How psychedelic drugs achieve their potent health benefits | Hacker News Reader

How psychedelic drugs achieve their potent health benefits

nature.com

13 pointsheadalgorithm15 comments

Hopefully the drugs and trip are done in a safe place like a lab. Anything that increases brain plasticity also increases suggestibility which can be extremely dangerous if you're doing ayahuasca in Peru with a bunch of strangers or even LSD in an apartment in NYC in mixed company.

I've done psychedelics at home (up to 400μg of LSD at once) and it was plenty safe, I think. I don't know if I'm accurate or not since I'm speaking about myself though, it's entirely possible I could have done something stupid if there was peer pressure. I think it depends on the person though.

"Set and setting" [0] is a widely known phrase, in those scenes.

The phrase attempts to catchily summarise the vital prerequisites, in any substance-taking situation - and this applies to alcohol too, as one of the potentially hardest drugs - of a suitable mindset, and a suitable (location, social, safe, fun, ...) setting.

And when you think about it, the general approach could apply beyond this context, to many things. If you get your mind happily aligned, and are going into a positive situation you enjoy, then that's a pretty large bias toward success! Drug or otherwise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_and_setting

A standard "lab" would not be suitable. Too cold, too unfeeling. It must be a space specifically designed to comfort and soothe. Familiarity also plays a big part of it, if one is in a strange place that they're not used to.

"But mice did not prefer the social room if given enough ketamine to make them unconscious and therefore unaware of their companions."

ah yes

I don't think MDMA or ketamine count as psychedelics. They are psychoactive, but not psychedelic. MDMA is a stimulant and ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. Psilocybin is indeed a psychedelic, though.

Clearly you haven't experienced either

What makes you say that? I probably will end up trying ketamine in a few days (depending on when it arrives), but that doesn't really have anything to do with drug classification.

What property(s) would MDMA and Ketamine need to exhibit in order to qualify in your opinion as psychedelic?

that's kinda like asking what kind of properties alcohol would need to exhibit to qualify as an opiate. it's similar in some ways, but the definition of "opiate" excludes alcohol.

if your definition of "psychedelic" is "drug that makes you see weird stuff", then sure, ketamine and MDMA can be psychedelics. but some people use a stricter definition based on chemistry and/or mechanism of action. under this definition, MDMA is pretty different than LSD, and ketamine is very different from both.

[[emphasis mine]]

> some people use [[a stricter definition]], based on chemistry and/or mechanism of action. under [[this definition]]

Can you please explicitly state that definition?, is what I am asking. If not, then we'd only be arguing over a vague, moving target.

I don't know of a universally accepted scientific definition. but you might find this section of the wiki page for hallucinogens helpful: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen#Effects_by_type

I can see some argument for certain substances having, at the least, some adjacency to psychedelia, e.g. by way of some shared or similar mechanisms based around 5-HT receptor agonism and key involvement of the dopaminergic & serotonergic systems. But in the end we can't accurately split a hair whose bounds we can't define.

> Can you please explicitly state that definition?, is what I am asking.

The Wikipedia article[0] contains this quote:

> the term psychedelic is sometimes used more broadly to include various types of hallucinogens or those which are atypical or adjacent to psychedelia such as MDMA or cannabis; this article uses the narrower definition of psychedelics.

as well as other information on the method of action that leads to a drug being classified as a psychedelic.

I wasn't previously aware of people referring to MDMA or ketamine as "psychedelics" but I guess it might be more common than I thought. Who knew.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug

I did a full ketamine treatment... and I had a conversation with Darth Vader

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