Could Buspar produce Psychedelic symptoms?

[Dresden]

Speaking from personal experience, Buspar (buspirone) is not very effective at treating anxiety in any desirable or effective way and is certainly not recreational. Maybe if you ate a whole bottle (don't do that without checking out where the really toxic dosages begin, if there are any), it *might* make you trip, but I doubt it. I think you got 5-HT2a agonism and antagonism switched in the case of buspirone. Even if it did make you trip, the trip would likely be unpleasant too, based on the impression I got from my own self administered trials years ago.

 

[clubcard]

Don't forget - the only rule (once a drug is proved non-toxic) is that in stage 2 & 3 trials, it just has to be better than NOTHING. The book Bad Pharma makes it quite clear that chloripramine should be the first-line treatment of depression BUT take a months supply and it kills you.... then again, people on SSRIs seem to kill themselves in other ways so it's morbidity is in the same range.

 

[serotonin2A]

Don't forget - the only rule (once a drug is proved non-toxic) is that in stage 2 & 3 trials, it just has to be better than NOTHING. The book Bad Pharma makes it quite clear that chloripramine should be the first-line treatment of depression BUT take a months supply and it kills you.... then again, people on SSRIs seem to kill themselves in other ways so it's morbidity is in the same range.

I'm afraid that simply isn't true. Placebo controlled trials are no longer sufficient for drug approval (note that placebos are not "nothing", the effectiveness of placebo in depression has increased significantly in western countries over that last few decades because most trial participants are aware of SSRIs and expect antidepressant medications to work). In the USA, drugs are no longer approved unless there is at least one trial with an active control (usually "three-arm trials" where the new drug is compared both to an existing treatment and to placebo). The only exception would be if there is no existing drug.

Clomipramine is an effective antidepressant but it tends to produce intolerable side effects. Patients don't want to take antidepressants that produce anticholinergic side-effects.

 

[clubcard]

But, as Bad Pharma points out, a company might do 10 trials and find only 3 that show the drug in a good light, the others are not published - that's a bone of contention in the Pharma vs Doctor. ALL studies should be published. 1 example is Radafaxine which was passed by NICE until an independent study found it no better than a placebo, now it's been removed from the BNF. Doctors are lied to.

As I say, read 'Bad Pharma' as it's packed with valuable knowledge and shows the pharma practices to get a drug adopted.

 

[serotonin2A]

But, as Bad Pharma points out, a company might do 10 trials and find only 3 that show the drug in a good light, the others are not published - that's a bone of contention in the Pharma vs Doctor. ALL studies should be published. 1 example is Radafaxine which was passed by NICE until an independent study found it no better than a placebo, now it's been removed from the BNF. Doctors are lied to.

As I say, read 'Bad Pharma' as it's packed with valuable knowledge and shows the pharma practices to get a drug adopted.

There certainly have been some bad actors in the pharmaceutical industry. But nothing is as black and white as Bad Pharma claims -- the book is arguably biased and sensationalized. The point about pharmaceutical companies cherry picking data is itself based on cherry picking data. Look at all the failed trials with LY2140023 that Lilly has published recently. If the central thesis of Bad Pharma was correct then you would expect that those trials would not have been published. The fact is that there are sometimes scientific reasons why trial results are not published. For example, there may be errors in design or trial execution that call the results into question. Furthermore, until recently there have been few avenues available to publish negative data -- journals traditionally don't like to publish negative data. The book presents examples of bad behavior but that doesn't mean that is representative of how all drug companies function, or that you can extrapolate from the examples to all approved drugs.