[somestag]

Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants counteract.

I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others.

This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.

[jdietrich]

>This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.

I don't recall seeing anyone make that argument, but I do tend to avoid woo and pop sci. What is reasonably clear is that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity even in vitro, which is hypothesised as being one of the plausible mechanisms of action for psychedelics as a treatment for mental disorder - they potentially create a window of opportunity for habitual patterns of maladaptive cognition and behaviour to be unlearned.

Some people are very attached to the idea that the qualitative experience of the "trip" is integral to the therapeutic effects of psychedelics, but that is by no means a universal belief; many groups are working on non-psychedelic drugs that exploit this mechanism.

I think it's entirely reasonable to be wary of people justifying their recreational drug use with outsized claims of therapeutic benefits, but in the case of psychedelics there is definitely something of clinical interest happening. I'm quite circumspect about the clinical use of psychedelics, but I think it's highly likely that we are going to see a generation of novel and useful psychiatric drugs emerge based on what we have learned from psychedelics research.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/

[garciasn]

> This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.

That's why some folks say they take psychedelics; they want to justify their drug use for 'fun' as something more beneficial. I wish people were more honest with themselves and others.

[somestag]

Some people take psychedelics for the feeling of connectivity, and there is some talk out there about psychedelics being healthy for the brain and "helping the brain form new connections" (all of that is based on very limited evidence and a lot of woo), but even that isn't what the article was about.

The article just scanned people's brains while they were on drugs and saw that the electrical activity was more erratic and scattered than normal, not more active and connected, and concluded that people were using psychedelics based on a myth.

[ethanbond]

"The drug increases connectivity in the brain" is a completely orthogonal claim to "the drug does something beneficial for me."

In fact a lot of people who have taken (and really cherish) psychedelics would not describe them as fun, and sometimes they're very actively un-fun/terrifying/unenjoyable, and yet can still be beneficial.

What exactly is going on at the level of "brain connectivity" is pretty much unrelated to all of that^

[Levitz]

I've had fun with psychedelics, I also honestly consider they have improved my life.

Yes the trip can be lots of fun, but really, "fun" is widely available once you cross the line and take drugs. MDMA is fun. Amphetamines can be fun. There is no scarcity of "fun" here and I have no issue admitting I've taken those to the possible detriment of my health and for fun.

The difference is that if I had to skip the "trip" part of psychedelics and retain the rest, I'd still do it.

[willy_k]

There are also people who do it because they find it interesting, or spiritual, or healing in some way. They aren’t really ‘fun’, and are generally not addictive, though ones with dopaminergic activity like lsd or to a larger extent MDMA do cause addictive tendencies occasionally.

[samtho]

Let’s say for the sake of argument (because it’s not true) that the only possible benefit of psychedelics is “fun”. Assuming sensible doses do not cause harm, what is the problem with it only being fun?

[jimz]

Or hell, even if it's not "fun" (since what is fun is ultimately subjective as well), as long as it is not harming anyone else, what is really the problem?

I did a lot of psychedelics, I don't know if fun was ever the word I'd use to describe most of it, but I don't regret any of it. It opened up a lot of the back of my brain in a way I never could conceive and really allowed me to think and analyze things in ways that I wouldn't have access to without. That in itself is well worth the experience, in my subjective reckoning. When I no longer felt that psychedelics were able to provide me with what it once did, I stopped. That was that. That surely is enough, right?

[renewiltord]

Legality in the US depends on suffering being alleviated. Honesty won’t get you legality. I’m pro legalization so I’ll lie about the benefits if necessary. You’ll then have to pay the costs necessary to detect lies.

[jimz]

Wait, what? US as in the United States? That's simply not true. Even if we disregard that "legality in the US" is at best a moving target considering that federalism creates jurisdictional differences as a feature and therefore there are few things that are entirely outlawed in the US across the board everywhere, but considering that the most efficacious painkillers are also the most controlled, while deliriants that, prior to processing, extraction of active ingredients, and pairing with other psychoactive substances at minute doses, have little health benefits but great potential to create harm (thinking of belladonna and datura as a start), are legal to grow and aren't even subject to scheduling. Criminalization's link to health is effectively ret-conned and a poor ret-con at that. What turned Laudanum from something acceptable to give to babies to something of a moral hazard far worse than a health hazard was the same rationale that turned a nation of with no provision for immigration controls for the first hundred years of its existence into one where entire ethnicities, nationalities, and places of origin served as the basis for exclusion and continues to do so under the thinnest of guises: moral panics based in racism and perpetuated by those empowered and enriched via the propagation of such policies.

