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Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Closer To Medicinal Use (nytimes.com)
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have recommended that psilocybin, the active compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, be reclassified for medical use, potentially paving the way for the psychedelic drug to one day treat depression and anxiety and help people stop smoking. The New York Times: The suggestion to reclassify psilocybin from a Schedule I drug, with no known medical benefit, to a Schedule IV drug, which is akin to prescription sleeping pills, was part of a review to assess the safety and abuse of medically administered psilocybin [Editor's note: the story may be paywalled; alternative source]. Before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify the drug, though, it has to clear extensive study and trials, which can take more than five years, the researchers wrote. The analysis was published in the October print issue of Neuropharmacology, a medical journal focused on neuroscience.
The study comes as many Americans shift their attitudes toward the use of some illegal drugs. The widespread legalization of marijuana has helped demystify drug use, with many people now recognizing the medicinal benefits for those with anxiety, arthritis and other physical ailments. Psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are illegal and not approved for medical or recreational use. But in recent years scientists and consumers have begun rethinking their use to combat depression and anxiety.
The study comes as many Americans shift their attitudes toward the use of some illegal drugs. The widespread legalization of marijuana has helped demystify drug use, with many people now recognizing the medicinal benefits for those with anxiety, arthritis and other physical ailments. Psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are illegal and not approved for medical or recreational use. But in recent years scientists and consumers have begun rethinking their use to combat depression and anxiety.
While falling asleep last night, I had the sudden realization that I was about to awaken from the actual dream and decided to stay "awake" for a bit longer, since I had to clean up some big messes back in the real reality.
fwiw, this dream has its ups and down, but has become decidedly absurd lately. If you want to find out what my actual reality is, then read up on Steel Beach, it is as close as a human can get
As opposed to the rampant misuse of narcs that have been legal for how long now?
Many cultures use hallucinogens. Changing how the brain works for a limited amount of time, can have profound effects on how people view themselves and society around them. Harnessing this to help people isn't a new thing, its simply a return to things that have worked over time.
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Here we go round the mulberry bush
My thought exactly. It's like that pill to help you end restless leg syndrome- side effect of death.
Let's help you stop smoking by sending you on a Magical Mushroom Tour!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
US6630507B1
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6630507B1/en
Assignee: US Department of Health & Human Services
"Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia. Nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention"
Certain drugs, like MDMA have been found to help people with PTSD and other conditions improve via exposure therapy. Exposure therapy involves exposing the target patient to the anxiety source or its context without the intention to cause any danger. Doing so is thought to help them overcome their anxiety or distress.
Psychotherapy incorporating use of the drug MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, is equally effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the most widely accepted psychiatric treatment for the disorder, according to a meta-analysis to be published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology
It's like that pill to help you end restless leg syndrome- side effect of death.
Exactly like that, except the side-effect is pretty much nothing.
Let's help you stop smoking by sending you on a Magical Mushroom Tour!
Sure. Why the hell not?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Try them before you make uninformed statements, AC.
Meanwhile the rest of the world makes less money per day than virtually anyone in the first world makes in an hour, and they can afford to have children, lots of them, and they generally report higher levels of happiness than those who live in western nations.
So is the solution really for us all to smoke weed and take shrooms?
"...The heavens parted. God looked down and rained down gifts of forgiveness onto my being, healing me on every level, psychically, physically, emotionally.
... You can see why the government is cracking down on the idea of experiencing unconditional love.”
And I realized that our true nature is spirit not body, that we are eternal beings that God’s love is unconditional. There is nothing that we can ever do to change that, It is only our illusion that we are separate from God or that we are alone. In fact, the reality is, we are one with God and he loves us.
Now if that isn’t a hazard to this country? How are we going to keep building nuclear weapons? What’s going to happen to the arms industry if we realized that we’re all ONE?
It’s going to fuck up the economy. The economy that’s fake anyway. Which would be a real bummer
Let's help you stop smoking by sending you on a Magical Mushroom Tour!
That seems a lot more sensible than the currently approved pill that has an 8% success rate and occasionally triggers a literally homicidal rage in otherwise normal people.
The Repubs are typically anti drug ... and they love small and oppressive governments.
You think mushrooms and a common plant (which the human brain has more receptors for than anything else) are more dangerous than synthetic man-made chemicals formed by labs in to things like SSRI's and benzodiazepines and the medical community "is not sure how they work"?
You *do* know "Reefer Madness" is not scientifically accurate.
As for psilocybin, both it and LSD have very low toxicity AND very low addiction potential. If you compare them to caffeine on both those scales (toxicity and dependence), they stand in relation to caffeine roughly as caffeine stands to alcohol. And while individual cases of post-usage psychiatric problems have been reported in the literature, when the use is examined statistically the prevalence of self-harm and psychological distress is actually lower in psychedelic drug users.
