I know a lot of people whose minds were ruined by psychedelics. It’s something you will see when you spend time in those communities. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s common.
This type of empty fear mongering comment is unhelpful at best. It's a McDonalds of a comment. What's a lot of people? Why are psychedelics so special compared to anything else (sugar, Facebook, gambling). "It doesn't happen to everyone, but it's common" - what does this even mean? "Common" based on what criterion? How should our behaviour as a society change based on your comment?
Agreed, I'm not here to insert my opinion about the therapeutic qualities of psilocybin, but I find vague anecdotal quips like this very frustrating. If there's validity to these treatments, let's let the science prove out. There's no point in trying to discourage folks from having an open mind about something that may turn out to help a lot of people.
Psychedelics can definitely trigger or exacerbate mental health issues. A few years ago my group of friends lost someone to schizophrenia after he started micro-dosing LSD daily.
I've tried many of these substances, and know people who have gone a lot further, so I'm not speaking out of ignorance here. There are risks to these things, and it's not a positive experience for everyone. Giving people a warning about that is entirely reasonable.
It's such a shame because I've seen people lose their minds on psychedelics and the problem is they just can't handle being out of control. If their view on the world is in any way distorted - they cannot handle it. And that's sad because life is ultimately about perception and changing your perception is usually a good thing.
It's not a useful warning, though - what would someone do with that?
It's like saying "driving in a car is dangerous, and many people art hurt every year doing so." Okay, so what? Are you saying everyone should stop driving? It's just not useful - compare it to something like telling people to wear a seatbelt or pointing out that driving in particular conditions is especially dangerous. Those are things that we can use to drive more safely. Saying vaguely that driving can be dangerous doesn't serve any useful purpose.
Because many people in this thread have no knowledge or experience with these substances, so giving them accurate information is useful. I'd say it's even necessary given there's a group of enthusiasts that very clearly over hype the benefits and make absurd claims like it's impossible to have a bad time, to over use them, etc. I want people to have a balanced view of what they may be interested in trying, vs that nonsense. Otherwise they're possibly setting themselves up for a bad trip at the least.
I don’t know if they are “special” compared to those, but you seem to imply they are the same.
You seem so laser focused on the promising side of things that you completely “forget” each substance is different and it’s use has serious consequences if abused, if not then do heroine.
Are you comparing psychedelics to sugar and social media?
Unless psilocybin is thoroughly tested and validated as a treatment that is as safe as SSRI, I don't think it's really worthwhile to jump into the psilocybin train.
In a sense, yes - I believe the damaging effects of sugar and social media on the society is far greater than psychedelics might have if decriminalised.
They definitely don't deserve to be Class A in the UK and Schedule I in the US. Even more so, they shouldn't be classified as Schedule I by the United Nations.
I'm not sure about using it regularly, but people have been using these for ceremonies for centuries. I personally believe the choice should be left with an individual.
Fortunately, "as safe as SSRI" is a pretty low bar.
Should we also compare the risk of addiction/dependence? Oh, yes, lets do!
Hey, while we are at it, shall we also compare effectiveness? 2 doses vs 6 weeks? Oh, wait, that's what the study did.
I wonder how many different types of psilocybin they had to test to find the effect one for these particular patients. Because, you know, getting the "right" SSRI based coctail is actual quite hard, many people go through three or four different variants before finding the one which they think works.
Yes, I'll bet they had to compare at least as many types of psylocybin before they found the combo that worked. Right?
SSRIs are notoriously NOT safe. In younger people, they often increase suicidal ideation. Even in adults, there is a very dangerous period when you first start taking them where suddenly you have more energy, but you are still massively depressed. People die because before they were so depressed they couldn't even take action to suicide, and the drugs give them just enough of a lift that they can.
Apart from that, there's the massive list of side-effects, many of them extremely common.
Complete loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, or worse, your libido is unchanged but you completely lose the ability to orgasm.
Insomnia, cause that's what a depressed person needs, even less sleep and more time for rumination in bed.
Akathisia, which is an uncontrollable need to move your body, think restless leg syndrome but it's your entire body. You literally cannot sit still.
Less life-destroying but still very obnoxious: increased sweating, dry mouth (which can ruin your teeth if you don't manage it with biotene or gum or something), blurred vision, headaches, the list goes on.
This is without even mentioning the risk of serotonin syndrome yet, which can straight up literally kill you if you don't make it to a hospital. It happens when your serotonin level is too high, and can cause seizures, fever, arrhythmia, or death.
This is why research is needed. My gut feeling is that the root cause is overdosing. Just search "How often can I do shrooms" on Quora and you get the gamut from "1 or 2 times per year", to "microdosing everyday, macrodose every weekend, and hero dose every month".
This is why, even though I stand firm behind the fact, that psychedelic experiences changed my life, I stay sceptic about changing body/brain chemistry over longer periods of time.
I used to macrodose and get immensely creative over a week or so. With a happy outlook on nature and all things uncontrollable around me.
But then the high died some day. Lethargy came back. Lack of actual structure and the 'happy go lucky' attitude derailed whatever tied my past with plans for the future.
Microdosing seemed to help from time to time, but mostly I just get distracted with random consumption instead of planned, structured and thought through creation.
Why is this being downvoted? Studies are great, but let's not act like drugs are suddenly safe to use in all cases. I'm sure the studies didn't conclude that.
Be pro-shrooms but don't act like they're safe in every case. Education is required before partaking in anything, let alone shrooms.
Can we point to any data showing that mushrooms or acid (for example) are more dangerous than, say, a coronavirus vaccine or driving a car?
Because generally speaking, unless something is concretely documented as dangerous we don't just assume it is dangerous "because". Especially when that "because" is because of a well-documented, decades-long propaganda campaign by the federal government.
I used to use mushrooms from time to time in my youth, and had some great experiences (which I've written about on HN before).
As far as danger, I think that, as with many things, it's about maturity, education and harm reduction.
I had a single bad experience with mushrooms, and it put me off ever taking them again. I was too young and immature (something like 15/16), and took about 5x more than I'd ever taken before. I can see now that it was obviously very stupid. If I'd been in a different location at the time, god only knows what could have happened to me - I'd say that, if abused, mushrooms can be far, far more dangerous than driving a car.
But - if the science backs it up, psylocilin could do amazing things for those with depression. And furthermore, sensible people can have amazing experiences. So as long as education and harm reduction is in place, I'm all for it.
I have had plenty of negative experiences with the many, many drugs I have done. But the most danger I have ever been in due to drugs has been being the passenger of a drunk driver. That's maybe the only real physical danger I have encountered. I have a hard time even imaging how mushrooms would lead to physical danger.
The subject has been studied. There is no good evidence supporting that.
Cause and effect is not easy to separate and anecdotal evidence is just anecdotal.
People who are not well are known to 'self medicate'.
For example: Increase of alcohol use among people with preexisting problems is well documented. Link between tobacco use and schizophrenia is also well documented. See: "Smoking and schizophrenia" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19794359/"It has been suggested that smoking may be an attempt by schizophrenic patients to alleviate cognitive deficits and to reduce extrapyramidal side-effects induced by antipsychotic medication."
Psychedelics are not the type of drug people keep using if it harms them. If they don't work for you, you really don't want to do them again.
(ps. I would not recommend _regular_ drug use of any kind)
How many is a lot? I've been around a lot of people that do psychedelics, and have done them myself quite a bit. No issues to report.
It is a crime that they've been locked away for so long due to Nixon and scare mongers. So many people in jail because of it. Legalize it already, sheesh.
I mean we could just discuss the issue of freedom and making it illegal for people to grow and consume a mushroom and stop making it about just drugs. Marijuana is the same way. If it isn't for someone then they shouldn't do it and we should make as much information available about something available and provide safe environments, but making it illegal especially when plenty of people have experienced positive effects sometimes profound religious experiences it is just another mechanism of control and taking away freedom and natural rights.
Freedom is indeed one narrative. What is being (re-)constructed here is a narrative about plant medicine. The concepts used in each narrative are very different, so if we discussing both at the same time may confound each other.
True, but the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as stated in the United States Declaration of Independence has it covered pretty well. Growing your own mushrooms or marijuana does not restrict on other individual rights if they do so willingly, and therefore getting caught up in treating it like a drug that needs to be studied more before they consider making it more accessible seems a bit absurd IMO. They're not being made in labs and grow naturally in many parts of the US.
I'm pretty sure there were formal studies decades ago showing potential use and positive outcomes (I think Stamets books from the 90s reference some formal studies, but i could be wrong). But like a lot of medical research, it never progressed to a market state. I think that's especially true in this case due to the legal classification around it.
Yeah, they were able to bring LSD into therapeutic use before it was essentially outlawed. I believe there was one dominant practice in California that became well known as specialists and there were articles written about them and the celebrities that were treated there.
Not OP, but I've met people that seemed to sort of lost their agency and ambition, because their psychedelic insight was that the universe will sort everything out on its own. Though maybe the causality is the other way round here - they were not ambitious in the first place and psychedelic insight helped rationalise that.
Also disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. Personally I believe they should not be criminalised, but people should be cautious using them.
Just a personal note, I experienced the complete opposite. I knew I wanted to do great things and accomplish things of importance, but depression was like a black cloud holding me back from doing so. Psychedelics took away that cloud and also infused a deep level of meaning into my everyday life.
I went from depressed and basically dropping off the edge of the world to traveling across the world and starting a startup with new friends in a different continent, which was just now recently acquired.
What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.
Fwiw 4-HO-DMT is psilocin (it and psilocybin are both in mushrooms in varying amounts; and psilocybin metabolizes into it in the body). It probably wasn't legal. 4-AcO-DMT is a bit more of a grey area (probably covered by the analogues act; allegedly also metabolizes to psilocin in the body too).
> What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.
They are both illegal where I live (Poland). The government maintains a huge list of forbidden substances (link only in polish: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wykaz_%C5%9Brodk%C3%B3w_odurza...). This is in response to a big designer drugs crisis that started over decade ago. Which most likely than not was caused by tightening of the drug laws happened around two decades ago. It's a bad situation that will take another decade to improve, I suppose.
>but rather that they have different priorities than you and that you're narrowminded and judgemental.
Having been loosely affiliated with the Goa/Psytrance scene, I too, have met some individuals who seemed to have "fried" their brains.
If those "different priorities", how you call it, also include being almost dysfunctional and therefore dependent on constant external support, paranoid and frequently incoherent then, yes, it made me judgmental too.
And this isn't even speaking of phenomena like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD)[1].
The thing is, it's not at all clear this was caused by psychedelics, so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.
If they had been in the midwestern USA would they also be dysfunctional but taking prescription painkillers? Mental health problems are common, and confirmation bias is real.
There is also the danger of reverse causation — and this may apply to cannabis. The epidemiology there suggests psychosis may cause people to take cannabis at higher rates, rather than the reverse.
Finally... I've also often wondered what partying so hard would do without the drugs. I've experienced festivals both with and without recreational drugs and it often feels like the sleep deprivation and over-stimulation have as large an effect on my subsequent mood as the drugs did.
>so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.
I wondered about this myself.
I think it is hard to pinpoint exactly since festival-goers often also consume a mix of different substances (the infamous "candy flipping") including alcohol instead of just straight mushrooms or LSD.
Funnily enough, I just came across a study of ecstasy use in Mormon kids who didn’t take alcohol or other drugs... not sure if they were staying up all night raving but my prior is not. Apparently they didn’t suffer the same cognitive deficits found in other ecstasy users.
Not OP, but there can be a few things they're alluring to.
Some disassociatives are often put into the "psychedelic," and they can cause addiction. Ketamine begin an example. People begin chasing the previous high, which often means higher doses and more money.
Some more ignorant people put MDMA (and family) of drugs into this category as well. These drugs are highly neurotoxic, and require a lot of "prep" to take to reduce their neurotoxicity (it's arguable to what degree this prep helps). Moreover frequent user of this can in some people (ie people succeptible to depression) cause a long-term disbalance in their serotonin system (some people take weeks to recover from even one usage).
People who have some mental "precondition" (eg such as psychosis, etc) can have some extremely severe response and permanent "side effects" (for a lackeof better expressions) from psychedelics, and never recover.
An extremely small percentage of people have what's called Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). Some people find it fun, some don't mind it, while some can't function because of it.
Quality of substance you acquire can also vary. On the black market things are often mislabelled or cut with other substances that are easier/cheaper to produce. One notable examples is NBOMe being sold as LSD. NBOMe is more dangerous for a few reasons that I won't be getting into in this post. Always test your stuff with test kits, or if you're not comfortable with that, sense a small bit of your batch to a testing lab (there's a few anonymous/free ones in Europe).
Lastly, there's always ignorance or
risk of being too "casual" about taking psychedelic due to familiarity with them. This leads to accidental drug combinations (eg some antidepressants + some psychedelics) don't combined well. Aimee just diminished the other, but people reported more severe symptoms. People also combine things recreationally without researching things properly, which can be a bad combo. Speaking of antidepressants and psychedelics: a notable thing to mention is that Lithium salts and LSD have been reported to lead to terors, seizures, and maybe even death (as reported on erowid).
