Psychedelica worden eindelijk ook gebruikt tegen depressies en andere psychische aandoeningen

Het is al lang bekend dat microdoseringen van bepaalde psychedelische producten kunnen helpen tegen depressies en andere psychische aandoeningen, terwijl in de VS juist een beweging ontstaat die alle psychedelische drugs verboden willen houden...... Je had waarschijnlijk wel begrepen dat hier een hele dikke lobby van de farmaceutische maffia achter zit.....

Echter de kans dat psychedelische drugs als cannabis* in de hele VS verboden zullen worden is te verwaarlozen, zeker nu de staten die e.e.a. hebben vrijgegeven, binnenlopen met de belastingen die worden geheven op die middelen.....

In de EU is de wetenschap al langer bezig zaken als MDMA, de werkzame stof in XTC, te verwerken als microdosis, hetzelfde geldt voor truffels en paddo's met de werkzame stof psilocybine, waar voor beide middelen al mensen zijn overgestapt van psychofarmaca op dit soort middelen (zoals gezegd met microdoseringen). Microdoseringen met psilocybine vergroten o.a. de creativiteit en empathie 

Uit begin 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw weet ik dat mensen experimenteerden met microdoseringen LSD, volgens de gebruikers destijds een probaat middel tegen depressies en psychoses.

Het volgende artikel over microdosering met ketamine in de hoofdrol (wordt gebruikt in VS ziekenhuizen), werd geschreven door Elias Marat en eerder geplaatst op The Mind Unleashed, door mij overgenomen van Anti-Media:

Psychedelic Drugs Are Finally Being Used to Treat Depression in US Hospitals

Scientists and psychiatrists are embracing psychedelic drugs as “game-changers” in the fight to treat depression.

August 19, 2019 at 7:44 am

Written by The Mind Unleashed

(TMU) — As the country increasingly sheds its prohibitionist stereotypes and misconceptions about psychedelic drugs, scientists and psychiatrists are increasingly embracing their potent qualities as “game-changers” in the fight to treat mental health disorders.

The new trend unfolding across the U.S. has converted drugs like ketamine—once known primarily as a recreational drug used at raves and underground concerts—into a powerful tool for mental health professionals in the Midwest, according to the Times of Northwest Indiana.

Dr. Joseph Fanelli, a psychiatrist who is the medical director for behavioral health services at St. Catherine Hospital in East Chicago, told the Times:

“It’s a pretty exciting time that we’ve entered over the last few years.”

Continuing, Fanelli noted that in the case of ketamine, researchers have found a drug that kicks in almost immediately versus the weeks that antidepressants take to make an impact. Ketamine treatment is “one of the most rapid, dramatic treatments we’ve had and been able to use in a long time,” he noted.

Ketamine is a strong sedative and dissociative that has been used in the veterinary and medical fields since the 1960s, but it has also been known as a club drug for nearly just as long.

Numerous studies in the recent past have shown how ketamine can be a powerful treatment option for major depression. And in March, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the approval of a ketamine-based nasal spray for treating depression that was patented by Johnson & Johnson, as previously reported by the Mind Unleashed.

The drug, called esketamine, has a slight chemical variation from the original substance and must be administered in a doctor’s office under tight monitoring due to the potential for hallucinations. However, Fanelli noted that any such dose is far lower than the amount typically used on the streets.

Fanelli noted:

“The effect patients get when treated with it is rarely anything like a high …Patients might feel foggy-headed or lightheaded. The main thing we watch them for is to make sure they’re fully alert, not sedated.”

Many of the patients leave his office saying things like “Maybe I felt something, I don’t know,” due to the fact that “it’s not really a pronounced effect” despite esketamine’s potency as an antidepressant. The drug is being given in conjunction with oral antidepressants for those who felt their previous antidepressants no longer offered relief or whose effects wore off.

Fanelli added that the treatment’s length and intensity depends on the individual patient. He explained:Dr. D. Alam

“Some people have a course of ketamine of two or three times a week for maybe two to four weeks, then they may be fine without the need for anything else … Some people have to have it continued, once a week or month; sometimes less often or more often.”

Dr. Danesh Alam, medical director of behavioral health for Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Illinois, said that ketamine could one day become a “first line of intervention” for suicidal patients. He noted:

“It’s going to probably change the way we practice psychiatry and medicine.”

Alam warned that despite the FDA’s approval for esketamine, government restrictions continue to make it difficult to research the psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs, along with marijuana, while other countries are able to conduct such research. He said:

 “It’s hard to study (drugs) if you can’t do it with federal support.”

