longtime researchers in the field worry they¡¯ll just become another commodity."

If you¡¯re a researcher, wouldn¡¯t that be a good thing? These things aren¡¯t magic fairy dust; they¡¯re tools. The sooner we remove the halo and treat them as such, the better off we are.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:00 PM on April 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

longtime researchers in the field worry they¡¯ll just become another commodity."

If you¡¯re a researcher, wouldn¡¯t that be a good thing? These things aren¡¯t magic fairy dust; they¡¯re tools.

except it's entirely arguable that the full-on free market is absurd (ie: it fucks up everything it touches). Also, in my experience, if there is such a thing as magic fairy dust, it would be psychedelic compounds. Given the choice between some mega-corp doing everything it can to maximize stockholders' return on investment and ... some oddball mystical-magical church (or whatever), I'm not sure which I'd choose to guide things forward.

The upside of all of this for me is that there are very many very smart people with a horse in this race (a dog in this fight?). I look forward to hearing such voices step up.
posted by philip-random at 6:21 PM on April 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Schoo, give me triple redundancy everytime.
posted by clavdivs at 6:27 PM on April 20, 2018

and on the topic of microdosing, effective as it may be for a while, in the end it just leads to burnout like any other prolonged utilization of artificial energy.

I do think there's a entirely plausible future dystopia where microdosing becomes the norm for certain kinds of businesses and their employees, and yeah, rather like pro football players and concussions, it doesn't go at all well for them on the long term.
posted by philip-random at 6:27 PM on April 20, 2018 [11 favorites]

Where do I sign up?
posted by valkane at 6:30 PM on April 20, 2018

Given the choice between some mega-corp doing everything it can to maximize stockholders' return on investment and ... some oddball mystical-magical church (or whatever), I'm not sure which I'd choose to guide things forward.

I'll pick mega-corp. Not because I believe that they'd be good corporate citizens or should be able to get away with doing anything they want in an unregulated space in the market, but because I believe the demystification, decriminalization, smart medical use, and above all the (to coin a horrible neologism) banalification of mind-altering substances would be a significant net good.
posted by tclark at 6:58 PM on April 20, 2018 [26 favorites]

I'm for hippie chemists riding bikes. Fuck corporations.
posted by evilDoug at 7:02 PM on April 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

I'll take an expansion of access to safe and legal psychedelics.
I'm of the belief that we need something somewhat formal.

Back when I ran in 2012, I named a friend as my nominee for Shaman General...

At least for the first few times, a guided experience via an experienced practicioner. I think if we're actually to reap the benefits of psychedelics where they're not simply "lets get fucked up" (even though that's good and fun now and then) we need to have some sort of process... I don't want "institutions" per se, but something along those lines that has an official social sanctioning equivalent to religion and medicine and psychotherapy and science pedagogy.

If you need a drivers license to drive, I'd require a psychonauts license for those who want to... Well no. I'd have open training centers for people who WANT to be guided - here, welcome to the State Church of the TechnoShaman.

I don't know how to do that without refying the concerns of the researchers worry about a commodification. Institutional commodities.

I guess, if we had legitimate respected institutions for psychedelic use (tip: we do. MAPS, Erowid) but not state sanctioned, but with community decision making and resources available for those for research, safety testing (if you want to commodify it and put it in the hands of a consumer protection bureau?

Something to protect, cherish, nurture and guide through the process.

Then I just think of how things are and revert back to my old nihilist self.
posted by symbioid at 7:15 PM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

That chemist on a bike wasn't a hippie and he worked for the Sandoz Corporation simply trying to find a cure for headaches and migraines.

We pretty much would not have the psychedelic movement and revolution if it wasn't for errant/accidental corporate drug research. Or even perhaps, ugh, clandestine gov/spook programs.

Psychologists, philosophers and other intellects of the 20th century didn't really start exploring psilocybin and mescaline in earnest until after LSD was accidentally invented and making the rounds.

I'd cry tears of happiness if I could even get LSD-25 safely and legally prescribed about once or twice a year for therapy. "Take on a clear, calm night with healthy snacks and plenty of water. Laugh at the absurdity your place in the stars. Repeat as needed no more than once or twice a year or more."

On the other hand at this point I don't know how I feel about full legalization and OTC access. I've seen and experienced how they can be abused, and I've also learned that there are definitely people who should not take them at all.

