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>same level of power as one of my children dying. See, that's terrifying to me. I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the s

• getonit 15y ago
  > I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill. I would have thought he meant it the other way around.
• jonknee 15y ago
  > See, that's terrifying to me. I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill. Maybe we just read it differently (hopefully the OP will step in), but I don't think he meant LSD trivialized the death of his child in any way. I think he meant that looking back, LSD had a similarly profound impact on his life. Losing a child can make you re-evaluate some things (or so I've heard). So can LSD (that I know).
  • araneae 15y ago
    The difference is that losing a child gives you real information about your surroundings. Taking LSD doesn't allow you to take in any different input- it simply changes the way your brain interprets that same information. I can see why people would enjoy this, but not how they could take it seriously. Taking drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function; I mean that quite literally. I mean, if I introduced bugs into my simulation code and got results that I liked, I'd be like, "I need to fix those bugs" not "boy are these great results! Look, I can stop the HIV epidemic!" Because I'd be wrong.
    • jonknee 15y ago
      > Taking drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function; I mean that quite literally. I don't agree at all. Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch.
      • jamesbritt 15y ago
        Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch. Thank you. I've tried explaining this to various people when discussing my on drug use. There's a common presumption that a person's brain, in its default state, is "OK", and that any messing with it is bad. Yet people typically do not have this same view of the (rest of the) body; few people get bent out of shape over diabetics shooting insulin. The brain is a meat machine sitting in a chemical soup and is no more or less inherently perfect than your heart, blood, or pancreas. The stigma attached to drug use is horrendous and keeps many people from getting proper treatment or even understanding that they may need help. People whose brains are broken by default end up self-medicating, or living miserable lives, or both, often because people believe that "drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function."
        • Alex3917 15y ago
          The way I think about it, we're all made out of drugs. Someone famous actually said this, I forget who.
    • thwarted 15y ago
      Taking LSD doesn't allow you to take in any different input- it simply changes the way your brain interprets that same information. I can see why people would enjoy this, but not how they could take it seriously. Asserting that "simply changing" the way inputs are interpreted provides nothing of value seems odd on a site where a lot of the participants are programmers who regularly take input and massage it through iterative development of software that interprets that input and produce actual value. Cyphertext and an encryption key looks random until you apply a cryptographic transform to it. Same inputs, different output, different value.
• michaelochurch 15y ago
  I've known a lot of people who've used drugs in different ways, and my observation is that people tend to attribute far too much, in terms of their own cognitive ability and potential, to the drugs. (Example: "Because of LSD, I was able to see past <psychological blockage X>." How does this person know he couldn't have seen past it without it?) People who use a lot of psychedelics (in my moderate amount of experience) tend to see reality through a drug-colored lens. To them, there's "reality" which is boring and gray and psychedelia which is interesting and profound. They lose the skill of intermingling these two aspects of life. This is what proper study of spirituality does and drugs do not: it gives you the ability to integrate your profound experiences with everyday life and to apply them to the real world. If you are even a late beginner at meditation and go out into the woods for 4-5 hours, you'll probably have positive and beautiful experiences. No, you don't get the "trippy" visuals, but that's not the important part. Most people don't have the focus to achieve this until they start practicing, but drugs aren't a way out. I prefer meditation's failure mode, which is no experience, to that of drug use, which is negative experience. I think psychedelics have great potential as medicines and, in ritual use, can bring lay people in contact with spiritual experiences that might not be accessible to them. The idea that these drugs are "evil" is a mixture of xenophobia, bigotry, and religious puritanism. They're not evil; they have great potential for good. On the other hand, I think the recreational use of drugs is seriously overrated. Psychedelic dependence (of a psychological kind, because these drugs are not physically addictive) exists, but it's much more subtle than physical addiction. When you know someone has a real problem is when he starts attributing positive things (creativity, spirituality, insight) that should not rely on drugs to psychedelics. This leads into materialistic nihilism and a very unsettling style of ennui in which a person has to get further detached from reality to feel good.
  • 5l 15y ago
    Unless you can truly experience reality through their eyes you simply don't know if what they have gained would have been possible without drugs. I, for example, don't believe in God. But I would never be so arrogant as to claim that people who do cannot reach a more complete understanding of themselves or their potential, or that this understanding is somehow more shallow than my perspective on the world. Even if I believe to my very core that my perspective is grounded in reality, and theirs in superstition. This is what you are doing though, only you believe your perspective is grounded in spirituality (whatever that means) and theirs in materialism. Yes, psychological dependence exists, but people become psychologically dependent on all kinds of things. That some of these things exist materially, doesn't mean the individual concerned is descending into materialistic nihilism. I don't understand why drugs get singled out as such a particular evil in this regard.
• RuadhanMc 15y ago
  I imagine that the experiences that you have while taking certain drugs don't just exist in a vacuum and disappear when you re-join earth. They stay with you. It is another experience to add to all of the other experiences that you have had in your life -- experiences that shape you. Having an overwhelming and profound experience while taking LSD does not trivialize or diminish other experiences in your life. The soul has plenty of room for boarding. Experiences do not have to be equivalent in order for the end result (i.e. you changing a particular behavior or making a decision to go on a different path in life) to be quite similar.
