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Why are Psychedelics Targeted/feared?

F

fractal fountain

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 24, 2010
Messages
181
You have to think about the odd double standards in the law regarding hallucinogenic drugs. Datura alkaloids are legal, yet 5-ht2a agonists are all illegal.

What is it about 5-ht2a agonists that make them devalued as having no therapeutic value? I can think of a broad variety of therapeutic applications, especially when compared to the (way overprescribed) antidepressants and anti-psychotics.

Let me share with you my experiences with mental health. I have had depression for a long time. I was first prescribed antidepressants when I was 16. Gradually, I changed meds around and landed with a combination of medications. Some medications made me sick and were probably prescribed inappropriately. Some of those medications which made me sick were also prescribed alongside other medications which had their own problematic side-effects. Some particular ones which made me sick include Lithium, Risperdal, and Abilify. Abilify made me sick upon the first dose.

I had a breakdown in my first semester of college and landed in the psych ward for 20 days. They put me on Risperdal, an antipsychotic. I was also on Cymbalta and Wellbutrin at the time. I didn't think much of it since the dose of Risperdal was relatively low at the time (.5mg) but things changed...

I started to improve in condition and had some success with college, then a year afterthe psych ward trip, I saw my doctor and he increased the dose of Risperdal to 2mg (!!!!!)

the following semester I had a lot of trouble with classes, failed one, got an incomplete on another and D and C in others... I was absent/late a lot and the high dose of Risperdal as well as the other meds made it so that everytime I slept, I could expect to be out for 12 hours. This really messed with my schedule and I contemplated going to the hospital again but ultimately didn't. After the semester, I immediately halted all psychiatric medications. There were a few weeks of negative side effects such as brain shocks and weird dreams, but I managed through them.

It has now been about 18 months since I have quit all psychiatric medications and I feel like a much smarter and happier person. More calm and stable than I have ever been in my life.

I feel like my psychiatrists used me by prescribing me all those medications and at such heavy doses. It makes me doubt the legitimacy of the mental health care industry. Especially in regards to the way pharmaceutical companies operate.

There is so much prescription, but so little work for therapy. It's puzzling...

And here we have psychedelics, 5-ht2a agonists which have the big label "No accepted therapeutic value". And I think the way I have felt on all the antidepressants (numbness, blocking out ability to think creatively and coherently) vs psychedelics (clarity and beauty of light, thought, color...). It seems to me that common psychiatric medications today are the ones which lack therapeutic value.

This is a big subject for me. I feel raped by the Pharmeceutical industry.
 
I think you're spot on focusing the discussion on the pharmaceutical industry. Certainly a big part of it is that the Drug War is a self-reinforcing system; the more drugs in general are demonized socially and prohibited legally, the easier it becomes to look at new, novel drugs and say "evilllllll!" without thinking.

Another big part, I suspect, is that the pharmaceutical and medical industries prefer making problems go away with pills that numb symptoms. Psychedelics can be amazingly useful therapeutic tools, but they are "difficult" to use properly - you don't just take a dose and forget about it, and to do it right in psychotherapy requires really top-notch therapists and is pretty demanding on the patient as well. The initial tests for MDMA and psilocin in psychotherapy were amazingly successful, but it's not a simple and non-controversial profit center for big pharma, so they'd prefer to keep them illegal while they peddle their SSRIs. Shifting the focus of psychotherapy from having the best pills and products to having the best therapists and therapy techniques would be good for doctors and patients, but not for the people making the real money.
 
This is just my own little theory but I know pretty much all ssris will weaken mdma to almost nothing. I was able to still roll on them maybe once or twice but it was really tricky and wasted a shitload of pills. Same with shrooms.

Lsd tho was completely cancelled out. I would barely trip at all or feel anything. So makes me think all these people and a lot of them young being prescribed anti d's and they are guarded from the light of psychedelics.
 
I find it odd that SSRI's aren't more controversial. They are known to increase the chances of suicide. I know I felt a lot more suicidal on all those meds too...
 
As far as the medical/research community goes I think psychedelics are taboo because they have always been taboo. People don’t want to risk their careers by supporting or heaven forbid conducting psychedelic research. I think the acceptance of LSD and other psychedelics among your everyday citizen in the 1960s may have been harmful to further research of these drugs. They became a mainstream phenomena and unsurprisingly caused problems and concern when the masses starting using them recklessly and without discretion. Naturally, negative fervor and propaganda began to outweigh interest in scientific research and understanding of how these drugs affect the mind so they were kind of shelved for decades.

