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I've successfully done self-therapy using nitrous oxide, psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT and LSD, most recently to come to terms with my difficult father to forgive him. My problem with the current push for this type of therapy is the requirment that it be done by professionals charging hundreds or thousands of dollars. One must never mention "self-therapy" because that might scare legislatures into keeping these drugs illegal. I remain resistant to this insertion of the state into what should be my right to use my own mind the way I see fit.
This is something that would quite easily kill other people who ventured into it.

Recommending it is not a safe and good idea.

At the most elemental level How can a person obtain medical grade pure LSD?

Further people have widely different reactions to the drugs mentioned, Making it into a cocktail is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps not for you, and perhaps not for a few others but the odds are against anyone who gives it a try.

Our current level of technology cannot even predict how a single person will react to one of our many anti-depressants. Here try this for a while.

" Dont like, doesn't work, lets try a different one. " (repeat until something works or you run out of drugs).

I am not advocating anti-depressants over the drugs you mention above necessarily. I have some faith that progress can be made in the realm of chemistry and medicine there.

I am saying dont do this on your own kids.

There are some that clean you can have great insights, magical experiences and some orgasm if you choke yourself nearly to death. Not quite death, just before.

Given the cocktail above, self-administered controlled strangulation might be safer.

Virtually all LSD that is sold is pure. The synthesis is well known and it's so cheap there is virtually no incentive for adulterants. Obviously some level of regulation would be better. But it is not at all difficult to acquire such a thing.
Yeah, and the Ehrlich test agent is hyper-specific, so very easy to test if it's legit or a potentially harmful analog.
I'm sorry strangulation is not safer than psychedelics... they have virtually no physical harm potential and have an extremely strong tolerance build up that is virtually instant which resists dependency.
>> Given the cocktail above

I really don't think he meant these combined in anyways. I don't think it'd be very ideal to mix any of them.

> Recommending it is not a safe and good idea.

They didn't. They're merely sharing their own experience.

I don't take them together. I'm not recommending it, rather I'm saying let me do it in the privacy of my own home if I want. It's a free country (US) isn't it?
The 'odds are against anyone who gives it a try'? What odds are those exactly? Psychedelics have an extremely high safety profile and low addiction potential. Your comparison to antidepressants is laughable.
And if you screw this extremely delicate self-administered chemical mind alteration up, the rest of us have to foot the bill for the resulting care / homelessnes / crime.

I’m a huge free marketeer, but a minimal amount of regulation really goes a very long way to improving outcomes.

Plus, you don’t get a second chance fixing your own brain.

>Plus, you don’t get a second chance fixing your own brain.

Says who?

I also believe your argument suffers from an attention fallacy. We allow (and encourage) people to do quite a lot of things that are outright more destructive and dangerous. Just walk past any gambling hall and have a look inside if you need an example. There are proper addicts there driven to extreme measures by desperation and tunnel views.

edit: If you need an example, a class mate of a very good friend of mine got into the habit of spending his pay check playing slots. He is currently serving time for cocaine smuggling after he ran out of options and couldnt see any other way out. Once losses are mounting peoples sanity goes quickly. Cocaine smuggling is by far not the worst thing he could have gotten himself into. And its not like putting him in detox for a week would have cleared his mind up as long as the debt is still there.

The 'rest of us' don't have to foot any bill. Your argument is a slippery slope fallacy that leads down the path of banning anything potentially dangerous. People take risks every day and psychedelic experiences are no different.
yes, that’s what collective health care means, regardless of if it’s state-mandated, or fully private.

you, or i, don’t get to decide what’s fair to treat, or who’s deserving of treatment.

While it's true you could do permanent damage with improper, reckless use of tools and get, eg HPPD, the brain is also resilient, and, eg nitrous oxide abuse takes a long time to get to a level of causing harm (which it very much can through B12 depletion), but used properly (aka taking B12 supplements) it can be used without doing damage, giving you as many chances to fix your own brain as you can afford, if that is a route you want to take.
>> if you screw this extremely delicate self-administered chemical mind alteration up, the rest of us have to foot the bill for the resulting care / homelessnes / crime.

