While it's been known for many years that endosymbiotic fungi are responsible for producing the ergot alkaloids in the Morning Glory plant family, and the recent discovery here is the identification of the host-specific fungal symbiont for the common decorative flower Ipomoea tricolor, this plant-fungus relationship was not known in the days of Albert Hoffman's research.
He is most famous for synthesizing and experiencing the effects of LSD from ergot-derived alkaloids; ergot is a fungal pathogen that grows on grain plants. He then identified psilocybin as the active psychoactive component of magic mushroom samples from Mexico.
When he turned his work to identifying the active component in Morning Glory plants, he presented his work showing that he'd discovered LSA, another ergot alkaloid. Other researchers accused him of having contaminated samples, because he'd found in plants compounds which were known only from the fungi kingdom. Hoffman's work was vindicated, in a sense, when the relationship of endosybiotic fungi (cryptic fungi which spend the majority of their lifecycle inside a plant) was later elucidated.
Really impressive that a student managed to find something Hofmann suspected nearly a century ago. Makes you wonder how many of these hidden chemists are still quietly working in symbiosis with plants, carrying out complex metabolic processes we haven’t noticed yet.
It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
> It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
A ton, which is one selfish reason the genetic diversity collapse is such a negative. In this particular discovery, we already knew there was something interesting about the morning glory plant and it took us decades and decades to find it. To give you an idea how little plant life has been studied, we have sequenced the gnome of less than one thousand species.
Think of the millions of years of evolution as knowledge discovered by non-human species. When we extinct an under-studied species, we don't know what we're losing. It's like burning the Alexandria library without any curiosity about what's inside it.
Perhaps, but that was not how it was worded. Like I said, I’m genuinely asking. If the original author wants to say “oh, I don’t think the student part is relay relevant”, then it’s all good. Otherwise it’s still all good but I want to understand their choice of mentioning the student.
If this is the case, isn't it quite clear why "student finds it" sounds more impressive than "expert finds it" or "professor finds it"?
Now I'm not saying that a student shouldn't be able to find it. But in conventional wisdom it seems quite clear why one sounds more impressive than the other if you ask me.
A student is still learning. Not at the peak of knowledge/ability. While an "expert" or in the context of academia, a professor, would seem more knowledgeable. In that context, the wording seems expected / understandable.
Of course in reality in some real life contexts a professor might be more "stagnant" than a student that's trying to get a big discovery in order to earn a doctorate/professorship or course. But that's not "conventional wisdom" for the masses.
> (…) sounds more impressive (…) sounds more impressive (…)
You keep saying that, but my question was why they considered it to be more impressive. I understand an article might want anything to sound more impressive for clicks.
> If this is the case, isn't it quite clear
And no, I don’t agree that taking so long immediately makes it more impressive that a student did it. How many experts are actively searching? And how many students? There are always more of the latter than the former. After long, fortuitous encounters (which anyone can have) become more common.
This is a bit much, I think. It is impressive because it is rare for an undergraduate to make a discovery. It’s not disillusionment with the educational system; that seems pretty politically charged. Normally, undergrads are studying what has been already known and it is a small portion of them that to do so”undergrad research” and usually that does not rise to the level of publishing anything. It’s normally graduate (MS and PhD) students that do such things. Also, graduate students, particularly PhD students, are primarily concerned with research while undergrads are primarily concerned with classes (educationally anyway!). Also, it would have also been surprising, as you say, if the student had been graduated for two-months and not in graduate school to make such a discovery. So, it’s not some grand reason or indictment of society. In the end, it is just plainly uncommon.
> It is impressive because it is rare for an undergraduate to make a discovery.
Is it? Looks like every other science story of this nature is “high school student did X”, “student at university Y discovered Z”. Perhaps they are the minority, but I still feel they happen often enough that it’s not really deserving of the always mentioning that.
> It’s not disillusionment with the educational system; that seems pretty politically charged.
Any political charged statement you read there is 100% in your head. Maybe in the USA such a simple statement could be politically charged, but where I live everyone would look at you like you had just lost the plot if you suggested that response.
> So, it’s not some grand reason or indictment of society.
Again, neither was I suggesting it was, merely postulating any hypothesis that could make sense.
> In the end, it is just plainly uncommon.
Doesn’t seem uncommon enough for me to warrant the frequent emphasis, but thank you anyway for taking the time to reply.
> The researchers prepared a DNA sample and sent it away for genome sequencing, funded by a WVU Davis College Student Enhancement Grant obtained by Hazel. The sequencing confirmed the discovery of a new species and the sequence is now deposited in a gene bank with her name on it.
> “Sequencing a genome is a significant thing,” Panaccione said. “It’s amazing for a student.”
Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
As I understand it, sequencing is the step that confirms the discovery, so it represents the culmination of the effort.
Biology is one of those fields where accidental discoveries still have value. Whether they earn the same recognition as some long grinding effort is up in the air, but it's a nice feather in the cap for a student.
There's the old saying: "Chance favors the prepared mind." The student must have had an insight that caused them to investigate something that many other people had probably overlooked or dismissed as unimportant.
I'm expecting the significant thing is knowing which DNA to sequence. Also, if I'm reading the article correctly she isolated the DNA being sequenced first, so it's not like she just sent in the fungus and offloaded all of the work.
>Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
It's actually a little more complicated than they made it sound. What the student likely did was assemble the genome.
When you send DNA out for sequencing, you get back files of 100-300 basepairs. You then need to do assemble them into a genome by figuring out where all the pieces overlap.
Obviously there are tools that help with this, but there are lots of fiddly bits and settings that you need to play around with to get it right.
You should stop projecting. I understand something may be incomprehensible to you and you happen to call yourself a programmer. That doesn't mean you're correct about either.
The whole article feels a bit confusing, and I’m not really sure what they’re talking about. Are they saying the mushroom produces ergot alkaloids—the precursors to LSD? That would be interesting but not groundbreaking. Or are they claiming it actually produces LSD itself?
Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.
iirc, it is LSD, but not LSD-25. Which is the kind usually synthesised and sold on blotters. LSD-25 was so named because it was Hoffman's twenty fifth experimental LSD variant.
It's great for the student. And it shows that the lab she worked in and the university are able to do this type of science.
Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.
What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.
The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.
I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.
Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.
Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved
After the discovery of a psychedelic compound, there are two pipelines for release:
- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.
- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.
I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.
LSD was discovered in and extensively tested and produced by the giant medical company Sandoz for about 20 years. It was also extensively studied in academic settings.
The black market production started a lot later, mostly due to the War on Drugs.
Source? Their patent expired, and Wikipedia says they stopped making it on the 60s. Occasionally a sealed bottle of Delysid will surface somewhere, but I think that they are all vintage.
The use of LSD in psychiatry is one of the less wacky things about the state of psychiatry at that time. Arguably psychiatry is still wacky, and still overhypes novel compounds without knowing how or why they work exactly. LSD was very rigorously studied compared to say today’s use of ketamine.
Yes, there was a ton of psychiatric research on LSD. However the bar of required to perform pharmaceutical testing on humans is much higher now, and the quality of the data is much higher because of improved testing standards.
For sure. But if you read some of that wacky stuff from way back, you can start to see how parts rhyme with aspects of contemporary psychiatry. They too had much better standards and data than their predecessors. The hype around LSD back then, and a bit of the kookiness, was similar to the current emphasis on trauma, ketamine therapy, etc… Stuff that works and is new gets overhyped.
>produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction
yes, such incredible maturity, didn't even mention that these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed... although, "self-medication" probably does adhere pretty well.
For me the last time I took a trip I was alone for most of the trip and I cried a lot and my heart felt physically pained. I felt sorry for my heart that it had to keep beating and could not rest. It was a really challenging trip. I haven't been on another trip since.
I am a frequent LSD user and I do it for fun and healing.
I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.
>but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties
counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience
It pushes more than just anxieties to the background. During the peak of an LSD trip, I can be so distractible that I can barely keep more than one thing in my head at a time, and it's incredibly easy for any new thought to overwrite everything prior. I do know that spending some time in that state of mind does tend to help me. With that said, I don't think I can speak much on the default mode network because I haven't developed an intuition on how that affects me.
i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
it completely makes sense that a person with neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis might experience these effects differently (different valence to same phenomenon; or, entirely different phenomenon from same preconditions). either way, imo the important thing (confirmed by what you say about the hyper-distractible state which you experience) is for one to spend as much time as needed in the headspace that is appropriate to their neurobiological makeup, rather than that headspace which other people want one to be in as if it's any of their goddam business.
ofc not to be taken that reaching "the personally good headspace" is trivial; a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place! (the premise of neurotypical supremacy?) hence the utility of altered states which demonstrate the opposite and thus provide the introspector with a basis for comparison
> i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
I'm not super sure what "blinders" you're speaking of. I don't think it's expected for a neurotypical person to only be able to keep ~one thought in their head at a time. Although I do notice a lot of the time people find it weird that I remember things that were besides a point; maybe that's what you're talking about.
> neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis
Weird trivia, but it's really fucking weird that dysgraphia predicts an ADHD diagnosis. I seem to have dysgraphia, and lo and behold[0]:
> Individuals with dysgraphia often have difficulties in Executive Functions (e.g., planning and organizing).
What the fuck lmao.
> a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place!
This is a totally different thing; this is intentional rejection of new ideas, and basically rejection of everyone who isn't the same.
