[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-mdma-ther...
That's the enduring pattern of a lot of "coming of age" initiation rituals across many different cultures. I'm not shocked to see this is the approach an unaccredited drum-beatin' hippie looking couple in beautiful British Columbia tried to carry out.
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Still feel the same. Have something more insightful to add?
I am not saying this to be mean, but people who have encourage these approaches do not have a mood disorder. They are sad people with sad lives.
I am a huge fan of these drugs but this part of the world’s shame and puritan culture really shows this unexpected effect: it is not sufficient for something to be pleasant. It also has to be “medically necessary”.
The outcome is we get a bunch of things showing that these things are medically necessary. “There is some evidence that X helps Y”. Dude, with the current standard of science I can do that for arbitrary X and Y.
And you know what, the truth is that people heal and recover in all sorts of ways. But that’s not enough for us. We need to place everyone under the control of these gatekeepers. And then we find ourselves horrified at the outcome of the machine we have built where the power hungry abuse their power.
It sounds like there was “intimate contact” during the session (maybe the spooning?) but the sex was not during the session. Still massively not OK.
> Yensen has admitted to having sex with Buisson after the experimental sessions ended but while she was still enrolled in the clinical trial. In a 2018 lawsuit that has since been settled out of court, she alleged it was sexual assault, while Yensen claimed in his response that Buisson manipulated him and initiated the encounter.
What? A therapist molested a drugged person and they blame the drug? Wtf?
therapist... the rapist... what's the fucking difference it's BC haha
Honestly, fuck those people.
damn i was really looking forward to MDMA therapy to deal with PTSD stuff
there needs to be harsh consequences and strong regulation. make sure people are going to trained and licensed practioners who will agree to recorded footage.
If you were seriously considering signing up for the study, I encourage you to contact the investigators who are running the study and/or MAPS and voice your concerns.
Not only would it help them understand what concerns prospective study participants have, but they may be able to answer your concerns to your satisfaction.
I think that's about to radically change in Canada without a lot of radical change in who gets to be a therapist or counsellor and that's pretty troubling, but so are a lot of really weird oversights in that country
I felt more likely to be beaten up as a teenager wearing heavy metal or grunge look from other packs of roaming teens (small town UK).
Wishing you more peace in the future!
It was safe as fuck before the pandemic. I grew up in Los Angeles and lived in East LA awhile; lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant two years; lived in the Tenderloin for a year (not the way it is now). I've also lived in Prague, Barcelona, Saigon, Bangkok, Sydney (King's Cross, before the fall of it). The total chaos and anarchy of Portland right now is hard to explain. Almost everyone I know has been attacked on the street, or a victim of random violence in the past two years. Every other city in America that had a meth or fentanyl problem gave their worst cases a one-way bus ticket to Portland, in part because "let the liberals deal with it". I was a die-hard liberal progressive two years ago, before I had savage children on drugs waging running melees with rocks and trying to rape each other's girlfriends in front of my house all night. Now I'm just waiting for the night I have to shoot someone coming into my house.
I think the only other place I sort of felt this way was Avignon. I lived on Rue des Teinturieres. It's a bit of a siege mentality when the drug dealers outside your window are blasting music so loud it sounds like they're standing over your bed at night.
At the start of the pandemic, Portland police announced they would no longer respond to any emergency calls unless a person's life was in danger. And the district attorney ran and won on the platform that he wouldn't prosecute anyone for any crime short of murder. The result is a free-fire zone. I showed up at my local bar a couple months ago and it was a crime scene with 30-40 bullet casings scattered under the table where I usually have a drink. My friend who had walked home from there a few nights prior had been jumped and had his leg broken because he was gay- by a man wearing full Joker makeup, who is still sitting and laughing to himself on the corner two blocks from my house. A boy and his girlfriend camped their van in front of my place and the boy beat their dog with a long metal pole, screaming and high on drugs. The neighbors tried calling animal services, the police wouldn't come, and this went on for days and nights, with the dog yelping in pain until I went in the street with a gun and told him it was time to leave. He got in their van screaming at me, and wrecked it into six parked cars around the corner. And finally he got arrested.
Shit, okay, I should stop.
I don’t understand this. It would make me more progressive if I saw that. What are the economic, political, social forces that are causing that? Is it that we are a fair country that treats people with dignity? Or is it that we are Country with a huge separation of wealth that doesn’t mind letting people suffer in homelessness.
