I know this comment was meant to be facetious, but this is actually how many people spiral into addiction. Recreational drugs feel like they're "working" when they make the person's problems temporarily disappear, but in reality the person hasn't solved anything. When the problems inevitably return, the temptation is to reach for more drugs. Tolerance is real, though, so people tend to reach for escalating doses over time. The cumulative effects of drug abuse and avoidance behavior begin to add up, compounding the original problems and digging the person into an even deeper hole.
That's why these successful programs are always therapy-first, rather than drug-first. The focus is first on identifying and fixing problems, using drugs to potentially amplify the therapy rather than avoid the problems.
Sadly, most of these studies lack any control groups (e.g. therapy-only) to compare against. If you look at the graphs in the study, patients were already reporting massive improvements after the first 3 therapy sessions, before taking any MDMA at all. Unfortunately, I don't think we can draw any conclusions about the MDMA in this study other than it didn't appear to make things worse when it was introduced.
IMO the difference between a drug, a medicine, and a psychedelic is behavioral more than substantive, although different substances do have more or less tendency for abuse.
Morphine is a medicine until you take like a drug. MDMA is a psychedelic at a rave and a medicine on a therapist's couch. By all reports, there's no possible way to abuse ayahuasca.
You will have more mileage with someone experienced, and more still with a professional, just like you would with other therapy practices that you can teach yourself, like meditation and yoga.
AFAIK addiction is mostly about a person's life, and not the things they ingest. That's why rehab clinic success is so heavily dependent on the support network (or lack thereof) the person returns to. You have to have something to avoid in the first place to turn to substances to avoid them.
"By all reports, there's no possible way to abuse ayahuasca."
I don't know where you heard this, but this is a highly dubious assertion.
I know people who have in fact abused ayahuasca, take it compulsively, and have had negative impacts on their life from taking it.
There's a long and sad history of various drugs being claimed to be harmless or even beneficial, only to have it revealed later that they aren't.
Cocaine was such a drug, with Freud being a huge fan of it, claiming it as a miracle cure with no potential for abuse. In fact it was used to treat morphine addiction.
Heroin was also initially used as a treatment for morphine addiction.
The methadone came around, and was used to treat heroin addiction. But, surprise! It turns out that just like heroin and cocaine, methadone itself can be addictive.
Marijuana was widely hyped as completely harmless, but it turns out that some people can get (psychologically) addicted to it, abuse it, and suffer negative effects.
Anything (whether drug, activity, object, or food) that is highly desirable can be abused.
>The methadone came around, and was used to treat heroin addiction. But, surprise! It turns out that just like heroin and cocaine, methadone itself can be addictive.
That's a little unfair to methadone. It is less addictive than heroin and morphine. But users figured out how to combine it with other drugs to get a stronger high, which led to some recreational abuse. It's sad that these maintenance programs are so widely disparaged when they are in fact valuable treatments for opioid use disorder supported by extensive medical evidence that are underutilized due to popular misconceptions and paranoia.
I know of two cases that aquitances were involved in. One person was suicidal, and doing it multiple times per month. I don't want to get into details but the shortest way to explain it is the person was psychotic and believed they were part of a cult of dead people and Ayahuasca kept them "alive".
The other person was a compulsive liar and kept on jumping from cult to cult until they landed in an Ayahuasca christian sect saying they were very experienced trip guides. After a few months of "secretly" doing it I assume to understand how it worked to be able to deliver on their promises they got discovered and kicked out.
Psychedelic mania or psychedelic psychosis is a thing. I don't think any substance that affects your perception in such a way will ever be free from that nasty side effect. There's people that actually binge smoke DMT multiple times per week because they really believe they are in contact with spirits and start acting that narrative with life changing consequences. The incorrect social circle or antisocial tendencies will turn that person into a monster living in hell. And if you don't know about smoking DMT let's say that making sense of the experience requires a great deal of... interpretation. Of the psychedelics it's one of the ones that will on most cases hardly create anything that is even mildly similar to reality in the "breakthrough" world.
You could argue that people who are microdosing are abusing strong psychoactive drugs. It's interesting that you can take a full dose of such drugs, and have no desire to repeat the experience for some time (months, years), yet small functional doses is something that you would look forward to repeating every few days.
Speaking from personal experience, microdosing was something that I wanted to push to the limits of being a microdose until it became a "minidose". I was a bit relieved when I lost my stash (due to my own drugged up incompetence), it was becoming a way to just slightly trip out two times a week.
