The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs
wired.com
wired.com
Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.
I'm not sure how this might play out for psychedelics, which are generally not addictive, but the incentives are similar. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, in fact I'm excited to see where those incentives lead things. Will researchers invent a hangover free ecstasy? Acid you can drive to work on? Lovely.
Talk about missing the forest from the trees.
The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.
The whole point of the article is that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity within the brain, and that pharma companies are trying to synthesize a molecule that does exactly that, but without the hallucinations.
Here's the article in question - perhaps there's something I missed that you might understand better than I do: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/opinion/hallucinations-ps...
I couldn't agree more. In fact, the trip itself is not a nice side effect, it's the precondition to get measurable, long-term positive changes.
I’ve always thought of it like a self-diagnostic mode/tool where we get exposed to debug data that our brain normally would filter out.
The predictive processing interpretation of these drugs is that they change the balance between top-down predictive generative models from our "deep" brain and noisy bottom-up sensory percepts from the peripheral brain. When you get super-resolution like experiences of banal everyday textures, that's your peripheral brain failing to filter them out for lacking novelty, when you get psychedelia style visuals that's intermediate "layers" of abstraction running amok, and when you go off on extended narrative experiences fully detached from reality that's the deep generative models doing their own thing unmoored from the error signals your senses would otherwise generate.
It's an awesome book in many other respects, but IMO the best bit is how many plausible mechanistic explanations it offers for psychedelic experience.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
Proponents frequently mention things like this, yet _no one_ who publicly admits to psych use is someone I want to be.
All the people I've ever met, and friends who didn't but started down that road, aren't "all there" anymore. They'll preach day and night about the "benefits", but from the outside looking in it's obviously a coping mechanism.
Obviously biased when talking about myself, but I think you can split your judgement into a frequency argument rather than a binary yes or no.
They all believe it doesn’t affect them negativity, that people can’t tell.
They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.
The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.
I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.
My 2 cents
> They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.
Well the post you replied to didn't address being able to tell.
> The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.
5 years is a while, surely?
> I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.
Do they still claim that after 5 years of non-use?
This basic claim is like saying an ocasional drinker who's become more social because alcohol helps them with talking to groups of people in certain specific situations is no different from an alcoholic because both drink and behave differently while drinking. Context, quantity and quality all make defining differences. How tedious it is to be judged harshly by someone who can't see this and takes any example of consuming something as a case of not admitting addiction. Often there really is no addiction.
you know plenty of people who aren't vocal about their experiences because they understand it's not appropriate or acceptable in the situations you have shared.
I'd be very curious to know what specifically about me, or about something you assume about me, would make me someone you don't want to be?
Addicts insisting that their addiction isn't one is cliché for a reason.
You might also note that the GP said nothing about frequency of use, only "long time psych user", AND that no one here has defined "high frequency" in terms of an actual threshold for addiction.
The fact is that for all drugs, and especially for the psychedelics, there are far many more people who use occasionally and responsibly than the subset who are addicted. AFAIK, the psychedelics are not considered addictive at all, either physically/physiologically or mentally.
As a real psych user, you should accept that your post clearly has the subtext:
“I have everything most people want, so you’re wrong”
I, too, have everything most people “want”. Maybe we’re equally well off, maybe we’re not. I’ve still never met anyone on-level who indulges in this habit that kept it, and you should know that at our level it’s about keeping it not having it, at least for very long.
The compounds being discussed can have major long term effects from one/few experiences.
If 5 "trips" over the span of as many years in someone's early twenties provided a decade of long term positive changes, would you classify that as a coping mechanism?
The claim is that psychedelic use is beneficial /because/ it's psychedelic, but this isn't necessarily true (because of the rule that the boring outcome is the most likely). You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.
> increased spirituality
Is that a positive effect? Imagine all the people you know turning into Gwyneth Paltrow.
Maybe it can be done but the real reason that the companies are working on this is that they can patent these new drugs, and that would increase patients' costs (see esketamine vs ketamine). A better use of money might be to do larger studies of existing psychedelics/dissociatives, since these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most and we won't know long-term effects of new drugs and whether they do much besides what they would get potentially approved for. These companies would then have a big incentive and money to lobby to keep the existing psychedelics/dissociatives illegal.