This doesn't mean that users of such drugs can't come to harm; schizophrenics should especially avoid them. But I personally see very little medical or public health justification in preventing most interested individuals in experimenting with pharmacy grade psychedelics.
I could easily imagine licensed facilities for people interested in LSD. These facilities would be responsible for dosage and purity and could handle routine bad trips that would result in emergency room visits.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Those cultures have a whole framework in which the shroomz or whatever it is they're using are just tools along with the rest of what they do. If you fish out just the "active" stuff, according to modern medical science, you miss out on the larger part of the whole thing.
Coincidentally I'm reading through some of Castaneda's work, and boy is that guy dense. Completely focused on things like "but the shrooms, they do stuff!" when even he admits (several books later!) that this focus made him miss the more important other stuff entirely. Despite being told at every opportunity. For ten years.
And he was just an anthropologist by training. Now imagine what a fully trained-up medical researcher would make of it. I think, if you could harness that density and make it into actual matter we'd be awash in fissionables.
Only significant possibility of death is if one accidentally eats a mushroom that isn't a psilocybe and is instead a poisonous look-alike. Problem will go away once it's legal and distribution is reliable, like cannabis is in some states.
Now that pot is legal, I can't go to a public park without smelling the stuff. Cigarettes weren't so bad since they had a 5 foot radius. But dammit, if somebody is smoking pot within a 100 feet everyone in my family (kids included) go "Ugh! It smells like a skunk around here!" It's only going to get worse...
Any attempts to reclassify Schedule 1 drugs will probably never happen because the big pharma companies are strongly opposed (since all the things on Schedule 1 are drugs that the big pharma companies can't patent or control and that any drug maker would be able to produce)
Plus you have the anti-drugs campaigners who would argue that (as with weed) the harmful effects of hallucinogenic drugs outweigh any medical benefits.
"small and oppressive governments."
Riiighhhhtttt - You're a dumbfuck...
and organized religion and I will go full teetoler with you on banning all other recreational substances.
What? We need to get rid of drugs but keep God?
There is a reason religion was called the opiate of the masses. If you're not willing to start with the worst drug, why both with the little ones?
You've done a lot for mainstream acceptance of taking shrooms!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So let eat this mushroom and fly to Miami. What could possibly go wrong?
This is purely hypothetical problem I am pretty sure - I have never heard of such a poisoning. The psychoactive psilocybin mushrooms almost all have a distinctive "bluing" reaction when bruised due to the oxidation of psilocin to form a blue dye. No deadly mushroom has this reaction.
Now people do get poisoned thinking they are eating wild edible mushrooms, of which there are many types, some of which resemble deadly ones. Such poisonings account for 70% of all fatal natural source poisonings.
On the (small) commercial psychoactive 'shroom market all of the ones sold are cultivated Psilocybe cubensis varieties which are very easy to grow (as easy to grow as the white Agaricus bisporus mushrooms in grocery stores).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Millennial alert: Then why does every one of these pieces sound like it refers to recreational use? Would you be all in the same way if it were only permitted to be prescribed after a diagnosis, and then only in the modified form of a pill? I highly doubt it. Nice try, though, kids. Do you really think that in your 20s you know better than people that have been around drugs for decades?
Some of the medical benefits 'shrooms provide are already well studied and known.
For example, we know that aerobic exercise is good for you. Which is just the kind of exercise you get when running from the angry bull or cows in the field, or the farmer, or ....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
But not to own a mushroom.
Yeah, PopeRatzzo's "ratztarded" method was to make some stupid post that would be modded to +5 doing something evoking an emotional response like "How DARE you talk about women and blacks like that?" storing up a bunch of karma, and going on a trolling spree against anyone he doesn't like. In this case, it's conservatives.
PopeRatzo: We know your modus operandi. Since Slashdot changed how much karma you can hoard, you are no longer cruising along at +2. Bravo to the Slashdot team for this!
Retard Pusher
I don't like getting blasted on them as they can make you wonder off into some dark places vs say acid but when I go out to a nightclub to rave I'll take about .4 grams and about 1-1.5 hours later I'll take another .5 sometimes in smaller portions over 30min. Usually I'd have done one chocolate which I make into 1 gram worth of shrooms. You get an almost weed high with out the body stone so your visual perception changes a bit and things seem more clear and happy. The come down is like a MDA come down you feel a little distanced from others for about 30 min then it goes away. Sleeping is no problem BUT the next few days as long as I didn't drink too much alcohol and done MDA I feel so refreshed and clear minded and happy.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Says the fucking hypocrite that happily takes drugs before dental work, and medical procedures, and surgery.
Of course "It's only OK when I do it, not for anyone else but meeeeeee"
I truly hope your selfish hypocritical ass finds itself in a serious accident resulting in the worst pain possible and you just have to take it without any pain relief for hours if not days on end just so you can get an inkling of how you demand everyone else but you live their life.