As strong as a full blown DMT experience can be, people abuse all sorts of substances with scary effects from solvents, to cough syrup, to Salvia.
Unfortunately (and I am a fan of psychedelics when used in the 'right' way) I think it is indeed possible to abuse psychedelic drugs, not perhaps in the sense of addiction, but it can still be a habit (with negative consequences) of sorts for some people, either alone or as a part of polysubstance abuse, or be used to manipulate people who are more susceptible under the influence. I have seen some examples of this.
It absolutely was not. I'm a caffeine addict and my life is a lot better for it, as far as I can tell.
There's a continuous gradient between "medicine", "habit", "functional addiction", and "rock bottom addiction". It's hard to draw defining lines on other peoples' spectra.
> I'm a caffeine addict and my life is a lot better for it, as far as I can tell.
False equivalency is a massive problem in online drug discourse. It's not helpful to lump all substances into a single "drugs" category and then draw conclusions by cherry-picking specific substances like caffeine. We have plenty of evidence that caffeine is safe to consume regularly over the long term. Trying to consume MDMA at a similar frequency would provided disastrous long-term effects. It's disingenuous to try to equate the two substances.
> There's a continuous gradient between "medicine", "habit", "functional addiction", and "rock bottom addiction". It's hard to draw defining lines on other peoples' spectra.
It's not really as arbitrary as you make it sound.
The bigger problem is that addicts almost always fail to categorize their own usage, especially in the early phases. It's frighteningly common to hear addicts rationalize their escalating addictions as self-medication, or for alcoholics to convince themselves that they are functional alcoholics as their lives slowly fall apart.
I chose caffeine as an uncontroversial example, to demonstrate the breadth of the spectrum. I am not equating them; indeed it was chosen for maximum contrast.
Everyone on this planet does things to alter their mental state and status, from running, to masturbation, to coffee, to meditation, to SSRIs from the pharmacy, to drink, to cigarettes, to recreational illicit stimulants like cocaine, to intravenous heroin from the streetcorner. I could plot a continuous curve between the extremes, and it isn't any of our place to say where "therapy" ends and "addiction" starts for any other person, because of the wide range of procedures, practices, frequencies, dosages, and effects, both positive and negative.
I took way to much mdma when I was in my twenties, it really messed up my short term memory and I'm pretty certain the affects on my memory are still there. At the time I think it started to mess with my confidence too. I had some great times on it and actually meet my future wife on it. Over all I wish I'd never tried it though. It was too good. Then after a while the nastier side of it outweighed the fun and we stopped doing it.
I can definitely see how it could help couples talk through their difficulties and it seems to bond people closer together.
As an aside I know a guy who completely fucked himself by doing mdma farvto much. It was really sad to meet him after a few years, he'd gone from happy outgoing to a paranoid mess.
> it really messed up my short term memory and I'm pretty certain the affects on my memory are still there. At the time I think it started to mess with my confidence too.
> As an aside I know a guy who completely fucked himself by doing mdma farvto much. It was really sad to meet him after a few years, he'd gone from happy outgoing to a paranoid mess.
The public discourse on MDMA is in a strange place. Many people desperately want to believe that it doesn't have negative consequences, but anyone who has watched acquaintances go downhill with repeated MDMA use knows that it's hardly free of side effects. The problem is that internet commenters will quickly come up with any and every excuse to dismiss negative studies, anecdotes, and evidence. The usual strategy is to blame polydrug abuse or imply that the drugs were somehow impure.
Have you ever taken NAC (N-acetyl cysteine) supplement - try taking it daily for 2-4 weeks to see if that helps you recover; search NAC + MDMA to see anecdotal evidence, there's lots on Reddit.
People can fuck themselves up on any substance if abused, that friend may be able to undo the damage done with MDMA via Ayahuasca ceremonies - perhaps via the neurogenesis that is seen with Ayahuasca use to recreate pathways that may have been lost due to excessive MDMA use. Not a doctor.
That's why these successful programs are always therapy-first, rather than drug-first. The focus is first on identifying and fixing problems, using drugs to potentially amplify the therapy rather than avoid the problems.
Sadly, most of these studies lack any control groups (e.g. therapy-only) to compare against. If you look at the graphs in the study, patients were already reporting massive improvements after the first 3 therapy sessions, before taking any MDMA at all. Unfortunately, I don't think we can draw any conclusions about the MDMA in this study other than it didn't appear to make things worse when it was introduced.