२४ ऑगस्ट, २०२४

"But the potential for researchers to bias the outcomes of these trials has become a common critique of the psychedelic research field."

"It is unusual for a drug under F.D.A. consideration to also be used personally and recreationally by the researchers studying it, or even for clinical trial researchers and clinicians to be encouraged to test the drug themselves. But that’s exactly what Lykos has done with MDMA. In a phone conversation after the F.D.A. decision, Dr. Doblin told me that therapists should be 'strongly encouraged' to have their own psychedelic experiences, as it 'really helps therapists to better understand their patients.' He says almost all of the researchers in the Lykos phase 3 clinical trials underwent MDMA experiences themselves, and many studying the drug are open about their own recreational use. It’s difficult to disentangle the personal enthusiasm for psychedelics with the study of these drugs as therapeutic interventions. And the extraordinary claims of some of its leading researchers — Dr. Doblin has professed a belief that psychedelics will usher in world peace — as well as criticisms of the quality of the clinical trials only accentuate how much the enthusiasm has gotten ahead of the science...."

From "How Psychedelic Research Got High on Its Own Supply" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Some of the criticisms of the current research and the ethics of its leaders have been present from the start. As part of a postwar pharmacological boom, psychiatrists in the 1950s explored psychedelics enthusiastically. About a thousand research papers were produced; tens of thousands of patients were prescribed LSD. But as the lines between scientific, clinical and recreational drug experimentation among researchers blurred, experts who once saw potential in psychedelics warned against their potential dangers. 'The trouble is, LSD attracts unstable therapists as much as it does the neurotic patient,' said Sidney Cohen, a leading psychedelic researcher and psychiatrist, in 1963. 'It gives them an intoxicating sense of power to bestow such a fabulous experience on others.'"

३४ टिप्पण्या:

cassandra lite म्हणाले...

Somewhere in the ether, Tim Leary smiles.

Mike (MJB Wolf) म्हणाले...

News flash: people who are on psychedelic drugs gush enthusiastically about psychedelic drugs! FFS have these people never been to a rave or a Dead concert? Next up: alcoholics like to write about how good whiskey is!

Wince म्हणाले...

He says almost all of the researchers in the Lykos phase 3 clinical trials underwent MDMA experiences themselves, and many studying the drug are open about their own recreational use.

Lesson Number 2: Don't get high on your own supply. - Course, not everybody follows the rules.

narciso म्हणाले...

we knew from the Greeks not to indulge psychedelics,

Shouting Thomas म्हणाले...

One of the amusing things about my Methodist client is that it is located close to Millbrook, NY, home of Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments. Many in the congregation were, of course, hippies. The pastor loaded up his family in his VW bus in the 70s and drove uninvited to Tennessee to join Stephen Gaskin’s commune, The Farm. And, of course, The Farm welcomed him and put him and his family to work.

Oso Negro म्हणाले...

I would be delighted to find a reliable supply of LSD. A half hit of acid can really smooth out challenging family occasions. But you just can’t get it anymore

Ironclad म्हणाले...

This is exactly the type of propaganda that Leviathan ( aka big Pharma) pushes to discredit this line of research. How can these simple drugs possibly
be effective when they are off patent and easily made? They threaten all of the $$$$$ “medications” that are shoved onto the public and don’t wonk or have horridous side effects but run up the bottom line. I mean they aren’t even addictive to guarantee continued use!

And sadly this load of malarkey will work - hurting those people most that could be helped by these substances.

Big Mike म्हणाले...

But do they really help? How would we know, if the researchers are not unbiased and are advocates for the drugs they’re testing. How can I believe that the drugs are beneficial if I cannot trust the research?

narciso म्हणाले...

it probably works for some people, but the evangelism about hallucinogenics did not have good results

now does the FDA take short cuts, certainly, we have seen it illustrated often,

Mikey NTH म्हणाले...

Dr. Harleen Quinzel giggles and looks about furtively.

Christy म्हणाले...

Do you figure the rise in recreational drug use correlates better with the rise in autism than vaccines?

Howard म्हणाले...

My 76-yo PTSD brother who flew helicopters for 45-years from Vietnam, the Andes, Sierras, Rockies, Africa, SAR and CalFire was struggling last year and self medicating with alcohol cannabis and tobacco did one solid trip on mushrooms and did a complete 180. He has a stash of shrooms and hasn't touched them since. His VA shrink credits the psychedelic experience as a reset.

