The admins of sites like that DGAF about anything or anyone. They enjoy the chaos and shock.
If you expect admins of edgelord websites to respect the laws of different countries or even care about kids, I suggest checking out 4Chan’s response to various attempts to regulate them.
Because true “zero knowledge” proofs are actually useless for age gating purposes.
Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that generated it, so there is no disincentive to freely share IDs.
So every real world “zero knowledge” proof eventually restricts something. Some require you to request your tokens from a government entity. Others try to do hardware attention chains so theoretically you can’t generate them outside of the approved means.
But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.
> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
Are you American or something? Because it takes a mind trained in divisiveness and dipolarity to read my comment as you seem to have done.
I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of.
I’m saying that simply rejecting the concerns - as you do - makes things worse, because you end up with unqualified people making poor attempts at fixing the problems, which exist whether you like it or not.
> I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of.
I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past.
These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the internet.
Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.
Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.
The Lancet has been around for 200 years. It publishes weekly.
It's a highly regarded journal, but it doesn't mean 100% of the papers published are perfect.
If you're trying to dismiss a study because it was published in The Lancet then that's not a convincing line of reasoning to anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape.
> anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape.
Anyone genuinely familiar with the scientific publishing process probably holds the most skepticism around publications. I could probably get ANYTHING published if I wrote it well enough.
IMO, publications are mostly useful if you're already a bit of an SME in the field so that you can parse snake oil from gold. Certain publishers and institutions also hold more credibility, depending on the topic. Broadly speaking, there's a ton of crap in the journal space and the ratio of crap/good grows by the year.
The above view is independent of the current article. But it's embarrassing to see people praise the heck out of publications in 2026 in a vacuum. Reeks of young PhD student vibes. Even nature is not what it was even 10 years prior.
> Anyone genuinely familiar with the scientific publishing process probably holds the most skepticism around publications
Healthy skepticism is a good idea
The silly notion that being published means it should be dismissed or that we should assume the opposite is true is not healthy though.
> The above view is independent of the current article. But it's embarrassing to see people praise the heck out of publications in 2026 in a vacuum. Reeks of young PhD student vibes.
I was responding to a comment above mine that said this journal was untrustworthy because of a single news bite they recalled.
I specifically said that not everything published in a journal is true!
Your condescending “young PhD student vibes” attempt at an insult is rich considering you didn’t even try to acknowledge what I actually said or the context in which I was delivering it.
Discussing anything science and research related on HN is such a slog because so many commenters are in such a rush to deliver some contrarian smug take that they’re not even reading what’s written.
Using quantified isolates is the correct way to do a controlled study. Dosing is important.
Claims that you need a special combination of exactly the right strains are just a way to move the goalposts forever. They could study 10 different strains in controlled trials and the same people would show up to dismiss this study because they weren't using some random strain that has some perfect combination of entourage effect.
Using actual plants and smoking would also introduce another major variable, with further claims that the strains they were giving patients were too weak or they were smoking it wrong.
EDIT: I don't have time to read every single citation included, but the claim above that they were all THC or CBD isolates does not appear correct. One randomly selected citation:
> The short-term impact of 3 smoked cannabis preparations versus placebo on PTSD symptoms: a randomized cross-over clinical trial
So the claim above that they didn't investigate smoked cannabis or "entourage effect" is false.
Way to completely misunderstand and try in an underhanded way to the dismiss entourage effect.
It’s not smoking 10 strains in a row it’s the fact that you need CBD THC and all the terpenes to get the effects. So the current growing trend of just getting the THC number higher tends to result in plants that don’t actually give people the full spectrum of effects, beneficial or not.
So the correct way to do this would be a full spectrum isolate, which again you coincidently forgot to mention I’m sure.
I never said it was. I was saying you could run 10 different studies on 10 different strains with 10 different "entourage effect" profiles and even if all of them were negative, they would be dismissed as not having precisely the right entourage effect.
If there are anti-depressant compounds in cannabis plants then they can be extracted and isolated, too.
> So the correct way to do this would be a full spectrum isolate, which again you coincidently forgot to mention I’m sure.
