The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

https://www.wired.com/story/race-to-engineer-new-psychedelic-drugs/

by gtsnexp • 4 years ago

149 186 4 years ago

labrador7• 4 years ago

It's sad that the only way to legalize is to force people to see a qualified therapist and take patented psychedelics in order to benefit from the experience, but that's what the normies want.

I've taken them with a therapist and it was meh because the doctor/patient relationship became weird under the influence. On the other hand I've had peak experiences by myself alone in a redwood forest on a fresh clear morning.

game-of-throws• 4 years ago

Is it really what "normies" want? Or is it just what drug companies/lobbyists want?

labrador7• 4 years ago

In America we live in a democracy (last I checked) so it's the mainstream public who decides in the end. The people in various western states were the first to decide that marijuana should be legal. So by normies I mean mainstream voters who worry about their children having uncontrolled access to psychedelics. Normies believe rules are made to be followed and laws are there for a reason.

NickC255• 4 years ago

Probably a mix of both. People who have some experience with drugs might want the benefit of the trip, but people who are a little more hesitant of the idea of mind-altering substances that last 8+ hours, such as LSD, might be more comfortable with some sort of watered-down experience backed by a major pharma brand and delivered by a licensed therapist.

Of course, drug companies and lobbyists also dream of such outcomes.

criddell3• 4 years ago

I think at least some normies want that. I'm pretty much as normie as it gets and I've been watching Michael Pollan's series on Netflix How to Change Your Mind. One day I might want to try LSD, psilocybin, or MDMA (those are the episodes I've watched) but probably wouldn't until I could buy from an FDA regulated company. I don't trust dark web sources or the neighborhood guy who knows a guy.

cflewis• 4 years ago

As a normie for whom ketamine treatment was a life changer, I can attest I would never ever have taken it without specialist supervision. And by specialist, I mean someone qualified, not some dude who has done plenty and has a K dealer.

I would hazard there’s a large contingent of normies for whom the difference between supervised medical treatments that happen to be psychedelics and just the act of taking psychedelics is too large a leap.

I personally hate the experience. The hate is part of the goal of being able to stop being in control all the time, but it doesn’t mean I like it. I also hate the hangover feeling afterwards, but the neuroplasticy benefits have been profound and so I keep doing the treatment.

TL;DR benefits are there, normies should be allowed them too, non-normies I assume can still do black market work.

labrador7• 4 years ago

I'm excited by what you describe and glad for it, but my sadness is that I could still be arrested by possessing mushrooms I picked for myself in a forest. I've been confronted by the authorities over this issue and believe me it is not a pleasant or healing experience.

rjbwork2• 4 years ago

non-normies I assume can still do black market work.

Why do you want non-normies to have gun toting government thugs put them in a concrete box for 20 years because they don't want to get a permission slip to do the same thing you did?

standardUser2• 4 years ago

Mushrooms are being lightly legalized in some cities and states. And while a lot of that is under the umbrella of mental health or spirituality, it is not being confined to medical environments. The normies appear to be losing that particular battle. And I think they're set to lose a lot more.

labrador7• 4 years ago

There are some spots in American where that is very true, such as my hometown of Santa Cruz

That said, I am not opposed to a therapeutic setting if that's what people who never tried them feel comfortable with

Leading the psychedelic renaissance: https://maps.org/

heap_perms2• 4 years ago

I think utopia would be to have both. That would mean legalization, and free distribution, but you can still take it in a therapy setting if you want to.

Gatsky4• 4 years ago

These drugs clearly have risks. I know a case who took LSD and amputated his genitals during the trip (heard this first hand from the urologist who reattached said genitals). Sure, many or even most people will be fine, but some clearly won’t. Sure, he has a mental illness and took too much and was alone, but that’s exactly the issue. Do you have any suggestions how to make these drugs broadly safe without giving in to the supposedly unreasonable demands of the ‘normies’?

labrador7• 4 years ago

From a reply I made later to a self-professed normie: I'm excited by what you describe [successful therapy] and glad for it, but my sadness is that I could still be arrested by possessing mushrooms I picked for myself in a forest. I've been confronted by the authorities over this issue and believe me it is not a pleasant or healing experience.

