The comparison condition was psilocybin or diphenhydramine (Benadryl), and both groups got addiction counseling.
>Participants correctly guessed their treatment assignment in 93.6% of the first sessions, reporting a mean (SD) certainty of 88.5% (23.2%). In the second session, 94.7% guessed correctly, and mean (SD) certainty was 90.6% (21.5%). Study therapists correctly guessed treatment 92.4% of the time for first sessions and 97.4% for second sessions, and their mean (SD) certainties were 92.8% (16.3%) and 95.4% (2.9%), respectively.
This is not a criticism, as these trials are very hard to blind, but as you can see in hindsight they could as well have not bothered with blinding at all. So we need to interpret this as a randomized but unblinded trial.
The researchers are well aware of this, and I suspect it will inform the next steps of their research.
>Several limitations of the study warrant discussion. First, diphenhydramine was ineffective in maintaining the blind after drug administration, so biased expectancies could have influenced results. Control medications such as methylphenidate,42 niacin,2 and low-dose psilocybin1 likewise did not adequately maintain blinding in past psilocybin trials, so this issue remains a challenge for clinical research on psychedelics.
Something that's going to be interesting with psychedelics and psychedelic research is that a lot of this sort of research seems to try to "control for" the phenomenological experience in favor of focusing on the biochemical mechanism of action - I think it's possible that the phenomenological experience _is_ the mechanism of action for these substances, that the actual experience of the trip is what makes the difference.
> I think it's possible that the phenomenological experience _is_ the mechanism of action for these substances, that the actual experience of the trip is what makes the difference.
I was really confused about the entire concept of blinding a study like this until I read your comment... Now I realize they are indeed proceeding from the assumption that the phenomenological experience is somehow distinct from the mechanism of action.
That seems really unlikely to me- these drugs are unique because of the phenomenological experience! It seems self evident that this experience is the reason for therapeutic effects.
Imagine the absurdity of trying to design a study blinding the effects of meditation for example. Meditation has measurable benefits, but what are the chances those aren't caused by the psychological effects of experiencing meditation?
It’s worth trying because it could be that there is a chemical mechanism rather than it being the trip. For example ketamine can ‘cure’ people of alcoholism and depression at doses that do not produce ‘profound’ experiences or at doses that do. Having said that I accidentally had a ‘therapy’ session while completely off my tits on LSD and it helped with things that I’d not previously been helped with on other trips.
The issues at hand are complex, it’s worth trying to control just to find out what the mechanisms are.
Also apologies for all of the air quotes in this ‘comment’
I’ve heard this theory before but wouldn’t that mean you could take these substances while anesthetized and derive the same benefits without remembering any of the “trip”?
It's self evident to you that there's no effect on brain chemistry that accompanies the experience? A change that could have an impact on the condition?
You might be right, maybe you're even probably right, but it's not self evident to me.
“Chemical imbalance” antidepressants take weeks of ~100 milligram tablets to take effect. (Nobody can quite explain what the imbalance was to begin with, and what the ideal levels are…)
Psychedelics have an impact at the microgram range, with a single dose. They could be hundreds of thousands of times more potent, or, it could be the experience.
It takes some tens of grams of sodium chloride to significantly alter my body chemistry. A few milligrams of cyanide will alter my body chemistry enough to be measured by the existence of a pulse.
With MDMA the doses studied aren't that different than the amounts needed for some SSRIs. Not sure what you're going for with the mass of the ingredient.
In this design, I have to imagine both groups' sessions were very much affected by thoughts of "am I about to trip or is this just allergy relief?" To be honest, I am uncomfortable with the thought of a participant being unsure if they had been given a psychedelic.
Consider that a non-trivial number got it wrong! To me that signals some of the control group participants may have been quite agitated.
I wouldn't mind seeing a self-controlled design where participants are randomized to receive either psilocybin with therapy or non-psilocybin therapy first, but ultimately end up receiving both. As others have noted it's not just the drug, it's the drug and the experience of therapy so I think the two ought to be packaged.
Ultimately though, what I am most curious about is the long term sustenance (and/or repeatability) of any effects and also whether any negative effects appear later.
The first wave of psychedelic research also showed some promise, but their utility faded. Have we gotten any better? Six months of alcohol use disorder or depression relief is great and useful, but the goal ultimately is long term relief.
Yea ... it's weird to talk to some types of neuroscientists who speak as though a particular neurotransmitter is an actual psychological phenomenon (beyond just short hand, IMO).
So focused they are, it seems, on the therapeutic development angle (receptors, agonists, drugs, etc), that they've forgotten that the brain/mind is a processing network of neurones that can exhibit phenomena of multiple levels of complexity. Sure, a particular neurotransmitter or receptor may be involved in a particular pathway, but that's just signalling, not the process itself, let alone its totality.
