Psychedelic Mushrooms Hit the Market in Oregon
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here's a recent Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/17/i-stopped-sl...
From the article:
> Horowitz experienced a prolonged antidepressant withdrawal in 2015 that caused intense panic attacks and, he says, even left him contemplating suicide. This personal experience has led the training psychiatrist to become an advocate for reforming antidepressant deprescribing.
> In June 2022 the UK health regulator, Nice, amended its guidance on how to support people coming off antidepressants, acknowledging the severity and length of withdrawal symptoms can vary. Nice encourages slow, staggered tapering over many months, if needed.
> In Australia, the RANZCP guidelines continue to recommend tapering by halving and quartering the lowest dose over about two to six weeks, and acknowledged that while slower tapering might sometimes be needed, it mostly isn’t possible in Australia “as current preparations of antidepressants do not allow for the dose to be reduced by such small decrements”.
There are well documented side effects of stopping SSRI usage that are not related to the original symptoms that the drug is prescribed to treat.
But yes, we all have different experiences, and there are many types of SSRIs. :-)
> psychiatrist and former RANZCP president, Prof Malcolm Hopwood, says most people who taper off a standard antidepressant dose will be able to do so without major withdrawal symptoms ... "There’s a _small_ group who really experience significant withdrawal symptoms that they really find very difficult to manage"
Discontinuation symptoms are a real risk, but people who could really benefit from these drugs absolutely shouldn't be put off by a categorization of these symptoms as being typical.
A small group that has severe side effects and finds them very difficult to manage is kind of a big deal in a class of drugs that actually have small effect size in the medical literature.
0: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/discontinuation-syndrome...
I can't say the drug use caused it, but I and the rest of her friends are of the opinion that it contributed (we all have experience with psychedelics, mostly in our younger days). We know that the microdosing also turned into macrodosing on a lot of occasions. She's in a group of friends who follow Phish around, and it's basically part of their identity.
She's doing better now, but still thinks she's in some kind of a stimulation, and has described feeling like she's on a never-ending acid trip. She's always been one of my most solid friends, and this came completely out of left field.
We can't get her to see any psychiatrists who would want to put her on anti-psychotics (which is basically all of them). So we just tell her we love her, and try to convince her that if this is all a big simulation, we're not in on it either.
The only signs we can come up with were a few times going back 20 years, either at a party (drugs) or a canoe trip (drugs) where she thought people were talking about her/plotting against her. I wasn't on the canoe trip, but I always believed her that some people in another group of friends we know were mercilessly cruel to her. Now I tend to think it was a manifestation of whatever this is.
Other than that she's been one of my most solid friends and always had her shit together, very successful career, someone I would call when I needed life advice, etc.
I mean a cup of coffee might push the wrong person over the edge if they’re already in the midst or about to enter a serious mental health crisis?
Of course you’d have to assume a psychoactive substance might contribute but maybe not?
I’ve had serious depressive stints of existential crisis where the world felt like it was telling me I don’t need to exist anymore and I’ve had them before and I’ve had them before and after smoking pot, did it contribute maybe ? Maybe not. I’ve smoked pot since and never had the same symptoms.
I feel like that whole "world feeling it was telling you you didn't need to exist anymore" may have been it trying to point to you towards a no-self experience, which can actually be a very beautiful experience, where the 'you' experiencing reality fades away and there is just reality.
I hope this comment was okay with you, and I apologize if it disturbed you. Still, if you've got nothing better to do with your time, no-self may be something to look into.
At some point I kind of just agreed with this new idea and have been running with it since.
Buddhism often tells you to let your pain and suffering be your guide, and it works,at least in my experience.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
It's pretty easy to slip into this. I don't have a good answer for solving this but criminalization is definitely a bad answer, so we will have to find a way to discourage such tendencies. It may be that it is mostly or entirely a cultural thing in which case public understanding of the drug is a prerequisite, so I'm glad more are starting to learn about it as a result of decriminalization and legalization.
I hope she can find some way to be comfortable again.
But I think there are some serious risks to heavy, prolonged use that probably aren't well-studied or understood. Also for all I know her problems stem from the acid and not the shrooms.
I’m all for people trying them but the effects shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve had powerful feelings of anxiety, love, euphoria, mania or sadness on different times. Very different from pot which has a pretty uniform and predictable effect on me.
Cannabis is quite a powerful drug for many. A lot more powerful than most "hard drugs" like stimulants, empatogens, opioids or sedatives, which don't "mind fuck" at all unless you do them days on end or ridiculous dosages.
