The trip treatment

[Derived Absurdity]

A pretty fascinating article on psychedelics.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... st-popular" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Cassius Clay]

This is interesting, but long as fuck.

[Derived Absurdity]

I like to think the reason no one's commented on it since I posted it here almost two weeks ago is that everyone's still reading it.

[BruceSmith78]

I read the first few paragraphs.

'Shrooms are cool, and I'd probably give them another whirl should the opportunity present itself, but that's unlikely. I've had good times on acid, but I don't think I'd want to take that trip again.

[sikax]

I think I got the gist of it. So the idea is relieving stress in terminally ill people by giving them a psychedelic drug. Sounds like they're supposed to return from the trip with some sort of new perspective on their condition and "accept" it. Or something. I dunno. I suppose it depends on the person and how they already feel about their condition. It could be helpful to someone whose stress is potentially making their condition worse. Otherwise, meh.

I did acid over the weekend. I've done it before and, personally, it never "opened my mind" and shit like everyone says. This is probably due to the fact that I've already got a pretty open mind. The friend I took it with, though, is a cynical, paranoid, judgmental asshole (who I love) and when he's on acid he just thinks everyone is out to get him. While I'm just enjoying the shit out of it. Just chillin. So, it depends on the person's predisposition. If my friend got cancer and they gave him acid to deal with it, he'd come out of it more pissed off at his cancer.

[Derived Absurdity]

I've never actually taken shrooms, unfortunately. The hardest thing I've taken is ecstasy, which was fun, even though it wasn't very pure.

I think the thing with psilocybin and others like it is that's it extremely sensitive to your initial mental state and different types of environmental stressors and so forth before it's taken. So if you're agitated and worried and uncomfortable and whatnot right before you take it, you're not going to have a very good time and it's not going to be very useful. But if you're primed to have a positive reaction - if you're told that it will help with your problems, that it will be in a safe and controlled environment with respected therapists guiding you every step of the way - then it would probably work very very well. That's why it should be really only be taken in a controlled clinical setting to get the most out of it.

And the positive effects this article describes are really quite amazing. Most of the participants in one study reported a long-term positive change in personality, something which was known before but is still mind-blowing, as personality is supposed to be largely "fixed". A study about smoking addiction reported that eighty percent of smokers were abstinent six months after using psilocybin, as opposed to a success rate of seven percent in the case of nicotine-replacement therapy. Other studies not mentioned in this article report similar things. I think more well-controlled studies of psilocybin - and other euphoriants and entactogens and others of their nature - could be really useful.

The most interesting part of the article was when it focused on how psychedelics affect the brain on a neural modular level. It helps gives a mechanistic explanation of their effects and goes a long way towards demystifying them and making them a bit less intimidating.

[Cinemachinery]

Acid: fun times and I've gotten lucky on my purchases (mostly) but, at 41 with a kid, my windows for "8 hours of partying" grow ever smaller.

Shrooms are the thing for me now. Can sleep if you need to, easier to control how hard you trip, can still function. Good times.

[sikax]

It is interesting. Hopefully some more good can come of it.

I really don't understand the intimidation. People consume alcohol and cigarettes without a second thought. And hospitals use heroin--er I mean "morphine"--as a pain reliever. Psychedelics are nice just like anything else and should be done in moderation just like anything else.

[Derived Absurdity]

Well, people generally don't really know what psychedelics are or what they do, and most of the time people can't even explain what they went through when they took them. Alcohol and cigarettes are relatively simple and straightforward on both a neurological and psychological level, and all heroin does is get you high and sometimes get you addicted. Not very complicated or hard to comprehend. Psychedelics are entirely different. We don't know what they do to the brain, and it's impossible to imagine their subjective effects without actually going through them. I've heard analogies of a society of blind people and one suddenly being granted sight for a short while and trying to explain it to others. It would be impossible. And of course there are multiple different types of psychedelics. They're not really comparable to heroin.

Not to mention they're highly illegal, which heightens the sense that they're dangerous.

[Cassius Clay]

I found this interesting a while back.