Why is it even legal to conduct LSD experiments? There was some animal testing post earlier, but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse.
I'll take the bait. A drug being regulated by narcotics regulation does not mean that its use has to be completely forbidden. Just because Average Joe is not allowed to do something does not mean that there might not be professionals who are. Opiates for example are both regulated and used for pain treatment.
Any study with human participants has to go through an ethics review and the participants have to be both informed about the goals of the study, possible risks and consequences of the procedures and also have to take part voluntarily. (Regarding "consequences": a brain scan could e.g. show a medical condition and having knowledge of that condition would mean that the participant would have to state this as existing condition in the future whenever they wanted to sign up for health insurance for example. So: it is complicated!).
You have to understand that because animals borrowed cell signaling form plants that most transmitter blockers and analogues can be found plant cell signal chemicals
Or to put in broad terms our brains are powered by degrees of getting high. Its more of the degree and method that produces bad social results
The similarities between very different species are absolutely mind-blowing indeed. Anesthesia works on plants for example! Jellyfish have to sleep, despite having no brain at all. They even suffer from disorientation when being sleep-deprived (afaik researchers frequently poked or otherwise disturbed them in their tank during their normal sleep-phase. On the "next day" they showed signs of sleep deprivation).
Psychedelics are a tool. You don’t ban powerful lasers because someone might get hurt. You regulate and prescribe how they may be used safely. And they are a very powerful tool, not only as a medicine to treat addiction and depression but also as a lens to inspect the nature of consciousness.
There is lots of potential benefits that far outweigh any downsides,so it's worth investigating. They were made illegal for political reasons rather than for scientific or evidence based reasons
They were criminalised to criminalise part of society. Lsd was similar - the govt was worried about losing control of people and their desires.
Lsd has never been an interest of mine, but I am aware many people find the experiences they have truly profound.
there was some excellent work in curing alcoholism that used Lsd and proved very successful prior to it being banned; BBC News - LSD 'helps alcoholics to give up drinking'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17297714
The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y
Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder. A Randomized Clinical Trial, Alan K. Davis et al., 2020
doi : 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285
LSD is one of the safest drugs there are. You may get a bad trip but it ends. Of course people in danger of psychosis should not take it.
People don't get addicted to LSD or psychedelics in general. It's not something you want to take frequently (excluding some who microdose at the levels where you don't feel the psychedelics effects).
Great, thanks for the objective response. My inquiry was substantially downvoted.
How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD? I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips. It wasn't clear from family history or medical history that they were at-risk for such a reaction.
At least based on these outcomes, it might be a bit inaccurate to claim LSD is safe. I suspect it was outlawed in part due to observed risks decades ago, but am still curious about political motivations. (e.g. "they want to deny us access to knowledge, man." or racial reasons, etc)
Perhaps there will be technology advancements in support of ascertaining propensity for adverse reactions to psychedelics. I suspect there's a strong component related to dosage. Maybe this is related to the microdosing movement?
The idea that someone took LSD and "was never the same" is a common trope, but I doubt it's based much on fact. I wrote a paper years ago in college about the difference between what "public education" about LSD said and what the medical literature said (I attended a university with a good medical school and a good medical library), and the short version is that federally-funded "public education" about LSD was mostly a lot of scare stories made up to serve someone's social or political agenda. They had little or no basis in fact.
Things like that get repeated, though. People like to repeat scare stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the "never the same" stories come from.
I will admit that I took LSD quite a few times at the end of the 1970s, and that at the peak of that period I spent a month or two in a fairly confused and impressionable state. Someone who had known me before and who encountered me during that period might be forgiven for concluding that I would "never be the same". It was temporary, though.
I gave up on psychedelics and other mind-altering substances by the early 1980s. They were no longer showing me anything new. As the fellow said, once you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.
The literature that I found in the late 70s made LSD look fairly harmless, as long as you were not already psychotic or close to it. That was peer-reviewed research, though, not news stories. It would have been scandalous at that time for anyone in the mainstream press to suggest that LSD was anything less than the scourge of Western Civilization.
Sometime around the late nineties or early 2000s, respectable researchers began to obtain permission to conduct research with psychedelics again, and have gotten some pretty interesting results, especially in areas like treatment of alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. By the way, they don't seem to be finding a lot of civilization-ending dangers in the process. Judging by the medical literature, they just aren't very dangerous.
As far as I know, based both on personal experience and medical literature, the main dangers from psychedelics are that they can be very disorienting and several of them amplify the experience of emotion. Bad trips mostly seem to be a combination of disorientation and fear, with the disorientation becoming frightening, and the fear amplified by the drug so that it becomes terror.
