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Scientists need to get high
- Georgelemental 3y agoNot everyone reacts the same way to psychedelics. One person might have a "mind-opening experience" for an hour and then be fine, another might suffer from permanent vision problems or worse.
- pie420 3y agoThe final frontier
- NickC25 3y agoAll for it. LSD and other similar substances can offer an incredible insight to people who are equipped to handle it. Such substances create new pathways in your brain and increase neuroplasticity. It's not the one-stop solution to everyone's problems and should NOT be treated as such (far from it!), but it does offer tremendous perspective and insight to those who know what they're getting into.
- bitlax 3y ago[flagged]
- skyyler 3y agoCan you restate your position in a way that doesn't seem to be a battle in the ongoing Culture War?
- quickthrowman 3y ago> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html You can argue that psychedelics are unsafe without resorting to bringing up ideological COVID culture war stuff.
- vorpalhex 3y agoOne of the issues is that LSD also simulates the feeling of insight. How many trip reports mention "finding the solution to everyone's problems" and "forgetting" it upon sobering? (They didn't forget, they never had it, the LSD simulated having it...) Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens.
- chaps 3y agoHave you ever done psychedelics?
- nathan_compton 3y agoI've done psychedelics of many types and I find the so-called "insights" they offer to be banal in the extreme.
- chaps 3y agoNot exactly going to disagree with you there. Just felt it was an important question to ask considering the rigidity of their comment.
- nathan_compton 3y agoI'm not the original reply, by the way. I think psychedelics can be fun and extremely liberating/relaxing. But they have not given me any significant personal, scientific, literary or other insights.
- grugagag 3y agoI find that whatever insights, they’re personal. But their general effect humbling our egos. I find that to be of great use in a selfish narcissistic society we’re living in. I remember after having an LSD trip with good personal insights I got home and had cathartic session of sobbing. It felt absolutely great to do something I rarely do. Last time I did this was more than 15 years ago and feel that I’m still drawing some essence from this experience. Perhaps if I find myself stuck or at crossroads I’ll give it another go.
- BasedAnon 3y agoand it can also be a one-way ticket to schizoville
- NickC25 3y agoWhen not done under proper set & setting, yeah. If you're around people you trust, in a controlled environment, you're not likely to develop schizophrenia. If you just decide randomly to trip in an unknown environment with people you're not comfortable around, yeah, it's going to be a wild ride and you might not ever truly get off it even after the stuff wears off completely.
- seabird 3y agoThings can just go bad, no matter how hard you try. There is always some level of risk involved, especially if you have a family or personal history of mental illness, in which case it's advisable to not fuck with it at all. "Set and setting" doesn't paper over everything.
- aaomidi 3y agoIsn’t this generally the case for everything? Things can go bad in any experience. You can go zip lining and things can go bad. You can go through any experience and can be left with various degrees of physical and mental damage. Does that mean we shouldn’t do anything?
- Jazgot 3y agoI'm wondering whether experiences with hallucinogens are some form of doing self regularization?
- extasia 3y agoWhat do you mean by self regularisation?
- sixo 3y agoYes in the sense that the aim is to avoid overfitting, and to improve generalization, but here the goal is not to favor simpler models but to avoid them, with the presumption that the observed data is a biased sample of reality, and that our natural model building intuition will not correctly make sense of outliers... That kind of thing.
- jacooper 3y ago[flagged]
- capableweb 3y agoIn order to facilitate some sort of discussion rather than knee-jerk reactions, why not?
- mahnen 3y agoUnrelated -> Why astronomers like to get high https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4T94Rt1tK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4T94Rt1tK0
- sitkack 3y agoWrite drunk, edit sober. Mind altering substances definitely give a new perspective on the problem.
- Wonnk13 3y agoI completely agree, but this stuff is still illegal in most of the United States. What am I supposed to do, just walk up to someone "how do you do fellow kids, I'd like to purchase one LSD".