- implicit taboos against things like mental self-modification, metacognition, introspection, empathy (latter two to a lesser degree because of their "glue" function); general abstraction-phobia scaling to sociall anti-intellectualism
- proclivity to pattern-match against acquired linguistic constructs (narratives, ideologies, superstitions) rather than trying to analytically reason about object-level cause-and-effect chains (leads to "shoot the messenger" style symptom-treatments; wireheading scenarios; all the "you can only ever win by being wrong" stuff)
- relatedly, conflating the ethically incorrect, vs the physically impossible, vs the unthinkable (whereas i'd venture there's a definite benefit to being able to tell apart these different modes of putative non-being)
these i view as "architectural patterns" in accordance with which the global "operating system" of "normative being" is constructed; infinite spanners into gearworks coalescing into what from afar might sound as a symphony to someone who has never heard one; poor memory and impaired reasoning skills being either organic side effects - or, scarier still, the very evolutionary pressures that make this whole show viable in the first place
the dysgraphia connection is interesting in its own right; i draw a tentative association with the known educational abuse of forcibly changing people's handedness. where i'm from, this was common up until relatively recently, and it remains folk knowledge that in the long term it can fuck up the developing mind's impulse control and executive function.
i'd conjecture what gets disrupted is the quasi-organic relation to one's "exocortex" (cf. jaynes' hypothesis of the emergence of the ego-as-subject-of-structured-reflection through the invention of writing?) so that one basically gains a self-reinforcing pavlovian "circuit" which fades into the background but disrupts one's cognition and/or motorics every time one approaches the correct conduction of the desired procedure (as in the case of reifying a particular grapheme out of muscle-memory)
sadly, as institutionally legitimized specialists tend to be pre-vetted for strong pro-sociality above all else, mainstream consensus dictates this fascinating and occasionally life-or-death stuff can only be studied on a basis i'd call "the merely actuarial"; but no deeper. conversely, conceptual tools for dealing with directly experienced phenomenological aspects (my "favorite" one being, of course, adversarial impairment of cognition) are few, far between, and rarely if ever from impartial sources.
> Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...
I spent a long time trying to decide if you were referencing licking the windows, or something more poetic. I decided to let both interpretations occupy my mind, as it seemed greater than the sum of its parts.
> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Wait: I thought LSD is schedule 1, and there are no legally-sanctioned uses of it? Did something change while I was living under a rock? (Unlike MDMA, where there were legally-sanctioned experiments recently.)
MDMA, magic mushrooms, and cannabis are all also Schedule 1 by US federal law too. All it really takes though to get around it is for a state law to allow it and the state to tell the feds to go fuck themselves and close the door to them and make them challenge it in court if they want to do anything about it, which the feds don't want to do because it would cost ass tons of money to fight in court and would only further prove that drug scheduling is mostly just bullshit and lies.
Fact check: true. It's also completely up to the head of the NHS, who is currently noted drug enthusiast RFK Jr. Here's hoping he'll legalize LSD and mescaline! He's used enough mescaline and spiked enough people's drinks with it, and also forced LSD on his pet birds, so at this point it's pure hypocrisy for him to keep it scheduled. Of course, we should expect everybody to have much better morals and sense about it than he's ever had.
Is this really for HN? This is leftist piffle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations. I’m not sure what it adds to the discovery by this undergrad. I don’t know.
"Robert F Kennedy Jr And The Dark Side Of The Dream" by Jerry Oppenheimer, page 54:
> Back at the Kennedy compound before summer's end, away from Billings for the time being, he continued his bad behavior, feeding LSD to his parakeet, and forcing his brother David to trip on the psychedelic mescaline. Hallucinating, looking wide- eyed at his brother, he imagined the worst, screaming, "You're dying just like Daddy!"
Jerry Oppenheimer is generally considered to be a credible biographer and journalist.
That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations." It is not piffle, it is written by a serious reported in a serious biographical piece. It is not a conspiracy theory, for it does not posit any particular conspiracy because typically those require more than one conspirator, and it is about as substantiated as many of the claims RFK Jr himself makes.
Having now established the substance of the claim I made, I shall proceed to establish its relevance. RFK Jr has a long history with drugs, as do many politicians. RFK Jr is the head of the HHS. The secretary of the HHS can initiate proceedings to deschedule drugs. It is hypocritical, given his own admitted history with drugs, to continue to imprison people for it.
For that matter, we have recently had Elon Musk (a notorious drug enthusiast) involved in the highest levels of government while actively doing copious amounts of illegal drugs. He should be in jail, like everyone else of lesser means who have been victimized by this senseless war on drugs. He won't be imprisoned, because he has money. It is the best evidence we have that the war on drugs is actually a war on the poor.
They don't care about drugs, or they'd enforce drug law evenly. Joe Rogan, a self-admitted fan of many schedule 1 hallucinogens, remains a free man in the proto-christian-nationalist state of Texas. It is hypocrisy.
It is time to end this war on drugs and move towards a sensible drug policy that is fair for all people and respects our basic freedoms.
Then, this is a good opportunity to learn more about good arguments. The supposed "refutation" amounted to "the person that wrote a tabloid biography is credible because I say he is. There, now that I have proven his credibility ..." I mean, you can't actually be serious.
Your initial rebuttal was "this is leftist piffle, conspiracy theory, and baseless accusations." It is not piffle. It is not a conspiracy theory, because no conspiracy was theorized about. It is not a baseless accusation, because I have a base for it. Yes, my refutation is more substantiated than your initial rebuttal. Cry about it. Substantiate your argument if you want it to be substantiated. Engage substantively if you want to be treated as doing such, "adult."
I started at "bronze age Protestant" and chuckled. I know you of course weren't being that serious about the exact phrasing, but of course the Protestants didn't come around until the 1500s. What that phrase put into my mind was Pilgrims showing up in the Trojan war. :)
I wasn't aware people could act so credulously in the face of obvious hyperbole.
Do you really, truly, believe this poster to be making a positive claim about when Protestants did or did not exist? If so, I weep for your social comprehension skills.
Christian moralism is an antiquated, self-contradicting, socially regressive belief system that continues to plague humanity and politics to this day. If people want to believe in Sky Daddy on their own time then that's fine, we all need a way to cope our way through the horrors of living with other humans. Your capacity to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms, which are not granted by any imaginary deity. We should keep Yahweh (and every other unfalsifiable, immaterial, intelligence) out of the politics that govern mortal, material, extant humans. An omnipotent presence could surely argue for his own agenda in politics. It's baffling that so many narcissists believe themselves to be charged with the responsibility for advocating his agenda instead.
Oh, save your weeping for my "social comprehension skills" are fine. I saw it less as hyperbole and more of pedestrian inability to make a real case and instead malign a pretty reasonable religion. This is a website often known for being pedantic about correctness and you're incredulity at see someone not accepting passive aggressive nonsense as a valid argument seems to say more about your social comprehension skills, to be perfectly honest.
The fact that you repeatedly write "Sky Daddy" as some child on 4chan seems to also imply that you may not be aware of what kind of a site this is. I don't know. Even the meat of your argument is plainly pathetic and I meant that with no disrespect. The idea that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs, which is not to say such an argument would be correct, is sophomoric to the point that I think it may be a topic better left to adults.
It's cool that you saw it less as hyperbole and "more of a pedestrian inability to make a real case." I suppose it does take one to recognize one, your game is pretty similar to this description.
It is not passive aggression. It is active aggression. We are seeing the plague of intellectual dishonesty spread in our civilization. It is making things materially worse for people who are currently alive. We should be actively hostile against it. Anybody who's reading this, I encourage you to take up polemics against the Christian faith. Read Peter Boghossian's "A Manual For Creating Atheists."
I have arguments against the complete legalization of drugs. I think there are many valid, good, principled arguments against it. Absolutely nowhere did I raise the idea "that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs." Nowhere did I even advocate for the "complete legalization of drugs."
I did not advocate for these things because I do not believe in them as policy positions. I have not, in fact, positively claimed what policies I would like to see enacted. I have criticized the current state of affairs and stated the principles by which I'd like to see them reformed.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not substantively supported by the text you read, probably as a form of prejudice or emotional response to seeing a "reasonable religion" maligned.
I outright reject every moralistic argument from the basis of Yahweh, a deity whose holy book contains self-contradicting inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies, scientific inaccuracies, and moral tragedies. Cry about it. Absolutely no deity which has commanded the sexual assault of innocent women, nor condoned chattel slavery, should ever be considered a source of moral truth. The Yahweh of the old testament is a vindictive, cruel, evil old spirit. The Yahweh of the new testament is, at best, a literary invention of Greek novelists and the charlatan Jesus of Nazareth. Did Jesus say some cool things and have some wisdom? I'd say so. Was he a scholar of the Bible? Probably. Was he the Messiah? Factually, by the messianic prophecies laid out in the old testament, the answer is a resounding "no." Any religion which both claims a text of messianic prophecy and a Messiah which fulfilled zero of those prophecies can not be considered a coherent religion, let alone a reasonable one.
Furthermore, Yahweh is 100% a Sky Daddy. His believers literally call him the holy father. The only way it even makes sense to object to the term "Sky Daddy" is because of the obvious infantilization. However, the infantilization is not my invention; merely my emphasis.
Doesn't this site say you should assume good faith? Maybe you don't know what kind of site it is, "adult."
EDIT: actually, the fact you thought calling Protestants "Bronze Age" was passive instead of active aggression does make me legitimately concerned for your social comprehension skills.
Another thing that makes me worried about your social comprehension skills is that you saw me say "your ability to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms" and immediately jumped to "so you think all drugs should be legal??" I'm pretty sure, at this point, I'm speaking to a dyed-in-the-wool, drank-the-kool-aid, brain-is-fully-rotted theist.
So let me say this really plainly, in easy words, to make sure you can grasp it without ambiguity: you can make arguments against drugs without invoking spirits. You can make moral arguments without invoking spirits.
I do it quite often.
EDIT2: I am fine with people who call themselves Christians. I am not ok with Christian nationalism. I do not want the Christian faith eradicated, but I do want them to stop meddling in politics.
Which part, in particular, is nonsense? You consistently refuse to engage substantively, instead running away and offering insults.
You said Christianity is a "very reasonable religion." I have made my argument for why this is not the case. I can back it up with scriptural evidence, if you'd like.
You stated I made the case that no argument could be made against the legalization of all drugs. This could not be further from the truth. You are wrong here, plainly.
Please actually engage, substantively, with the text. If it is nonsense, quote it, dissect it, and show it to be the case.
I know you won't, and I suspect it's because you can't. Have fun baselessly insulting me yet again.
EDIT: let me break down the structure of my prior comment for you. There were 8 paragraphs in the initial section, 3 in the first edit, 1 in the second edit.