They're starting up legitimate research again with psychedelics and MDMA, and as far as I can see it's going very well. I guess certain countries are using MDMA to treat PTSD in returning soldiers, LSD and mushrooms are being used in cluster headache studies and end of life therapy. It’s getting better.

The cynic in me thinks big pharma doesn’t want to cure its patients/customers. Why would they? If everyone could get better without consuming tons and tons of their medications, and medications to treat the side effects of those medications they wouldn’t be nearly as filthy rich. Its far more lucrative to peddle addictive substances and medications that rarely work period than to invest in more progressive treatment.
 
I think it was targetted in the 70's because acid basically turned society on its head.

The government was angry, and they banned it.

Now they have to keep it banned, otherwise they will seem like a bunch of hypocrites and nobody will believe them.

For them, its not broken, so dont try to fix it.
 
when it comes to the 5ht-2a system there are a few pharmacueticals that utilize this specific pathway among others. i believe they are used mainly to treat migraine headaches.

drugs have a tendency to cause the user to be less of a consumer, and more of a viewer of the world. the govt. doesnt care about narcotic/stimulant drug use as much because millions of people are hooked on Vicodin, Oxy, Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin etc etc whether they choose to be or not.

but pharma companies cant sell psychs now can they....
on top of that, psychs definitely caused me to be less of a consumer. to think differently about my life and the world around me, and not need so many "things." if people stopped buying magazines about justin beiber, and started doing MDMA or mushrooms with their family on a picnic, the world would be a different place.

i also completely agree about that SSRI thing. I was put on SSRIs and even when they didnt work at all for my problems they kept bumping them up. I could not get any effects from MDMA, psychs were a little different, my dick stopped working and I felt fucking crazy.

if kids on prozac across the globe try to roll for their first time and dont feel anything...they might not do it again.

my two cents. peace
 
I think the excesses of the 60s have a lot to do with this, as there was so much research on these things up until they were banned. Between them being associated with the anti-war movement, Timothy Leary's general craziness & narcissism, & Nixon's paranoia we ended up with a really unfavorable atmosphere for research in this field, and none happened for over 20yrs, then Rick Strassman's DMT studies were allowed, and in the past 3 or 4yrs MAPS has made some really great strides in getting these types of substances approved as medicines. MAPS is basically a non-profit pharmaceutical company that is developing MDMA & psilocin as psychiatric medications. They are also looking at LSD, Ibogaine, & a few other things. Their site is definitely worth perusing & donating to. They also have a good bookstore and all the MAPS published books sales go directly to support psychedelic research! You can even specify which program you want to fund.
 
I never understood why exactly Ibogaine was made Schedule I, given its treatment profile to help addicts of various substances.

I think its irrational for the government to mark psychedelics as 100% non-negotiable illegal. Various primitive cultures consider them useful medicines

I'm starting to view serotonin as the 'earth molecule'. The molecule responsible for insight, inspiration, progression in thought, dreams...

It's like psychiatrists across the world are taking a one size fits all approach to therapy and medicine. They prescribe the medicine... but they're almost always too lazy to conduct any type of significant therapy.

I wish the government would take a more regulatory approach with the way pharmaceutical companies operate. The amount of advertising and overprescription is a threat to public mental health, but we seem to be more than happy to let them continue with aggressive profits.

If only there were a huge ethical investigation.

I'm not sure if this is true, but I think psychiatrists get compensation for prescribing medication, so they are effectively profiting off of overprescribing and the patient is stuck in a loop and meant to be kept on the meds. I just wish there were less advertising and focus on profits and more focus on smart and highly beneficial therapies to work out issues.
 
It would be cheaper to do one or several of these illegal treatments than to take the other looping stuff. SSRIs are so out of touch, they don't work immediately and then 'might work,'

As a patient my doctor was nice and just asked me how stuff was going and if my drugs were doing okay. Of course I wanted more haha.

Uhh I just deleted a lot of irrelevant stuff, but its more of the encouragement of taking these smaller therapies, the only way to make it work is if more people do it. Does it work? Yup. Is it cheaper? Yup. Companies with high turnout rates will want this therapy!
 