It isn't as mystical as I used to believe it was, and it's a tool like any other. Sometimes a hammer is a brutal weapon or builder of fences, not just a builder of homes or shelters.
posted by loquacious at 7:16 PM on April 20, 2018 [32 favorites]

I'm for hippie chemists riding bikes. Fuck corporations.

In 1982, a cluster of heroin addicts effectively developed Parkinson's disease overnight. The cause was 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine, an accidental side product produced in a batch of designer drugs.

The accounts I've read suggest that the chemist who synthesized the drugs was easily the equal to any Ph.D.-bearing synthetic chemist. But he didn't - and, probably, couldn't - perform analytical tests of the sort that's used to screen pharmaceutical drugs to prevent similar disasters from occurring.

Speaking as a chemist, give me a corporation over a hippie chemist any day.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 7:24 PM on April 20, 2018 [37 favorites]

It's just a chemical, friend. It has no magical properties. If you really believe that psychedelics have beneficial properties then you should be pushing for more acceptance worldwide. There's nothing wrong with turning a profit, and pushing a shit load of money behind this stuff could get it legalized faster, which is what everyone wants right? I mean, we've left it to feel good efforts in the past, which is why there has been sooo much progress towards legalization in the past fifty years.
Honestly, the people in the article are talking about what if Compass makes psychedelics too expensive, but for some people the cost right now is pretty much infinity dollars.


Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Compass got caught doing something shifty, because AFAIK most legitimate enterprises are conservative and risk averse by nature and wouldn't touch stuff that could get them in trouble with the Fed. But still, you deal with the people you have to, or you can spend another fifty years waiting around talking about the ethereal mystery of something you can cook up in a basement.
posted by Query at 7:30 PM on April 20, 2018

Why would psychedelics be federally legalized before marijuana? Is it because they don't have the same racist, paper industry hate or resulting stigma that pot does?

Also, were they ever actually officially made illegal?
posted by bendy at 7:36 PM on April 20, 2018

Metafilter: Welcome to the State Church of the TechnoShaman
posted by thedward at 7:45 PM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also, were they ever actually officially made illegal?

Very much so. Most of the drugs people consider psychedelics are in Schedule I in the US, which is as illegal as a drug can possibly be. Since the introduction of the Federal Analogue Act in 1986, even new drugs that merely resemble existing illegal drugs are automatically illegal in the US.
posted by shponglespore at 8:11 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do I believe psychedelics can open the doors of perception? Well, they can trigger interest in authentic practices which can reveal the truth behind our habitual perception of what we have come to think of as our "self." (No such thing. See Thomas Metzinger.)

Do I think corporations or governments should control our inner explorations? Do I have a choice?
No, I don't. It is very strange to me that either companies or nation-states should have such an interest in such personal matters.
posted by kozad at 8:51 PM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

My experience with hallucinogens was powerful and deep. I want to share that experience with other people, I want to help them have that. And I have always found their use as a party drug to be totally baffling, what even is that? My first inclination is that if everyone is going to do some acid then we have to MAKE SURE THEY DO IT GOOD, OMG GUYS WHAT COULD HAPPEN!

But if tripping me were around to give me some advice he would tell me:

Nice ego there. What are you, the curator? You can't make someone do a profound. You're not the gatekeeper, you hate gatekeepers. The authenticity of each individual's experience lies entirely with them, theirs is not the same as yours, and it doesn't have to be.

And he's right, that pool-eyed weirdo, so safety first, and then have at it, everyone.

(safety includes the reliability of purity, measurement of dosage and security of environment.)
(And stay hydrated!)
posted by Horkus at 9:01 PM on April 20, 2018 [20 favorites]

I'm for hippie chemists riding bikes. Fuck corporations.

Those happy bicycle-riding hippies run the corporations now. Have you paid any attention to what the Baby Boomers have been up to over the last 40 years?
posted by happyroach at 11:10 PM on April 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Those happy bicycle-riding hippies run the corporations now.

I believe that was a reference to Albert Hoffman, the Sandoz chemist who invented LSD. He was riding a bike home from work when he realized he'd dosed himself something high and mighty.
posted by philip-random at 12:02 AM on April 21, 2018

Christ but the type on that site is hard to read.

I'm only halfway kidding when I say that weed-enthusiast aesthetics constitute argument number one for corporate standardization and quality control. Naw, son: where blowing open the doors of perception is concerned, give me high modernist corporate clarity over headshop fug every time.
posted by adamgreenfield at 1:54 AM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

doors of perception

Aldous Huxley riding epicycles
posted by thelonius at 1:59 AM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Obviously fuck Peter Thiel always. Nevertheless the point stands.
posted by adamgreenfield at 2:59 AM on April 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Pharmaceutical companies already make and market chemicals with profound effects, and while there are many systematic problems with how things work, they do work. I can and have accessed many beneficial drugs, some as I wish over the counter from a pharmacist, some flat on my back in a hospital with machines nervously monitoring the effects, and many in between those two extremes. I would almost certainly not be here otherwise.

I don't see there being any particular reason why psychedelics can't fit into this picture, excepting the usual problems over who pays for the pathway through the clinical safety trials. That's hard for things that can't be patented, or things that can be patented but are unlikely to turn big profits, and many useful psychedelics known (thanks to Shulgin, pbuh) and unknown fit into one of those two categories. The OP illustrates how hard it is to overcome those difficulties, but also how much pressure has built up to make something happen.

Of course, the ideal outcome would be that the piecemeal reform of 'recreational' drug policy would speed up and a new framework adopted that accepts personal use by choice while regulating the market, as far as possible, for safety, not just for psychedelics.

And I for one stand ready to help anyone who wants to make the psychedelic experience available, with love, compassion and understanding, to those who seek it. That part of the 60s dream is unquenchable.
posted by Devonian at 6:55 AM on April 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

> There's nothing wrong with turning a profit,

In case duffel's link to crazylegs' post hadn't driven things home enough, YES THERE IS. A tidy bit of profit as a well-regulated, but cottage industry? Sure. But we're not talking about a sweet older chemist earnestly trying to change the world for the better. We're talking full on venture capital "to the Moon or bust" funding, to the tune of $5 million dollars, followed by pushing to get a government granted monopoly on production, then charging what the market will bear. Need it twice at year, or face PTSD ruining your life? Charging $50,000 for a legal hit seems reasonable, yeah? I mean a full 12-week course of Hepatitis-C cure costs almost $94k. You can just see the corporation' executives salivating at the idea of how much they can charge for a 6-month reprieve from PTSD, and how many yachts, planes, and spare housing they'll be able to buy with that kind of profit margin.

We're talking regulations that say it can only be taken at an approved clinic with shaman licensing, and the company is, of course, in charge of who can get a license - and charges the clinic a princely sum for the shaman to get yearly training who then passes the cost onto you, the consumer.

I'd actually welcome regulation to assert quality and purity of.the medication, along with help to make sure that trips are safe and optimally with a (trained) sitter, but history teaches us that capitalism will pervert it.

Steve Jobs famously described LSD as a life changing experience, and who could argue with the success of Apple's iPhone? What can be argued with is how much of a controlling micromanaging asshole he was to be around. His relationship with his daughter wasn't fixed by some supposed door to the inner psyche, but by good old fashioned emotional labor by his sister.

What I'm saying is that some people are better for having taken it, but LSD won't cure the ills that prevent us from all holding hands and singing kumbaya.

Which is a shame, because I like that song. I don't want to be forced to watch an ad before I'm allowed to hear it, or have to pay royalties every time I sing it.
posted by fragmede at 7:04 AM on April 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

There's nothing wrong with turning a profit

seriously?
in this, TYOOL 2018, i feel like we have so many perpetually screaming examples of this logic's drawbacks
posted by halation at 7:12 AM on April 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

Which is a shame, because I like that song. I don't want to be forced to watch an ad before I'm allowed to hear it, or have to pay royalties every time I sing it.


Right now, possession of LSD is a misdemeanor, and giving it to someone else is a felony. LSD is nigh impossible for most people to get, and what they get is frequently tainted with poison. Right now, vanishingly few psychedelics users have anything resembling a guide/shaman, regulated or otherwise. Right now, most people see zero legitimate use of LSD, and if the wrong people know you take it, you can get fired, jailed, and stigmatized out of social support.

