Posts tagged "fear"
Control Freaks: America and its Uncontrolled Substances
I’ve analyzed the psychology of Prohibition before, concluding that the War on Drugs is a deceit maintained by the national ego. In this article I take a deeper look at how the desire for control affects our laws and language. This is a prelude to my six-part essay on language called Reclaiming the Prohibition Debate. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. —Goethe Humans like to feel in control. This is not always a bad thing, but it becomes problematic when we are so obsessed with the illusion of control that we forego the...
Ego, Fear, and the War on Drug Users
“Over one’s mind and over one’s body, the individual is sovereign.” —John Stuart Mill From the point of view of psychedelic enthusiasts, the prohibitionist stance is farcically weak. The moral imperative could not be more obvious: stop jailing non-violent consciousness explorers and give us back our tax dollars. But let’s consider how we got here to begin with. I don’t want to talk about Nixon and the Controlled Substance Act, or the DEA, or how America has exported its neurotic drug policy to the rest of the world. I won’t even present data revealing how ineffective and dehumanizing...
Low dose psychedelics increase neurogenesis, help mice unlearn fear
A new study of mice published in Experimental Brain Research shows that low doses (but not high doses) of psychedelics increase the rate of neuron creation in the hippocampus, and help the mice to rapidly unlearn conditioned fear responses. From the abstract (paragraph breaks added for readability): Drugs that modulate serotonin (5-HT) synaptic concentrations impact neurogenesis and hippocampal (HPC)-dependent learning. The primary objective is to determine the extent to which psilocybin (PSOP) modulates neurogenesis and thereby affects acquisition and extinction of HPC-dependent trace fear conditioning. PSOP, the 5-HT2A agonist 25I-NBMeO and the 5-HT2A/Cantagonist ketanserin were administered via an acute intraperitoneal injection...
Ketamine shows promise in treating “Fear of Harm”
There has been a huge resurgence of research on psychedelic and dissociative drugs recently. This is very promising because for 40 years, the study of these very promising medical compounds was shelved in the name of prohibition. Finally, after decades of hiatus, we are able to shed light on some of these compounds in controlled clinical settings. The studies may be small and few in number right now, but their positive results should help open the door to larger and ever more diverse studies. If early studies are any indication, the medical potential of psychedelics is absolutely vast....