• radu_floricica 15y ago
  The death of your own child even, not just any child. Just a thought: can you imagine that there may be many completely different ways you could think, all of them "sane"? That the patterns of thought you take for granted are mostly there by chance? Please take a moment and think before you answer. Because if you can't, that would explain your reaction. GP found out something about himself by using LSD, and that something happened to be important enough that it changed his life. Why is that such a hard thing to imagine? There are pills and there are pills. For my uncle 40 years ago, "just a pill" saved his life (penicillin). There are many pills that could kill you. And apparently there are pills that can change the way you think, and at least for some people this happens to have major positive consequences. Why is this by default evil? I share your concern about MDMA use for therapy - but I don't think we should throw away the baby along with the bathwater. Drugs are extremely dangerous, especially for young and/or uneducated people, because they _work_. They have real, consistent effects, and if you manage to align those effects with your goals, good things happen. But if you don't... and this is why you usually have several horror stories for each successful one. Still - I think there is a lot of potential here. My particular experience is of much smaller scale - a few months ago I found out that occasional melatonin use can fix my sleep schedule long term. Not a big thing, but I see it as one battle I've won with my genetics. And that's a good thing.
  • araneae 15y ago
    The analogy about penicillin is quite silly, because LSD didn't save this guy's life- it didn't do anything tangible- it was a mental experience disconnected from reality... whereas the death of his child was real. If the pill brought the kid back to life I wouldn't be criticizing it.
    • tptacek 15y ago
      That last sentence bothered me so much I downmodded the comment. Maybe I'm just overly touchy; I have kids.
• ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  I think many people on here are missing the point about "same level of power as one of my children dying." He's only using that as a way to convey how much of a life altering event it was, not how tramatic, or depressing it is. I've never taken LSD, nor to I plan to, but every, EVERY, person I've talked to that have, talk about how it changed thier lives dramatically. It seems there are a fair ammount of people on here somewhat scared of the way drugs alter you, (hey, this is hacker news, why not hack yourself? you only live once, see what happens) but it's really one of those things you will never understand until you experience for yourself.
  • MrScruff 15y ago
    That is exactly how I see it, self hacking. The most fascinating thing about psychedelics is that they give you a momentary glimpse into what is pulling the strings behind the organism that is you. They allow you to selectively shut off or amplify the effect of different parts of your brain, which should be profoundly interesting for anyone with a hacker mindset.
• Alex3917 15y ago
  "I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs." That's not how it works. The drugs allow you to explore feelings that you're otherwise not able to explore, and work through whatever emotional roadblocks you're having with your partner. Essentially it lets you find the source of your anxiety and problems, when normally you'd just be really anxious and unhappy all the time but you wouldn't know why. And then once you know why you are unhappy it allows you to communicate these feelings with each other so that you can use them to rebuild the relationship. It does also make you love and care much more about the other person's wellbeing, which is an important part of the process, but it's not why it works. The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it. "I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill." You should take some time to learn about what the experience is actually like. You're trivializing the psychedelic experience by saying that LSD trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
  • araneae 15y ago
    >That's not how it works. How do you know how it works? It's possible it doesn't, but release of vasopressin in the brain is responsible for bonding behavior i.e. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6446/abs/365545a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6446/abs/365545a0... On the other hand, there's no evidence for all this "exploring feelings" stuff.
    • Alex3917 15y ago
      "On the other hand, there's no evidence for all this 'exploring feelings' stuff." What I'm saying is actually the currently accepted scientific theory. What we see in PET scans is that MDMA shuts down part of the amygdala, which allows people to process emotions and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible. Michael Mithoefer refers to this starting at 10:45 in this MAPS lecture: http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video3.html http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video3.html And Peter Oehen has a more in depth explanation in his lecture here: http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video4.html http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video4.html There's no question that couples therapy would be vastly less effective without the increased pair bonding and empathy, but if that was the only mechanism in play then we wouldn't expect the relationship to still be vastly improved 12 - 24 months after just one session. (Otherwise we'd be seeing a large percentage of marriages happening between people who met at raves, which is not the case. People who hook up under the influence of MDMA don't seem to have any lasting 'extra' feelings for each other after a couple weeks, beyond what would be normal without the MDMA.)