Because psychedelics = 'getting high' and (by implication) having a good time, which will be unacceptable to puritans. The idea pharmaceutical changes your behavior without making you feel any better. I will not be the least but surprised if some slow news day in Congress is filled by a Rand Paul type complaining that people are becoming alcoholics to trick doctors into giving them party drugs.
I agree with your point about puritanism, however the following bit doesn't make sense to me:
> I will not be the least but surprised if some slow news day in Congress is filled by a Rand Paul type complaining that people are becoming alcoholics to trick doctors into giving them party drugs.
Rand Paul is a doctor by trade, I'd find it strange if doctors didn't have something to say about that, or if doctors that became politicians had nothing to say about it. Should doctors not care that people are abusing the system and lying to them in order to get prescriptions?
This is Paul's position on cannabis[0]:
> you ought to be able to pretty much do what you want to do as long as you don't hurt somebody else
and "has supported efforts to legalize in Kentucky"[0].
Though he professes to be libertarian I don't think he's very sincere. By all means substitute him with someone else, though. He was just the first person that sprang to mind when I thought of 'politicians making specious arguments'.
I wouldn't have thought that "you ought to be able to pretty much do what you want to do as long as you don't hurt somebody else" was a specious argument but there you go.
I'm pretty sure the (hypothetical) specious argument referred to was "people are becoming alcoholics to trick doctors into giving them party drugs".
And in addition to that, anigbrowl believes Paul isn't sincere when he professes to believe that "you ought to be able to pretty much do what you want to do as long as you don't hurt somebody else", which is why they chose him as an example, but that wasn't the important part.
Fair enough, though since anigbrowl is continuing their absurd argument regardless of any opposition, I think replacing “hypothetical” with “straw man” would be more appropriate.
A straw man does not need to be intentional, it's easily done through ignorance. I do wonder why you'd be bothered about having an off-hand remark that is clearly wrong corrected? If it was truly offhand I'd think it would be easy to accept such correction.
Maybe you'll tell me more about your belief that Paul is insincere but I don't count mind reading among my beliefs, so we'll just have to agree to disagree and - hopefully - agree that wilfully ignorant offhand remarks add nothing to HN. Perhaps take the time to find a non-libertarian, non-doctor from the Republicans to use in future and the tribalism will at least be less blatant and egregious.
Look at his questioning in COVID-related oversight hearings, there's a lot of grandstanding - given that he has a medical education it's disappointing that he leans so heavily on rhetoric instead. I would not be at all surprised to see him vote against a cannabis legalization bill, citing some obscure technicality or averring that it doesn't go far enough. We might even find out this session.
His questions were certainly valid - why were we pushing a jab on kids who don't need it, of which we don't know the long-term effects, for a "vaccine" that's rendered mostly ineffective after 4 months, against a disease that almost never kills kids (less than 100 in the U.S. who had serious health problems).
The rushed rollout and forced mandates of these products across the country invited much criticism. If that's a tough pill to swallow, maybe you'd be happier in Canada or Australia, or China, for that matter - their COVID policies are basically the same in abnegating personal choice and freedom for bodily autonomy.
Careful, your opinions might be considered heresy by some.
It's been shocking to observe how quickly society descended into "trust the science", when time and again the public has been betrayed for trusting these institutions, the pharmaceutical companies, the politicians and even scientists.
I'm not saying I agree with one side or the other completely, but it's a relief to see the tide of public opinion turning toward critical thinking. (Maybe not though, the manufacture of consent is as powerful as ever.)
I think that this is correct. I don’t remember the name of the person, but he explained that MDMA is useful for treating PTSD because it lets the patient have enough mental “energy” or wherewithal to revisit the trauma and not be overwhelmed. So it’s the—in some sense—safe revisiting of the trauma that is therapeutic.
There are non-chemical ways to achieve a psychedelic experience.
Holotropic breathwork could be one way.
So perhaps you could do holotropic breathwork + placebo versus holotropic breathwork + psilocybin.
Possibly not practical, would need a lead in phase where people practice breathwork, then selection of people able to have an experience, then actually running the trial.
The focus on the molecular mechanism of action is of course typical for this kind of study. Ignoring the phenomenological aspect can seem odd however there is a rationale behind it. I don’t think that it stems from a denial that the phenomenological experience has an impact on the results. It’s stems from the complexity of the experience. Culture, personal experience, setting, etc. all play a role in the phenomenon. It’s likely impossible that we will br able to control for the many parts that influence the psychedelic aspect of therapy and at the very least it’s something that will have to be investigated further down the road.
