I wish more people spoke about their negative experiences with psychedelics. It's a sobering and necessary counterpoint to most of what floods these threads of how it changed someone's life, but the "how" is largely ambiguous.
As studies continue, it seems that a key component is a safe and therapeutic environment and a trained guide who can help the person navigate what they experience. People most often get in trouble when they bring a recreational drug mindset, or are predisposed to certain conditions, or have not worked with a therapist to have foundational tools to manage the experience.
The risks are absolutely real and should not be taken lightly, but there’s a huge difference between going on a personal journey of experimentation without the tools to navigate that journey, and going through a careful screening process with counseling during and after each trip.
Michael Pollan’s work (book and documentary) explores this somewhat. I don’t think most people would describe the experience as ambiguous. That is not to say that the experience can be sufficiently described with language.
Interestingly, my recent bad experience was in what I expected to be the safest and most therapeutic environment available to me. What I discovered instead was an irrational culture with an immature fascination for shamanism. My individual experiences, informed by my research, were more beneficial (and cheaper as well). Knowing the topic and a trip-sitter you know might prove a better choice than trusting self-proclaimed guides.
I have heard a lot of similar tales regarding the shamanism and rejection of science and reasoning, making all kinds of outrageous claims about what it can "cure", which just isn't physically possible.
The biggest claim is that psychedelics are a tool to access a profound truth about the nature of life, the universe, etc. The scientific literature shows there’s a correlation between the intensity of the mysticism experience and its therapeutic benefits. The problem is truth. If experiencing religious visions and feelings is followed by getting better, it doesn’t mean God actually exists, or that your “soul” left your body.
> What I discovered instead was an irrational culture with an immature fascination for shamanism
Hilarious revelation to have from a trip. I never put it like that in my mind, but I feel kind of similar.
My take is.. people want an external locus of control and/or instructions on how to live so bad that in the modern bent towards Atheism/Agnosticism, they transfer that responsibility elsewhere (star signs, tarot cards, psychedelics, their political party, some 'expert'..)
I think the medical community is still catching up to the knowledge that experienced users have - even today, I'd still recommend newbies read up on the stuff themselves, and do it with someone experienced that they trust.
The research will eventually catch up, and within a decade or two tripping in a doctor's office will be much more responsible and fruitful. Doctors can already provide a lot of pharmacological advantages: they have access to consistent, predictable, controlled dosages, and access to prescription antipsychotics to end a trip if it is not going well, which is obviously a much better situation than eating a few mushrooms with an unknown amount of psilocybin then hanging on and hoping for the best.
> I wish more people spoke about their negative experiences with psychedelics
people do. But just maybe 'negative' doesn't mean catastrophically bad, and just maybe bad experiences are in the minority hence the flood of positives. What your post comes across as, to me anyway, is that you want drugs to be a bad thing.
> but the "how" is largely ambiguous
Does it matter? Or are people just not allowed to have a positive thing happen from psychedelics?
You seem to be bringing a mindset to this discussion without apparently considering maybe drugs aren't always that bad. And you may be right, and you may be wrong, but you do seem determined to look on the darker side of things.
It's not at all clear to me that those statements are promoting a "drugs are bad" narrative. Discussing negative experiences is inherent to an honest conversation.
I don't think drugs are good or bad. The intent behind why and how people use them is what counts. However, if people want these things to see progress in acceptance and safe use, hearing anecdata from all demographics is important, including those with negative experiences.
One thing that people didn't want to talk about with the cannabis legalization boom was how common paranoid schizophrenia is. My step-father has marijuana-induced paranoid schizophrenia, I have a few other friends also diagnosed with the same thing. For all the good that it has done for x demographics, it has damaged y demographics irreparably. A future of powerful and debilitating prescription drugs to treat their schizophrenia is what they have to look forward to now, they are objectively worse off for it and classified as legally disabled.
Nobody is hiding negative experiences. Again, you come across as wanting more badness than perhaps there actually is.
<A paragraph about personal knowledge of drug damage >
Yes, we know about this kind of thing . I personally know of alcohol deaths, permanent damage from amphetamines, addiction to cannabis, and second-hand reports of mental illness from cannabis abuse (note: abuse not use), anecdotal but reliable reports about mental damage from LSD. These conversations are happening.
You seem only receptive to the negative side of things.
Yeah, the people doing all the writeups tend to have the info and support network in place to manage the experience in a way that maximizes the possibility of success. Not everyone reading the latest article about mushrooms in the NYT has that.
I think this kind of misses the bigger reason that there isn't a lot of formal discussion on psychedelics; people are worried/nervous to talk about it too openly because psychedelics are "hard" drugs. Even for research purposes, they're tightly controlled which ends up suppressing a lot of practical research and you _have_ to rely on hearsay and anecdata to make a decision.
Edit: Also, as another commenter noted, because very few places allow you to get psychedelics legally, dosage and purity is always questionable; naturally you're going to have a bad time with something that is cut with really nasty drugs if you aren't aware of it and prepared for it, but this is pretty true of most things in life, even those not related to drugs.
Search engines, well, Google at least, are pretty complicit in this too, as it seems that sites discouraging drug use are brought to the top when searching for relatively reasonable things like "safe dosage $drug" or "$drug interaction with $other_drug". Even between different countries, the same search query on google will give quite different results.
I don't think among the people I've talked to that enjoy psychedelics have ever introduced a newbie to any drug without a safety warning and a fair amount of preparation, and in Amsterdam where mushrooms are legal, the shops are quite careful to ensure they are giving you the rundown on what to prepare for, dosages, finding a comfortable and reliable setting, safety, etc.
> but the "how" is largely ambiguous.
Honest question, have you taken any drugs that weren't prescription or alcohol/caffeine/nicotine? Because it's very easy to pinpoint how drugs (especially psychedelics) are life changing, at least for me.
Ecstasy - For a few brief hours, I not only felt good, but thought good thoughts about myself. It was a complete reset after many years of extremely low and dark times in my life, and after that I had a baseline of "hey, I actually _can_ feel good and think good things about myself; I am capable of it." And it was basically all I needed, a single time to break me out of years of depression
Psychedelics - It is an immense spark of creativity and just fascinating to see what your mind can invent and how everything has additional "perspectives", like the color of music, visualizing a world or scene in your imagination that you probably never thought of before, and the good sensations you have amplified by 1000x. Your mind makes connections and associations which sure, with time you could maybe reach sober, but it happens rapidly, effortlessly, and repeatedly on psychedelics, and the experience stays with you. If you've never had a moment of clarity, be it academic, problem solving, etc, then I'm not sure that psychedelics are the biggest concern for you :). These experiences _can_ happen sober, but at least for me, only with guided meditation over many sessions could I reach such an experience.
I'm not sure it's possible to be more specific than this with simple descriptive words, and I think the art and other drug-inspired pieces more than speak for themselves as to how it can be life changing.
> in Amsterdam where mushrooms are legal, the shops are quite careful to ensure they are giving you the rundown on what to prepare for, dosages, finding a comfortable and reliable setting, safety, etc.
Last time I was in Amsterdam was quite a few years ago but... magic mushrooms were illegal. Instead they sell psilocybin truffles so roughly the same thing. When I've bought them, from a few different popular shops, no words of caution or safety were exchanged.