No one is getting ego-death and dimensional transcendence from ripping dabs of THC concentrate all night. Just lots of paranoia and distress.
Its distressing to spill your coffee. It's also distressing to have your house burn down. The difference is large.
The THC induced paranoia and distress are usually due to effects like time-dilation, memory impairment, depersonalization, thought loops etc, which I'd put into more or less same category as you get from psychedelics or dissociatives.
Plenty of bad trips with quite low doses of THC too: https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=70884
I think the "hardness" of different drugs, especially in how strong the effect is, is mostly a cultural and legal artifact that doesn't really correlate that much with the actual experience.
Acid also stimulates dopamine receptors, so this could be similar to amphetamine psychosis.
And what have you done for us?
I think the best you can do is be a calm friend and imagine you're dealing with a two year old without being condescending.
You could also try contacting https://challengingpsychedelicexperiences.com/
There are also therapists who work with people before and after psychedelic experiences, called psychedelic integration therapists. They usually have legit mainstream psychotherapy qualifications.
There are also integration circles where people support each other. For example, https://acerintegration.com/ This was set up by a researcher in psychedelics. Not sure if it would be appropriate for someone experiencing psychosis though. You could also try contacting the researcher directly for recommendations: https://www.drrosalindwatts.com/
There are also forums where you could ask for advice, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/
They might be able to point you to other resources like this in your area.
Another contributing factor in all this is she lost her job, which gave her a lot of satisfaction. She has savings, so she's not hurting for money. But sitting around all day in her head and getting depressed isn't good.
Do you know how frequent the macrodosing became? I have never seen or heard (anecdotal) of microdosing leading to a psychotic break. But frequent use (more than once every three weeks) of large quantities will almost certainly harm you in the long run.
I assume stuff like that happens a lot in her Phish group. Other times we've hung out at a party she's broken acid/e/shrooms out and I'm thinking, "We're not 25 anymore, we don't have to do this."
At the time I kind of admired her for still being willing to go to those deeply introspective trippy places, whereas I'd rather just get a nice buzz and not plumb the depths of my soul. But now I'm thinking it's probably a good thing to hang that stuff up after a while, or at least not keep doing it regularly.
From my experience, the psychedelics will "tell you" to slow down, but it's up to the individual to make that choice.
(yes, I've tried psychedelics; they're fascinating and super promising, but at least for me, not transformative in the way that fluoxetine was)
No individual depression treatment works for everyone. SSRIs are not a magic bullet. Neither are psychedelics. But if you're depressed and haven't tried SSRIs, you owe it to yourself and everyone in your life to at least test the hypothesis that they might help.
Scott Alexander's page on SSRIs is a great, relatively objective resource, from a psychiatrist who regularly prescribes them: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/25/ssris/
I think in my part my negative reaction is, like many people, having observed the effects of SSRIs on young people. It's well known that risks like suicidal ideation are actually higher among those under 25, and in general it is awful to see the mental health crisis among young people dealt with primarily via instantly reaching toward semi-permanent medication, rather than considering other treatments.
Prozac actually saved my life. Psychedelics since have certainly enhanced it, but they could not accomplish what prozac did. I can go into more detail if interested.
What was your experience like? And do you still take it?
You might be interested in the book "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty"[1] by Patrick Radden Keefe. Although it focuses on Oxycodone and other painkillers it touch on Prozac and other SSRI's. Quite the eye opener...
I don't mean to bring other classes of drugs in, only to note that it is _very common_ for someone to go in for one thing, find it doesn't work, and then to start tweaking / adding / combining in an attempt to find a solution, and that's where the real problems often live.
Shrooms first and SSRI after
Otherwise there may not be laughter
As SSRIs will readily prevent
Any and all trip-like eventPsychiatrists can have similar issues but you don’t meet with them nearly as often. Once I got on meds that worked for me, we’d have a 30 minute meeting every two months just to check in and see if any adjustments were needed. That was fine by me because I was going to a therapist weekly, the two were aware of each other and would communicate if needed, and it saved both of us time.
Btw, have you noticed exposure to sunlight to make you even more laid back? I've recently been casually tracking a correlation in that for myself.
The bad sides of of SSRI's are as overblown as the good sides of psychedelics are. It's easy to form an opinion from reading personal experiences online but that doesn't reflect the real world imho.
I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type So I am prone to being more sensitive to SSRI. This is mostly to do with my genetically odd 5HT2A receptors.
Depression is no longer really a part of my life anymore after I found I was zinc deficient. But now I do tend towards the manic and have issues with psychosis still so I need to be careful with my serotonin.
Zinc can inhibit the observe shows copper, so that’s why the copper tested.
