A real fMRI high: My ecstasy brain scan

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/23/magic-mushroom... )

For any of you HNers out there hesitant to utilizing any of these of substances in your life, remember that they help change your perspective and allow you to look at problems from new angles. I will leave you with a Steve Jobs quote on the topic:

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/...

Simplification: the act of recollection involves the memory being erased and then rewritten. If you're "happy" when you rewrite it then some of the negative emotions get knocked off for the next time you recall it.

In case anyone is not already aware, David Nutt was the head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), a scientific advisory body to the UK government. In 2009 he published an editorial comparing the harm from taking ecstasy (MDMA) to the harm from horse riding (in short, you can make a powerful case that horse riding is much more dangerous than taking ecstasy). In October 2009 he was dismissed from his position, because "he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy."

In my view it was a terrible decision by the UK government, and showcased their reluctance to make evidence-based decisions on politically charged subjects (like drugs, prison sentences, immigration etc). Since then, David Nutt has formed the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD), whose website [1] is well worth visiting if you want the most up to date and scientifically reliable information on drugs.

[1] http://www.drugscience.org.uk/

Recreational use of MDMA has given me panic attacks, increased anxiety, emotional dependence and depression. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence online that tells the same story, which is something you rarely hear anyone talk about. It seems like different people respond differently to MDMA. Perhaps it's dependent on your personality or brain chemistry. For people like me the effect on the serotonin system in the brain can be very dangerous and sometimes cause permanent damage.

I used to be very liberal towards drug use in general until I experienced the down sides first hand.

The short version is that there is lots of DEA-funded propaganda and verifiably flawed scientific studies out there. Buddhist monks and therapists have used MDMA before in their practice where they claim that one dose of MDMA is equivalent to a full year of couples therapy. I'm really glad more research is going on in the open about MDMA; for too long it's just been the DEA using fear mongering.

Psychedelics have become a small but important part of my spiritual practice, yet I do not belong to Santo Daime or the UDV so my practice is illegal. I find it strange and quite sad that a person following his or her own path is not granted the same legal rights as someone who chooses a path with the defined structure of a church. I guess we haven't gotten past persecuting our alchemists and witches yet.

Mushrooms, MDMA, DMT, are category 1 drugs in the US, which means that there is no known medical use for them according to the government. This is a very sad joke.

This is why it's impossible to do a truly double blind study of this kind. So you give them MDMA or psilocybin and ask if it helped their PTSD therapy or if they had a religious experience, and they are more likely to say yes.

I remember, years ago, seeing brain scans showing something like serotonin receptors before MDMA usage, and months after, and if i remember right, things hadn't gotten back to normal long after. Anyone know anything about the long term effects?

I wonder to what extent this can affect the readings of the MRI. Any brain scientist in the crowd?

'The hypothesis was that MDMA would make the negative memories less painful. "We saw a boosted brain response to positive memories, and a weaker response to negative ones," says Carhart-Harris. "It fits the idea that MDMA can help people access negative memories without being overwhelmed by them and they might be able to change the way they feel about what happened."'

I have Asperger's, and so not only have I a pallid response to gore or human pain but I can understand it, visualize it, repeat it in thought, allot it a mental space. Horrific murder is latent with images, which I believe only become a growing gestalt in the mind's of those humans with Optimally Performing Long-Term Memories. It is perpetual moral education, as if with an admonishing tone, on the significance of human life. The morbid sense of humor which Aspies tend to develop becomes a fatal flaw in a world incapable of sustaining its own net happiness. (News which promulgates, indirectly, our Net Unhappiness Quotient. -- News becomes the Negative Nancy to unwitting optimists, aspie or otherwise. Granted, good news without explanation is pointless, and News' marketing format is non-amenable to Demonstration, Explanation, Maturation, and Observation (DEMO) of Knowledge.)

Of course a point is often made that industrial capitalism depends on a sufficiently self-imposed unhappiness, otherwise "no one would work," etc. The cost, however, is that those who can remember what is good in "bargain reality," and remember it well, flack and flail at those who are habitually forgetful, habitually like an agent whose sense of time must be perpetually engineered for them.

MDMA does not "wake one up" but established a greater memory retention for those events existentially nurturing to one's happiness.