I don't know whether the experience of purple sage counts as psychedelic; I tried it once. The visuals are reminiscent of LSD visuals, but richer. But there's no euphoria at all. Combined with extreme couch-lock, I didn't find it enjoyable.
Remember how gay activists used to be the craziest fringe gay people you could find, back when there was a serious stigma around it?
Now most gay people I encounter or hear about ar just as boring and sensible as the straights.
This doesn't prove that the same will happen with psychedelics. But it tells you why treating the outspoken minority as representative is not right.
Here is the first one I am aware of: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050654/. So 14 years of evidence backing up this claim.
Edit: on the premise that the environment is crucial for the outcome. This means creating a safe comfortable environment. Maybe with these new drugs will show otherwise in time.
Anyone asking either doesn't have any or needs help.
If you had a bad trip, you might feel differently about it.
Today, in therapeutic contexts, they use "easy trip" and "difficult trip" to give patients a sense of what to expect, and some context for how to interpret the experience they're about to have.
Some trips are like tropical vacations; peaceful respites. But others feel closer to climbing a perilous mountain, or trekking through endless desert, or slogging through dark marshlands.
Some of the most fulfilling journeys in life can be quite uncomfortable and hard, and notably, 70% of people that have bad/difficult trips do not regret the experience.
What makes the trip is worthwhile is if it causes you to learn and grow in a meaningful way.
Oh, you said might
And I personally know people for whom the exact opposite is the case. I'm very much looking forward to the rise of psychedelic therapy.
If you want to trip in nature, or on your couch, or in your therapist's office, or wherever else you might find to be the optimal set/setting for your experience, you should be able to do so.
That said, I'm all for taking whatever works in a setting that works for the user.
Every person I know who had a 'bad trip' did so at a concert or some place they weren't alone or in a quiet area outdoors with close friends (not that there aren't rare exceptions to this rule).
Like, what did you expect?
I've only really done LSD once tho and it was interesting, and seemed more low key than shrooms, so maybe I should try that again.
Also, LSD is not lower key than shrooms; maybe you took a smaller dose or personally have a tolerance. But with high doses they can both be very intense.
The right way to dose shrooms IMO is not eating 4 hours prior, ground up fine (and optionally put into gel capsules if you can't stand the taste), and taken with OJ. This gives you a very strong and peaky trip at minimal doses, but the peak lasts for 2-3 hours, whereas LSD is generally a whole day affair event at lower dosages.
Its also worth while imo to grow your own shrooms. There is this philosophical meta element of taking charge and creating your own medicine which then you take can better your own life, which can be a very positive thought during the trip.
Especially for such a short duration in consensus time (my trip was about 45 minutes, a bit on the long side but again I smoked a cigarette directly before consuming DMT, which I understand has MAOI properties and thus can extend the duration of DMT), DMT is one of the most powerful substances known to mankind. Perhaps 5-MeO-DMT might be more powerful, but there is physical risk involved there in such a way that isn't present with N,N-DMT.
IMHE, it's not, at least in regards to (racemic) ketamine and depression. The benefit doesn't appear until ~24 hours later, and the effect scales with dosage, but not trip intensity or outcome.
I found taking it almost unpleasant at times, but the subsequent effects uniformly profound. Unfortunately, I developed a rare health issue, or I'd still be taking it.
"In our study, OABSS (overactive bladder symptom score) significantly increased with the combined use of ketamine and marijuana (P = 0.016). Cannabinoids are the active components of marijuana, and select cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2, have been identified in the human detrusor and urothelium."
"1P-LSD - PsychonautWiki" https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/1P-LSD
Also people tend to describe their trips as being subjectively less pleasant.
And please, if you have to resort to dealers, invest in a cheap testing kit. You might be lucky and find a nearby non-profit that can not only do a cheap reactive test, but also a purity test.
Stay safe out there.
