from the then-he-lit-up-a-banana-and-he-hung-up dept.
In March, the Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine, a drug that produces psychedelic effects, to treat depression—the first psychedelic ever to clear that bar. Meanwhile the FDA has granted "breakthrough therapy" status—a designation that enables fast-tracked research—to study MDMA (also called "ecstasy") as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin as a treatment for major depression.
While these and other psychedelic drugs show promise as treatments for specific illnesses, FDA approval means doctors could also prescribe them for other, "off-label" purposes—including enhancing the quality of life of people who do not suffer from any disorder. Hence if MDMA gains approval as a treatment for PTSD, psychiatrists could prescribe the drug for very different purposes. Indeed, before the federal government banned MDMA, therapists reported striking success in using MDMA to improve the quality of intimate relationships. Recent research bolsters these claims, finding that the drug enhances emotional empathy, increases feelings of closeness, and promotes thoughtfulness and contemplativeness.
Similarly, while psilocybin has shown potential as a treatment for depression and anxiety, physicians could also prescribe the drug to promote the well-being of healthy individuals. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave psilocybin to healthy participants with no history of hallucinogen use, nearly eighty percent reported that their experiences "increased their current sense of personal well-being or life satisfaction 'moderately' or 'very much'"—effects that persisted for more than a year.
Yet while the FDA generally does not regulate physicians' prescribing practices, a federal law called the Controlled Substances Act bars them from writing prescriptions without a "legitimate medical purpose." Although this prohibition aims to prevent doctors from acting as drug traffickers, the law does not explain which purposes qualify as "legitimate," nor how to distinguish valid prescriptions from those that merely enable patients' illicit drug abuse.
Would prescribing a psychedelic drug simply to promote empathy or increase "life satisfaction" fall within the scope of legitimate medicine—or would these practices render the physician a drug dealer?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by XivLacuna on Friday August 02 2019, @04:47AM
We must also kill the livers of people with medication. It is the American way.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 02 2019, @07:08AM (5 children)
Globally TPTB treat the entire psychedlic movement as a threat and they are infiltrating it.
Essentially drugs like psylocibin and lsd act like truth serum and so they want to gather what this truth is about you and trap you into crimes while you are intoxicated that you otherwise might not commit, think of, or be dumb enough to be tricked into.
This whole legalization of shrooms and awakening of the medicinal aspects comes far too late, if like marijuana the obvious truth that it has helpful uses and has been made illegal literally as a program of actual mass mind control and has in general the vibe that they are luring people out into the open to be labelled, blacklisted and imprisoned for thoughtcrime, or worse.
For the same reason we don't want facegag being the first to have mind control tech you should probably not think the right time to explore your mental innerspace is at a festival heavily surveilled and infiltrated by the FBI.
I can promise you, from experience, there are literally hundreds of young twenty somethings running around coachella and burning man trying to get intimate knowledge of you and they will use it to put you in jail because they do not want anyone who does not obey their programming to have any power in society.
So they treat all beginnings of anything that might look like 'the sixties' as if it is a fire and run the 'man gulch fire' tactic, they starve the fire. I saw this everywhere I went in the united states between 2013 and 2017 before I left.
The Oregon Country Fair, I've never seen so many obvious undercover cops.
When I was younger back in the midwest there was a festival in the summer by a river in Missouri called 'The Peace Conspiracy', I now believe this was all cops. The festival was run by cops and most of the people were there were cops. I thought the name was dumb so I didn't want to be involved but it was a nice place to camp on the weekend with music.
I went to Schwagstock too in southern missouri, a popular dead cover band The Schwag tried to start a festival area. Now I know most of the people I met there were cops too and eventually the band leader was jailed and all proceeds confiscated.
They lure psychedelic culture out into the open and then secretly attack it and then say only wierdos are into these things even though the police themselves are probably the ones who handed out the overdose.
I largely expect the entire grateful dead tour scene operated along these lines, and that now all of the large festivals operate along these lines.
The psychedelic movement in the united states is now an undercover police festival and you are invited, to be the food.
This should scare you and you should warn everybody, and I believe I am in danger because I am relaying you this information that I in a lot of ways risked my life to figure out through gonzo investigation. I actually went to these places and tried to meet these people and although there are plenty of normal people, the ratio of people who was not real was very high.
Like at burning man, the woman who crashes into your camp drunk while you are chilling and says she's from camp 'fandango'.
Cop testing you to see if you'll take advantage of a vulnerable person and the goons are 100 yards away waiting to pounce you.
At the time you think, what an odd random experience, what a trainwreck, etc. Later you think oooooh.
The festival(or 'therapy') is not there for you to have fun at this point, it is there to lure your secrets into the open.