A list off the top of my head mentally ill people should avoid: hand guns, rifles, poison, rope strong enough to hang oneself with, enough narcotics to go to sleep forever, dynamite, poison gas, large quantities of alcohol, religious cults, LSD...

denton-scratch5• 4 years ago

I'm in favour of drug decriminalisation. And I had good experiences with LSD; but for many years, my attitude was that LSD specifically should remain illegal, because for people who are prone to schizophrenia-like illnesses, even if they've never before shown symptoms, LSD can provoke an extreme episode.

I suspect that psychedelics maybe appeal particularly to people who are psychiatrically marginal. In my youth I tripped a lot, and a surprising proportion of the people I knew turned out to be schizophrenic or bipolar. But maybe it's just that I found the company of people who were psychiatrically marginal engaging...

LordDragonfang• 4 years ago

How many thousands of cases of alcohol-related injury are there in ERs every day? If we're pointing fingers at drugs where the consequences include self-inflicted physical harm, there's a much more relevant drug that society has firmly decided is fine to legalize, and your single anecdote doesn't change that.

galaxyLogic2• 4 years ago

doctor/patient relationship became weird under the influence

That reminds me of a joke, "I said to the doctor, doctor, you got be patient with me"

phkahler• 4 years ago

> As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens.

Same old same old. Let's tweak this molecule to make it "novel" while retaining it's cool properties. Then we can patent it and own the market. In this case they also get the advantage that the existing molecule is illegal.

labrador7• 4 years ago

I'm not above making money off it if I can despite the Nurse Ratched vibe: https://www.psychedelicfinance.com/

jseliger• 4 years ago

This may be somewhat difficult, however, given the prior art of Shulgin and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL. TIHKAL and PIHKAL cover a lot of ground.

CameronNemo• 4 years ago

The problem is not that we lack patent unencumbered medicine, the problem is that only patent encumbered medicine has the incentives behind it to fund studies into its safety, and the rest of the FDA process.

xyzwave• 4 years ago

May be different for a drug company, but I believe a lot of those molecules would still be illegal under the Federal Analogue Act [0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

notjulianjaynes• 4 years ago

I can't help but notice that this is basically how we got oxycodone, and even stronger opioids such as fentanyl. Would the opiod crisis have been so extreme if the hardest stuff you could get was raw opium? Not that opium's not a hell of a drug itself, but as I understand it, the risks of serious health issues like fatal overdose are not as high compared to synthetic opiates. Jeet Thayil's semi-autobiographical novel Narcopolis touches on this. Set in Bombay, the opium-addicted characters run into problems when dealers start switch from selling opium to heroin.

I'm not sure how this might play out for psychedelics, which are generally not addictive, but the incentives are similar. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, in fact I'm excited to see where those incentives lead things. Will researchers invent a hangover free ecstasy? Acid you can drive to work on? Lovely.

NickC255• 4 years ago

There was an NYT article not too long ago whose entire point is that "true" psychedelic drugs are too dangerous to go mainstream, but isolated chemical compounds that provide some of the chemical effects of LSD / Mushrooms / Ketamine without the "trip" were a much better way to go. The reasoning was that they could engineer a way to chemically induce neuroplastic change in the brain without the liability of visual or auditory hallucinations.

Talk about missing the forest from the trees.

The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.

turdit• 4 years ago

the word you were looking for was probably “psychoactive” not “neuroplastic”

NickC255• 4 years ago

Perhaps.

The whole point of the article is that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity within the brain, and that pharma companies are trying to synthesize a molecule that does exactly that, but without the hallucinations.

Here's the article in question - perhaps there's something I missed that you might understand better than I do: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/opinion/hallucinations-ps...

heap_perms2• 4 years ago

"Talk about missing the forest from the trees. The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself. "

I couldn't agree more. In fact, the trip itself is not a nice side effect, it's the precondition to get measurable, long-term positive changes.

sharklazer2• 4 years ago

My belief is that the “trip” is us being able to observe more about our brains than we typically access. My personal experience indicates to me that the “trip” is removing filtering processes the brain uses to remove noise and irrelevant information to the task at hand. When in a “trip” then, it’s more like we are seeing what our brain sees—the things that appear auditorilly and visually are due to neural circuits overfitting and subsequently not being able to filter the misreads and “extra data”.