The first paragraph was me telling you that you have not demonstrated a capacity to substantively engage with people, while saying they make baseless arguments. This is what you are doing.
The next 4 paragraphs are me telling you that you have plainly misstated my argument, and made an accusation that was textually unfounded.
The next 3 paragraphs are my discussion of why Christianity is not a "very reasonable religion" and why I reject moral arguments from Yahweh.
I used the term "Sky D*ddy" (censored to spare your feelings) exactly once in this second comment, to explain that: yes, that is an accurate description of Yahweh.
The next 3 paragraphs in the edit were pretty much just insulting your social comprehension skills, and the last paragraph in the last edit was me stating that I'm fine with people who call themselves Christian but not fine with Christian nationalism.
All of my sentences were grammatically well-constructed. There is a logical through-line that connects one sentence to the next, and each paragraph to the next. I stated things without substantiating them, but there is nothing I said which I can not substantiate with evidence and sound reasoning.
It is not an example of disorganized thinking. It is not an example of poor thinking, nor of poor writing. Your condescension in telling me to get treatment is not well-taken. What you are seeing is a passionate person telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you are a bellend, along with specifically "how" and "why."
> it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.
That is not necessarily related to the compound but the method of consumption. Natural sources of psychedelic compounds have, naturally, variances in potency. With Morning Glory seeds you also ingest some other probably pharmacologically active compounds, again in amounts that vary from seed to seed.
LSA distorted my perception of object sizes and made me very nauseous.
I took it once in high school. HBWR seeds. Scraped the nasty stuff off the outside. Fell asleep while waiting for it to kick in. Woke up intoxicated. Puked. Went back to sleep
Lol similar situation for me. Took a hike actually. Puked on the beach. Got some seawater and washed the puke away / buried it in the sand. Rough time.
Always take dramamine or ginger with you if taking HBWR. There are ways you can extract the LSA without the compounds that give you nausea but it's a pretty involved process
What happened ? I took LSA (both top-choice morning glories and HBWRs) about 20~40 times. About half to 1/3rd were "blank shots" (when you feel almost no effects). I even re-peaked once.
Very unpredictable, but it was always less, never more intense trips. The fact I took top-of-the-shelf seeds might have to do with that. It's better to take 10 HWBR from Ghana than 50 from Hawaii (may have god mercy upon your soul if this is the case).
Also ipomea vs HBWR is as different as sativa vs indica.
>Still, some clinicians use them to treat conditions like migraines, dementia, uterine hemorrhaging and Parkinson’s disease.
I think it's more common to use synthetic derivatives of ergot alkaloids like ergonovine. But ergot itself is infamously difficult to cultivate. So it's no surprise that they have immediately started trying to culture this new fungus.
The video is not about LSD or PTSD, so it would be nice if I could give a time index into where in the video Dr gives the warning, but sadly I don't have time right now.
LSD saved my life. I suffered chronic depression and anxiety with suicidal ideation, had tried multiple psychiatric drugs and forms of therapy, and nothing had improved (the failure of these officially-approved modes of treatment actually left me feeling much more hopeless). Taking LSD gave me the insight that this wasn't fundamental the the nature of being me, that there was hope that one day I could love my life. The road to get there has been difficult, and has involved intense (non-LSD) psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with very deep childhood trauma, but that first fundamental glimmer that there's a reason to have hope came from an experience with LSD.
If I had listened to stern authority figures telling me that there's never a good reason to try it and it could only do me harm, I would in all likelihood be dead today.
Similar experience here. Historically traditional talk therapy only retraumatized me and was not going to be compatible with my personality. I had ran out of other treatment options (stimulants, SSRIs, EMDR, ECT, meditation/mindfulness...) before finally reaching for psilocybin purely out of desperation.
Combined with intensive integration therapy it has been the only treatment that had any positive effect. A lot of treatments have a risk profile in whether they will confirm my existing beliefs and only aggravate my situation (similar to above, failing to find "go to therapy" useful advice and opening myself to blame/unlovability from givers of the advice), but I hope I can go back sometime for a similar treatment if it's psychoactive.
It was no cure, and today I'm largely the person I was before treatment moodwise, but one thing I learned was for a condition such as mine, there is unlikely to ever be a cure. I had just the right amount of trauma that I can expect to manage my condition for the rest of my life. But what opinion do I choose to attach to this belief? That I'm okay with it. It wasn't my fault so there's not any sense in shaming myself for not finding what I can't have. At least one thing I can say is I found something that had an effect, and no matter how pessimistic I get, not even I can deny that with some depressive retort. This is not a sensation I'm familiar with. Before taking the drug I had lost all hope from believing my incompatibility with doctor-approved methods made me an untouchable, on top of already being depressed. It was clear my path forward would have to be paved away from the one society prescribes for me from then on.
Strangely I have no strong desire to take the drug again yet even though I am still depressed. I accept my life will be one of sometimes violent mood swings and I will have to be more patient with myself than in the past. I have made it my life's goal not to foist my malfunctioning brain's irrationality onto others at all costs. My condition is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to manage it. If I'm depressed now I just try to sit with it instead of fighting for things I know are unrealistic to have. I'm just not like most people, and I'm okay with that now, more or less.
hey thank you for posting this. I'm sorry to hear about your condition but happy LSD was able to help a bit.
One unsolicited idea from a stranger: consider trying it again! I was in a similar situation for a long time (found it helpful but no strong desire to try it again), but multiple trips over time ended up being very helpful - for me at least.
Agree, I read research (unsure which) that stated people with my circumstance benefited more from repeated sessions, sometimes as high as 5x. I intend to go back at a later date but I see no rush.
It’s always risk vs reward. It turned you around, it can push healthy folks into a long lasting depression. Happy for you, but it isn’t a magical cure, it’s a chemical for twisting your synapses. As you’ve noted, having a guide through the experience and a purpose is vital.
Thats an oversimplification to be polite. For most people it can bring the most intense and beautiful experiences their live can ever produce. Then there is (non-trivial) minority which has something broken in their core (which is a statement that can mean many things). Yes, its not for them, or only at great risk (and potentially great reward as OP wrote).
But man, I never ever came close to the simple pure beauty that I experienced repeatedly on mushrooms (for the sake of argument cca 1:1 to LSD), never with any sort of guide, just let my mind wander to places it wants to go.
And I've got married, have 2 beautiful healthy kids, was there to cut umbilical cord for both, climbed extreme peaks like Matterhorn, hiked for weeks and months in himalaya and other places around the world, all very intense.
Psychedelics changed permanently perspective on life and important matters quite a bit. Experienced very intense spiritual moments, despite being cca agnostic (and it just confirmed and enforced my views to be clear). For all the bad it can do and does, it adds so much good to mankind. Its a very powerful tool.
Your post actually makes me sad. You have such a wonderful life: kids, wife, privilege and wealth to travel to Europe. But the most beautiful experience in your mind wasn’t any of that, it was tripping on shrooms? If you are trying to make me not want to try psychedelics you did well.
Hmm, an interesting reaction, I think I get it but I view topic from different perspective.
I am not anyhow lowering value of all other things I ever achieved in life, those are some hard won victories that didn't come without pain (and lets check in 20 years whether that stood the test of time). I gave them as a mere comparison.
Those mushrooms were that intense, it would be a lie to say otherwise. Cutting first umbilical cord was second, but then every hard peak I've climbed brought me to my knees and brought tears of joy and released emotions, those were some powerful emotions too (I guess when you struggle very hard and risk life for some specific goal and then reaching it this happens, at least to me).
But don't judge before knowing, there is nothing in this world that can prepare you for that intensity, if dose is enough (milder stuff, full stomach etc may result in different experience). Few words of description - laying in bed with eyes closed, losing gradually all the senses, dissolving what remained into mist of atoms that swirled and danced to shamanic music playing in the background. Then after a long time, very slowly starting to climb down that 'hill' by putting those atoms back together one by one, piecing together my personality, and then sense by sense, very slowly. Pure happiness afterwards, grin for an hour or two. Massive mental exhaustion from 'expanded mind', worst headache I ever had (but basic stuff like paracetamol helped a lot). Long lasting effects on life perspective.
But thats me, other folks may put the umbilical cord as #1, others those mountains or other endeavors.
The glass is half full of half empty? Did GP have reduced intensity of experiences related to his family, or they were of "normal" intensity, just intensity of shrooms experiences were above it?
The person you reply to sounds like someone who kknocks it without having tried it. I base this on the full comment, and more specifically on the fragment "tripping on shrooms". Drugs all enhance and alter what's inside you, for better and for worse, controllable or not. If climbing Mt Everest was your most eye opening and amazing experience, does that somehow reduce the value of your wife and kids? Such a strange premise...
I mean I hear former junkies say the same thing about heroin after they kick. “It was the greatest pleasure I’ll ever know,” they’ll tell you with utmost sincerity. More a bug than feature, to me, YMMV
Pink Floyd’s man who recently passed away may be an example. Brian Wilson another, I heard him say his one regret was psychedelics as they scrambled his brain… I’m all for them when used with respect and correct (mind)set and setting. Lots of human progress has came off the back of psychedelics but they not for the common people. It takes a brave and worthy (shaman) to guide someone through the collective conscious
Wilson was taking a lot of different sorts of drugs iirc. Part of the problem is people take psychedelics in youth, when schizophrenia, bipolar and other mental disorders tend to arise making it hard to quantify true risk.
Those folks had serious psychiatric mental issues to begin with. Then they threw tens of truckloads of hard drugs in various mixes on top of that, often for decades.
This could break even the most healthy person and tells nothing about therapeutic potential of these substances with right approach. Its like judging how healthy salt is to humans by watching some maniac consume 200g of it daily.
Ironically, many in this thread are advocating for that! Take someone with mental problems, throw a truckload of psychedelics on top. That’ll fix em gud! And, if that doesn’t work, up the dosage, or maybe do the 3000 dollar ketamine sessions twice a week to really really fix the problem.
