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Comment by rednum | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but I've met people that seemed to sort of lost their agency and ambition, because their psychedelic insight was that the universe will sort everything out on its own. Though maybe the causality is the other way round here - they were not ambitious in the first place and psychedelic insight helped rationalise that.

Also disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. Personally I believe they should not be criminalised, but people should be cautious using them.

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Just a personal note, I experienced the complete opposite. I knew I wanted to do great things and accomplish things of importance, but depression was like a black cloud holding me back from doing so. Psychedelics took away that cloud and also infused a deep level of meaning into my everyday life.

I went from depressed and basically dropping off the edge of the world to traveling across the world and starting a startup with new friends in a different continent, which was just now recently acquired.

What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.

4-HO-DMT is psilocin, which is illegal in most places.

Fwiw 4-HO-DMT is psilocin (it and psilocybin are both in mushrooms in varying amounts; and psilocybin metabolizes into it in the body). It probably wasn't legal. 4-AcO-DMT is a bit more of a grey area (probably covered by the analogues act; allegedly also metabolizes to psilocin in the body too).

You're very right, that was a late-night bleary-eyed mistake. 4-HO-MET (thanks to TiHKAL) is what I meant to type.

> What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.

They are both illegal where I live (Poland). The government maintains a huge list of forbidden substances (link only in polish: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wykaz_%C5%9Brodk%C3%B3w_odurza...). This is in response to a big designer drugs crisis that started over decade ago. Which most likely than not was caused by tightening of the drug laws happened around two decades ago. It's a bad situation that will take another decade to improve, I suppose.

doesn't sound like their "minds were ruined", but rather that they have different priorities than you and that you're narrowminded and judgemental.

>but rather that they have different priorities than you and that you're narrowminded and judgemental.

Having been loosely affiliated with the Goa/Psytrance scene, I too, have met some individuals who seemed to have "fried" their brains.

If those "different priorities", how you call it, also include being almost dysfunctional and therefore dependent on constant external support, paranoid and frequently incoherent then, yes, it made me judgmental too.

And this isn't even speaking of phenomena like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD)[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

i was responding to the parent’s description of people having “lost their ambition.” not everyone needs ambition, and ambition can be destructive.

what you’re describing sounds like psychosis which is entirely different

The thing is, it's not at all clear this was caused by psychedelics, so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.

If they had been in the midwestern USA would they also be dysfunctional but taking prescription painkillers? Mental health problems are common, and confirmation bias is real.

There is also the danger of reverse causation — and this may apply to cannabis. The epidemiology there suggests psychosis may cause people to take cannabis at higher rates, rather than the reverse.

Finally... I've also often wondered what partying so hard would do without the drugs. I've experienced festivals both with and without recreational drugs and it often feels like the sleep deprivation and over-stimulation have as large an effect on my subsequent mood as the drugs did.

>so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.

I wondered about this myself.

I think it is hard to pinpoint exactly since festival-goers often also consume a mix of different substances (the infamous "candy flipping") including alcohol instead of just straight mushrooms or LSD.

Funnily enough, I just came across a study of ecstasy use in Mormon kids who didn’t take alcohol or other drugs... not sure if they were staying up all night raving but my prior is not. Apparently they didn’t suffer the same cognitive deficits found in other ecstasy users.

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