When conservatives go hippy

Another interesting NYT piece - this time about 75 year Republican Rick Perry going all in for a new hallucinogenic I hadn't even heard of before.   

As usual, I remain deeply skeptical that the positive experiences of the few who become evangelical is a sound guide to its more widespread use.  (And this one sounds particularly dangerous, not to mention unpleasant):

     Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm     reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. “Satan, get behind me,” he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.

Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.

But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, “I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.”......

But the powerful drug, which is illegal in the United States, comes with risks. Because ibogaine lengthens the time between heartbeats, a user who gets the wrong dosage, is taking other drugs, or whose heart rate is not being monitored during treatment, can go into cardiac arrest. Even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as “the opposite of a pleasant experience.”

It is because of the drug’s potency that Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and other ibogaine advocates have adopted a baby-steps approach. Rather than promote wholesale decriminalization, or even widespread availability, they are seeking public funding for the development of an ibogaine compound in the United States, with the initial aim of treating military veterans. 

Probably because it is a conservative promoting it, there are a large number of skeptical comments after it:

To have credibility with me, this  article should explain the actual mechanisms( even if not completely known), the actual treatment process (does the dose of the substance magically transform specific memories in one sitting or is there a therapeutic conversation with a real therapist , or 12 weeks of therapy or just exactly what) and how is improvement measured, validated, followed up . How long does the identified benefit last? And how is that defined and measured— hours of improved sleep, fewer arrests or car accidents , less domestic abuse phone calls or more steady employment, less drug and alcohol and other self medication abuse. Only  quoting some people who say they are better is as meaningless as if they were describing the therapeutic benefits of shopping, ice cream or racing fast cars, what about all the people who have not had a positive effect- they will never be assessed in an anecdotal narrative. Show me the facts , the mechanisms, the double blinded assessments—not just because Kirsten Syenema  says so. 

Also, funny how its often the military veterans lining up for something to cure their mental ills and PTSD.

A simpler solution might be:  stop putting your military into pointless conflicts with no real moral justification.  Maybe then the relived horror of the killing they have implemented will not happen in the first place.