Those guys were using a shit ton of drugs of all forms, so I'm not sure a single hit of LSD (which I'm sure was many) was the culprit.
For me, I've used LSD a few times, both alone, and with a few trusted people. It's an incredibly intense drug, and if administered correctly, can really help.
Of course it has the potential to really fuck with someone permanently, but so does alcohol, Ozempic, etc, yet we say nothing of those.
Neither psych drugs nor therapy nor LSD is a cure for depression. I too have had chronic depression and anxiety. Maybe I have had a more severe cocktail of mental conditions. Psych drug informed me where the irritation came from, caused me to rebel, but then it proceeded to give me suicidal ideation. Therapy was like a person talking a language I didn’t understand. alcohol was the most addicting experience as an escape from problems. I imagine lsd was an escape from reality.
The ultimate cure for depression: call this new line of sadness and hopelessness and despair as the baseline for what life is. And any ounce of hope, happiness, bloom is a gift and blessing that you appreciate without taking for granted. And then you structure yourself to live for those fleeting moments. And suicide is a world of persistent misery many times worse than what you are experiencing.
But instead you took LSD, and found yourself hope yet the message can be a complete deception. What will you do when you realize that? All you have done is separated yourself from ever understanding your reality because of that hope.
People who suffer from depression are those who are unable to connect with their world. Either trauma, anger, or confusion will cause them separation and difficulty of integration. There is this book called feeling good I think which goes into CBT. The first few pages repeats one thing relentlessly: you have exaggerated the negatives in your world in order to cope with it.
Some people adopt supremacy complexes to give themselves new meaning and curse out all irritations. This is a temporary solution because it swings them into the other side of disconnect eventually
Then you might have misread what a supremacy complex is. It is a position of defeat in the face of adversity so you seek avenues of justification for your superiority.
It's not at all unusual for drugs to have effects similar to the thing they're used to treat.
The anti-emetic I needed to take for chemo (chemotherapy is literally poison, your body will quickly figure out that you're being poisoned and, despite the fact that the poison was injected into your veins, throw up to try to remove it, so, you need an anti-emetic or you'll have a bad time each session) has "Nausea, vomiting" on its list of possible side effects. It also has a long list of really nasty psyc effects, so since taking it after chemo isn't mandatory I just didn't, most people take it for a few hours or a day, I just didn't, which was not fun but to my mind the risk wasn't worth it. [Yes I'm fine now, chemotherapy works]
Even more hilariously I read a friend's Morning After pill patient info while she was busy taking it, and almost every symptoms of early pregnancy is on the side effects list - basically the only thing they're not saying you might have despite this pill is a baby. Vomiting, cramps, dizziness and headaches, bleeding, sore nipples - pretty much everything except the newborn human in nine months was on the list.
The other things that are good for PTSD though don't carry a risk of making it worse: friendship with people who understand you and don't trigger you, talking about the traumatic experience, supporting general metabolic health and brain health.
For lessening the effect of traumatizing experience, 40mg of propranolol an hour before remembering and visualizing the traumatic, under guidance of a therapist, should be the gold standard for treatment. There a lot's of researchs showing its effectiveness but for some reason it's use stays experimental. I suppose it's because there is no money to be made with an old drug cheaply available from many generic suppliers.
Yes, it is a major risk. I’m unsure why people want to pretend that it isn’t. Everyone knows someone who unexpectedly changed forever for the worse bc of these drugs. It also happened to me even though I had perfect set and setting, I was traumatised by it for years, and I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time. And yet I’ve met multiple people who have told me that the issue is that I just didn’t take enough, some even going as far as saying that I’m stuck in some kind of purgatory unless I take a heroic dose
Wildly irresponsible, many of the fans of these drugs, who seem to talk as if things like risk and responsibility are just constructs from the man trying to keep you down
> It also happened to me even though I had perfect set and setting, I was traumatised by it for years, and I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.
> I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.
Yes they literally did. I spoke on various topics, one of those being about how people try to convince me to take more drugs. Their sole response? Telling me, in effect, "maybe you won't have a bad trip next time". This cannot be interpreted in any other way than to convince me to open up to the possibility of taking such drugs again which is exactly what I am criticising.
The only thing you said is “maybe maybe not” to me saying that I won’t take drugs again bc I know next time I’ll have a bad time. How is that appropriate? Let’s stick with what you did wrong and how it is indicative of the blasé attitude people have about the risks. All I’m doing is pointing that out but since I mentioned trauma you are weaponising it against me
Can you provide a transcript or a quote to support your claim that Dr K "only says psychedelics can be dangerous if you already have PTSD"?
Here is the passage that I think is relevant to whether people should do hallucinogens. (I was mistaken earlier when I claimed the passage was about LSD specifically.)
>substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it
It is an aside in the middle of another sentence. Here the same passage with more context (specifically, everything said from 7:10 to the end of the video):
>the focus of your mind is on "I". You are the object of your attention. [Dr K looks at the chat stream] OK? Like anxiety, yes. [Dr K stops looking at the chat stream] Then what happens -- so, when this person says, this person on the reddits says, you know, "I actually think that self-awareness is the problem," they are absolutely right because their self-awareness is their default-mode network being highly active. Then we can look at neuroscience papers, and what we discover is that substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it -- fractures the sense of self, but when you stu -- when that sense of self gets fractured, you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, and when you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, this problem of over-self-awareness goes away, and people get better in terms of depression. Does that make sense?
I think people should be properly informed about the risks of LSD and should try a small dose before trying anything larger, and should have the maturity to understand what a complex or difficult trip could mean.
It's extremely well-known and documented that the War on Drugs was racially motivated, and hence drugs used by certain minority groups more than the majority white population were made illegal.
GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.
are you acknowledging that alcohol was made illegal in the US for white people and only re-legalized after those laws proved unenforceable and fed the growth of white organized crime?
there was a lot of racism in US legal history, but don't try to make drugs and white people who wanted to do drugs the victims, it was non-white people who were the victims directly.
Look at what Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy were saying about LSD
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
Apart from being really stupid advice it was viewed, correctly, as a direct threat to the established order. The established order is very bad (no arguments now?) but Tim and Ken were being very stupid and bought a whole load of shit down and put psychedelics back 40 years
Yes of course, but the point was that the hippies were part of the undesirables, along with the black folks, the mexicans, and any women who wanted to say, own private property or have a bank account.
why so? this is probably the direction he wanted to go if i can recall his book (problem child) correctly
the more insight into the synthesis of a pro-therapeutic substance, the easier (i guess) is to remove the undesirable effects (what recreational people want)
How is it a problem child? The only problem is the fed's blanket ban of it like many other drugs that do have known medical uses. Feds still classify marijuana as schedule 1 with no medical uses, and yet multiple states allow you to buy it freely. Just don't invite the feds to your house.
While it's been known for many years that endosymbiotic fungi are responsible for producing the ergot alkaloids in the Morning Glory plant family, and the recent discovery here is the identification of the host-specific fungal symbiont for the common decorative flower Ipomoea tricolor, this plant-fungus relationship was not known in the days of Albert Hoffman's research.
He is most famous for synthesizing and experiencing the effects of LSD from ergot-derived alkaloids; ergot is a fungal pathogen that grows on grain plants. He then identified psilocybin as the active psychoactive component of magic mushroom samples from Mexico.
When he turned his work to identifying the active component in Morning Glory plants, he presented his work showing that he'd discovered LSA, another ergot alkaloid. Other researchers accused him of having contaminated samples, because he'd found in plants compounds which were known only from the fungi kingdom. Hoffman's work was vindicated, in a sense, when the relationship of endosybiotic fungi (cryptic fungi which spend the majority of their lifecycle inside a plant) was later elucidated.
Really impressive that a student managed to find something Hofmann suspected nearly a century ago. Makes you wonder how many of these hidden chemists are still quietly working in symbiosis with plants, carrying out complex metabolic processes we haven’t noticed yet.
It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
> It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
A ton, which is one selfish reason the genetic diversity collapse is such a negative. In this particular discovery, we already knew there was something interesting about the morning glory plant and it took us decades and decades to find it. To give you an idea how little plant life has been studied, we have sequenced the gnome of less than one thousand species.
Think of the millions of years of evolution as knowledge discovered by non-human species. When we extinct an under-studied species, we don't know what we're losing. It's like burning the Alexandria library without any curiosity about what's inside it.
If a plant species going extinct is like burning a book, then it's a book that might contain medical knowledge that would help millions of people.
Plant genomes are an insane mess.
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Perhaps the impressive thing is that it wasn't found for so long and finally was. Not that it was a student.
Perhaps, but that was not how it was worded. Like I said, I’m genuinely asking. If the original author wants to say “oh, I don’t think the student part is relay relevant”, then it’s all good. Otherwise it’s still all good but I want to understand their choice of mentioning the student.
Now I'm not saying that a student shouldn't be able to find it. But in conventional wisdom it seems quite clear why one sounds more impressive than the other if you ask me.
A student is still learning. Not at the peak of knowledge/ability. While an "expert" or in the context of academia, a professor, would seem more knowledgeable. In that context, the wording seems expected / understandable.
Of course in reality in some real life contexts a professor might be more "stagnant" than a student that's trying to get a big discovery in order to earn a doctorate/professorship or course. But that's not "conventional wisdom" for the masses.
> (…) sounds more impressive (…) sounds more impressive (…)
You keep saying that, but my question was why they considered it to be more impressive. I understand an article might want anything to sound more impressive for clicks.
> If this is the case, isn't it quite clear
And no, I don’t agree that taking so long immediately makes it more impressive that a student did it. How many experts are actively searching? And how many students? There are always more of the latter than the former. After long, fortuitous encounters (which anyone can have) become more common.
You're reading a whole lot into how it's worded that isn't there.
A student generally lacks much of the experience and knowledge of a professional or academic, that's all.