Indeed, a growing body of research has laid out the benefits of psychedelic drugs such as magic mushrooms. Recent studies have shown how a microdose of psilocybin—far from the level needed for a full-blown trip—actually increases the creativity and empathy of participants. Advocates note that psilocybin has also shown great promise in psychotherapeutic settings.

Alam sees the current moment as “a challenging and exciting time in our field: challenging because of how society is affected by the opioid crisis, the suicide crisis, and I’d add in the trauma crisis. The exciting part is new treatments may help us treat the disorders associated with all of these conditions.”

By Elias Marat / Creative Commons / The Mind Unleashed / Report a typo

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* Cannabis, ook een psychedelisch middel, dat in diverse verwerkingen al wordt gebruikt tegen een groot aantal klachten, o.a. klachten bij ernstige aandoeningen als kanker.

LSD niet alleen als therapiemiddel maar ook om tot een betere wereld te komen

Het gebruik van middelen als paddo's, MDMA (ook wel ecstacy of XTC genaamd), LSD en cannabis geniet al jaren veel belangstelling van wetenschappers, psychiaters, artsen en psychologen, bij psychiatrie en de wetenschap is dat zelfs al vele decennia.

Steeds meer aandoeningen worden toegevoegd aan de lange lijst van aandoeningen (zowel geestelijk als fysiek) die met succes kunnen worden behandeld met één van de voornoemde psychedelica.

Zo kunnen posttraumatische stressstoornissen positief worden behandeld met MDMA, zaken als depressies en concentratiekampsyndroom (of KZ-syndroom) kunnen succesvol met LSD worden behandeld en dat cannabis o.a. kan worden gebruikt als pijnstiller is intussen redelijk algemeen bekend, echter cannabis kan ook helpen als middel bij staar, een middel om ADHD'ers beter te laten functioneren en voor het opwekken van eetlust bij kankerpatiënten.

Hieronder opgenomen een artikel over LSD van Vikram Zutshi, waarin hij o.a. schrijft over het gebruik van LSD als middel om tot een betere wereld te komen, een wereld waar de hersenspoeling door onderwijs, media en religie teniet kan worden gedaan door nieuwe netwerken in de hersenen te ontwikkelen (middels het gebruik van LSD). Daarmee zal de mens i.p.v. tegen elkaar op te staan, eerder elkaar de hand reiken om samen te zorgen dat de wereld niet ten onder gaat aan haat, afgunst, onverantwoord gebruik van grondstoffen en ga nog maar even door.

Niet voor niets ook dat vele overheden zich zo afzetten tegen het gebruik van drugs als cannabis, paddo's, LSD en XTC. Terwijl men alcohol gewoon blijft accepteren en zelfs pissig wordt als je deze drug een harddrug noemt, wat het wel degelijk is......... Veronderstel dat er dagelijks 12 mensen zouden overlijden aan het gebruik van XTC, het hek zou van de dam zijn, terwijl dit bij alcohol de dagelijkse praktijk is..... (en daar mag gewoon reclame voor worden gemaakt; vergeet voorts niet dat alcohol fiks kankerverwekkend is!)

Lees het volgend artikel en geeft het door, het is de hoogste tijd dat het verzet tegen de genoemde drugs algemeen als contraproductief wordt gezien en erkend...... Dit verzet kost ons bovendien een enorm bedrag aan politie-inzet en het voeren van rechtszaken...... Al is de georganiseerde misdaad uiteraard wel blij met een repressief drugsbeleid, je kan verzet tegen deze drugs dan ook rustig aanmerken als lobby voor de drugsmaffia! Zo kan men de prijzen verhogen door te wijzen op dat repressieve beleid, bovendien: pubers vinden alles wat verboden is op dat gebied uiterst interessant en zullen proberen als met alcohol deze drugs te verkrijgen.... (zoals je weet: waar een wil is is een weg....) 

In de tijd dat Nederland als enige een gedoogbeleid voerde, op in ieder geval softdrugs, waren de problemen met andere drugs verwaarloosbaar vergeleken met de ellende waar omliggende landen mee te maken hadden......

The Political Significance of LSD: What You’re Not Being Told

June 6, 2018 at 9:36 pm

Written by Open Democracy

(OD Op-ed) — “Microdosing” on psychedelic substances like LSD—ingesting just enough to heighten cognitive faculties, enhance creativity, improve concentration and alleviate depression—is currently back in vogue among people not normally associated with anything remotely ‘countercultural’ in the USA.

