Psilocybin shows success in medical trials

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/28/the_new_lsd_cure/

by gnosis • 13 years ago

284 165 13 years ago

prawks2• 13 years ago

Interesting. I'm curious what measures they take to prevent a "bad trip"

montecarl• 13 years ago

I imagine that being able to carefully control the purity, dosage and the environment will go a long way. It is unfortunate that it is impossible to get illegal drugs of known purity, concentration, and quality.

drewblaisdell• 13 years ago

It is absolutely possible to get illegal drugs of known purity, concentration, and quality.

refurb• 13 years ago

If you can get approval to possess a Schedule I substance from the DEA, you can purchase drugs such as LSD and psilocybin from companies that manufacture them. They also come with certificates of analysis describing their purity.

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Sigma/General_...

ahoyhere5• 13 years ago

They don't say "this is to avoid a bad trip" but the article clearly explains how. EDIT: Actually, they do say "to avoid bad trips." I missed it the first time but noticed the description of the environments. Yup, it pays to actually read the article.

prawks2• 13 years ago

Fair enough, I had missed it.

elemeno• 13 years ago

It also mentioned that they had staff on hand to help calm someone down if they started to have a bad reaction.

gnosis8• 13 years ago

If you are interested in this question, I recommend listening to the following recording of a talk given by Alicia Danforth, research assistant to Dr. Charles Grob (who ran the psilocybin research study mentioned in this article).[1] She goes in to quite a lot of detail as to exactly how they conducted their study, and what measures they took to help prevent bad trips.

As supplementary reading, see the Erowid page on Dr. Charles Grob,[2] a book called The Secret Chief Revealed by Myron J. Stolaroff (about a famous psychedelic therapist),[3] and The Psychedelic Experience FAQ.[4] The book and FAQ have lots of great suggestions for having positive, constructive trips.

One of the key things you can do to increase the odds of having a good trip is having a trusted, experienced guide or sitter. To that end, I recommend the following sitter guidelines: [5][6][7][8]

[1] http://www.matrixmasters.net/archive/Playalogues/131-Danfort...

[2] https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/grob_charles/grob_...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Chief-Revealed-Myron-Stolaroff/...

[4] https://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/faqs/psychedelic_experi...

[5] http://csp.org/nicholas/A59.html

[6] https://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/guides/guides_article2....

[7] http://www.maps.org/gateway/%5B55%5D181-197.html

[8] http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n1/09124mar.html

dntrkv• 13 years ago

A lot of bad trips are caused by anxiety. This anxiety can come from: societies view on drugs, the person thinking they are going to die, the legality of what they are doing, lack of a knowledgable trip-sitter, to name a few. I think taking a psychedelic in a setting as described in the article will help remove a lot of those common triggers to a bad trip.

ahoyhere5• 13 years ago

The researchers deserve serious props for undertaking this research in this climate, and whoever approved their study proposals for doing so. The positive effects of halucinogens on depressed, dying, & addicted people have been "known" for quite some time but not rigorously tested. Hopefully this is as positive a sign as it seems.

EDIT: Here's an example - a meta-analysis in the Journal of Psychopharmacology shows that LSD seems to have a hugely beneficial effect on alcoholism http://www.nature.com/news/lsd-helps-to-treat-alcoholism-1.1...

dfc5• 13 years ago

I'm curious why you think these researchers deserve more props than any other researchers investigating helping people with terminal illness? And in what climate? now? 2009? 2010?

GuiA2• 13 years ago

Despite numerous older studies showing that psychedelics have positive effects in a number of medical cases, there is a very big "anti-psychedelics" climate in the US right now, making it harder to go further with the existing research.

ahoyhere5• 13 years ago

Have you heard of "The War On Drugs"?

eof• 13 years ago

Presumably because we live in such an anti-"drug" climate that taking on this type of research could have a presumably negative impact on their careers; not to mention the extra effort to get something like this approved.

I don't think the general cultural feelings surrounding hallucinogens has changed so much since 2009?

theorique• 13 years ago

A lot of social and regulatory barriers stand in the way of any medical researcher who wants to use MDMA / mushrooms / LSD and other hallucinogens to help people with end-of-life depression and psychiatric issues.