Of course, the correct formulation is something other than what was tested, right? And if they tested a full spectrum isolate with negative results, we should assume that it just wasn't the right blend of terpenes and therefore that study should be dismissed too? Repeat ad nauseum?
That's a great example study to highlight what I really mean by entourage effect. I've edited my post to emphasize most not all - i only looked at the 6 anxiety studies as that's what I have the most experience with - as well as the included table which highlighted that the vast majority of studies included in this metastudy only looked at THC.
That particular study did look at High THC low CBD, mid THC mid CBD, and high CBD low THC. There's no information on the terpene profile of the smoked cannabis preparations, though, and that is a confounding variable in the entourage effect that potentially defeats the part of the entourage effect they did test. Additionally, a quick look at the cannabinoid %s in those smoked preparations rehighlights my point that these are not inclusive of all the chemical compositions that the cannabis plant could present itself in.
I still stand by my point and hope the clarifications bring the conversation back on track to the fact I was highlighting which is simply that this is a metastudy built off of studies that were conducted with restrictions on experimental design that few observers fully understand the research implications of.
This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition.
There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, but opioids were more casually prescribed a few decades ago. I recall some discussion where one of them said they were seeing good initial results but the effects faded, and then it was hard to get the patients off of the opioids when they were no longer helping. Not surprising to anyone now, but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
I feel like I've seen a weaker version of this in some friends who turned to THC to "treat" their depression: Initial mood boost, followed by dependency, then eventually into a protracted period where they know it's not helping but they don't want to stop because they feel worse when they discontinue. This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems.
Yes. Rather it is the reverse that helps. Exercise is the biggest one, but essentially “pain that will stop” seems to help in general. Ice showers, fasting, new challenging activity, giving up caffeine/alcohol.
All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”
> but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
There was also quite alot of talk about how doctors, by being reticent to prescribe opioids, were inhumanely forcing patients to live in pain, and not being sufficiently deferential to patient autonomy. Moreover, the rhetoric was incorporated into discussions about racist disparities in treatment, given there was some evidence doctors were less likely to prescribe opioids to black patients, suggesting doctors were systematically being cruel. Naturally, the easiest way to dodge those accusations was to simply prescribe opioids as a matter of course. Even in the absence of Purdue Pharma pushing their claims about lack of significant addictive potential, there was already significant pressure to discount the risk of addiction.
If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment.
Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different
> If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for.
This mistake has been made many time throughout history. Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression. Opioids and amphetamines too. You take them and you feel good for a while, which was mistakenly equated with treating depression.
Many drugs will make you feel good temporarily by blocking certain feelings or tricking your brain into feeling good. This is not the same as treating a condition.
You can think of actual treatments as working closer to the source to reduce the problem, not temporarily overriding it with a powerful drug-induced sensation.
Psychiatry as its practiced has no idea as to what depression even is under the hood. The entire science is based on the patients self reported feelings or the psychatrists feeling of how someone else is feeling.
What you're saying is something else, that drugs can produce long term harm despite short term improvements
>> This study is showing that THC, CBD, blends, or cannabis do not improve self-reported feelings over the long term.
Just to clarify, the study is not saying that.
The study is saying "there isn't conclusive evidence at this point, but it leans more toward helping than hurting on many categories". Please read the paper if in doubt.
I did. I don’t know if you did, though, because the categories that they said there might be some signal were secondary topics like insomnia, not depression PTSD and anxiety.
I mean, it’s literally in the title. It’s covered again in the abstract.
I dont have a problem with the study or its conclusions, just the parent post I was replying to.
>Recreational drugs make you feel good temporarily. That's literally why people do them.
The point Im making is this is true for a ton of psychiatric or even non psychatric treatments. And to be perfectly clear Im not saying you should be treating your anxiety with weed, even if it does help you
> The point Im making is this is true for a ton of psychiatric or even non psychatric treatments
That point wasn't intended to be taken in isolation.
I was making statements about how long-term treatment of an underlying condition is not the same as taking a drug which temporarily masks a problem or induces altered mood states.
