Michael Pollan: prediction

Transcript context

…And it may not mean anything. Right. Five years later, they take it out or they change it. As authoritative as that sounds, it isn’t clear exactly what that phenomenon is. There does seem to be some phenomenon. Anecdotally, I hear about it. Sometimes people describe it as a state they will themselves into, or that they use meditation because they want to get back to that. Other people say it’s this unbidden sense of defamiliarization that happens. But it’s not like you’re driving the car, and you go into a full-blown hallucination. There’re not accounts of that that I’ve been able to find. So I don’t know how real acid flashbacks are. It’s a really interesting question and why there hasn’t been more research on it. I don’t know that, in the trials, they’ve found it with psilocybin. Is it specific to LSD? LSD persists in the receptors for a remarkably long time, but whether it would be months seems hard to believe. There’s something about the LSD molecule that gets caught under this little hood on the receptor and sticks around even longer than serotonin. I don’t know what to say about that. I think the real risks are to people who are at risk of psychosis, whether they have schizophrenia in their genes, in their family background, or personality disorders of various kinds, bipolar. People in that category of mental illness, these drugs can have very negative effects on. Some people will have psychotic breaks. That’s a serious risk, and a lot of work is done to screen those people out of the university trials. Other people, though, using drugs outside of a supervised clinical situation simply do stupid things because they’re debilitated. They walk into traffic because maybe they’re having a hallucination. They do jump out of buildings. There are occasional suicides on LSD. It becomes a very big story because it fits into a narrative of this incredibly dangerous drug. There are a lot of suicides on SSRIs. It’s a recognized side effect. The number of drugs we administer to people for which suicide is a side effect listed is remarkable. Some people blame the increase in suicides in recent years to prescription drugs that have that as a risk factor. So it’s a risk factor for LSD, also. As I say, it becomes a huge story when it happens. Many psychedelics operate through the serotonin system. If I have a serotonin imbalance, am I at some kind of special risk? Or do we not even know?…

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