This is a bit much, I think. It is impressive because it is rare for an undergraduate to make a discovery. It’s not disillusionment with the educational system; that seems pretty politically charged. Normally, undergrads are studying what has been already known and it is a small portion of them that to do so”undergrad research” and usually that does not rise to the level of publishing anything. It’s normally graduate (MS and PhD) students that do such things. Also, graduate students, particularly PhD students, are primarily concerned with research while undergrads are primarily concerned with classes (educationally anyway!). Also, it would have also been surprising, as you say, if the student had been graduated for two-months and not in graduate school to make such a discovery. So, it’s not some grand reason or indictment of society. In the end, it is just plainly uncommon.
> It is impressive because it is rare for an undergraduate to make a discovery.
Is it? Looks like every other science story of this nature is “high school student did X”, “student at university Y discovered Z”. Perhaps they are the minority, but I still feel they happen often enough that it’s not really deserving of the always mentioning that.
> It’s not disillusionment with the educational system; that seems pretty politically charged.
Any political charged statement you read there is 100% in your head. Maybe in the USA such a simple statement could be politically charged, but where I live everyone would look at you like you had just lost the plot if you suggested that response.
> So, it’s not some grand reason or indictment of society.
Again, neither was I suggesting it was, merely postulating any hypothesis that could make sense.
> In the end, it is just plainly uncommon.
Doesn’t seem uncommon enough for me to warrant the frequent emphasis, but thank you anyway for taking the time to reply.
> The researchers prepared a DNA sample and sent it away for genome sequencing, funded by a WVU Davis College Student Enhancement Grant obtained by Hazel. The sequencing confirmed the discovery of a new species and the sequence is now deposited in a gene bank with her name on it.
> “Sequencing a genome is a significant thing,” Panaccione said. “It’s amazing for a student.”
Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
As I understand it, sequencing is the step that confirms the discovery, so it represents the culmination of the effort.
Biology is one of those fields where accidental discoveries still have value. Whether they earn the same recognition as some long grinding effort is up in the air, but it's a nice feather in the cap for a student.
There's the old saying: "Chance favors the prepared mind." The student must have had an insight that caused them to investigate something that many other people had probably overlooked or dismissed as unimportant.
I'm expecting the significant thing is knowing which DNA to sequence. Also, if I'm reading the article correctly she isolated the DNA being sequenced first, so it's not like she just sent in the fungus and offloaded all of the work.
>Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
It's actually a little more complicated than they made it sound. What the student likely did was assemble the genome.
When you send DNA out for sequencing, you get back files of 100-300 basepairs. You then need to do assemble them into a genome by figuring out where all the pieces overlap.
Obviously there are tools that help with this, but there are lots of fiddly bits and settings that you need to play around with to get it right.
She did want to say: "It is amazing for a student to get this much success by a half accidental discovery"
Then she thought about things incomprehensible for programmers and said the other sentence.
> incomprehensible for programmers
You should stop projecting. I understand something may be incomprehensible to you and you happen to call yourself a programmer. That doesn't mean you're correct about either.
The whole article feels a bit confusing, and I’m not really sure what they’re talking about. Are they saying the mushroom produces ergot alkaloids—the precursors to LSD? That would be interesting but not groundbreaking. Or are they claiming it actually produces LSD itself?
Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.
iirc, it is LSD, but not LSD-25. Which is the kind usually synthesised and sold on blotters. LSD-25 was so named because it was Hoffman's twenty fifth experimental LSD variant.
I think what they mean is:
sequencing a genome [of a new species] is a significant thing
It's great for the student. And it shows that the lab she worked in and the university are able to do this type of science.
Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.
What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.
The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.
I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.
Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.
Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved
A full human sequence is only 2-5k USD so it's about money.
I doubt she wrote the grant, professor looks like he would give certain students undue credit.
> professor looks like
Sounds awful already
> ... he would give certain students undue credit.
What the fuck???
I hate our stupid ape brains so much.
I really appreciate the mature tone this article took towards the discussion of a psychedelic compound
After the discovery of a psychedelic compound, there are two pipelines for release:
- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.
- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.
I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.
LSD was discovered in and extensively tested and produced by the giant medical company Sandoz for about 20 years. It was also extensively studied in academic settings.
The black market production started a lot later, mostly due to the War on Drugs.
Sandoz still produces LSD
Source? Their patent expired, and Wikipedia says they stopped making it on the 60s. Occasionally a sealed bottle of Delysid will surface somewhere, but I think that they are all vintage.
I feel like it overhyped it for being a treatment when that hasn't been validated yet
The use of LSD in psychiatry is one of the less wacky things about the state of psychiatry at that time. Arguably psychiatry is still wacky, and still overhypes novel compounds without knowing how or why they work exactly. LSD was very rigorously studied compared to say today’s use of ketamine.
Yes, there was a ton of psychiatric research on LSD. However the bar of required to perform pharmaceutical testing on humans is much higher now, and the quality of the data is much higher because of improved testing standards.
For sure. But if you read some of that wacky stuff from way back, you can start to see how parts rhyme with aspects of contemporary psychiatry. They too had much better standards and data than their predecessors. The hype around LSD back then, and a bit of the kookiness, was similar to the current emphasis on trauma, ketamine therapy, etc… Stuff that works and is new gets overhyped.
>produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction
yes, such incredible maturity, didn't even mention that these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed... although, "self-medication" probably does adhere pretty well.
>...these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed
Yes
To be clear most LSD users, who've done LSD for years, do it for fun.
Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...
For me the last time I took a trip I was alone for most of the trip and I cried a lot and my heart felt physically pained. I felt sorry for my heart that it had to keep beating and could not rest. It was a really challenging trip. I haven't been on another trip since.
Set and setting?
If setting includes the people you are with, or lack thereof, then yeah.
That would be good subject matter for a poem.
> I haven't been on another trip since
Good choice.
It is not fun, unless it is
I am a frequent LSD user and I do it for fun and healing.
I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.
>but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties
counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience
It pushes more than just anxieties to the background. During the peak of an LSD trip, I can be so distractible that I can barely keep more than one thing in my head at a time, and it's incredibly easy for any new thought to overwrite everything prior. I do know that spending some time in that state of mind does tend to help me. With that said, I don't think I can speak much on the default mode network because I haven't developed an intuition on how that affects me.
i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
it completely makes sense that a person with neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis might experience these effects differently (different valence to same phenomenon; or, entirely different phenomenon from same preconditions). either way, imo the important thing (confirmed by what you say about the hyper-distractible state which you experience) is for one to spend as much time as needed in the headspace that is appropriate to their neurobiological makeup, rather than that headspace which other people want one to be in as if it's any of their goddam business.
ofc not to be taken that reaching "the personally good headspace" is trivial; a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place! (the premise of neurotypical supremacy?) hence the utility of altered states which demonstrate the opposite and thus provide the introspector with a basis for comparison
thanks for sharing your experiences!
> i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
I'm not super sure what "blinders" you're speaking of. I don't think it's expected for a neurotypical person to only be able to keep ~one thought in their head at a time. Although I do notice a lot of the time people find it weird that I remember things that were besides a point; maybe that's what you're talking about.
> neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis
Weird trivia, but it's really fucking weird that dysgraphia predicts an ADHD diagnosis. I seem to have dysgraphia, and lo and behold[0]:
> Individuals with dysgraphia often have difficulties in Executive Functions (e.g., planning and organizing).
What the fuck lmao.
> a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place!
This is a totally different thing; this is intentional rejection of new ideas, and basically rejection of everyone who isn't the same.
> thanks for sharing your experiences!
Of course~
[0]: https://ldaamerica.org/disabilities/dysgraphia
some "blinders":
- implicit taboos against things like mental self-modification, metacognition, introspection, empathy (latter two to a lesser degree because of their "glue" function); general abstraction-phobia scaling to sociall anti-intellectualism
- proclivity to pattern-match against acquired linguistic constructs (narratives, ideologies, superstitions) rather than trying to analytically reason about object-level cause-and-effect chains (leads to "shoot the messenger" style symptom-treatments; wireheading scenarios; all the "you can only ever win by being wrong" stuff)
- relatedly, conflating the ethically incorrect, vs the physically impossible, vs the unthinkable (whereas i'd venture there's a definite benefit to being able to tell apart these different modes of putative non-being)
these i view as "architectural patterns" in accordance with which the global "operating system" of "normative being" is constructed; infinite spanners into gearworks coalescing into what from afar might sound as a symphony to someone who has never heard one; poor memory and impaired reasoning skills being either organic side effects - or, scarier still, the very evolutionary pressures that make this whole show viable in the first place
the dysgraphia connection is interesting in its own right; i draw a tentative association with the known educational abuse of forcibly changing people's handedness. where i'm from, this was common up until relatively recently, and it remains folk knowledge that in the long term it can fuck up the developing mind's impulse control and executive function.
i'd conjecture what gets disrupted is the quasi-organic relation to one's "exocortex" (cf. jaynes' hypothesis of the emergence of the ego-as-subject-of-structured-reflection through the invention of writing?) so that one basically gains a self-reinforcing pavlovian "circuit" which fades into the background but disrupts one's cognition and/or motorics every time one approaches the correct conduction of the desired procedure (as in the case of reifying a particular grapheme out of muscle-memory)
sadly, as institutionally legitimized specialists tend to be pre-vetted for strong pro-sociality above all else, mainstream consensus dictates this fascinating and occasionally life-or-death stuff can only be studied on a basis i'd call "the merely actuarial"; but no deeper. conversely, conceptual tools for dealing with directly experienced phenomenological aspects (my "favorite" one being, of course, adversarial impairment of cognition) are few, far between, and rarely if ever from impartial sources.
Do you have or suspect you have ADHD?
I definitely have ADHD.
> "Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view..."
On the other hand:
"If you get the message, hang up the phone."
- Alan Watts
> Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...
I spent a long time trying to decide if you were referencing licking the windows, or something more poetic. I decided to let both interpretations occupy my mind, as it seemed greater than the sum of its parts.
Huxley
> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Wait: I thought LSD is schedule 1, and there are no legally-sanctioned uses of it? Did something change while I was living under a rock? (Unlike MDMA, where there were legally-sanctioned experiments recently.)
