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I’ve taken psychedelics a few times. Sometimes, it’s just been mild and giggling at colors and nature. Pleasant, but just kind of a fun drug. Sometimes it’s been just extremely confusing and not at all fun, to the extent that I’d forget my own name or what I’ve taken and basically just all memories. It’s very frustrating to be in that state, constantly trying not to fly away but not able to ground yourself. It’s a little disturbing, but not horrific.
Sometimes though, it’s been a truly beautiful, enlightening experience. I still think of it sometimes. It’s very difficult to really explain in words, but it feels like kind of extreme empathy with all life. Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay. I’m not particularly religious or spiritual at all but that experience really changed me a bit, I still think of it. It feels like a shortcut to enlightenment that usually takes a lifetime of meditation, albeit short-lasting. To really get it permanently, you probably have to meditate a lot. It was amazing. It feels like life is in all these different forms, and you just happen to be one variation of it, but you could easily be any other living thing, so you just feel love and empathy for all life. And you know it’s finite and you’re not afraid of death. I would still attempt to avoid death, but I was just at peace with it if it was inevitable.
I think it’s a shame psychedelics get put in the same category as other drugs in the law and in people’s heads. It’s not at all the same as heroin, meth, cocaine. Not at all. I think on balance they should probably be legal, but I can easily imagine someone with mental illness struggling with mushrooms so I’m glad John Hopkins is doing these studies. It does seem like the therapeutic affects are long-lasting, and it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them. However if the dose is so strong, you probably wouldn’t be able to move much anyway.
Edit: a lot of replies to this post seem to talk about LSD. I was actually talking about mushrooms. I've only taken LSD once. Maybe the distinction matters.
I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a friend in high school who was a brilliant programmer and started using LSD and other psychedelics.
He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook and after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore - the drugs permanently changed him.
To be fair I don't know if he was using other drugs in conjunction with psychedelics but my (possibly ignorant) gut feeling is to be wary of implications of harmlessness when it comes to any drug.
I knew a guy who had changed significantly after a weekend retreat with some cultish experience (Landmark Forum, I am, or something like that). 48 hours of intensive experience though no pharmaceutical.
He was on every kind of excellence list at uni, on 3 different merit scholarships (which all unfortunately went directly to the uni, not personally to him).
That weekend was in the middle of the semester; he basically quit that week, but still came in to campus to complete his TA duties which are hard to drop mid semester; then went on an around-the-world trip for a year. I met him once randomly on the street afterwards, and he said he was happier than ever before, with no intention of going back to his studies or any other aspect of his former life.
I had told this around the time he came back from his trip to two of my friends, neither of whom knew that guy.
One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”.
The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”.
20 years later, I still don’t have a firm opinion myself.
Agreed. I think HN in general is too quick to dismiss the potential dangers of psychedelics. I know at least a couple people who have essentially lost their minds as a result of frequent psychedelic use. It's pretty terrifying to see someone slowly become more paranoid delusional and incoherent when they once were an intelligent and charismatic friend.
> I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose
I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway.
And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.
>The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them.
Not so fast. I had a bad LSD (and some marijuana) trip once and had flashbacks for 2 months. I would be going around my day and suddenly reality turned into a videogame or an evil simulation.
That was like 3 years ago, it has all passed now, never had flashbacks again and I'm glad I had that bad trip, because it showed me reality in a way that I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. But maybe if I had had a higher dose, or had been in a worse place in my life, I would have gone completely mad.
You might enjoy reading the book How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan. It describes exactly what you are saying, has lots of different testimonials and has a great overview of the whole psychedelic therapy research world going from the 50s all the way to now.
> Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay.
My Mom raised me to feel that this is putting yourself outside the picture as a passive observer. I was taught from a very young age to remove myself to this state whenever I felt I couldn't understand the world. The older I get, the more I observe the world and behaviour of people around me, the harder I find it to escape this state, silently watching, observing, trying to understand the chaos that is humanity.
This was beautifully written, and very, very much captures my sentiments (and experiences) with psychedelics as well.
Actually, reading your post was moving. Maybe the most impactful HN post I can remember reading (perhaps with some amount of recency bias in it's favor. Still...)
Thank you!
Could you elaborate why are you calling experience "enlightening", considering you can not put it into words?
There is a joke about a guy, who could not remember a brilliant idea, he got under drugs. He left a piece of paper and pencil around, and wrote it down during the next trip. A day later he found the paper, which read "The Water is Wet".
