Hallucinogen in ‘magic mushrooms’ might have helped smokers quit
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
YMMV.
I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use. That goes for a fair number of prescription drugs as well for reference.
Consequentially the chain of events is pretty obvious but ultimately everyone kicked him out, especially his girlfriend who couldn't cope with him kicking the shit out of her randomly and then being completely normal 20 seconds later.
Eventually they managed to help him get control over it with a cocktail of drugs but he's not the same now. The drugs they give him take away most of his good traits as well as the bad ones.
A shell of a human for the sake of one mistake.
Not saying the problems may never have manifested themselves at all but the sudden change was unbelievable.
Being 100% honest, I did some experimentation back in my student days and was damn lucky. Now in my late 30s, people who stayed with it aren't the same anymore. It's destroyed them entirely. I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late. One of my friends got a first in his degree (electrical engineering) but is so fucked up now from just smoking pot that he can't even hold down a job stacking shelves in Tesco.
All I see is self-destruction and it makes me very sad and angry.
Edit: I expect downvotes as you can't have rational discussion with the pro-drugs crowd on the Internet. I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise. Even the fact I have to suffix the post with this shows the sad state of affairs.
Edit: 3 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd.
> . I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late.
Okay, I'm gonna be that 25-year old: It seems to depend on the dosage, like almost any substance use. It's fine to smoke some hash every two weeks or maybe even a bit every evening, but if your friend is one of those who spend most of their day doing nothing besides smoking pot, then of course that destroys you just like drinking beer for the whole day.
Still, sad to hear.
Or the downvotes could relate to your unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than your own.
Well, that was definitely mistake #1; psychedelics require the right set & setting. That with the possibility of him not knowing he had a mental illness is probably what did it. Also, there is a possibility that he was given a different kind of mushrooms, like amanita.
Drugs, food, anything for that matter, when taken to excess can be damaging, like what happened with your friend.
Personal anecdote, which you've been relying on so far.. LSD helped my depression and allowed me to quit adderall and weed. With shrooms, my anxiety got better and I quit my fap/porn addiction. I will be going to Peru in 2 weeks to do Ayahuasca (DMT) to help me get over my childhood sexual trauma. You can't lump all drugs into one category; psychedelics might as well be called "medicine".
The whole mantra of "do unto others..." (the golden rule) goes out of the window the moment you start taking drugs.
We all have a social responsibility if we like it or not and taking drugs is not responsible in any way.
(neither is drinking, smoking etc but that's another debate)
Lets say I'm fed up with my life and decide I want to drop out of Stanford and go live in the wild on my own, doing my own hunting, and at large leaving society. This decision is going to greatly affect my parents, my close friends, and (if I have any) my kids.
Should it be illegal though?
Everything we do affects other people. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, but drugs are not much different from other major life decisions. Deciding to climb Mount Everest is dangerous; you've got a high probability of dying. Deciding to repeat this every year is exceedingly dangerous, experience won't protect you from many of the things that kill climbers. Should mountain climbing be illegal for people who have friends and family/dependents?
There are responsible approaches to drug use, and how it affects me and my ability to be a person should not be your primary concern. If it makes me commit crimes, you now have a case, but until I've committed crimes, my life is my own, and the fact that my life decisions impact my friends does not mean that I do not have control over what those decisions are.
Social responsibility is a construct that should be enforced socially (IE my wife pressuring to leave me and take the kids if I keep mountain climbing), not legally.
Should cars be banned?
My wife had to quit her job as a psychiatric nurse because of the violence from drug addicts. She was punched in the face five times by someone who wanted his methadone.
Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized.
I'm in the UK as well. The last thing we need is more health expenditure on this.
Edit: 1 downvote from the pro-drugs crowd.
Edit: seeing as HN has restricted by posting rate...
He wasn't in the hospital because he needed methadone. He was in the hospital because his drug problem had lead to him passing out in the street, flies had laid eggs in his legs and maggots were crawling out of them and he was going to die from infection. My wife was trying to help him. The only reason that he wanted methadone is because they won't give him the real stuff in the hospital, which he could get his hands on without any trouble outside the doors so availability is not a problem.
Another edit: work in a psych ward. 95% of people in there are violent addicts of various substances. This is not a coincidence.
Well, presumably he wouldn't have needed methadone, because the drug he was addicted to would've been available for a reasonable price at a known potency.
Conversations like this require clarity.
It's a travesty that rational discussion is impossible.
It's difficult when you are entirely dismissive of an idea because of a few bad personal experiences. Literally, there is nothing else to your argument besides that. That is neither compelling nor rational.