I would prefer random trials compared to "guessing" the action. Our understanding of human body is still very primitive at best and we just don't know the mechanism of action of many frequent things like headache or hangover, where we could get data from millions of people. Even in pharmacy, the mechanism of action runs backward. We get many candidates for drugs, do animal testing, and see if something changed in them, and if it works, we later try to come up with some mechanism, which a lot of time in history was completely wrong.
People who swam naked in ice water reported feeling "cold", but 95% could identify if they were in the treatment group. We'll never know if it's the placebo effect or not!
You can't do double-blind psychedelics trials. Researchers should stop wasting their time trying.
That is not basic science. Randomized, double blind, placebo controlled trials are the gold standard of trials. Doesn't mean they're the only option. And, frankly, trials aren't that great as far as science goes. Physics seems to get by without them.
And "prove"? What does that mean? (Big epistemology rabbit hole).
I'll make the same point I did in my other comment more literally. I have a hypothesis that giving a 5k jog, three times a week to sedentary but otherwise healthy individuals will lower resting heart rate. I get my study population and randomize between treatment and control. Treatment does the running program for six weeks. Control does nothing.
Treatment has a mean reduction in resting heart rate of 4 bpm. p = 0.01. n = 200.
Have I proven anything? Do you think this was placebo? If it was debated if jogging reduced resting heart rate, was this study useful?
If a substance can reliably produce a strong placebo effect that helps a lot of people with minimal serious side effects, probably just start offering/administering it anyway!
Doing science that answers just that question would be valuable on its own. Knowing why/how it helps would be nice, but if it definitely helps…
If you can reliably solve the problem by doing that then why not.
I guess saying “this is just a sugar pill but it might help” and “this is a psychoactive substance that might make you trip a bit but also seems to measurably help some people though we’re not sure if it’s just a placebo” might have different placebo effects. Or maybe it actually works and it’s just hard to know.
The point is if it measurably works better than other substances, including definite placebos, why not use it?
We should want the outcome with sufficiently high probability and within whatever risk tolerance we define. Not the outcome in a way that satisfies a specific group of scientists. That’s not to criticise the scientists or their science, it’s important to do it, and knowing is better than not, but not knowing everything shouldn’t necessarily stop us if the risk/reward is there.
How on earth can you control for that? The only thing that comes to mind is holotropic breathwork, which reportedly brings about similar experiences without introducing a drug. That…might constitute an informative study, now that I write it out loud.
Yeah it seems like the closest you can do to “blinding” in this case would be to take people who haven’t been on psychedelics at all, and give the control group something that elicits a “trippy but not psychedelic experience” that is new to them, so you rule out merely “experiencing something trippy and new” like that as being the mechanism of action.
> and give the control group something that elicits a “trippy but not psychedelic experience”
The doses of benadryl they were giving them as an "active placebo" are approaching levels where you do start to get some... Interesting (and often extremely distressing) deliriant effects.
This has been borne out in studies so far. They have seen data that one of the highest correlation factors measured for positive outcomes has been the degree to which the participant had ‘mystical’ experiences! [0]
It’s hard to convey why that would be or even what a ‘mystical’ experience is, but speaking as someone who has been profoundly helped by this modality in my own journey, that finding tracks pretty well with my experience.
Obviously take studies of new findings with a grain of salt, and n=1 anecdotes even more hesitantly, but before psychedelic medicine, I was stuck in a deep depression that no psychological, psychiatric, or medical treatment could budge.
I wanted desperately for anything to help, begging for even a placebo effect I could hang my hat on!
After beginning treatment utilizing psychedelic medicine, I have been given a life I could have never imagined before. I’m not cured by any means and it’s not all sunshine and roses, but I went from virtually being a shut-in, sometimes incapable of showering even once a week, to enjoying being around people, hanging out with old friends and making new ones, and easily handling a 40-hour work week at a retail job, within 6 months. After being stuck for four and a half years before that, unemployed and numb inside.
And that’s only the quantitative, objective measures. I’ve also gained a richness in my emotional being that I was shut off from before that I’m so incredibly grateful to have received.
To be clear, this has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life, but without a doubt it has also been the most rewarding.
One more earnest warning, I’m not advocating you or anyone else pursue this treatment. While I do believe it represents a major step forward in the treatment of many forms of mental illness, it is not a magic pill or a quick fix.
It should be regarded with the same seriousness as any surgery or other major medical intervention. This stuff can be very disruptive to your life in the short and medium term and there are very real risks involved that you can’t simply hand-wave away. There are a lot of advocates in the field who I feel are too overzealous and push people towards it hard and bill it as a panacea. Do your research and be cautious, and don’t take lightly the decision to pursue this form of treatment. You are the one who must make these decisions for yourself, in your life.
If you are interested in learning about psychedelic medicine, one very helpful resource I’ve come across for beginners is “The Beginner’s Guide to Psychedelic Medicine” [1] by Tucker Max.
