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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Having myself spent a period of my life thinking that all the world's problems would vanish if only we all took more LSD, MDMA and DMT... and since realizing that there really is no substitute for honesty, self-sacrifice and hard work... I'm reminded of Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing:

... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

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I had a similar phase myself. Though I still genuinely believe that every person should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their lifetime, as well as a talk-session with close friends while on MDMA.

These two things radically shifted my life perspective and resolved a lot of inner issues, both after just a single time.

Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.

Were you racist, xenophobic, and hateful before? If not, your realizations about their productivity aren’t particularly relevant.

I don't think that's true. Even if someone doesn't explicitly hold those views, one can still be complacent, ignorant, or subtly enabling of them. Seeing things from a different perspective can provide insight into how relevant certain ideas are to the larger picture of humanity.

You’re saying the mindset one would have going into it is one of “I’m not personally hateful, xenophobic, or racist, but I can see how those are all logical and productive things to be”?

I don’t believe that mindset exists.

I think that’s exactly the mindset of most people because they don’t think they’re being racist, xenophobic, etc.

If someone were to grow up in an economy built on coal mining with 13 year old miners, and you’re really effective at organizing 13 year old coal miners, then you’re gonna be very productive.

Even though everything that you’re doing is existentially bad for everybody, they are all ignorant of it’s harms. So even if temporally coal mining with miners might be the only thing that anyone is aware of to do that is “productive.”

You can make no “mistakes” and still lose just from ignorance

Your anecdote does nothing to address the root complaint; which is that if one is to make extraordinary claims (LSD is “great for” dismantling hated, etc.), they should have some actual extraordinary experience to support it. Something like a personal experience. Otherwise it’s just more “LSD is so good, it solved problems I didn’t even have” nonsense.

No, that's not what I said at all. I think someone could believe that they're not personally hateful, xenophobic, or racist while still being unconsciously complacent, ignorant, or subtly enabling of those attitudes in themselves and others. I can see how a psychedelic trip could show someone a different perspective, causing them to change their beliefs and behavior in significant ways.

That may be true, but if someone is to make a claim that it is “great for showing hatred…”, I think more proof should be offered than some other person saying “I could see how…”.

I don't think I understand your argument. Your claim was that if someone wasn't already racist and xenophobic, then their epiphanies about that subject on psychedelics is irrelevant. However, a very common experience people have on psychedelics is the feeling that everything, including the entirety of humanity, is part of the same thing, and that anything other than love for all of it comes from an artificially limited perspective. I think that's extremely relevant to having a different perspective on racism and xenophobia and their absurdity, even if the person wasn't racist and xenophobic going in.

If someone who wasn’t racist says they took LSD and found themselves one with all races, and ended up continuing to not be racist, that doesn’t tell me in any way that LSD is “great” for dismantling racism.

All I’m saying is that if someone is to make extraordinary claims “this drug is great against racism”, they should be able to back it up with more than “well I wasn’t racist before, and I’m still not, and besides we’re all one so why would someone else be?”

You should go back and re-read gavinray's post. I don't think they were making a claim anywhere near as strong as the claim that LSD is great for dismantling racism.

> Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.

I’m well aware of the claim. I’m the one who protested it to begin with. And I still have found no evidence that the parent hadn’t realized any of those beforehand.

I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of what they said, and not how I interpreted it, but ok. It seems like I'm not going to convince you otherwise.

I just want evidence for the claim, but nobody wants to provide it, or even consider that requesting evidence is a valid response.

This is the exact kind of behavior that gets the psychs-solve-everything crowd dismissed.

If you Ctrl+F for my other responses in the thread, you'll see that I'm not advocating for psychs-solve-everything. I think a reasonable interpretation is that gavinray was giving their personal experience, not making a sweeping scientific claim. It would be like if I read a book that gave me a perspective on racism I had never thought of before, and I said "this book is great at showing you how racism is absurd!" It's not the kind of claim you would jump on and ask for a scientific study. In general, it's a good idea to take the most charitable version of what someone says, because people aren't always perfectly precise in their language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I've personally seen someone go from racist, xenophobic and hateful to not in the space of a single trip.

Wow, I'd love to witness something like that one day. My circle doesn't include a lot of these people, and maybe that in itself is part of the more general problem.

And if they wanted to talk about it, I’d listen. Where I protest is when people make grandiose claims like “this solved so many problems for me, it even solved problems that I didn’t have!”, which only serve to perpetuate the modern hippie-dippie stereotype.

How would you even see that? Can you describe in more detail?

We were both tripping. Fairly recent acquaintances, I had no idea about his views, until it came up during conversation. We ended up talking about it for several hours. I stayed non-judgemental and just kept probing with questions about why he feels this way. Eventually he realised he was really just angry about the failures in his own life and the local community he was from. He'd picked up a bad media diet(neocon youtube...) and found some kind of relief I suppose in directing his anger at others. There was a lot of crying. He even thanked me the next day.

