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I liked the article and tend to agree there is a lot of pressure to rush psychedleics to the mainstream. This is from a person who used MDMA to heal bipolar /

by ada1981 5y ago

I liked the article and tend to agree there is a lot of pressure to rush psychedleics to the mainstream. This is from a person who used MDMA to heal bipolar / schizophrenia in an underground setting; ran an underground clinic for 3 years; took funding from Dr. Bronner to found a non-profit to decriminalize plant medicine; and was featured in a PBS documentary administering MDMA in an underground setting. Also, the author obviously hasn't done psychedelics ;) and he states as such. "I’d think about taking them if I had a relevant condition and the evidence they worked was convincing." You could argue that the relevant condition is that you are a living human, and we've evolved to be in relationship to altered states of consciousness.

mountainriver 5y ago
Yeah I have the same impression. The author wouldn't have even written the article if he had tried psychedelics, which are often reported as the most significant experience in peoples lives. This is just reductionist thinking, which can be good to temper things and reduce harm, but the authors bias is pretty readable
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  I have to wonder how many of our strongly held beliefs can be rendered irrelevant to our own minds by something as mundane as a few micrograms of a chemical. I also have to wonder how many of those beliefs can only be corrected by something as drastic as a foreign substance acting on it against our will. In some other universe, the world might become a very different place if the people in power chose to take LSD with an open mind. If so, there would be no "meaning" we could attribute to that radical change except that it was the result of a chemical formula. It feels like there is something profound about that related to the meaningfulness of all things, but since I haven't taken psychedelics, I guess I am still blind to what it is.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It does stimulate empathy among other things, which is something that's very lacking in politics (meaning genuine empathy, not the virtue signalling performance variety).

mountainriver 5y ago

Yeah I have the same impression. The author wouldn't have even written the article if he had tried psychedelics, which are often reported as the most significant experience in peoples lives. This is just reductionist thinking, which can be good to temper things and reduce harm, but the authors bias is pretty readable

nonbirithm 5y ago
I have to wonder how many of our strongly held beliefs can be rendered irrelevant to our own minds by something as mundane as a few micrograms of a chemical. I also have to wonder how many of those beliefs can only be corrected by something as drastic as a foreign substance acting on it against our will. In some other universe, the world might become a very different place if the people in power chose to take LSD with an open mind. If so, there would be no "meaning" we could attribute to that radical change except that it was the result of a chemical formula. It feels like there is something profound about that related to the meaningfulness of all things, but since I haven't taken psychedelics, I guess I am still blind to what it is.
- int_19h 5y ago
  It does stimulate empathy among other things, which is something that's very lacking in politics (meaning genuine empathy, not the virtue signalling performance variety).