They are to be complimented for persisting in the face of such obstacles.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

We live in a political climate where it is considered acceptable to have teams of soldiers attack civilian homes if there is even a suspicion that they are producing, transporting, or distributing the drugs described in this article. Our politicians firmly believe that propaganda promoting such approaches to drug policy should be forced down the throats of grade school children, and that those children should be asked to report their parents' activities to the government in the name of enforcing drug policy. That is a pretty rough political climate for a researcher investigating positive or medical uses for those drugs. There is also the issue of having to be careful not to tell the public how to manufacture these drugs in their kitchens, as Alexander Shulgin discovered after a team of soldiers attacked his lab.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

RTFA:

The closing of the psychedelic mind involved the weaving of a fine-spun stigma and the application of indistinct professional pressure. “A subtle microphysics of power guided scientists away from further work on these compounds,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School who studies psychedelic science. “The allocation of funding, having to guard one’s reputation, approval of research projects, recruitment of test subjects — it all led to a near-total breakdown of academic hallucinogen research.” Before the end of the ’60s, two leading lights in the field would bemoan the fact that interested and capable scientists were “turning their backs on psychedelics for fear of identification with irresponsible researchers.”

sp332• 13 years ago

Heidegger posited that our society's anxiety over death was artificial. Not the instinctive fear of death, but the constant worrying. This also leads to massive denial of the reality of death in popular culture (at least your own death; death is something that happens to "other people"). He proposed that people would be happier if they stopped denying their own mortality and also stopped being afraid of it.

So maybe the LSD and psilocybin just cut through the socialized anxiety crap and give people a more natural or normal view of death, among other things.

s_baby3• 13 years ago

Someone wise said, "People can endure all the suffering in the world if they find the experience meaningful."

Psychedelics often situate the experience of death in a deeply meaningful context.

gnosis8• 13 years ago

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.

-- Nietzsche

ahoyhere5• 13 years ago

If anyone's interested in this topic, I highly recommend: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Mea...

mtrimpe4• 13 years ago

Whenever I think of our society's relationship with death I remember a documentary I once saw about an aid worker who travelled with a nomadic tribe in Africa for a while.

During her stay one of the tribe's elders decided she had had enough and told the tribe so. They started their ritual and held a feast for a day or two where everybody peacefully said goodbye to the old woman and on the morning of the third day the tribe moved on and left the old woman behind in the desert to die in peace.

However the aid worker couldn't accept this. The woman was still alive! She could go on for at least a few more weeks, maybe even months! So she frantically ran back to the tribe pleading with them to let the old woman live. The tribesman were confused and tried to calm the aid worker down. It was all good! They had said goodbye and she had led an amazing life!

When it became clear she couldn't convince the tribe of the error of their ways, the aid-worker went back to the old woman and stayed with her to comfort her until she passed away.

The aid worker never realized that she was the one being comforted.

euroclydon• 13 years ago

How was she being comforted? By gaining a new perspective on death? I'm not sure that, if I were the tribe woman, I would have wanted this aid worker around in my final weeks.

wr1472• 13 years ago

Sounds interesting. What's the name of the documentary?

mattm• 13 years ago

One friend of mine has made it his mission to improve the way we look at death in North America even and has even worked at a funeral home and in a morgue. He is currently writing a book. If anyone is interested his website is http://embraceyourdeath.com/

aantix• 13 years ago

I appreciate the link and have book marked a few of his blog posts.

Another good read on finding perspective with death is "Staring at the Sun".

hosh24• 13 years ago

You can reach the same insight by doing enough vipassana meditation. I've talked with people who, having gained this insight through LSD, psilocybin, or other methods, gain an interest in meditation.

Either way, it's not so much that it cuts through socialized anxiety. Another insight you gain from this kind of experience is realizing how much you participated in creating the socialized anxiety within you. The anxiety doesn't go away so much as you become less attached to it. Being less attached to it, you see how it no longer serves a purpose in your life, and you're free to pay attention to the stuff that is more important. Like experiencing what time you have left -- and make no mistake, whether you have a terminal cancer, or not (or whether we make it to technology that allows someone to transfer personality into silicon), you too will eventually die.

