I have known too many people with "psychotic disorders". I have learnt the hard way to show such people enormous respect. A person who cannt distinguish a real thing from a thought is somebody that can do very surprising things.
These can be wonderful things, great artists etcetera. But it can also mean unexpected violence.
Yes "psychadelics should be considered very carefully... in context of those who have experienced psychosis". Everything should in that context.
A cup of tea should be.
It is true that it is possible to manage psychosis.
But it is also true that if you live with some one with psychosis you must respect the illness.
Denying that is dangerous. Unexpected violence is dangerous, and unexpected violence is a common symptom of psychosis.
I know this is currently a popular snarky rhetorical maneuver, but it gives me the creeps every time. It’s pretty ugly.
> I understand your reaction may be coming from a place of trauma
This is basically personally attacking someone on no evidence except their opinion, which happens to be different from yours.
I wonder what trauma you have experienced to behave like this. /s
I also know a nurse in a psychiatric clinic (the harder kind), he gets bit so much they have special vaccines (?, or some other kind of medication) to protect him against illnesses that can come from a human's mouth.
I don't believe the above reactions that I have learned are trauma, it's just the rational way to act when you've seen literal examples of what can happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
Yep
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-a...
This papering over of side effects that people insist on is why so many are so hesitant to legalize these drugs. It's doing no favor to the cause when so many refuse to acknowledge the danger that's inherit in some kinds of psychoactive drugs.
1. The link between psychedelic use and persisting minor visual disturbances is reasonably well established.
2. The link between psychedelic use and serious, problematic visual disturbances or psychiatric issues is not well established at all, and modern evidence calls into question[1].
Even if we do take at face value the attributions of problematic HPPD to psychedelics (which we really shouldn't), the prevalence of this phenomenon is extremely low. So low that there isn't much in the way of empirical data to estimate its prevalence - just case reports. And case reports are a notoriously unreliable way to reason about etiology.
You are misinterpreting this. This is saying there's no link between psychedelic use and increased cases of psychosis. That isn't the same as debilitating HPPD, or any depression/anxiety caused as a result. In fact in that same article he highlights this;
>But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.
>For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.
In the case of recreational drugs it is relative to alcohol.
So not "completely harmless" but "relatively harmless"
Psychedelics radically impact cognition and consciousness, and not always in a safe way.
It's not always just a 'woah man' giggling in a park.
People climb high things and fall. They run into traffic or harms way. They often attack first responders that are attempting to deescalate.
Thought loops are dangerous and psychotic breaks are an obvious possibility to anyone who has done these substances.
I wouldn't go that far. Any substance that alters perception, inhibition, etc has the potential for some social impact. For example, public drunkenness, DUI, liquor license etc were created because intoxicated people caused some sort of problem and laws were created around that. While these were created for alcohol, it's likely similar laws would be created for other substances.
>"No county, municipality or other political subdivision may adopt or enforce any local law, ordinance, resolution or rule having the force of law that includes being a common drunkard or being found in an intoxicated condition as one of the elements of the offense giving rise to criminal or civil penalty or sanctions..."
And in fact they specifically make it illegal to do the thing you suggest, and use other laws as a backdoor against public intox:
>"No county, municipality or other political subdivision may interpret or apply any law of general application to circumvent the provision of subsection A."
(This leaves ability to pass a law at state level, but state has no public drunk law)
But my point still stands - there are social negatives that we pass laws around consumption of various drugs (including alcohol), and that they are very similar in most states (AZ might not have a public drunkeness law, but still has plenty about other stuff like DUI, public consumption, age limits, licensing, open container law, etc).
It's merely an illustration that the absolute language used to proclaim that there are no social issues related to them is not correct.
Not so much "chalk and cheese" but "feather and revolver"
Not true.
My friend woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed after a bad trip on mushrooms. He saw his dead body in the street and was convinced he was dead and a ghost. He then went running around Manhattan traffic jumping on cars.
An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.
