[saturdaysaint]

I hope that nobody reading this has an unsupervised psilocybin experience in 2021. We are so close to being able to pay for a professionally supervised experience (and you can almost surely find one today if you look in the right circles and come with the right intentions) - these will enhance the moments of clarity and alleviate a lot of the confusion and darkness that are part of the territory with psychedelic experience.

I've benefitted greatly from a handful of psilocybin experiences in my life. The experiences were marked by long periods of profound terror and deep sadness, but I consider these to be powerful literalizations of anxieties, fears and attachments that helped me grapple with them in new ways. That said, I've glanced at scary thoughts that don't occur to me in daily life and came close to getting in trouble when I ran outside. Get a good babysitter - even better, track down a professional.

[creamytaco]

There are absolutely no guarantees with mushrooms, regardless of set, setting, sitters, professionals or not. To say nothing about the persistent hallucinatory disorder you are risking ever time you imbibe.

Even McKenna swore off mushrooms after he went through a hellishly intense existential nightmare. His brother wrote a book about it: The brotherhood of the screaming abyss. It’s not all rainbows and happy elves, there are trips so devastatingly dark that make death seem like a merciful release.

[nonbirithm]

This is what worries me: I feel that the only reason that public opinion on psilocybin is recovering is because the drug is outlawed, so only the most motivated and prepared people would be willing to seek it out, and thus there is overreporting on the positive, life-changing effects that are impossible to be had without the drug. If the drug becomes more widespread, stories of "average people" taking the drug and experiencing negative effects could surface, causing mainstream public backlash, because there are so many more people taking the drug, some without the level of preparedness of the people willing to go off the beaten path (breaking the law, finding a distributor and a trusted copilot, being in a positive state of mind), so there are so many more chances that something could go wrong.

If psilocybin is legalized I feel that the responsible thing to do is to restrict its usage to the context of therapy. I have a feeling that this kind of legalization shouldn't be equivalent to marijuana where you'd be able to walk into a store and purchase some out of curiosity.

I haven't tried psilocybin yet, because of my impressions above, and because without knowing someone who could act as a guide I don't think it would be worth it.

[pmoriarty]

"If psilocybin is legalized I feel that the responsible thing to do is to restrict its usage to the context of therapy."

What are you going to do with those people who choose to use psychedelics for religious or other purposes outside of a therapeutic context? Throw them in jail? We know that doesn't work, is counterproductive, and ruins lives. People are going to do them regardless, especially as more and more people wake up to how beneficial they can be.

If there's a media backlash from the inevitable increase in negative reactions as more and more people use psychedelics, we'll have to take on that backlash head on. Hopefully the world will react more sanely than the last time there was a moral panic about psychedelics in the 1960's and 70's.

We've learned a lot since then, there's a lot more information in the public about these substances, and they're not as closely associated with the counterculture, the antiwar movement, and antiestablishment sentiment this time around. They're actually much more mainstream now, and as allies there are many suffering people and even veterans who see the healing potential of these substances, so it's much harder to demonize their users as mere druggies and freaks, as was done in the 1960's and 70's.

As every successive year of the Psychedelic Renaissance passes and more and more positive results come out of all the research that's going on in to them, I'm feeling more and more hopefull that they'll fully become part of the mainstream culture in some fashion (starting with therapeutic and religious use), and that there'll be no major backlash.

[efficax]

> and you can almost surely find one today if you look in the right circles and come with the right intentions

It would be great to know more about how to make this happen

[heroHACK17]

https://maps.org or, more specifically, https://integration.maps.org

[jk888]

https://www.eleusiniaretreat.com/meditating-on-mushrooms-wit...

[pmoriarty]

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759681

[cambaceres]

Tripping alone can be wonderful, just don’t take too much.