Best of luck to you in your journeys, all of you. And no matter what’s happened to you or what you’ve done, or what you’re going through right now, I want you to know that you matter! You deserve to have a wonderful life, and I hope that every day brings you a little closer to that lovely place, and with it a little more hope! “Remember, I’m pulling for ya! We’re all in this together!” [2]
> If you are interested in learning about psychedelic medicine, one very helpful resource I’ve come across for beginners is “The Beginner’s Guide to Psychedelic Medicine” [1] by Tucker Max.
Please please please remember this point. If you are going to start a psychedelic journey, do some prep work first!
Good point. I can see the normal approach being valuable if studying microdosing, but regular dosing is going to go from 'hmm I wonder if anything will happen' to 'woohoo space llamas' in no uncertain terms.
One wonders why even tried this approach, other than satisfying funding and review bureaucrats that prefer not to think.
You absolutely cannot blind a psychadelic study unless you are testing psychedelics against each other or different doses. No more than you could test someone’s performance while drunk against a sober person. The effects are just invited to everybody.
It's going to be incredibly hard to blind a study on psychedelics due to their unique and powerful effects... the best might be some sort of VR experience with a dissociative to mimic a psychedelic experience, but even that seems unlikely to be an effective control.
Especially when dealing with addiction. In other contexts, a fairly strong sedative is frequently used as the control, which is going to be a lot less subtle.
There's still a difference between "guessing" correctly versus actually knowing the truth. It's different from an actually unblinded study even if participants can "guess" correctly.
In order to understand the difference, you'd have to have a blinded and unblinded study, and compare the results. Then you could understand the difference between a guess with 90% confidence and actually knowing what treatment you received with certainty.
It seems reckless to presume the difference (between blinded and unblinded) is small. The numbers you cite (94.7% and 90% confidence) have nothing to do with the question you're trying to answer.
For example, an important difference may be with respect to expectations. If you're told you're receiving a psychedelic treatment, you may go into the experience with different expectations than if you were unsure about what treatment you were getting.
I didn't see it in the paper, but I wonder what the difference was in people who correctly guessed their treatment assignment between the different arms.
I would imagine that everyone who got psilocybin guessed correctly.
if the intention is to have a blind test, is there a reason it's not administer while the patient is asleep?
If you stay up for 48 hours, go to sleep, get a random injection after an hour or two, wake up ~10 hours later. I would think you'd probably cut that ~90% down significantly
I have a friend I went to rehab with who after numerous relapses post-rehab decided to give "micro dosing" a try. I was and am doing well with regular old AA. At a certain point there was a meeting I didn't want to go alone and I tried to get him to come with me. He wanted to but felt like he'd have to lie about what he's doing or face a barrage of advice and doom and gloom predictions, and he was right. For my part I don't think this is a good long-term solution for as we call them "real alcoholics" but in my experience AA is very combative to this kind of thing, which is unfortunate.
AA is really more of a religion than an evidence based approach. Some find it helpful. For others it's harmful. Statistically speaking, IIRC, there's no significant difference between AA and other approaches to long term sobriety. If it works for you, great! For anyone who is skeptical or having a hard time with AA, I recommend the book The Sober Truth.
i was honest with my sponsor about using THC edibles to wean myself off of sleep meds i was prescribed in rehab. he was supportive, in his own way, but said he couldn't continue taking me thru the steps even though he personally knew of quite a few people on "team green" in AA.
Just popping in to say that psilocybin shrooms + therapy permanently changed my life for the better and I STRONGLY recommend it to pretty much everyone if their therapist specializes in that kind of thing
I was recommended the therapist by a friend. We both struggled with depression. The therapist engages in alot of research on psylocibin-assisted therapy, and unfortunately the only way they're able to legally do the trip-sitting thing is in the context of the research. However, after a few months of sessions, I decided to just do it myself.
I ate 4.5g and laid on my couch with a notebook and relaxing music on. I had a list of issues that I needed to work through (obtained through the therapy), and I just sat there and ruminated on it for 6-7 hrs. It was difficult, but cathartic.
I noted my thoughts/conclusions and discussed the whole thing with my therapist afterwards, and while I can't say my depression is cured, it's much much MUCH better.
Maybe there's someone who does psilocybin research in your area? Or, remote to another area? While I'm sure literally having your therapist right there is very effective, I'm of the opinion that therapy + shrooms in general is really effective too.
is your friend named SWIM? I concur though, i've personally helped a number of people experience psychedelics for the first time, though it definitely helps to have some benzos on hand for the outliers who are just incompatible with psychedelics.
