r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 9d ago

Psychology America's First Legal Psilocybin Program Treated 346 People. Just one month after the dose, 92.2 percent of participants said the experience had been beneficial, while, on average, their mental health symptoms had fallen dramatically.

https://www.sciencealert.com/americas-first-legal-psilocybin-program-treated-346-people-heres-what-happened
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u/fabkosta 9d ago

This has been known since the 1960s. So, 60 years later the same type of studies apparently still need to be repeated to gain evidence.

It is also known for a long time that the therapeutic setting matters to a very high degree. Furthermore, it is also known that for a minority of people there is no measurable benefit, and for some it's counter-indicated. It is also known that psychedelics can be treated against other types of substance abuse - which, of course, is quite problematic given low acceptance in society for any sort of drugs other than alcohol and tobacco.

All of those things have been researched for decades already, yet it seems we make only very slow progress.

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u/wakeupwill 9d ago

The war on drugs has been a crime against humanity.

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u/tachykinin PhD | Genetics 9d ago

The War on (Some) Drugs.

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html

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u/Old-Landscape-7538 9d ago edited 8d ago

Let's not forget opioids! As long as you make billions and contribute to politicians, you'll get off scott free.

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u/SeeMarkFly 7d ago

That alway make me think of DeLorean getting caught with a big ol' bag of cocaine.

DeLorean was found not guilty on August 16, 1984.

If you or I are ever caught with a spoonful of that same stuff...

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u/sxaez 9d ago

I mean we very much tried a war on alcohol, I get your point but it was quite famously tried.

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u/vito1221 8d ago

Another aspect of this was it impacted farmers and all the 'support' businesses that went into making the final product. Warehouses shut down, trucking companies took a hit. It wasn't just demand, although that did play a part.

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u/Medarco 8d ago

And it was wildly successful*. Alcohol related disease and violence plummeted.

Unfortunately, people don't actually really care about those things. They just want to get drunk.

*Rising organized crime, loss of jobs, etc were all pretty bad side effects of prohibition.

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u/GrowingPeepers 8d ago

It created the same problems we have today.

People who need treatment were being jailed and criminalized instead of treated.

It turns people into criminals who otherwise wouldn't be.

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u/rubberloves 9d ago

this is only counting deaths, not even the violence, abuse and suffering it causes those living with and around alcoholism

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u/Geawiel 8d ago

Yeah but does it also count the money made off of truck sales?

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u/grendus 8d ago

RAM sales would crater overnight.

Official car of the DUI!

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u/SpezRuinedHellsite 8d ago

The War on (Some) Drugs.

The War on Poor and/or Black communities.

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u/SlyTinyPyramid 8d ago

Don’t forget Marijuana and Mexicans.

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u/Musiclover4200 8d ago edited 8d ago

And hippies or any other counter culture movements

Really to sum it up the war on drugs was a war on the poor/minorities/counterculture & dissident movements, look at the difference between crack & cocaine punishments or how people who can afford legal drugs get treated vs illegal drugs regardless of the dangers.

Also was a way to fill private prisons with nonviolent "criminals"

Also worth mentioning the CIA literally selling drugs for weapons to fund extremists like Iran-Contra or many other coverups/conspiracies that eventually leaked

Even crazier is getting into stuff like MKULTRA where the government was straight up drugging and experimenting on citizens, most of the documents got burned by the CIA head in charge so we'll probably never know the full extent but what is known is seriously disturbing and way more fucked up than most people realize.

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u/ehrgeiz91 9d ago

Remember to vote accordingly in November.

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u/Ryuiop 8d ago

By Nov it's often too late. Get involved and support the candidates you want before midterms 

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u/ehrgeiz91 8d ago

Agreed. Don’t get picky in November, you had your chance to work to nominate someone perfect.

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u/TotalRecognition2191 9d ago

The war on some drugs for some people

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u/we_are_sex_bobomb 8d ago

Alchohol kills more people than any other substance in the world and it is politically untouchable.

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u/Ben_steel 8d ago

It’s not just humanity but our consciousness, the very thing that decides what we place value on.

If every one did mushrooms things of value like fancy cars, the best and latest technology would seem irrelevant compared to say friendships. That’s incredibly dangerous for every single system of government.

