Another condensed excerpt from Lenny's research paper from law school, "Legal Frameworks for Psilocybin: A 'Magic' New Frontier for Mental Health Treatment."
Didn't know that shrooms had so many applications! I wonder if that works against them - it's typically effective to have a drug approved for a narrow use, with other applications added over time. Maybe psilocybin advocacy groups don't have a central strategy.
For sure. They have many use cases. I didn’t even include studies that speak to PTSD, OCD, etc. I started with depression, anxiety, and addictions because they are (1) common, and (2) still without a widely effective treatment.
I’d argue that if advocacy groups were to pick one route, they should strategize around either depression + anxiety (mental health advocacy) or PTSD (veteran’s advocacy).
Hi Alex, I’m glad you’re thinking along those lines — there’s another section in the original paper that deals with risk and mitigation. I may edit and post that.
To answer your question: generally no. A metastudy of psilocybin experiments found no meaningful risk of physiological addiction or long term harms.
But it’s nuanced. And it depends on the context. Psilocybin, like any other mind-altering substance, can be abused or misused. Your set (i.e. mindset) and setting matter. It goes without saying that uncontrolled, unsupervised usage could possibly lead to harmful outcomes.
In particular, psychedelic use can lead to HPPD or long-term psychosis, especially in people with certain conditions (say, schizophrenia or bipolar) — though that too is typically associated with psychs much stronger than psilocybin (LSD, DMT, etc).
Ultimately, I argue for psilocybin to be legalized in the safest way possible: in a clinical trial or medically prescribed, for patients who do not carry an uncommon condition that predisposes them to HPPD/psychosis, with careful dosage and intention, and some sort of direct or indirect supervision.
Also we could view the opportunity cost of using those as well. For example, extreme depression cases might warrant the benefits of usage despite potential unknown long term consequences due to the extremely low quality of life that those patients would otherwise have.
Didn't know that shrooms had so many applications! I wonder if that works against them - it's typically effective to have a drug approved for a narrow use, with other applications added over time. Maybe psilocybin advocacy groups don't have a central strategy.
For sure. They have many use cases. I didn’t even include studies that speak to PTSD, OCD, etc. I started with depression, anxiety, and addictions because they are (1) common, and (2) still without a widely effective treatment.
I’d argue that if advocacy groups were to pick one route, they should strategize around either depression + anxiety (mental health advocacy) or PTSD (veteran’s advocacy).
Are there any proven long term detrimental effects that you’ve seen in your research?
Hi Alex, I’m glad you’re thinking along those lines — there’s another section in the original paper that deals with risk and mitigation. I may edit and post that.
To answer your question: generally no. A metastudy of psilocybin experiments found no meaningful risk of physiological addiction or long term harms.
But it’s nuanced. And it depends on the context. Psilocybin, like any other mind-altering substance, can be abused or misused. Your set (i.e. mindset) and setting matter. It goes without saying that uncontrolled, unsupervised usage could possibly lead to harmful outcomes.
In particular, psychedelic use can lead to HPPD or long-term psychosis, especially in people with certain conditions (say, schizophrenia or bipolar) — though that too is typically associated with psychs much stronger than psilocybin (LSD, DMT, etc).
Ultimately, I argue for psilocybin to be legalized in the safest way possible: in a clinical trial or medically prescribed, for patients who do not carry an uncommon condition that predisposes them to HPPD/psychosis, with careful dosage and intention, and some sort of direct or indirect supervision.
Also we could view the opportunity cost of using those as well. For example, extreme depression cases might warrant the benefits of usage despite potential unknown long term consequences due to the extremely low quality of life that those patients would otherwise have.