Furthermore, upon the shaky basis of your beliefs, you want drug use to be forbidden for everyone. Take away the rights of everyone because of a few bad apples.. if you're going to do that, you better present some VERY compelling evidence. You have presented none.
Not only that, but you have ignored the positive effects of drug decriminalization. Portugal was pointed out - nothing from you. Portugal has seen a decrease in new HIV cases, fewer overdoses, and a large uptick in people seeking drug treatment.
And at the end of the day, you're not going to stop people from using drugs. Keeping them illegal doesn't seem to work. Keeping them illegal means people will get bunk drugs, a danger it it's own. Keeping them illegal forces drug users to buy from drug dealers, the chain eventually leading back to drug cartels and violence; if drugs were legal, less money would make its way back to cartels. In the United States, the war on drugs aka prohibition costs a ton of money, puts a ton of people needlessly in prison, and we still have a ton of addicts. It's a lose-lose-lose situation.
On the issue of mushrooms (since opiate addiction is a much different problem), the only thing I'm hearing from you is that ONE guy had his life spiral out of control because of mushrooms. Have you even considered the number of people that mushrooms has helped? I could point to plenty of anecdotes of people who self-treated their depression with psychedelic drugs and were quite successful at it.
Every one of us can answer individually only with anecdotes, other than my wife who spent the best part of a decade dealing with drug addicts. They in turn dealt with the police who deal with the problem at the source. There are very few cases of "healthy" drug use, if any out there, at least in the UK as it stands.
Yes I do indeed want drugs to remain forbidden for everyone because the population is generally irresponsible and illogical and will quite happily smoke, drink and destroy each other. That's just the human race; at least 25% of it is self-destructive and the rest of us really want to protect our position. There's nothing wrong wit that. If the Westborough Baptist Church moved in next door, you'd be pissed off right? Well I don't really want my taxes taken and applied to addiction care or rehabilitation that is unnecessary. I want it to be applied to general healthcare to help me through my life.
I'm entitled to think that and vote for it - that's a democracy.
Regarding Portugal, that's quoted a lot but the fact is, if you read into it that they haven't legalised drugs at all. They have introduced possession limits at which point you are prosecuted. Selling drugs is still illegal. That's not blanket legalisation - that's a soundbite used by the pro-drug lobby, so stop quoting that horse shit.
For reference, HN decided I'd posted too much otherwise I'd have replied directly.
Mushrooms may have helped people but that's where recreational drug use and the medical sciences diverge. Anecdotes from the former and studies from the latter so it's little hypocritical saying what I'm saying is an anecdote and ending on one.
I have no problem with medical research being done and former recreational drugs being provided but only after someone has done an unbiased medical study and trialled it to the same standards as other medicines.
Scientific studies as well.
> They in turn dealt with the police who deal with the problem at the source.
In the United States, this is not the case at all. The police go after black people disproportionately when white people consume drugs at pretty much the same rate.
> There are very few cases of "healthy" drug use, if any out there, at least in the UK as it stands.
No basis/evidence for this belief.
> Well I don't really want my taxes taken and applied to addiction care or rehabilitation that is unnecessary.
Have you considered the possibility that it might be cheaper in the long run to legalize drugs?
> Regarding Portugal, that's quoted a lot but the fact is, if you read into it that they haven't legalised drugs at all.
I specifically said "decriminalization".
> They have introduced possession limits at which point you are prosecuted. Selling drugs is still illegal. That's not blanket legalisation - that's a soundbite used by the pro-drug lobby, so stop quoting that horse shit.
I thought you were writing a rational reply? I nowhere mentioned that Portugal legalized drugs. Decriminalization is, however, a step towards legalization.
And I am going to quote that "horse shit" because, even though it is contrary to your worldview, decriminalization produced many positive effects: http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experie....
"... less teen drug use, fewer HIV infections, fewer AIDS cases and more drugs seized by law enforcement. Adult drug use rates did slightly increase — but this increase was not greater than that seen in nearby countries that did not change their drug policies. The use of drugs by injection declined."
But that's just horse shit, right?
> Anecdotes from the former and studies from the latter so it's little hypocritical saying what I'm saying is an anecdote and ending on one.
I'm not using anecdotes as the basis for argument for/against drug legalization. I was pointing it out for you to consider since you are.
Unfortunately the health effects will not be known for perhaps another 15-20 years.
Then we'll see if it worked or not...
No, it really doesn't. For very small amounts of cannabis people mght get an on the spot fine (£90) and a warning - this has effects on CRB checks and visa and etc. please stop spreadin the myth that England has decriminalised cannabis.