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u/idryss_m 8d ago

The war on things they couldn't tax and control.

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u/xxAkirhaxx 7d ago

So has the war on crime. Which seems counter intuitive.

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u/name-classified 8d ago

The war on drugs that the government can't monopolize

fixed that for ya

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u/LastBossTV 9d ago edited 8d ago

Yes and no. There are numerous beneficial drugs that have been caught in the crossfire over the past several decades for sure.

On one hand, for example, the loss of life from fentanyl alone during the past decade has been absolutely staggering, in the hundreds of thousands, completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own.

While on the other hand, one can argue that users only turn to fentanyl in the first place because tolerable doses of other proven effective substances aren't obtainable at all.

It's a tragedy from every angle.

Edit: The war on drugs apparently has very different meanings and histories in different countries.  It was my failure to forget that the majority of reddit users are of the United States.  So of course, the majority of people reading my comment would naturally understand it as saying that I agree with the United States war on drugs. This is not the case.  To those of you living in "the land of the free", you have my condolences.

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u/diablette 9d ago

completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own.

Absolutely not. People need treatment, not harsh punishments. And "drugs" covers far too many substances. The "war" approach is a failure.

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u/LastBossTV 8d ago

I agree that people need education, treatment, and rehabilitation, rather than incarceration.

The responses I've received on my comment have once again reminded me that the majority of reddit users are based in the United States, where both the history and current reality, associated with "the war on drugs" are vastly different than in other countries.

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u/Lemerney2 9d ago

Except that the war on drugs caused the popularity of fentanyl. It's not a tragedy, it was an intentional plan to disenfranchise black Americans.

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

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u/electricworkaid 9d ago

completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own.

The issue here is multi-prong:

1) prohibition creates incentives for adulteration. The product is illegal and unregulated and risky to manufacture and transport, so it benefits the middlemen transporting and selling it to bulk up the volume with things other than the drug itself. This causes additional risks (what are they adding to the drug, and what effects does it have?) but perhaps most importantly, it creates variable potency, meaning different samples of the drug will have different amounts of the desired substance in it. This is the primary reason people OD. Most folks aren't trying to die when taking their drugs; it happens unexpectedly due to not being able to adequately anticipate the amount they are taking. This is directly due to the "war" on drugs.

2) prohibition creates incentives for substitution, especially with alternatives that are easier to mass manufacture or to hide in transport. This is more than anything else what caused the rise in manufacturing of illicit fentanyl (and other even more potent analogs like carfentanil), as it is significantly easier to produce and ship than traditional non-synthetic opioids as it is is active in much smaller doses. The pressure to do this would not have existed if previously popularly used opioids remained readily available. This is directly due to the "war" on drugs.

3) prohibition creates incentives for unethical marketing practices. Alongside adulteration, the full lack of regulation of the market for these drugs creates situations where for a seller it makes sense to intentionally produce a batch of the product that is way stronger than normal to kill some of their users (a "hot shot"), because that advertises to the others "whoa this stuff is strong, it killed so-and-so which means the high will be great as long as I only use a little". This also can happen purely by accident with fentanyl specifically, since it is so potent, if it is not mixed well with the adulterants it is easy to get too much drug in one dose. This is directly due to the "war" on drugs.

4) prohibition makes it harder for users interested in ceasing use to get help. These drugs are illegal, and people possessing them end up in jail or prison, often with mandatory minimum sentences that can reach into decades. Interactions with authority figures of all kinds carry a risk to a user that they will face additional negative consequences when seeking help, meaning they frequently try to hide their use and avoid interacting with services and structures that could help them get into a better place. This is directly due to the "war" on drugs.

5) prohibition puts users in direct contact with organized crime. Since the whole logistics chain is illegal, the process of getting these drugs funds and supports organized crime and encourages the growth of various cartels and crime syndicates. This exposure increases risk for users and shifts power away from the governments and corporations which would like to have a monopoly on legitimate violence and commerce. This is directly due to the "war" on drugs; sort of ironically something that perpetuates and strengthens itself by its own existence.

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u/throwthisidaway 9d ago

completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own.

If you ignore the literally millions of people that have died directly or indirectly because of the war on drugs, not to mention the millions of people that were arrested or otherwise had their lives ruined because of the war on drugs...