MDMA, magic mushrooms, and cannabis are all also Schedule 1 by US federal law too. All it really takes though to get around it is for a state law to allow it and the state to tell the feds to go fuck themselves and close the door to them and make them challenge it in court if they want to do anything about it, which the feds don't want to do because it would cost ass tons of money to fight in court and would only further prove that drug scheduling is mostly just bullshit and lies.
They'd likely have to show they're worse than booze or cigarettes, which is gonna be awfully hard to accomplish.
No such requirement.
Ibuprofen would not survive being compared to the danger of alcohol. A shot-glass full of headache pills can be lethal.
Are you confusing ibuprofen with acetaminophen?
Lots of stuff that's poisonous is legal, though. You can buy and drink all the drain cleaner you want.
The federal government has just shown itself willing to militarily invade states that it doesn't like. (See also the imperial boomerang)
Here's one, I'm sure there are others:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38042914/
Drug scheduling is complete bullshit and is backed by politics and bronze age protestant beliefs, not science.
Fact check: true. It's also completely up to the head of the NHS, who is currently noted drug enthusiast RFK Jr. Here's hoping he'll legalize LSD and mescaline! He's used enough mescaline and spiked enough people's drinks with it, and also forced LSD on his pet birds, so at this point it's pure hypocrisy for him to keep it scheduled. Of course, we should expect everybody to have much better morals and sense about it than he's ever had.
After the dead whale nothing should surprise me but what?
Is this really for HN? This is leftist piffle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations. I’m not sure what it adds to the discovery by this undergrad. I don’t know.
"Robert F Kennedy Jr And The Dark Side Of The Dream" by Jerry Oppenheimer, page 54:
> Back at the Kennedy compound before summer's end, away from Billings for the time being, he continued his bad behavior, feeding LSD to his parakeet, and forcing his brother David to trip on the psychedelic mescaline. Hallucinating, looking wide- eyed at his brother, he imagined the worst, screaming, "You're dying just like Daddy!"
Jerry Oppenheimer is generally considered to be a credible biographer and journalist.
That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations." It is not piffle, it is written by a serious reported in a serious biographical piece. It is not a conspiracy theory, for it does not posit any particular conspiracy because typically those require more than one conspirator, and it is about as substantiated as many of the claims RFK Jr himself makes.
Having now established the substance of the claim I made, I shall proceed to establish its relevance. RFK Jr has a long history with drugs, as do many politicians. RFK Jr is the head of the HHS. The secretary of the HHS can initiate proceedings to deschedule drugs. It is hypocritical, given his own admitted history with drugs, to continue to imprison people for it.
For that matter, we have recently had Elon Musk (a notorious drug enthusiast) involved in the highest levels of government while actively doing copious amounts of illegal drugs. He should be in jail, like everyone else of lesser means who have been victimized by this senseless war on drugs. He won't be imprisoned, because he has money. It is the best evidence we have that the war on drugs is actually a war on the poor.
They don't care about drugs, or they'd enforce drug law evenly. Joe Rogan, a self-admitted fan of many schedule 1 hallucinogens, remains a free man in the proto-christian-nationalist state of Texas. It is hypocrisy.
It is time to end this war on drugs and move towards a sensible drug policy that is fair for all people and respects our basic freedoms.
So, yes, it is for HN, thank you.
> Jerry Oppenheimer is generally considered to be a credible biographer and journalist.
> That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations."
[Citation Needed]
You're idea of what constitutes a refutation is, and I mean this as nicely as possible, pretty ridiculous.
To me, the refutation looks significantly more substantiated than the charges.
Then, this is a good opportunity to learn more about good arguments. The supposed "refutation" amounted to "the person that wrote a tabloid biography is credible because I say he is. There, now that I have proven his credibility ..." I mean, you can't actually be serious.
Your initial rebuttal was "this is leftist piffle, conspiracy theory, and baseless accusations." It is not piffle. It is not a conspiracy theory, because no conspiracy was theorized about. It is not a baseless accusation, because I have a base for it. Yes, my refutation is more substantiated than your initial rebuttal. Cry about it. Substantiate your argument if you want it to be substantiated. Engage substantively if you want to be treated as doing such, "adult."
I started at "bronze age Protestant" and chuckled. I know you of course weren't being that serious about the exact phrasing, but of course the Protestants didn't come around until the 1500s. What that phrase put into my mind was Pilgrims showing up in the Trojan war. :)
Now I'm imagining some skit for something like History of the Wolrd Pt 3
Make the kickstarter and I'll donate
What are Bronze Age Protestant beliefs? I wasn’t aware that Protestants existed in the Bronze Age.
I wasn't aware people could act so credulously in the face of obvious hyperbole.
Do you really, truly, believe this poster to be making a positive claim about when Protestants did or did not exist? If so, I weep for your social comprehension skills.
Christian moralism is an antiquated, self-contradicting, socially regressive belief system that continues to plague humanity and politics to this day. If people want to believe in Sky Daddy on their own time then that's fine, we all need a way to cope our way through the horrors of living with other humans. Your capacity to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms, which are not granted by any imaginary deity. We should keep Yahweh (and every other unfalsifiable, immaterial, intelligence) out of the politics that govern mortal, material, extant humans. An omnipotent presence could surely argue for his own agenda in politics. It's baffling that so many narcissists believe themselves to be charged with the responsibility for advocating his agenda instead.
Oh, save your weeping for my "social comprehension skills" are fine. I saw it less as hyperbole and more of pedestrian inability to make a real case and instead malign a pretty reasonable religion. This is a website often known for being pedantic about correctness and you're incredulity at see someone not accepting passive aggressive nonsense as a valid argument seems to say more about your social comprehension skills, to be perfectly honest.
The fact that you repeatedly write "Sky Daddy" as some child on 4chan seems to also imply that you may not be aware of what kind of a site this is. I don't know. Even the meat of your argument is plainly pathetic and I meant that with no disrespect. The idea that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs, which is not to say such an argument would be correct, is sophomoric to the point that I think it may be a topic better left to adults.
It's cool that you saw it less as hyperbole and "more of a pedestrian inability to make a real case." I suppose it does take one to recognize one, your game is pretty similar to this description.
It is not passive aggression. It is active aggression. We are seeing the plague of intellectual dishonesty spread in our civilization. It is making things materially worse for people who are currently alive. We should be actively hostile against it. Anybody who's reading this, I encourage you to take up polemics against the Christian faith. Read Peter Boghossian's "A Manual For Creating Atheists."
I have arguments against the complete legalization of drugs. I think there are many valid, good, principled arguments against it. Absolutely nowhere did I raise the idea "that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs." Nowhere did I even advocate for the "complete legalization of drugs."
I did not advocate for these things because I do not believe in them as policy positions. I have not, in fact, positively claimed what policies I would like to see enacted. I have criticized the current state of affairs and stated the principles by which I'd like to see them reformed.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not substantively supported by the text you read, probably as a form of prejudice or emotional response to seeing a "reasonable religion" maligned.
I outright reject every moralistic argument from the basis of Yahweh, a deity whose holy book contains self-contradicting inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies, scientific inaccuracies, and moral tragedies. Cry about it. Absolutely no deity which has commanded the sexual assault of innocent women, nor condoned chattel slavery, should ever be considered a source of moral truth. The Yahweh of the old testament is a vindictive, cruel, evil old spirit. The Yahweh of the new testament is, at best, a literary invention of Greek novelists and the charlatan Jesus of Nazareth. Did Jesus say some cool things and have some wisdom? I'd say so. Was he a scholar of the Bible? Probably. Was he the Messiah? Factually, by the messianic prophecies laid out in the old testament, the answer is a resounding "no." Any religion which both claims a text of messianic prophecy and a Messiah which fulfilled zero of those prophecies can not be considered a coherent religion, let alone a reasonable one.
Furthermore, Yahweh is 100% a Sky Daddy. His believers literally call him the holy father. The only way it even makes sense to object to the term "Sky Daddy" is because of the obvious infantilization. However, the infantilization is not my invention; merely my emphasis.
Doesn't this site say you should assume good faith? Maybe you don't know what kind of site it is, "adult."
EDIT: actually, the fact you thought calling Protestants "Bronze Age" was passive instead of active aggression does make me legitimately concerned for your social comprehension skills.
Another thing that makes me worried about your social comprehension skills is that you saw me say "your ability to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms" and immediately jumped to "so you think all drugs should be legal??" I'm pretty sure, at this point, I'm speaking to a dyed-in-the-wool, drank-the-kool-aid, brain-is-fully-rotted theist.
So let me say this really plainly, in easy words, to make sure you can grasp it without ambiguity: you can make arguments against drugs without invoking spirits. You can make moral arguments without invoking spirits.
I do it quite often.
EDIT2: I am fine with people who call themselves Christians. I am not ok with Christian nationalism. I do not want the Christian faith eradicated, but I do want them to stop meddling in politics.
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Which part, in particular, is nonsense? You consistently refuse to engage substantively, instead running away and offering insults.
You said Christianity is a "very reasonable religion." I have made my argument for why this is not the case. I can back it up with scriptural evidence, if you'd like.
You stated I made the case that no argument could be made against the legalization of all drugs. This could not be further from the truth. You are wrong here, plainly.
Please actually engage, substantively, with the text. If it is nonsense, quote it, dissect it, and show it to be the case.
I know you won't, and I suspect it's because you can't. Have fun baselessly insulting me yet again.
EDIT: let me break down the structure of my prior comment for you. There were 8 paragraphs in the initial section, 3 in the first edit, 1 in the second edit.
The first paragraph was me telling you that you have not demonstrated a capacity to substantively engage with people, while saying they make baseless arguments. This is what you are doing.
The next 4 paragraphs are me telling you that you have plainly misstated my argument, and made an accusation that was textually unfounded.
The next 3 paragraphs are my discussion of why Christianity is not a "very reasonable religion" and why I reject moral arguments from Yahweh.
I used the term "Sky D*ddy" (censored to spare your feelings) exactly once in this second comment, to explain that: yes, that is an accurate description of Yahweh.