I am not saying psychedelics should remain banned. But to casually call them harmless is incredibly irresponsible. They need to be taken under supervision by people with experience. This is called trip sitting. Not all trips are good as emotions and state of mind can effect the outcome. Things can go wrong fast. Be safe.
Do you have a qualifying medical certificate and professionally diagnosed my friend? The answer is no. So don't try to down play a serious incident you have ZERO knowledge of.
> And the second one you describe is a pretty common story to be told (same rumor at my college).
When my teacher told us the story she was quite emotional and serious. It could be a well intentioned lie to discourage "drug use" but again, you have no way of knowing the truth so knock it off.
It's weird that you yourself don't require these kinds of qualifications to participate in this discussion. I guess you don't need them in order to disqualify people from disagreeing with you.
(as for credentials- no, no actual medical credentials, but I do have a phd in biophysics [emphasis on drug discovery], and have worked in the field of medical biology for decades). More importantly, my goal is here to avoid the "reefer madness" effect by countering establishment propaganda and college rumors with my read of the scientific literature, and also to raise awareness that mental illness is common and that psychedelic drugs can be a precipitating condition that turns a maintained disease into an emergency.
Trip responsibly,
1. Someone has had a latent mental disorder since birth, which then manifested itself permanently upon taking psychedelics, and would have never manifested itself without them
2. Someone who originally had no mental disorders developed a permanent one from taking psychedelics
* 15% of robberies
* 37% of sexual assaults
* 27% of aggravated assaults
* 60% of domestic violence (victim reported)
* 40% of child abusers (self reported)
* 40% of convicted murderers (self reported)
* 30% of traffic violence fatalities
https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/crimes/
psychedelics are essentially insignificant and are almost never involved in violence.
What behavior could be prosecuted here except for giving someone LSD without supervision?
Since, if you're on LSD (or pretending to be) and acting out, the first thing you're expected to do is talk about how you can fly and threatening to jump out of the window. It's silly. No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic, and the trope has proved longer lasting than the memory of Art or Diane Linkletter.
edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-scarlet-linkletter/
> Diane’s death helped spread a widespread urban legend that lives on to this day, although it was around well before her fatal plunge. According to a popular story that warns young people about the dangers of drug use, “some girl” jumps from a window while on an acid trip because the drug fools her into thinking she can fly. The claims immediately made after Diane’s death that she had been on LSD, coupled with her method of suicide, seemed to some to fit this existing cautionary tale, and afterwards her demise was pointed to as an example of this legend’s coming true.
Salvinorin-a on the other hand has (slightly?) more potential for this scenario. Users can experience what they call “salvia gravity,” a sensation of being pulled in some particular direction, which they follow with their body. I saw someone curl into and begin to lean against a 2nd-floor window screen. His friends kept him safe for the ~7 minutes the trip lasted. If he had been alone though, he could have fallen out.
I don’t know how common that effect is, and it’s quite different from the folklore of people thinking they can fly on acid. This is just a PSA for the few people who are interested in trying that particular drug.
I often hear stories about people tripping on mushrooms getting upto mischief. When I did I always find that, along with the mushrooms, there was a bottle of whiskey, or equivalent.
My culture is awash with alcohol. It is hard to disentangle the dreadful effects of the alcohol overdose experience form the psychedelic experience after consuming a bottle of whiskey.
https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/resources/dual-diagnosis/a...
and then consider the mortality and harm caused directly by consumption of alcohol, which is significant, and one of the statistically largest causes of death at 140,000 people killed per year
https://nccd.cdc.gov/DPH_ARDI/
and once again, the involvement of psychedelics with with suicide is extremely limited and rare. psychedelics are often self-reported as a source of long-term relief from suicidal feelings, after even a single experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
Basically a chemist gets secretly drugged with a massive dose of LSD, then nine whole days later allegedly jumps out the window of a hotel... this was after he was declared a possible security risk...
So more than likely he was helped out that window.
If not that - it was probably the guilt: for being a part of MKUltra and the clandestine drugging of American citizens - he had a moral crisis, that much is certain.