> That is, there are a bunch of tests that ask you a bunch of questions about your feelings and symptoms, and you can add them up and call that a “depression score”, and if you do that, antidepressants have an effect size of 0.3. Or you can ask patients “how depressed do you feel on a scale of 1-10”, and if you do that, antidepressants have an effect size of 0.5. I think the latter is better, because it’s what we actually care about (how patients are doing), and the tests are kind of dumb and ask about a lot of symptoms most people realistically aren’t experiencing.
(In other words, if you ask a patient with depression how they are feeling, and they say 'great', and then you ask them questions like "are you managing to shower every day", or "did you think about suicide a lot this week" and they give the same answers as a depressed person, they are cured!)
Does weird napkin math which clearly can't be justified:
> For those people, they will have a large real effect size of 1.0, plus a large placebo effect size of 0.9, for a very large total effect size of 1.9.
(How do you get to add the placebo effect back on to the postulated 'large real effect size'??)
Says that extremely common side effects are 'very unusual':
> It can be any or all of decreased libido, difficulty orgasming, difficulty getting an erection, difficulty enjoying sex, or decreased sensation in the genitals. These usually go away a few weeks to months after stopping the medication, but in rare cases they might linger for months or years, and there are a few people who say their sexual side effects never went away. These cases are very unusual and still not well understood.
(Note that in the same article he points out that, in general, the medication only improves mood or anxiety while you keep taking it, when you stop taking it you still have the depression or other conditions. So the fact that sexual disfunction usually gets resolved after stopping taking the medication isn't much relief. For most people SSRIs will never lead to a steady state where you are stable with regards to your mental health issue and also are able to enjoy sex.)
Makes armchair psych connection between well-studied things which are not the same:
> When everything goes right, SSRIs blunt negative but not positive emotions. But many people even at reasonable doses will notice that their most extreme positive emotions become a little less extreme (this may be part of the problem with sex).
(Difficulty getting aroused or orgasming or feeling in the mood for sex is not the same as "most extreme positive emotions becoming a little less extreme")
What I am on now (Lexapro) was life changing in a good way, with only minor sexual side effects that more or less went away.
As such, studies that day "SSRIs have this effect on people" or "have these side effects" are fundamentally flawed. Despite belonging to a common class, there isn't a universal experience.
This news will probably come as a huge surprise to the psychiatric epidemiologists who carried out the peer-reviewed research that Alexander mangles! They probably thought all SSRIs were exactly the same!
I was with you up to this. What even is a “psychiatric epidemiologist” I had to look it up,
“It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events,“
Yeah, I don’t know, I’d sort of go with an experienced clinician when it comes to advice about pills. Sociology/epidemiology is cool, but there’s a lot to say for the importance of “practice” in medicine.
It's a bit like doing a meta analysis of hydrocarbons in two and four stroke engines. Some will work better than others in some situations, but the meta analysis itself isn't illuminating when you are putting liquid propane into a gunked up carburetor.
For what it's worth, synthetic opioids and spinal fusion saved my life. If I'd listened to the Internet, I'd have likely never pursued treatment or maybe just taken Kratom and gotten massages or something, fearing I'd end up a drug addict with a worse spine than I started with.
My advice is to take a breath and focus on the present. Chip away at what’s causing your anxiety. Don’t shy away from working on yourself. Use your medication as a tool, not as a solution.
I’m painfully aware that these are all much easier said than done. It was a three year journey for me. And who knows - I may start having panic attacks again. If I do, I’m going to try buspar.
Also. Don’t be afraid to switch medications. Don’t just live with severe side effects. Sexual dysfunction, lethargy, significant weight gain - this is no way to live your life. I found the Prozac - Wellbutrin combo to be pretty tame in that department.
Comments like this -- and there are an awful lot of them online -- dissuaded me for a very long time from taking SSRIs. And that was a terrible mistake: SSRIs have been a life-changing good for me. I am on a high dose of Lexapro, and in no way do I live in a gray fog, and my relationships are markedly better. My GAD is gone, completely.
A few years ago, a doctor tried to convince me that they were causing sleep apnea, so I came off them, slowly, over many months. I didn't have cessation symptoms. My anxiety slowly returned, in proportion to the dosage, my sleep apnea didn't improve, and I was glad to start them again.
They're terrible for some people, but they work well for others. I don't think they should automatically be disregarded.
> In the worst case, they cause suicidal ideation
Is this actually true? My understanding is that people in severe depression can have suicidal ideation but not actually be able to put in the effort/energy needed to go through with it. SSRIs initially give you a little more boost in energy before the mood-lifting effects kick in. During that middle phase, we observer higher suicide rates because you've now enabled them to have effort to follow through with their suicidal ideas.