I’ve always thought of it like a self-diagnostic mode/tool where we get exposed to debug data that our brain normally would filter out.

zionic2• 4 years ago

long-term positive changes.

Proponents frequently mention things like this, yet _no one_ who publicly admits to psych use is someone I want to be.

All the people I've ever met, and friends who didn't but started down that road, aren't "all there" anymore. They'll preach day and night about the "benefits", but from the outside looking in it's obviously a coping mechanism.

TaupeRanger3• 4 years ago

That is a claim that would require a study to confirm. No such study has been done to my knowledge.

mkoryak• 4 years ago

sounds like you had a good trip.

If you had a bad trip, you might feel differently about it.

sharklazer2• 4 years ago

I’ve had several bad trips in my life. I think they are the most impactful and clarifying. Uncomfortable for sure. Good trips let me know I’m comfortable with myself. Bad trips usually lead to uncovering or bringing to the front things that need to be addressed in my life.

sianemo3• 4 years ago

I have had good trips and bad trips on a variety of highly psychedelic substances, and I've had a lot of those trips. Trying to engineer the trip out of the drug to get a desired psychoactive result free from pesky side effects like not being as grounded to reality for a while is absolutely missing the forest for the trees. Not to say that it can't produce some benefit but it's leaving a lot of unexplored potential on the table, largely in deference to failed puritanical ideals about recreational drug use.

golergka• 4 years ago

I've had many bad trips throughout my life, and they have always been the most educational. Learning about your shortcomings and confronting your demons and traumas isn't supposed to be a pleasant experience.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

It's not that simple at all. Bad trips can be more therapeutic than good ones. If you have tripless neuroplasticity, (a possibility I doubt) then what's your feedback mechanism? You might wind up selecting for shitty or dysfunctional behavior.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 4 years ago

"Good trip" and "bad trip" are older terms created by recreational drug users who wanted to get high and have a good time.

Today, in therapeutic contexts, they use "easy trip" and "difficult trip" to give patients a sense of what to expect, and some context for how to interpret the experience they're about to have.

Some trips are like tropical vacations; peaceful respites. But others feel closer to climbing a perilous mountain, or trekking through endless desert, or slogging through dark marshlands.

Some of the most fulfilling journeys in life can be quite uncomfortable and hard, and notably, 70% of people that have bad/difficult trips do not regret the experience.

What makes the trip is worthwhile is if it causes you to learn and grow in a meaningful way.

psyc2• 4 years ago

Please. A million people have gotten back on the horse after having terrifying trips, myself included.

Oh, you said might

danaris• 4 years ago

Dosing myself in a therapist's office sounds terrifying. The best experience I've ever had was taking a hit of LSD in my living room and spending the day with a pen and paper, writing down thoughts as they came to me.

And I personally know people for whom the exact opposite is the case. I'm very much looking forward to the rise of psychedelic therapy.

NickC255• 4 years ago

And that's a good thing! I am in NO way advocating for a one-size-fits-all approach. There should be many different avenues available for those who wish for different experiences. For people who aren't experienced with psychedelics, doing it in a place they are comfortable in is of utmost importance. The same logic applies to those who are experienced with the substances.

If you want to trip in nature, or on your couch, or in your therapist's office, or wherever else you might find to be the optimal set/setting for your experience, you should be able to do so.

That said, I'm all for taking whatever works in a setting that works for the user.

dmix• 4 years ago

You mean the isolated subparts right, not actually doing LSD-style drugs in a clinical setting?

Every person I know who had a 'bad trip' did so at a concert or some place they weren't alone or in a quiet area outdoors with close friends (not that there aren't rare exceptions to this rule).

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

It’s like when med chemists trialled a cannabinoid-blocker as an experimental appetite suppressant. Surprise surprise, it gave the participants depression and suicidality.

Like, what did you expect?

