3 ms·

There's currently no patent on Lexapro, Prozac, or Risperdal either. "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on

There's currently no patent on Lexapro, Prozac, or Risperdal either. "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents. There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics: https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/psychedelics https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/psychedelics And yes, psychedelics have side effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

mandmandam 4y ago
> "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents. Bro. They have new drugs that are a molecule different which they sell instead. And your scorn notwithstanding, they do have entire division of goons, whose explicit purpose is to alter opinion online, in academia, in politics, etc. > There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics Pfft. Same goes for pharma drugs. > And yes, psychedelics have side effects: I didn't say they don't. The side effects are on a different level though. We're talking about companies that knowingly sold AIDS infected products, among other atrocities. You'd wanna be a little less naive.
brnaftr361 4y ago
Patent is actually kind of irrelevant here, it's discrete competition. How do you put your fingers into this when it takes all of 3 months to have a lifetime supply of therapeutic doses? But it does ostensibly (if effective) curtail sales of pharmaceuticals. The originator pharma companies pay generic mfgs to not manufacture the drugs, ultimately the arrangement is such that both parties profit while maintaining the status quo allowing single-entity control of a given substance - in the US at least, which is the only place any of this matters. Not that that's the case with the previously mentioned medications. Ritchie on his vast tower of scientific conceit totally fails to acknowledge the human element in all of this. These drugs are interesting because of their mechanism, but that mechanism isn't necessarily complimented well by the "therapeutic" setting; the drug in and of itself isn't necessarily the catalytic element, but rather the experience - itself derived from the set and setting: In normal (particularly traditional use) practice it is unheard of to take a bunch of these drugs and hang out in a lab with a bunch of strangers. Anthropology shows us these drugs are uniformally used in group practices with familiars. And this is something noted in the textbooks, you can have internal and external validity - and "internally" yes, it may not look great but that's kinda predictable because it's going to get railroaded into the narrow confines allowed by statistics and ethics. You can on the other hand hop on Erowid and read countless case studies from various perspectives to get a holistic view, but that's not "science" because it has nigh-zero internal validity. But to me that reads as a semantic difference and we could debate it all day - what I think really matters in this case is that in the wild, in real practice, it's efficacious.

mandmandam 4y ago

> "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents. Bro. They have new drugs that are a molecule different which they sell instead. And your scorn notwithstanding, they do have entire division of goons, whose explicit purpose is to alter opinion online, in academia, in politics, etc. > There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics Pfft. Same goes for pharma drugs. > And yes, psychedelics have side effects: I didn't say they don't. The side effects are on a different level though. We're talking about companies that knowingly sold AIDS infected products, among other atrocities. You'd wanna be a little less naive.

brnaftr361 4y ago

Patent is actually kind of irrelevant here, it's discrete competition. How do you put your fingers into this when it takes all of 3 months to have a lifetime supply of therapeutic doses? But it does ostensibly (if effective) curtail sales of pharmaceuticals. The originator pharma companies pay generic mfgs to not manufacture the drugs, ultimately the arrangement is such that both parties profit while maintaining the status quo allowing single-entity control of a given substance - in the US at least, which is the only place any of this matters. Not that that's the case with the previously mentioned medications. Ritchie on his vast tower of scientific conceit totally fails to acknowledge the human element in all of this. These drugs are interesting because of their mechanism, but that mechanism isn't necessarily complimented well by the "therapeutic" setting; the drug in and of itself isn't necessarily the catalytic element, but rather the experience - itself derived from the set and setting: In normal (particularly traditional use) practice it is unheard of to take a bunch of these drugs and hang out in a lab with a bunch of strangers. Anthropology shows us these drugs are uniformally used in group practices with familiars. And this is something noted in the textbooks, you can have internal and external validity - and "internally" yes, it may not look great but that's kinda predictable because it's going to get railroaded into the narrow confines allowed by statistics and ethics. You can on the other hand hop on Erowid and read countless case studies from various perspectives to get a holistic view, but that's not "science" because it has nigh-zero internal validity. But to me that reads as a semantic difference and we could debate it all day - what I think really matters in this case is that in the wild, in real practice, it's efficacious.