Get it through your thick skull, Total Information Awareness. That means inside your brain.
Check out my website's important definitions page for a description of the Man Gulch Fire(ctrl F) in historical context as a model for elimination of unwanted subcultures and essentially all civilian movements. It is important and profound, it took me years to Reverse Social Engineer what I experienced.
btw all you undercover cops who think you are hot shit with your invisible earpieces, you're really the monsters here. You do not know or understand who you are truly working for, you should rethink your lives.
This comment has a lot of safety value to a lot of people and it puts me at risk to say it, with my real frickin name, so if you want people like me talking in public and surviving at all past the age of 50, please finance my continued work otherwise I'm extremely vulnerable to their dirty tricks. Also I need to talk to journalists who would dare to report on this. What I have seen appears in nothing to my knowledge that has been written about.
My religion is self improvement and helping others and finding the truth, and other things like that, and the truth that helps myself and others improve includes the truth that altered states of consciousness are helpful and useful and a key aspect to the human experience, and the suppression of this idea is an openly hostile act against me and my friends and reason itself.
Nowhere else is it more apparent the contempt with which TPTB see the people. Pass this on, thanks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Farkus888 on Friday August 02 2019, @07:20AM (1 child)
MDC reincarnated already?!? Welcome back, we missed you. Please get more help earlier this time around.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 02 2019, @05:44PM
I follow the 10 commandments of logic, the first of which is in case you need review:
Thou shalt attack the argument and not the person making the argument.
If that is the most intelligent response you have then really you should remain silent until you have something to contribute to a serious discusion.
Thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @01:18PM (2 children)
Oversimplification. You might as well use alcohol as a "truth serum".
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 02 2019, @05:51PM (1 child)
It's not an oversimplification it's a reduction. One of the effects is that it is more difficult to lie and that is essentially what is most useful to the police state.
Don't nitpick, it's rude and anti-intellectual. It's also something actual cops due to break up and prevent discussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @06:26PM
I'll "nitpick" all day if you mischaracterize hallucinogens.
The police don't really need drugs to get people to talk. Most people will do it voluntarily. Those who don't can be nailed by other means, because most criminals are dumb. That leaves widespread surveillance for people like you.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Friday August 02 2019, @07:14AM (1 child)
Homeopaths and other similar hucksters set society back here. So many claim the same benefits for crystals or vortexes and other complete snake oil. This embeds a societal fear of things that aren't fresh out of a lab. You can see the science that shows it works, they have beakers and everything. There may be science behind psilocybin but it is much harder to see than the science of Prozac. That means we'll get MDMA before shrooms and weed will continue to see headwinds. LSD would be a winner here except the hippies ruined it, everyone hates boomers after all. MDMA won't have the same problem because Gen X didn't stick their drug use in everyone's faces. Raves after all can't even have windows. They gave us the X games then peacefully disappeared from society.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @08:07AM
How?
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday August 02 2019, @11:50AM (3 children)
If the law can deal with the problem of addictive and potentially lethal pain killers (which it can— the social impact is another question), it can deal with hallucinogens.
Why the inflammatory question that equates doctors with drug dealers? Doesn’t seem like a way to encourage thoughtful discussion.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 02 2019, @06:20PM
Alternatively, we could simply let the law off the hook entirely: legalize them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @06:23PM
Psychedelics are some of the safest drugs around, so yes.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @10:34PM
In a very scientific study, we gave text subjects access to all the heroin they wanted.
Unfortunately, within two years, 90% died from overdosing. But at least they died with an "increased sense of personal well-being".
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Friday August 02 2019, @12:48PM
The statute would fall in the realm of "unconstitutionally vague" if it has criminal penalties attached. It might be more interesting if the worst case a doctor would face is a civil penalty, such as losing a medical license, in which case it depends on the whims of the judiciary (and how much money they are paid?).
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:17PM
What's the diagnosis of the person? What's the action of the drug doing to either reverse the diagnosis or alleviate the symptoms of it? What deficiency is being treated by the issuance of the prescription - what a "legitimate medical purpose" is to anyone who's bothered to study it at all?
While there are psychological (and physical) diagnoses which very much touch upon quality of life, "I need more life satisfaction," is not a diagnosis, nor is it a legitimate symptom to be treated. And generally any REMS drug is not going to be off-labeled for anything - that's part of the point of having to do the training to use the drug is understanding that one really does need a sanctioned indication to use it even if there is still a degree of prescribing freedom.
I hear that heroin makes one feel really good and is the most potent of the opioids. When does that get a drug trial? Oh, nevermind.
Yeah, I can tell this was written by somebody with no contact at all with actual medical practice.