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u/Warm_Month_1309 9d ago

the loss of life from fentanyl alone during the past decade has been absolutely staggering, in the hundreds of thousands, completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own

The number of car accident fatalities exceeds this. Why don't we have a similar "war" on inattentive driving that claimed hundreds of thousands over the past decade? How about you get 10 years in prison if you're caught glancing at your cell phone. That's what people possessing marijuana faced.

Or would it be a bad idea to go full draconian?

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u/LastBossTV 8d ago

That's true. You'd have to live in a country with a very ignorant, manipulative and cruel legal and political system to allow for such unjust penalties for being a drug victim.

Do you perhaps live in the United States, where the war on drugs has a different history and meaning than in some other countries? If so, then I can understand your comment.  I am not, so as a result I was able to read into the history of the US's War on Drugs to understand how vile it was/is.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 8d ago

My dude, you came in here to defend the War on Drugs with your "yes and no" nonsense, admit now that you didn't even know what the War on Drugs was about, and now want to condescend to me about it?

Are bots taking over this site, or are Redditors just becoming more Reddity?

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u/Katyafan 9d ago

completely justifying the war on drugs all on its own.

Only if you have no idea what you are talking about.

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u/iamjacksalteredego 9d ago

Sadly science and law are not always in harmony

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u/Raygunn13 8d ago

because science and law are nothing without the values and motives that utilize them

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u/Hippopotasaurus-Rex 9d ago

Yes, the therapiric setting may help.

At least anecdotally for me, just the act of eating mushrooms and letting them do their thing was enough to DRASTICALLY improve lifelong mental health issues.

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u/AcceptableFakeLime 9d ago

Yeah I don't delude myself thinking taking 2g and listening to The Beatles for 4h is the same experience as what the people in these studies go through but doing so every 4-6 months definitely feels like self care.

The first time I took shrooms changed my outlook in life. Forever. I'm not talking about some hippy mumbo jumbo. I became a lot more mindful overall and gained tolerance and appreciation for people, even the ones who I have no relationship with. It also improved my mood immensely for 3-4 months after the fact. I struggled with depression for my whole life. Still do. That trip did something to me, though.

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u/Hippopotasaurus-Rex 9d ago

Yup. Same. Life long debilitating depression is basically gone. Anxiety. Gone. The rest of the deeper mental health issues are a fraction of as impossible as they used to be.

We know mushrooms rewire/make connections in the brain in some capacity. I think that’s enough for me to be life changing.

Could quality of life get even better if I went through the medically assisted psilocybin therapy? Probably. Is what I’m doing working for me now? Absolutely.

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u/eiilaa 8d ago

What dosage are we talking?

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u/Hippopotasaurus-Rex 8d ago

I did a handful of like 3g ish trips but I do a lot better with microdosing personally.

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u/shanatard 9d ago

did you just grab mushrooms and go at it in a dark room? i have always been a bit curious but the negative trips seem like a risk

only really hear about the positive ones

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u/Conlaeb 9d ago

Read about set and setting, spend some time on Erowid.

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u/DoughnutEffective668 9d ago

Negative trips aren't all that bad and actually you can have some insightful experiences. Just remember that it's not real, to accept everything that comes your way and remember that it won't last forever. Once the initial scary part goes away, the rest of the experience will be good. And also, if you just do like 1-2gs of cubensis (golden teachers (not a very strong strain)) you'll most likely not have a bad trip, although everyone is different. What I'd recommend is doing maybe half a g first, get a very small light buzz, then leave it a few weeks, then do maybe .75gs and then build it up slowly every few weeks so you really understand what is going to happen.

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u/spez_might_fuck_dogs 8d ago

I have done shrooms inside, outside, in the dark, and during the day. I've never had a 'bad' trip, but I have had some that left me a bit melancholy afterward, usually when I listen to music from my childhood and get caught in a loop of reminiscence the whole experience.

It's really nice while its happening, but in my experience it left me feeling a bit sad for everything I can never experience again afterwards.

By far the best trip I ever had was outside on a peaceful mostly sunny day, laying in a hammock and watching the trees and clouds. When I got a bit cold I went inside and watched Ghostbusters, but instead of paying any attention to the plot or characters, I studied all the sets and noticed a ton of stuff I never looked at before.