What are you on about? Have you actually tried any of the substances mentioned in the parent comment?

Sure. And we should outlaw motorcycle riding, rock climbing, and rodeo while we’re at it. After all, the rest of us are going to have to foot the bill when you get hurt. I’m sure we can expand that list.
> One must never mention "self-therapy" because that might scare legislatures into keeping these drugs illegal.

That's because it's dangerous. Even good old weed can provoke psychosis, never mind LSD and mushrooms. Case in point: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/off-duty-...

LSD, ketamine, and other chemicals seem to be working for some people. But it doesn't mean that they're completely _safe_.

> That's because it's dangerous. Even good old weed can provoke psychosis, never mind LSD and mushrooms. Case in point: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/off-duty-... > > LSD, ketamine, and other chemicals seem to be working for some people. But it doesn't mean that they're completely _safe_.

Nobody should ever be getting behind the wheel of a car, let alone the cockpit of a plane, if they have not slept in 40+ hours.

There are lots of things that went wrong in that story, at multiple points. Using it to conclude that drugs are categorically unsafe, and therefore should be criminalized, is the wrong takeaway.

The critical part of that article is that Emerson was suffering from depression for 6 months prior.

And because any sign of depression or mental illness is career-ending from a pilot, the FAA and airlines' policy turned something that might have been treatable into something much worse.

This situation reads to me like a last ditch effort to fix the depression before attempting suicide. The tragedy here is that this will only lead to stricter regulations, rather than the mental health reform this industry needs.

Well, psicosis is like gravity. I have not experienced psicosis, but I have experienced episodes of psicosis. The first time was when I had a little accident where I broke a glass with my forehead. The second time was when I was awake for 3 days in a row.
Do you feel that including drugs in the therapy was a benefit over more common dialog-type therapy? If so how was it different?
Oh yes, nitrous oxide for example lets me surface and approach traumatic events without over-whelming anxiety that blocks the memory out. I've done years of talk therapy without drugs and the problem is that it's hard to let go of my ego personality when I'm talking to another person and it also takes a long time to get a therapist up to speed about what is going on with me internally, because I don't often even know. I did MDMA therapy with an alternative/underground therapist in the 90's and didn't get much out of it because it felt like the experience conformed to her expectations. I didn't feel free to let my mind wander.

I'm not knocking dialog-type therapy or psychedelic therapy, but maybe I'm built different and as a computer programmer figured out how to use these drugs to debug myself.

I'm curious about this as well, a lot of studies have shown that psychedelic therapy is most effective when bracketed by talk therapy -- the brain plasticity (or anti-inflammatory effects, the jury is still out) induced by psychedelics open the mind to the suggestions of talk therapy and that without talk therapy (or some kind of self dialogue perhaps?) psychedelics are not as effective.
Absolutely. Both are necessary.
Lots of places will eventually get you free LSD therapy, same as any other kind of free healthcare.
How was 5-MeO compared to the other two?
I've drank ayahuasca about 300 times (I work at a retreat center). 5-meo/bufo (especially at the "full release" dose) is probably the most profound experience I've had. To go "all the way", you really have to drop every attachment and accept that you are indeed dying in that moment (the freakouts happen when people are unable to and fight it). When you come back it's like being reborn. It is good for releasing a lot of stuff, but without many sessions things tend to come back pretty quick (it's good to be aware of those first things that come back- it's primo stuff to work on in therapy or ayahuasca/longer-lived psychs to really dig in to).
When looking for drug experiences, Erowid is probably the best resource I've ever found: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_5MeODMT.shtml
> My problem with the current push for this type of therapy is the requirment that it be done by professionals charging hundreds or thousands of dollars. […] I remain resistant to this insertion of the state into what should be my right to use my own mind the way I see fit.

