pmoseman
Bluelighter
The first time I smoked pot was in high school, it was also my first real date. My legs went numb and it was hard to keep my head up. The next time I smoked pot was a better experience. It was summer and my girlfriend had her cute friend over. They laughed when I told them about the hallucinations I was experiencing. A guy stopped in to repay a debt, he offered my girlfriend some cocaine. At first, she refused, wanting money, but ended up taking the cocaine and started using it right away (not uncommon). We broke up later, after I told her how I felt about it.
In my first year of college, I met a guy with a reputation of talking too much. Steve was nearly a year older and had abused drugs regularly when he was young, but he considered himself a genius. His friend had killed himself while on LSD in high school. I moved in with him and his roommate, a socially awkward guy who liked to smoke cigarettes. It was not long before Steve invited us to try LSD. I knew about LSD from users and had mixed feelings about doing it. His roommate and I took blotter, it did not have much of an effect. I thought his roommate had used it before, but it turned out to be his first time also. I tried several other drugs for the first time that year. My favorite was nitrous oxide, although a good friend of mine was ready to give himself brain damage from doing too much. I also went to some real fun parties and met a lot of people too.
After that semester, Steve's original roommate was kicked of college and he moved out of the dorms. I stayed. Steve had offered to help me with classes, being a genius and all, but he never did. I was kicked out the following semester. I felt bad for our roommate, he had called me about several problems he had after returning home. We both got kicked out of school after two semesters and each continued to smoke pot. I stayed around town for a while, with different friends, and after losing a job I moved back home. I spoke with Steve before leaving and told him how I felt. He was living with a couple guys and they were dealing mushrooms.
Steve had some messed up notions, including his dead friend being involved with the apocalypse, visiting other worlds, shooting magic out of his hands, and stuff that may sound like a joke to someone who has never experienced delusions. They were definitely real to Steve. This is not unprecedented. I would later be an officer in some imaginary army of some crackhead.
People rarely take LSD without using other drugs, especially dope. So these delusions never leave their system. Another friend of mine would take mushrooms multiple times a week and talk to faces on the wall.
Drug abusers get real attached to their delusions.
Obviously, any group will typically have mental problems, but at the same time nobody can deny that drug use influences that amount. I fear that drug abusers will damage others as much as they damage themselves, without any guilt, because they do not see their own situation. And I see a lot of sketchy reasoning why drug abuse does not cause this, but I hope to never see a claim it can cure anything, people tend to do much better without the stuff.
This may seem obvious, but people are capable of finding answers without going and taking drugs. If they need drugs, that is hopefully something a doctor can prescribe for them.
I notice a lot of scapegoating between the various drugs that users take, leaving none to carry the blame.
All this "study" did was use some very sketchy mathematics (not available for me to verify) that make a link between psychedelic use and lower mental health problems. There is clearly a link between drinking caffeine and falling straight away to sleep, or driving drunk and NOT getting into an accident. It would be trivial to spin a study in that direction. Clever words like "association" mean nothing to the casual reader, who interpret the words to mean that drugs improve mental health. Nothing of the sort was established by the study.
There is nothing to refute it, if you know how to interpret it, it is simply trivial.
The report of "no correlation" being found is completely ludicrous. There is clearly a link between psychedelics and an increase in mental health issues. Simply looking at the study verifies this, more than twice as many (self-reported mind you) mental issues are reported by psychedelic users.
The researchers critical thinking is grossly missing from this and the previous alcohol report. The ethics here are meager to say the least. Being the first PLOS ONE study I have ran into does not say much for its non-traditional approach to scientific journalism.
LSD may have made alcohol treatment a more positive experience and thus improved results. However, at the time, there were some double blind studies of LSD for alcohol treatment that did not report improvement. I am sure you can look back and find there was some improvement in only some studies, if I recall correctly, a 60% improvement was suggested. Assuming that is accurate, a researcher would only have to glimpse at the success rate of AA meetings at that time. Again, if I recall correctly, this was around 30%.
