alt Hacker NewsWonder how Adderall with its fourfold amphetamine recipe can fast-track to market, while psylocibin with all its ancestral approval had not yet been pilled AT ALL. How can a soldier designated pill make it to 60m prescriptions and amazing substantiated illegal use, while psylocibin is still rated as schedule-1 drug alongside heroine, which of course is major offense to possess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History
This makes very little sense unless on purpose. I mean, like what, people been doing it for millenniums and still we got where we are now, and not because of downsides of its use, or what?
Replies
Not enough money in it. It's not something that is taken regularly for long term like ADHD meds, or something that pretty much everyone uses at some point like antibiotics. If psilocybin came in a pill, it'd be targeted to a relatively small group of people for occasional use.
>had not yet been pilled AT ALL
Simple - there is no real lasting money in psylocibin as most people really only need 2 or 3 good sessions.
Whereas adderall is not technically addictive, but if you can function on it, you do become dependent on it.
You also really don't need it to become a prescription, shrooms just need to get legalized. The risks that come from overuse are far and few in between to the point where normal over the counter meds carry much more danger in abuse than shrooms do.
It's politics and optics. But as someone taking a schedule 3 medication that is really a schedule 1 in disguise (sodium oxybate) I wonder why they couldn't use the same tap dance for psylocibin or MDMA. Slight chemical modification to adjust absorption rate but same active ingredient. I think we only get away with this because it's prescribed so rarely and out of public consciousness. It's incredibly effective at treating a pernicious condition.
Psychedelics sometimes makes people wake up to the abuses of government, so they are pretty scary to governments.
But there's also the issue that not everyone should take psychedelics. They can have lasting negative effects on certain people that may already be experiencing issues with mental stability, or they may trigger such effects in people that don't necessarily know about their own mental wellbeing or how the psychedelic will affect them. These, like every drug, should be used with caution.
In one word- predictability. Psychotropics are not predictable and heavily situational.
That the guy that was on Adderall was able to pay attention to endless meetings and fill out forms and stick with it, while the guy on mushrooms was not, is surprising to you?
The traditional HN way is to make up some "It's Just That They Hate Us"[0] teenage conspiracy. The reality is this: amphetamine was widely used medically for decades by the time the Controlled Substances Act was passed. When these acts are passed, governments are usually under pressure to not remove access to things that people commonly use. Therefore, it was scheduled in a category that recognized medical use. This allowed the subsequent development of associated clinical trials and so on. It is much harder to work with Schedule I drugs than Schedule II drugs. So an accident of historical timing is what caused the difference.
0: This game is really tiresome. It's "capitalism". "They just don't want to lose power". "There's no money in it". Thought-terminating cliches. LLM-grade.
Modern drug laws came about in the 1970s, at the height of hippies on psychedelics trying to overthrow the government.
People in power fear losing their power, and they saw these drugs as a threat.
The weirdest part of the whole thing to me is that they outlawed Cannabis, Psilocybin, and LSD, but kept cocaine legal with a prescription under schedule 2.