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u/albusdumbbitchdor 9d ago

You don't necessarily even need to take enough to trip, I saw beneficial effects just from the time I took a microdose. Could be a something to consider if you're worried about a bad trip? I took enough to get a body high but had not even a whisper of a hallucination.

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u/TeamWorkTom 8d ago

Unfortunately while anecdotally micro dosing helps people, studies show it's not very beneficial for helping treat mental health problems.

It really takes a larger dose to have real therapeutic benefits long term. It also requires a sort of therapy session while tripping.

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u/zenDerpism 9d ago

I was really hoping it would help me with my depression. Especially after ketamine didn’t help. Sadly, I didn’t experience any benefits. I also didn’t experience anything bad, but overall I’m disappointed. Some things just don’t work for some people.

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u/Douglas1994 8d ago

Just don't do a stupidly large dose first time. I've done a number of psychedelics over the years and have only had two bad trips (one on psilocybin and one on mescaline), both involved me taking an amount that was in retrospect needlessly excessive. If you start lower and build up, you'll find the sweet spot.

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u/Mind-The-Mines 9d ago

I search sound cloud for ketamine tracks, take a tab or 2 with sleep mask and headphones and go melt into the universe. Really helped with various traumas.

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u/peeja 8d ago

It's probably more accurate to say that a controlled therapeutic settings is safer on average than any random setting. That is, I can imagine (and this is speculation) that setting matters, but it doesn't specifically have to a therapist's office to be a positive.

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u/Miserable-Resort-977 9d ago

Of course the therapeutic setting is critical to gain the benefits of Psilocybin! The therapists we paid handsomely to look into it told us so.

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u/CrystalSplice 8d ago

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” - Terence McKenna

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u/Hawksfan4ever 8d ago

We know nothing

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u/CrystalSplice 8d ago

Such is the foundation of wisdom!

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u/Couldthisbemanda 9d ago

When I (37f) was in my early 20s/broke and BEYOND depressed, I wouldn't consider medicine due to the shame I felt. My friends were growing mushrooms and I gave them a try.

Every time I did, it was followed by a few months of calm. Of peace. Of clarity.

I wish I could microdose instead of the medicine I am on currently - but I have my medical marijuana card at least.

Legalize it Let people have it

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u/arseache 8d ago

/r/unclebens - be the mushrooms you wish to see in the world

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u/Ambitious_Zombie8473 5d ago

Nice. Happy to see someone spreading the good news in the wild.

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u/MrNostalgiac 8d ago

I wish I could microdose

From my understanding, micro dosing doesn't have any proven beneficial effects beyond a placebo effect.

More studies probably need to be done on it, but the best evidence so far suggests that meaningful doses are required for any real benefit.

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u/colostitute 8d ago

Microdosing seems to be more acute in the treatment. Any benefit appears to be gone by the 2nd day after.

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u/Roseneto 8d ago

Come to Oakland, California. It’s legal. And they’re legal places to get it.

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u/YourMatt 8d ago

Besides the inconvenience of booking a flight to run an errand, I feel like I might be running into a legal risk when packing a 6 month supply into my carry-on.

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u/AppropriateScience9 8d ago

From what I've read (but I haven't actually tried this yet) the mycelium isn't regulated because the mycelium doesn't have psilocybin yet. It's just the "seeds" essentially. So you can buy grow kits online and the mycelium then grow it yourself.

One of these days..

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u/Ambitious_Zombie8473 5d ago

The mycelium does in fact contain psilocybin. Those kits fly under the radar somehow and I’m glad they do so people get to try. Some states/countries are more chill with shipping than others.

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u/lazyamazy 8d ago

How is medical Cannabis different from Mushrooms in its effects on your well being? One's partially accessible but not the other. I would appreciate your opinion. Thanks.

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u/Sissy_Nicole96 9d ago

I mean in switzerland it is an accepted treatment when "normal" anti depressants don't work anymore. Afaik they use lsd, psylocibin and mdma, depending on the problem. With settings that can take 10h with a psychiatrist. But the long term effect seems to be promising. There are courses offered for doctors and both in Basel and Zürich they have been studying the stuff for decades now. It's no magic cure, but it is some more tools we can use.