OK. That is an improvement from 30% to 48%. If the researcher cares not to elucidate on that, and notice that the success rate of AA today is above 80%, he would then not realize that it would not assist alcoholic treatment in today's world anyhow. Such a researcher can suppose whatever he wants, but I question his ability to look a little deeper into something he is supposedly trying to figure out. It is too bad everyone here wants to believe it, and just accept it as evidence.
....
Alcohol and drug abuse can make symptoms of a mental health problem worse.
When did I say that all drug users are all mental?
....
The "damage" caused by prescription drug use are lower than the "damage" caused by the illicit drug use, when you account for differences in population size and the "benefits" of each.
You can clearly see that I never said that all users were mental.
Sorry if this is all very confusing.
My point about the AA treatment was that it has improved greatly since 1960. More than LSD improved it. So perhaps whatever improvements LSD had made have been realized another way. Also, since low doses did not show much improvement, I am thinking, along with the chances of LSD improving treatment today being remote, that it would also require a pretty big dose of LSD, which would be problematic.
I never disliked the alcoholic study and the only reason I mention it is that their next study had issues. It is obviously very lopsided, I think they reference every possible finding that supports psychedelic use, and they are very uncritical of their own results. Which leads me back to re-examine the alcoholism study with a bit more skepticism, although I have not really taken a second look at it.
I am not frustrated with my friend. I am frustrated with so many people who discount what people like him have gone through with drugs. Claiming this is just some bias by uninformed brainwashed fools who watch too much TV, or what-not. Pretending to be cynical when they support drugs more than anything.
I think you get caught up in your little community and forget that most drug abusers are not trustworthy sources of information.
I could never be truly objective on this issue I don't think. The point of my posting is to explain my viewpoint and hopefully find some middle ground and find some things that cause me to question myself.
Well some studies do report AA has a 75% success rate. I know that is probably bullshit. But what am I supposed to do about it? This is just an example of picking out the right set of data. I could have went with a study that gives AA a negative success rate and throw everything out because how the hell did anyone get a positive result in 1960 and a negative result today?
(It all depends on understanding the measurements used in the original studies)
Results require a professional interpretation, that prize comes with doing all the research. These researchers seem to have chosen a 27% success for AA in 1960, this seems pretty much in line with 33% that I would have chosen. The results would still be significant.
These researchers admit fully the research done in the 1960s were not as scientifically sound as they are today. These researchers say that may be why everyone prematurely abandoned LSD as an option for treatment. That is one interpretation, another interpretation may suppose that nothing at all can be found by using them. It seems reasonable to me. God knows I have seen anti-drug propaganda thrown out with worse logic than this.
Look above for a better groomed view of this research. I was speculating pretty heavily on the first go-round.
Everyone makes a biased decision, they take a guess at what the results signify and suggest future research. It is purely speculative and a necessary evil in research.
Hopefully it leads to better research and better evidence and we are able to identify an exact cause.
A lot of what gets said here depends on personal experience. I suppose bringing up those studies helped you to uncover some personal issues of mine. I will have to reflect on this a bit.
... I wish I had a good way of resolving it, but I am just myself and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it.
....
The effect that drugs had on my life were a detriment. The illegal use of drugs led me to develop some rather serious life-threatening complications that ordinarily I would not have experienced. It has taken me a long time to figure that out and come back to speak at all on the topic. Poke it all you want, that fact is going to remain stationary. Now, that is my bias that I cannot afford to get rid of.
Assumptions can be made about how well I know myself. How in touch I am with reality. Whether I am just fucking mental. Whether my experience or use are any more valid than yours. Sorry to say that drugs just simply fucked me up in a way that is really hard to reason with. It is probably largely due to a huge amount of factors, and you can play around with that idea in your head. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there is not much medical data to verify this. What I can account for is my introduction to drugs, my belief in drugs, and my use of drugs. Put yourself as far away from my person as you care to imagine, and I am right there under your skin beside you. So cast me aside all you like.
As far as pretending to know things. I am obviously not just here to blow smoke up my own ass. Pardon my french.
