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Comment by snovymgodym | Hacker News Reader

Had a somewhat similar experience.

Irritating how harmless and positive psychedelics and cannabis are made out to be in popular culture in spite of the issues like these that can cause.

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I had a similar experience, too. I was 18, just before starting college. It took me about 15 months to start to recover with Prozac helping me create breathing space. Daily flashbacks. It took about 4-5 years for the flashbacks to stop. I stopped marjuana/cannibis during that time, tried it again 10+ years after the event, could handle it then.

LSD is dangerous, even once taken in the right environment can screw you up for life. I had a long road back, screwed up my first 3 years in college (went from top of class in high school to average, but recovery in year 4 meant i ended up back top-of-class). Still, terrible drug.

Makes me wonder if a counterpoint to adopting almost anything will arise with 1 million people having the ability to obtain a drug with ease instead of 10,000 people that are forced to jump through a lot of hoops and navigate a specific kind of closed drug culture to come out changed for the better. When there's a 0.0001% chance of years-long negative effects, that's a lot more people making up the minority. Safety regulations are always written in blood. I think there will only be pushback when, ironically, enough people are convinced that we should finally legalize these drugs for millions of people to use, and that 0.0001% minority grows loud enough.

The person wasn't talking about policy but about how people aggressively pretend like these drugs can do no harm. You can have a completely free policy while also being honest and accurate about what the drugs do and what can happen.

I had a similar thought. I talk about how delicious Japanese, Korean, Indian, etc food is, but don't warn people that .23% of Americans are allergic to Sesame oil which is used often in those cuisines. Same can be said about products that contain say peanuts. Would you say people aggressively pretend like those foods do no harm if they aren't caveating their love of it with facts about allergy rates and impact? Further, there was a very long discussion on this forum about the sesame warning being mandated and whether that was government overreach or not.

People don't say that it's impossible for peanuts to hurt you. That's the difference.

It's a way for people that want to be addicts to rationalize their addictions, and should be mercilessly shamed out of being so popular.

Is psychedelic addiction even a thing? Anyway, people who aren't addicts do it too.

I'm not sure you know much about the subject of which you speak.

I think there are no people who get addicted to psychedelics in the classic sence of addiction. They could get addicted like when you are addicted to a book or a movie. Because the experience was so impactful. But most psychedelics have a quick saturation cycle, you get really high levels of tolerance in a really short time. For example, using acid multiple times during a festival will just degrade the experience exponentially until you really dont notice even high doses (not on a physiological level either). So its really hard to structurally abuse it. Having said that, drugs are a bit like extreme sports: they are definetly dangerous when handled without care and never really become safe. Doesnt mean you should or shouldnt use them. Its just a choice. Some people want to take that risk, others dont. Some people want to risk their money on entrepreneurship and other dont. Doesnt mean entrepreneurship is something bad.

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