Hey this "friend of mine" subscribes to Playboy and in this months issue there's a pretty decent article on the use of MDMA, LCD etc. for people who are dieing and need "end of life treatment"
Good rule of thumb: drugs are bad. Don't mess with them.<p>Exceptions: some aren't so bad, like caffeine or aspirin or wine. But always use in moderation.
Psychoactive drugs shouldn't be illegal, but they can be dangerous. They provide a lot of spiritual and psychological benefits for a lot of people, but have also wrecked a lot of people. Cocaine, heroin, amphetamines (including Rx) and alcohol are probably the worst, as far as I've seen. Psychedelics don't seem to be as damaging in general-- I think it could even be argued that alcohol is more dangerous than psilocybin-- but becoming an acid-head is a terrible idea. I find it astonishing that, although psychedelic experiences can be very interesting and illuminating, the vast majority of frequent drug users (e.g. 2-4x/month LSD users) are exhaustingly boring people.<p>Psychedelics are a completely different class of drug, of course, from coke and alcohol. Most people lump together utterly different behaviors (cocaine at a party vs. shrooms in the woods) into "doing drugs", and that isn't really fair. I think psychedelics have a lot of value to offer humanity, but they <i>are</i> dangerous and we, as a society, need to rediscover safe means of using them.
It's really irritating when scientists "rediscover" what people have known for years. Yes of course psilocybin can give people intense, potentially life-changing experiences. Did you think we were making all that shit up?<p>And it's not even that there is now empirical evidence to make it "true." These guys aren't the first to do these sorts of experiments.