Comment by trumpdong
10 hours ago
Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
10 hours ago
Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
Was that causation though? I have to imagine the kind of people who are open to psychedelics also generally oppose war.
On the other hand I heard a single dose does permanently increase your trait openness by a standard deviation, which is nuts. So maybe there is causation there too.
It definitely wasn't causation, the causation flows the other way (criminalizing a proxy for a political belief as an end run around the first amendment).
What’s exciting though is that this administration recently signed an executive order directing the agency to speed up the development and approval process for psychedelics.
> this administration recently signed an executive order directing the agency to speed up the development and approval process for psychedelics
Can’t the President directly unschedule it?
Yup. Not sure which particular stopped-clock struck right within the generally anti-science MAHA movement but I think everybody is happy to take the win.
Ironically enough, the psychedelic field sort of defies some scientific analysis, so could be construed as "anti-science". I've seen some commentary that it's difficult to test. As an example, you can't really do a double blind study with a placebo because it's obvious to everybody who got the drug.
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They only did it because it lets them beat the "big pharma is stealing from you (not us)" drum.
> MAHA
Make America Hallucinogenic Again?
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that feeling of a clock striking right is actually a momentary glint of light pouring through a crack in the cold stone shell that has become encrusted around the hearts of those soaking too often in the type of extreme rhetorical panic which broods a curated and embedded fear similar to the kind that makes children afraid of the bogey man, they feel safer to stay hidden with the fear than to venture out enough to discover it was just a chimney sweep on the distant rooftop and everything is fine outside after all where they soon discover some great adventure or purpose in the richness of the world
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Ironic statement considering the last administration used terms like, "birthing people" and denied the existence of the president's dementia.
Keep the pathetic "pat me on the back" comments to Reddit please.
Because Trump is in bad need of this shit?
"oh wow, look at my tiny hands, so tiny, hands"
>>the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
If you are to believe the Brave New World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World) worldview of Huxley (who topically was on loads of LSD himself), you'd think the government would want to flood the public with psychedelics -- low to zero toxicity, allows people to zone out, not addictive, allows people to focus inwards rather than focus on civic mismanagement.
Any ideas on why the US government is so opposed Psychedelics? Clearly the government is for Bread and circus. In fact, the establishment left and right want desperately for us to believe everything is indeed fine regardless of the facts our eyes see (e.g. Annie Lowrey on https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/americans-depresse...)
Psychededics are unpredictable. We know the government looked into their use as thought- and behavior-manipulating tools (MKUltra) but the results proved too chaotic. You might get a manchurian candidate...or the unabomber. But most likely just a renewed outlook on life.
Psyches basically raise the "temperature" (in machine learning parlance) of the brain, increasing crosstalk. This can jostle folks out of a mental rut. But it can also create positive feedback loops of upheaval.
Soma would only work as it did in BNW if society controlled essentially all sources of information - which is essentially the whole premise.
I thought the Soma in BNW was more like a type of depressant, like an opioid.
hallucinogens where taken by hippies, it was probably a way to put a few extra commies and lefties in prison
Yes, I think half of the politicians nowadays run on cocaine, no busts on TV.
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Psilocybin is harder to get research approvals for than many things, but it’s not “completely banned”. There are studies every year being completed with psilocybin, many of which get posted here on HN.
There is a growing tension between the extraordinary pop culture claims of psilocybin curing everything (now extending to Alzheimer’s due to this 1 low-quality report from Brazil) and the actual studied effects, though. A lot of the published outcomes are surprisingly low quality, like this case report or all of the studies that neglect to include a control group. Mental health studies without a control group are basically useless because even a control group that doesn’t receive a placebo (that is, people you simply monitor and interact with) will get better.
Just look at this comment section: People raising suspicions about the obvious problems in the study are being downvoted. The top voted comments are citing a Joe Rogan podcast with a guy hyping his startup. People really, really want to believe this is a magic cure and the usual guardrails of suspicion for extraordinary claims are seemingly suspended for this one topic.
When you take it, you understand, that if taken with the right approach it can lead to profound insights in changing your life and the effects described: helping with depression, addiction and accepting death are not far fetched at all. Yet it can also, if not guided or done on someone with anxiety have the opposite effect.
The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.
Right, when you take it, it becomes clear it just injects salience / profundity / meaning into whatever you happen to be focused on or have on your mind (EDIT: mostly this is the main effect, but there can be novel perspectives / insights, and other audio-visual changes, but IMO it is the felt meaning that primarily drives the more credulous claims). Without adequate preparation, this is likely to be worthless in most cases, harmful in other cases, and helpful in some again. However, not all causes of depression or addiction are about accepting death, or a salience / meaning problem, and even when that kind of issue is involved, a momentary experience of profound meaning is NOT actually necessarily transformative either (i.e. you can and in fact must still choose how to interpret that experience, once out of it).
So it would actually be very surprising if it was just a clear net positive overall
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> When you take it, you understand
To be fair, this is not how medical research is done.
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In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.
I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors.
Our ability to synthesize new compounds has also exploded since then. Drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster drug. They don’t need to use psilocybin. We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly. There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.
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> A lot of the published outcomes are surprisingly low quality, like this case report or all of the studies that neglect to include a control group. Mental health studies without a control group are basically useless because even a control group that doesn’t receive a placebo (that is, people you simply monitor and interact with) will get better.
Honest question, does a control group really matter that much when it's not possible to do a blinded study? Unless it's some incredibly small microdose, I would assume most study participants are able to tell if they're tripping or not.
>There is a growing tension between the extraordinary pop culture claims of psilocybin curing everything (now extending to
That's the playbook that got marijuana (more or less) legalized. So of course they're going to use the same exact strategy with each drug in turn.