And N=1 but I can say without any doubt that LSD (and a pretty low dose at that, 50ug at once plus some microdosing) played an immense role at recovering from burnout. It was like night and day even after such a low dose that I _knew_ I recovered.
Those are amazing and powerful but also potentially dangerous substances and it’s a crime that we don’t allow everyone to get the benefits by, if not freely legalize it, at least adding those in the medical toolbox.
Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that—that is—scares people so deeply? Even the guy that invented it. What is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in, we might learn somethin' that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control"
--Ken Kasey
Would love to read, what's it called?
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but it's important to understand that according to federal law it's not actual legal to possess them regardless of which state you're in.
They're still illegal under federal law. A person could technically be prosecuted at the federal level even in a state that doesn't have state-level laws against it, though that's unlikely in practice.
To be clear, this compound they're testing is also a Schedule 1 drug. COMP360 is their name for their psilocybin formulation. It's not a separate chemical, it is literally psilocybin.
Schedule 1 drugs can be used in clinical trials. Positive results in a clinical trial does not automatically remove the Schedule 1 designation. The medication is not approved yet and the clinical trial results are preliminary.
https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.x...
> "Researchers have called attention to the ways that the hype promoting psychedelics as miracle cures
replicates preceding claims about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants in prior decades.
As the drug historian David Herzberg articulated in conversation with UC Berkeley's The Microdose:
There’s been an enormous amount of money invested in psychedelics as people hope that they
can be the real Prozac in the same way that Prozac hoped it would be the real Valium and
Valium would be the real barbiturates, which would be the real morphine.
There’s a long history of hoping that maybe this time, it’s not so complicated;
maybe there is a simple switch to change people without having to change any [other] aspect of their [lives].
While others have noted similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications,
the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and magico-religious aspirations that have no parallel
in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. I argue that this utopian discourse provides insight
into the ways that global financial and tech elites are instrumentalizing psychedelics as one tool
in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality.
This elite project reveals how medicalized psychedelics can potentially undermine the very prosocial and
pro-environmental outcomes that the field's funders insist psychedelics will promote.
To understand the envisioned role of psychedelics within this elite project, this paper analyzes a different
parallel hype, revealing correspondences between the psychedelic industry hype and the concurrent
hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), including the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT.
The presence of these parallels is understandable when one considers their underlying affinities,
like two blooms from one plant: the same Silicon Valley and venture capital forces are investing
enormous amounts of capital to develop both as cultivars in their own image,
selecting for desired traits that further the existing socioeconomic order.The difference with psychedelics is that they enable and manifest those behavioral changes.