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First LSD Test In 40 Years Reveal Drug Helps Terminal Patients Prepare For Death
EwanPalmer writes "The first controlled LSD study in more than 40 years reveals the drug could be used to help people with terminal illnesses deal better with death. The study, published in the Journal of nervous and Mental Disease, showed that 12 people who agreed to take the banned hallucinogenic drug during therapy sessions felt 'significant reductions in anxiety' about their lives ending."
There are definitely people who should NOT take psychedelic drugs but at this point any level headed person should be able to see what LSD is.
This has been a long known fact, shortly after the study, or experiments were done this was being discussed among the medical community, and among the Public. I guess the newer generation will rediscover these studies but this isn't anything remotely "new" or ground breaking!
Well, yeah, they're high. Duh
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep?
Great.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The bible thumpers who think we should all face death kicking and screaming and in maximum pain will put an end to this research forthwith.
I can't image a worse trip than knowing your going do die and experiencing those thoughts while under the influence of LSD. For those that have never taken this drug, beyond the entertaining light, sounds and altered twisted reality and all, it can also puts your mind on a train of thought such that you can not break out of it unless someone is monitoring you, picks up on that and says, "dude, snap out of it." Somehow death and and LSD are a bad idea.
Let's work on life extension and anti-aging technology which would mean we understand life processes much better than we do now.
I'd say it was more like the first test in 24 years, I remember it being tested extensively in college.
I do remember there was often a sense of finding a higher meaning or truth, but come morning we could never remember what it was. It was maddening. So one time I borrowed a pocket dictation machine during our, uh, testing, and we thought we'd record this great insight we had.
Even though we finally went to bed with the idea that we had, at last, captured this great truth for posterity, when we listened to the tape the next day we were disappointed to find out that all we had recorded were the semi-coherent ramblings of some guys on LSD,
Were done with Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms) on terminally ill cancer patients (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/psilocybin-anxiety-and-depression-in-cancer) and also PTSD sufferers (http://guardianlv.com/2013/08/psychedelics-show-promise-for-ptsd-treatment/). Psychedelics are beautiful substances which when used correctly can give the user a profound, new outlook on life and put personal matters into better perspective. There's no doubt these drugs are exceptional in acting as what I would describe as the psychological equivalent to a disk de-fragmentation on a computer; nothing is necessarily gained or lost, just arranged and sorted back into the order which is most conducive to the operation of the hardware (or human body, in this case).
Wish it was a standard ingredient in my morning wheaties.
People use all kinds of substances to reduce anxiety when they are aware of their upcoming deaths. Alcohol is a popular one. Cigarettes (countless stories of mortally wounded soldiers asking for a cigarette). I'm sure marijuana would work equally as well. It's not really that much of a shocker: mind altering substances (of any potency) make facing death easier.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The Grateful Dead takes on a deeper meaning.
Home Clinics!
Huxley had his wife intravenously administer a high dose of LSD shortly before he passed away.
A feeble brained person could have told you without taking a mind altering drug like LSD.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
A sample size of 12 is ridiculously small. It is shocking that scientific journals still publish such dubious empirical results.
On a side note, Chicago economist Emily Oster dissects a number of medicinal studies for their use of statistics and finds many flaws. She points out that medicinal schools concentrate strongly on the mechanics of being a doctor as opposed to focusing on decision theory and statistics.
Saying LSD is like marijuana is like saying Alcohol is like Caffeine.
For me, my first trip, I thought I was gonna die.
about my death?
As long as I can remember (that includes Captain Kangaroo and the Watergate Hearings), I've known I'm going to die, and it's never worried me that much.
No, I don't want to die, but it's gonna happen whether I want it to or not, so no use getting my tits in a twist about something I can't prevent.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What about the daily uncontrolled testing?
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep? Great.
It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!
I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...
....showed that 12 people who agreed to take the banned hallucinogenic drug during therapy sessions felt 'significant reductions in anxiety' about their lives ending.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whi...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
natural compounds like psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline have identical effects and have been used for thousands of years.
The question the article doesn't answer is "where did they get it?". The existence of such a study implied to me that pharmaceutical grade LSD was manufactured. Not that I'm looking to score some or anything; but it's my understanding that getting the process right is notoriously difficult. I've read stuff where people said nothing ever came close to the original Sandoz LSD.