It seems like you forgot the word "ideation" is in the original claim you're disputing, based on your description. Yes it is true that SSRIs can cause suicidal _ideation_. And the first step to suicide is suicidal ideation.
You can only know how bad it was in retrospect.
I no longer experience anxiety to the same degree I did back then, no use of other SSRIs or any other drugs.
This isn't meant to scare people into not trying SSRIs, just sharing my experience. I think had I been more informed of the potential risks and changed my attitude of toughing it out, it could've probably been more beneficial.
Stopping cold turkey was bad news for me, too. I got the "zaps" any time I turned my head. So, I decided to taper down, which worked fine.
GlaxoSmithKline paid the Department of Justice $3 billion for covering up evidence of this while promoting their SSRI to under-18s. They paid the fine in 2012, 11 years ago. The medical trial was done in 1994-1998.
In 2003, the (UK medicines regulator) MHRA obtained full clinical data from Glaxo, and based on that data forming robust evidence of significant increase in suicidality, both the MHRA and the FDA immediately said that paroxetine couldn't be prescribed to under-18s.
The UK govt rules on how to report medical trials were changed in relation to what happened with the publication of the Glaxo Paxil trials.
GSK paid around $1 billion in the 2000-2010s to settle several hundred lawsuits, including many many suicides and several family annihilations.
The main investigative news TV show in the UK, Panorama, reported on this in 4 shows between 2002 and 2007.
The Boston Globe did significant investigative work on this around 2005, including a book published by their reporter.
In view of that, your question comes across as at best, uninformed and naive.
Sometimes I feel foolish for being skeptical about safety claims for food additives/cosmetics/pharmaceuticals/etc, then other times it feels completely rational.
But you do you, I won't judge foreign exotic cultures.
2/ there is increasing evidence that psychedelic therapies for mental illness were all based on hype and don’t actually perform any better or at all
Psychedelic therapies are most definitely not based on hype -- there's real research being conducted by real doctors, and it's only becoming more prevalent.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/research/psychede... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2206443
Let's hope language doesn't have something to do with how humans perceive reality! (Or, maybe I have that backwards.)
Psilocybin on the other hand acts kind of like the serotonin molecule itself. It attaches to most of the serotonin receptors, including the two receptor. The reason why it works for so long is you get such a huge and strong attachment to the serotonin receptors that the body ends up, reducing the serotonin receptors in response. It’s this lack of serotonin receptors that make us more sensitive to what little serotonin we make.
There’s nothing non-pharmacological about the effects of mushrooms.
What we believe we know is that low serotonin in the brain does not directly cause depression, and artificially lowering serotonin in individuals does not induce depression (at least not in the way researchers have done so, within the time limits they measured).
None of this necessarily means that SSRI activity downregulating the reuptake of serotonin is not the primary mechanism of action (pharmacologically speaking, it definitely is the main thing this class of drug is doing in the body).
It's worth noting that we also have a ton of serotonin receptors in our GI tract, and SSRIs do have notable activity there as well, to the point that they can relieve chronic constipation in some individuals. Although levels of serotonin outside the brain (which represent 95% of serotonin produced by the body and our microbes) generally get ignored in analysis of depression, since serotonin cannot cross the blood brain barrier, it may well be very relevant to human health, both physical and mental, for as yet unknown reasons.
Depression is a multi causal disorder.
SSRI side effect prevalence is a hard thing to measure for a large variety of reasons. But in [1] only 1/4 patients report the side effects as ”very bothersome.” Given that 100% of patients are so anxious/depressed that they want to try psych meds, it seems like SSRIs are a great treatment option for many.
A quarter of patients reporting very troubling side effects is not great for a class of drugs with an effect size around 0.3, or about 10% more reduction in depression symptom scores compared to placebo. If you have run out of options and are desperate for relief, it may be an appealing risk/reward equation for some people. But the notion that 100% of patients believe they need these meds, rather than had the drug recommended by a doctor/psychiatrist (who maybe didn't go into great detail about the potential risks vs tempering expectations about how likely they are to help), is absurd. It totally ignores how our medical system operates in most cases. Many times, the doctors prescribing will be informed by drug company PR literature moreso than careful reading of scientific research.
Isn't this the primary effect, more than a side effect? Atleast in my case, it's been super helpful, going from jumping between a 1 to 7 in mood, to just lie around 4-5-6.
