While I may not be someone you want to be for specific reasons relating to our individuality, I am a long time psych user and I'm demographically and overall culturally someone that is presented as desirable to be. I'm in a reasonably high income percentile, I lack unsecured debt, I'm happily married, I have a diverse social circle and several personal hobbies, I stay physically active, and I enjoy intellectual pursuits.

I'd be very curious to know what specifically about me, or about something you assume about me, would make me someone you don't want to be?

I can’t really give you a fair shake without meeting you, but I can say that I appreciate your reply.

As a real psych user, you should accept that your post clearly has the subtext:

“I have everything most people want, so you’re wrong”

I, too, have everything most people “want”. Maybe we’re equally well off, maybe we’re not. I’ve still never met anyone on-level who indulges in this habit that kept it, and you should know that at our level it’s about keeping it not having it, at least for very long.

I know alcoholics who are well to do, out of debt, happily married, and have a diverse social circle and several personal hobbies, get exercise, and enjoy thinking. None of that shows the merits of alcoholism. I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I could guess that it's your drug addiction that they have no desire to emulate.

Addicts insisting that their addiction isn't one is cliché for a reason.

Setting aside the hilarious disrespect of assuming that I'm a drug addict from single comment on the internet, you are capable of realizing that taking issue with people who use a drug only because of the mental and social association you have of people who use the drug is a super tight loop of circular logic, aren't you?

The idea of accusing someone of being a drug addict in the context of psychedelic use is absolutely hilarious. You sound completely uninformed and pretty much nobody should take you seriously on this topic.

Psychedelics are largely not "addictive". Certainly not physiologically, and almost certainly not mentally.

They actually show promise for stopping additions.

Many psychedelics are the opposite of addictive: if you take LSD for more than a couple of days, for example, the effect diminishes to nothing, whatever dose you take. You need at least a couple of weeks to re-sensistise.

I challenge you to find someone addicted to psilocybin. I would be impressed if someone managed to do a trip sized dose let’s say… 2x a week for any long duration.

High frequency of use is a necessary condition for addiction.

>>necessary condition for addiction. Necessary, but not sufficient

You might also note that the GP said nothing about frequency of use, only "long time psych user", AND that no one here has defined "high frequency" in terms of an actual threshold for addiction.

The fact is that for all drugs, and especially for the psychedelics, there are far many more people who use occasionally and responsibly than the subset who are addicted. AFAIK, the psychedelics are not considered addictive at all, either physically/physiologically or mentally.

I agree. Traveling expands the mind, but you don't want to be traveling all the time. Is travel addictive? Maybe for some but for most of us probably not

High necessity of use is a frequent condition for addiction.

alcohol is neurotoxic and addictive. psychs are neurotrophic and non-addictive, but the purity isn't guaranteed. Impurities are common in blackmarkets.

I publicly, to my peer group at least, state I have enjoyed benefits of psychedelic drugs every five or ten years, I am pretty sure I have my shit together compared to most people. That being said i know the people you are talking about, but they in my experience use drugs much more frequently. Multiple times a year, and regularly also smoke weed etc.

Obviously biased when talking about myself, but I think you can split your judgement into a frequency argument rather than a binary yes or no.

35 years of dealing with friends and family addiction issues.

They all believe it doesn’t affect them negativity, that people can’t tell.

They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.

The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.

I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.

My 2 cents

You won’t see benefits if your sample only includes addicts! But some people’s drug habits are objectively not addiction. For example, someone who takes LSD 3 or 4 times a year, with months in between. It seems quite plausible to me that this could be beneficial to them whereas someone taking it say twice a week would see detrimental effects.

Taking it twice a week is a waste of a dose, unless one is microdosing or threshold dosing (where tolerance, in my experience, doesn't quite kick in as hard).

> They all believe it doesn’t affect them negativity, that people can’t tell.

> They are all wrong. We can see the changes in them. Good or bad.

Well the post you replied to didn't address being able to tell.