- capableweb 3y agoThis wasn't what I imagined myself doing this morning, but here is a shortened step-by-step guide how to acquire psychedelics as an adult: - Get Tor browser and find one of the various marketplaces, purchase small samples and send part of the sample to one of the various test labs that can confirm the quality OR - Find a community where people are likely to have some sort of experience with psychedelics, like self-improvement groups, hacker spaces or just visit raves - Start talking with a person who could maybe possibly have done psychedelics at one point or another. Don't ask them outright about buying, but starts a conversation about your curiosity around psychedelics for self-help. - If they reciprocate, you can at one point of the conversation ask them kindly if they happen to know anyone who can sell to you. If they say no, just move on with the conversation as to not make anything awkward for either of you - Repeat until you find someone, you'll find someone for sure, in either of the groups mentioned before.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago> Start talking with a person who could maybe possibly have done psychedelics Clue: If they are a guy with long hair. Or if they are a gal they might have flowers in their hair
- swores 3y agoHaving known a few people of those two physical descriptions, and quite a few people who've used psychedelics, in my small sample set you'd be looking at the wrong people. Change "long hair male" to "dreadlocks on a white male" and you'd have a point, but the majority of long-haired men I've known either wouldn't do drugs or are into non-psychedelics. And having spent a lot of time in clubs/festivals/house parties around drug use, of the many many users and dealers of psychedelics I've met... I don't think I could narrow down a single "look" that's more, or less, likely than any other. On the other hand, a) there is "a look" to facial expressions (not dissimilar to a weed "stoned" or amazed expression) that can be quite recognisable of somebody being under the influence - aided by things like super wide pupils and b) there are activities - such as being in a place where people are dancing to electronic music of some genre - where plenty of people use psychedelics and those faces can often be seen (though easily confused with expressions caused by other classes of drug).
- pookha 3y agoIf you're predisposed to schizophrenia, pure bi-polar or other mental health issues you probably shouldn't be tripping balls on LSD (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6870484/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6870484/) or taking THC at high levels (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/). Seems to be a major risk.
- hellotomyrars 3y agoI am bipolar and can not tolerate these substances. It is very bad for me. I’m happy to let people enjoy them but it is not something I can do. It does bother me when people say that they’re all harmless with no problems though. As with all things there are adverse reactions and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise. I don’t advocate prohibition to be clear, just actual truth and honesty.
- Spivak 3y agoAlso there is a (small) risk that you can't really check for in advance that lsd will just give you tinnitus, ask me how I know. I'm told it might go away in about a year.
- NoImmatureAdHom 3y agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6870484/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6870484/ doesn't make your argument. It's a sample of people who were admitted to the hospital for "LSD psychosis" compared to people who were admitted for a first schizoid break. They conclude that there are a lot of similarities. What you really want to know is: the probability of a schizoid break given you have a predisposition P(break|predisposition), the probability of a break given LSD use P(break|LSD, predisposition), the prevalence of predisposition to schizophrenia P(break), or P(break|human). And maybe P(break|LSD), too, for kicks (probability non-predisposed person gets a schizoid break given taking LSD). With those pieces you can come to some sort of reasonable conclusion about the risk. The paper tells you very little to nothing about it since the samples don't tell you anything about the population. It's like a mechanic concluding Toyotas all need work because all the ones he sees need work.
- mcculley 3y agoI am always amused that the discourse around LSD uses the term “microdosing”. We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans. Claiming that many uses are “microdoses” is rationalization. Edit: I meant to say “harm and help”, not “harm and hurt”.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago> We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans Evidence? (Other than tiny doses of anything potentially can cause harm and hurt, assuming harm and hurt are 2 different things, not perhaps the same thing repeated in different ways to make an emotive appeal)
- xXTyrannosXx 3y agoThe dose for LSD to be harmful is extremely high and you would likely never encounter anyone selling anywhere close to the amount needed. The biggest threat to the user is the contamination of the LSD by possibly fentanyl or other opiates due to the unregulated nature of the black market.
- klyrs 3y agoOn a previous thread here about LSD I learned about NBOMe -- it's a hallucinogen that's sold on paper tabs; if a dealer (or their supplier) is unscrupulous they might sell it as LSD. Only problem? Where psychonauts feel comfortable eating mouthfuls of LSD tabs, the difference between noticeable and harmful doses is quite small with NBOMe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25I-NBOMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25I-NBOMe
- bagacrap 3y agoLsd is one of the hardest substances to synthesize but the effective dose is so small that the price is almost free. Therefore someone who has real LSD to sell would not bother contaminating it. (At least I have not heard of that.) However you may be sold something that's not LSD at all but is advertised as such.