And it's certainly not thecase for heroin nor crack.
Here's the problem with the experience of your wife (or anyone in medicine): selection bias. She only sees drug users whose use is a problem.
Even if positive drug experiences outnumbered negative ones ten-to-one, a hundred-to-one or even a million-to-one your wife would still have the same subjective impression: that all the drug users she sees are people who can't handle it. Same thing with the police officers. If somebody does drugs a few times and finds it a positive life experience, they probably don't go to a hospital or deal with cops.
Steve Jobs claimed taking LSD was one of the most important experiences in his life - he took it a dozen or so times (and smoked pot weekly for about 5 years). Many other people have made major creative breakthroughs or used these drugs to successfully deal with PTSD or depression. There is an upside. Your wife's experience by its very nature will never encounter that upside. So what she tells you is data, but not definitive data. You need to put it in a larger context to reach conclusions...which is where large-scale studies, Portugal and the rest comes in.
You'd have to offer some first. All I see is hysterical ranting coupled with bog-standard downvote whinging.
Alcohol leads to plenty of crimes, but look how prohibition worked out? Also, in the case of your friend who had schizophrenia triggered, does your friend know that the drug they were taking was what they believed it to be? Likely not. Another side effect of drug prohibition is that it leaves no place for quality control in the underground drugs market.
It deserved to be buried.
> Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized.
Perhaps it could be used to treat opiate addiction.
And some more from the "tired of seeing people complaining about downvotes crowd". Sometimes opinions are just crap. Yours was. Get over it.
Do you realise how stigmatising this sounds?
You're making links between mental ill health and violence (people with a MH illness are more likely to be the victim than perpetrator of violence); and you're saying all mental illness is drug related when it obviously is not. You're not correcting for people who had mental illness before they started taking drugs and are self-medicating.
The fact that your ward if full of people in terrible states shows how pisspoor treatment is for peope with mental illness in England.
Life is about risk, and everything we ingest has the risk to do terrible things to us. You can die from too much water. So the question isn't whether things or good or bad, rather who gets to assess the risk and what tools do they use?
Would I want my 16-year-old assessing the risk of magic mushrooms? Hell no. Would I want my drug addicted 35-year-old cousin? Yeah, probably. So the real question is who gets to decide. And why. I'm completely comfortable with some kind of psyilocybin addiction treatment coordinated (but not approved by) a GP or LCSW.
I also would rather not flip the coin on drug use, including a fair number of prescription drugs. But as a voter I remain convinced of my right to change my mind and not have others make that choice for me. The problem we're seeing now, that is only just getting started to be addressed, is that vast numbers of chemicals have been off-limits for even scientific exploration of benefits. That means nobody can assess the risk -- of things that might have great benefit to mankind. That's whacked.
Thou who bites off the latter, increases the former in psychiatric and general healthcare.
And that's not fair on everyone else. So perhaps you should forfeit your right to free healthcare when you make that choice?
(I speak with respect to the NHS in the UK).
For ref, I'm allergic to penicillin as well. Fortunately because we have research budgets, we have other antibiotics. Perhaps expenditure on drug related problems (crime, psych, healthcare) should be diverted into that?
Do you have data on the overall cost of legalization/decriminalization? Surely the decrease in the cost of incarcerating drug offenders is significant.
It's worse than that. As you know, many times effects can be randomly distributed. So ingesting substance X may kill or maim 70% of the people, do nothing in 29% of the people, and cure incurable cancer in 1%. So who gets to decide whether granddad, who is dying of this cancer, gets to take the substance or not?
The problem the western democracies have been struggling with for decades is that at some point somebody has to say "no". No, I will not pay for the consequences of your choice to smoke every day. No, I will not provide a treatment that may only work in 1% of cases. Somebody has to be an adult. Instead we hold conflicting ideas: I want to make my own choices vs. I want to live in a world where I do not have to worry about anything. Unfortunately the universe does not feel obliged to play along.
From historic experience, I don't think criminalizing things we don't want to pay for as a society is workable. How about providing some kind of long-term healthcare insurance that would cover people in a vegetative state for many years? Or just making it all open and informing people as much as possible what's going on around them? Because there's also a perverse aspect of the relationship you describe: by giving healthcare providers sole discretion over these things, we're also putting them in a position to define deviancy down.