One day, I hope that we'll have socially sanctioned initiations, not just for treating existential anxiety in people facing terminal illness. It would cut away a lot of teenage adolescent bullshit, and a lot of midlife bullshit. Having experienced that "cosmic force" invites people to really connect with each other, something far more meaningful than our current crop of "social networks." So this isn't just about having a meaningful experience of death. It's about having a meaningful experience of life.

orasis5• 13 years ago

To be concrete and explicit, my experience with death via vipassana is to notice gaps in experience where there is absolutely zero experience occurring. I've found this especially effective while falling asleep. If you get lucky, you'll be paying attention the exact moment that you fully lose consciousness.

Doing this has made me fully comfortable with death, as there is simply nothing, no experience, no frame of reference, no self, nothing to judge, nothing to suffer.

Highly recommended.

rada• 13 years ago

You can reach the same insight by doing enough vipassana meditation.

If someone posted an article about a new supersonic jet that takes you from New York to Sydney in under 4 hours, you could make a comment about being able to do the same by foot. You would be technically correct however it wouldn't be a very useful comment, given the difference between several hours and a lifetime.

flywheel• 13 years ago

Meditation is "the third way". The Fourth Way is superior in many respects.

http://gurdjieff.tribe.net/thread/158f144d-6630-46e6-ad5d-f2...

DMT is the epitome of the fourth way. It is transformative in a way that nothing else can really approach, not LSD or mushrooms or any amount of meditation, or what have you.

eric-hu• 13 years ago

Something my devout Buddhist uncle told me in our religious debates:

"I'm not claiming Buddhism and meditation are the only way to enlightenment, just that they are one way."

That's had a profound impact on my acceptance of people from different walks of life. I feel like one can find peace and enlightenment from a Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic path, or as was the case with me, a psychedelic one.

To me, there is no question of universally better. Perhaps one path is more suited to a particular individual, but that's up to him or her to discover.

networked• 13 years ago

One book I would recommend on the subject of death and its place in society is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Although it uses a Freudian (or rather, Rankian) foundation you can appreciate its thinking and conclusions without buying into that whole framework. Its concept of individual "immortality projects" (which are exactly what they sound like) is especially helpful.

Here's part of the notes I took while reading it:

http://tdod.pen.io/

Please excuse any grammar and/or spelling mistakes since these were written very quickly on a cell phone keyboard.

P.S.: To feint: please fix your site. Trying to publish material on Pen.io under an the custom URL "tdod-notes" I got someone else's page and couldn't even go back to edit what I had posted. Also, using a custom URL "tdod" didn't work at first, and I couldn't change the title to "Partial notes for Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death" afterwards. It seems like the safest way to use the site now is to create a short "asdf" post and then edit it to add the content.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

What makes you believe anxiety over death is socialized crap, and that total acceptance is the natural/normal view?

IMO anxiety over death is 100% rooted in our instinctive fear of death. Best I can tell, humans have been anxious about it ever since they had the cognitive ability to see it coming, and the time to stop and think about it.

hosh24• 13 years ago

What makes you think "humans have been anxious about it ever since they had the cognitive ability to see it coming, and the time to stop and think about it"?

JoshTriplett2• 13 years ago

Denying it certainly makes no sense, but we could do with more people having a healthy fear of it; perhaps then we might start doing more about it.

People who think of death as "the next great adventure" (as phrased in the Harry Potter book series), or any number of other cached euphemisms, will have relatively little inclination to actually fix it, or even think about it.

orangecat• 13 years ago

Yes. Life is good; death is bad. Sure, if you were born a few centuries ago, it would have been best to come to some sort of "acceptance" of death, because there was no hope of avoiding it. But today, we're on the edge of being able to prevent the destruction of billions of sentient beings, and that acceptance is counterproductive.

hosh24• 13 years ago

There isn't any such thing as a "healthy" fear. It's more that fear arises and passes without obstruction. "Oh, I feel afraid. Noted. Oh, its gone now."

spotman2• 13 years ago

20mg is an awful high dose. The usual dosage is between 75-1000 micrograms. 1000 still being awful high. (and 20 milligrams, is a _lot_ more than that!) Wonder if its a typo, of it they are just going balls out.

s_baby3• 13 years ago

He's talking about a dose of psilocybin not lsd.

