Geeky Stats About Magic Mushrooms | Mother Jones

Geeky Stats About Magic Mushrooms
By Kevin Drum, Fri Jun. 17, 2011

Here's something a little offbeat for a Friday morning. A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has recently documented a safe, long-lasting way of improving both your life and your personal feelings of well-being: shrooms.

Or, more precisely, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Here's the boring news first: ingesting psilocybin produces a mystical experience that can be quantified. "Noetic quality," for example, increased from 19.4 on a placebo to 70.6 on the highest dose used in the study. "Transcendence of space and time" increased from 18.3 to 78.2. Etc. You probably already knew that.

Here's the somewhat more interesting news: psilocybin can sometimes produces bad trips full of fear and anxiety, but the researchers have also figured out how to minimize this. Partly this was due to the experimental design: "The study was designed to optimize the potential for positively valued experiences by providing 8 hours of preparation, administering psilocybin in a pleasant, supportive setting, and instructing volunteers to focus explicitly on their subjective or inner experience." They used soothing music, too. But they also tried various dosages of psilocybin on their subjects, and it turns out that nearly all of the episodes of anxiety happened at the highest dose. Crank it down one notch and you're still likely to get most of the benefits but with significantly less chance of a bad experience.

But now for the most interesting result: psilocybin produces not only mystical experiences, but joy, happiness, and positive social effects. And it does it for a long time: in followup interviews 14 months after the study was completed, nearly all the subjects still reported positive changes in their lives, especially if they received their psilocybin in increasing dosages. (Half the study volunteers got the highest dose first and worked down, and half started with the lowest does and worked up. All volunteers also got a placebo tossed in at some point.) Here are the geeky charts you've been waiting for:

(go click the link)

These effects were confirmed by interviews with friends of the volunteers who had been recruited to provide periodic feedback to the research team.

Notably, 61% of volunteers considered the psilocybin experience during either or both the [highest dosage] sessions to have been the single most spiritually significant of their lives, with 83% rating it in their top five. Consistent with this, 94% and 89% of volunteers, respectively, indicated that the experiences on those same sessions increased their well-being or life satisfaction and positively changed their behavior at least moderately.

....One month after sessions at either or both the two highest dose sessions, 94% of volunteers endorsed that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction moderately or very much, and 89% rated moderate or higher changes in positive behavior. At the 14-month follow-up, these ratings remained high. The types of behavior change most frequently cited by volunteers were better social relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased spiritual practice (Table 6). Ratings by community observers before and after the study as well as ratings by study monitors after the study were consistent with the persisting positive changes in behavior and attitudes claimed by the volunteers.

So there you have it: a genuine mystical experience with long-lasting positive effects, no reported negative effects, no known medical side effects in healthy people, and with virtually no chance of a bad experience. Does that sound like something you'd like to try? Well, you can't: no matter how safe and beneficial it might be, psilocybin is a Schedule 1 controlled substance and you can't have any. You may thank the War on Drugs whenever you like.

For a taste of what the volunteers said about their psilocybin experiences, keep reading. A selection of comments from the Hopkins study is below

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Loosely related: The Drug War Turns 40 | Mother Jones

The Drug War Turns 40
— By Asawin Suebsaeng
Fri Jun. 17, 2011

It's been 40 years to the day since President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, kicking off a quagmire that every commander in chief after him has inherited.

Both the Global Commission on Drug Policy and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) have recently released reports calling for decriminalization and large-scale restructuring of drug policy.

LEAP's June 14 report, titled "Ending the Drug War: a Dream Deferred," [PDF] makes special note of Gil Kerlikowske, the Drug Czar appointed by President Obama in early 2009, a man they also claim refused to meet with their police representatives earlier this week when the group unveiled its report in Washington. The critical report covers much of the expected ground: prohibition breeds protracted turf wars, law enforcement officers have more productive things to do with their time, and the United States is "waging war against [the] seriously ill." Regarding Kerlikowske, LEAP calls him out for misleading rhetoric and doubletalk.
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When he assumed office, Kerlikowske spoke of putting an emphasis on the public health aspect of the issue, publicly disavowed the use of the phrase "War on Drugs," and talked about his son's arrest on drug-related charges. This, in the view of some progressives, made him the best drug czar the country's ever had since the position was created in 1989. But even back then he delivered friendly soundbites like "we’re not at war with people in this country" in the same breath that he labeled marijuana a life-threatening substance.

Since his appointment to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Kerlikowske's tenure has demonstrated no real shift in policy. He has overseen an escalation in the controversial Mérida Initiative, which has only increased bloodshed. In 2010, when California attempted to legalize pot via Prop 19, it was Kerlikowske who threatened a federal suit.

And in spite of a greater flow of US funding and manpower, and a mounting death toll south (and north) of the border, he still claimed in March that the Obama administration had "ended" the drug war two years ago.