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrcardio.2010.148

TaylorAlexander3• 4 years ago

Well, I love my therapist, and research suggests that psychedelic assisted therapy is effective. I've never taken a large dose of mushrooms because I am nervous about where it would take me, so personally doing that with my therapist could be pretty nice. Tho expensive lol.

I've only really done LSD once tho and it was interesting, and seemed more low key than shrooms, so maybe I should try that again.

recyclelater3• 4 years ago

It’s not more low key it’s actually much more intense, or rather can be depending on dosage. Easier to exact dose with LSD. Mushrooms are over quicker and as a result can be more pleasant.

akvadrako• 4 years ago

Well you can get a guide (or just an experienced friend) for less than a therapist.

Also, LSD is not lower key than shrooms; maybe you took a smaller dose or personally have a tolerance. But with high doses they can both be very intense.

ActorNightly• 4 years ago

You likely did a starter dose of LSD. Also, it doesn't depend on stomach processing to activate, which means its not diet dependent - shrooms very much are. Plenty of people make a mistake of taking shrooms after eating a meal, not getting anything after an hour, taking more thinking their shrooms are weak, and then when it hits they are taken for quite a ride.

The right way to dose shrooms IMO is not eating 4 hours prior, ground up fine (and optionally put into gel capsules if you can't stand the taste), and taken with OJ. This gives you a very strong and peaky trip at minimal doses, but the peak lasts for 2-3 hours, whereas LSD is generally a whole day affair event at lower dosages.

Its also worth while imo to grow your own shrooms. There is this philosophical meta element of taking charge and creating your own medicine which then you take can better your own life, which can be a very positive thought during the trip.

WalterSear• 4 years ago

The whole transformative experience is the "trip" itself.

IMHE, it's not, at least in regards to (racemic) ketamine and depression. The benefit doesn't appear until ~24 hours later, and the effect scales with dosage, but not trip intensity or outcome.

I found taking it almost unpleasant at times, but the subsequent effects uniformly profound. Unfortunately, I developed a rare health issue, or I'd still be taking it.

debenedictis• 4 years ago

I too developed a rare health issue, OABSS.

"In our study, OABSS (overactive bladder symptom score) significantly increased with the combined use of ketamine and marijuana (P = 0.016). Cannabinoids are the active components of marijuana, and select cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2, have been identified in the human detrusor and urothelium."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6510790/

14• 4 years ago

Where does one buy LSD this day and age. Doesn’t seem very popular in my neck of the woods and have not heard anyone having it since I was in high school 20 years ago.

Fargoan• 4 years ago

There's an international network of computers used for communication and commerce. You can find it on this network.

"1P-LSD - PsychonautWiki" https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/1P-LSD

nick__m• 4 years ago

It's been at least decade since I did LSD or it's derivatives but I still read about them and I known that if you live in Canada a search for indole lysergamine and ALD-52[1] should lead you to a shop!

1) https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/ALD-52

kaoD• 4 years ago

I recommend staying away from street dealers. There was a huge influx of NBOx compounds sold as LSD blotters since 2017 (apparently there was a global LSD shortage around that year, and IIRC they're cheaper to produce?) Their safety profile is not well-understood but it looks like it's riskier than the (very safe) LSD due to their vasoconstriction effects, and fatal doses aren't that high compared to active doses, unlike LSD which has a huge buffer.

Also people tend to describe their trips as being subjectively less pleasant.

And please, if you have to resort to dealers, invest in a cheap testing kit. You might be lucky and find a nearby non-profit that can not only do a cheap reactive test, but also a purity test.

Stay safe out there.

EDIT: Sibling comments also mention compounds like 1P-LSD sold online. I'd still test those even if bought from reputable vendors.

Anyways, their safety profiles aren't really that well understood either. They're suspected to be just metabolized into LSD and therefore pretty safe, but they're very new (~2015) and after all they're research chemicals (or rather, not-yet-researched chemicals). In comparison LSD had been known for decades and it's pretty well understood.

I guess this is what prohibition leads to...

m4jor• 4 years ago

Its still around and extremely common.

I would suggest you learn how to use Tor and surf to some of the many dark net marketplaces that are around.

You can buy an entire sheet of LSD blotter for like $220 atm.

scythe6• 4 years ago

the liability of visual or auditory hallucinations.

