[GreaterFool]

When did we forgo

> Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

?

"Modern" mentality seems to be that everything is illegal unless government specifically approves. Any substance that emerges and becomes popular enough gets banned immediately (unless there's a huge backlash; I can only recall one case like that, kratom. Don't know much about that substance though). Meanwhile invasive questionable medical treatments and supplements are marketed as safe (government stamp of approval) all the time.

I recall how green tea extract destroyed someone's liver because the dosage was just crazy high. But it's green tea, so must be good for you? Or how about alcohol or tobacco or opioids which are literally killing people?

I think psychedelics should be unbanned first, because it's the right thing to do. The need for more research to treat specific conditions is a separate manner.

At the very least this should apply to mushrooms and perhaps LSD. MDMA can be great even in self-administered setting but I think it has more potential for (unintentional) abuse.

But mushrooms can be abused right? Sure. What about people who died in water drinking or hot-dog eating contents then? Are we going to ban those?

[GreaterFool]

Also, psychedelics make you face your inner demons. Perhaps not right away because the wonders of the experience can be captivating, for a while. But sooner or later they will. Many people I talked to tried something like LSD once or twice and while they enjoyed the fun part they didn't like what they've seen once the party was over and they were left alone with their own thoughts. This is where the benefits are but it's work and it's not easy.

Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.

But then who'd gobble up those anxiety or depression or ADHD or sleeping^` pills?

^1 Wasn't there a severe warning issued by FDA on sleeping pills just few days ago? Risk of injury or death? I had some Ambien to sleep on a plane but I thrown that stuff away.

[schrodinger]

> Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member.

You can do this in Amsterdam. I went to:

Kokopelli Warmoesstraat 12, 1012 JD Amsterdam, Netherlands [phone] https://goo.gl/maps/tFkvQJgtA3NNawqe9

And it’s a fantastic artistic environment where they’ll help you pick which strain of mushrooms (well, actually truffles, but same active ingredient) and offer a trip area in back in which to enjoy them while enjoying the nearby canals. Highly recommend Amsterdam, and not as a “party city,” but as a wonderfully tolerant and beautiful city.

[atoav]

LSD can be a incredible eye opener. But if the part it opens your eyes to is bad and you are not ready, you will have a bad time.

If you are a stable and reflected person, it could be one of the most valuable experiences in your life.

When I took LSD for the first (and only) time, I gained an incredibly valuable insight into my whole beeing that stayee with me forever. Also I was sure there was no real need to do LSD again for at least half a decade.

If you take LSD to escape from something, you arw doing it wrong

[vlan0]

>Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.

I believe the type of person you are referring to has historically been referred to as shaman.

[eurticket]

I'm glad someone brought this up, more than anything - and before anything we need shamans and sitters. Without these people basically dedicating their time to making sure that people are safe and feel safe.

[skyyler]

I want to be a shaman. I feel a real calling to it. When my friends are having a bad time on substances I really enjoy helping them out of it. I wish there was a way to receive a formal training in this art, but learning on my own has been productive.

[sutterbomb]

Not sure how you’re defining formal, but the typical route is basically an apprentice model. Find a practicing shaman and work with them.

[grawprog]

>Just imagine something like cannabis lounge where you could take mushrooms in safe setting and if you feel overwhelmed you could talk to a trained staff member. Not necessarily a psychologist, just someone who can guide you through the experience. I really believe it could unleash incredible well-being for the society.

I like idea of this, but I don't think I'd like to do mushrooms in a place like that. I tend to alternate between getting strong urges to wander and urges to just sit and do nothing and i'm not a big fan having people around not also on mushrooms. I couldn't hand sitting in a cafe like that for the duration of a trip. That would probably make it worse for me.

[katzgrau]

Yeah and I don't think talking to a stranger, trained staff or not, is going to be anyone's cup of tea when they're on mushrooms. It should be an experience for friends whose company you truly enjoy - and trust to keep you cool if you get anxious.

[beenBoutIT]

The whole bit about needing other people around is leftover hype from anti-drug propaganda films. Nobody really takes a psychedelic and leaps out of a window or fries their child in a pan.

[blotter_paper]

Ehh, I have enjoyed taking psychedelics alone many times, but I think it's probably clever to start with somebody more experienced who can keep their cool enough to remember where the towels are and help guide you to another area if something in the environment is overwhelming. Once you've been there a few times you can pretty much do this yourself, but without understanding how much set and setting affect the experience it can be difficult to remember that walking into the next room over can change everything. It's not about keeping you from jumping out of a window, it's about managing messes and mood.

[gjm11]

There's someone in this very thread talking about a time they (an experienced user) took LSD and jumped out of a window. More precisely, off a balcony. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847655

(I suppose they might be lying, but it doesn't look that way to me. Especially as the lesson they say to learn is "be careful", not "don't take psychedelics".)

[blotter_paper]

Personally, I feel like non-tripping people are fine if they've been there before. It's frustrating when you have somebody who has never dosed asking you what it's like, and you have to suddenly explain color to this blind person who thinks you're a gibbering idiot (because you are, kind of).

[all2]

> But then who'd gobble up those anxiety or depression or ADHD or sleeping^` pills?

Could you expand on the ADHD bit? That sounds interesting as its not something I've heard a lot about.

[philwelch]

It's just generic anti-psych talking points, tbh.

[0xdeadb00f]

ADHD medication includes Ritalin and Adderall. Both have stimulant/amphetamine like effects to those without ADHD. You can see the window for abuse and addiction here is pretty huge.

Children misdiagnosed with ADHD can get hooked on this stuff (I don't have a source for that, but its what I've heard).