It's kind of sad to see that the anti-state libertarian propaganda is working so well: the problem at stake here is not “too much state”, it's that you don't have universal healthcare to pay for these professional bills and keep the rate these guys charge at a decent level.

Nobody should be forced to do their own research and risk their health just because therapists are unaffordable.

Not OP, but personally I have no problem with people going to licensed therapists to do psychedelic assisted therapy if that's what they feel comfortable with. What I would take issue with is if that becomes the only way to access something like LSD legally.

I've only ever taken psychedelics on my own, and while I've done regular talk therapy, I don't think I'd want that experience with a therapist. Taking 100-150ug of LSD at my house while listening to music, meditating, and practicing yoga should be available legally to me if I choose it. It's completely transformed my life for the better.

I live in a state with universal healthcare through mandatory insurance that's 30% of my income. Guess what? The state doesn't recognize this kind of therapy, and the insurance pays out only for whatever the state recognizes (and there is no free market of healthcare insurance), so I have to pay everything out of my pocket. And it costs the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That's alright, that's new experimental therapy and it will improve, you might say. Well, they don't even pay anything for my ADHD treatment because the state says adults can't have it, it's children's disease. That's what I get for 30% of my income - nothing.

The antistate libertarian "propaganda" is working so well because it's not propaganda but the only way to get treatment. At least they let me pay for the drugs myself, I'd probably kill myself if I couldn't get them just because the state said so.

There's a bizarre and partly funny short document about LSD test in Czechoslovak army. Sadly no English subs although I am considering running it through Whisper and translating it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HXMHdhQL_8&pp=ygURbHNkIGluI...

On a more serious note, it's a shame that the psychotherapy research was stopped.

Another article from Maps https://maps.org/news-letters/v17n1/lsd_in_prague-long_term_...

I've been noticing when I was growing up weed was in fact the cure to all problems people had depression, anxiety, anger issues? "Smoke a joint man it makes everything okay." People were out there claiming weed cured cancer, that the whole reason weed wasn't legal is because the evil pharmaceutical industrial complex didn't want people to do it because it would cure all their problems, that weed had absolutely no bad side effects and if everyone was just puffing all day all their problems would go away, etc. etc. Well weed became legal in most places and research started being done and it turns out weed didn't cure everyone's problems, weed does have side-effects and risks with using it, especially if you smoke or vape it, and it isn't the magical silver bullet to all mental health issues.

I feel like I am seeing the same cycle happen again with psychedelics, especially shrooms and LSD.

A lot of this, I've observed in myself at least, was caused by heavy-handed anti-drug propaganda I experienced as a kid. "Weed is addictive." "Weed kills all your motivation." "Weed leads to other much worse drugs." Etc etc. Once you take that first hit and realize none of that trash is true, or is true only in the worst cases, you start to really question everything you were told...not just about weed, but other substances as well. Meanwhile, so many of the people telling you how terrible drugs are drink themselves into a stupor every night. If you want one of the most damaging, addictive substances on the planet, one of the few drugs where withdrawl will kill you, look no further than alcohol. But that one is ok!

Point being, the pendulum always swings. If weed is always terrible and always going to kill you, then when the pendulum swings, it's going to cure cancer and bring back your dead pet bunny. The truth is somewhere in the middle: it can lead to transformative experiences, but mostly just makes you slow, hungry, and often paranoid.

LSD and psilocybin and the like will probably end up being the same. Microdosing works fine for some people, not so much for others. Psychadelic therapy will be great for some and really screw up others. You can have people who get bad reactions to psychadelics, and you can have terrible therapists, and you can have both at the same time.

I definitely feel the need to allow this space to be explored, but with cautions in place, mainly via public education. These substances can open doors to different parts of our psyches and can open our eyes to patterns in the universe we hadn't seen before, and that should be celebrated. But they can also uncover horrors we were not meant to experience, and tear apart our sense of reality in ways that leave us much more damaged than we ever were before. Start small and start slow, and if it gets too much, stop.