The term psychedelic was coined in 1958 by British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and is derived from the Greek words psyche (“soul, mind”) and delein(“to manifest”), hence “soul-manifesting,” the implication being that psychedelics can access the soul and develop unused potentials in the human mind. It’s a contention that’s gaining increased acceptance in mainstream universities.

New York University, for example, is hosting clinical trials using psilocybin to treat alcohol addiction. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has been at the forefront of research in treating patients suffering from chronic treatment-resistant PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) with MDMA, commonly known as ‘Ecstasy'. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently designated its MDMA-assisted psychotherapy project as a ‘breakthrough therapy.’ Apart from MDMA, MAPS also advocates the use of Ayahuasca, Ibogaine and medical marijuana for a variety of conditions ranging from bipolar syndrome and drug addiction to autism-related disorders, ADHD and clinical depression.

The therapeutic use of psychedelics isn’t new. Between 1953 and 1973, the US federal government funded over a hundred studies on LSD with more than 1,700 subjects participating.

Psychedelics were tested on convicts, substance abusers, people suffering from chronic depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenics and terminal cancer patients. LSD was also tested on artists and scientists to explore its effects on creativity, and on divinity students to examine spirituality from a neuroscientific perspective. The empirical data gathered from these tests was largely positive.

LSD “truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind… and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority” says author Michael Pollan in his book How To Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. And that’s what makes this subject socially and politically interesting.

“It is curious to me that what I see as the two greatest threats—environmental crisis and [political] tribalism—these drugs directly address both those mindsets” Pollan told the Guardian in a recent interview. “They undermine our tendency to objectify nature, to think of ourselves as separate from it. They undermine tribalism in that people tend to emerge from these experiences thinking that we are all more alike, all more connected.”

If this is true, then those of us committed to social transformation must start to take the use of psychedelics much more seriously. But what’s the actual or potential connection between LSD and politics?

It was a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman who discovered the drug by accident in 1938. While conducting research on another pharmaceutical compound he absorbed the drug through his skin and staggered home to lie down on his sofa, where, “in a dreamlike state, with eyes closed”, he wrote later, “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.” Hoffman felt he had been given the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.”

A few decades later in August 1960, Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist from Harvard University, traveled to Cuernavaca in Mexico and ingested psilocybin (‘magic’) mushrooms for the first time, an experience that radically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented  that he had “learned more about … (his) brain and its possibilities…[and] more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than…in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.” Leary became a lifelong evangelist for the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics.

Theoretical physicist Carlos Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, says his romance with quantum theory and the mysteries of the space-time continuum were sparked by his LSD trips as a student radical at the University of Bologna. “It was an extraordinarily strong experience that touched me also intellectually,” he told the Guardian. “Among the strange phenomena was the sense of time stopping. Things were happening in my mind but the clock was not going ahead; the flow of time was not passing any more. It was a total subversion of the structure of reality. How do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong?”

Rovelli has spent the better part of his life grappling with the relationship between space, time and consciousness, fundamental concepts that underlie existence and how we simultaneously perceive the world and shape it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” he writes, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” The concept of time, he says, “has lost layers one after another, piece by piece.” We are left with “an empty windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality…a world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty.”

Large parts of the world are being polarized at a rate rarely seen before, helped in no small measure by social media ‘filter bubbles’ and algorithms that divide people sharply along the lines of nationality or ideology, their underlying human connections rendered increasingly irrelevant.

Perhaps such deep hatred and suspicion of the other was always there, but now it has taken center stage and is being used as a potent election strategy by populist and hyper-nationalist leaders the world over. Like herds of cattle, large numbers of people are being programmed and deployed as pawns for a larger agenda.

Therefore, perhaps real change begins with rewiring our perceptual framework. Psychedelic substances have been ingested sacramentally by indigenous cultures to achieve this goal since the dawn of time, and now they’re being validated by the scientific and medical communities.

The shifts in consciousness that can be brought about by psychedelics can help in dissolving the man-made boundaries or fear of the other that are implanted in our collective psyche.

While Silicon Valley bio-hackers microdosing on LSD to enhance their workplace performance may not be looking to bring about tectonic shifts in collective consciousness, there’s no reason to restrict the use of psychedelics to these groups and purposes. They could also work as a potent catalyst to awaken humankind to the dangers of toxic nationalism and rabid nativism that threaten to engulf us.

Op-ed by Vikram Zutshi / Creative Commons / Open Democracy / Report a typo