Some people, for whatever reason, are just unable to separate themselves from the experience or accept what is happening without extreme stress. It's almost like classic psychedelics act more like disassociatives for them.
Indeed. Interestingly, psychedelics (mushrooms, LSD) work wonderfully for me, but cannabis is typically a bad experience (anxiety, nausea, no attention span, racing thoughts). Every brain is wired differently.
-- THC is also a lot wider ranging than typical psychedelics - a dose of LSD tends to be a does of LSD - from my experience a trip on AL-LAD or LSD are basically same - also true with PE vs Golden Teachers Psilocybin - however - strands and doses of sativa vs indica can differ massively - won't smoke Jack the Ripper as it's just not a good time for me --
in my experience, nausea tends to be dose-dependent...and edibles are the most efficient way the human body can metabolize the THC family, so proper dosing is much more important for edibles. if you're smoking, and have zero tolerance, a single small toke is probably advised. at least then any discomfort won't be terribly long-lived.
manic symptoms vs. depressive symptoms can definitely be linked to strain, and the balance of constituent psychoactives...of which there are plenty. ask a reputable bud tender for sleepy weed and i wager your experience might be more pleasant.
You will know when we have made real progress because an informed, responsible adult will be able to make their own decisions about what to put in their own body. Medical progress in psychedelic theory is a altruistic slippery slope. It clearly bends attitudes towards acceptance in the general public, slowly at first.
Cognitive Liberty and Religious Liberty FTW. Medicalization implicitly promotes the idea that you should need a "medical issue" in order to have the government's permission to ingest plants and fungi that spring out of the ground spontaneously.
The idea that cognitive liberty should be a global constant for all humans — seems self-evident to my mind. The freedom of the individual should be placed above everything else, as long as it's not hurting anybody.
Astonishingly enough, quite a huge part of the population don't seem to think this as important. This honestly shocks me.
This is not a problem. It is vitally important that people are allowed to believe batshit things. Yes, most of them will be nonsense, but countless times throughout history, things that were formerly considered batshit became obvious truths, and things that were considered obvious truths turned out to be batshit.
If they're not hurting anyone else, people can believe whatever they want. It's by having people try out large amounts of disparate beliefs that we can best figure out what works and what doesn't. Homogeneity is death.
this is completely irrelevant. conformity does not represent knowledge. the majority of doctors in the u. s. believe a divine being rules the universe and pray to this diety regularly. are they too ill-informed and irresponsible to give you medical advice?
I personally think so. I avoid religious doctors (just like I avoid homeopathy) because I don’t think magical thinking results in better outcomes. I’m worried that this magical thinking gets in the way of treatment and outcomes.
To illustrate this, I started drawing recently starting from scratch. It’s distressing to realize how much my own brain intercepts and modify what my actual eyes see, to show me a picture that isn’t reality (proportions are changed for instance, we tend to naturally draw faces without forehead when the forehead is actually half the face).
The point I’m trying to make is that the brain is very weird and biased already to make all kinds of mistakes or overlook things without adding magical thinking on top. Believing things like “it’s gods will” or “it can be prayed away” would seriously bias and interfere with treatment or available evidence, I feel.
You do realize that it's not black and white, right? Just because someone for eg prays in their personal life doesn't mean that they're untrustworthy doctors. Or do you ask if your doctor is an atheist before the appointment?
I'm being charitable in that I don't think you mean to go to this extreme, but your comment allows the interpretation that the State should dictate everyone belief. What if I don't believe in the Big Bang due to evidence provided by the Webb telescope? What if I concur with the minority opinion that the telescope shows such properties as to remove various assumed affects of the Big Bang? Should I, or better yet, those who put forth the alternative theory be censored in our discussions of such? Should those astrophysicists not be allowed to publish papers, with their evidence, to Journals in an effort to make their case?
As someone who believes completely in Astrology (having studied the discipline at great length) I would hardly call myself ill-informed in scientific matters, or irresponsible. These kinds of comparisons are absurd and miss the obvious fact that people hold contradictory perspectives all the time.
It's not scientific, it's an archetypal divinatory system. Ptolemy attempted to cast astrology into a scientific model, but underneath it is something different.
Astrology is vastly more sophisticated than where the sun was when you were born, contrary to popular understanding. It is a system that has been intricately developed over thousands of years, akin to a very ancient computer program with rules that could fill thousands of books. Some rules are more important than others and thus rise into popular culture (eg, sun sign astrology); that is not real astrology, but rather a single facet of the craft which is typically used incorrectly.
Without the time of birth one can say very little, because the time of birth configures all of the 12 houses of the chart. The houses reflect ones experience in material reality. The sun in the 1st house in Libra is vastly different than the sun in the 12th house in Libra, to use a simplistic example.