Here's the source which lays out the details of the study, and it's not too difficult to read. The source is in there too. Obviously you're not going to run over to Switzerland and score some now; but it's interesting to think that this stuff is being made. I had a teacher once who said she made some in an organic chemistry class (!). I doubt she tried it though, because of the aforementioned difficulty of getting it right.
Let me be blunt. I have not taken LSD in 10+ years, but I had my time... of large doses, clean as you could hope for. (half D half L isomer) LSD experiences. It forces you to look at your past and come to terms with regrets. You will be the better for it. And can be very fun and interesting if you relax. I have no desire to use it soon. I have to many painful regrets, but i am not dieing (hopefully) anytime soon.
This has been a long known fact,
Some of this was known back in the '60s and '70s. But the federal government decided to suppress it. In particular: Any drug with side-effects that were pleasant was considered a threat to the status quo of governance - a way for productive people to achieve happiness without driving industrial profit and/or part of a Communist conspiracy to rot the "Free World"'s moral fiber.
There was a period where researchers would only get new grants if the conclusions of their studies stated that the drugs - psychedelics, marijhuana, etc. - were useless for medical purposes and/or dangerous. (The papers in Science, for instance, were often pathetically hilarious. The reduced data said one thing, while the conclusion said the opposite.)
Meanwhile the government (notably with such things as the FBI's COINTELPRO program) smeared those (formerly highly respected scientists) who had been proponents of finding uses for them (especially those who had tried to use them to augment intelligence and experimented on themselves - often with bizarre results). The most prominent of these was Timothy Leary, though there were a number of others.
Somewher in there the drugs were added to various "schedules" and banned from medical use.
After a couple years of this, with any actual benefits buried in the noise, the government declared that it was "settled science" that there were no useful treatments using these drugs and stopped issuing new permits for their use in new research projects. (It's very much like research into global warming: You can't convince people on either side because the research is suspect due to the government becoming involved and pushing its horse in the race.)
Then the government declared acts related to banned-drug trafficing, possession, and use to be "serious" crimes and imposed passed mandatory minimum sentences - recreating the scenario of alcohol prohibition, funding organized crime, filling up the prisons, and lining corrupt police personell's pockets with graft money. Then it passed RICO and created the same financial incentive structure that fueled the Spanish Inquisition - driving ever-increasing anti-drug activity and blocking attempts to repeal drug bans.
And that's where it stood for decades. Negligible work on uses for the chemicals - either by organized research or private self-medication (with drugs of uncertain content and quality).
So while Moore's Law drove the computes from giant cabnets filling floors of office buildings to chips in everything under the sun, work on a nimber of categories of drugs stagnated.
The canabinoids of Marijuana, alone, have a number of apparent (but not adequately researhed) benefits:
- They appear to be a specific treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, itself, seems to be a result of undermeidcation for pain - also driven by the "drug war").
- Canabinoids (including at least one which does not produce a substantial "high") also appear to be a successful treatment for a debilitating form of childhood epilepsy.
- Parkinson's disease eventually kills, not directly through loss of dopamine, but by the body's attempt to compensate for it by fouling up a system that uses the recently discovered endocanabinoids as neurotransmitters. (These are the chemicals that THC and its relatives mimic, much as opioids mimic endorphins.) This ends up with loss of memory and loss of appetite, and the victim starves herself to death. Canabinoids may help alleviate this and/or prolong life, (if only by reducing the tendency to self-starvation by inducing "the munchies").
- Canabinoids have been claimed to arrest the progress of several cancers, including a brain cancer.d
- Canabinoids have long been used for reducing the nausea of chemotherapy, easing self-starvation in cancer patients. (Similarly with side-effects of anti-AIDS drug coctails.)
I could go on.
But "more research is needed" to determine which (if any) of these effects are real, turn them into practical treatments, and deploy them. And it's not going to happen smoothly and rapidly with the government continuing to interfere.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1. Drug advocates and addicts will misinterpret this to justify recreational use of drugs, even though we are talking about terminally ill patients taking LSD with the assistance of trained professionals.
2. No shit, getting high or drunk numbs anxiety. Look at how many miserable people are dependent on booze and drugs to make their lives bearable. That's not science.
Aside from the fact that "get high" can refer to drugs besides marijuana, marijuana itself is technically classified as a mild hallucinogen. I've never understood this classification because :
(a) marijuana makes you lethargic while most hallucinogens make you more energetic,
(b) marijuana can cause visual effects but only after you've taken so much it becomes unpleasant.
(c) marijuana has a predictable effect while serious hallucinogens are much more susceptible to "set & setting".