> I feel like I am seeing the same cycle happen again with psychedelics, especially shrooms and LSD.

It's a repeat of the '60s all over again. Back then there was the same "miracle drug" attitude, a ton of overuse, then a bunch of negative reports, and the pendulum swung to "we need to heavily restrict these drugs".

I'm waiting for that part to repeat.

> I feel like I am seeing the same cycle happen again with psychedelics, especially shrooms and LSD.

As in we see that while research is prohibited people have all kind of wild ideas but once we let researchers research they uncover the truth about them? Honestly does not sound half bad.

True...

Though I think there is more to LSD. It's fair to be skeptical. If the pitch is it's going to fix everything for everyone, or the likes, then it's definitely a lie.

Perception of psychotherapeutic progress does not equal progress. Anyone can convince themselves of almost anything, for any number of reasons. Including convicning themselves of a therapeutic effect.

Conversely, "therapeutic" processing of trauma often occurs subconsciously. Such as during sleep, and arguably more so as sleep quality improves.

Instead of looking for benefit, at least for now, the concentration should be on an assessment of harm. Only in that context will a future study on possible benefit be informative.

> Anyone can convince themselves of almost anything, for any number of reasons. Including convicning themselves of a therapeutic effect.

This is a weird take. If a person is suicidal, and "convinces himself" (whatever that actually means in the context of the therapy) to not kill themself, this is therapeutic effect by definition.

I disagree that it is a weird take. As your logic is incomplete, respectfully.

I didn't mean to imply that being convinced of therapeutic benefit always means that there isn't any. There could even be a lot of benefit.

I meant to state or imply that being convinced doesn't necessarily mean that such a benefit was significant, if there at all.

This means that someone convinced of such benefit may have that benefit, but not necessarily.

Respectfully, using a binary life and death measurement example only means that you've cited a circumstance where we can definitely measure when there has been a significant benefit. Assuming that we can conclude that suicide was otherwise likely (we can assume that for this hypothetical).

Take another example:

A person can momentarily convince themself that their PSD is healed, even just out of positive self-talk, a single good therapy experience, and hope, and then go on to realize continuing debilitating symptoms for their lifetime.

What the experimental use of currently illicit street drugs in psychotherapy should be measuring, assuming that we can agree that we should be conducting such experiemnts (I don't agree given the available research), is whether or not they may make conditions such as PSD worse over the coming decades. In spite of patient verbal feedback at any point in time. Because people like street drugs, in general.

When was the lsat time that you witnessed an enthusiastic or otherwise "therapuetic" user of street drugs lamenting the thinning of their cortical white matter?

Or lamenting the loss of other brain architecture that theoretically would help them overcome mental illness should it survive their habit?

I agree that it is a weird take, but your analogy is off.

The actual therapeutic effect would be stopping suicidal ideation, not a single instance of suicidal behavior. A person may continue to suffer whatever ill effects that were pushing them to suicide but (temporarily) reconsider the action itself.

On the one hand, nobody can "fix" you; you need to internalize different ways of thinking and build emotional resilience. Drugs may help this process, or help maintain it, but they're not a cure, and neither is talk therapy. It is, in a sense, a matter of convincing yourself.

On the other hand, most people- even very introspective people- will struggle with self-therapy. It isn't as easy as "today I am happy".

Sorry to be so off topic or dumb. I read a user comment about a Freudian observation. The phantom. So I log on and try to reply... Is hn the one who deletes bad hombres? Or is it bad hombres who deletes his posts?
The post is not deleted, it is hidden. Go to your profile at

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=willsoon

and enable 'showdead'.

The comment still exists but it’s been hidden. I believe as standard you can expand the comment (likely at the bottom) to view it but might need to change some settings to see these comments. Logging in probably refreshed the view and updated the comment to its new hidden status (or your user specific settings kicked in and stopped it displaying)

Whether it’s HN or not, no idea, but it looks to be flagged by other users who can downvote to me though.

edit: someone beat me to it! I should have logged in to refresh the view! :D