I get the feeling if I tell you people that I did not find drugs beneficial to myself (leaving my negative response to them out of the picture) that you would say it is because I was not trying. Well I suppose you could say that. But that is all dependent on so many ridiculously intangible factors I can't even begin to imagine. How is that you, knowing nothing about me, would ever pretend to know such a thing.
So I am a bit defensive about being in my position. Sorry for being closed up.
Now that we have that out of the way, I hope we do, can anyone confirm or deny what I am saying about that study on Psychedelics and Mental Health. I am calling bullshit. It strikes me as a kind of response to anti-drug propaganda, fighting fire with fire if you will.
That study (which I did egg on because I know that in it you will find evidence for the several "uncited" assertions I did choose to make) fails to mention the factors that it used which would contribute to mental health in such a significant way to make psychedelics actuallly change from correlating positively, quite positively I might add, with mental health issue to correlating negatively with them. Please, let us all send a letter to the editor. I think we could all make use of such information. Myself mostly. I already made a rather stupid contribution on the PLOS ONE website.
(sorry for the manittack, yes I am using the forum for my own random ends.)
I am FINE without drugs. Did not learn shit from them. Pass the crayons.
I simply did not get any that mental stuff you are talking about from them. I doubt the very idea!
Thank YOU ALL!
In my first year of college, I met a guy with a reputation of talking too much. Steve was nearly a year older and had abused drugs regularly when he was young, but he considered himself a genius. His friend had killed himself while on LSD in high school. I moved in with him and his roommate, a socially awkward guy who liked to smoke cigarettes. It was not long before Steve invited us to try LSD. I knew about LSD from users and had mixed feelings about doing it. His roommate and I took blotter, it did not have much of an effect. I thought his roommate had used it before, but it turned out to be his first time also. I tried several other drugs for the first time that year. My favorite was nitrous oxide, although a good friend of mine was ready to give himself brain damage from doing too much. I also went to some real fun parties and met a lot of people too.
After that semester, Steve's original roommate was kicked of college and he moved out of the dorms. I stayed. Steve had offered to help me with classes, being a genius and all, but he never did. I was kicked out the following semester. I felt bad for our roommate, he had called me about several problems he had after returning home. We both got kicked out of school after two semesters and each continued to smoke pot. I stayed around town for a while, with different friends, and after losing a job I moved back home. I spoke with Steve before leaving and told him how I felt. He was living with a couple guys and they were dealing mushrooms.
Steve had some messed up notions, including his dead friend being involved with the apocalypse, visiting other worlds, shooting magic out of his hands, and stuff that may sound like a joke to someone who has never experienced delusions. They were definitely real to Steve. This is not unprecedented. I would later be an officer in some imaginary army of some crackhead.
People rarely take LSD without using other drugs, especially dope. So these delusions never leave their system. Another friend of mine would take mushrooms multiple times a week and talk to faces on the wall.
Drug abusers get real attached to their delusions.Obviously, any group will typically have mental problems, but at the same time nobody can deny that drug use influences that amount. I fear that drug abusers will damage others as much as they damage themselves, without any guilt, because they do not see their own situation. And I see a lot of sketchy reasoning why drug abuse does not cause this, but I hope to never see a claim it can cure anything, people tend to do much better without the stuff.
This may seem obvious, but people are capable of finding answers without going and taking drugs. If they need drugs, that is hopefully something a doctor can prescribe for them.
Marijuana, people who use LSD overwhelmingly (98.2%) also use marijuana, and all other drugs as well at an extremely high level.
I meant that people get cloudy and maintain fogginess with various drugs.
Those articles are as ridiculous as they are numerous. It is an impossible to draw any such conclusion from that study. Those researchers are equally ridiculous. The same also published a paper stating that LSD can help treat alcoholism; this is obvious sensationalism that deserves a great deal of skepticism.
My questions is, many forum users seem to condone drug use. I appreciate the sharing of experiences, but knowing that drug users have mental health issues, why would anyone suggest our peers would benefit from drug use?
Are you stating that marijuana is addictive?
I notice a lot of scapegoating between the various drugs that users take, leaving none to carry the blame.
I looked at the reports and the study, which contains plenty of druggie propaganda and not much substance. What we need is to see the effects of psychedelic drugs on a control vs non-control group.