• Ixiaus 15y ago
  It doesn't work like that at all. MDMA gives you a sense of euphoria while slightly altering your perception (it's considered a slight psychedelic in that sense) - it also makes you very empathic to the people you are with. MDMA isn't like a love potion, usually, once you come down you go back to being "you". It doesn't make you addicted to the people you experienced it with at all. What it does do is open you all up, so at controlled doses that can be highly beneficial in a therapeutic setting because both people will feel love for each other and empathy. Which, at a controlled dose, they should also be able to coherently iron out their issues. Once they come down, they go back to being who/what they were, but with a whole lot more "sharing" now - they both now know how each other feel because it was expressed out of love and empathy rather than witheld or stated in a defensive/offensive manner. Psychedelics really shouldn't be toyed with unless you are psychologically stable - if you can imagine, being "normal", then psychedelics take you to the reciprocal of "normal". I've played with Magic Mushrooms and really hated the experience, I also did two nights of Ayahuasca - extremely powerful experience, beyond LSD for sure, but a very rough ride (Ayahuasca is a shamanic "purging" psychedelic, it causes you to vomit uncontrollably while having the hallucinogenic and psychedelic experience of LSD x 5 for about 8 to 10 hours straight). I will say this: I believe all of the benefits people would seek in the use of mind-altering substances can, without question, be found through meditation - deliberate thinking - introspection - and just "chilling the fuck out".
• ltemp 15y ago
  Forgive me, I did not clearly explain that. It does not trivialise the death of my child in any way. Having my first daughter dying was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. It slowly, but totally changed my life. Emotionally, I just hardened up. My outlook on life changed (realising the one chance to live, life is precious, enjoy every second, etc. etc.). The other horrible event in my life was a series of severe panic/psychosis attacks. I stood next to my girlfriend, and truly did not know if I was me, if she was anybody, if I was an alien, or what. And then it was just a feeling of "absolute terror". You're utterly and completely terrified - no "reason", just a total sensation of dread. I would have cut my legs off if it would have stopped it. (BTW, this was all before I tried LSD.) So, when I say "powerful", I mean, reflecting back on my life, looking at the events that stand out, that truly had an impact, that are "amazing" - what would those be? In no particular order: - The birth of my children (the first time I almost fainted, not from the blood but just from sheer awesomeness of holding her in my arms). - The loss of my first child (when the doctor shook his head, I just collapsed, not to mention the effects for years to come). - Panic attacks - Some of the times my wife and I have made love. - LSD: Even just the experience, let alone the impact on my life. In other words, it's a "lifetime experience".
  • michaelochurch 15y ago
    Panic attacks are truly awful. I'm sorry to hear that you've had them, and more sorry to hear about your daughter. How long did your panic disorder last? How'd you get it into resolved? What therapies did you pursue, how long did they take, and how well did they work? I developed PD after making the idiotic decision to work (at a Wall Street job) through a flu-- not a cold, but actual influenza-- taking only 2 days off. Stupid macho trader bullshit I tried to pull at 24. So I didn't recover properly and ended up developing a respiratory infection that intermittently made breathing difficult: hence, panic attacks. At the same time, two very close friends (a little bit too deep into psychedelics) were having nervous breakdowns at the same time and even though I wasn't using, I started worrying that it might happen to me, because I was dealing with their bullshit every day. Which meant that the panic attacks became self-reinforcing; because I saw mental illness in my daily life, I thought I might develop it. Of course, that didn't happen because, even though it feels otherwise, panic disorder is not "going crazy". I think panic disorder is actually more like a much less severe cousin of epilepsy (an acute, intermittent, and highly treatable physical problem) than chronic mental illness, but that's anther rant. I don't have full-on panic attacks at this point, but I still have low-level anxiety attacks (the kind that normal people get once a decade or so, which are rough but NOT panic attacks) on a 1-2 per day frequency. It was a fascinating experience, but a deeply negative one. It doesn't help that most people think of panic attacks as the punchline to a joke. Sometimes I feel the need to say, "No, you didn't actually have a 'panic attack' when you saw Lady Gaga wear the meat-dress." This must be what people with real insomnia feel when idiots write Facebook statuses like "farmville at 2:30 am. i'm such an insomniac lol". What has actually stayed with me is the incompetence of the U.S. medical system. The experience of being neglected in a time of (perceived) exigent emergency is jarring. More scarring than the attacks themselves (during a panic attack, you don't write many memories, and this is a good thing) was how much medical incompetence and don't-give-a-shit attitude I experienced when I was sick with this "mystery" health problem (the respiratory infection and panic disorder onset happened at the same time) that turned out, thankfully, not to be that serious. I'm terrified of what it will be like in a few decades (fingers crossed) when I have to deal with real, serious health problems-- I hope the system is less broken, by then.
• Cushman 15y ago
  Do you feel the same way about "natural" sources of vasopressin, i.e. sex? Like it or not, if you're in a relationship you are taking drugs.
• Confusion 15y ago
  I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs. That's the naturalist fallacy: implicitly assuming that the 'natural state of affairs' is by definition better than an 'artificially' created situation. Taking a pill is no different from living in a house. Both are unnatural. Both can make life a lot easier. It's also the fallacy of the split middle: it's not either 'you love someone' or 'you can't stand them'. If you're in a loving relationship that has gone downhill somewhat and a few medicated sessions can renew the bonds, is that really any different from going on a second romantic honeymoon, where you also create artificial circumstances to strengthen the bond? Physical forces or cultural forces: they are equally real and do equal work.