Anyways, mescaline, the naturally occurring drug closest to LSD, has been used for religious purposes since before recorded history. Also, LSD is knowing for leaving a lasting impression. Ain't surprising that controlling the "set & setting" allows for serious psychological work.
Also, psychedelic mushrooms are useful for treating alcoholism in that you should not take alcohol when on mushrooms, so partying on a mushroom trip means a night out sans alcohol.
According to this scientific paper. Acid blows holes in your aura, man, ain't nothing but a quick buzz and they won't take no LSD.
I remember an article about LSD being used in the 1950s as a psychotropic therapy to instantly alter behaviour. Just think how much has been wasted on hypnotherapy, counseling and self-help books since then.
Some people describe their first LSD trip being a truly enlightening experience which allowed them to see life and the world in a completely new perspective. Can you explain this more specifically?
Was a poineer.
Interesting, I was just testing this a few months ago. LSD is strong, and I can only imagine what these people thought of death or "god" after tripping.
I'm a bit Leary of this kind of research.
Table-ized A.I.
Not so much a matter of filling out the paperwork, as a matter of "any paperwork for research that doesn't set out to agree with the neoprohibitionists' Drugs Is Teh Devil agenda will be summarily canned, period."
It's exactly the difference between the faith-based and investigation-based approaches to anything else: Once the faithful have decided they're Correct, they're not only not interested in pursuing any lines of inquiry that might suggest otherwise but actively work to surpress them.
If we supplied the terminal patients with plenty of opium and a pipe they would probably be far happier than at any time in their lives. Pain would not be an issue and fear would be at zero. Sadly our society just can't stand the idea that a pain killer as effective as opium just might mean that a terminal patient might only live 28 days whereas without opium that might get to suffer a few more days. Maybe a nice dose of LSD and a good pipe full of opium would be even better. Instead of going out with a whimper why not go out grinning and giggling and really happy about the experience?
They seem to have similar effects, but these things are notoriously hard to study objectively, so anecdotal evidence is not enough to establish that they have identical effects (and it would be really weird if they did. How should such different molecules get identical pharmacokinetics and pharmarkodynamics?).
Apologies for spoiling the joke, but for our non-UK friends: Jacqui Smith is a former Labour home secretary, drugs witch-hunter (and hypocrite) extraordinaire, and general fuckwit when it comes to drug policy. She has no relevant experience except for having smoked a few joints.
You just made those words up to sound "smart."
It's nice to see this being discussed. I've only done LSD once but would seriously recommend trying it before you die. I know drugs and users are often found upon but its seriously one of my top life experiences. If you have the right setting with the right people, it's an unparalleled experience.
Besides coping with death it would probably be a great substance for couples therapy. You communicate on an emotional level with people and your self that you may never experience with out it. The laws are really unfortunate. Incredibly harsh. Restricting this to therapy would do a lot of good for a lot of people.
Oh get over it. LSD is no different in being illegal but in paper only.
Just as liquor is illegal in Saudi Arabia, yes they are nut jobs for making it so, but no different to the
west making LSD illegal too.
Live a little try it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You can drink when high, but you will not feel it, or the lsd effect nullifies it, but when the lsd wears off, then you feel drunk.
Also because of this, drinking is dangerous to your body, and system in high amounts, yet LSD is safer at the cellular level.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It's just a ploy from the anti-drug people.
After the trial, they can say: We tried LSD on 40 people and they all died.
I can confirm that after the last time I took LSD I was DEFINITELY prepared for death. Hence why that was 20 years ago.
Imagine LSD during death. Like Aldeous Huxley's.
have identical effects
Hard to tell, you can get "identical effects" (vivid visual and auditory hallucinations) simply by forcing yourself to stay awake for more than ~60hrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And lobotomy helps as well.
If you haven't been paranoid from too much THC, then you don't know what the parent is talking about. Today's cannabis is a much stronger animal than your father's weed. Especially if you vaporize it.
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If the person can't physically think or feel, and their neurons function are disrupted, they don't and can't particularly feel anything in a controlled way. So of course they will stop worrying about death, and their entire brains will be immobolized and incapable of defense or anything else.
They used to slip this drug to unwitting victims to turn them into schizophrenics for gods sakes. The CIA also envisioned putting it in water supplies to make the entire populace of a region defenseless, walking around like mindless zombies even at low doses.
