really going on in respect to drug safety, benefits, and policy.
Most just swallowed the official line.
I know we're largely talking about hypothetical people, but if people were just going with the flow, I'm not sure that explains the inability to swallow the new official line.
How official is it?
In the US, at least, the government spent many millions of dollars (hundreds of millions? billions?) on anti-drug education campaigns for decades, and there was mass media hysteria against drugs for decades.
There are still no comparable pro-drug education campaigns, and while there have been some positive research results and positive media coverage on some drugs, the message overall is pretty mixed, and there's still plenty of anti-drug hysteria in the media and anti-drug messages from the government today.
It's probably going to take a long time to change the minds of most people who grew up soaked in anti-drug propaganda.
"all drugs are bad" was a "greatest generation" attitude and I'm afraid they are mostly beyond caring