Kai Akker म्हणाले...

Sidney Cohen, "The Beyond Within"? I read that one. His quote does nail it. That "intoxicating sense of power to bestow" the psychedelic experience on others. Key word, power. Power is so inevitably abused.

And what about the bad trips? Does MDMA ever produce a bad trip? Anxiety, fear, confusion, ego obliteration, in some cases terror? LSD sure did. There was an awful lot of wreckage in the '60s. Not only to marriages and careers, but even to deaths.

Pretty good article. But so much like what was later to be written about the 1960s and 1970s psychedelic fantasias. A little weird to be seeing such a replay of that aspect of those times. Cohen, despite his reservations, still advocated for more research into psychedelic usage in terminal situations, according to what I see in Wikipedia.

RCOCEAN II म्हणाले...

there's a long history of people pushing "Wonder drugs" that will alter your mind and outlook. Freud was hawking Cocaine in 19th century. Then it was uppers - Bob Fosse got addicted to those. Then it was LSD. And now its MDMAs and microdosing. People like getting high, and the rationalizations start. Remember how legalized MJ was first pushed as "pain relief"?

Screwing around with your brain chemistry is never a good thing. You always pay a price.

RCOCEAN II म्हणाले...

There seem to be two types of people: Those who want to escape reality, and those who want to enjoy reality. Those who avoid putting chemicals in their bodies , and those who embrace it.

Narr म्हणाले...

Gaskin, the anti-Clinton: Clinton never inhaled; Gaskin never exhaled. Or so goes the old joke.

Levi Starks म्हणाले...

The military industrial complex is strongly opposed to world peace.

Tina Trent म्हणाले...

I went to New College in the 80's because it was incredibly cheap and you could follow a Great Books program there. So I knew Rick Doblin (who has a founder's stake in both the nonprofit MAPS and the potentially $7 billion for-profit MDMA industry, and is featured in this article). I watched the first iteration of this Esctacy/PTSD "treatment" evolve -- a rich professor, a rich (much older) undergraduate (Doblin), Timothy Leary himself, and occassional Eurotrash would pop in to the college and hand out party drugs and, literally, a yes/no survey (Did taking MDMA solve your life problems? Yes or No?). They always seemed to skip town when another fragile undergrad manifested psychosis or schizophrenia and ended up in the hospital or dropping out. For a very tiny school, there were a lot of casualties. Now they're just doing it on a bigger scale. Or, actually, a smaller, but very potentially profitable one. Wasn't this "study" based on 12 people and still not conducted more professionally? I didn't trust those people when I was 18, and nothing appears to have changed about the way they operate.

Academia and nonprofits have been screwing up extremely well-funded psychedelic research for half a century. Can't anyone find three sober psychiatrists to give it a try? Why not? The best answer I know lies in the Inspector Morse episode "Cherubim and Seraphim": once you have tasted escasty, it is hard to go back to just living.

Ironclad म्हणाले...

Can you believe the studies now paid for by Pharma by “grants” to places like Harvard and the “prestigious” schools that proclaim the miracle status of new drugs? The whole “peer review” system is so corrupt today it’s hard to believe anything. If it’s a double blind study, where is the bias? And frankly - if the reviewer is being paid by the company that stands to make money - how can you see that as not being totally fixed?

Tina Trent म्हणाले...

Levi: who do you think funded the original American LSD research? The Pentagon. Who is being lobbied hardest by MAPS and Lykosto fund MDMA research? The Pentagon.

Tina Trent म्हणाले...

Ironclad: there is no way to do a double-blind study with MDMA, any more than you could do a double-blind study making half the group down a bottle of whisky while the other half drinks water. And the MDMA advocates are getting exactly the same grants at exactly the same elite universities that you complain about here.

Lykos and by extension MAPS will be the patent-holders of this therapy plus drug combination. Why do you believe their claims that what they really want is world peace, not money and power? And does that mean everyone needs to be innoculated with MDMA, and then we'll have no war? I know Doblin says that, and I honestly believe he believes it. But this is Ivy League-level nonsense.

Old and slow म्हणाले...

In my (pretty extensive) experience MDMA is a very benign drug. It does not cause anxiety like LSD, and it does not lead to habitual use. Whether it has value as a psychiatric drug or not I have no idea,but it does not seem too far fetched to me.

minnesota farm guy म्हणाले...

