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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

I have zero experience with drugs, so I am wondering if there is a sugar/cigarette industry that put a lot of money into promoting it's products, then what will be different when drugs get legalized?

Won't we repeat the history where companies make billions from this products, put them into ads to spread the use and addict people, suppress research into bad side effects etc,.

Personally I think there are some good applications for mushrooms or marijuana but my instinct is that the greedy people would do what they do best, sucker people and make big money.

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Sure, for weed maybe.

But psychedelics are very different. They're really, genuinely not addictive -- probably because they're not "fun." In fact, they're exhausting. You may feel a lot better after, the experience may be fascinating, but you're in absolutely no hurry to do it again. The whole thing lasts a few hours, but literally feels like months, with numerous epochs along the way.

It's not like the kind of hollow calories of a bag of Cheetos, it's more like a long, difficult workout. That's hard to productize in that way.

I don't think that it is a "fun" factor that keeps people addicted. It's the fear of withdrawals.

There are really two different things here: physical dependence (which can mean withdrawals on cessation), and psychological dependence (commonly referred to as "addiction").

>probably because they're not "fun."

You've been doing it wrong ;-) I'm not sure I've ever laughed so much or felt so connected to people. Just thinking about it is making me nostalgic.

The nature of psychedelics makes it difficult to overuse them.

Your body will actually build a tolerance to them and they'll stop working if you use too regularly.

You also don't establish a physiological addiction like you do with drugs like nicotine and sugar.

Finally, the dosage required is absurdly small and would be extremely cheap to mass produce. You can grow mushrooms relatively easy in your damn closet. It's not like it's a patented designer drug.

Will people created patented designer psychedelics? Certainly. But it seems to me like it would be a similar kind of problem to people buying Fiji water when nearly the same stuff is flowing out the tap for damn near free.

You can also grow tabacco or make alcohol yourself, so I still expecting a giant industry that will try it's best to hide the side effects, blame the victim when something goes wrong, put billions in ads to make it look cool to use their products.

Why would you take micro doses of mushrooms rather then use an approved anti-depressant treatment? Your home grown mushrooms might differ in concentrations, the one you buy might be low quality...

I have nothing against the product, I am just anxious that it will be promoted as a miracle , "text mushrooms and your anxiety will be gone, your creativity is 10X better, see Joe the developer wrote this cool Rust project fueled just with weed and mushrooms in 48 hours" - I have a bias, I do not trust companies and capitalistic societies, they fuck the society for profit, we need to keep our eyes open on this studies, make impartial ones and maybe do something about misleading ads and posts promoting unsafe stuff.

Of course. And when multi billion dollar marketing budgets are put to work for weed and psychedelics, you can expect the same situation to occur as with tobacco or alcohol.

I’ve seen it suggested that a reasonable legalization framework would be to legalize all drugs but not allow advertising. This would logically include getting rid of alcohol and tobacco advertising too.

5-HT2A agonists, which all classical psychedelics are, induce a strong tolerance that prevents people from abusing them everyday.

Every day isn’t sustainable, but Psilocin/LSD tolerance builds as fast as it diminishes again, typically gone within a week or at most two. If you want to abuse them, the chemicals certainly won’t stop you. And when you’re in the mindset of getting hammered all the time no matter what you can just take Ketamine for a day, do less LSD but mix it with MDMA, and all those things. People can be very creative.

Abuse is a person problem, not a chemical problem.

Surely, you must have sampled ethanol? ;)

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