Why did certain scientists say it was OK to use Ecstasy in couples/group therapy?
Why was LSD (then thought to be a great therapeutic agent) used in psychiatric wards when it was first coming to mainstream in the 60’s?
The question is a simple one, but my meaning is deeper. I mean, why were these drugs freely given to just anyone without any study of the drugs themselves done beforehand?
It was almost like they said, "hey, this screws with your brain, let’s give it to the guy who talks to himself in the corner over there and see what happens.
Did they really not have as much common sense as they seemed to not have back then?
I actually take the opposite view. Why was it decided that some possibly useful drugs are completely banned just because of recreational uses? That seems irresponsible.
As to the “unofficial testing” aspect, there really wasn’t widespread prescribed use of LSD by a lot of doctors. It was more of a limited informal trial situation. (I suspect that the CIA tested more people than all US doctors combined. And without many “patients” knowing about it. Now that’s scary.)
How do you test psychoactives on anybody other than humans? I mean you can do toxicity, blood tests and side-effects, but it’s not like there’s that many borderline pigs out there that can tell us how LSD makes them feel. It’s a pity psilocybin is no longer available due to stupid laws – that’s as close to a panacea for addiction disorders as we have ever gotten.
Getting binned on mushies for a bit of a laugh won’t do anything, sure… but the administration of psilocybin to facilitate therapy sessions has shown some degree of success with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and similar conditions. Not sure about addictions though.
I know that in the 60’s Eric Kast studied the use of LSD both as a method of pain-relief for cancer patients, and also as a method to help terminal patients come to grips with their impending demise.
It seems like the original question wasn’t so much a question about why LSD and other substances was banned, but why they were apparently tested on human subjects without the more rigorous standards we have today in regard to testing on human subjects.
The Research Act of 1974 was passed mainly because of ethically questionable studies that had been done on people throughout the first half of the 20th century. Some of the tests that a small number of psychotherapists were doing with LSD pale in comparison to some of the other stuff out there.
Between 1932 and 1972 399 African Americans were involved in the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis. Over the forty year period they were denied treatment for syphilis (even after penicillin was introduced as a highly effective treatment for syphilis in 1947) simply to see the effects of the untreated disease.
Debacles like this and many other tests performed on the poor, mentally ill, members of the military, and prisons that were done without informed consent spurred Congress to action and it passed the Research Act of 1974.
So the reason people were tested with psychoactive drugs without the sort of institutional standards and informed consent you see today, is because the law and ethics at the time hadn’t evolved and that sort of thing was not terribly uncommon. It’s because of public outrage that researchers have to get approval from Institutional Review Boards when doing human studies as well as provide informed consent to the subjects.
I will always believe the main push that started the crusade against ecstasy came from the alcohol lobby. Can you imagine a greater threat to the beer companies than a drug that can be taken once a night, keeps you feeling good for 4-6 hours, leaves relatively no hangover(compared to alcohol), and by nature of how it works, is unaddictive?
I also think it has potential as a treatment for other addictions as well. When my fraternity first discovered it, we basically went from 50 drunk assholes spending $100+ on alcohol for parties or at bars every weekend to 50 guys spending 25-50 bucks on MDMA. After the first time I rolled, I’ve never had a single urge to go out and get shitfaced drunk like we used to do. There is simply no fun in it.
Leary’s theory of LSD is that LSD breaks neurological imprints. That we are sometimes imprinted with negative emotions, and that the LSD can break that imprint, and within a clinical setting led by someone who knows what they are doing a person can be reimprinted with a more positive and beneficial imprint.
As much as everyone likes to talk trash about Leary, he was opposed to recreational use of LSD because in a random setting it would merely reinforce neurological imprints, or imprint whatever you happened to be experiencing at the time.
I prefer Alcohol to Ecstacy. Ecstacy gives me a vicious hangover unless I take it with acid, in which case there is a synergistic effect where the hangover of both cancel one another out. I know very few people that take just one e pill though, and the potential for abuse is very high.
The notion that E is not addictive is laughable. I have known plenty of addicts. It’s a Methamphetamine after all. A friend of mine used to have to sell a lot of acid because he’d get the E for free and then do it all, but still owe the Gangsters he got it from. E of course is far cheaper in a lot of places. In Europe it’s like $ 2-4 a pill in a lot of places. Here the markup is ridiculously high, and you still have a lot of kids popping half a dozen pills or more in a single night.
I would challenge you to find any study that says MDMA is physically addictive. Chemically, the active chemical in a Vicks inhaler is an amphetimine, and no one gets addicted to those.
I take anywhere from 3-7+ when I roll and almost never have a hangover(I also hydrate correctly, preload with 5HTP, B6, and magnesium as well), but I imagine this has quite a bit of variance from user to user.
I don’t know enough about chemical addiction to really tell you whether it is physically addictive, but emotionally/mentally, it certainly is. Can you go to a rave without taking anything at all and still have a good time or do you require the Ecstacy? I’ve seen too many people do it obsessively to believe it’s not addictive.
Many people cannot open up emotionally without ecstacy, and in that way it’s changed the lives of many people for the better, but I have seen dependence upon it to allow someone to enter into an emotionally open space which they cannot do without the drug.
E is not a “Methamphetamine”. It is also not addictive. People don’t get withdrawals, people don’t become prostitutes or frequent liquor stores to get that next hit of E.
E does not cause people the ability to lose access to their own regular personality; it provides access to other states of consciousness that many find enjoyable. A substance is not addictive merely because someone wants to do it more than once.
If you provided at least one cite to support your anecdotal assertions, someone might halfway take your proposition seriously. As it is, in one short post you’ve displayed such gross ignorance of both chemistry and addiction that you really have little business describing contrary ideas as “laughable.”
I’d also like to add that for the most part, people do not lose their decision making ability while on MDMA (yes, at extreme doses you can get stupid, but I don’t know anyone who would just eat 8 pills all at once). When you are too messed up to drive, you don’t drive. You don’t get in stupid bar fights. This is all anecdotal of course, but I would say that 95% of the people that I know that take it are able to make intelligent decisions while on it(as opposed to being drunk)
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine is not a methamphetamine? I agree that the extra groups tagged on make a profound difference in the effects, and the entire class is usually just called “amphetamines,” but chemically, MDMA most certainly can be called a methamphetamine (I suppose calling it a “derivative” would be more rigorous).