All this "study" did was use some very sketchy mathematics (not available for me to verify) that make a link between psychedelic use and lower mental health problems. There is clearly a link between drinking caffeine and falling straight away to sleep, or driving drunk and NOT getting into an accident. It would be trivial to spin a study in that direction. Clever words like "association" mean nothing to the casual reader, who interpret the words to mean that drugs improve mental health. Nothing of the sort was established by the study.
There is nothing to refute it, if you know how to interpret it, it is simply trivial.
The report of "no correlation" being found is completely ludicrous. There is clearly a link between psychedelics and an increase in mental health issues. Simply looking at the study verifies this, more than twice as many (self-reported mind you) mental issues are reported by psychedelic users.
The researchers critical thinking is grossly missing from this and the previous alcohol report. The ethics here are meager to say the least. Being the first PLOS ONE study I have ran into does not say much for its non-traditional approach to scientific journalism.
LSD may also have the power to replace alcohol use for an extended period of time. There was no difference after 6 months between LSD treatment and non LSD treatment. We also have to assume LSD use has a better outcome that alcohol abuse, for current alcoholics who already have high rates of mental disorders in the family and are prone to drug abuse.
LSD may have made alcohol treatment a more positive experience and thus improved results. However, at the time, there were some double blind studies of LSD for alcohol treatment that did not report improvement. I am sure you can look back and find there was some improvement in only some studies, if I recall correctly, a 60% improvement was suggested. Assuming that is accurate, a researcher would only have to glimpse at the success rate of AA meetings at that time. Again, if I recall correctly, this was around 30%.
OK. That is an improvement from 30% to 48%. If the researcher cares not to elucidate on that, and notice that the success rate of AA today is above 80%, he would then not realize that it would not assist alcoholic treatment in today's world anyhow. Such a researcher can suppose whatever he wants, but I question his ability to look a little deeper into something he is supposedly trying to figure out. It is too bad everyone here wants to believe it, and just accept it as evidence.
Rather obvious that mental health professionals throughout the world do draw that conclusion.
....
Alcohol and drug abuse can make symptoms of a mental health problem worse.
When did I say that all drug users are all mental?
....
The "damage" caused by prescription drug use are lower than the "damage" caused by the illicit drug use, when you account for differences in population size and the "benefits" of each.
Take your own advice, first of all. Second, take responsibility for the effects your actions have on other people. It is far easier to see the damage done to ourselves and much more difficult to repair damage done to others.
You can clearly see that I never said that all users were mental.
Sorry if this is all very confusing.
My point about the AA treatment was that it has improved greatly since 1960. More than LSD improved it. So perhaps whatever improvements LSD had made have been realized another way. Also, since low doses did not show much improvement, I am thinking, along with the chances of LSD improving treatment today being remote, that it would also require a pretty big dose of LSD, which would be problematic.
I never disliked the alcoholic study and the only reason I mention it is that their next study had issues. It is obviously very lopsided, I think they reference every possible finding that supports psychedelic use, and they are very uncritical of their own results. Which leads me back to re-examine the alcoholism study with a bit more skepticism, although I have not really taken a second look at it.
More importantly, where did I state that it possibly makes it worse? Other reports done in the 1960s said it did not improve things. They never said it made it worse and I certainly never said it either.
They call news reporters newsies. Sorry I was being insensitive. I apologize. I was referring to "drug abusers".
I am not frustrated with my friend. I am frustrated with so many people who discount what people like him have gone through with drugs. Claiming this is just some bias by uninformed brainwashed fools who watch too much TV, or what-not. Pretending to be cynical when they support drugs more than anything.
I think you get caught up in your little community and forget that most drug abusers are not trustworthy sources of information.
I could never be truly objective on this issue I don't think. The point of my posting is to explain my viewpoint and hopefully find some middle ground and find some things that cause me to question myself.
Well some studies do report AA has a 75% success rate. I know that is probably bullshit. But what am I supposed to do about it? This is just an example of picking out the right set of data. I could have went with a study that gives AA a negative success rate and throw everything out because how the hell did anyone get a positive result in 1960 and a negative result today?