"I took a walk alone last night.
I looked up at the stars
To try to find an answer in my life
I chose a star for me, I chose a star for him I chose two stars for my kids and one star for my wife Something made me smile. Something seemed to ease the pain Something about the universe and how it's all connected"
I have a question though. Have you ever had a bad trip on psychedelics?
The closest analogy to that seems to be an episode of psychosis. The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those.
Sam Harris wrote about his experience with it in Waking Up. He had numerous good experience with it, a good setting and state of mind but yet he still had a bad trip and it has stuck with him ever since, like “a door left ajar” in his words.
Another fast-acting psychedelic is Salvia Divinorum. Salvinorin-A is a one-of-a-kind compound, different from all the other known psychedelic/entheogens both for its structure (which allowed it to stay legal for longer) as well as for its "dysphoric" effect. The experience can be as intense as something like this can be. Completely dissociative, and scary as well.
Despite all of this though, I can't overstate the beneficial effects that a dozen of experiences spread across a decade had on me. From a grumpy loner, to a compassionate human being who can't get angry anymore (and no, I'm not apathic), the absolutely REAL experience of losing all of this, made me pretty much fall in love with life, and at the same time made me more light-hearted with it. It's hard to explain, but once you experience something as real as the only real thing you thought there was (life), you start questioning it quite a lot and to take it a bit less seriously.
Maybe I simply grew up. But when I think of this change, these experiences are the first thing that comes to mind.
Please be responsible and careful with these experiences. You don't want to waste a good opportunity for growth.
Really odd to see you promoting Salvia, one of the psychedelics with the worst (and deserved) reputations imaginable. I know you give you passing warning of it being "scary as hell", but that's probably not a strong enough of a warning.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvqkvb/why-is-salvia-so-u...
I don't know, I always found it to be an interesting experience too. The effects are very much unlike other psychedelics indeed and I can see how they can be terrifying for some - it might feel as if your body is being controlled by another entity and you are just an observer, watching.
The shift in perception can be pretty dramatic too!
This is probably depending on the dose. I've never tried more than 20x extract mixed with leaves. There are much stronger concentrate, I can see how those would be terrifying if you didn't know what to expect.
This bad reputation is usually based on people's experiences of consuming this through smoking the leaves. This can be and often is very intense, intensely psychedelic, and deeply terrifying.
The traditional way to consume this medicine is orally - through chewing on the leaves or taking a tincture. The onset is much slower and gentler, and provides ample space and time for the some incredible visionary experiences to open and unfold in a much safer container.
Yeah... Salvia is not a party drug. Interesting, though. I wrote about my experience on Reddit a while back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/avrig...
to me salvia is more visual and less deep experience (but maybe I just didn't have time to dig so deep as on mushrooms). But yeah its pretty close, closer than anything else, I would say works with +-same receptors in brain
> This questionnaire included a series of questions about whether respondents had a specific psychiatric condition, including depression or anxiety (categorical response options: yes, no, unsure), and whether their conditions had changed (categorical response options: better, stayed the same, worsened) after 5-MeO-DMT use.
This is a self-reported study. Asking whether a substance or drug improved someone condition will often result in positive answers, whether or not it was therapeutically useful.
In the sample, more than 90% of individuals had already used 5-MeO-DMT, 41% had depression, 48% with anxiety. 79% reported that “their anxiety was better following 5-MeO-DMT use”. This is indeed not a balanced sample, and self-reports provide very weak results compared to a proper double-blind study. While doing a double-blind study on such substances might be challenging, there are definitely tools and environments that can help correctly measure the true effect of a substance on depression on anxiety.
I don't see how this study proves anything.
5-Meo-DMT, the non-psychedelic psychedelic. Void of visuals, full of infinity.
Even before your head hits the pillow, already, you know. No time for, "am I ready?", only, "there's no going back". It's not a stretch to call it the the king of psychedelics.
p.s. depending on nothing, isn't that the ultimate way? While it may be interesting to immediately encounter the "truth", a painting of a rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger (paraphrasing, iirc, Eihei Dogen).
As soon as I can I will invest all my money in companies productizing therapeutic psychedelics...
It's sure to be a money loser compared to other addictive psychiatric drugs which are taken daily as a maintenance to the problem. Drugs like DMT should only be taken once in a blue moon, are not addictive, and are extremely cheap to produce.
Not sure there's much money to be made there, as many of the psychedelic compounds are both cheap to produce and unpatented.