But yes, a careful analysis of a natal chart that includes an accurate birth time and place of birth would very precisely determine someones personality. It could also determine the personalities of the parents, indicate the nature of partners and friends, health, the home and work environment and just about anything else you can think of. Not in precise specific detail (though one _can_ get specific), but thematically. And further, one can project this chart forward through time to determine future events involving said themes, also with great accuracy.
Unfortunately however, the weakest link in astrology is the astrologer, as has been said time and again. It requires extraordinary skill and learning gained through years of study, like any technical craft.
You are talking about natal astrology, which isn’t the only kind. I could see astrology being used as a personal growth/psychological exploration tool, like tarot is sometimes used.
I group astrology with personality tests like Myers-Briggs. They're harmless unless taken authoritatively, and they can provide the benefit of a framework to guide discussion of touchy topics like personality and interpersonal conflict.
TLDR; “Percentage of heavy drinking days during the 32-week double-blind [0] period was 9.7% for the psilocybin group and 23.6% for the diphenhydramine group, a mean difference of 13.9%”
[0] And see below with good comment re double blind part.
As phren0logy points out, the study was essentially unblinded. So it's probably worth clarifying that in a TLDR, or at least removing the explicit "double-blind" claim.
A historical counterfactual I've often wondered about is, what would have happened if Timothy Leary didn't exist? Prior to psychedelics going counterculture, there was a lot of evidence that they could help with alcoholism and other disorders. But then he went all "tune in, turn on, drop out", threw acid parties, and then psychedelics got tangled up with counterculture ideas instead of psychology, and we got the drug war instead. Maybe that was all inevitable, but maybe it wasn't?
Whatever drug the anti-war crowd was going to use was going to get banned by Nixon.
“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.”
Take the same mentality and apply it to the politics today; gets interesting. What’s being vilified? What are the associates that may or may not be factual? Everything is propaganda
> Propaganda - The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
It pays to collect a breadth of news / information from all sides and dive deep into any subject you want to know well (can't do everything).
In terms of identifying it, typically you'll see general discussion without diving into facts and / or name calling. Alternatively, you'll see downplaying of particular events, specifically of ones own "side" so to speak.
Here's a few articles that are clearly propaganda:
1. Omission - A group of similarly aligned pundits, reports, etc will not report on a topic. This is when the topic is likely partially true, but they have no response. Think "Hunter Biden Laptop" - which was reported pre-2020 election; but only reported on by the left wing news in 2022 (https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-...)
2. Propaganda - The more common thing you'll see is spin or dismissive name calling. Things like...
You'll see the name calling "denier" or "anti" a lot in the spins (think: "climate change denier", "election denier", "anti-vaxx", "anti-science", etc). Most of the time, if you actually read articles about said "denier", they really take a more nuanced view. The article itself is titled to attract a particular kind of reader. Often you have to read between the lines or go to a transcript to get a clear understanding of the persons views.
If you can't tell, I take particular beef with CNN. But most news on all sides of the spectrum are effectively doing the same. My particular beef with CNN started when they said (paraphrased): "It's illegal to read documents from wikileaks, you must get your news / interpretations from us" - https://streamable.com/6g5v
Sure, I am familiar with these talking points and I agree completely with your perspective.
What I was wondering aloud is, do some people have ideas about a way to discern what's more or less propagandized? IE, even being propagandized, it is relatively less so and safer for mental health (since being scooped up into a culture war can be pretty taxing). I was asking hoping someone might chime in with different perspectives/strategies. Something I might glean insight from.
What’s more mind boggling to me is Americans driving around with freedom written on our big ol trucks but we’re not legally allowed to take…a mushroom. The cognitive dissonance is huge.
Damn, this is some peak hackernews vibes. Bringing up eating poison as a way to deflect from thinking too hard about the contradiction of America's cultural meme of intense individual freedom against extremely restrictive governments policies against psychedelic consumption
We both know that the above poster wasn't trying to make the point that mushrooms are intrinsically innocuous. It's obvious from context which mushroom they're talking about. Your comment serves only to make discussing the original point harder, and erodes everyone's ability to have an interesting conversation by adding inconsequential fluff to the thread.
Let's be fair. There is not ever be a movement of individuals from HN banding together to win the ability to take whatever medicinal they want. Given that no conversation here will result in any meaningful movement, let alone an actual policy change, the whole conversation in inconsequential fluff.
I don't think it's illegal for you to possess or cultivate a toxic mushroom, unless there's additional evidence to show you're planning to poison someone else with it.
The reason they were banned from Harvard is (allegedly) mainly because the researchers were having sex with the undergrads, not because Leary was telling kids to drop out. IIRC it was Andrew Weil who wrote the article about it in the crimson.