More commonly, college/highschool students can get them pretty easily to cram for an exam or finish an assignment in one night, or at least that's what they're told by movies and TV (but I'm told by a friend that it really is effective in getting a lot of work done in a small timeframe).

[fujipadam]

Not sure about ADHD but there have been several anecdotal evidence of magic mushrooms helping reduce or in some cases eliminate Autism symptoms. Bear in mind that Autism is a spectrum and not everyone will react the same way

[TheAceOfHearts]

I've read that it would be incredibly difficult to abuse psilocybin mushroom because humans quickly build up a tolerance. It's also impossible for a human to consume enough psilocybin to kill them.

You should be able to take any chemicals you want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Even if certain drugs are potentially dangerous and they have associated risks, as a responsible well-informed adult you should have the freedom to decide.

Besides, humans do dangerous and risky things all the time! Bungee jumping, rock climbing, and sky-diving are some examples that immediately come to mind. In those situations even a small failure or mistake could easily end a life.

Legalizing it will actually make it safer, since anyone will be able to buy their drugs from a reputable store with strong quality guarantees. We've already seen this happen with marijuana.

Since we're on the topic, I also want to mention that there is ongoing work to legalize psilocybin in California. A few years back there was an initial attempt to get it on the ballot, but it failed to get enough signatures. Check out California Psilocybin Decriminalization & Research Initiative 2020 [0] if you're interested.

[0] https://decrimca.org

[max76]

> I've read that it would be incredibly difficult to abuse psilocybin mushroom because humans quickly build up a tolerance. It's also impossible for a human to consume enough psilocybin to kill them.

"Abuse" has a much larger definition than daily use or fatal overdose. Someone ignorant of the effects or with poor judgment might take psilocybin while operating a gas stove, taking care of children, or operating machinery. It's also possible to take too much, take it too frequently, or take it in inappropriate settings and cause real harm to the user. All of which behaviors probably fall under substance abuse.

EDIT: I'm pro-legalization, but I think statements understating risk are just as harmful to society and statements overstating risk.

[CameronNemo]

Agreed -- I would never try to claim that psychedelics are anything other than powerful substances that needed to be treated with respect and caution.

Additionally, contemporary academic discussion surrounding psychotropic substances has used terminology focusing on use. Not abuse, not addiction, not anything else -- just use.

[nickpp]

> When did we forgo

>> Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Right about the time we started screaming for government regulation every single instace we saw something we didn’t like/agree with in the world around us.

"It’s for your own good" and "Think of the children" were such convenient excuses to shift our responsibility from us to an ever growing government more than happy to protect us from ourselves.

[zasz]

That's ahistorical and just wrong. The government saw an opportunity to selectively target its most dissident elements during the 60s and it went for it: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

[njarboe]

It's too bad this quote was published by Dan Baum in Harper's 22 years after Ehrlichman might have said it and after Ehrlichman was not alive to confirm. I would say the quotes around the text are not really appropriate for this most important of historical memories. It is not like something recorded on the Nixon tapes.

From the same CNN article we have the Ehrlichman children saying: "The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him," the Ehrlichman family wrote. "We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that's because we were not raised that way."

[rosser]

One can not be the kind of racist that raises their children to hate, while still being the kind that leverages the racism in the broader culture against social and political movements that run counter to your own.

I'm not sure which is worse: one directly teaches hatred; the other takes advantage of that taught hatred to pursue its own ends, at the cost of fomenting and entrenching it.

[kirsebaer]

The Ehrlichman quote was first published by Dan Baum in his 1997 book, Smoke and Mirrors. This book came out before Ehrlichman died, and it included other interviews with Nixon staffers that supported the Ehrlichman quote. The book was reviewed by the New York Times.

[uxp100]

I believe that this quote was not published in that book, and instead he "remembered" the quote years after the book was published to put in a Harper's article. He chose not to publish it in the book because he was focused on first hand accounts of the time period, not people's statements in retrospect.

Do you know the page number this quote appears on?

[fwip]

"Our dad couldn't have implemented racist policies because we're not racist."

[heed]

Another argument for legalizing psychedelics is that they might actually be useful for treating illness. For example there is some evidence that ibogaine [0] can help reduce or even reverse some symptoms of Parkinson's disease [1].

There were some formal studies done on ibogaine in the early 90's, I believe, but were shut down after the cardiotoxicity of the compound came into question at certain dosages.

Now I have no idea if ibogaine is truly a useful treatment for disease and I'm not promoting it as such, but the point is no one does. And as long as it remains a scheduled substance we won't be able to gain any formal answer to the question of it's usefulness.

Further, how many other scheduled substances have medical properties beyond more well known use cases (ie, psychotherapy, addiction treatment)? We don't know and we may never know, sadly.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine

[1] https://www.ibogainealliance.org/ibogaine/therapy/parkinsons...

[User23]

> "Modern" mentality seems to be that everything is illegal unless government specifically approves

The Anglo-American legal tradition of everything being permitted unless explicitly prohibited was actually an huge abberation and always had been. Unfortunately there is nowhere left in the world where that tradition still holds.

[kasey_junk]

> when did we forgo

For certain parts of the population it was a very long time ago.

Our current drug war is just an extension of despotic laws that kept them subjugated.

That it’s been extended to a wider part of the population is a statistical error.

[blurbleblurble]

Not to mention this passage:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Unless your definition of "religion" is so narrow and legalistic that you don't consider non-institutionalized forms of belief to be protected under this statement.

[kirsebaer]

And in 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled that psychedelic ayahuasca use is a protected religious rite.

[mapcars]

>I think psychedelics should be unbanned first, because it's the right thing to do.

It's good that you think, but it's not enough to call it the right thing