I'm not saying your story isn't true... but I've been on the internet long enough to see how stories morph over time.
As long as alcohol is a legal substance to consume, it makes no sense to criminalize substances widely shown to have lower harm coefficients than it. There's tons of studies which mostly-objectively quantify harm/addiction caused by substances. The only drugs squarely as bad or worse than alcohol are tobacco products (also legal, contains many more psychoactives beyond nicotine), meth, crack cocaine (delivery route matters), cathinones, GHB, certain gaba-ergics, and most opioids.
Nicotine in isolation, ketamine, classical psychedelics, cannabis, MDMA, most of the Shulginoids (phenethylamines and tryptamines), all fall short of the harm caused by alcohol.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.5921...
The three first principle components of a drug's harm are the therapeutic window (log ratio of LD50 to median active dose), addictivity (harder to quantify, but we have models based on pharmacokinetics and dynamics), and degree of harm to others when altered.
Alcohol is dangerously toxic on the order of ~15-25 units, has fast onset and hits GABA so rather addicting, and as a CNS depressant, is obviously very risky to others.
If a designer analog came out with the profile of EtOH, it'd immediately go to Sch I.
It still should be legal but we should be honest about risks.
Sure, too much alcohol can cause people to get sick too, but then nobody ever said alcohol had "no known negative health effects" either.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/teendeathbridgefal...
Of course, if I buy rat poison, I have a pretty pure product and I can look up the ld50 and make a scientific estimate on how much I can take before I die. Not so with some random shit off the street.
True.
Where I live (Aotearoa) drug testing has been made legal and there are many opportunities to take your stash along to the spectrometer (I am not a chemist, unsure about the actual nature of the instrument, except it is reliable) and get it tested.
You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?
The "studies that usually fail to replicate" are the ones supporting a LSD inducing schizophrenia.
Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy
Yes, if it has the potential to ruin my life and the life of people I care about, as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around them that these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.
I pay attention.
Decades of observing.
Some negative effects (the paranoia induced by repeatedly taking magic mushrooms for instance).
I too have heard horror stories, I just have not witnessed them.
But then I prefer to pay attention to the scientific research by people like David Nutt
You do what you want based on your own prejudices and if you must your bigotry. But places like thos that influence public policy statements like:
"as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around" as an argument against scientific research simply does not belong here
scientific research of this particular type has proved to be unreliable enough that it should be taken with a grain of salt. Fwiw my anecdote was probably caused by weed not LSD, my friend was taking frequent doses of a "legal" research LSD precursor he found in europe and didn't have problems until later when he stopped and smoked weed more. Idk if the LSD precursor accelerated his problems or not and I don't care to speculate.
> Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy
I did not imply that psychedelics should be illegal, if it were up to me I'd legalize all drugs.
My issue is with people calling these chemicals "harmless", that very stance I believe is harmful. Any drug should be treated with respect. Weed is not harmless and the right edible or strong enough joint will fuck you up for days. People abuse MDMA regularly and come down with serotonin syndrome or fuck up their brain by not waiting 3 months or more. Ketamine is often abused too and that's not a fun ride either.
I've heard that SV types take LSD micro doses and I've tried it, I got a more cheerful day out of it but the next day I didn't have any motivation to do anything and didn't get much pleasure out of the whole day. So your mileage may vary, be careful when doing this stuff, do proper research and make sure you have enough free time with no responsibilities in the near future when doing them because you can't predict your specific reaction.
You have to know that you're having this discussion with people who have done psychedelics and have friends who have done psychedelics.
The paper I linked even discusses this a bit - the problem is that psychedelics are an intense experience, and they have this reputation for causing psychosis (helped along by the drug war lies, naturally), and so people tend to attribute subsequent psychiatric issues to their psychedelic experience, inappropriately.
I'd ask you regarding your anecdata, do you actually know someone personally who you witnessed this happen to, or is it more like "a friend of a friend" had this happen, and told you about it? I've never personally known someone to whom this has happened, but like you, I've heard my fair share of tall tales from the gossip mill. It's just that, in this particular instance, I think it's pretty likely that the stories are just that - stories.
