April 21, 2012

Medical psilocybin.

Easing your way down life's off ramp.

Why not? The boomers are aging. The death panels will be handing out prescriptions.

Turn on, tune in, drop out... indeed.

18 comments:

LYNNDH said...

Solyant Green, coming our way.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Well, old people and mushrooms are treated the same.

Kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

"After Reamer’s psilocybin experience, she separated from her husband. Eventually, she stopped practicing medicine. She started regularly meditating. She bought a house. “I read somewhere that, with my kind of leukemia, even if I stay in remission, the most I have left is 15 or 20 years. So that’s my sentence. But after I die, well, there could be a next phase. I believe that now.”

edutcher said...

The Conservatives have always been pro-life and pro-choice.

And the Lefties have always been pro-death.

Now it's out there for everyone to see.

Anonymous said...

Conservatives are pro choice?!

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

"Broader awareness of these sorts of end-of-life psychedelic studies could be good for everyone, the researchers say. “If insurance companies knew about our outcomes, they might get a lot more interested in what we’re doing here.” Griffiths continued: “When you make people less afraid to die, then they’re less likely to cling to life at a huge cost to society.

"After having such a transcendent experience, individuals with terminal illness often show a markedly reduced fear of dying and no longer feel the need to aggressively pursue every last medical intervention available. Instead they become more interested in the quality of their remaining life as well as the quality of their death.”

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

The Soylent Green-ness is all over the place. Not only the grafs John Lynch points out (8:23), which frankly scare me shitless, but the whole floral-scented, flowing-cloth atmosphere of the room in the study itself.

wyo sis said...

Allie
Pro death as a liberal descriptor is much more honest.

edutcher said...

AllieOop said...

Conservatives are pro choice?!

Conservatives want people to live free and make their own choices in life.

Lefties want people to do as they say.

SGT Ted said...

I don't want to hear anymore whining about medical pot. :)

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

The problem with having a realistic view of life and death is that you either become depressed (in my view depression is a rational response to the human condition), or you realize that society is based on the illusion of immortality. We go to work every day with the belief that we'll be able to do what we want later.

Well, there is no later.

Once you process that fact the present becomes a lot more important.

traditionalguy said...

Conservatives are pro choice.

In abortion area the Conservatives want a Legal Guardian appointed for the unborn baby to honor the baby's choice. We are very pro about the baby's choice.

But the legal system has washed its hands of the guilt. It is not a legal issue until the 5th vote on the SCOTUS decides that it is one again.

leslyn said...

Bless your hearts, did even half of you bother to read the article? Althouse throws "death panels" out there and you jump on it like a bunch of lemmings.

"When the research was completed in 2008 —(and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) —the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths."

If that's what "death panel" has come to mean then gimme my script when I find out I'm stage 4 terminal. And yes, I will pay for it.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Half of me read it.

autothreads said...


"So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day.

"Which will finish her off in a month or two," the doctor confided to Bernard. "One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can't."


-Brave New World
Aldous Huxley

RigelDog said...

Sure there are obvious Brave New World and Soylent Green analogies here, but I find this research exciting and long overdue. Like any tool it could be used for good or ill. If you are terminally ill; if you are paralyzed by anxiety for whatever reason, what business is it of the government to deny you relief? People in chronic pain, even those who will die soon, are often denied adequate narcotics because---oh, the horror!---they might become addicted. Or,even worse, feel something of an enjoyable high.

Bartender Cabbie said...

I know of a person who ate a few mushrooms then proceeded to run through the town on a Sunday morning clad in only a t shirt. Into a church he ran then headed to a donut shop. He went into the front, jumped the counter, then exited the shop out the drive through window.

Most were shocked that he was not apprehended in the donut shop but he was so quick he surprised the cops on duty there.

True story

walter said...

As an advocate to two family member with "terminal" cancer, I have researched and seen a wide range of realities within the category.
In short, the medical and legal landscape can funnel the figuratively blind to a premature "palliative/hospice" stage despite real options for the patient and doc willing to explore. In the case mentioned in the article, I have to wonder if Dr. Nagourney at Rational Therapeutics was ever involved. Likely not. But true "choice" would mean acknowledging the limits of by the book SOP oncology.