But bad trips end, just like good ones do.
So if you're going to experiment with them, you want to be in a safe place, in a reasonably sane and calm state of mind, and in the company of trustworthy people who have your best interests in mind--preferably mental-health professionals with some experience with psychedelics, if possible.
> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips.
This seems to be weird legend with very little fact behind it.
> claim LSD is safe.
Obliviously nothing is perfectly safe, but pharmacologicallly LSD is the safest drug there is. Safer than Aspirin. It's virtually impossible to overdose it, it's not toxic and LD50 is way 10^5 - 10^6 times of what is the usage. It is possible to get into accident during big LSD trip if you are not fully aware of your surroundings. Having trip sitter helps with that.
Frequent use of any drug when you are young is probably always more risky. Brain is fully developed late 20's.
This was addressed in my previous comment. I've known folks who took the stuff and had a horrible reaction, without family history as such.
Also, consuming street drugs of unknown quality in uncontrolled settings with uncontrolled dosages is quite different than controlled medical experiments.
> overblown
I never wanted to try the stuff after personally observing people change after having a "bad trip". If it permanently alters perceptions in unpredictable ways, then ingesting it likely catalyzes alternate life trajectories, also in unpredictable ways.
Seems like a double edged sword. Many report the positive benefits but the supporters seem to downplay risks or point to other factors without supporting evidence.
It's unclear how to determine safety with prospective victims/winners whose family history doesn't include mental illness. Again, I suspect dosage is a critical factor to trip outcome; this being common pharmacological wisdom.
Szabo A. (2015). “Psychedelics and Immunomodulation: Novel Approaches and Therapeutic Opportunities”. Frontiers in immunology, 6, 358.
Abstract:
Classical psychedelics are psychoactive substances, which, besides their psychopharmacological activity, have also been shown to exert significant modulatory effects on immune responses by altering signaling pathways involved in inflammation, cellular proliferation, and cell survival via activating NF-κB and mitogen-activated protein kinases. Recently, several neurotransmitter receptors involved in the pharmacology of psychedelics, such as serotonin and sigma-1 receptors, have also been shown to play crucial roles in numerous immunological processes. This emerging field also offers promising treatment modalities in the therapy of various diseases including autoimmune and chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, and cancer. However, the scarcity of available review literature renders the topic unclear and obscure, mostly posing psychedelics as illicit drugs of abuse and not as physiologically relevant molecules or as possible agents of future pharmacotherapies. In this paper, the immunomodulatory potential of classical serotonergic psychedelics, including N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine will be discussed from a perspective of molecular immunology and pharmacology. Special attention will be given to the functional interaction of serotonin and sigma-1 receptors and their cross-talk with toll-like and RIG-I-like pattern-recognition receptor-mediated signaling. Furthermore, novel approaches will be suggested feasible for the treatment of diseases with chronic inflammatory etiology and pathology, such as atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer's disease.
Lots (hundreds? thousands? a large cross section of the population of every music music festival on the planet for the last 50 years) of human beings report them encouraging a good time with increased enjoyment, openness, creativity, ability to do things, and they where praised by the creators of AA to be helpful in the treatment of alcholism. Very few of the doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, support workers, shop keepers, crafters, farmers, scientists who attend these events and lie about their participation go on to develop serious social or medical problems or they wouldn't have the money to go back year on year for more illegal fun. Unfortunately the majority of these positive experiences are not recorded by government backed science, since reporting LSD use to the government results in the loss of jobs, driving privileges, children and ultimately homes and freedom. Users complained about the war, lsd was banned (- over simplification for brevity.). Laughter has no accepted medical use and trying to prove otherwise is a crime
I would assume the people taking these drugs in a modern study would be participating having given their consent and under the supervision of an ethics review board. I’ve never taken LSD in my life but I would be willing to participate in a study like this and I can’t imagine I’m alone.
I agree that's the intended sense of what was said, but what a fascinating side-track! I can readily imagine the idea of illegal "states of mind" (1984/Orwell style: simply things the state made a law stating that it's illegal to think or whatever) but the idea of illegal consciousness is much more bizarre!
Any study with human participants has to go through an ethics review and the participants have to be both informed about the goals of the study, possible risks and consequences of the procedures and also have to take part voluntarily. (Regarding "consequences": a brain scan could e.g. show a medical condition and having knowledge of that condition would mean that the participant would have to state this as existing condition in the future whenever they wanted to sign up for health insurance for example. So: it is complicated!).
The Helsinki Declaration contains ethical principles on human experimentation if you want to have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki