Describing the Effects of Different Psychedelic Substances
People ask me all the time what the differences are between various psychedelic substances. I say:
MDMA (Molly) is all emotion. You will be massively present, seeing and feeling everything, and being effusive in describing it. You won’t see God, but everyone around you will be an angel. As you might imagine, MDMA combines well with therapy.
Ayahuasca is the opposite. You and God will be in your head, getting deep into your shit. It is a marathon for the brain. Since the researchers combined ingested ayahuasca and smoked DMT, I’ll note here that smoked DMT will make you a contestant on the strangest and most visually-beautiful game show, where everyone is winner.
LSD moves you fast and far. Go toward the light. You’ll feel, more than you will think and process. Is it any wonder that LSD and art go hand in hand?
Mushrooms are like Ayahuasca or LSD, but on a minute-by-minute basis. You’ll suddenly realize that your crying is getting in the way of dancing. And, then, your dancing is getting in the way of crying. Buckle up and hang on. You’ll go lots of places and experience lots of things.
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Ketamine, well, we’ll talk about it when you rejoin the group. Until then, we might use you as a coffee table. Ketamine combines well with therapy. But, the mill approach many clinics use (take you in, dope you up, and send you home) doesn’t do much.
My description cross-checks rather nicely with the findings of researchers published in Psychopharmacology magazine. Using trip notes from the vaults of Erowid, researchers examined the language people used after experiencing the different substances, to attempt to contrast the effects of the different substances. Specifically, researchers searched the trip notes for “positive emotion, negative emotion, anxiety, and sadness,” along with words reflective of cognitive processes and analytical thinking.”
MDMA. The researchers reported that language used to describe an MDMA journey depict “an emotionally intensifying profile accompanied by many cognitive process words and dynamic personal language.” Importantly, the researchers also noted, “The language of PTSD patients (during therapy) predicted posttreatment symptoms after treatment with MDMA versus placebo, where MDMA produced more treatment-relevant utterances that were negatively related to posttreatment symptom severity.” In other words, MDMA helps PTSD patients. I think my MDMA description above gets full credit on this one.
Ayahuasca/Smoked DMT. The researchers reported that language describing an ayahuasca/smoked-DMT journey “involved relatively little emotional language, few cognitive process words [and] increased analytical thinking-associated language.” Ayahuasca and DMT produce the deepest psychedelic and mystical experiences and the fewest sadness words and, despite the purging, the fewest negative words. Also, ayahuasca/DMT words showed the least cognitive processing words (i.e., cause, know, ought) which often are associated with anxiety. My description does well on this one, in the sense that lots of magic is going on in your head. While I have believed the outcomes are greatly affected by the manner of consumption (a 4-8 hour ayahuasca ceremony involving purging v. a 20-minute DMT experience), the researchers do not. I’m still scratching my head on this one.
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LSD. The researchers found that LSD trip reports contained the most negative, sadness, and anxiety words. Also, users language suggested that not much was going on cognitively or analytically. Like I suggest, go toward the light, not the darkness. Don’t think about it, just experience it.
Mushrooms. The researchers found what I thought they would. Mushrooms tamp down anxiety words and produce an experience somewhere between the elevation of ayahuasca/DMT and the whipsaw emotions of LSD.
Ketamine. The researchers found that ketamine flattened out language in every way. Hence, my coffee table comment stands. Ketamine shuts everything down for a bit. This could explain why integrative ketamine treatments seem to work well (a blank screen to doodle on) and plug-in-and-go “treatment” centers don’t seem to do much that endures.
As we grow more scientifically sophisticated with psychedelic substances, future studies with better controls will no doubt follow this one, allowing individuals and providers to better select appropriate tools to achieve desired outcomes.
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