The next 3 paragraphs in the edit were pretty much just insulting your social comprehension skills, and the last paragraph in the last edit was me stating that I'm fine with people who call themselves Christian but not fine with Christian nationalism.
All of my sentences were grammatically well-constructed. There is a logical through-line that connects one sentence to the next, and each paragraph to the next. I stated things without substantiating them, but there is nothing I said which I can not substantiate with evidence and sound reasoning.
It is not an example of disorganized thinking. It is not an example of poor thinking, nor of poor writing. Your condescension in telling me to get treatment is not well-taken. What you are seeing is a passionate person telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you are a bellend, along with specifically "how" and "why."
I believe there are religious exceptions allowed. See Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind.”
Book: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/
Documentary based on book: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/
Timothy Leary didn't get to have his!
It is know since a long time that morning glory seeds contain LSA.
Also LSA is different from LSD. While you can legally get the former it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.
>It is know since a long time that morning glory seeds contain LSA
This is one of the givens they were working off of. The finding of the research is the fungus that produces the LSA in the seeds.
> it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.
That is not necessarily related to the compound but the method of consumption. Natural sources of psychedelic compounds have, naturally, variances in potency. With Morning Glory seeds you also ingest some other probably pharmacologically active compounds, again in amounts that vary from seed to seed.
LSA distorted my perception of object sizes and made me very nauseous.
I took it once in high school. HBWR seeds. Scraped the nasty stuff off the outside. Fell asleep while waiting for it to kick in. Woke up intoxicated. Puked. Went back to sleep
HBWR seeds cured my anxiety when I was in highschool. Also gave me the worst nausea I'd ever experienced. Also made me a lot closer to my mother
Hell of a plant
Lol similar situation for me. Took a hike actually. Puked on the beach. Got some seawater and washed the puke away / buried it in the sand. Rough time.
Always take dramamine or ginger with you if taking HBWR. There are ways you can extract the LSA without the compounds that give you nausea but it's a pretty involved process
What happened ? I took LSA (both top-choice morning glories and HBWRs) about 20~40 times. About half to 1/3rd were "blank shots" (when you feel almost no effects). I even re-peaked once.
Very unpredictable, but it was always less, never more intense trips. The fact I took top-of-the-shelf seeds might have to do with that. It's better to take 10 HWBR from Ghana than 50 from Hawaii (may have god mercy upon your soul if this is the case).
Also ipomea vs HBWR is as different as sativa vs indica.
>Still, some clinicians use them to treat conditions like migraines, dementia, uterine hemorrhaging and Parkinson’s disease.
I think it's more common to use synthetic derivatives of ergot alkaloids like ergonovine. But ergot itself is infamously difficult to cultivate. So it's no surprise that they have immediately started trying to culture this new fungus.
>> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder
LSD can cause PTSD. Dr K of the "Healthy Gamer" YT channel gives that as the reason people shouldn't do LSD in this next 8-min video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So7hE1Ba_QA
The video is not about LSD or PTSD, so it would be nice if I could give a time index into where in the video Dr gives the warning, but sadly I don't have time right now.
LSD saved my life. I suffered chronic depression and anxiety with suicidal ideation, had tried multiple psychiatric drugs and forms of therapy, and nothing had improved (the failure of these officially-approved modes of treatment actually left me feeling much more hopeless). Taking LSD gave me the insight that this wasn't fundamental the the nature of being me, that there was hope that one day I could love my life. The road to get there has been difficult, and has involved intense (non-LSD) psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with very deep childhood trauma, but that first fundamental glimmer that there's a reason to have hope came from an experience with LSD.
If I had listened to stern authority figures telling me that there's never a good reason to try it and it could only do me harm, I would in all likelihood be dead today.
Similar experience here. Historically traditional talk therapy only retraumatized me and was not going to be compatible with my personality. I had ran out of other treatment options (stimulants, SSRIs, EMDR, ECT, meditation/mindfulness...) before finally reaching for psilocybin purely out of desperation.
Combined with intensive integration therapy it has been the only treatment that had any positive effect. A lot of treatments have a risk profile in whether they will confirm my existing beliefs and only aggravate my situation (similar to above, failing to find "go to therapy" useful advice and opening myself to blame/unlovability from givers of the advice), but I hope I can go back sometime for a similar treatment if it's psychoactive.
It was no cure, and today I'm largely the person I was before treatment moodwise, but one thing I learned was for a condition such as mine, there is unlikely to ever be a cure. I had just the right amount of trauma that I can expect to manage my condition for the rest of my life. But what opinion do I choose to attach to this belief? That I'm okay with it. It wasn't my fault so there's not any sense in shaming myself for not finding what I can't have. At least one thing I can say is I found something that had an effect, and no matter how pessimistic I get, not even I can deny that with some depressive retort. This is not a sensation I'm familiar with. Before taking the drug I had lost all hope from believing my incompatibility with doctor-approved methods made me an untouchable, on top of already being depressed. It was clear my path forward would have to be paved away from the one society prescribes for me from then on.
Strangely I have no strong desire to take the drug again yet even though I am still depressed. I accept my life will be one of sometimes violent mood swings and I will have to be more patient with myself than in the past. I have made it my life's goal not to foist my malfunctioning brain's irrationality onto others at all costs. My condition is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to manage it. If I'm depressed now I just try to sit with it instead of fighting for things I know are unrealistic to have. I'm just not like most people, and I'm okay with that now, more or less.
That last paragraph just about knocked me out and is something I'll be thinking about for a long time. Thanks for sharing.
hey thank you for posting this. I'm sorry to hear about your condition but happy LSD was able to help a bit.
One unsolicited idea from a stranger: consider trying it again! I was in a similar situation for a long time (found it helpful but no strong desire to try it again), but multiple trips over time ended up being very helpful - for me at least.
Agree, I read research (unsure which) that stated people with my circumstance benefited more from repeated sessions, sometimes as high as 5x. I intend to go back at a later date but I see no rush.
I wish you all the best. You have a lot of weight to carry.
It’s always risk vs reward. It turned you around, it can push healthy folks into a long lasting depression. Happy for you, but it isn’t a magical cure, it’s a chemical for twisting your synapses. As you’ve noted, having a guide through the experience and a purpose is vital.
> it’s a chemical for twisting your synapses
Thats an oversimplification to be polite. For most people it can bring the most intense and beautiful experiences their live can ever produce. Then there is (non-trivial) minority which has something broken in their core (which is a statement that can mean many things). Yes, its not for them, or only at great risk (and potentially great reward as OP wrote).
But man, I never ever came close to the simple pure beauty that I experienced repeatedly on mushrooms (for the sake of argument cca 1:1 to LSD), never with any sort of guide, just let my mind wander to places it wants to go.
And I've got married, have 2 beautiful healthy kids, was there to cut umbilical cord for both, climbed extreme peaks like Matterhorn, hiked for weeks and months in himalaya and other places around the world, all very intense.
Psychedelics changed permanently perspective on life and important matters quite a bit. Experienced very intense spiritual moments, despite being cca agnostic (and it just confirmed and enforced my views to be clear). For all the bad it can do and does, it adds so much good to mankind. Its a very powerful tool.
Your post actually makes me sad. You have such a wonderful life: kids, wife, privilege and wealth to travel to Europe. But the most beautiful experience in your mind wasn’t any of that, it was tripping on shrooms? If you are trying to make me not want to try psychedelics you did well.
Hmm, an interesting reaction, I think I get it but I view topic from different perspective.
I am not anyhow lowering value of all other things I ever achieved in life, those are some hard won victories that didn't come without pain (and lets check in 20 years whether that stood the test of time). I gave them as a mere comparison.
Those mushrooms were that intense, it would be a lie to say otherwise. Cutting first umbilical cord was second, but then every hard peak I've climbed brought me to my knees and brought tears of joy and released emotions, those were some powerful emotions too (I guess when you struggle very hard and risk life for some specific goal and then reaching it this happens, at least to me).
But don't judge before knowing, there is nothing in this world that can prepare you for that intensity, if dose is enough (milder stuff, full stomach etc may result in different experience). Few words of description - laying in bed with eyes closed, losing gradually all the senses, dissolving what remained into mist of atoms that swirled and danced to shamanic music playing in the background. Then after a long time, very slowly starting to climb down that 'hill' by putting those atoms back together one by one, piecing together my personality, and then sense by sense, very slowly. Pure happiness afterwards, grin for an hour or two. Massive mental exhaustion from 'expanded mind', worst headache I ever had (but basic stuff like paracetamol helped a lot). Long lasting effects on life perspective.
But thats me, other folks may put the umbilical cord as #1, others those mountains or other endeavors.
The glass is half full of half empty? Did GP have reduced intensity of experiences related to his family, or they were of "normal" intensity, just intensity of shrooms experiences were above it?
The person you reply to sounds like someone who kknocks it without having tried it. I base this on the full comment, and more specifically on the fragment "tripping on shrooms". Drugs all enhance and alter what's inside you, for better and for worse, controllable or not. If climbing Mt Everest was your most eye opening and amazing experience, does that somehow reduce the value of your wife and kids? Such a strange premise...
I mean I hear former junkies say the same thing about heroin after they kick. “It was the greatest pleasure I’ll ever know,” they’ll tell you with utmost sincerity. More a bug than feature, to me, YMMV
LSD and heroin are pretty uncomparable. And those people were right: heroin is the greatest pleasure, that's its whole thing.
Why must the items in his list of great moments share ordinality with the items in your list?
I personally know some whose life was destroyed by it. LSD totally shattered them.
10 years later and this person still isn't right.
Pink Floyd’s man who recently passed away may be an example. Brian Wilson another, I heard him say his one regret was psychedelics as they scrambled his brain… I’m all for them when used with respect and correct (mind)set and setting. Lots of human progress has came off the back of psychedelics but they not for the common people. It takes a brave and worthy (shaman) to guide someone through the collective conscious
Wilson was taking a lot of different sorts of drugs iirc. Part of the problem is people take psychedelics in youth, when schizophrenia, bipolar and other mental disorders tend to arise making it hard to quantify true risk.
