It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.
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.