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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

The frequency of these kind of posts followed by anecdotes about how it worked for the commenter (who I believe btw) makes me a little uneasy. Somewhere buried in the discussion eventually is a comment from a relevant professional urging caution in interpreting and reacting to these news reports and anecdotes. Now with something as serious as this I would not at all object to such cautions being placed a bit more prominently. This isn’t reckless use of goto being discussed but something much more serious. Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. Perhaps it’s just me, don’t take it as a holier than thou attitude.

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As someone who has taken extremely heavy doses of some very, very potent psychedelics (LSD, DMT, ketamine, mescaline and psilocybin), I am inclined to agree with you. I acknowledge that some people experience great benefits from psychedelics, but the current push to label psychedelics as mental health miracle solution doesn't sit right with me.

Make no mistake: these chemicals are not to be trifled with. People with underlying mental health issues - the poeple who would be most interested in using psychedelics - are at heavy risk of exacerbating their illnesses. Even outside of those special cases, I've seen normal people become heavily affected by bad trips. I simply don't think that there is enough scientific literature on the adverse effects of psychedelics. I also do not like the heavy focus on the "spiritual" aspects that these drugs are believed to confer: are you really transcending, or are you just so heavily intoxicated that you believe you are and no longer have the rational capabilities to convince yourself otherwise?

If I can end on just a little anecdote myself, I personally believe that heavy psychedelic use is especially counterproductive to technical/knowledge-based work. I did barely any work during the year that I was experimenting with these drugs. I was so content with my life as it was that I simply didn't feel the urge to exert myself. I was becoming soft, more predisposed to magical thinking. I believed that psychedelics had revealed unto me truths about how society should be run, how life should be and the true nature of mathematics. But I didn't know a damn thing! I just lost the inclination to actually analyse my ideas (or notions, because they barely qualified as ideas), instead being content to just accept them as they were. After a long stretch of abstinence from these drugs, I realised how worthless most of these notions actually were. I also deeply regretted the amount of time I spent taking these notions seriously, as well as the amount of time I had wasted in thinking that I had actually been experiencing any spiritual truths.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Most stories I read online about psychedelics are overwhelmingly positive, so much that it feels like you’d be missing out on life if you didn’t try it. It’s good to read your kind of stories too.

> I was becoming soft, more predisposed to magical thinking.

My experience is only with microdosing LSD and psilocybine mushrooms, however this 'softness' does ring true to me.

The good part with microdosing though is that it doesn't last anywhere near a year, while the positive effects I've felt and the deep conclusions I reached about myself and life in general I think will last a lifetime.

LSD has especially helped me get pretty much completely rid of anxiety in a particularly tense moment of my life. It has also 'thawed' some more ingrained thought patterns and ideas I had about things.

What you are saying makes me wonder whether there is a correlation between predisposition towards magical thinking (spirituality, religiosity, etc.) and effectiveness of psychedelics?

And for that matter could there be an equivalent of psychedelics for various types of AIs?

As my stoner friend says, “you just gotta believe, bro”

Believe what tho?

Your skepticism is warranted. Psychedelics are a hot topic and journalists have been promoting a lot of one-sided articles that make them sound like miracle cures. In clinical practice, ketamine can be useful as part of a recovery and treatment strategy, but it's not really an effective long-term treatment due to the short duration of effects (1-2 weeks post dosing) and the unsustainable nature of the drug (tolerance builds to the anti-depressant effect with repeated dosing).

Some ketamine treatment providers are running very professional and well-staffed businesses (source: had to do a lot of due diligence on the industry for a potential investment) but some of the others are shockingly under-qualified to be administering high doses of ketamine to patients with little evaluation. The regulatory bodies are slowly catching up to some of these providers and instituting stricter regulations. While there is some therapeutic potential, it needs to be delivered in the context of a long-term treatment strategy rather than just giving someone ketamine over and over again (as some unscrupulous providers will gladly do as long as the patient is willing to pay).

Something much more serious for many people is the specter of suicide looming over them.

Caution is useful, but it’s not always an unalloyed good.

Chemotherapy isn’t healthy or safe, but the thing it’s used to stop is even worse.

Honestly, I find HN's obsession with "professionals" annoying. For long-tail conditions, the professionals are frequently far less informed than fellow sufferers.

During the beginning of the pandemic, people on HN were telling us that N95 masks do nothing without official fit training. Bro, official fit training is something you can easily sub with a free video from 3M's website. It's this hopeless obsession with "official" and "professional" and shit like that when any reasonably intelligent individual can work through stuff themselves.

The one side effect of regular ketamine use in particular of having it recrystallize in your bladder, ripping it to shreds, is something I wonder if we're going to see more of in the medical literature in the future.

That said it's a pretty interesting wonder drug of sorts for a ton of different things, for example preventing further excitotoxic damage from brain injury

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