I am fairly sure that rigorous scientific research has shown that this is not the case.

Why did you delete your comment? I really appreciated it and actually bookmarked it specifically. I know it probably wasn't popular among consumers, buy I liked it and agreed with it. I actually have witnessed exactly what you describe in people I know.

Thanks. You’re right. It was stupid for me to delete it. I will repost it here with the caveat that I wrote it on impulse. It’s an oversimplification of a really complicated subject.

> The way I think of these drugs is just that they flood your brain with toxins. That in itself will make it not work properly. But the scary part is that the more time your brain spend intoxicated the more likely you start loosing or weakening connections. If you weaken connections only for the bad memories, that would be a good thing. But what if you weaken the connections for other important things in your life ? Like self control, moral values, family love, etc.

No, its not just an oversimplification. It's entirely incorrect. Most psychedelic drugs are very low in toxicity, to the extent that they can accurately be called non toxic.

As Paracelsus said, all medicine is poison, the dose is what makes it medicine. So even if psychedelics were toxins, that's not a knock against them.

For LSD and Psilocybin I'm not sure if Toxin is the right word. From my layman understanding, LSD and Psilocybin mimic naturally occurring proteins that bind to certain receptors in your brain triggering release of chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and etc. Your brains natural processes will "clean-up" the LSD and psilocybin just like it would for your body's natural analogs.

You have never tried psychedelics have you? They often have the opposite effect of what you have speculated on.

Consider expanding your definition of what a "therapist" could be and what a "clinical setting" could look like. Michael Pollan's interactions with the therapists (they're called "guides") in "How to Change Your Mind" are not clinical at all in the sense of sterility, beige-walled offices etc.

Pollan actually does go on the black market (still probably $200/hour though). You can't legally get a psychedelic trip guide in the US right now.

The point is that the exact people who are well-known and respected as black-market guides would become therapists in a world where such a profession were legal!

> You can't legally get a psychedelic trip guide in the US right now.

Not entirely true, although only a few, there have been and continue to be legal studies involving psilocybin (also MDMA) in addition to the one in the OP.

Here is a smoking cessation study in Baltimore, involving a psilocybin psychedelic trip. https://www.quitsmokingbaltimore.org/

Here's an article about the findings of the 2014 pilot study on the same thing which describes the methodology to some extent. https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/

Seriously, read the book. You're grossly misjudging what the book discusses.

In running there is an expression, "you have to run your own race". The same is true here.

But specifically in this context psychedelics are generally introduced to individuals who haven't had prior experience with them, and may need additional support that therapists can help with (e.g. survivors of sexual assault, deep depression, anxiety regarding terminal diagnosis, PTSD, etc) and the therapist have been trained specifically in guiding these individuals in psychedelic trips. So they are like the best trip sitters you can have if you are trying to get out of rut.

what does that even mean? There is absolutely zero chance that there is a placebo effect in psychedelics. It’s a mind shattering experience. Obviously the hallucinations are illusory but the fact that you are having them is not.

To nitpick: it's accurate to say that there is zero chance that the effect of psychedelics is just a placebo effect.

This does not mean that there is zero placebo effect involved with taking psychedelics. The latter statement would mean your experience is identical between actively taking a psychedelic and someone slipping some in your drink. I'd say this is unlikely, no?

We know for lots of other drugs, both therapeutic and recreational, that there is always a placebo component as well as a "real" one.

This is why people do placebo-controlled trials. You take 100 people and give them ibuprofen against joint pain, then you give another 100 people sugar pills against joint pain. Then you record their pain reduction on some scale, and the placebo scores 2 +/- 1 points, and the ibuprofen scores 7 +/- 1 points. So you say ibuprofen has a significantly better effect than placebo, but (probably) 2/7th of the ibuprofen effect is due to placebo.

Yeah, i understand that, but the point of a placebo is that you don't know whether you got the medicine being tested or not. I can assure you that you will be left with zero doubt about whether you received a psychedelic or not, unless it's a very small dose.

You're thinking of a blind study, strictly speaking a placebo is simply any pharmaceutically inert substance. You can take a placebo knowingly and in fact knowing that it's not medicine doesn't stop you from getting the benefits of the placebo effect.

It's actually a change in perception and perspective. Since consciousness and reality are subjective results of individual perception and perspective, there is an altering of consciousness and experienced reality. Perception being perceiving and mapping out the external world outside of the individual mind. And perspective then deriving a meaningful relationship between "I" and external Abstract or Concrete Things X.

They have measured very distinct changes in brain functioning.

How do you know reality is not just an illusion?

It is an illusion, but at the same time it's not. It's 100% real to the person perceiving the shift, and in the case of treating mental illness that's all that really counts.

It's not so much about how it works or why it works, it's mostly about the result.