It sounds like it’s not that scene, but your wealth, that made you less progressive, and wanted to protect it that caused you to become less progressive.
Where do you think the people causing all the crime come from? Why do people commit crime? I’m pretty sure people don’t commit crime when their lives are going great. And I’m sure it’s the same thing with drug addiction.
And the people that run Portland? They’re not progressive, not in the least.
Threatening a man who is beating a dog in your front yard with a gun does not make you conservative, it makes you caring. Don’t buy into the paradigm that if you own a gun you are suddenly conservative. That’s just propaganda both sides want to live inside of you.
But I think your point is "no true progressive" - if the policy didn't work, then it's not progressive because progressive policies always work.
"Passive-aggressive people regularly exhibit resistance to requests or demands from family and other individuals often by procrastinating, expressing sullenness, or acting stubborn."
"What do we want!?"
"Ending homelessness!"
"When do we want it?"
"It's impossible!"
This is how a society collapses, when people think they know who "refuses" to take care of themselves and who simply cannot.
* Perhaps no bail, although I think in isolation that's unlikely to be an issue
These areas are always unique because transient and the homeless can live with some degree of year round comfort, so they will be naturally appealing to people who have uncertain housing prospects.
Progressives believe in restorative justice not prison or punishment. They believe that justice is actually righting the wrong that caused people to behave this way in the first place. "The infinite perfectability of man". That's a core progressive belief. Thus they "catch and release" for non-violent (and sometimes violent) crimes. Reduce property crimes to misdemeanors, and generally tell law abiding citizens - "just put up with quality of life issues".
Suffice to say the experiment has failed entirely.
Lawlessness begets more lawlessness. Giving people a place to shoot drugs (without treatment options) just helps addict get their fix. Not prosecuting property crimes just encourages ever more bold property crimes.
And the funny part is, it's not poverty driving much of this. It's organized crime - easy pickings, low hanging fruit. It's not the single mom trying to feed her newborn milk that is stealing catalytic converters.
I keep saying this, but history repeats itself. Major urban cities saw mass out migrations in the 60-70s for this exact reason. Crime, lawlessness, rioting, general degradation of QOL. The "Death Wish" movie series about a vigilante taking on a lawless city wasn't popular because people enjoyed the genre. I could easily see it happening again, especially with WFH. Then the "law and order" types will get elected and we'll start the whole thing over again.
You've described the justice systems of modern progressive countries and what would you know, they work fine. The US needs a firm hand because it's culturally savage. Folks think about themselves and corporate "culture" is enshrined as something good and expected. Everyone sees the exploitation of other human beings and denigration everywhere, is it any surprise that they cannot behave in a manner that has a little compassion for themselves and everyone else? The entire environment is fundamentally dehumanising. No amount of localised niceness is going to undo decades of absolutely brutal culture.
The people I know in progressive countries are shocked at the rampant violence that is tolerated and no prosecuted and punished in the US. It wouldn’t be tolerated in their countries.
Hell, the lefties I know in Europe look at the West Coast of the US and ask “what the fuck are you doing?”
Well said.
I think this is a dramatic misrepresentation. The west Coast cities you're referencing are making these decisions because practically speaking they do not have the resources to deal with what's happening in their cities.
These things aren't happening in other "liberal" cities because they don't have those policies. I think you're confusing the egg for the chicken.
Why is the same thing not happening en masse in Austin, in NYC, in Boston, in Atlanta, in DC, in Tampa? These are liberal cities.
The answer is the underlying problem is bigger than liberalism.
Justice reform has been desperately needed for decades, but that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is underfunded cities being overwhelmed and largely giving up.
And organized crime and poverty climb on the backs of each other. To blame one or the other is simplistic.
But you keep working on your anarchistic utopia while the rest of get “exploited” and pay taxes that actually support the people who you claim to care about.
I know, change is hard.
[EDIT] TLDR: I never committed crimes or hurt people when I was poor as fuck.
When I was 20 I would've maybe thought this. I was a left anarchist, and my leanings are still in that direction. It's not wealth that made me less progressive. I wrote a novel when I was 24 that brought the world down on me; it was a satire that involved a rock band murdering Bush and Cheney at a gala at Bohemian grove. It got thousands of hits from .mil sites and I got police going through my trash cans, my apartment raided. I left the country for 15 years. And railed against the military/industrial complex.
It's progressives who made me less progressive. During my exile I worked, I created things. It was hard. But I never lost my dignity. I never acted like a savage. I did lots of drugs and drinking but I never blamed anyone else; I worked out what it was that I needed to do. I've worked every day since I was 15. I wasn't handed anything. My parents were born in complete poverty.
So when I see a 20 year old beating his dog and literally taking a shit on the sidewalk, and then screaming at me that "how dare you tell a homeless person he can't shit here unless you want me to use your bathroom", when the City of Portland and me put a porta-potty on the corner thirty paces from where he's shitting for him, what I see is an able-bodied guy with a facebook and instagram account who's LARPing as an anarchist and needs to go through some form of hardship which he's obviously not experiencing yet.
I don't blame anyone for anything I could reasonably - or unreasonably - see someone doing. Slapping someone for making fun of your wife's hair is bad but it's not incomprehensible. Beating a dog is outside the sphere of what I can understand, though. So is shitting on someone's porch.
I've started to think the main thing is that people in their early 20s are being told this is an acceptable form of rebellion. It's not the peaceful Drop out, tune out of old times. It's an aggressive attempt to assert rights to dominate everyone around them - to terrorize peaceable people - without any kind of understanding of what terror people like me went through to be here. The one thing you won't find among these Portland youth is any kind of understanding of the immigrant experience. Just (mostly white) entitlement, wrapped in a thin veneer of "woke" speech. With no thought behind it.
Social forces that drive it? Poor education, stupid parents, I don't know. They're a threat to the working order of society. I would say that even more if I were homeless; I say it as a homeowner.
[Edit] Two side thoughts: 1. Just announcing you're a homeowner in Portland is cause for being attacked these days. As if no one deserves to reap any reward for anything they've done. 2. Someone on Nextdoor here last week complained that she was sleeping on her kitchen floor because the same guy had broken into her apartment three times in a week and once started a fire in the bathroom; other people asked why she didn't call the police, and she had, but they didn't respond. Someone asked why she didn't have a baseball bat at least. She recoiled and said she didn't want to hurt anyone. Is that a way to live your life?
So you’ve taken up the I’ve pulled myself up with my own bootstraps defense. I don’t demean that at all, but you did not grow up the same way as a 20 year old in your yard did.
To be a progressive, and I’m not talking about these progressives that you think you have in the Portland government, is to understand that we all don’t share the same life experiences.
You were lucky growing up in the time You did and probably you were lucky growing up in a time in Portland actually embrace community.
Tell me all these horror stories does not do anything to address the fundamental problems that are causing the horror stories in the first place.
Can you talk about this peaceful rebellion that took place in the past. What? What rebellion? Those people turned into the boomers that bought up all the property in Portland as investment vehicles. These people aren’t revolting in any positive or not coordinated way. Their revolt is more primal and therefore A true rebellion. It is an unconscious rebellion and that scares people into conservatives.
I've staked my entire life on being an individual who won't support a team, a religion, or a social movement (beyond individual points I agree with). I happen to believe that if everyone acted this way, we'd have a lot fewer problems as a society. I refuse to take the side of a movement that claims some holistic righteousnes, just like I refuse to accept religion and race. So on a case-by-case basis, I decide what seems fair. I should note that before that dog-beating kid drove his van into six cars, I went out there with a gun and a six pack of beer which I distributed to his 17 year old homeless friends, who I sat around with while they told me he was a crazy shithead. I think that was what really drove him mental.
Individuals. That's how the world functions. Everything else is theory.
So my rebellion didn't work? It did. I was gassed in the street in 2004 protesting the Iraq war. Everyone hates neocons now and hates that war, don't they? Did I do nothing? An argument is ridiculous if it asks every person to pawn everything they ever did to the next struggle in the future. Portland is a shit show in the real estate market, but where isn't? It's by leaps and bounds the most progressive city in America.
The boomers' homeless and ultimately functional children grew up richer than I did. They need to come halfway and see that acting savage and refusing completely to partake in society is not an ultimately winning strategy. They're not going to win some revolutionary war where they suddenly abolish all private property - and if that's their goal, they've really got to become more coherent and stop doing so much heroin, because I can't even understand what they're saying.
[edit] my contention is that the 20-yo shitting in my yard's problem is that he is spoiled and rich, by every standard I've seen everywhere I've traveled in the world. And that's why I can't relate to the conditions that led to him, or sympathize with his plight.