The visual/audio effects aren't what gets you on a trip, though. It's the headspace, the distortion of "automatic self-recognition", and to some extent, the role of the crucial 5-ht2a receptor in the sleep-wake cycle: all 5-ht2a antagonists are soporific, and almost all psychedelics produce insomnia as a side effect. A bad trip leading to worse after-effects practically always proceeds through a sleepless night.

jokowueu4• 4 years ago

i have tried all the psychadelics that dont provide "trips" . all of them were complete failures yet they show effects on mice for some reason but when did that ever matter.

The only interesting one that was impressive was tabernanthalog but even though it didn't produce a twitch response in mice it clearly had a psychadelic effect

elevaet2• 4 years ago

How did you end up getting to test tabernanthalog and these other novel compounds?

s1artibartfast• 4 years ago

Seems pretty testable. Co administer the LSD with something to knock out the individual, and ideally prevent them from dreaming.

You could determine if the benifit(s) arise from the the process, experience, and dis/associations of the trip or simply the subconscious biochemical fuckery.

ngold• 4 years ago

Couldn't agree more. One of my best trips was in a closet reading Peters principle.

user90323432• 4 years ago

The problem is that Pharma companies can't patent and sell a full spectrum product. They can only make the big bucks by getting a certain compound approved after going through the full FDA process on that one particular compound. It's the same thing we saw with kratom. The FDA had multiple attempts over the last 7 years to ban it, while kratom is basically as harmless as coffee. It took a massive grassroots effort to stop the ban. Then shortly after it comes out that GlaxoSmithKline, who the FDA head (Scott Gottlieb) at the time of the attempted ban sat on the board for just a year prior, was trying to bring synthetic 7-hydroxy-mitragynine (7hm is thought to be a main active ingredient in kratom) to market, which it has a patent on. Follow the money people

carapace• 4 years ago

The thing that bothers me is that anyone who thinks they should decide for other people what (non-poisonous) chemicals they should put in their body is obviously so crazy that their opinion should be excluded from serious consideration on the matter. (This goes double if the person hasn't ever even tried the chemical(s) in question!)

Anti-drug hysteria has caused far more human destruction than all the bad trips and psychotic episodes put together. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in prison right now for illegal drugs. In some cases they had their lives ruined over nothing worse than a few grams of weed.

braindead_in• 4 years ago

Bad trips are not caused by the drug, they're caused by set and setting. You just have to let go and accept whatever's happening to enjoy the trip. Unfortunately, letting go is easier said than done. The Ego is very good at self preservation and it invariably prevents the letting go process.

LocalH5• 4 years ago

You could say... missing the mycelium from the flowers

yndoendo• 4 years ago

Good book about the subject matter is [0] How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan.

Set and setting are what create the good or bad experience. The therapist prepares the person for the journey while walking them out of any bad paths while on the journey. Layout and design of where the journey takes places must be soothing and relaxing.

Fun fact. Fungi growing closer to humans has higher potency in psilocybin than ones growing deeper in nature.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36613747-how-to-change-y...

Edit: wording

kodah3• 4 years ago

I recently did LSD. It wasn't my first encounter with psychedelics but none have done what LSD did. I have a good bit of trauma that I'd attempted to work through throughout my life. The thing is, many of those things are settled. I cannot change them, I've course corrected my life away from my actions being influenced by these things, and on the exterior I think most people would find me well adapted. I was pretty miserable on the inside though; those traumas hue the depths of your soul in ways that intentional and advertent action cannot rectify, only mask.

LSD gave me the power to set those things to sea and give them the burial they needed. Not all of them are gone, but I'm in a much better place because of it.

There is nothing different that I need, just make it so I don't have to order it on the dark web.

Edit: Happy to answer questions about my experiences. Can also be reached on Libera if public questions are not what you want.

standardUser2• 4 years ago

I think most of us are desperate to see ourselves from a different perspective (whether we realize it or not), but that's really hard to do when success in our day-to-day lives depends on us having a stable vision of ourselves and our place in the world. I think a lot of experiences, including a lot of drugs, can help either provide a temporary new perspective, or even shift our everyday view of ourselves and our lives more permanently. LSD seems to be one of the most effective.

mysore• 4 years ago

mdma is generally even more powerful for healing trauma.