I think that's about as detailed as I can get without revealing private information.

It was a remarkable experience and fundamentally changed the way I think about the human mind, extreme political views, political dialogue, and most of all how therapy should work.

Transorbital lobotomy would achieve that result too.

I wasn't racist or xenophobic, but I had a lot of spite and a fairly negative world-view due to experiences I had growing up.

I had a chip on my shoulder, so to speak.

YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't. The only life changing thing was I was down some cash which I could have spent on something else. A friend at the time took it and killed themselves a month later.

Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science. But it's difficult to be anything but subjective about it if you have experienced it. I suspect any critical thinking becomes biased and that relationship requires some analysis as well.

Boring take I know but to pose a question: at the level of society if it is normalised, does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?

>A friend at the time took it [LSD] and killed themselves a month later.

Do you think the two events could be otherwise related?

As you then say "Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science."

>...does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?

It's a great question, but banning it, so the quality of the chemical supplied then may be suspect, and the dosages may be wildly different - and seeing what happens over 60+ years was an incorrect move.

Yes they are 100% related. The side effect was triggering underlying schizophrenia. Which is why we need controlled research.

>> does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?

If everyone took them in a context conducive to healing/therapy it would be positive. Unfortunately that's rarely the case (though it's becoming more common).

Well that's not how you need to test it really and is not an objective measure. That's a badly posed question. It should be compared to other forms of therapy. And the criteria for entering therapy needs to be understood.

> YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't.

For me, despite regularly taking high doses of psychedelics (so far LSD and psilocybin), none of them have been huge life-shattering trips. They're just recreational experiences.

Maybe I'm just neurodivergent in a very specific way that isn't easily impacted by psychedelics. They're still my favorite substances and I still enjoy them, but it hasn't made that big of an impact on my life, other than being something to spend my money on, like you say.

Or maybe people with self-proclaimed life-shattering experiences are just extrapolating more out of their trip than what actually happened.

I'm sure plenty of people have legitimately improved their lives this way, but I don't believe the hype.

Do we hold things like alcohol or tiktok to the same level of rigor?

> when we need science.

Do SSRIs beat placebo?

My son "forgot" his asthma after one dose of LSD. Literally - 1.5 year and no problems.

That was absolutely unexpected effect. I still don't know what to think about it.

I'm not a psychodelic enthusiast

I had asthma as a kid. I stopped taking the meds at 15 and had no problems since. YMMV. Would require a study.

I suspect it was something similar: he had real asthma during childhood but continued taking meds when they were not really needed.

After LSD he just "forgot" to take them

> YMMV. I took LSD. It didn't do a whole lot other than make me think I could play the piano when I definitely can't. The only life changing thing was I was down some cash which I could have spent on something else. A friend at the time took it and killed themselves a month later.

I remember one trip I was reading this book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Very new-agey, acid culture type thing. A very spiritually intense book

I remember having this lingering feeling of "I probably shouldn't be doing these" because of some mental health history on my mother's side of the family. I remember there was this part of it about how people go insane off of psychedelics, turning the page and seeing this lightning bolt hitting a giant tower and seeing a bunch of people falling to the ground out of it. And right when I saw that, I heard the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my entire life (it was raining outside). Like it shook the whole fucking house

Afterwards I looked up the dude who wrote the book, saw he was a "new age" guy with a white robe on and sort of felt like I was tricked, and that the lightning was some type of coincidence. In hindsight I see this as pride from my part. Also that was the last time I did a psychedelic. There's this saying with them where "you get the message and hang up the phone", that was my cue

I was an atheist up to this point but that scared this fear into me that there's something out there. You can rationalize and come up with reasons to deny that (it isn't hard), but I'd rather not personally. At least, I feel more at peace now after accepting that there is

MDMA in particular has such obvious usefulness for relationship/marriage counseling therapy.

After many years of experimenting with pretty much every conventional and 'research' drug, MDMA is the only one that stands out to me personally as having a lasting impact on how I view the world.

I had the same experience, minus MDMA (never had the chance) and the racism stuff. Completely changed my mental shape at age 47 when I tried mushrooms for the first time (also my first psychedelic). Not a do-frequently thing but genuinely mind opening.

The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well... good grief.

Microdosing is supposed to be at an imperceptible level. The people that do it correctly don't feel high. If you can feel it, it's not a microdose.

> The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well… good grief.

I think this is overly dismissive. I don’t think we should all be taking drugs to squeeze every bit out of ourselves out into the next jira ticket, but elsewhere in the thread there’s a comment discussing fundamental breakthroughs in networking technology that came about after an LSD trip. If someone believes that microdosing improves the creativity and overall satisfaction with their job, is that a bad thing?

IMHO yes.