Cushman3• 13 years ago

That dose is referring to psilocybin, I believe. 20,000µg would be a psychosis-inducing dose of LSD.

spotman2• 13 years ago

Ah, thanks. Mis-read that part of the article.

s_baby3• 13 years ago

Every psychedelic I've taken has had an upper-bound beyond which increasing dose didn't really do much. Granted I've never taken astronomical doses of LSD but a "heroic dose" of psilocybin will take you places a "heroic dose" of LSD can't.

sneak• 13 years ago

psilocybin != LSD

The modern study written about in this article uses psilocybin, not LSD.

They are entirely different substances, with different effects.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Interesting how they're using synthetic psilocybin, maybe for control purposes, but I thought it would be easier to obtain it from the original sources

gnosis8• 13 years ago

Alicia Danforth, research assistant to Dr. Charles Grob (who ran the psilocybin research study mentioned in this article) goes in to detail as to their reasons for using synthetic psilocybin in this recording of her talk at the Burning Man festival.[1]

The talk is also well worth hearing for the other details she gives of this important research.

[1] http://www.matrixmasters.net/archive/Playalogues/131-Danfort...

northband2• 13 years ago

I completely agree. I think a common misconception is all psychedelics are the same - but last different times. Definitely not the case. They may share common characteristics but definitely have a personality of their own ;-)

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I tell you what, I'm not driving anywhere near "Medical LSD Dispensaries" :-)

mediacrisis• 13 years ago

No need, you can float :)

hudibras• 13 years ago

I think Salon's editor messed up the title of the article (and, by extension, the HN title). The article describes recent trials for psilocybin and MDMA, not LSD. There were certainly LSD trials in the '60s but if there have been some recent ones the article doesn't mention them.

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

I'm sure that "LSD" was added to the title for its name recognition. No one was going to click on an article about psilocybin. :)

orasis5• 13 years ago

I'm also curious about the facts, at one point he sates that 30mg of LCD was measured out, which is a pretty insane amount of LSD from my understanding.

amckenna• 13 years ago

From a massive steel combination safe they removed a bottle containing one gram of synthesized psilocybin, the psychoactive agent animating the 200-member fungus family commonly known as “magic mushrooms.”

The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong ‘shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety.

The article said 20 to 30 milligrams of psilocybin which is the hallucinogen in shrooms.

northband2• 13 years ago

Love seeing the rise in interest in psychedelics posts here. I have always had a strong interest in 'entheogens'. Its hard to write about such a subject matter due to their powerful nature. All I can say is early on it was about fun and partying, but over time the lesson I learned was they are powerful tools not to be taken because you have them but instead when you need them. Lately my interest has been in ayahuasca. Seems from what I have read its more of a healing tool.

steeve• 13 years ago

My only concern now is how do you find pure LSD/Psylocybin? As in, how do you know that you're buying what you think you're buying?

Obviously in a controlled, medical environment the problem is void.

NB: I am NOT advocating drug use/abuse of any kind. This is a legitimate question I've been asking myself for quite some time.

zwegner• 13 years ago

Well, luckily, psilocybin is easy enough to grow on your own in the form of mushrooms, though quite illegal. The information is out there if you look for it.

scarecrowbob2• 13 years ago

Indeed-- this is fairly trivial to do, though as noted, illegal.

gnosis8• 13 years ago

Well, one way is to learn organic chemistry and synthesize the substances yourself (or know people who do this).

Another way is to pick or grow psychedelic mushrooms. Before picking wild psychedelic mushrooms, I strongly suggest you learn a lot about how to identify them (ideally not just from books, though good books are important, but from experienced mushroom hunters). Picking wild mushrooms can be very dangerous. As the saying goes, there are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.

Yet another way is to go to a country where these substances are legal, decriminalized, or tolerated. Until recently, the Netherlands effectively allowed the sale of psychedelic mushrooms. Erowid's Law Vault may help you find other countries with less idiotic drug laws than the US.[1]

Finally, you can submit a sample of your substance to, or get testing kits from companies such as: [2][3]

[1] https://erowid.org/psychoactives/law/law.shtml

[2] http://www.dancesafe.org/

[3] http://www.ecstasydata.org/about.php

mnicole• 13 years ago

I'll add this to your comment since it's much better than the one I'd written; Dancesafe sells DIY kits for certain chemicals as well -- http://dancesafe.org/products/testing-kits

jsn2• 13 years ago

It's pretty simple with LSD. You should buy it in blotter form. A piece of blotter can only contain so much of active material (fractions of a milligram). It's too small a dose for almost any psychoactive substances to have any effect on you. LSD and DOB are rare exceptions to this rule. So if you have something on a blotter, it's either LSD or DOB.

