Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization

This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging.

> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards

The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.

There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.

There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.

> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.

The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.

This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.

There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.

I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.

Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.

We are struggling to pay for the research that would result in these being effective treatments (not subscription medicines) that would start out as generic drugs.

> ketamine

Great example, SPRAVATO, is a brand name patent protected version of this drug (enantiomer) that as a dose cost over 500 bucks.

Even the bizarre murder of Central American fishermen is justified by someone somewhere having a dime bag or something.

Who needs trials , or evidence. Drugs are bad.

Government good.

Drugs bad.

i can think of a way to find out :)

we'll have to take it in stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial

In particular it is the thumbnails that look identical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NeLNYCGo0 The Zombies Of America! (i have never seen anything like this..) by Frank van Dam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snN0PNZVWNA Inside Philadelphia's Real Life Zombie Outbreak by Tyler Oliveira

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htZCX1Y0ZiA THE ZOMBIES OF AMERICA (I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS) by Joe HaTTab

Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.

Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.

There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.

What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?

Imagine what effect alcohol has

Consider the question yourself next time you are in the throes of an exoerience and see how hard it is to maintain objectivity...

Is it such a leap that fungi are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity so maybe our early ancestors took it to get the evolutionary process started.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory

Recycled Lamarckianism would be Lysenkoism. :)

In fact, when you take fungi, it tones down common neural pathways and allows new ones to form between new places.