> The ones that make an effort to get off for awhile are usually shocked when they realize how they were being affected.

5 years is a while, surely?

> I have never seen positive long term affects in anyone of them. Even though they all claim otherwise.

Do they still claim that after 5 years of non-use?

Addiction issues are a totally different animal. Just look up the definition of addiction. I’ll comfortably stand by my statement of use on the order of every few years being wellllllll within the margins of reasonable use.

Your absolutist stance is absurd. Just because all people who don't believe that some substance affects them negatively are wrong because a certain percentage of people who consume that substance are actually wrong. The same goes for certain changes in behavior, they don't automatically mean that a problem exists.

This basic claim is like saying an ocasional drinker who's become more social because alcohol helps them with talking to groups of people in certain specific situations is no different from an alcoholic because both drink and behave differently while drinking. Context, quantity and quality all make defining differences. How tedious it is to be judged harshly by someone who can't see this and takes any example of consuming something as a case of not admitting addiction. Often there really is no addiction.

It's still illegal, so most sensible adults don't mention their usage.

Remember how gay activists used to be the craziest fringe gay people you could find, back when there was a serious stigma around it?

Now most gay people I encounter or hear about ar just as boring and sensible as the straights.

This doesn't prove that the same will happen with psychedelics. But it tells you why treating the outspoken minority as representative is not right.

This is the kind of anecdote that I used to hear about smoking weed. Tripping can be abused as a means of escape like many other things (work etc), but over-use without a proper cool-off/reintegration period can definitely throw one off psychologically. It’s a powerful tool that should be feared and respected (like the ocean) for its ability to fuck you up if you’re reckless.

People who do a bad job of concealing their illegal activities probably make other failures in judgment, too. The most well-adjusted psychedelic users I've met were the ones who only told me after I had known them for years.

as with anything, there is a set of people who are too excited, and they are all evangelists

you know plenty of people who aren't vocal about their experiences because they understand it's not appropriate or acceptable in the situations you have shared.

Read a meta study like https://mindmedicineaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Long.... From section 3.3-3.4, you can see that psychedelic use is beneficial for anxiety and depression and results in improved well-being, increased openness to experience and increased spirituality. Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for substance abuse has positive effects. The safety profile shows that they are not risk-free but that there are few negative long-term effects.

> psychedelic use is beneficial for anxiety and depression

The claim is that psychedelic use is beneficial /because/ it's psychedelic, but this isn't necessarily true (because of the rule that the boring outcome is the most likely). You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.

> increased spirituality

Is that a positive effect? Imagine all the people you know turning into Gwyneth Paltrow.

> You could probably invent a kind of ketamine that does absolutely nothing interesting and yet still has the benefits.

Maybe it can be done but the real reason that the companies are working on this is that they can patent these new drugs, and that would increase patients' costs (see esketamine vs ketamine). A better use of money might be to do larger studies of existing psychedelics/dissociatives, since these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most and we won't know long-term effects of new drugs and whether they do much besides what they would get potentially approved for. These companies would then have a big incentive and money to lobby to keep the existing psychedelics/dissociatives illegal.

> these side-effects (psychedelic experiences) are enjoyable for most

I don't know whether the experience of purple sage counts as psychedelic; I tried it once. The visuals are reminiscent of LSD visuals, but richer. But there's no euphoria at all. Combined with extreme couch-lock, I didn't find it enjoyable.

OTOH I think you'd be surprised at how many people you know in your daily life probably are taking psychedelics these days, especially on the west coast.

This post suggests sustained long term usage.

The compounds being discussed can have major long term effects from one/few experiences.

If 5 "trips" over the span of as many years in someone's early twenties provided a decade of long term positive changes, would you classify that as a coping mechanism?

There may be confirmation bias. Plenty of people might imbibe psychedelic drugs, but you wouldn't know because they don't talk about it with you and they are "all there".

You do it a few times and move on with your life. The Beatles famously only did it a handful of times during their most productive period and stopped all together eventually.

Are they happy? (Are you happy?)