I fear the real problem isn't making yourself into an addict for the rest of your life -- it's that the rest of us want a more homogeneous society in which fewer and fewer outliers are tolerated. That worries me from a statistical and evolutionary standpoint. We need our Edgar Allan Poes, our General Grants, our Gonzo Journalism. Yes, 99.9% of junkies are basically walking dead people. Then you run into a Freud. We can't sacrifice the Freuds in our empathy towards the others who are suffering.
Would I sacrifice 10% of the population on an ongoing basis to keep that kind of chaotic, creative, evolutionary potential? I don't there's even a question about it. It's an existential question, not a moral or philosophical one. This has been the natural state of our species for eons, and it's what brought us out of the savannah. The real question is why we would want to deviate from it.
I don't want to live in a totally-controlled world where I am unable to make capricious decisions affecting the rest of my life -- and I hold that opinion for purely pragmatic reasons. It does not sound like any kind of future state for mankind that we ever imagined (aside from dystopian fiction) It also does not sound like the species has much of a future if it keeps heading this way.
Freedom and natural variation sucks. Let's have more of it.
People in the drug underground use it to treat OCD and depression. I've heard of people saying they use it once or twice a year to "stop worrying so much" or "to get my head straight." What kind of addictive drug motivates people to want to break the law annually to take a drug just one time?
A well researched individual who is curious about LSD will know that LSD can trigger schizophrenia in people who are genetically predisposed for schizophrenia. If you aren't genetically disposed to schizophrenia, LSD is not going to cause schizophrenia. Greater amounts of studies and scientific research into drugs like this increase our knowledge and make their informed usage much less risky.
So, you like to make decisions for yourself do you? That's interesting because you seem to want to take away everyone else's capacity for making this same decision, by keeping all drugs illegal.
Maybe we should make Penicillin illegal next because my mum is allergic to it.
Drugs is one.
And yes I'm quite happy for this decision to be made for people.
The allergic to penicillin is a stupid comment. I'm allergic too but thanks to public funding and study, there are alternatives. If we had to put public health funding into addiction related problems, perhaps there wouldn't...
Also when drugs are legalised, what is to stop a pharmaceutical company trying to provide a superior experience with addiction so you come back (nicotine v2)?
where does the ethical line lie? Right at the start.
What if more people would realize that they're constantly being controlled by fear created by commercial and governmental interests? This loss of power probably contributes to the fact that such substances are mostly banned.
I don't want to believe people want to keep others from their own choices, but I also know they exist.
I've been on the anarchist side of things for a lot longer than I've been doing psychedelics, but certainly on psychedelics you are more aware of the things constraining you. I remember being in a convenience store on 300ug of LSD, and seeing rows and rows of products. And my mind would look at a box of food and think "wow! that food says it's healthy for my family - I want to buy it", and looking at the next box of food and thinking "wow! this reduces heart risk - I want to buy it", and then being able to also take a step back and realize that this was all processed food and utter garbage, yet in my vulnerable state I was completely being manipulated by the branding. And I was horrified that this was considered a 'normal' way to shop. Misleading information (even if technically true) was being thrown at me left and right.
- take some smokers
- give them therapy for 5 weeks
- dose them up on psilocybin
- hope they stop smoking.
I am guessing there was more to the study then that.
Also the results of the study are never even listed, except for saying that it "worked in most cases".
Honestly, I am all for studying the affects of these drugs but this article is pretty garbage.
http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/06/026988111454...
"Pilot study of the 5-HT2AR agonist psilocybin in the treatment of tobacco addiction", Johnson et al 2014 https://pdf.yt/d/i123Xa2YOeU3os-6 / https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5317066/2014-johnson.pdf / http://libgen.org/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1177%2F0269881114548...
Cantaloupe can kill me (allergy), so I choose not to eat it. Darwin at work... For similar reasons, I'm not pro-drugs.
But I don't think a ban on cantaloupe is needed, the same way I think drug prohibition is not an appropriate response to drug abuse. I know it seems far stretched, but please read on.
We base our choice on perceived risk vs benefits. People who decide to use drugs that could kill them probably don't care about the law. If you accept a high risk of death, jail shouldn't look like a major risk for you.
The fact that a majority of people have tried drugs prove that prohibition only allows punishment, but it doesn't prevent drug abuse.
Reconsidering prohibition doesn't equal being lawless: if a drug addict kills/hurts/steals from you, he risks jail anyway for that (not so much for using drugs!). Prohibition doesn't protect us.
Reconsidering prohibition might open the society for more evolution. Research could lead to real health benefits under medical supervision. Maybe a startup could find ways to explore the effects of some drug safely. Maybe the society would start teaching people about psychology and altered states of mind... Maybe drug traffics would plummet, leading to less violence. Maybe we could then treat all addictions, without a legal vs illegal barrier which is probably barring some from seeking help. And I believe I'm not creative/clever enough to imagine all those changes that would occur.