Now, DOB is very bitter, and LSD has no taste. If you put a piece of blotter in your mouth, and it tastes bitter, just spit it out -- that's probably DOB. Otherwise, it's LSD, and it's pure.

HeyImAlex• 13 years ago

DOB blotter is sometimes a little thicker/larger since dosage is about 10x heavier than the equivalent of LSD. Bad mistake to make by the way since DOB is less tested, lasts considerably longer and takes around 2 hours to kick in.

I didn't know that LSD wasn't ever supposed to taste. Figured the bitterness was just from the ink on the blotter. Took three tabs, felt it a little (comparable to 100ug), figured it was just weak acid and so redosed five more tabs about two hours in. Even on heroic acid trips the longest I'd been away was eight hours. On DOB I stayed out for a solid 24.

jimwhitson4• 13 years ago

The first part of your message is a rather dangerous misconception. Many, many drugs can and have been dispensed on blotter paper, often as LSD mimics. For dozens of examples, see DEA Microgram bulletins passim (http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms.shtml).

The point about bitterness is absolutely correct though, and certainly any purported LSD blotter that tastes bitter should be suspect.

Interestingly, at least one non-psychedelic has been found distributed on blotter paper: alprazolam (See http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms/2008/mg0508.pdf), for which I'd tentatively expect the bitterness rule also to work.

munchhausen2• 13 years ago

This is terrible advice, that must not be heeded.

The times when you could be reasonably sure you are getting LSD if you are getting the drug on blotter, are long gone. There are many drugs that can be/are being distributed on blotter paper. Some of these have a very steep dose-response curve, and can be very dangerous in relatively minuscule amounts.

While it's perfectly safe (if a bit reckless) to consume, say, upwards of three hits of LSD on blotter, doing the same with blotters containing 25I-NBOMe or Bromo-Dragonfly could land you in hospital or even the mortuary.

Taking psychedelic drugs originating on the black market has, unfortunately, become an intricate game, and you really need to learn the rules before you can play it at least somewhat safely. There is no easy answer, other than doing your research, preferably lots of it.

sv123• 13 years ago

Silk road.

jrogers652• 13 years ago

Please don't publicise this - Gawker already did enough damage. If some of the more interesting things become popular enough then governments will begin to attack them. In fact, there has already been at least one conviction regarding what you mentioned. Authorities have a terrible fear of things they do not control and are quite willing to become very violent to expand their influence. The less they know, the better.

hkolek2• 13 years ago

Growing Psilocybe mushrooms is really easy: http://www.shroomery.org/11432/Lets-Grow-Mushrooms-Pf-tek-vi...

largesse• 13 years ago

Interesting, but we live in a country where the Mayor of New York (Bloomberg) is attempting to actively restrict the use of narcotics for people in pain in order to keep them out of the hands of abusers.

We live in a pathetically immature culture.

Mvandenbergh• 13 years ago

>Huxley himself would famously request and receive a large intravenous dose of LSD on his own deathbed the following year.

No, it was intramuscular. His last written request (he was no longer able to speak) was " "LSD, 100 µg, IM".

gnosis8• 13 years ago

The story of Aldous Huxley's death and his wife's decision to administer LSD to him is very touching and well worth reading.[1]

[1] https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxle...

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

I'm a little surprised that science is so surprised that this changes people.

Basically, what it does is teach, rather than chemically alter. The chemical goes away; the lesson does not.

What I'd do a study on, if I was studying this, is combining it with "spaced repetition" - that is, treat the pill like a flash card, to maximize retention of lessons.

derwiki• 13 years ago

In case it wasn't obvious to anyone else, this post is from fall 2011.

brd• 13 years ago

For anyone interested in this sort of stuff, The Spirit Molecule was a great read. http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-Revolutionary-Near-Death-...

pinchyfingers• 13 years ago

Fear, depression, anxiety, misplaced energy, clouded perception, debilitating ego...