I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. In my personal experience, they can be wonderful and provide healing experiences. However, we need to always be careful when using them, because they have such a profound effect on our minds, and we still understand so little about the mind itself. With that in mind (no pun intended), treat them with respect they deserve!
Off-topic: writing long form text on a phone is such a chore. I can't edit the typos anymore, but just to clarify: "Aimee" was meant to be "mostly they". There's also a few words dropped here and there, but it doesn't impact readability as much.
Any psychadelics (and I think cannabis as well, but much more rarely) can cause a psychotic break, which can’t always be recovered from. It seems to be more prevalent if there is a family history of psychosis.
Even with cannabis, states have no FDA that is prepared to do studies and I just wish a basic level of known side effects were listed from the actual FDA which they do for studied and much more harmful drugs, because they were studied
When you add all the other scheduled drugs that have no state level recreational framework, then you no studies and you also have a compounded supply chain problem where nobody knows what they’re actually consuming
There are molecule combinations out there which can cause instant parkinson’s disease
nobody can give a real case about “the friend of friend” who went crazy because of the illegality and imagined or real liability
and its not fair to say “this drug is perfectly safe stop fearmongering, oh wait you should have known about your family history of schizophrenia never mind then lol too late, but everyone else dont listen to that person” this isn’t directed at you, just a collection of things said in the psychadelic community pretty reliably
>nobody can give a real case about “the friend of friend” who went crazy
This is a very good point. I'm not going to suggest that the commonly cited anecdotes are all wrong or misguided, but a lot of well meaning people throw around anecdotes but just like a discussion about flat earthers, everyone knows about them but virtually nobody seems to actually know any personally.
In 2016 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) cited 37,461 people died due to automobile accidents. Those are easily traceable numbers because they create a tremendous amount of paperwork and news articles.
But with psychedelics there is a very odd disconnect between the perception of their danger and the extreme lack of actual medical/scientific evidence that actually gets cited.
Not exactly what you're referring to, but after a 15 year-or-so break from cannabis (I used a lot in my youth, starting around 12YO), I've found that I can't use it any more - it gives me the most horrible anxiety! I persisted, but was close to panic attacks, and gave up on it.
It's actually pretty annoying, as I have a health condition that it might help with, and furthermore I used to really enjoy recreational use.
There are some studies on PubMed around this. I remember hearing about one that the DoD did involving soldiers who used cannabis and mental illnesses. I wasn't able to find that, but here's a similar one.
At least some of this could be the tendency of people with pre-existing mental illness to self-medicate. High smoking rates amongst people with schizophrenia is an example. Smoking seems to ameliorate some psychotic symptoms.
I have heard this too, but mostly because there where looking for something that is not there. Example: if finding your true yourself is like peeling of an onion, the can peel a lot, but at some point, the reach the core where there is nothing to peel anymore. I have never reach this state and it is not at all my goal. I think it has something to do with ego. Doing psychedelics makes ego less important. But if you do it too much, you lose your ego too. Living without ego is not possible in my opinion..
I'm not sure what this is responding to. The prior comments were asking about details around potential permanent psychiatric issues. There's some stuff in here about psychosis turning into schizophrenia, etc. It's rare, but we also can't dismiss it.
I know a bunch of people who went totally nuts with the aid of drugs; but I know even more people that never touched any drugs who went off the deep end with the aid of media, romantic relationships, religion, politics, etc.
Setting is definitely important, as is choice. One of the big problems with illegal psychedelics is that people aren't sure what they are getting. For instance, DOB and MDMA both come in pill form, but have wildly different effects.
Some of the worst outcomes I've seen have come when one drug is believed to be another, and this is something that decriminalisation would definitely help with.
That being said, psychedelics have traditionally been combined with ritual, and the lack of said rituals can be a big impediment to useful results.
Here in NL, large festivals have drug testing booths, where the visitors can have their drugs tested so they know what they'll be ingesting. That's possible because of decriminalisation and destigmatization.
Legalization would allow the government to create a testing infrastructure so drugs can be tested/validated before they're sold, that's arguably better. But it's definitely possible to create a safer drug environment with decriminalisation only.
Drug testing is possible here in the US with overt criminalization.
Decriminalization is just marginally safer. Testing is a huge waste of resources unless its a stopgap towards recreational legalization with a reliable supply chain.
