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...
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.
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.