Only to promptly lose it when it's blanket-banned because a 15 year old got his hands on some, and then committed suicide in the midst of a paranoid hallucination.
(fwiw I think it should be legal too)
I have a friend who experienced 5-MeO-DMT in this fashion three times. In each case he reported that it was a powerfully overwhelming ecstatic experience; it felt like contact with the divine. A key feature of the experience was that his ability to control the trip was completely overwhelmed; it is an experience of surrender. His depression improved because he gained a temporary perspective on the world which was utterly suffused with love and light; after it faded, he still remembered what it had felt like, and knowing that it was possible to see the same world in such different ways based on nothing but a chemical state change in the brain has made it possible for him to stop taking his own current state of mind so seriously. It is just one of many possible ways of experiencing the world, after all.
I think he experienced a form of "ego death". My understanding is that it works on varying levels for some but not all.
Thanks for sharing and I'm glad to hear it's worked so well for him.
Did the study clarify whether the effects were long-lasting, or were the psychedelic drugs simply a momentary distraction?
From my experience, especially with psilocybin (shrooms), the main benefit is not hallocinogenic at all (at a ~2g or so dose) but that it has the effect of basically forcing you to confront all the emotional pain that you bury and ignore. I always end up laugh-crying and experiencing revelations about myself, my relationship etc that I simply don't have otherwise. I can see how effective it can be when taken while in therapy because you basically force yourself to open up. It's a truth serum, of sorts.
I have not tried DMT but my understanding of ayahuasca (active ingredient is DMT) retreats in places like Peru is that it's like "10 years of therapy in a week."
Don't know about this particular experiment. However, in the book How to Change your Mind, there are a lot of references to recent research of psychedelic therapy to treat addictions and after 1-3 sessions, 50-80% of subjects drop their addictions for good (at the time of the book's writing, they had only been able to follow the patients for up to 1 year). There's also the anecdote of one of the founders of AA, who quit alcohol through psychedelic therapy.
> Righteous outrage isn't just an addictive drug, it's a hallucinogen. - Elijah William Eby
Although equating outrage with a drug is a metaphor it seems to me to be a strong one. No doubt its effects are mediated by neurotransmitters as are directly chemical hallucinogens. Yet outrage seems to generally enhance depression and anxiety.
Maybe that's because hallucinations caused by outrage feel more like simple perceptions of reality, and it's depressing that reality is so outrageous. Whereas chemically induced hallucinations can more easily be discounted.
This is an interesting survey result, but given that 5-MeO-DMT can cause sudden cardiac arrest I doubt this will ever go to clinical trials.
Citation? Curious also how this compares to other classes of medications.
Contact: dr. Elf Machine MD
Said this for years nothing is as powerfull as dmt/hamalas .. I’ve seen a dusin times how it changed the life of someone myself included with a single trip you could live on it for years.
Is there significance to the 5-meo-dmt? It seems close to dmt, 4-ho-dmt, and some of the research chems like 4-aco-dmt?
Completely different. James Oroc wrote a book on it, and there are also a bunch of YouTube videos of him talking about the differences between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT.
https://www.amazon.com/Tryptamine-Palace-5-MeO-DMT-Sonoran-D...
it’s close to dmt in the sense that part of it’s structure is DMT. as far as effects, if you believe the literature: dmt is like sailing into the sunset and 5meo is like stapping yourself to a rocket.
both give you something, but radically different
So where can I obtain this? Legally?
Dunno but its little sister dmt is easily made by yourself and to me less scary/risky with the same benefits. You Can order root bark legally and extract it in your kitchen.
Nowhere, but Mexico's probably your best bet -- the Sonoran desert, where the 5-Meo-DMT secreting toads live, runs through northern Mexico and southern Arizona.
For obvious reasons it's best to avoid the land of the free.
It's legal in Canada and most of Europe
Google jungle spice
From a frog.
I’ve taken 5-meo-dmt several times it’s probably the most powerful and uncomfortable psychedelic I’ve ever tried (and I’ve tried just about everything). Makes you feel like you are dying, would not recommend.
This means very little until we have all the research available, and until we've run a good meta-analysis.
When Prozac was introduced we had claims that it was a miracle drug, and made people "better than well", and that current drug licencing laws were unjust because you could only get prozac if you had depression and this was denying access to it for the general population.
Now we know that it's a somewhat useful medication for some people, especially when provided with therapy and other psycho-social interventions, but it is very far from the miraculous claims.
tldr claims of efficacy for depression treatment are either outright bullshit or oversold.