As others have stated in this thread, this overt generalization is harmful. SSRIs and psychedelics have both been studied, and both have outcomes that we don't really understand. To say one is better or worse than the other in most cases is pure ignorance.
We all have roughly the same physical properties to our brains but how they develop is truly unique to every individual, which leads some methods of treatment for mental health disorders more or less effective than others. I am 100% onboard with pursuing psychs for treatment if you want, but its not for everyone and neither are SSRIs.
I'd downvote this if the responses weren't so full of instructive counterpoints.
It took me MONTHS to even consider SSRIs because of rhetoric like this that is online and pervasive in our culture.
So respect to all of the early adopters who have nothing to lose and are willing to put their own sanity at risk. I just don't understand people who in one breath curse the Sackler family but then line up to try the first batch of industrialized psilocybin from Rose City Laboratories.
It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.
> Dr. Janis Phelps, director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said she and other researchers had been wary of the decriminalization movement. Many in the field had worked for years to remain strictly scientific, hoping to avoid government crackdowns, and to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration time to fully review the effects of psilocybin before pressing ahead with efforts to make it legal.
> “I have changed my mind,” she said. While she remains concerned that bad actors could try to enter the industry strictly for profit, or try to take advantage of vulnerable people, she has come to believe that the open door in Oregon could advance the use of psychedelics in ways that methodical approaches cannot.
> Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, said he continues to be wary. Psilocybin is powerful, with immediate effects lasting for hours, and uncertain outcomes for patients, he said, recalling one patient of his who has experienced protracted psychosis, losing partial connection to reality, after taking doses of mushrooms. The treatments ruined her life, said Dr. Nemeroff, who said he worried about the lack of required medical oversight in Oregon’s program.
Just like the Sacklers, people pursuing psilocybin are fully aware of all of these warnings and problems. And just like Purdue, anyone selling psilocybin right now are willfully misrepresenting the evidence and ignoring medical opinion. Again, Purdue did all of the things they did because they believed they were ultimately helping treat people's suffering.
I am fully aware that time may tell and the concerns may be unfounded. And I get that we are dealing with a completely different drug/mechanism. But one is right and one is wrong only through the benefit of hindsight.
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02698811221084...
Like with all treatments, it’s a careful balance of whether the risks are worth the positive health outcomes. But there’s no sense in denying that psychedelics, and thus psychedelic mental health treatment programs, have no evidence of potential issues.
One interesting recent study I've found is this, but it's too small to conclude anything, and it also does not appear to be peer-reviewed yet: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yzmcj
Very many people have encountered aliens, but there's still no evidence of aliens. Your comment is more ideological hyperbole than the one you're replying to.
> Purdue Pharma created false advertising documents to provide doctors and patients illustrating that time-released OxyContin was less addictive than other immediate release alternatives. Furthermore, they sought out doctors who were more likely to prescribe opioids and encouraged them to prescribe OxyContin because it was safer. They did this because OxyContin quickly became a cash cow for the company. (https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-purdue-pharma-and-...)
A degree of malfeasance in the same realm as Big Tobacco's denials of the risks and addictiveness of smoking:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/
Although, perhaps could be considered worse since it occurred more recently in a theoretically more highly regulated market than mid 1900's tobacco.
However, the lack of significant safety research does make it hard to determine the incidence of development of disorders like HPPD but, unlike opioids, I can’t imagine someone wanting to continue taking psilocybin after developing HPPD.
A quick search on Reddit would show you countless people who say they’re physically unable to function without weed anymore. Withdrawal symptoms include insomnia, depression, brain fog, lack of appetite, lack of energy, shaking, etc.
This is especially true of people who started using it when they were young and people who use high THC products.
That is an interesting line to draw. Are "MENTAL withdrawal symptoms" not neurological in nature? Are "hallucinations or the shakes or seizures" not based in neurology?
Delirium tremens is a severe form of alcohol withdrawal. It involves sudden and severe mental or nervous system changes.
Delirium tremens may also be caused by head injury, infection, or illness in people with a history of heavy alcohol use.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/comments/17fhb1y/intense_phy...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/comments/17fazp4/sweating_in...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/comments/yt9sud/cannabis_doe...
Thousands more examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/search?q=symptoms&restrict_s...
Also, I'd argue that brain fog, low energy, insomnia, lack of appetite, night sweats, shaking are all physical symptoms, chest pains, heart palpitations.
There are also no known cases of psilocybin overdosing (same for LSD and Ketamine).
People have been using these drugs for a very long time. Their affects are fairly well known.
Opioids are addictive, mushrooms are not. That singular fact makes them very very different.