The fact that a drug has acute effects, good or bad, is separate from any conversation about chronic effects.
For depression, anxiety, and other conditions it's the chronic effects that matter. The acute effects almost become side effects at that point. For some drugs, getting to long-term treatment involves tolerating the acute effects while your body adapts
You keep ignoring the fact that what you just said applies to current medications used to treat depression and anxiety. They do not treat the underlying issue long-term, and if you stop them, you are worse off than before due to rebound effects, and even if those effects subdue, your depression and anxiety returns. And just to add to this for clarification, antidepressants may treat depression, but it does not cure it either.
Same with amphetamines for ADHD. And yes, if you take much more, you will experience side-effects ("cause harm when abused"). Opioids are not an outlier at all.
> Recreational drugs make you feel good temporarily
Drugs are only recreational if you take them recreationally, there is nothing that makes them inherently recreational.
And we have not discussed MDMA, which is considered a hard "recreational" drug, yet there are lots of benefits for treatment of PTSD, for one, similarly to psychedelics.
... or ketamine for depression, which is now approved by the FDA, even.
The difference between your positions is not about acute vs chronic, it's about tolerance. If a drug for a long term condition has short term effects the first few times and then they fade under regular use, it's less of a valid treatment. Especially if there is a withdrawal effect, and any negative side effects of regular use.
We absolutely overprescribe a lot of psychiatric meds that do not have significant beneficial long term effects. "Stabilizing" a patient in an inpatient hospital psych ward may as well involve a Magic 8-Ball picking the particular antipsychotic for its short term effects, while on the other hand doctors and nurses put people on Seroquel at the drop of a hat in reported sleep problems, and don't take them off until natural death or until the essential tremors get reported decades later.
This is a fair point but there’s also truth to the fact that “I feel better” does not automatically mean it’s an effective/good treatment.
Lots of depressed people turn to alcohol to provide a mood lift. But you can’t be drunk all the time and function, and when the alcohol wears off you feel even worse. So it’s a terrible treatment.
People talk a lot about cannabis like it’s a great treatment for all kinds of stuff. But is it closer to a drug you can take on a schedule that boosts your mood essentially all of the time with acceptable side effects? Or is it closer to a drug that lifts mood very short term and then makes it worse?
> “I feel better” does not automatically mean it’s an effective treatment.
Of course, I agree with that.
I also agree that you cannot be drunk to function, but there are many other "drugs" that people would oppose that do not make you dysfunctional.
Personally I would not use cannabis because I know that it makes me dysfunctional, but it may not be the case for some people for all I know.
FWIW I take opioids for my chronic condition, and it also helps with my emotional volatility, depression, and anxiety, too. I have not experienced any side-effects either.
Alcohol is so terrible, especially when severely abused, that "better than alcohol" absolutely cannot be a meaningful standard for being a proper treatment.
> there are many other "drugs" that people would oppose that do not make you dysfunctional.
People oppose these drugs because they do tend to make you dysfunctional, at least when abused. And when people are severely depressed, the depression itself makes it more likely that they will abuse their drugs.
The problem with your argument is it's whataboutism. Your argument's conclusion should be that even prescription drugs aren't necessarily good.
Really what is wrong is that most prescription drugs do show less tolerance. Yes, prescription drugs have tolerance, but not as fast as recreational drugs taken at recreational doses.
By giving a patient the ability & skills to establish a less dopamine-seeking lifestyle while temporarily relieving them of the deficit.
Its use is supposed to be coupled with therapy and/or coaching (e.g. https://www.thriveemerge.com) to ensure that the patient isn't just using it as a lifelong crutch.
That's how it's supposed to be done. This approach is more effective in children for obvious reasons. Persons diagnosed later in life are therefore more likely to require it permanently.
Why do you need amphetamines to do this? Why not a legal stimulant? Even something as trivial as coffee can be effective if you take it strategically, i.e. stay off of it completely until the rare times when you need the turbo boost.
There's also atomoxetine, but it's not very effective.
> Why not a legal stimulant?