Lastly, it's widely accepted on HN that we must measure the effects of the actions we take. Reconsidering prohibition will allow such measurement and we'll build our future more wisely.
There will still be casualties, but think again about that cantaloupe... You can't ban cantaloupe to save me from myself.
OT, but why do you drink if you feel this way? Alcohol is perhaps one of the least safe recreational drugs there is. Of course, with proper dosage management and supervision from a sober individual, the risk is minimal. But that applies to all drugs, doesn't it?
But I'm not pro-drugs in the sense that I won't promote drugs. But I'm not anti-drugs either. I guess if anti==prohibition then pro==promotion... If that's a scale, it's not binary, and I'm just not at one of the extremes.
If drugs were marvelous, enlightening and risk-free, of course I'd be pro drugs! Who wouldn't? So yes, it's a scale.
Trade in illicit drugs is estimated at over $300 billion per year or about 1% of global trade. That's huge...and it doesn't even account for the other side of the coin which is the amount of tax dollars that the DEA, your local police and other groups can take control of to "fight" the war on drugs which they don't really want to end. Furthermore, I am convinced that governmental intelligence agencies who need secret money to run their "black ops" do indeed take profits from the sale of illicit drugs. Nobody can prove it of course (well, maybe Gary Webb could have, but he's dead now).
So, I think that arguing from the standpoint that laws are made to protect the public just doesn't work here.
Government agencies like the DEA benefit greatly from penalization of drugs. And governments hate closing agencies and firing people. Governments love a good fight, a costly one. And governments don't care about efficiency: it could be negative, they'd throw more of our money at it to get results.
But I think we can't reject as a whole that "laws are made to protect the public". Some laws are stupid, when they try to protect you from yourself. Laws that protect you from others' enactments on you are mostly sane. Laws should be restricted to preventing prejudice I think.
Without prohibition, drug dealers could still be prosecuted for not informing customers properly or, in extreme cases, for poisoning their clients. And that's good, because it would mean they'd have responsibility. They'd make their products better, safer... like every other business must do.
Prohibition removes the responsibility argument in favor of a stupid "it's forbidden"... It's like a shortcut that doesn't take you where you wanted.
But let's not talk about drugs that pose a mortal risk for a moment. Instead, let's focus on the topic at hand which is psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, etc... These all carry different risk profiles individually but overall it is safe to say that risk of dependence or lethal overdose are several magnitudes less than that of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, or opiates. Yes, there is always the chance of a bad trip and it is entirely possible that poor decisions are made on LSD or mushrooms (if you are making poor decisions while on DMT, it would only be in conversations you're having in your head as you aren't walking about on that drug). I also don't know anyone addicted to LSD.
And while I've heard of few people having life-changing positive breakthroughs while trash drunk on alcohol or buzzing from nicotine, I have met scores of people who have had such experiences on comparatively safe psychedelics.
As you say, prohibition has run its course especially for psychedelic drugs and must end. Are there 'bad' drugs out there? Absolutely! But there are many more positive ways to deal with them through education and resources.
And I must say I'd like to try LSD.
Yet there's a risk. I've suffered a cerebral stroke 10 years ago, and that condition could raise that risk. I'm aware of it. Anyway, I decide.
Prohibition? yes, it's hugely inefficient. We grow as we learn to deal with our lives by ourself... Prohibition tries to prevent the society from coping with problems, without avoiding the problems themselves. How is it supposed to even work?
It's being administered once as part of an intensive CBT program. MAPS et al have done studies that have shown psilocybin and other hallucinogenic substances can accelerate change in people's thought processes. Addiction is one of many possible uses for these substances, administered in a controlled environment under medical supervision and guidance.
My original comment is pointing out the title is stupid and uninformative.
I can't downvote, so I'm not one of those who anger you so much, but allegory is most likely being downvoted for presenting anecdotes as conclusive evidence and dismissively referring to anyone who disagrees with him as having opinions lacking experience.
If we're dressing up anecdote as evidence then I have plenty of my own, but I'm well aware of how useless they are at informing debate.
It didn't come across that way, which is more likely why you were downvoted. I read it as a snide remark equating psilocybin to heroin and didn't understand what you meant until you explained it. Make your comment less ambiguous next time and you won't get downvotes.
There's some irony to the fact that his anecdotes are about a nurse, who is someone who probably administers opiates as part of a pain treatment therapy.