Subject line describes the stock market for the last 3 weeks
I ate about 5 caps and stems my first time. My buddy and I tried to play this fucking wrestling game and the dudes were all running around not where I told them. We switched controllers, still would not do what my hands telling it to do. We tried this for about what seemed 2 hours until we put the controllers down and the dudes kept moving and doing moves - it was the intro the entire time, we never hit "start" to start the game. Dude kept saying, man that's weird. I don't know, it's just weird isn't it? WTF is weird. Tell me. I don't know, just weird man. I got freaked the fuck out and drove home (bad Idea on shrooms btw kids) I was convinced he was fucking with me and I ate poisonous shrooms so I wrote a shitty ass note and put it in my short pocket and laid down after driving home. Oddly enough I was able to sleep. I tried shrooms several more times and I just make an ass of myself for similar reasons so Ever since then I've been, like, fuck mushrooms. LSD is, and always was, way better meign. I've never had one bad LSD experience.
I for one would love it if they were legal. Tried both shrooms and acid in college. More silly than "enlightening" but still a very pleasant and refreshing way to spend an evening. Like a vacation, without having to take a week off to drive across the country. It would be a lovely thing if once a year or so I could enjoy something like that without risking all I hold dear. It's been almost 20 years, and I miss it.
Pot's legal here, but I don't enjoy it very much. Booze is plentiful, but it's probably the worst for my health. But some occasional strangeness brings some of the fun back to normality.
Actually the treatment associated with MDMA isn't exposure therapy. It's radically more effective than exposure therapy and shares nothing in common.
There are clinical guides available regarding the application of MDMA in the treatment of patients with PTSD that you can access for free.
The short version is that the hypothesis for PTSD is it is a condition of excessive self doubt and detachment, in other words the patient loses the ability to trust or accept their own feelings and come to terms with reality and as a result develops intense delusions in response to their cogitative dissonance. MDMA reduces or limits our natural distrust of others which is why it is known as having the effect of making people seem more friendly or accepting of one-another. What has been newly discovered is the fact that this effect also applies to the self. It isn't commonly recognized that self is comprised of many disparate elements that operate both cooperatively and combatively. MDMA seems to effect a shift toward trust and cooperation which can lead to a solution for dissonance.
Please do put in the time and read the published papers.
Mod up please. Out of points.
Lyrica? I can attest to the described side effects. I live with a guy who had it prescribed and he was drivin mad by the shakes, cold sweats and rage is caused.
Chantix can be even worse. There have been actual homicides and suicides.
This brain scan thing is gonna be the new techno phrenology.
This is like all the stoner proposals to make everything out of hemp.
Sure, the stuff won't work better than anything we already use for those purposes, but ... it's hemp man, so it's good!!
Actually, no, I don't. I always compare the potential side effects to the seriousness of what the drug is supposed to fix.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Even in the states where it is legal, cannabis distribution isn't reliable.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Doesn't matter about the addiction potential. What matters is that you're trying to treat anxiety by having hallucinations. And I compared that to treating your restless leg syndrome with a medication that can kill you.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
These facilities would be responsible for dosage and purity and could handle routine bad trips that would result in emergency room visits.
Um, yeah ... so "routine bad trips that would result in emergency room visits" are what you don't get with caffeine.
So, it is worse than caffeine.
And how do you know that doesn't work?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, there are emergency room visits caused by caffeine too, some of which require hospitalization. Look it up.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Doesn't matter about the addiction potential. What matters is that you're trying to treat anxiety by having hallucinations. And I compared that to treating your restless leg syndrome with a medication that can kill you.
Have you ever tried mushrooms?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
All while taking the most painkillers.
After about 6 months of depression from my mother's suicide, I took one relaxing "trip" with my S/O and now I have come to terms and have made huge improvements in my life.
1) No longer smoking nicotine.
2) No longer Depressed
3) No longer working menial job in a call center and got a job implementing a RDS system for a general contracting company and actually utilizing some computer skills.
4) Started to exercise again.
5) Cut back on my marijuana consumption by about 75%
All of this was started after my "trip" and I'm still reaping the benefits.
And you've just proven you don't know a goddamn thing about how the brain works.
Just saying that it isn't useful to prescribe hallucinatory drugs for non-hallucinatory disorders.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yes. Which is why I have grave doubts that sending somebody on that sort of a hallucination journey will help with smoking or anxiety at all.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The question isn't even if it works. The question is, are you creating a bigger problem than the original problem?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Speak for yourself then, not for others.
It's for individuals to decide whether the potential risks of a treatment outweigh the illness. You don't get to decide that for everyone else.
I'm to the point that altered reality states constitute stupid risk, no matter what it is for.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.