Yes, psychedelics can alleviate these problems. I could've told you that when I was 14, and I'm sure that many intelligent, creative, productive people will agree. Anecdotal evidence, I know.

Although I haven't touched anything stronger than caffeine for well over 7 years, I AM advocating the use of tryptamines and phenethylamines

acd• 13 years ago

People should be free to take whatever soft drugs they like. We will not win the war against drugs with prohibition, just look at when alcohol was forbidden in United states during the 30ies that led to the rise of Al Capone and similar mafia organizations.

The solution is simple make it unprofitable for criminal originations to manufacture drugs by making them legal.

The current drug laws are also hypocrazy as long range bomber fighters are allowed to take light doses of Amphetamine to stay awake during long missions. So the state are allowed todo what its citizens are not allowed todo.

girvo• 13 years ago

Citizens can be prescribed (meth)amphetamines for medical usage. Also, the air force has moved to Modafinil IIRC.

jrogers652• 13 years ago

What about hard drugs? You argue against prohibition - that alcohol should be legal, yet it is a hard drug.

cynest• 13 years ago

Prohibition was 1920-1933.

gburt• 13 years ago

Why did the title get changed to "psilocybin" when the article is clearly about both psilocybin and MDMA and even mentions the original LSD title?

friendly_chap• 13 years ago

Wow, it only took us (the west) 60 years. That's what I call a progress! Not so fast please, a couple of billion people could live miserable lives before we stop the bullshitting around psychedelics and spirituality.

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

David Nutt, former head of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, amusingly points out that "Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken [LSD, another psychedelic], and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it". He also notes that "l'Avenue des Champs Elysees in Paris is named after the Elysian Fields in ancient Greece, where people went annually to eat psychedelic mushrooms"

Nutt was removed from his role for suggesting British drug classification needed to correlate more with drug harm. The absurdity is illustrated by the British people having the "ridiculous situation that if you find magic mushrooms in the wild you can sit in the field and munch them to your heart’s content, but if you take them home you could go to prison for up to seven years, and if you give them to a friend you’ll be supplying a Class A drug and you could spend 14 years in jail."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Without-Hot-Air-ebook/dp/B009KCL... Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs (2012)

elliptic• 13 years ago

Quick note - Nutt is incorrect. The Elysian Fields were a Greek domain of the dead. He probably means the city of Eleusis, which was the location of the famous mysteries, during which some (1) speculate that the participants did in fact use psychoactive substances, although I believe ergot is the most frequently suggested culprit.

1 - it's by no means universally accepted. E.g, I don't believe Walter Burkert thinks much of the idea.

rglover2• 13 years ago

This glowing report — based on a single dose of a naturally occurring, non-addictive, low-toxicity substance — sounds impossible. Surely one pill can’t succeed where months of traditional psychotherapy and antidepressants usually fail. According to science, that’s not how drugs work. It’s foreign to the model.

Really? Have people consumed so much lack of common sense kool-aid that they believe humans know better than the Earth? From a purely birkenstockian point of view, it should be obvious that these naturally occurring things are there to help us. Why else would endless species of plants/fungi/etc. happen to be hanging out at our feet?

The mistake we've made is that we're too skeptical. Instead of believing in what's right in front of us, we choose synthesized drugs and the ideals of people no more keyed into existence than you or I.

Be aware of what's around you and learn about why most of what they say is harmful or "illegal" isn't and shouldn't be. Start with marijuana.

7rurl• 13 years ago

The Earth is not an intelligent agent. The Earth doesn't "know" anything. Also, plenty of plants have evolved to be poisonous to prevent animals (including humans) from eating them, so you can't just blindly go around eating any mushroom or berry you find in nature. Natural does not always mean "good for you".

rglover2• 13 years ago

you can't just blindly go around eating any mushroom or berry you find in nature. Natural does not always mean "good for you

Of course it doesn't. That's not what I was suggesting. Rather, when people are told that something is illegal or cannot help them, for them to conduct research into it independently. Even better, seek out studies like the one mentioned in this article and participate in them.

Concerning the Earth as an intelligent agent, can we be so sure? It's been around for an awfully long time to not know a thing or two.

Psilocybin shows success in medical trials

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