From what I understand the psychedelic frontier in the 60s was largely unaware of existing cultural frameworks around psychedelics, like the shamanic tradition in south america. It appeared they had made a revolutionary discovery of mental territory, revelatory and subjectively meaningful like to meeting your local deity.
Presuming the psychological magnitude of their experiences I can find my way into the psychology of someone being propelled into some decade long mania of propheticism and hubris (not to justify or sugarcoat the consequences).
I'm pretty sure James Fadiman has said if it wasn't Leary, someone else would have probably done what he did - although his charisma made him particularly effective. Hard to imagine a world where humans were able to keep the magic of LSD solely inside the confines of a lab.
Leary seemed to have been much more public, radical, prestigious and famous. He had the authority as a popular Harvard professor, so when he began to influence the counterculture on matters of policy and action it was duly noted by the mainstream media and governmental establishment. President Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America." Nixon rightly recognized that Leary personified every force opposing him: anti-war, anti-authority, anti-consumerist. He was the head of the snake to be culled, and Nixon was so successful we are still grappling with the aftermath more than 50 years later.
You're probably right. I just have the impression that Kesey was the reckless one performing "acid tests" en masse on an unsuspecting public.
My perhaps misinformed impression of Leary was that he held the view psychedelics were best used by the intelligentsia who should then pass on what they learned to the general public. Maybe it just shifted after Leary was ostracized by academia and pushed into the same camp as Kesey in the fullness of time.
It's not something I've spent much time researching.
it is possible that there were widespread uses of psychedelics in multiple earlier civilizations, but those social systems either did not last themselves or were defeated in wars and erased. Some of the vigorous rhetoric about "pagans" in the middle ages Europe for example.. psychoactive substances are not new
The primary thing that happened is the rise and power of the catholic church, which saw the "direct" spiritual experience offered by psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelic plants as a threat to their gatekeeping role and violently stamped out knowledge and use of such substances.
Similarly, the moral panic about psychedelics was because it threatened vested business and corporate interests (and the economic war with communism), especially when slogans such as "Turn on, tune in, drop out" because associated with them.
Alternatively, see John Allegro's (one of the people who worked on deciphering the Dead Sea scrolls) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross which posits that Jesus actually was a mushroom.
My point was more to say that mainstream Christianity has an established view on drugs. I'm far from an export on Allegro's work, however I'm pretty sure it is rejected by most Christians.
If he is correct then you could argue that drugs have not been seen as witchcraft since the beginning of Christianity. But I wasn't really trying to argue historical fact, simply that it's a long held mainstream belief within Christianity.
well.. so lets be broader here.. I listened to "Guns, Germs and Steel" on audiotape and that book gives great examples of innate advantages to the peoples in Europe, about grains and farm animals and a few other things.. that were multiplied over time for advantage.. However, they do not talk about the particular collection of psychoactive substances in that part of the world -- they occur all over the globe. But some of the drugs used in Europe were pretty awful actually. I imagine that taken badly, some fairly awful results could happen over time.. see the Baba-yaga group of stories, or just plain old bad health outcomes..
So yes it is easy to fault the Church of Rome and others like it, but also there is benefit in gentler means of enlightenment.. is that not the higher evolutionary goal? Having more powerful black-metal shows or whatever, is not fertile and not productive over time.. Whereas the focus of the Church of Rome now is the family, stability and arguably forming the social strength to make strong military. There are other groups to pick on that way, not exclusive to the Church of Rome.
I go out of my way to explain this because I also have Catholic-or-not conflicts in my own family tree.. so it is a real issue, for sure. I will also add that schizophrenia is a real and serious condition, and could be ignorantly connected to some strong drugs. Sadly, marijuana is now linked to schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population that is prone to that.. So .. more research needed.
European indigenous psychoactives were primarily deliriant nightshades and amanita muscaria mushrooms - both of which are very interesting to read about but I've never felt compelled to try.
Taking nightshades and "speaking with the devil" seems entirely plausible to what people of that cultural mindset would have experienced. Erowid's Datura experience vault has a collection of first hand accounts of the experience, and they sound quite terrifying: being in a dream-like state for days at a time with heavy amnesia, hallucinations of people who aren't really there, dark ominous imagery and out of body experiences. Much more realistic hallucinations than are reported from psilocybes. See also "flying ointment" for some interesting (nsfw) context to 'witches riding brooms".
Everything I've read about the amanita muscaria experience makes me never want to experience it... thankfully we have a fair set of varied experiences with other mushroom varieties and many synthetic tryptamines with more pleasant experience and risk profiles.
when i checked myself into rehab last year, it was solely based on the self-realization gained by a shroom trip. i shared this at rehab and nobody was shocked.