I understand that we are not talking about the same specific mechanism (addiction), but I also want to keep my eyes open and not blindly stumble into the same broader category of problem all over again.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybe_aztecorum
[1] Look under History and look for Avicenna https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid
A key caveat is "ceremonial." Was it available at the Nahua corner store?
That's not really what happened with the current pills, though. They were touted as not being addictive in the same way as opium.
And then we prescribed them, didn't (and don't) offer realistic talks about how addiction starts with them, aren't giving people sick time so they are less likely to need them, putting folks in jail for using things like pot instead, and aren't giving folks affordable and medicine-based help if they do happen to get addicted. And then, if they do happen to get addicted, we treat them like a pill-seeking addict for many years, if not for life.
We know other things cause dependency - it isn't just opioids - but we are better at having conversations around them and better at making sure to taper folks (and so on).
And we've also known about problems from psychedelic abuse for centuries. And we're talking about dumping them on the market with way less oversight than we did opioids!
It's like that truism about the military always fighting past wars...
Such as?
Not that I disagree with the contents of your list, but the effects of psychedelics are not always positive.
Well great because it doesn’t!
you could say the same thing about alcohol, and I think you'd agree that alcohol is not an entirely benign substance.
Oxycotin was never touted as "not being addictive".
Hell they had (and still have) a big "WARNING: OxyContin is an opioid agonist and a Schedule II controlled substance with an abuse liability similar to morphine." in their label.
It was a confluence of medical professionals being taught "pain is the 5th vital sign", "pain is routinely undertreated" and "controlled release opioids have a reduced abuse potential".
This was not necessarily bad because many of those things were true and the pendulum had swung back from "just tough it out", "Tylenol is enough for most people", "just one dose of opioids will make you an addict".
Then layer on top pill mill clinics popping up where doctors were dispensing scripts for 120 sixty milligram Oxycotin without so much as a physical examination, the DEA doing nothing despite having ample data in front of them that some doctors were dispensing milions of pills each year and the massive amounts of money doctors made writing the scripts by charging addicts cash.
I know this because I was in part responsible for opening up the gates, with a company that sold them very responsibly, starting in Camden.
However, there is still a lot of potential for harm. The biggest one is triggering latent psychosis and other psychological issues followed by possibly dangerous actions under the influence of high doses.
I also believe the "recreational" potential is low but it will probably be very interesting for many people to try at least once.
you can totally use shrooms too much, because you're bored on summer break so you eat a bunch to spice up your day. It's honestly not the smartest use of it, but 'overuse'/spending too much time tripping is totally a thing.
This is what was said about THC until it was legal and now we know there are physical withdrawal side effects in a decent percentage of people. So I don’t trust advocates pushing this narrative at all
> I also believe the "recreational" potential is low
Laughable. Most people doing magic mushrooms are doing so recreationally. That’s what it’s known for, that’s why there has to be entire talks given about the mental health benefits. Because it’s widely used exclusively as a recreational drug
My point is that the vilification of 'soft' drugs like mushrooms and weed is because the powers-that-be can't make a profit off of it. Or they could, but they would have to compete with home grown.
That doesn't stop the industry though; in the past few years in my country (Netherlands, famously tolerant but in a weird way to weed) you can get CBD oils and products off-the-shelf, alongside things like melatonin and whatnot. They've made it a consumer product and much more socially acceptable.
At the moment there's trials going on for the legal production of weed in greenhouses; up until then, all production was done illegaly in people's basements / attics, or via skirting the rules: legally you can have... I forgot, 1, 2 or 3 plants in your house (it used to be 7 but then the plants got bigger). There's "companies" now (they call themselves a foundation, charity or private club) that will offer to put a grow tent in your house if you have a spare room, just needs some electricity and water, they'll come and harvest it once it's done and you get a share of it and / or paid for it.
It took the EU all of ten seconds to reject opiates for minor use -- the opioid crisis is very much manufactured and endured in North America and is a regulatory failing of the FDA. The most crucial distinction here is the addictiveness of psilocybin vs opioids, mushrooms are not remotely addictive relative to opioids.
But neither of these chemicals are magic. A lot of people are looking for magic pills. A lot of companies want to sell you magic pills. Take a couple pills and your problems go away; that's just not achievable anytime soon. We have to get better as a Western society of supporting people on their various, multifaceted journeys through life.
And this is a very bad state of mind to be in when starting psychedelics. I wonder how people usually deal with that.
I have heard second-hand reports of users who tapered their SSRI treatment, and on first exposure to psychedelics, had a severe negative response (to the point of re-traumatisation). So you're correct, this is exceptionally difficult to do correctly.