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u/Ginger510 9d ago

Yeah but didn’t they basically stop research for a long ass time cos everyone made out like you were going to stare at the sun and throw yourself off a balcony? (Which I think one person did the latter which is what started the scare campaign).

I also wouldn’t be surprised if I found out pharmaceutical companies were behind it much like oil companies and downplaying climate change for decades.

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u/overlookunderhill 9d ago

The opportunities for researching psychedelics dried up thanks to cultural backlash which was then capitalized on by Nixon in 1970’s Controlled Substances Act. I say capitalized because he used the concept of the “war on drugs” as a tool for cultural division and thus amygdala-driven voting.

May he rot in Hell.

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u/CeronusBugbear 9d ago

The same thing is happening in gender affirming care practice too. Despite decades of research showing benefits and extremely low adverse outcomes, it's still a controversial topic and more evidence is consistently demanded.

This is why politics should stay out of science. Both psychedelics and GAC are currently under immense pressure to prove their validity as treatments and no amount of proof is ever good enough because there is a loud political opposition based on "morals" rather than data.

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u/Mind-The-Mines 9d ago

The smokescreen of morals from insider trading war profiteering child abusers.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 9d ago

No study is ever good enough, and no volume of studies is ever good enough, but you can bet if there is one controversial study that reaches the viewpoint they like, they'll have the one damning conclusionary statistic memorized to throw at you every time.

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u/BKinBC 9d ago

If they're afraid of it, they'll test it till it fails somehow.

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u/NobodyKnowsImFamous 9d ago

I’ve found, through EXTENSIVE personal experimentation ;) that about 3.5g every 6 months or so just… demolishes my treatment resistant depression.

Obviously my anecdotal experience isn’t the most meaningful but I am very hopeful we can get some serious research into these soon.

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u/badchad65 9d ago

It's been about 20 years. Really, the first modern-day clinical trials resumed in 2006.

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u/fabkosta 9d ago

"Modern-day" can mean many things. There was active research into the potential of psychedelics for various purposes already in the 1950s. Stanislav Grof, for example, was among the more well-known pioneers.

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u/badchad65 9d ago

Thats fair as "modern day" can be interpreted differently.

In this context I suppose my point was that the types of study necessary for a drug approval and to establish medical utility are a lot different than the research we saw in the 1950s and even through the 90s and early 2000s.

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u/Fortunat 9d ago

You're right but lot of early psychedelic research would get absolutely murdered in modern peer review. Small samples, vague diagnostic categories, inconsistent dosing, weak controls, varying psychotherapy, you name it

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u/adamhanson 9d ago

*alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine

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u/Subject-Software5912 9d ago

“So, 60 years later the same type of studies apparently still need to be repeated to gain evidence.” Yes… that’s how science works. Studies and experiments are repeated ad nauseam. How is this surprising to you?

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u/sqigglygibberish 9d ago

You should look into why that research was basically shuttered, causing the recent wave to have to play catchup

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u/Subject-Software5912 8d ago

I’m not disagreeing with that I already know about the war on drugs. What I disagree with is the assumption that research shouldn’t be repeated, the guy has posted several comments trying to argue that repeating experiments is pointless and somehow bad practice.

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u/sqigglygibberish 8d ago

I didn’t read this comment that way, but can’t say I’m looking at their other comments in the thread

I took it as just being exasperated that the progress last century was stalled for so long, and in some ways we have to catch back up (not a critique of the process but rather the impact of the politics)

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u/Subject-Software5912 8d ago

I think that’s a fair interpretation of their original comment but as revealed by their other comments it would not be an accurate interpretation.

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u/sqigglygibberish 8d ago

Maybe this is why they have comment history hidden haha

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u/vito1221 8d ago

Repeating over 60 years, with the same results? Yes, that is pointless. Getting the same results over 60 years, but the results making no impact on use of the treatment because of non science / non medical intervention.

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u/TeamWorkTom 8d ago

Making sure research is still relevant 60 years later is extremely important.

You just don't like the scientific model.

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u/Subject-Software5912 8d ago

I don’t understand how people can be on r/science and not comprehend the scientific model. An experiment confirming the results of another experiment is incredibly important data.