- pessimizer 3y agoYou seem to know of a discourse where "microdose" implies that something has no effect. Why would they be taking it if it had no effect? > We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans. We don't know that tiny doses of LSD can harm or hurt humans. What we do observe is that smaller amounts of things tend to have smaller effects than larger amounts of things.
- canadiantim 3y agoWe need a better science for sharing experiences. Science is great for sharing experiments where we can replicate the conditions in the outside world. But it's terrible for sharing experiences because they are harder to share in a replicable way, yet that's where some of the most important insights are.
- nine_k 3y agoExperiences can be hard / impossible to share in principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia Humans do need a better language to describe certain areas of experience though, states of mind and emotions. Poetic language is a good approximation, but it uses various quirks and undocumented properties of the "normal" language to get its point across. It's a poor fit even for philosophy, to say nothing of scientific research.
- doc_gunthrop 3y agoReminds me of how Carl Sagan wrote about his experiences with cannabis usage (under the pseudonym Mr. X, as to avoid the social stigma associated with it at the time).
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoSomebody was watching Fringe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_(TV_series)
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- outside1234 3y agoSounds like rationalization for the next Fentanyl outbreak
- coffeebeqn 3y agoPsychedelics aren’t addictive and most you can not take multiple days in a row
- Phelinofist 3y ago[flagged]
- minroot 3y agoTo get rich you need service, scale and infrastructure
- up2isomorphism 3y agoNo I don’t need it. And I am fine someone takes it. But using the word “need “ is just bs with some political leverage.
- dlkf 3y agoImagine if Einstein, Newton, and Maxwell had used LSD! They could have reached the heights of such greats as ”Humphry Davy” and ”Sigmund Freud” instead of wallowing in mediocrity.
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoI pretty much agree with the article, and I would argue that the reintroduction of subjectivity goes much further than just the study of psychoactive substances for medical purpose. I tend to believe that the obsession with drugs in our cultures can be traced back to the reformation and the going away from religious experience as a form of wisdom and a valid way to access reality. When one reads the texts of christan, muslim or jewish mystics from the middle ages, one can only wonder at the depth of experiences and the care that is taken to interpret those experiences and build a model of the world that includes them. My feeling is that with the shift to stronger and stronger materialism, mystical experiences were more and more seen as suspicious and potentially a sign of mental disorder. As such, drugs are more acceptable, as one can always explain things away with "neural pathways" and "neurotrasmitters" and whatnot. The experience can be seen as interesting, but what is finally "real" are just electrical signals in a big meatball. While continuing research from this materialistic perspective is essential, there is a growing recognition that one should allow other ontologies and epistemiologies, that allow the use of direct experience to derive knowledge. This means accepting that some researchers and philosophers explore world models where consciousness is not just an phenomenon emerging from physical process in the brain, but potentially has an existence of its own, or even is primary. If you are interested in this topic I would recommend reading the Galileo Report, written by scientists and philosophers who work with consciousness, and in particular Near Death Experiences: https://galileocommission.org/report/ https://galileocommission.org/report/ Side note: I also think that this materialistic view favors the conception some have that drugs can be the only path to accessing some insights. In other cultures, such as the Ayahuasca consuming tribes of south america or the Amanita Muscaria consumers of Siberia, drugs are seen as powerful helpers for establishing contact with the spirits, but are by no means mandatory or necessary to this end. In Siberia for instance, Amanita is mostly consumed in "heterarchical" societies, where non chamans are "allowed" to contact the spirits. It is just something that can help, when one misses the necessary training or gift. In "hierarchical" societies, where the chaman is seen as being of a different species, use of drugs is actually seen as illegitimate, as the chaman should be able to communicate with the spirits thrpugh his/her skills alone. The difference with our culture is the ontology of the experience: one is not tripping for the trip, but to take contact with spirits and ask them something. Whether this happens with fireworks or more silently is less relevant. But we do not want to entertain the idea of spirits, so we are only left with the fireworks. But the real gift from those experiences is not the experience itself, but the opening of potential ontologies it allows, and the practice with choosing the right ontology in the moment to sustain and open the experience. Which is something that, again, also does wo der without drugs. TL;DR: what we need is to accept non-materialist ontologies as legitimate in a research setting
- riversflow 3y agoWhat a bizarre article. It talks about scientist self experimenters and specifically about psychedelics yet makes no mention of Shulgin?
- spookie 3y agoNeed is a very strong word.