Those folks had serious psychiatric mental issues to begin with. Then they threw tens of truckloads of hard drugs in various mixes on top of that, often for decades.
This could break even the most healthy person and tells nothing about therapeutic potential of these substances with right approach. Its like judging how healthy salt is to humans by watching some maniac consume 200g of it daily.
Ironically, many in this thread are advocating for that! Take someone with mental problems, throw a truckload of psychedelics on top. That’ll fix em gud! And, if that doesn’t work, up the dosage, or maybe do the 3000 dollar ketamine sessions twice a week to really really fix the problem.
Literally no one has suggested anything like that.
Those guys were using a shit ton of drugs of all forms, so I'm not sure a single hit of LSD (which I'm sure was many) was the culprit.
For me, I've used LSD a few times, both alone, and with a few trusted people. It's an incredibly intense drug, and if administered correctly, can really help.
Of course it has the potential to really fuck with someone permanently, but so does alcohol, Ozempic, etc, yet we say nothing of those.
Was that person a well-balanced cca normal happy person without any childhood traumas or in-borne mental issues before?
no but I believe he was trying to treat some mental problems by using it
Neither psych drugs nor therapy nor LSD is a cure for depression. I too have had chronic depression and anxiety. Maybe I have had a more severe cocktail of mental conditions. Psych drug informed me where the irritation came from, caused me to rebel, but then it proceeded to give me suicidal ideation. Therapy was like a person talking a language I didn’t understand. alcohol was the most addicting experience as an escape from problems. I imagine lsd was an escape from reality.
The ultimate cure for depression: call this new line of sadness and hopelessness and despair as the baseline for what life is. And any ounce of hope, happiness, bloom is a gift and blessing that you appreciate without taking for granted. And then you structure yourself to live for those fleeting moments. And suicide is a world of persistent misery many times worse than what you are experiencing.
But instead you took LSD, and found yourself hope yet the message can be a complete deception. What will you do when you realize that? All you have done is separated yourself from ever understanding your reality because of that hope.
People who suffer from depression are those who are unable to connect with their world. Either trauma, anger, or confusion will cause them separation and difficulty of integration. There is this book called feeling good I think which goes into CBT. The first few pages repeats one thing relentlessly: you have exaggerated the negatives in your world in order to cope with it.
Some people adopt supremacy complexes to give themselves new meaning and curse out all irritations. This is a temporary solution because it swings them into the other side of disconnect eventually
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Then you might have misread what a supremacy complex is. It is a position of defeat in the face of adversity so you seek avenues of justification for your superiority.
I guess we should both re-read it then.
It's not at all unusual for drugs to have effects similar to the thing they're used to treat.
The anti-emetic I needed to take for chemo (chemotherapy is literally poison, your body will quickly figure out that you're being poisoned and, despite the fact that the poison was injected into your veins, throw up to try to remove it, so, you need an anti-emetic or you'll have a bad time each session) has "Nausea, vomiting" on its list of possible side effects. It also has a long list of really nasty psyc effects, so since taking it after chemo isn't mandatory I just didn't, most people take it for a few hours or a day, I just didn't, which was not fun but to my mind the risk wasn't worth it. [Yes I'm fine now, chemotherapy works]
Even more hilariously I read a friend's Morning After pill patient info while she was busy taking it, and almost every symptoms of early pregnancy is on the side effects list - basically the only thing they're not saying you might have despite this pill is a baby. Vomiting, cramps, dizziness and headaches, bleeding, sore nipples - pretty much everything except the newborn human in nine months was on the list.
The other things that are good for PTSD though don't carry a risk of making it worse: friendship with people who understand you and don't trigger you, talking about the traumatic experience, supporting general metabolic health and brain health.
For lessening the effect of traumatizing experience, 40mg of propranolol an hour before remembering and visualizing the traumatic, under guidance of a therapist, should be the gold standard for treatment. There a lot's of researchs showing its effectiveness but for some reason it's use stays experimental. I suppose it's because there is no money to be made with an old drug cheaply available from many generic suppliers.
These two go together - set and setting.
Yes, it is a major risk. I’m unsure why people want to pretend that it isn’t. Everyone knows someone who unexpectedly changed forever for the worse bc of these drugs. It also happened to me even though I had perfect set and setting, I was traumatised by it for years, and I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time. And yet I’ve met multiple people who have told me that the issue is that I just didn’t take enough, some even going as far as saying that I’m stuck in some kind of purgatory unless I take a heroic dose
Wildly irresponsible, many of the fans of these drugs, who seem to talk as if things like risk and responsibility are just constructs from the man trying to keep you down
> It also happened to me even though I had perfect set and setting, I was traumatised by it for years, and I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.
> I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience.
And again another irresponsible person comes to try and whisper in my ear “try it again”. Absolutely horrific morality
They did not do that.
Yes they literally did. I spoke on various topics, one of those being about how people try to convince me to take more drugs. Their sole response? Telling me, in effect, "maybe you won't have a bad trip next time". This cannot be interpreted in any other way than to convince me to open up to the possibility of taking such drugs again which is exactly what I am criticising.
So yes, they did do that.
> Yes they literally did
No.
One in technology should learn to not speak about things in such absolutes, we get proven silly time and time again.
It seems your LSD experience further traumatized you.
I am sorry you had a bad experience.
Now you are mocking me? Why do you want to make me take LSD again?
You are putting intent where there is not.
When someone else tried to explain that to you, you doubled down.
Note that I said: "we get proven silly time and time again". You made that statement a personal attack on you.
It fucking says "we".
This is just a perfect example of what I'm talking about about.
Your trauma has given you a particular worldview that is assigning intent or malice where there is none.
I won't return to this thread, it's not of any relevance and you're clearly worked up about this.
Peace be with you.
The only thing you said is “maybe maybe not” to me saying that I won’t take drugs again bc I know next time I’ll have a bad time. How is that appropriate? Let’s stick with what you did wrong and how it is indicative of the blasé attitude people have about the risks. All I’m doing is pointing that out but since I mentioned trauma you are weaponising it against me
Why do you want to convince me to take drugs?
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It is at about 7:50 in a short aside. Notice that he only says psychedelics can be dangerous if you already have PTSD and he does not recommend it.
The video seems not to say that nobody should take LSD. In fact it explains how psychedelics can help with depression if I am not totally mistaken.
(LSD is also never actually mentioned in the video. It talks more generally about psychedelics and hallucinogens.)
Can you provide a transcript or a quote to support your claim that Dr K "only says psychedelics can be dangerous if you already have PTSD"?
Here is the passage that I think is relevant to whether people should do hallucinogens. (I was mistaken earlier when I claimed the passage was about LSD specifically.)
>substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it
It is an aside in the middle of another sentence. Here the same passage with more context (specifically, everything said from 7:10 to the end of the video):
>the focus of your mind is on "I". You are the object of your attention. [Dr K looks at the chat stream] OK? Like anxiety, yes. [Dr K stops looking at the chat stream] Then what happens -- so, when this person says, this person on the reddits says, you know, "I actually think that self-awareness is the problem," they are absolutely right because their self-awareness is their default-mode network being highly active. Then we can look at neuroscience papers, and what we discover is that substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it -- fractures the sense of self, but when you stu -- when that sense of self gets fractured, you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, and when you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, this problem of over-self-awareness goes away, and people get better in terms of depression. Does that make sense?
I did in fact mishear, sorry for that. Where he says "and leave people with PTSD", I heard "in people who have PTSD".
I think people should be properly informed about the risks of LSD and should try a small dose before trying anything larger, and should have the maturity to understand what a complex or difficult trip could mean.
I'm not taking someone known as the "Healthy Gamer" seriously as an expert.
Not every channel title is a reference to the channel's creator.
He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.
Are clones available for research purposes?
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> drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Umm, ok, sure thats what it's used for.
That one sentence just points to a large issue with the whole tone of this article. Clearly LSD is still a problem child.
Please be serious: alcohol is a real problem child but it’s widely used and legal.
Cannabis and LSD have their issues, sure; but, so do so many other drugs that aren’t schedule I.
Scheduled drugs are simply politicized to separate the ‘desirables’ from the ‘un-‘.
are you saying alcoholics are desirables because I have a different view on them
It's extremely well-known and documented that the War on Drugs was racially motivated, and hence drugs used by certain minority groups more than the majority white population were made illegal.
GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.
are you acknowledging that alcohol was made illegal in the US for white people and only re-legalized after those laws proved unenforceable and fed the growth of white organized crime?
there was a lot of racism in US legal history, but don't try to make drugs and white people who wanted to do drugs the victims, it was non-white people who were the victims directly.
No, it's because the "Undesirables" simply have a skin tone that isn't white.
pretty sure LSD is readily found amongst white people at predominantly white universities.
Look at what Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy were saying about LSD
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
Apart from being really stupid advice it was viewed, correctly, as a direct threat to the established order. The established order is very bad (no arguments now?) but Tim and Ken were being very stupid and bought a whole load of shit down and put psychedelics back 40 years
Yes, but it was the dirty hippies taking it, not the god fearing white male conservatives. They just smoked cigarettes and drank until they died.
to be clear, a lot of the dirty hippies smoked cigarettes and drank till they died too. maybe some heroin too.
source: my family
Yes of course, but the point was that the hippies were part of the undesirables, along with the black folks, the mexicans, and any women who wanted to say, own private property or have a bank account.
"problem child" is an allusion to Hoffman's own characterization.
Indeed. “LSD: My Problem Child” is the name of Hofmann’s book:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lsd-9780198840206?la...
You should read / watch Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/
why so? this is probably the direction he wanted to go if i can recall his book (problem child) correctly
the more insight into the synthesis of a pro-therapeutic substance, the easier (i guess) is to remove the undesirable effects (what recreational people want)
How is it a problem child? The only problem is the fed's blanket ban of it like many other drugs that do have known medical uses. Feds still classify marijuana as schedule 1 with no medical uses, and yet multiple states allow you to buy it freely. Just don't invite the feds to your house.
“LSD: My Problem Child” is the name of Hofmann’s book.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lsd-9780198840206?la...