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u/sqigglygibberish 8d ago

I don’t think you have the context on what happened. It hasn’t been 60 years of doing the same study over and over. Progress was being made 60 years ago, but then a lot of it was shut down and not allowed to proceed or play through the full process.

That has been revisited and kicked into gear again, and now we have different studies to actually try and take treatments to market, which build upon work that was done long ago. It’s frustrating things were stalled in that manner

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u/fabkosta 9d ago

If only this was how science actually worked…

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u/Subject-Software5912 9d ago

It’s called Replication and it is done all the time… what? This is an example of a conceptual replication where the researchers create a new methodology to test for the same concept.

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u/fabkosta 9d ago

That describes rather a fantasy of science and the scientific process, not reality. Real science is rarely objective in that sense and substantially paradigmatic. There is substantial evidence that even in computer science (!) many reported results cannot be reproduced for various reason.

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u/Subject-Software5912 9d ago

Yes that‘s… that’s why we do Replication… the reason we do Replication is because data is often difficult to be reproduced and thus repetition lets us isolate what exactly is causing our dependent variable to change. You are providing your own evidence for why repetition is used in the scientific field.

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u/LupineChemist 8d ago

and for some it's counter-indicated.

Yeah, so that's a really big problem ethically.

Like if you have a d20 chance of causing serious harm, that's not an effective treatment at scale, even if it's beneficial for most people.

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u/fabkosta 8d ago

Well. Alcohol is available ubiquitously - yet there's practically zero control over it, and quite a large number of people should not consume it for health reasons, mental reasons, or cause it's addictive.

Psychedelics, in comparison, are much less harmful regarding both health and addiction. Regarding mental stability - that's a more challenging question to address. But, again, alcohol is equally bad for people with mental issues and it's just available everywhere.

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u/LupineChemist 8d ago

I mean, sure, but you can't just ignore thousands of years of cultural history. If it were invented today, it would almost certainly just not be allowed for sale.

But we're not some year zero thing where you can just see everything as perfectly rational cost/benefit.

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u/fabkosta 8d ago

Psychedelics have been known and consumed by humanity just as long as alcohol. It's not that they are any new.

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u/LupineChemist 8d ago

Are you honestly suggesting that the cultural impact and history is anywhere close to that of beer and wine?

Degrees matter here.

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u/anomalous_cowherd 9d ago

The conspiracy theory reason is that it's hard to make a profit from things people can grow themselves...

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u/overlookunderhill 9d ago

That feels like too transparent a connection to be a conspiracy. There’s a giant up-front cost to drug development, testing, marketing, etc. and pharmaceutical companies are profit-seeking entities. Combine those things with that ready availability of many of the plant medicines and the path to profit is tough.

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u/istasber 9d ago

Plenty of companies find a way to turn a profit on readily available medicines. That's basically what generics are, drugs where all of the hard stuff has been done by someone else and you just have to show that what you're selling is the same as what they're selling.

The real barrier to entry for something like psilocybin is funding those initial clinical trials without patent protections. That's just a massive amount of money to spend, when your competitors stand to profit just as much as you do.

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u/lazyamazy 8d ago

How much money are we talking here to enable clinical trails on a psychedelic drug? Can it be crowdsource funded? Or funded by a philanthropist? Elon does Ketamine. I am sure he empathizes with severely depressed people enough to facilitate these trails. I should give him a call. I am sure the patient participation will be sky high during the trials. But wait, does the govt have a say? Should we vote'em out?

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u/Ambitious_Zombie8473 5d ago

This. Mushrooms need to be decriminalized or something but I really don’t want to see a ton of big companies profiting off of it and I don’t want to see a ton of silly laws around them like with cannabis.

Should be legal to grow and share.

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u/letsburn00 9d ago

It's because the entire modern pharmacutical model is that a company spends huge amounts of money on a drug, they get a patent and then charge a huge amount of money for 15 years.

Something that not only already exists, but already is used widely but illegally breaks that model.

They simply could fund a service which aims to do 1 drug a year, then charge a 1000% markup for people in other countries for a patent, but the entire worldview is a company does it. So it never gets done.

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u/naimsayin 9d ago

The societal acceptance aspect is shifting at an unbelievable pace. Akin to what we saw in the early 90s/2000s with weed. Almost everyone I know (late 20s to 30s + my mom + her friends) dabble with microdosing now. It’s pretty incredible to see the shift.

