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Since I listened to Cover Story recently, it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this on the front page. I’m curious to hear from you and others wh

Since I listened to Cover Story recently, it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this on the front page. I’m curious to hear from you and others who listened to the podcast about your impressions, because something felt really off to me about it. I feel this way because of how the presenters initially introduced themselves as very pro-psychedelic, then over the course of the series made what seemed to be increasingly negative and misleading statements to lead listeners to the conclusion that all psychedelics research is garbage (because everyone involved is either an abuser or motivated by greed) and that these drugs are just too dangerous to be legalised or used in therapy (because they are too disinhibiting or because they break people). They started with ‘psychedelics are great and I love them and they really helped me in my life’ and ended with almost an entire episode of ‘I tell anyone who is interested not to do it’. The serious and legitimate problems that they detailed are very worthy of investigation and remediation, but they also all seemed, to me, to be failures of: (1) individual practitioners who engaged in unethical/illegal behaviour; (2) study runners who didn’t know, or didn’t care, or even believed that these unethical behaviours were actually fine; (3) the drug war, which stopped reputable groups with stronger ethical standards from performing studies and created space for an underground movement led by sociopaths; and (4) the medical research apparatus itself which is too uncritical and accepting of garbage study designs and data. Some other “problems” they raised just struck me as odd, like the claim that results couldn’t be legitimate because they were combined from multiple trial sites, or that MDMA-assisted therapy is uniquely bad because it is ‘like doing open heart surgery and then walking away’. Regarding multiple trial sites: I’m not a medical researcher, but I’ve seen this many times when looking up trials on clinicaltrials.gov. So, either (1) it’s not actually a problem, or (2) they didn’t clearly explain why this study’s multi-site design was uniquely bad, or (3) it’s a problem not unique to the MDMA-assisted therapy trial and should’ve been framed as an industry-wide problem instead but wasn’t. Regarding the ‘open heart surgery’ analogy: Limiting the number of follow-up sessions was clearly a terrible study design and never should have been allowed, and the practitioners who refused to help should almost certainly be—at a minimum—barred from practice, but basically all forms of therapy have similar risks[0], so it seemed misleading at best for them to frame it as some consequence unique to MDMA-assisted therapy. There was even an article here on HN in 2020 about risks associated with meditation and mindfulness[1]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219072/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219072/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185710

pmoriarty 5y ago
We're starting to see the beginning of the backlash that the psychedelic community has been dreading since the start of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance about a decade ago. Everyone in the field knows that there'll inevitably be some adverse effects among some (as far as we know, small minority) of participants in these studies and users of psychedelics as a whole. We also know that both the media and many media consumers love sensationalism and mud-throwing, whatever the facts may be. So far the overwhelming majority of psychedelic studies have been enormously positive, but we also know that can't last forever and realistically speaking there are bound to be some negative effects. This was crystal clear long before the Psychedelic Renaissance even started. We've been lucky that since the beginning of the Psychedelic Renaissance the media attention has been almost completely positive and curious. But that too will likely change. These Cover Story podcasts are a recent example of the start of this change. The question is whether such negative media attention will derail the Psychelic Renaissance and whether we'll go back to the dark ages of complete prohibition and mainstream terror at the prospect of using psychedelics. At this point that doesn't seem likely, and stories like this will probably just cause the scientists and organizations involved to get more serious about safety and the general public to stop (erroneously) regarding psychedelics and the people involved in the scene as panaceas that can do no wrong. At the same time, I don't think we're at the peak of the hype curve, and as more people try psychedelics there'll be a lot more influencers and true believers who'll hype them to the sky. We might even get another Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey.

pmoriarty 5y ago

We're starting to see the beginning of the backlash that the psychedelic community has been dreading since the start of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance about a decade ago. Everyone in the field knows that there'll inevitably be some adverse effects among some (as far as we know, small minority) of participants in these studies and users of psychedelics as a whole. We also know that both the media and many media consumers love sensationalism and mud-throwing, whatever the facts may be. So far the overwhelming majority of psychedelic studies have been enormously positive, but we also know that can't last forever and realistically speaking there are bound to be some negative effects. This was crystal clear long before the Psychedelic Renaissance even started. We've been lucky that since the beginning of the Psychedelic Renaissance the media attention has been almost completely positive and curious. But that too will likely change. These Cover Story podcasts are a recent example of the start of this change. The question is whether such negative media attention will derail the Psychelic Renaissance and whether we'll go back to the dark ages of complete prohibition and mainstream terror at the prospect of using psychedelics. At this point that doesn't seem likely, and stories like this will probably just cause the scientists and organizations involved to get more serious about safety and the general public to stop (erroneously) regarding psychedelics and the people involved in the scene as panaceas that can do no wrong. At the same time, I don't think we're at the peak of the hype curve, and as more people try psychedelics there'll be a lot more influencers and true believers who'll hype them to the sky. We might even get another Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey.