Great book btw. I highly recommend it anyone who is curious about the subject.
> The way I think of these drugs is just that they flood your brain with toxins. That in itself will make it not work properly. But the scary part is that the more time your brain spend intoxicated the more likely you start loosing or weakening connections. If you weaken connections only for the bad memories, that would be a good thing. But what if you weaken the connections for other important things in your life ? Like self control, moral values, family love, etc.
The point is that the exact people who are well-known and respected as black-market guides would become therapists in a world where such a profession were legal!
Not entirely true, although only a few, there have been and continue to be legal studies involving psilocybin (also MDMA) in addition to the one in the OP.
Here is a smoking cessation study in Baltimore, involving a psilocybin psychedelic trip. https://www.quitsmokingbaltimore.org/
Here's an article about the findings of the 2014 pilot study on the same thing which describes the methodology to some extent. https://hub.jhu.edu/2014/09/11/magic-mushrooms-smoking/
But specifically in this context psychedelics are generally introduced to individuals who haven't had prior experience with them, and may need additional support that therapists can help with (e.g. survivors of sexual assault, deep depression, anxiety regarding terminal diagnosis, PTSD, etc) and the therapist have been trained specifically in guiding these individuals in psychedelic trips. So they are like the best trip sitters you can have if you are trying to get out of rut.
It's not so much about how it works or why it works, it's mostly about the result.
This does not mean that there is zero placebo effect involved with taking psychedelics. The latter statement would mean your experience is identical between actively taking a psychedelic and someone slipping some in your drink. I'd say this is unlikely, no?
We know for lots of other drugs, both therapeutic and recreational, that there is always a placebo component as well as a "real" one.
This is why people do placebo-controlled trials. You take 100 people and give them ibuprofen against joint pain, then you give another 100 people sugar pills against joint pain. Then you record their pain reduction on some scale, and the placebo scores 2 +/- 1 points, and the ibuprofen scores 7 +/- 1 points. So you say ibuprofen has a significantly better effect than placebo, but (probably) 2/7th of the ibuprofen effect is due to placebo.