Or rather MDMA can accelerate healing by released "stored unprocessed memories"

LSD can help you by showing you a possibility of whats possible by dissolving the prision of identity and seeing the world from a non-local perspective.

gavinray• 4 years ago

I think they're very different and both unique.

MDMA with the right group of people a few times completely changed me for the better. Lot of anger and resentment out the window.

I've had positive experiences with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and a dozen other things with alphabet -soup names but I also have PTSD and HPPD from them.

On MDMA the worst experience you can have is feeling sad, which is nigh impossible.

I'm still pro-psychedelics but it's important to recognize how powerful they are, and that a bent reality isn't always a pleasant place.

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

I’ll second this. LSD provides a huge paradigm shift in a way mdma absolutely doesn’t, but if you already know your trauma causes irrational emotions or ones you’d prefer to go away mdma is where to look.

Personally LSD was an eye opening experience, but mdma is the only trip I’ve taken that I can say lead to changes in my perception that I still have to this day.

randomopining• 4 years ago

How big of a dose?

kodah3• 4 years ago

It was about a single tab. Not enough to have any color blending or anything like that.

huetius• 4 years ago

With the collapse of the SSRI hypothesis, I feel like there was a missed opportunity to interrogate what it is about the affluent, technological society that makes such a staggering number of people so depressed. It seems that we will instead (characteristically) plow forward with even more powerful drugs.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

Just because it hit the news last week doesn't mean the window has closed. You jsut have to be willing to get in arguments/break up with people who dislike hearing their assumptions questioned.

jeffreyrogers• 4 years ago

I don't think that the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis means that SSRI's don't work, just that they don't work via increasing serotonin levels.

astrange3• 4 years ago

Nothing new has happened with SSRIs. Everyone always knew perfectly well they don't work by "raising serotonin levels", but they do still seem to work.

hiram112• 4 years ago

Yeah, I saw a lot of bad takes on Twitter related to the "debunking of the serotonin myth" with the insinuation that they'd finally proven that serotonin itself has absolutely no involvement in depression or anxiety, and it was all just a big hoax perpetrated by Big Pharma.

And then you read an article like this:

The receptor has proven crucial to understanding the neuropharmacology of the psychedelic experience induced by classical hallucinogens. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin—they all interact with 5-HT2A. (In certain circles, the phrase “5-HT2A agonist” has supplanted “psychedelic”...

5-HT2A receptors, of course, bind to serotonin (or at least that's our primitive theory of what's going on).

We've known for 70 years now that monoamines like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, etc. greatly influence mood. But our model of the brain is primitive, though that doesn't mean our current theories regarding these neurotransmitters like serotonin aren't on the right track.

mathgladiator2• 4 years ago

Do we really need new ones? Maybe, we just need to decriminalize nature and let a shamanic class arise to guide us on a spiritual journey of self-awareness.

engineer_222• 4 years ago

What could possibly go wrong?

stocknoob• 4 years ago

What could possibly go wrong with a society full of people living unexamined lives?

tastyfreeze• 4 years ago

Shamanic rituals have been the cornerstone of many of the great civilizations of the past. Why are substances that induce introspection and a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself banned?

mathgladiator2• 4 years ago

I'm sure lots can go wrong, but the justice department is the wrong place for these issues to be resolved.

LocalH5• 4 years ago

Things are certainly not going "right" now, where everything medical has to be gatekept

asdff2• 4 years ago

The rituals are already happening. We just choose to ruin people's lives over it.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

Freedom is default. Your burden is to explain why an individual can't take a psychedelic drug.

BLO716• 4 years ago

Here's a legit question - what is single driving factor for increases in substance abuse? Asking for a friend.