That's the sad thing about those pills I guess, it's that you stay on them or you get better.
Mindfulness, communication, learning how to rest and better time management techniques have more than likely done more for my mental health than the SSRIs. I'd love to taper off with them one day but we'll see.
Which pharmaceutical is going to back this clinical trial though??
Doubtful that these things will cure depression though
What if certain things about your brain are gonna just be like that for life and you're the only one who has the burden of dealing with it? How will you?
What if what you're striving for in life is realistically _unattainable_ and something about your brain thinks it is so you try really hard to fight reality and get depressed? You have to unlearn bad habits your brain picked up over time that it merely thought were good survival skills at the moment.
SSRI or psychedelics alone will not fully help a person. They can be a step in the right direction. The body keeps the score.
Don't undersell the value of learning how to rest. It is more complex and has far more healing power than the understated phrasing implies. A lot of important processes in the body only take place when the parasympathetic nervous system is active (including proper digestion, which is where all of our neurotransmitters come from either directly or by way of precursor molecules). This is likely a big part of why chronic stress is so strongly correlated with poor health.
I've heard of tinctures made by dissolving them in alcohol, but I don't think even those are measured objectively. No idea what sort of titration/measurement you'd do to determine the mg amount of psilocybin, or if that's even well documented.
Weights you read are dry weights.
> tincture
Tinctures at least homogenize. So a “0.05g” dose of a tincture is consistent within the batch, and more consistent between batches.
This is how medicine worked up to the 19th century.
> I've heard of tinctures made by dissolving them in alcohol, but I don't think even those are measured objectively. No idea what sort of titration/measurement you'd do to determine the mg amount of psilocybin, or if that's even well documented.
You could create a tincture and test it. And like the other person who replied said, the doses will be consistent.
Personally I took magic mushrooms once. I've always been an anxious person. For at least 2 or 3 months after. My anxiety was gone like never before, I was not scared of anything or talking to anyone. I was the most free I ever was. Ive been wanting to take another dose soon, I think I should... 1g.
I make full spectrum CBD oil for myself and family. It has a very real effect too. Much more powerful than most CBD products you can purchase, because it will contain more than pure CBD. Its the same process as a tincture with a few steps after. I turn 4 ounces (112g) into 60ml. ~300+ mg/g, take 0.05-0.1g. I think the benefits should be experienced without expectations, because they can vary. Helps with stress, anxiety, blood pressure, inflammation and some pain, arthritis, and others. There are some other compounds in this plant that can help with other things. CBG/A CBN, CBDA. A tiny bit of THC, which is naturally found in tiny amounts in most CBD containing plants, increases the effects of the others greatly. Too much THC alone has a negative impact if you continue long term use, at least on me. These compounds effect the endocannabinoid system, but have some off target activity which is why a variety of similar compounds can have a lot of different effects. Those other compounds can help with different issues-digestion, sleep. Keeping a decent amount of CBD/G(A) (by not cooking/heating it) is important too.
I am a very scientific person, and I understand some people are weary of this type of medicine. But what is your alternative? Eat the pills by big pharma filled with lies to sell drugs and make money? Take an SSRI so you can kill your sex drive and feel like a zombie? Maybe that won't happen to you, and I understand that they help some or many people. But if you understood the potential negative effects, and that some of them can be permanent, would you still be okay with starting it yourself? Perhaps something that has grown in nature with us can be beneficial, we came from the same planet, we evolved together. We consider other plants and vegetables from this earth to be healthy for us, why? Coffee, tea, in moderation, are good for you too. Tea is more than just caffeine.
But taking those mushrooms, one can see that there is something real in that direction, just obscured by millennia of deceit and misdirection.
If the PiHole is to blame (haven't checked yet), I guess it sort of makes sense that I can't expect to read TFA when offering neither tracking nor dollars in return.
As noted elsewhere, it is powerful medicine and not without risks. But we also need to remember that many other medications come with significant risk as well, including suicidal ideation.
So yes, it's powerful and should be treated with respect, but many of those other medications don't require you to spend thousands of dollars to have a baby sitter whilst taking it.
Finding a friend to babysit is not always easy. I've got this crazy idea on setting up a cooperative to do something like that. Leverage existing guides from tripsitters.org and others. Develop protocol and legal indemnification, identify suitable locations (nature!), etc.
I'd love to chat this up with anybody who doesn't think it's crazy (and even those that do, to disabuse me of this notion). There's another spin on it too that I need to write out and find likeminded souls to explore...
I have written out a bit of the experience, I can share it with you if you'd like. We're still in the planning phase.