Timothy Leary redux.

Ironclad म्हणाले...

So using any drug that has noticeable effects on the recipient cannot be tested with a study because the effects are obvious? So much for science or testing. But hey, we know how well the testing you call for worked on the Covid vaccines for effectiveness.

You can’t patent a drug that has been around for ages - aspirin patented treatment anyway. I just understand that any therapy that isn’t profitable for big Pharma gets trashed. See ivermectin, etc. So let those PTSD patients suffer because Pharma can’t make a buck.

Tomcc म्हणाले...

Until researchers can reliably map the brains of those folks that can benefit from psychoactive drugs, the downside risks make them a poor option.

RCOCEAN II म्हणाले...

MDMA fact sheet put out by DEA:

Some unwanted psychological effects include: Confusion, anxiety, depression, paranoia, sleep problems, and drug craving All these effects usually occur within 30 to 45 minutes of swallowing the drug and usually last 4 to 6 hours, but they may occur or last weeks after ingestion.

Users of MDMA experience many of the same effects and face many of the same risks as users of other stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines. These include increased motor activity, alertness, heart rate, and blood pressure.

Studies suggest chronic use of MDMA can produce damage to the serotonin system. It is ironic that a drug that is taken to increase pleasure may cause damage that reduces a person’s ability to feel pleasure.


Tina Trent म्हणाले...

Ironclad, it's called market capture via credentialism. MAPS the social movement and Lykos the profit arm "train and certify" therapists to deliver these drugs in a specific therapeutic setting. Except for the part where they're actually a cult and a magnet to drug-seekers, and their real goal is to fully legalize all psychedelic drugs, in which case they're set up to merely profit from them, which is enabled by their unique cache of quality MDMA and their decades of influencing decision makers. They are big pharma as much as anyone else, except they pretend to be religion too.

FullMoon म्हणाले...

Old and slow said...

In my (pretty extensive) experience MDMA is a very benign drug. It does not cause anxiety like LSD, and it does not lead to habitual use. Whether it has value as a psychiatric drug or not I have no idea,but it does not seem too far fetched to me.
8/24/24, 1:07 PM


I'm gonna take experiance and real life observation over DEA reports or govt warnings. Difficult to tale serious the same govt pushing Reefer Madness" and telling us LSD makes you wanna fly off high buildings.

Anything can be dangerous in excess, beginning with alcohol. Moderation is key.

Gemna म्हणाले...

Still better than this FDA approval:
"Neffy’s approval is based on four studies in 175 healthy adults, without anaphylaxis"

Apparently, the FDA sees no reason to make sure it can actually save someone's life in anaphylaxis. Are the ads going to let people know this?

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-nasal-spray-treatment-anaphylaxis?utm_source=MarketingCloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PT+Daily+August+12&utm_content=PT+Daily+August+12

mikee म्हणाले...

I once worked in a government lab. My lab bench and hood had some loose wires in odd places. When I asked my boss about it, he said the previous user had been recorded synthesizing illegal drugs, using precursors signed out of the lab's storeroom. The recording devices were supposedly all removed after the idiot's arrest, but I only said nice things about the then-president while working there.

The Godfather म्हणाले...

When I was an undergrad at H-vard, probably in my sophomore year I was taking a "Soc-Rel" class, and the grad student who was our "section leader" (who ran things on the third day of class when the students met, but the Prof. had the day off) invited a fellow grad student, who was one of the Leary group, to talk to us. This was while Leary was still allowed at the U, but could only dose grad students. The speaker was oblivious to reality, or even to what the heck was going on in the vicinity to reality. This helped me avoid the acid-head temptation that too may of my contemporaries succumbed to

Assistant Village Idiot म्हणाले...

You didn't answer his question. If they could be shown to work "Big Pharma" would be glad to make them and sell them. It's the expensive things that have only few users that they try to get away from.

Assistant Village Idiot म्हणाले...

Very few first graders take hallucinogens. And anything correlates better than vaccines.

Ampersand म्हणाले...

There are moral and practical hazards associated with having a priestly caste with exclusive control over access to powerful molecules. Just as one example, consider the high suicide rates among medical professionals. It may be related to their systematic proximity to death and pain, but I suspect it's more related to their easy access to drugs that bring about quick and painless death.