It's nice to hear, in principle.
Also expensive.
The requirement that, for the entire (up to 8-10 hour) duration of the trip, a suitably qualified therapist be on hand, must dictate that each non-trivial dosage under this regime will have a ticket price of several thousand dollars per-time.
It's one of the catch-22s in medicine. That a poor person on the street can have the same experience for $50 as a rich person has for $5000, with the difference in cost being the literal $4950 more of specialists and testers and monitors and side experts that the rich person is paying for. For reasons, yes, but that doesn't change the numbers, the fact that for every one of the latter there are 10 of the former.
But marijuana is illegal most places in Australia.
So young people who want to get high have to go to drug dealers who also offer meth and other drugs.
Thanks, conservative Australian politicians.
This sounds great on paper, but there's a devil lurking in the detail:
> The regulator says there are currently no approved products that contain MDMA or psilocybin. However the reclassification means psychiatrists will be able to access and legally supply certain medicines that contain them, even if they have not been evaluated for safety or effectiveness.
How exactly is this supposed to work then? Are psychiatrists supposed to order MDMA/psilocybin directly from the companies that produce the two for research use, which presumably involves fearsome bureaucracy and markups?
It sounds like this would make the law effectively a dead letter until a regular pharma company goes through the Australian approval process and gets the drugs into pharmacies. Medical marijuana in Australia has suffered from similar issues, with an onerous approval process in many states making it very difficult to get a prescription.
That's great !! Aussie rock should be precribed along with psychedelics for better results
> Experts say there is still the risk of a "bad trip", which is when the user has an unpleasant experience while under the influence of drugs.
All psychiatric treatments have a risk of a bad experience, including talk therapy.
> MDMA - also known as the party drug ecstasy - is a synthetic drug that acts as a hallucinogen.
This is misleading. It's 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, an amphetamine and a stimulant. It has minor psychedelic effects and no one in their right mind would consider it a hallucinogen.