Hey, I like it when Australian public broadcasting takes up an issue and unexpectedly doesn't take (what might be called) the squishy Left line on the topic. It happened a couple of months ago when SBS did an Insight episode on trans women in sport, which (surprise!) featured a preponderance of people who argued that it was indeed unfair for former men to become women's sport champions by becoming women.
And last night it happened when Four Corners looked at psychedelic therapy, and actually focused on some pretty strange people who are at the forefront of promoting it in Australia. (Some Canada therapists came out of it looking bad, too.)
In fact, one would have to suspect that the people who appeared were more or less ambushed - thinking that surely the ABC will take the sympathetic line that this is a type of therapy that only stick-in-the-mud conservatives are arguing against, only to find they about to come out of their participation looking somewhat nutty and not entirely trustworthy.
In fact, why did the guy who takes people out on 8 hour bushwalks after taking (I think) peyote agree to appear at all, including showing him distributing an illegal drug? I mean, the worst aspect of his dubious exercise was that he admitted that he (at least sometimes) takes the drug at the start of the bushwalk too - so much for having someone sober to lead them out of the wilderness if an emergency happens.
Anyway, least I be criticised for my conservativism on the issue, I wouldn't want to stop all research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics. It's just that I think it needs to be extremely cautious, and not taken over by people with a missionary zeal, as the use of these drugs has been around long enough to take a reasonable guess that they are going to be of limited use and benefit, and very unlikely to be some kind of mental health universal panacea.
2 comments:
The early trials for psilocybin have been very good results. The effect is immediate and only one dose is required for several weeks. Too many people get carried away with the effects of the drug and think they are opening the doors to perception. The poor fools but enough of those fools manage to convince others they have found the secret ... follow me.
I watched a little of that doco but came in at the part about some "therapist" kissing a client. I switched off because that is not psychedelic therapy, that's guruism. Psychedelic therapy is not like that. It is in the peer reviewed literature, done under the most strict controls. A friend of mine was working with a psychiatrist treating veterans with PTSD and they were waiting for approval to use MDMA. This isn't new, these were active research areas in the 60s. Then Leary came along and spooked the governments. A friend of mine who was a neuropsych in NY said the profession was very angry with Leary.
Yes, I guess the main point of the show seemed to be show that the field is attracting very dubious gurus. And yeah, I think I have read before that other researchers were annoyed with Leary.
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