If you're talking about years of binging on mind altering substances, it's a virtual certainty that there were underlying psychiatric issues causing that. You can't simply conclude that because one thing came after the other, the drugs caused it, when we're talking about years of abuse.
There's one other extreme example where someone I'm acquainted with did a lot of psychedelics over the course of a summer who seems permanently changed (although not ill or non-functioning in any way) but there's too much that could've happened outside the drug use that summer that could have affected him for me attribute those changes to drugs (although many other friends did).
These survey methods come with huge uncertainty and lots of pitfalls. I would not be surprised if the result in the paper is not reproducible. In fact, "over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test"[1]
Just this past summer I had a friend tell me he was thinking of getting some mushrooms for us to all use at a party, like it was something you just casually do for fun like weed.
I have another friend with a serious family history of schizophrenia and he does pot and now psilocybin because they’re “natural and harmless.” I warned him, showed him literature, etc. There’s been far too much propaganda (?) on how safe those substances are for him to think they could ever cause harm.
And frankly, he’s always been a bit crazy but the past couple years…. Something has definitely changed in him. We’re talking things like believing he can heal people.
The only thing that has really changed is that we have fewer people in jail, we can know our doses in milligrams (instead of "hits" or whatever), and we can talk openly about our plans and get feedback from a wider audience re: whether they're good ones.
If psilocybin were legal, you friend would probably know better than to mess around with it if he has a family history of schizophrenia. As it is, he can only talk about it in small echo chambers, which is how harmful misinformation thrives.
"For the entire population twelve and older, Colorado’s marijuana use has increased starkly since legalization, rising 30 percent to become third in the nation, 76 percent above the national average. Among college-age youth (20–25), past-month use is 50 percent higher than the average, while past-month use for ages 12–17 is 43 percent higher."
https://www.hudson.org/research/17052-the-colorado-experimen... / https://www.thenmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/RMHIDTA-Ma...
I very much doubt your last point as I haven't seen the same thing happen with marijuana. Again, I told him myself. There's a good portion of the population that wouldn't conceive of taking a prescription medication unless absolutely necessary but think that several illicit drugs are somehow wonderdrugs that can cure all ailments.
HN is just low quality commentary on a lot of stuff and this is just another example. It's full of Internet urban legends and junk like that.
The classic sign of the Internet person who's trying to make himself seem like an authority on some subject is to try to use the trappings of expertise: speaking in passive voice, using words like "evidence" to describe urban legends, speaking in pseudo-formal tones to simulate expertise.
It's so clear that there is collectively very little expertise among this group on most subjects.
I'm curious to see how often these events happen as more areas decriminalize it.
Considering that the place with the highest psychedelic drug use is also the place with the highest number of mentally ill and homeless, that seems a rather preposterous assertion.
Simply put, confirmation bias will convince you that people who do psychedelics end up on a bad track if your sample only includes people who are on bad tracks, rather than a sample composed of those who use psychedelics.
More probably (and this in my experience is definitely true) many more people use psychedelics than you might naively assume, and in fact probably the proportion of people who use psychedelics and end up on good tracks is way higher than that of those who use psychedelics and end up on bad tracks.
On a more meta-level, your searching and inquisition is still based on a more fundamental assumption, that homeless people are homeless for reasons stemming from their own decisions, rather than some confluence of bad events that leads one to ruin or another possible path to homelessness (e.g., they have mental health conditions which prevent integration into "normal" society without proper treatment, or that they simply want to be homeless and nomadic as a lifestyle choice). Empathy pays off here to temper un-credible assumptions and analyses.
I'll agree with that, but the real question is whether people who use psychedelics more frequently end up on bad tracks than those who don't, which in my experience is definitely true.
> homeless people are homeless for reasons stemming from their own decisions
No, my bias is that many homeless are homeless because they live in a place that enables and even encourages actions that lead people to become homeless (psychedelics use being one example).