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Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

"... lower than the abuse rates for other hallucinogens like ecstasy and LSD."

Ecstasy is a stimulant, not a hallucinogen. I thought bloomberg was generally considered to be better at fact checking than that.

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Empathogen-entactogen with both stimulant and hallucinogen properties. You expose a(n) (over)simplified understanding and aren't really contributing, since you aren't a subject matter expert. Any given class of drug may have any number of additional effects outside of it's class, depending on structure and interactions. This example especially is not a complicated one.

Or expand the name, and recognise it as MDMethamphetamine.

Ecstasy is a stimulant, not a hallucinogen.

It’s both.

Ecstasy/MDMA. MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a synthetic, psychoactive drug chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mdma

I thought bloomberg was generally considered to be better at fact checking than that.

They are. You’re not.

The use and abuse of MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or ecstasy) is a significant public health concern. In the United States, MDMA is classified as a hallucinogen, a category comprising LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), PCP (phencyclidine, or angel dust), peyote, mescaline, and psilocybin (mushrooms).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2648386/#S1titl...

Assuming they mean MDMA when they say Ecstasy, it does in fact have hallucinogenic effects (depending on the person and dosage) in addition to being a stimulant.

I take it you didn't follow the SuperMicro supply chain attack story? (and subsequent fallout due to complete lack of fact-checking)

That was a huge blow to my ability to trust Bloomberg's journalistic credibility, along with several others' trust I'm sure.

Granted that was clearly a different reporter and a different field altogether, but the name "Bloomberg" alone should no longer lend the same credence in this era of fake news.

Food for thought.

Agreed, also LSD doesn't have a measurable abuse rate. It is literally anti-abuse.

I think that in the article, abuse is used to mean illegal unintended use, rather than abuse in the conventional sense.

"hallucinogen" is a silly word to begin with.

The primary effect of LSD isn't hallucination, but something far more strange and more difficult to describe.

Psychedelic is the correct term.

Psychedelic is one term that is almost certainly more correct. "Entheogen" is perhaps another. But "hallucinogen" and "psychotomimetic" do not properly describe my experience nor anyone I know.

The whole idea of lumping different drugs into discrete categories is flawed.

MDMA is both a stimulant and a hallucinogen. In smaller doses the effect isn't noticeable, but it's definitely there in larger doses.

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