End result: you can give a person a drug that does all sorts of damaging shit, doesn't mean its working therapeutically or right to give a person. Because they're terminal they obviously figure the brain damage wouldn't matter, since they're going to die anyway. Lets slip them into a psychotic episode to control them until they finally pass! Yay, that makes them easier to deal with!
This is true, I stayed awake for almost four days during senior project, when I was in college, and I was starting to hallucinate during my presentation.
Psychedelics are dangerous. They are very effective at treating addictions, and modern society is entirely build around all the consumers running on hamster wheels for their next hit. They grant self-awareness, and that just might make the marionette see the strings they dance from. But even more dangerously they might make the puppetmasters realize those same strings also tie the hand that holds them.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It worked on me.
I take it you haven't done any of these, since the effects of LSD is **NOT** identical to the effects of psilocybin mushrooms or mescaline-containing cacti. I have done all three, and all three are dramatically different from each other. For that matter, a trip from San Pedro cacti is different than a peyote trip, and a chemically-generated LSD trip is different than a morning glory seed generated LSD trip.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
It's already understood that participating in activities that a person thinks are valuable gives that person additional mental resources (think willpower).
So here we have a volunteer group of dying people who are given the opportunity to advance science, a cause they clearly think is valuable or they wouldn't have volunteered.
As always in such situations, this helps them come to terms with the immediacy of their fate. They are doing something with their remaining time rather than just lying in bed waiting for a bedpan. They are doing science, which is the religion of many people today (and well respected even by normal people who don't fetishize it as a replacement for spirituality).
As you say, coming to terms with your inevitable end is a powerful experience. People who do so often wish to devote their remaining hours to what they see as worthwhile efforts, like science research, and one of the few types of science research a bedridden terminal case can do is drug research.
Live every single day like you will die next Tuesday, and suddenly "World of Warcraft" holds no appeal. You'll want to do meaningful things.
"their friends, family member and colleagues also reported that the psilocybin experience had made the participants calmer, happier and kinder."
In pharmaceutical parlance, Psilocybin appears to be a potent Assholeimase inhibitor
Morning Glorys don't contain LSD, they contain LSA, which, while being a precursor to LSD, is very different.
><));>
The reason why marijuana is considered a mild hallucinogen is because of the paranoia that many people associate with the drug. If someone is paranoid while high on marijuana then this is a type of hallucination.
I am going to assume it is somewhat like exposure therapy which is used to overcome phobias. Exposure therapy is when you introduce the fear or in this case trauma to the patient just a little bit and then you gradually increase the exposure until the phobia or trauma is gone. Of course trauma can not technically be gone but the trauma can definitely hold less anxiety.
Which one is the most interesting?
News flash - being frozen will kill you one *hell* of a lot more thoroughly than pretty much anything short of being fed through a meat grinder. In fact on a cellular level the damage will be far greater than that, even if you superficially appear undamaged. Cryogenics technology is still a long way from being able to reliably glassify something much thicker than millimeter-scale, and that's a challenge. Even if they *could* do such a thing, keeping you perpetually cold enough to remain glassified rather than warming to temperatures where ice crystals form and destroy the cells would likely be extremely expensive - burying you under an ice cap just won't be cold enough.
But hey, if you have no heirs or worthy causes to leave your fortune to, and can't think of anything better to do with while you're still alive, *and* trust the cryogenics company not to just take your money and cremate you once nobody's watching, then knock yourself out. I'm sure many, many centuries from now when medical science has reached the point they can rebuild a body and brain from frozen mush (I'm sure there's *lots* of useful applications for that, right?) they'll just be clamoring to resurrect 20th century cavemen for their museum exhibits. It won't be *you* obviously - they'll have to damn near rebuild the copy from scratch, but it will potentially have your memories and personality if enough neural data still exists in the corspicle's brain.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They seem to have similar effects, but these things are notoriously hard to study objectively, so anecdotal evidence is not enough to establish that they have identical effects (and it would be really weird if they did. How should such different molecules get identical pharmacokinetics and pharmarkodynamics?).
Because the "such different molecules" actually have very similar shapes and active sites and thus very similar/identical mechanisms of action - just as with all the other drug classes (peptidoglycan synthesis inhibiting antibiotics, COX inhibiting anti-inflammatories, etc.).
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Depends on the context. Where I am, what I am doing, where my head is. Mushrooms for walking in the Pacific Northwest rain forest, morning glory seeds hiking in the Andean altiplano or playing in our garden, LSD when staying indoors, San Pedro at Lake Titicaca or visiting pre-Colombian ruins, etc.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
felt 'significant reductions in anxiety' about their lives ending."