I know quite a few people in PDX, some of who have lived there their whole lives. Not one of them has felt unsafe in the past few years. As a matter of fact my ex laughed and told me to stay away from the national news when I texted her and told her to be safe during the height of the PDX "anarchy."
btw - the TL isn't any more unsafe than it's ever been and I've lived in The City since 1972.
Is there a great re-location of tech staff happening in the US right now? I heard that a lot of people are leaving California including a few friends of mine. Even Joe Rogan moved to Austin and he can handle himself!
Whatever reasons Joe Rogan had for moving had nothing to do with him fearing for his personal safety. He was almost certainly scared of taxes, not muggers (add joke about the IRS being the worst muggers, here)
Everyone in the US who formerly worked in an office is threatening to quit if they can't work remotely full time now. No one is going back to offices. Oregon is a beautiful place to move to. 99% of it is not the city of Portland.
Particularly LSD but also MDMA.
The wreckless abandon with which psychedelics were handed out Willy nilly was some of the evidence for making them schedule 1.
Leary was in the 60’s and the Drug Control Act wasn’t until the 70’s. Not a direct cause and effect, but certainly a contribution.
The cases of abuse that ultimately led to the stigmatization where blown up because that narrative served the view that the general public had of these substances anyway.
The same rhetoric people use today: "encryption should be forbidden because paedophilia|money laundering|<insert whatever upsets your target demographic most>"
> Not a huge factor really because schedule 1 DEA permits are available. I know a few academics with them.
What good is an permit if you don't have anyone to fund your research? And how do you get research funded for something that can't be brought to market because ... Schedule 1?
It's kind of how crypto has a reputation for buying drugs online and money laundering. When something gets tainted like that it's hard to shake it.
It's a chicken and egg thing. What I'm saying is the scheduling and bad reputation came after the reckless use of the 60's - not before.
"Updated announcement March 25, 2022
This a public announcement of additional information obtained regarding the conduct of former sub-investigators for a MAPS-sponsored clinical trial, initially publicly reported in 2019. We make this information public as part of our commitment to creating a culture of safety in psychedelic therapy and in alignment with our core value of transparency.
The initial ethics complaint was reported to MAPS in 2018 by the participant. The complaint specifically identified the unethical conduct as occurring after the active treatment sessions had concluded in 2015. Yensen and former sub-investigator Donna Dryer verbally confirmed that Yensen engaged in a sexual relationship with the participant. Sexual contact between therapy providers and participants is unethical conduct of sexual abuse in violation of Section 6 of MAPS Code of Ethics for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and generally accepted standards of care. In 2018, as a result of the ethical misconduct, Yensen and Dryer were barred from all MAPS-related activities and from becoming providers of MAPS-affiliated MDMA-assisted therapy if the treatment is approved.
On Saturday, November 6, 2021, MAPS staff were interviewed by a reporter who had viewed videos of clinical trial therapy sessions for the participant described in the original announcement below. Session video is made available to participants in MDMA-assisted therapy clinical trials for private review upon request. The reporter characterized former sub-investigator Richard Yensen’s behavior in at least one therapy session as “disturbing.” This characterization triggered a compliance review which was initiated Monday, November 8, 2021.
The reopened review of conduct during the trial period includes a review of previous documentation, all available videos of sessions from the sub-investigators, and information reported in media accounts of the participant’s experience. Though the review is ongoing, MAPS has provisionally determined that Yensen and Dryer substantially deviated from the MDMA-assisted Therapy Treatment Manual on several occasions during the treatment period.
MAPS has notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, Ethics Committees, and relevant authorities that the review has been re-opened. We will continue to keep regulatory agencies, ethics committees, and relevant authorities apprised of any developments on this case. Changes to MAPS policies, practices, or materials made as the direct result of the review will be reported publicly at maps.org/safety."[1]
Also see MAPS's article on the Cover Story podcast regarding this issue here: [2] It contains a pretty informative FAQ in which MAPS addresses what it sees as misunderstandings in the media coverage of these events.
[1] - https://maps.org/2019/05/24/statement-public-announcement-of...
[2] - https://maps.org/2022/03/01/participant-experiences-cover-st...
Hopefully nobody thinks that therapists and counsellors without a properly regulatory framework in place aren't doing shady practices like this even without the drugs.
That is… really fucked up. Predators in the healthcare industry need to face serious punishment. Unfortunately, they largely don’t and get away with things.