How is that gatekeeping? I'm trying to ask about what the risks are for people who take it at a party or a festival or at home for fun.
>Psychedelics like psilocybin have a remarkably benign safety profile relative to other Schedule One drugs, not to mention very different social, cultural and historical roles. Lumping psychedelics together with powerful opioids like fentanyl misdirects resources, diminishes buy-in from the public and undercuts the legitimacy of federal drug laws.
The author of the article does not specify what risks these drugs have. Simply that they are relatively less dangerous than synthetic opioids.
There are some studies, and LSD is quite safe. Way safer than alcohol, for example.
But being on a very tight Schedule I (like MDMA, also quite safe), worse even than morphine, good luck researching the risks. It's a catch 22: we don't know the risks, so we ban studies about the substance. We don't have studies about the risks, so we cannot unban it.
When LSD was liberally consumed (1960's), there were almost no deaths related to it. And the very few reports are suspiciously "suicides" or "near suicides", which all of them seems to be accidents while tripping, like any drunk commit everyday (and not like LSD makes you suicidal by choice). More serious reports have found zero deaths directly linked with LSD toxicity: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29408722/
MDMA is not quite safe. We have decades of research to prove otherwise now. r/DrugNerds have been putting out study after study pointing this out. The protocols required and safety measures for how often to dose are not what folks are going to be doing generally. It is neurotoxic.
LSD on the other hand, yes quite safe (and even good) for your brain, unless you're prone to mental illness or currently suffering from mental illness.
Let me put it in another way: safety profile of MDMA is better than lots and lots of other clinically approved drugs. And much safer than substances like alcohol, that are not only neurotoxic but hepatotoxic, carcinogenic, highly addictive and with worse withdrawal.
There was a time when MDMA was prescribed to thousands of people, and nobody had a problem. Of course some people will always abuse any substance, we currently have people killing themselves with food or sugar. But the best solution is not to classify it as Schedule I, which in practice is a full ban even for research.
You're continuing to make bad claims. I'm taking the time to debunk them because the safety of people reading these comments is important to me.
MDMA is far more neurotoxic than alcohol. The oxidative stress put on the brain is potent. When you add elevated body temperature, which most folks on MDMA are likely to find themselves experiencing (dancing, hot club, lots of people), the damage climbs precipitously. In primates, damage to the brain has been detected after even single use.
If people want to take drugs, that's their prerogative but after “playing” with drugs when I was younger, the only recreational drugs I can recommend are certain psychedelics if people care about their health, physical or mental. You can replace alcohol and ecstasy in many settings with a very low dose of psychedelics and get similar social opening effects with none of the damage of either.
To my knowledge, the one study that people held up as showing damage from MDMA usage after a single dose was later retracted, as they had mixed up the vials of MDMA and methamphetamine. They were never able to replicate the results after resolving this mistake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retracted_article_on_dopaminer...
Disclaimer: I have taken MDMA a couple of times over the years, though I have never particularly enjoyed the experience and have never considered doing it regularly.
Sure, happy to. Here's a meta-study [1] that cites another meta-study showing single use harm. [2] This study [3] shows changes in serotonin patterns seven years after administration in primates.
MisterYouAreSoDumb was a legendary Redditor who frequently commented on the topic of harm. This one's a collection of references and a good TL;DR. [4] It's ten years old now but there's still a treasure trove of material here. Another comment from them that is the beginning of a series. [5] And as I mentioned earlier, the safety protocols required to mitigate the damage are extensive. You cannot rely on users going the distance to have a less-harmful experience. You must assume it's being taken under non-ideal conditions, with plenty of redosing, which is multiplicatively more damaging, as the axon terminals involved will simply run dry.
Hope that's helpful.
I'm not here to judge. I've also taken MDMA in my youth and quite a lot of it. But I do wish we had these resources available then as we do now so I could have made a more informed decision.
My personal, anecdotal, experience is I had a bunch of pretty magical experiences with MDMA in my youth which I've never been able to reproduce since. That was personal confirmation that irrevocable changes had occurred due to use. The internet is chock full of similar stories.
They point out that they showed neurotoxicity in animal studies with doses higher than those typically for recreational users. In studies of human users, they did find evidence of brain structural alteration, but no large-scale cognitive impairment of clinically relevant proportions. Fairly significant evidence of impact to memory.
They chose dosages for MDMA here that are extremely high. 80-120mg is the standard recreational dose with anything above 150mg being considered high, but the dosage they chose would be the by-weight equivalent of a 160lb person taking 340mg of MDMA. This looks intentional - they say in the study the selected a dosage that was known to cause brain lesions. The sci-hub study references a species-specific dose scaling chart that explains some of this, but it also disclaims that the science of the dose scaling is disputed. I'm not super sure what to make of it - it stands to reason that too much of anything can be dangerous, but it doesn't seem like the science is close to being settled on whether or not these dosing differences make sense.
I haven't yet had a chance to go through all the references from the reddit post, but I'll work through them.
I think it's pretty compelling evidence that there is risk in taking MDMA long term, or in very high dosages on more acute timescales. I don't know that what I have read so far counters the science in the meta-study I linked around more moderate use, since that did draw primarily on observational studies that included imaging of human users. I'm no expert, though, and hopefully no one reading this is taking my understanding of the science as anything resembling authoritative.
It does further highlight a lot of the potential risks in taking street drugs, though - you never know the actual potency or chemical composition of what you're being sold.
>My personal, anecdotal, experience is I had a bunch of pretty magical experiences with MDMA in my youth which I've never been able to reproduce since. That was personal confirmation that irrevocable changes had occurred due to use. The internet is chock full of similar stories.
Hmm. There's a lot of experiences I found magical at one point in time that I've never been able to reproduce, none of them related to drugs. I think it's hard for humans to disentangle their perceptions from the novelty of new experiences, the impact of their mental state, point in life, etc. etc.
At any rate, thank you again for the wealth of information.
MDMA is also addictive, because it makes you feel good (it's not called "ecstasy" for nothing), and builds tolerance rapidly, so you need to keep increasing the dose. No, it's nowhere near as dangerous as meth/heroin/cocaine, but I have seen people spiral into pretty dangerous usage patterns, including switching to harder drugs when ecstasy isn't cutting it any more and they're stuck in a multi-day depressive withdrawal slump.
For all practical purposes, none of this applies to LSD, since trips are much more intense and unpredictable. Although there is a small subset of psychonauts who adopt an extreme sports mindset and intentionally push the envelope by taking larger and larger doses.
Sadly, “LSD is safe” doesn’t mean “things sold as LSD and that feel similar to LSD are safe”. Lots of research chemical LSD analogues feel very similar to LSD but are dangerous. Just wanted to leave that disclaimer in case anyone on the fence about trying it reads this. Be careful.