MonkeyMalarky2• 4 years ago

For many people it is the same as it ever was, an escape from a bleak and miserable reality.

akimball• 4 years ago

Dysphoria

scythe6• 4 years ago

In adolescents, it's exposure to violence and/or family members' drug abuse. The latter is very unsurprising.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-13544-003

Major findings were (a) adolescents who had been physically assaulted, who had been sexually assaulted, who had witnessed violence, or who had family members with alcohol or drug use problems had increased risk for current substance abuse/dependence; (b) posttraumatic stress disorder independently increased risk of marijuana and hard drug abuse/dependence; and (c) when effects of other variables were controlled, African Americans, but not Hispanics or Native Americans, were at approximately 1/3 the risk of substance abuse/dependence as Caucasians. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

mateja• 4 years ago

It's trauma. See Gabor Mate for more about the trauma-addiction connection. https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

"High" stakes? Someone at Wired likes a good pun...

anglojlo• 4 years ago

Just legalize the ones we got already.

throw819352119• 4 years ago

I have a friend who has severe depression, including self harm and thoughts of suicide. So far guided meditation sessions and antidepressants have had little effect.

I have read that some illicit drugs can be effective in treating depression, even after just one or two uses. Can anyone suggest what might be the best option out of ketamine, shrooms, LSD or MDMA?

scythe6• 4 years ago

Speaking very broadly, ketamine has shown positive effects on depression, MDMA on PTSD, and psychedelics on grief and to some extent anxiety. So it really depends on what your friend is dealing with in their personal life.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

By "psychedelics" do you mean psilocybin? As Ketamine and MDMA are also both psychedelic

MonkeyMalarky2• 4 years ago

If their depression stems from isolation and the inability to relate to, trust, or connect with others then I'd recommend MDMA.

cannaceo2• 4 years ago

Ayahuasca, then MDMA.

temp08262• 4 years ago

Would not recommend ayahuasca to someone with suicidal thoughts or a history of self-harm. Especially if they have not done any prior work/therapy as to the cause. (Disclaimer, not a doctor or any kind of therapist, but have drank it myself 150+ times and worked at an ayahuasca retreat where I've seen this situation).

Ketamine seems to be fast-acting for depression. A proper MDMA session with a therapist and follow up support is looking like a great way to work on things like this. (This is not advice: please don't take advice concerning illegal drugs from random people on the internet)

vorpalhex6• 4 years ago

Please don't give your severely depressed friend random street drugs in hopes it will magically help them.

You are not equipped to purity test them, severely depressed people can become more suicidal on rebounds, and you are almost certainly not equipped to care for them if they hit a major health issue.

klyrs2• 4 years ago

Most people I've met who use ketamine at all are addicted to ketamine, and long-term heavy usage has severe negative consequences. It has therapeutic uses and can be used to treat otherwise untreatable depression, but the risks are severe if somebody seeks it out on their own.

MDMA is a good trip, but damn the hangover: I wouldn't suggest your friend endure "suicide Tuesday."

Shrooms and LSD can be effective, but a bad trip can aggravate depression and anxiety.

There are no silver bullets. Therapeutic uses involve therapists. The only advice I can give is that your friend seek out a competent therapist.

babyshake2• 4 years ago

After one "normal" dose of MDMA without doing a bunch of doses over a weekend or something, the hangover tends to not be any worse than a typical alcohol hangover.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

Sad really. As this headline might as well be: "Big Pharma: Patents Equal Profits."

There are plenty of cultures and associated history to support using what we already have available.

The only reason to invent anything new would be to control access and make a buck. We're going through that with the Covid vaccine. What does it take for us to learn from our mistakes?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/07/13/1111137...

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

'Engineered' experiences, huh? To what end?

At least the article 'tuned in' to Shulgin. More on Sasha and Ann's prolonged studies, along with a big bibliography, here (Web 1) [https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/...]

coding123• 4 years ago

It seems like we should find ways to excite people about life and discovery rather than drum about the worker bee life. That's why people want drugs so much.

Go build something interesting - physical, not on the computer, stop doing drugs.

denton-scratch5• 4 years ago

The line tops out at a dose of 10 mg/kg, or “mig per kig,” as chemists pronounce it.

So that would make the sweet-spot dose for someone my weight about 800mg, which doesn't sound very 'potent' to me. I haven't read PIHKAL, perhaps that dosage is in line with the kind of substances Shulgin tested.

The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs

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