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Questions

Posted by HelleKaasik on 21 Aug 2013 at 14:34 GMT

Could somebody explain:

1. The authors found that % of people who had a symptom of mental illness was bigger among users for all symptoms (see Table 3). For a simple reader, it means that being a user is more risky than being a non-user. How did they adjust their numbers to get lower odds ratios for users compared to non-users?

2. How is it possible that users had so low % of hearing voices and seeing visions - aren't these symptoms the usual effects of psychedelics that almost every user experiences?

No competing interests declared.

RE: Questions

EricSpelt replied to HelleKaasik on 22 Aug 2013 at 18:24 GMT

1. Statistics are complicated, and I am not qualified to explain them properly. I know enough to know that anything with a P value of above .1 or so is a pretty much useless statistic. I am confused by their data as well and would love someone who can better explain statistics to explain it.

2. The study was not reporting on users while they were actively under the effects of a psychedelic drug. The study was measuring their rates of mental disturbances after having used drugs in the past. Hearing voices and seeing visions is typically only experienced at extremely high doses of certain psychedelics anyway. DMT is well known for causing these types of visions but to actually hear voices or see visions on LSD you would need a very large dose.

No competing interests declared.

RE: RE: Questions

HelleKaasik replied to EricSpelt on 22 Aug 2013 at 21:26 GMT

Thanks!

1. I understand that their intent when adjusting the odds ratios was to eliminate influence of "control" or "confounding" variables. Something similar to computing partial correlations, just more complicated mathematically. But it is the choice of confounding variables here that bothers me. There are many of them. Of course, gender, age and race are ok as confoundings. But many others of these used (even income, marital status and education, not speaking about risk-taking, stressful event and use of 10 (!) other drugs) can be influenced by psychedelic use itself and can influence mental health, so being part of the same causal chain we are trying to explore. If we eliminate a big part of the causal chain, no wonder there remains no relationship. Some statistician could comment on this.
Interesting, if we take use of opiates or inhalants as "suspected cause" of symptoms and add psychedelics to same pool of confoundings, would the same procedure yield "no independent risk" also for these substances?

2. Yes, probably the respondents were asked if they have heard voices or seen visions while not under direct influence of psychedelics. Users often report visions while under influence (e.g. Hoffmann's first self-experiment with 0.25 mg LSD), voices seem to be less frequent.

No competing interests declared.

RE: RE: Questions

guillemain replied to EricSpelt on 14 Dec 2013 at 22:39 GMT

No absolutely false, most of this people got the LSD sold on the street, most of the time there was no purification or quantification, in order to have a deal they would never sell 25 micrograms but at least 250 micrograms, and this is already a high dose anyway enough to make you have vision or hearing voices. Good deal on the street had between 250 and 1000 micrograms. If you took that in a reasonable way and could get directly from Switzerland before it was ban, then I can believe that you have no mental disorder. To get pure peyotl and to swallow it without throwing away is hard. To get pure psylocybin so gar in Berkeley as I can remember they were not able to synhetize it, the only one was Hoffmann in Hoffman-Laroche Switzerland. The people around SF in the ends of the sixties or at the beginning of the seventies, when they knew the right people they could get good stuff, after that we did not want anymore that became too polluted. There are alive while they knew what to take. The famous chemist of Berkeley is alive, I think He wrote a book about it. I am sorry I forgot his name. I left the US 1971.

No competing interests declared.