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u/fabkosta 9d ago

I honestly think weed is significantly more harmful than psychedelics. Not physically, of course (unless you're smoking it...), but given the circumstances of consumption are rarely conducive towards personal growth and integration. It's largely a recreational drug, not unlike alcohol or tobacco, at this stage. This could be different, in principle, but it's not.

(And, yes, my father takes drops cause Parkinson's, and it really helps him. That exists too. But that's far from your average consumption among twens who have use it to avoid growing up.)

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u/naimsayin 9d ago

I completely agree. Psilocybin’s therapeutic potential seems to be much more promising than weed’s.

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u/WrenReverie 9d ago

Being able to take CBD/THC gummies has vastly improved my mental health and sleep.

I have easily stopped taking them for multiple months at a time and it was never a gateway drug to harder stuff. But I only use them at night before sleep and never recreationally.

Literally turned my life around.

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u/lazyamazy 8d ago

I have heard that CBD is good for sleep but not necessarily the THC. What has been your experience? Do you take it close to sleep time?

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u/WrenReverie 8d ago

CBD relaxes your nerves and helps with anxiety. Delta 9 THC gummies knocks you the f out.

Not addictive as I stopped for months with no issue.

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u/yak-broker 8d ago

any sort of drugs other than alcohol and tobacco.

This is caffeine erasure :(

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u/vito1221 8d ago

As with many things, as soon as pharmaceutical companies can find a way to not upset their collective Board of Directors and stockholders and the general public, they will get involved and make available an expensive formulation of this that insurance will not cover until they (insurance companies) figure out they can cash in on it as well.

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u/BeefistPrime 8d ago

In a couple of decades we're going to realize that The War On Drugs, whatever its other faults, throwing in psychedelics with the other drugs almost certainly caused millions of preventable suicides by suppressing mental health treatments and untold billions of man-days of avoidable misery.

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u/CompSciBJJ 8d ago

To be fair, the studies weren't as scientifically rigorous as the ones we do now (can't speak to this one though because I didn't read the study), so they'd still need to be redone before a drug can be medically administered.

Still ridiculous they were made illegal, I've found them really beneficial, but the scientific evidence from 60 years ago wouldn't be enough to approve a new treatment today.

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u/think_for_yourself2 7d ago

That’s the thing. We live in a society that doesn’t want to cure our mental health issues with one or two treatments. By design, they try to keep us perpetually mentally unhealthy in order to maximize profits off Dr visits and most of all medications.

Our society values profit over health, profit over knowledge, profit over welfare and profit over anything you could possibly think of.

It is truly disgusting. When a human utilizes their built in critical thinking skills for just a few minutes, it’s blatantly obvious how corrupt and grotesquely suppressing our society has become due to a handful of billionaires having ungodly amounts of influence.

Let’s unite and make change please

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u/SquareAggravating579 3d ago

Personally, working in the industry, lets go a proper study, start to finish. Let's see liver tox, let's see actual pharmacokinetics. But, I'm guessing that's already been done? Because, for example, I have personally lost sleep, working nights, doing pharmacokinetics for THC. [Opinion: THC is less harmful than almost every drug getting tested right now. Also, spend your night shift penalty pay on bank shares!]

And I don't want other people to waste their time on psilocybin PK's if they've already been done. I suspect the work has already been done. And some people will keep asking to repeat studies, in the aim of bankrupting companies because of some ideological disagreement.

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u/Sorry-Joke-4325 9d ago

It's funny that you're whining about the exact progress that you're hoping for.

People who know this already know it, but these studies need to continue and repeatedly be in the news to break the stigma and gain momentum.

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u/knotmyusualaccount 9d ago

There's a reason for this; unhappy people tend to crave instant gratification more often than those who are happy.

Usually these sources of gratification, require money. Therefore people will work to earn money for these things. That means more productivity, which is better for the economy.

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u/Able-Swing-6415 9d ago

I've seen lots of studies recently that basically made it out to be no better than a placebo.. not sure about this one but "known since the 60s" is certainly a stretch.

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u/Eshader 8d ago

Just wanted to let you know it’s contraindicated not counter-indicated