These days, Kerlikowske doesn't seem that much different from his predecessors. The drug war didn't just stop because he said so.

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What kills me is how much this echoes AIS's comment on the Libya non-war affair. Basically, Obama and Obama Team say all the right thing and then proceed to do fuck all. But, if Obama's white hair is anything to go by, he still stresses about it. Dude, relax. Doing fuck all shouldn't be that hard...

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Quote:

Notably, 61% of volunteers considered the psilocybin experience during either or both the [highest dosage] sessions to have been the single most spiritually significant of their lives, with 83% rating it in their top five. Consistent with this, 94% and 89% of volunteers, respectively, indicated that the experiences on those same sessions increased their well-being or life satisfaction and positively changed their behavior at least moderately. ....One month after sessions at either or both the two highest dose sessions, 94% of volunteers endorsed that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction moderately or very much, and 89% rated moderate or higher changes in positive behavior. At the 14-month follow-up, these ratings remained high. The types of behavior change most frequently cited by volunteers were better social relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased spiritual practice (Table 6). Ratings by community observers before and after the study as well as ratings by study monitors after the study were consistent with the persisting positive changes in behavior and attitudes claimed by the volunteers.

Wow, I'd hate to be that easily influenced.

On the other hand, I would love to see a guy given a placebo and told it was shrooms. Videos of that please.

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Why assume you wouldn't be?

I don't particularly fancy a greater sense of spirituality myself, but I know that one of the effects of psilocybin is a sense of nature beeing a sort of living, breathing greater entity. In people who live in jungles etc. it strongly supports the idea that the world is full of conscious, willful spirits. I don't tknow that someone with a modern mindest would get exactly the same result; the sense would not doubt be the same, but the interpretation would probably be different. On the other hand, if most of our sense of self and perception of the world is in essense chemical, then drug induced experiences are not inherently different to any other. To some extent, I can say, this can serve to broaden your perspective on life, the universe and everything. Give you a sort of neutral and even external position to look back at your habitual mentality. In that respect I can agree with the view that it can enhance well-being and life satisfaction, even without being an ongoing effect and not exclusively due to being induced by the drug as such.

Frex, I can say from experience, Ecstacy makes you happy. By happy I don't mean, drunk or delirious or that sort of thing, I do mean happy in exactly the sense you are happy in the best of circumstances. And that is in fact quite an interesting experience, precisely because it is mechanically imposed; you can look at your life and compare this state to when you have in fact experienced anything approaching it. I'm certain there are people who have used that experience as a baseline for what in life has really made them happy, as opposed to those things they thought would make them happy, or when they tried to convince themselves they were happy, and derived from that a greater degree of satisfaction with their lives, with themselves. In this respect it serves as self-knowledge. Allegedly, although I don't know from personal experience, LSD can do much the same. Cannabis can have a similar effect, it lets you look at the world with a not-giving-a-shit attitude. So sure there are people who take it and drop out of the rat race, that doesn't strike me as a bad thing. That would only be bad if the rat race were in some way virtuous.

I guess in summary that because these things are so physical, they can over-rule social conditioning. Many people benefit from that.

Quote:

Why assume you wouldn't be?

Because I've got a terrible memory. I might have had any number of life-changing experiences, but after a few days I can guarantee I'll have forgotten all about them.

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Memory is just another layer of physio-chemical patterning. You presume there is some you that is consistent over time, rather than being an artefact of your experience.

The OP is a very interesting article.
FWIW, it coincides very closely with reported results of any "genuine" intense spiritual event, epiphany or whatever. The mechanisms are probably the same. Just because one is induced by an external chemical and the other is induced by spiritual practices that elicit internal chemical responses, doesn't make one experience more valid than the other.

It is also interesting that the preparation is needed to get the most benefit. That is certainly true of most spiritual practices much to the dismay of wannabe practitioners, "dabblers" and spiritual travelers.

F

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Since I was in Holland at the time and it's perfectly legal over there, I think I can safely disclose that I used shrooms... a grand total of two times.

The first time was awesome. I was with a very close friend of mine and it certainly boosted our empathy levels - No, nothing sexual happened, you perverts but we had a great time playing the bar pinball machine (and winning like maniacs - the balls seemed so slow compared to our reflexes... but our legs seemed cut off). It basically was an awesome time shared with a friend.

The second time was less good - Nothing like a bad trip but we put on a 'funny' movie to try and get into the hilarity zone and I think the movie was funny but not 'stupid' enough to make us laugh out loud so it failed.

I would quite like to try out again with something like "Wedding Crashers" on or somesuch. But, alas, I don't go to Holland anymore...

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Originally Posted by contracycle

Memory is just another layer of physio-chemical patterning. You presume there is some you that is consistent over time, rather than being an artefact of your experience.

Well it's my memory. I don't need to presume.

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Sure. But even if your conscious memory is poor doesn't mean you aren't affected by your experiences.