If psychedelics were legal but obscure, then yes, VC-backed corporations could make things worse. Given the status quo, I'd welcome it. Illegal channels will still exist, only there will be more opportunities for clinical study, and more social legitimacy around the whole topic.
posted by andrewpcone at 8:13 AM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Obviously fuck Peter Thiel always. Nevertheless the point stands.

but Peter fucking Thiel is exactly why the point should not stand. When it comes to determining the ebb and flow of our dreams and imaginations, a rich and powerful misanthrope scares me at least as much as a cat-herd of high and fuzzy minded hippies who can't even find their way home let alone get the key in the door. Seriously, look at everything that's wrong with the world and try to tell me that clear eyed entrepreneurs delivering the goods to sober, upright shareholders is not very high on the CAUSES list. Why would we even begin to trust this model to something as profoundly reality-shaping-defining-subverting as psychedelic drugs?

I'd actually welcome regulation to assert quality and purity of.the medication, along with help to make sure that trips are safe and optimally with a (trained) sitter, but history teaches us that capitalism will pervert it.

So yeah, let's figure a way to accomplish A. safety, quality etc without passing the controls to B. self-interested free market true believer types.
posted by philip-random at 9:36 AM on April 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

I find myself interested in microdose acid. If any of you in the nein aight won zip codes knows, hook me up. To paraphrase Yoda, amply rewarded you will be.

On a sidenote, today is Earth Day and I must note somewhere that today is the first day a Google Doodle brought tears to my eyes. God, I love Jane Goodall.

And closer to the point, I think all drugs derived unrefined from nature should be legal -- cannibis, psilocybin mushrooms, dode and, yes, poppy tea at one cup a day. Salvia divinorum, yes, but not as a social drug. As an herbalist friend once said, it is far too harsh a teacher.
posted by y2karl at 9:47 AM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I do think there's a entirely plausible future dystopia where microdosing becomes the norm for certain kinds of businesses and their employees

Indeed many well-known businesses already offer urns of hot stimulant tinctures to their employees.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:49 PM on April 21, 2018 [10 favorites]

There is legitimate research LSD being done in the USA and Switzerland not only with terminally ill cancer patients but also in psychotherapy as a treatment for chronic depression.
posted by DJZouke at 6:46 AM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

fragmede: "Steve Jobs famously described LSD as a life changing experience, and who could argue with the success of Apple's iPhone?"

I'd like recreational acid to be legal however Jobs thought fruit juice could cure his pancreatic cancer; not sure I'd use him as an expert or advocate on the effects of medication.
posted by Mitheral at 10:17 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

LSD is nigh impossible for most people to get, and what they get is frequently tainted with poison.

It's not that hard to get if you know the right people. If you're willing to take a slight risk of getting caught, there are web sites (on the regular web, not just the dark web) where you can order similar substances with virtually identical effects, manufactured in countries that have no equivalent of the US Federal Analogue Act.

Concerns about tainted LSD are nothing but an urban legend as far as I can tell. I've been hearing about it for as long as I've been around people using drugs—around 20 years now—and I've known a lot of people who did a lot of LSD, but I've never heard of anyone being poisoned by it. It's also pretty implausible because LSD is so potent, and the amount of material users ingest is so small; delivery mechanisms vary, but a typical example for a single dose would be about 25 sq mm of card stock that's been soaked in a solution containing LSD and then dried. There's no way to fit a dangerous amount of most poisons into a piece of paper that small, and poisons that are that potent tend to be even harder to come by than LSD, because they're basically chemical weapons.
posted by shponglespore at 12:34 PM on April 23, 2018

I am far from knowing the right people. And while I'm not too worried about dieing from some "acid" I order from some random web site I sure as heck would be worried bout getting ripped off; getting way more of a dose than expected or getting unwittingly sold some analogue that isn't quite as analogue as one would like.

There are all sorts of drugs that can at least lead to a very bad time if not death that'll fit into a 1" paper square. EG: a lethal does of Fentanyl is a few mg.
posted by Mitheral at 1:32 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's not that hard to get if you know the right people. If you're willing to take a slight risk of getting caught, there are web sites (on the regular web, not just the dark web) where you can order similar substances with virtually identical effects, manufactured in countries that have no equivalent of the US Federal Analogue Act.