I've had "friends" in the OTO and that is something I'd like to avoid, but yes, please! My contact info is in my profile -- please ping me, as I'd love to get involved.
Creepy dudes using mysticism to get laid
That said, a good friend (or more) who has experience with psychedelics can also really help.
I solved a bad trip one time by turning the TV off in the other room. It was almost inaudible to me, but it was playing WWE and it was just... negative. Turned it off and everything was fine, but the other babysitter (someone who'd never done psychedelics) couldn't be convinced that the TV was the issue because they couldn't see how negativity could cause a bad trip.
This is all probably just bias on my part. No reason a professional psychologist couldn't make these connections too.
You can get a growkit for 40USD and get four flushes of shrooms off of it.
All of this "baby sitter" BS is just so much BS. I'd rather be baby sitted by a friend than a nondescript "medical professional".
Almost makes me wanna say "wake up, sheeple"
A society might be allowed to have safety mechanism in place but otherwise nothing else.
A athletic person gets health care, a fat person gets health care.
In worst case we just triage.
But this would definitely be something the society would be allowed to regulate:
The society can say 'you can take any drug you want but if you take x you become second in line'
That would be transparent and fair but we don't even have this type of discussion.
And while I get Ritalin from my doctor the other one is with one leg in prison for either speed or crystal.
At the end of the day keeping this hidden is more of a problem than not. Educating people is critical but no one feels educated by police.
And the fat person may well have a lower lifetime total healthcare cost.
When I meant athletic person I actually thought about injuries.
We could as a society outlaw anything and everything that would statistically burden our healthcare system, but in the end we would be living in a fairly boring world.
At a forum of people who are mostly software engineers and embrace the sedentary lifestyle, to talk about a "healthcare gap" WRT drugs is ludicrous.
Sitting for 8+ hours a day will injure your health more than a cocaine addiction would. Source: Have experience with both.
Anecdotal, etc. all the disclaimers apply (obligatory disclaimer for the half-smart bros)
You're supposed to have initial therapy sessions leading up to the journey, sessions after, and two journies two weeks apart.
Psychedelics can change your mind but do them with help in the right setting.
It was useful for my wife and I gift it to any female friend who ventures into psychedelics.
Typical capitalist rag take on the situation: it doesn't exist until a rich guy makes money on it...
She later apologized and said she thought I was joking. We don't talk anymore.
As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It is interesting to observe, retrospectively, how the brain can adopt a new set of axioms and coerce every one of the "senses" into supporting those axioms - no matter how detached from "our typical understanding of reality" (whatever that means) they are.
In short, I had lost all faith in the "official narrative" of creation/existence/whatever as taught in schools/society/etc. that I had grown up believing (growing up I'd have called myself atheist, then agnostic). You might call this an anti-science view, but I'd counter it is more scientific to reject a theory when it does not match observations than to keep it just because it's "the standard". Anyways, this put me on a path of not knowing anything to believe, which is to say any seemingly small flashback/thought/whatever could shatter whatever worldview I had been temporarily existing in and send me into a seizure.
This continued for some time until I began to be touched by what christians would call the Holy Spirit, which guided me towards preachers of the Gospels (aka "The Word", aka "Jesus Christ" (see John 1)). I began to see the innate truth presented by The Word, as I saw how my lived experiences were consistently in agreement with it. For one, I embraced prayer and observed the Father respond to it.
Basically, I built up a new worldview around The Word (Jesus Christ) and it has been unshakable, in stark contrast to all the attempts I had made to do the same without Jesus (Matthew 7:24-27 summarizes this well).
(For those following along, this is a cute and fun example of Scripture being used to rebuke attempts to shake the foundation. The forces that be typically aren't so overt.)
Ephesians 5:18 instructs us to "not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit". And it is indeed accurate that the feeling is a higher high than wine or weed will take you. I suppose molly or heroin might be superior but I have no experience with those. And there's something psychologically nice about feeling good because you are doing the God-ordained right-thing, versus simply hijacking chemical receptors. And the Holy Spirit has no "come-down", which is nice.
Do you have Scriptural support for that? It seems like the Holy Spirit often communicated with words (e.g., "the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.”"), unless you think that is simply the way it is recorded
Brainwashing is real. Just make people really emotionally unstable and then hit them with an onslaught of social pressure with a vision.
https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neu...
> As for recovery, Jesus saved me. He can save your friend too, if she lets Him.
It's best not to proselytize on HN. It's ok to talk about your own experience of course, but when it starts to move into standard religious tropes, that's already a kind of flamebait and discussion quality plummets, and boy did that happen in this thread.