Objectively, those people are normalizing performance-enhancing drugs and the usual vicious cycle that goes with it.

Less objectively, they also tend to be the typically soul-less nerds who have made the technology industry so malicious.

"We should continue to keep our borders unchecked. Source? It was revealed to me in a psychedelic dream."

You should run for office with that platform and see how far it carries you.

I don't think psychedelics are a panacea but they'll likely help the world move in a positive direction: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/09/25/strange-trip-psychedelics....

MDMA may also be the only, or among the few, things that really work in and for couples therapy (it's also not a panacea). Banning it is a travesty.

There's an interesting alternative world chronicled in part by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, and by others, in which psychedelics are integrated into therapy, psychiatry, and other forms of medicine and improvement.

Unlike LSD or psilocybin, MDMA causes addiction, so there is some ground for a ban.

The effects of LSD and psilocybin can still sometimes result in some degree of psychological addiction, just not physical dependence.

MDMA can cause permanent tolerance and brain damage, and even though there has been plenty of research and testing by harm-reduction communities (like Bluelight), it's still not fully understood how this works or how to guarantee the substance's safety. This is probably why it should stay banned, at least for now.

LSD and psilocybin are much safer, in my opinion. I would probably say LSD is the safest, since high doses of psilocybin can render me unconscious, but that could just be me.

I'm not sure what good comes from "banning". The people who want to do it are going to do it anyway, but now you have a lot of folks taking unknown substances at unknown doses, and sometimes getting arrested and ending up with a record. Bad all around.

Yes, I share this sentiment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38992990

Simply unbanning MDMA with no further action though wouldn't be very productive right now when it still is quite unknown. I hope more research and clinical trials can be done in the future, with all sorts of things and not just MDMA.

Most people who try these things briefly entertain these ideas. They are really interesting and have the potential to trigger positive breakthroughs in a person’s thinking. They also have high potential in therapy for things like PTSD and depression.

But all you have to do is spend a little time around drug users or pay attention to the discourse in psychedelic friendly circles (Joe Rogan and Russell Brand anyone?) to see that drugs are not some kind of magic enlightenment in a pill. If they were there’d be more enlightened drug users.

There is also the example of the Canadian psychologist, Elliot Barker, who tried to treat criminal psychopaths with LSD, only for researchers to later learn that it made them more psychopathic and re-offend at higher rates.

Interesting, do you have a good source for this? Based on personal experience, it does seem somewhat intuitive that psychedelics would make you be more comfortable being "you", regardless of who you really are.

It’s covered to a fair extent in Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. I believe this is the retrospective study on rates of recidivism:

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02352266

It's not necessarily that psychedelics make you more comfortable with yourself. Psychedelics can reinforce the psychopathic way of thinking. I'm not a psychopath (...as far as I can tell), but I can think similarly to one when sober. For me, LSD can intensify that way of thinking. It can intensify everything, to be fair, but the way you think while on it can be... I guess "conducive to psychopathy"? If a psychopath is missing emotion/conscience and is given LSD, then they can end up with far more ways to manipulate their own thoughts in a way that supports their psychopathy, if that makes any sense.

Maybe, it's like with programming.

You can code a game, a database, an OS, a framework, a LLM etc. with one tool.

Set and setting are critical factors in the outcome of any use of psychedelics, particularly for naive users unfamiliar with the effects. Practically speaking, this means LSD could plausibly be used in both cult brainwashing and cult deprogramming activities. That's why the CIA thought it could be used as a mind control / interrogation tool in the early 1950s (e.g. MKULTRA), while others adopted it as a liberating creative tool for artists (indeed, I once met a classically trained flutist who reported that they found it impossible to improvise over a jazz chord progression until they tried LSD).

Personally I think a great many of the problem outcomes with psychedelics is related to consumerism and the desire for quick fixes. A society blanketed with pharmaceutical advertising and indoctrinated with the notion that pills fix health problems will tend to generate individuals who think taking some drug will 'fix' them. A typical outcome for such people is that they try some psychedelic, have a great time, and then run back to the well for another taste, and then have a horrible grim experience, reliving some past personal trauma or consumed with morbid thoughts of death and darkness, etc. - the so-called 'bad trip'. Let alone people who take so much they completely dissociate with sensory reality, a very dangerous situation as they may fall off cliffs, walk into traffic, etc.

More often than not, people indoctrinated into consumerist drug use will instead turn to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzos, etc. - all drugs with fairly predictable feel-good effects, a variety of negative health effects, and high addiction potential - but not much risk of a 'bad trip'. In contrast, psychedelics have potential for combatting addiction to such drugs because they lead to introspection, self-reflection, and the realization that the short-term feel-good effects of addictive drugs are not worth the long-term consequences - the degradation of ones' mental and physical capabilities, degraded social relationships, loss of emotional control and so on.

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