EDIT: Sibling comments also mention compounds like 1P-LSD sold online. I'd still test those even if bought from reputable vendors.
Anyways, their safety profiles aren't really that well understood either. They're suspected to be just metabolized into LSD and therefore pretty safe, but they're very new (~2015) and after all they're research chemicals (or rather, not-yet-researched chemicals). In comparison LSD had been known for decades and it's pretty well understood.
I guess this is what prohibition leads to...
I would suggest you learn how to use Tor and surf to some of the many dark net marketplaces that are around.
You can buy an entire sheet of LSD blotter for like $220 atm.
The visual/audio effects aren't what gets you on a trip, though. It's the headspace, the distortion of "automatic self-recognition", and to some extent, the role of the crucial 5-ht2a receptor in the sleep-wake cycle: all 5-ht2a antagonists are soporific, and almost all psychedelics produce insomnia as a side effect. A bad trip leading to worse after-effects practically always proceeds through a sleepless night.
The only interesting one that was impressive was tabernanthalog but even though it didn't produce a twitch response in mice it clearly had a psychadelic effect
There are a lot of other substances as well just recently we were able to procure very cheap rapamycin for people with autoimmune issues
If you are interested in joining or just look around reply to me here
After a group buy the admin has his own site where he sells it as well. We had another chemist but he was in Ukraine and is missing currently . He had a huge selection of compounds on his own site .
Admin site : nootropicsfrontline.com
You could determine if the benifit(s) arise from the the process, experience, and dis/associations of the trip or simply the subconscious biochemical fuckery.
Anti-drug hysteria has caused far more human destruction than all the bad trips and psychotic episodes put together. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in prison right now for illegal drugs. In some cases they had their lives ruined over nothing worse than a few grams of weed.
Set and setting are what create the good or bad experience. The therapist prepares the person for the journey while walking them out of any bad paths while on the journey. Layout and design of where the journey takes places must be soothing and relaxing.
Fun fact. Fungi growing closer to humans has higher potency in psilocybin than ones growing deeper in nature.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36613747-how-to-change-y...
Edit: wording
You know, that sorta stuff.
I'm all for counter arguments but please actually make a counter argument and not a sarcastic statement.
LSD gave me the power to set those things to sea and give them the burial they needed. Not all of them are gone, but I'm in a much better place because of it.
There is nothing different that I need, just make it so I don't have to order it on the dark web.
Edit: Happy to answer questions about my experiences. Can also be reached on Libera if public questions are not what you want.
Or rather MDMA can accelerate healing by released "stored unprocessed memories"
LSD can help you by showing you a possibility of whats possible by dissolving the prision of identity and seeing the world from a non-local perspective.
MDMA with the right group of people a few times completely changed me for the better. Lot of anger and resentment out the window.
I've had positive experiences with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and a dozen other things with alphabet -soup names but I also have PTSD and HPPD from them.
On MDMA the worst experience you can have is feeling sad, which is nigh impossible.
I'm still pro-psychedelics but it's important to recognize how powerful they are, and that a bent reality isn't always a pleasant place.
Personally LSD was an eye opening experience, but mdma is the only trip I’ve taken that I can say lead to changes in my perception that I still have to this day.
These things are less rigid as people put in text, I think. At a certain level of LSD it's very like MDMA, but past that level it's very different.
Between LSD and mushrooms, I'll quote one of my friends, "LSD puts you in the drivers seat; mushrooms make you a passenger."
And then you read an article like this:
> The receptor has proven crucial to understanding the neuropharmacology of the psychedelic experience induced by classical hallucinogens. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin—they all interact with 5-HT2A. (In certain circles, the phrase “5-HT2A agonist” has supplanted “psychedelic”...
5-HT2A receptors, of course, bind to serotonin (or at least that's our primitive theory of what's going on).
We've known for 70 years now that monoamines like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, etc. greatly influence mood. But our model of the brain is primitive, though that doesn't mean our current theories regarding these neurotransmitters like serotonin aren't on the right track.