^The Government IS dumb.

I just wish politics would be removed from such medical matters and a scale based on scientific data would be implemented. I keep hoping that such a reformation of drug laws by that scale is in our future... but sometimes it feels like that future is so far away.
 
The OP was spot on. I won't go into my story, because it's quite similar.

Basically, psychs have helped me far beyond any prescribed medication. It beggars belief that the evidence in favour of their usefullness is ignored.
 
I see the situation as analogous to that in "The Matrix." The "tools of The Machines" in our society who are addicted to all the benefits of their illusory lives of money and privilege and comfort of course will treat "the red pill" as the biggest evil of all and will tell all sorts of horror story lies about it in order to keep people from waking up to the true reality at all costs... they find it threatening and terrifying even if they cant verbalize why.

It's also a reaction of indignance, like they are thinking "HOW DARE YOU free your mind from bondage, while I have devoted my entire life to being a happy slave!" They are too chickenshit to become free, and so do their damndest to keep everyone else in shackles along side them.
 
well it's not like drugs are the only thing that do this

It is believed that through various techniques one can break down old reality tunnels and impose new reality tunnels by removing old filters and replacing them with new ones, new perspectives on reality—at will. This is achieved through various processes of deprogramming using neuro-linguistic programming, cybernetics, hypnosis, biofeedback devices, meditation, controlled use of hallucinogens, and forcibly acting out other reality tunnels.
link

maybe they know they can program other biocomputers but just don't want others to know
 
here's a post I typed out for another thread regarding why I think psychedelics are illegal:

I doubt that much though went into it actually. It seems as if logical reasoning has nothing to do with drug laws.

I think cannabis and psychedelics were outlawed as a backlash against the rapid social changes of the 1960s and 70s. It was an easy scapegoat for politicians and their ilk to beat up on to garner support from voters who did not like the new direction the country heading at the time (e.g., civil rights, environmentalism, anti-war movement, college protesters etc).

Why did these drugs stay illegal then? I think there are several reasons why drug laws have not softened even as evidence became available that they weren't as bad as previously portrayed.

First, there has been a lot of hyperbole spouted off as the official government stance on drugs, and a lot of money has been spent. Many people have been incarcerated, more than anywhere else in the world. At this point, no politician wants to be the one to admit that this was all a waste, in terms of money and peoples lives (those incarcerated included). It's analogous to the Vietnam war, no one wanted to be the one to ''lose the war'' after so much has been spent, and so many have been wasted, so the war went on even though it was obviously a failure. Goes to show where our leaders intentions lie, they care more about ''winning'' than the public well being.

More importantly, there is a lot of money at stake with the war on drugs. The groups that are benefiting from prohibition will fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo in place. what was the DEA's budget last year? If drugs were legal, they would all be out of a job. How many people in jail are there for drugs? The private companies that handle our enormous prison population would loose fortunes,and towns that have prisons would loose jobs. How much property was seized by police departments under forfeiture laws? That's a huge source of free money for them. how much of any given police department's efforts go to drug enforcement? budgets would be slashed and officers laid off if they didn't have to enforce such laws. And those groups, particularly police officers, carry a lot of weight on public opinion. Voter eat up whatever they say, and no one ever votes to cut the amount of police officers in their area. Surely a lot of money would be put into fighting any legislative change proposed.

And finally, Public perception is terribly skewed on the topic. There have been decades of misinformation put forth as fact about drugs, in schools and in public service announcements. The ''news'' media loves sensationalist stories about drugs. moral panic pieces are cheap and easy produce, especially compared to actual investigative journalism. And most people don't really care much about the issue. Most people don't use illegal drugs, and I think a lot of them view it as a removed problem. They think of drug users as shady criminals operating in the inner city and not as just regular people.

Ultimately, as the drug war keeps on chugging, and more of the electorate have a family member caught up in the legal system because of it, people will eventually reconsider these policies. until then, just try to inform people about the realities of drug use and users, and donate to a pro legalization group if you can.
Click to expand...

I think we actually are inching towards medicinal use of some psychedelics. Take for example the recent (FDA approved) studies using psilocybin to alleviate end of life anxiety or using MDMA to treat PTSD in military personal. It seems scientific research is the current driving force for the normalization of psychedelics. Psychedelics do have a serious public image problem with the general population though.
 
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