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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

After many years reading about Leary, I realize now that he set the field back by decades.

Leary was just the fall guy – Nixon sent the field back decades. The narrative about Leary's damage to the psychedelic movement is massively overstated.

Here is a relevant discussion between Michael Pollan and Hamilton Morris about this: https://youtu.be/XvMArmwI10Q?t=2744

Michael Pollen talks about this in his book, How To Change Your Mind. It's insane how irresponsible Leary was. A good example is what's commonly called the Good Friday Experiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment

Intuitively, we learnt a lot about human behavior when we were able to do those unethical experiments back in the 60s and 70s. Set us back yes, but “set us back” by being moving us forward unsustainably.

The last several years, I've noticed there's been a lot of effort to debunk and discredit a lot of those unethical experiments. I'm still inclined to agree with you though.

I am not aware of any long-term legitimate findings in psychology research from the 60s or 70s (that would not be allowed today). Are you? My guess is all, or nearly all, have been debunked, or are non-reproducible for silly technical reasons.

Just off the top of my head, the monkey in the dark funnel study, the mit prison experiment, the Stanley milgram experiment, the rat utopia/dystopia experiment, the little Albert experiment (1919), Leuba’s tickling experiment involving his son (1930s) etc.

All of those studies are basically scientific garbage. They're just pop-culture tripe at this point. Each one has been invalidated, repeatedly, and for reasons that have nothing to do with medical ethics.

Also the prison experiment was at Stanford.

the Silver Spring monkeys experiment made inroads on treatments for stroke patients I believe

Thanks, I wasn't able to find that experiment based on the previous person's description. That experiment doesn't qualify, as we still do experiments more or less like that, it's animals not humans, and it's neuroscience, not psychiatry.

That’s not true. At best you can say the Stanley milgram experiment was reanalyzed with a poor reproduction involving various amounts of money. Not nearly the same and definitely not conclusive.

The little Albert study holds, the tickling study findings are still true, the Stanford prison experiment hasn’t been repudiated, the rat experiment has literally been reproduced outside of the US and the pit of despair findings still hold true.

And yes, it was Stanford but it was off the top, I made a mistake.

The Milgram obedience studies have been replicated many, many times.

OK, fair enough, I made a mistake not verifying the Little Albert study before saying that it didn't hold. I have since checked on that one and I can't say that I consider it valid.

The Prison Experiment's methods were repudiated (in the sense that the methodology as described and carried out is unlikely to answer any sort of true psychological research question). |

I'm not sure what to make of the Milgram experiment.

Most of them didn’t really need to be unethical though.

There are things you can learn either extremely slowly or extremely unethically, but it didn’t really seem to be the case with psychedelics. Things which could have been done responsibly were done recklessly, and not all that much time or effort was saved.

I'm more concerned about the lack of random sampling:

Leary and Alpert taught a class that was required for graduation and colleagues felt they were abusing their power by pressuring graduate students to take hallucinogens in the experiments. Leary and Alpert also went against policy by giving psychedelics to undergraduate students, and did not select participants through random sampling. It was also problematic that the researchers sometimes took hallucinogens along with the subjects they were supposed to be studying

It's hard to blame it on a single person. The Stanford Prison Experiment didn't involve any drugs and was as or even more irresponsible than Leary's messianic psychedelic mania fueled binge. The Stanford Prison Experiment was in 1971, Leary had already been indicted of multiple charges by that year if not in prison already, according to Wikipedia he was fired from Harvard in 1963.

So eight whole years after Learys irresponsibility the ethical standards for human experimentation in psychology were still nowhere near to what they are today.

The perspective given in this book was really interesting to read. Way different the typical story you get out of drug communities

Agreed. I think Alexander Shulgin deserves some blame as well, though maybe not to the same extent.

I recall talking to a guy when I was working at Berkeley who was convinced that you could take shulgin's work and expand it to larger sample sizes and use it as a basis of rational drug design for psychedelics. I see Shulgin as a bit of a different character, and he was embedded in an time and area that had already absorbed LSD and was ready for psychonautical adventures.

I respectfully disagree. What Shulgin did simply represented rational science and protocols for self experimentation. He established some of the best possible harm reduction methodologies, and communicated his knowledge to the world through PIKHAL and TIKHAL. Through those books he's saved countless lives and minds as people used and shared his guidelines.

He was a subtle rebel, who played by the rules and they kept changing the rules until they could shackle his research.

The context of the war on drugs and the vastly restrictive IP laws created the current culture of drug development and research. That culture is dominated by the pseudo capitalism and monopolistic death grip Big Pharma has on drugs in general, and their development and manufacture in particular.

People absolutely should be allowed to self experiment, and knowledge should be freely available. Shulgin and his wife showed virtually no I'll effects after a life of responsible drug use - he lived to a vigorous 89, and his wife is still kicking around at 90! I wish their brand of drug use had taken deep root in American culture such that substance use was appreciated and respected and approached with the caution it deserves. If high school children were given drug use education, and pharmacies were a legal source of all drugs without the asinine scheduling prohibitions, so many tragedies could have been avoided.

Even most doctors don't prescribe drugs as responsibly and carefully as they should, and people are ignorant and ill prepared for anything that happens. They could use Shulgin's approach, carefully increasing dosage and providing patients with a common verbal framework with which to describe their experience.

Anyway, sorry to rant. Shulgin is a hero to me - a gentle rebel who made his PhD count for something he believed in.

I agree that ultimately, people should be allowed to self experiment. But looking at his situation from a pragmatic perspective in the 70's and 80's, would it not have been wiser to be just a bit more careful with his advocacy? Publishing a book that details how to craft hundreds of untested psychedelic drugs is not quite what I would call subtle.

I'd say that Shulgin and the people who worked with him on his mental adventures all had strong egos and had been tested by previous experiences with psychedelics. So there is some selection bias about whether the general populace could enact PIKHAL and TIKHAL.

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