I've taken them with a therapist and it was meh because the doctor/patient relationship became weird under the influence. On the other hand I've had peak experiences by myself alone in a redwood forest on a fresh clear morning.
To quote an older friend who grew up in a dry county in Alabama: “The bootleggers didn’t care how old you were which was a good thing because I liked to drink and when I was 16 I looked 13”
Of course, drug companies and lobbyists also dream of such outcomes.
Wall Street doesn't like companies that go against the ingrained model of "extremely expensive long term care as a service".
Was it the lsd or were they just already nutters? Nobody knows.
Telling people to take strong drugs that are purity tested and in a supervised clinical setting is sensible, not some conspiracy.
I would hazard there’s a large contingent of normies for whom the difference between supervised medical treatments that happen to be psychedelics and just the act of taking psychedelics is too large a leap.
I personally hate the experience. The hate is part of the goal of being able to stop being in control all the time, but it doesn’t mean I like it. I also hate the hangover feeling afterwards, but the neuroplasticy benefits have been profound and so I keep doing the treatment.
TL;DR benefits are there, normies should be allowed them too, non-normies I assume can still do black market work.
Why do you want non-normies to have gun toting government thugs put them in a concrete box for 20 years because they don't want to get a permission slip to do the same thing you did?
That said, I am not opposed to a therapeutic setting if that's what people who never tried them feel comfortable with
Leading the psychedelic renaissance: https://maps.org/
A list off the top of my head mentally ill people should avoid: hand guns, rifles, poison, rope strong enough to hang oneself with, enough narcotics to go to sleep forever, dynamite, poison gas, large quantities of alcohol, religious cults, LSD...
I think there's a problem that we can agree on and that is early detection and treatment of mental illness in teens before they get their hands on an AR-15 or LSD. As a culture, America is very neglectful in this regard.
I suspect that psychedelics maybe appeal particularly to people who are psychiatrically marginal. In my youth I tripped a lot, and a surprising proportion of the people I knew turned out to be schizophrenic or bipolar. But maybe it's just that I found the company of people who were psychiatrically marginal engaging...
That reminds me of a joke, "I said to the doctor, doctor, you got be patient with me"
At least the article 'tuned in' to Shulgin. More on Sasha and Ann's prolonged studies, along with a big bibliography, here (Web 1) [https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/...]
I have read that some illicit drugs can be effective in treating depression, even after just one or two uses. Can anyone suggest what might be the best option out of ketamine, shrooms, LSD or MDMA?
Ketamine seems to be fast-acting for depression. A proper MDMA session with a therapist and follow up support is looking like a great way to work on things like this. (This is not advice: please don't take advice concerning illegal drugs from random people on the internet)
You are not equipped to purity test them, severely depressed people can become more suicidal on rebounds, and you are almost certainly not equipped to care for them if they hit a major health issue.
MDMA is a good trip, but damn the hangover: I wouldn't suggest your friend endure "suicide Tuesday."
Shrooms and LSD can be effective, but a bad trip can aggravate depression and anxiety.
There are no silver bullets. Therapeutic uses involve therapists. The only advice I can give is that your friend seek out a competent therapist.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-13544-003
>Major findings were (a) adolescents who had been physically assaulted, who had been sexually assaulted, who had witnessed violence, or who had family members with alcohol or drug use problems had increased risk for current substance abuse/dependence; (b) posttraumatic stress disorder independently increased risk of marijuana and hard drug abuse/dependence; and (c) when effects of other variables were controlled, African Americans, but not Hispanics or Native Americans, were at approximately 1/3 the risk of substance abuse/dependence as Caucasians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Go build something interesting - physical, not on the computer, stop doing drugs.
There are plenty of cultures and associated history to support using what we already have available.
The only reason to invent anything new would be to control access and make a buck. We're going through that with the Covid vaccine. What does it take for us to learn from our mistakes?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/07/13/1111137...
So that would make the sweet-spot dose for someone my weight about 800mg, which doesn't sound very 'potent' to me. I haven't read PIHKAL, perhaps that dosage is in line with the kind of substances Shulgin tested.