Lying about efficacy will do nothing but only bolster what was never a legitimate rationale to begin with. This is a country that failed to learn lessons from prohibition, that managed to kept the Mann Act on the books even though the legislative intent - that of the fear over 'miscegenation' was hardly a secret, a country where congress never bothered to even get rid of the chapter in the US Code that contained the Chinese Exclusion Act and therefore leaving the ugly legacy plain to see for all. Why lie about your cause when the truth that undergirds the reality is far uglier and far more disconcerting to begin with? And of course, for once, Oscar Wilde was wrong and the truth may not be pure but certainly simple: prohibitionist policies began in racism and are sustained by moral panics while protected by the state agencies that now benefit financially from its existence. All this has a paper trail, both online and in print, in the federal register, in the US Code, in congressional records and archives. If that's not enough to justify resistance, your real reasoning will still be more persuasive than having to make up something to justify a position against a line of thinking that has goalposts with wheels built in from the start.

[renewiltord]

Dude, there is no way I'm going to get shrooms legalized by saying I want it for fun. It's too hard to get support for. It's much easier to place this fig leaf in front: look at these suffering people with mental illness; here's some evidence that it heals them; look at this grandma who has less pain; look at this grandpa who doesn't have seizures.

Marijuana legalization used the same strategy: medical first, then complete. The technique works. The other technique of "Oh yeah, I want it for fun so you should let me do it" has been tried for eons and got nowhere. You can come up with all the theory, but one technique worked and the other didn't, so I'm not interested in the theory.

Fake science it's going to be. The people who hate it don't have the ability to tell that it's fake.

[kbelder]

No, some of us know it's a completely fake argument, know that people just want it for fun, even support legalization, and still hate the liars.

The amount of half-braindead pot smokers earnestly talking about their medical need to get stoned is so irritating. Legalization happened despite them, not because of them.

[renewiltord]

Both you and I know that your support or hate are limited to comments on the Internet. No one really worries about that moving the needle. When the thing is done, you'll fall into line with the new norms. I doubt anyone is that concerned one way or another.

[somestag]

I don't agree with them, but I don't agree with you either. Spreading fake science and medicine is fundamentally harmful to society, and doing it just because you want to trip legally is not a good enough excuse. This is like a textbook example of the ends not justifying the means, and it's from the same playbook that big pharma uses.

[renewiltord]

Well, everyone hates Big Pharma and gives them what they want, and everyone agrees with honest legalization efforts and doesn't give them anything. You're welcome to aim to be loved. I aim to get what I want.

And come on, healthcare requires you to lie. The head of the NIAID famously lied about mask efficacy in order to get what he wanted and people backed him for it. I don't see myself as any different.

[somestag]

I don't agree with the parent that it's okay to lie about the health effects of a drug just because you want it legalized, but I feel like you missed the forest for the trees here.

When a drug is stigmatized in the United States, it is essentially impossible to get it legalized without showing there is a medical use for it. That's just how it is. If your goal is to get a drug legalized, it does not matter whether that's how it should be, or whether this is all rooted in systemic discrimination, or whether pharmaceutical companies push stuff that's just as bad under their veil of legitimacy. Citizens who are anti-drug are under the impression right now that ~100% of illicit drugs are extremely dangerous and a major threat to their community, and they are not going to sit around and listen to a history lesson philosophizing about how all their fears are a propagandized illusion.

Even if you got them to listen, they would just say "Why risk it?" The only way to start changing minds is to point out there are upsides to drug legalization beyond just "freedom is good." That's why all of the arguments for legalization focus on health/therapeautic benefits, either directly from the drugs themselves or in the ability to treat those who need help with addiction.

[milesvp]

>My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy"

I don’t know a lot about stimulants in general, but I know for caffeine in particular this is not true. As an anecdote, I have a friend that caffeine puts to sleep, she just can’t take it. I’ve come to find out (partly from knowing her) that part of why the FDA doesn’t regulate caffeine, is that it has a very wide range of varying effects on different people.

[somestag]

Well, everyone is different biologically and every drug affects everyone differently, I didn't mean that there's no biodiversity between people. What I meant was that these stimulants don't function differently based on whether you're "cognitively healthy." Methylphenidate doesn't do something different in a person with ADHD versus one without, because it doesn't interact with any mechanisms of the illness, and whether or not you have ADHD you're experiencing similar effects on the drug.

Contrast with, say, SSRIs, which might have some effect in a healthy person but you're looking at a different range of effects compared to someone taking it for depression/anxiety/OCD/whatever.