Hacker News Reader

Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.16968

yeah, it just happens most anyone with friends who do psychedelics have had some of them go on psychotic breaks that take months or years to fix. It's not super common but I'm gonna trust my own observations of reality over studies that usually fail to replicate

> not super common but I'm gonna trust my own observations of reality over studies that usually fail to replicate

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

>You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

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.

> 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

How many well recorded and observed anecdotes are required before it becomes recorded data worthy of being considered a replication of a poorly designed and unreplicated academic study? Do I just gotta format it in two columns like it's a high school newsletter and pray nobody reads the dozens of references I threw in there but never actually used beyond roughly associating my own thoughts with ones someone else already had?

> You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

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.

It might be that we underestimate the number of people who sometimes can go on psychotic breaks without the drugs, as it is a taboo topic and is often dealt with quietly by mental hospitals. Also lots of homeless have mental conditions. This will skew the stats somewhat.

> most everyone

You have to know that you're having this discussion with people who have done psychedelics and have friends who have done psychedelics.

I'm sympathetic to the impulse, and I think it's a good one to be skeptical of things like that when they conflict with anecdotal evidence. However, I think you have to look at the context of the anecdata in this case to conclude that it's probably better to rely on empirical data.

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.

Yes, I know someone directly that had suicidal tendencies for months after a couple of years of binging on weed, some lsd precursor I'm forgetting and mushrooms. He's fine now thankfully but he went through hell.

"Years of binging on weed and 'some lsd precursor'" are not exactly the same thing as traditional plant based psychedelics. The only LSD precursor you could be referring to is Ergotamine (rye fungus), which is pretty well known to be toxic.

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.

I've known him for 20 years, he didn't have any psychiatric issues at all before he started doing psychedelics often. He went deep into Terrance McKenna videos and had high ambitions to bend reality through his will and drug trips, this was fueled by magick videos and the like, got into crystals, all that crap. The "lsd" was ald-52.

I personally know 2 people who suffered from a bad trip. One who thought demons were out for them for about a month and another who just had some wild mood swings for a couple weeks afterwards. Both were temporary but the effects of a bad trip are no joke.

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).

The title of this study "No link found between psychedelics and psychosis" should really be that "the authors did not find links between psychedelics and psychosis using their survey method".

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]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248

Reply on news.ycombinator.com