Right, I don't want LSD to be accessible only to people who "know the right people." It is pretty obvious to me that people who run in more educated, liberal, younger circles can get LSD, and more or less everyone else can not. Identifying which legal substances are similar but safe is complicated and nuanced, and not something most people are reasonably going to do.

This sort of elitism around drugs is rampant in the psychedelics community, which is otherwise a pretty awesome scene. I find it nauseating.

Concerns about tainted LSD are nothing but an urban legend as far as I can tell.

25I-NBOME, which is probably dangerous, is frequently misrepresented as LSD. I'm sure there are others. Anyway, given that LSD synthesis is complicated and involves some nasty reagents, and it is of course unregulated, it is reasonable to presume it isn't exactly USP.

Anyway, even if we assume high purity, dosage varies wildly across "hits." This adds an element of unpredictability that is antithetical to responsible drug use. I maintain the status quo around access and quality is unacceptable, except to a core group of elites. It's dandy for me, and probably most others on this thread, but it isn't dandy for most people.

Look, I don't like the idea of Thiel's minions trying to commoditize the thing either. I'd rather go the route MAPS went with MDMA, where they made a nonprofit drug company. I'd also rather see the matter wrested out of clinical hands, such that religious organizations can possess and distribute psychedlic drugs known to be safe.

But I think it's naive to imagine that MAPS and some shamans are going to legitimize psychedelics at a rate that will achieve widespread access in a timeframe I deem acceptable. As distasteful as the corporatization of psychedelics is, I can not concretely imagine that it will reduce access for anyone--certainly not relative to the status quo. Even while Thiel & Co do their thing, the growing armies of competent, idealistic psychonauts and their allies will continue doing their thing.

It is a good sign that corporations want to get their hands on this stuff. It means that people outside of the old-school psychedelics scene are starting to see this stuff as legitimate. It is threatening, but it's an inevitable part of a larger and more savory process.
posted by andrewpcone at 1:52 PM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

This sort of elitism around drugs is rampant in the psychedelics community, which is otherwise a pretty awesome scene. I find it nauseating.

Huh? I'm not trying to defend the status quo. I think it sucks. Access to something like LSD should not depend on knowing the right people. I was just trying to correct what I saw as factual inaccuracies. In particular, I was responding to a claim that LSD is "nigh impossible" to get, which I think is a major overstatement. It's not easy to get, and most people would find it impossible to acquire any on short notice, but my experience suggests that most people could get their hands on some if they were sufficiently persistent and motivated.

As for poison, 25I-NBOME sounds like a valid concern, and I was not aware of it. Mostly I've heard rumors about strychnine, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because AFAIK there's no particular reason it would be a contaminant in LSD.

Fentanyl (mentioned above) is one of the substances I was alluding to that would be a very weird thing to show up as a contaminant in LSD because it's not exactly easy to get, either, and there'd be no reason to mix it with LSD unless a terrorist specifically wanted to kill some strangers who were trying to use LSD. Virtually any other street drug would be easier to contaminate with a dangerous amount of toxins. Fentanyl is also what I was thinking of when I mentioned chemical weapons above. Initial reports from the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002 said it was fentanyl that was literally used as a chemical weapon in that case.

Things have changed a bit since 2002. Fentanyl is apparently much easier to get on the black market now, and the chemical agent used in Russia turned out not to be fentanyl after all. Using fentanyl as a poison is a lot more realistic since it has gone from being a possible chemical weapon to an ingredient heroin dealers use to make up for a sub-par product, but as I said, I still see no reason someone would want to do that when there are much easier options available for indiscriminately killing people. Since the rumors have been around long before 25I-NBOME or fentanyl were things drug dealers had access to, to me that puts it right up there with urban legends like "LSD cooks your brain" and "LSD stays permanently in the spinal column".

Anyway, the tl;dr is that I'm on a hair trigger when it comes to people repeating things that sound like urban legends about drugs, and some of my facts were out of date, but I don't think either of those things qualifies me as an elitist.
posted by shponglespore at 3:16 PM on April 23, 2018

The New Science of Psychedelics
posted by kliuless at 10:16 PM on May 5, 2018

-Michael Pollan on How LSD Isn't Just for the Young
-Are psychedelic mushrooms the next legalization frontier after cannabis?
posted by kliuless at 5:41 PM on May 15, 2018