A similar result to that experienced by many adults upon listening to Justin Bieber music.
Ok, when did that become permitted again? last i heard it was still a 'scheduled drug' and even research was banned.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The dea is in violation of human rights!!! I come home from war a vet and am directly at ods with the dea the war on drugs is a war agents humanity!!!!!! The dea must stop this nonsense !!!! I want the head of the dea in jail!!!!! That's were these crooks and cons belong!!!! If I have any pull left in the d.o.d. I order the arrest of the office of the dea!
Exactly what I was thinking. I've known too many suicides in my life on bad trips, from the "I can fly off a 20 story building" to the "I'm superman and I can stop a train" to not know that LSD affects the instinct for survival.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
First *concentration* was 1938.
Morning glories did not evolve overnight in 1938, nor apricot seeds, nor any of the other plants this drug can be concentrated from.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Can't wait to pull the plug on Grandma? Give her some LSD and have her sign the euthanasia form.
And - just a note - I'm prepared to assert with confidence that LSD is not identical to Psilocybin, Mescaline, DMT or any other hallucinogenic materials. Ask users of these substances and they'll tell you - they cause very different experiences, both during the "high" and the subsequent hangover ("crash", "come-off", etc.).
Incidentally, when you're high enough on pot to see these things, you need to put the bong down. You're just wasting weed at this point (IMHO).
It's disrespectful.
So is there a generally safe way to get these things and be reasonably sure they are what they should be?
LSD, no. Morning glory seeds used to be coated with a little strychnine to prevent the plants from self-fertilizing and producing viable seeds, but that's not done any more. To be just a little paranoid you could buy organic morning glory seeds and avoid the issue altogether. Grind them up and mix them with something like peach juice, or let the powder sit in water (or wine) overnight and drink the water. Psilocybin mushrooms grow wild all over the place if you know how to recognize mushrooms. San Pedro is available from any herbalist in any market in Peru/Bolivia/Ecuador. There are several ways to prepare it but don't use the core, there's no mescaline there and it will upset your stomach. Peyote will make you puke no matter what, I've only done it once and don't know how to recognize it anyway.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Breathing makes you FEEL better! Drinking water makes you less-thirsty! Using mind-altering drugs suppresses pain and makes you care about things less.
Oh, and there MUST have been taxpayer dollars involved in funding this study... of course, Nancy Pelosi insists that there is NOTHING left to cut in the US budget... "the cupboard's BARE" she says... (oh and if there's no American tax dollars involdes, then there are probably Canadian or English, etc tax dollars... private companies just tend to have better uses for their money...)
LSD's insights may be illusory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnQr2AqVpIU
and this may actually get in the way of dealing with the problem directly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLdUE1VTl4
Having said that if you only have a year or less to prepare then perhaps a chemical accelerant needs to be applied to the process. Better to start thinking about life and death when you are young and healthy.
Yes brother, this is the way it is. We are all one, and in oneness, two-ness must be illusion. Death is the ego's most prized possession in creating fear about what will ultimately be viewed as a non-event, thus destroying ones peace during their time here.
Nothing is ever lost, with oneness, there is no where to lose it to, hence too, you will never die.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
But they will have different physico-chemical properties (polarity etc.) and different reactivities, so they will have different pharmacokinetics and different pharmacodynamics. This is a good thing, because it means that the treatment can (to some degree) be tailor-made to the problem, but it means that talking about "identical" effects of different compounds is close to being meaningless.
This is really ancient knowledge. Did science just get hep? Great.
It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course! I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...
so true, been waiting for this for a while as it's been on the potential high therapeutic benefit list for some time, Tim "f**king" Leary as well as the ott governmental policies wipe so many promising agents off the potential breakthrough research lists. MDMA is coming into it's own with the fruition of trials for successful treatment of battle induced PTSD where not much else worked.
I remember surprise as a youngster what we could order from the suppliers no problems never mind what we could make, and yet so many things much less damaging including LSD placed in the restricted section of our labs catalogue required soooo much paperwork you'd never get it approved it'd never happen for human use
They do not have identical effects. Not even close. Even the Tryptamines (DMT and Psilocybin, for example) have vastly different effects from each other. You can really only generalize the effects of the two major classes of psychedelics - tryptamines are intellectual and phenethylamines are emotional. Beyond that, each chemical is unique.