I find that effective dosage is the most surprising aspect of this study
>Interventions Study medications were psilocybin, 25 mg/70 kg, vs diphenhydramine, 50 mg (first session), and psilocybin, 25-40 mg/70 kg, vs diphenhydramine, 50-100 mg (second session). Psychotherapy included motivational enhancement therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.
25mg is an extremely small dose! Much smaller than most micro-dose regiments at 0.5g
25mg is not a small dose if you're actually measuring the psilocybin rather than the dried weight of the mushroom fruit. The exact psilocybin weight ratio depends on the strain of mushroom, but typically dried P. Cubensis is about 1% psilocybin by weight. This means that 25mg of psilocybin roughly corresponds to 2.5g of dried shrooms.
Has anybody come across any studies with adverse outcomes with psilocybin? I've heard of HPPD (hallucinogen persisting perception disorder) though it's somewhat rare. The benefits seem overwhelmingly positive.
I have only anecdotes, but I have met a lot of people with some form of HPPD even after moderate and safe usage. I think it is probably a bit underestimated right now. My guess is that it is one of the bigger risks of using psychedelics, along with PTSD from the experience and DP/DR. Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5 news has it pretty strongly but he did abuse it at a young age. He spoke about it on "therapy gecko".
Obviously the benefits is a fleeting and difficult to pin down thing. Outside of a clinical setting, experiences with psychedelics range from life-changing to life-destroying, with most people seemingly in the middle with "it's just fun". It certainly does not seem reliable.
I have DP/DR induced by LSD and I am always skeptical of psychedelic usage in psychology. I think that especially people with psychological problems to begin with should not be taking LSD or mushrooms. Even it's a small minority who get HPPD it's potentially life ruining.
I also have minor DP/DR and HPPD induced by very minor LSD usage years ago, which comes and goes depending on the situation. I've had times before where I literally start tripping, just for a moment, like I totally enter the trippy headspace or have a very trippy feeling. For example I will be cooking and suddenly the barrier between me and the food disintegrates and I just feel completely whack for a while. I also have lost a sense of what is in my peripheral vision, for example I was in a meeting earlier and in my periphery someone's bag fell over and I was convinced for a moment that it was an animal even though we were just sitting in an office. This happens basically every day and slowly getting worse tbh and I'm convinced it is an LSD thing. Also sometimes if my mental health is bad I have tactile hallucinations, like someone is tapping on my shoulder but no one is there.
I had actual HPPD for about a year after my trip, e.g. I could reproduce certain visual effects by looking in a certain way. I think it also caused my tendency to experience pretty strong open-eye hallucinations while meditating, which are called "makyo" in Japanese.
Of course, maybe none of this is due to the LSD usage, but I think some of it probably is.
After my 2 LSD trips with 100ug and very good setting (and I thought at the time good enough set) I slowly became very depressed and suicidal and had a total crisis. I actually had to seek out religion (which I always hated as a life long atheist) to be able to cope and not kill myself. It got close at some point and basically every since suicide has been lingering over my head. It made it a possibility: before LSD if I had stress I would lament at the world being unfair or something, after LSD if I have stress (even just minor work stress) I just can't stop thinking about killing myself. I'm on a waiting list for therapy but it is very long.
The absurd part about the LSD community is that even after telling other psych users all that, the response of about 50% of people is that I should take more at a higher dose...
Netflix's _How to Change Your Mind_ (based on a book with same name, I believe) has been a nice digestible look at psychedelics' uses in various therapies, now and in the past, if you're interested in that kinda thing.
(And, off-topic, but the scrollbar on the left here is interesting. Looks like it's a LTR block overflowing a RTL block. I don't think I like it, but, interesting!)
How are these controlled for? It should be pretty apparent to the user that they're on the placebo segment given that psilocybin has some pretty apparent effects.
>Participants correctly guessed their treatment assignment in 93.6% of the first sessions, reporting a mean (SD) certainty of 88.5% (23.2%). In the second session, 94.7% guessed correctly, and mean (SD) certainty was 90.6% (21.5%). Study therapists correctly guessed treatment 92.4% of the time for first sessions and 97.4% for second sessions, and their mean (SD) certainties were 92.8% (16.3%) and 95.4% (2.9%), respectively.
This is not a criticism, as these trials are very hard to blind, but as you can see in hindsight they could as well have not bothered with blinding at all. So we need to interpret this as a randomized but unblinded trial.
The researchers are well aware of this, and I suspect it will inform the next steps of their research.
>Several limitations of the study warrant discussion. First, diphenhydramine was ineffective in maintaining the blind after drug administration, so biased expectancies could have influenced results. Control medications such as methylphenidate,42 niacin,2 and low-dose psilocybin1 likewise did not adequately maintain blinding in past psilocybin trials, so this issue remains a challenge for clinical research on psychedelics.