(It all depends on understanding the measurements used in the original studies)
Results require a professional interpretation, that prize comes with doing all the research. These researchers seem to have chosen a 27% success for AA in 1960, this seems pretty much in line with 33% that I would have chosen. The results would still be significant.
These researchers admit fully the research done in the 1960s were not as scientifically sound as they are today. These researchers say that may be why everyone prematurely abandoned LSD as an option for treatment. That is one interpretation, another interpretation may suppose that nothing at all can be found by using them. It seems reasonable to me. God knows I have seen anti-drug propaganda thrown out with worse logic than this.
Look above for a better groomed view of this research. I was speculating pretty heavily on the first go-round.
Everyone makes a biased decision, they take a guess at what the results signify and suggest future research. It is purely speculative and a necessary evil in research.
Hopefully it leads to better research and better evidence and we are able to identify an exact cause.
I think you are misunderstanding my opinion of the study. The study found a correlation between psychedelic drug use and lower incidence of mental illness. I am not sure you understand, that does not mean that psychedelic drug use lowers incidence of mental illness.
It was touching.
My thoughts are not bent on blaming drugs. My thoughts are bent on dealing with issues which mostly revolve around the way people treat one another.
A lot of what gets said here depends on personal experience. I suppose bringing up those studies helped you to uncover some personal issues of mine. I will have to reflect on this a bit.
... I wish I had a good way of resolving it, but I am just myself and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it.
....
The effect that drugs had on my life were a detriment. The illegal use of drugs led me to develop some rather serious life-threatening complications that ordinarily I would not have experienced. It has taken me a long time to figure that out and come back to speak at all on the topic. Poke it all you want, that fact is going to remain stationary. Now, that is my bias that I cannot afford to get rid of.
Assumptions can be made about how well I know myself. How in touch I am with reality. Whether I am just fucking mental. Whether my experience or use are any more valid than yours. Sorry to say that drugs just simply fucked me up in a way that is really hard to reason with. It is probably largely due to a huge amount of factors, and you can play around with that idea in your head. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there is not much medical data to verify this. What I can account for is my introduction to drugs, my belief in drugs, and my use of drugs. Put yourself as far away from my person as you care to imagine, and I am right there under your skin beside you. So cast me aside all you like.
As far as pretending to know things. I am obviously not just here to blow smoke up my own ass. Pardon my french.
I get the feeling if I tell you people that I did not find drugs beneficial to myself (leaving my negative response to them out of the picture) that you would say it is because I was not trying. Well I suppose you could say that. But that is all dependent on so many ridiculously intangible factors I can't even begin to imagine. How is that you, knowing nothing about me, would ever pretend to know such a thing.
So I am a bit defensive about being in my position. Sorry for being closed up.
Now that we have that out of the way, I hope we do, can anyone confirm or deny what I am saying about that study on Psychedelics and Mental Health. I am calling bullshit. It strikes me as a kind of response to anti-drug propaganda, fighting fire with fire if you will.
That study (which I did egg on because I know that in it you will find evidence for the several "uncited" assertions I did choose to make) fails to mention the factors that it used which would contribute to mental health in such a significant way to make psychedelics actuallly change from correlating positively, quite positively I might add, with mental health issue to correlating negatively with them. Please, let us all send a letter to the editor. I think we could all make use of such information. Myself mostly. I already made a rather stupid contribution on the PLOS ONE website.
(sorry for the manittack, yes I am using the forum for my own random ends.)
I am FINE without drugs. Did not learn shit from them. Pass the crayons.
I simply did not get any that mental stuff you are talking about from them. I doubt the very idea!
Thank YOU ALL!
Very well.
I like the bible. To be clear on my metaphysical and religious beliefs, I have none.
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![[éS]Infinite](/community/data/avatars/m/98/98112.jpg?1554214550){kind=avatar}
). Maybe it sounds like sensationalism to you, but that doesn't mean that it is. Apparently you don't know a great deal about psychedelics, it is fine to be skeptical but don't be so quick to reject it if you know little about the subject.