Which ones? People absolutely do self-medicate with coffee, ephedrine, or even cocaine where it's available (coca tea). And these stimulants do work, but they have _more_ side effects than amphetamines when used in theurapeutic doses.
Would love to learn more about how this is the case (both assertions). Mind sharing?
Neuroscience seems to be coming through with more and more understanding using technologies like fMRI and others the past 5-10 years. There is definitely some understanding there.
The short version, as I understand is, is that brain scans show differences at the population level but not on the individual level. Amen claim to both diagnose ADHD through brain scans (which is already impossible) and also diagnose various "subtypes" of ADHD like "Limbic ADD" which have no scientific backing for their existence.
not clinical understanding, not in any useful way. its another tool for study, but my understanding is that aside from some very high level structural information, there's sadly not that much to be learned from watching the flashing lights.
As someone who has had depression literally as long as I can remember, being able to releve my symptoms when I really need it, even for just an hour, would be life changing.
> Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression.
Is it not??
Sure there's the addiction and harm from abuse that make it less than ideal for long term use, to put it mildly, but weed isn't coke so what's really the argument here?
Duration of effect matters when it comes to successful treatments.
If we take your position and apply reductio ad absurdum, we could say that cocaine is a highly effective treatment for anxiety, although of course we know that in the not-so-long run it has the opposite effect.
Shouldn't that be up to bodily autonomy? If someone feels that cocane relieves their symptoms then who is the doctor to say that they don't. Perhaps releaving those symptoms even for a short period of time is worth the consequences.
That's just arguing for drug legalization with extra pseudoscience.
I am all for people doing however much cocaine they feel they need. In broad daylight - let's just drag that into the light and let people go to the dispensary for cocaine hydrochloride, metered, measured and with warning labels.
Because the war on drugs is a stupid waste of time and lives, but no doctor or medical professional has to justify your own stupid actions.
But a lot of psychatric treatments are just that. Treatment for ADHD for example is giving ampethamines (which btw are chemically no different than a low dose of meth), which have a duration of 3-6 hours and its back to worse than baseline after the effect has worn off.
There are multiple treatments for ADHD, including alpha-2 receptor agonists and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. Some of them show patterns of increasing efficacy out to a year (the length of the study).
The reason amphetamines are used for ADHD but not depression is that they've been studied to show that the ADHD improving effect can remain for many months, while the mood-improving effect will taper off quickly if you take them every day. Almost everyone who takes ADHD stimulant, feels a mood and motivation boost ("so happy I could cry" is the common phrase) and then is disappointed when that mood boost stops happening after a few weeks or months will learn this. Attention enhancement is less prone to tolerance, though it still accumulates tolerance too. There are some studies showing that the effects of stimulants in ADHD diminish substantially on a multi-year time frame, and it's probably not a coincidence that many people (though not all) who take stimulants discontinue after several years.
No not just like it, because the only difference with methampathemines is that the added meth group makes it able to cross the blood barrier much quicker, hence why I said its equivalent to a lose dose of meth. The chemical/biological response on the body and brain are very similar, the difference is in potency
That's a terrible oversimplification. Stimulant treatments for ADHD are not supposed to produce pronounced mood-enhancing effects. Stimulant treatment has been shown to be effective indefinitely in majority of people without increasing the dosage over time.
These days formulations like lisdexamfetamine and extended release methylphenidate are preferred because they have all-day efficacy with typical duration of action of around 8-12h which carries lower abuse potential.
extended release are just two doses of the drug where half the beads are delayed by ~4 hours. How is that different from taking two edibles a day and claiming full day efficacy?
Well, it's not that simple. It's reasonable to expect that you could see some increased level of oxidative and excitotoxicity. It's harder to draw a bright line around the dopaminergic system specifically because some level of neuronal death is expected over the course of a lifetime. We lose 5-10% starting with middle age yet don't tend to show parkinsonian symptoms until 60-80% are gone.
It's pretty reasonable to expect reversing DAT and inhibiting VMAT2 increases oxidative flux, the question is really how much not if. Methheads certainly get "brain damage", but is nudging the average loss from 5-10% to 7-12% "damage"? Is it meaningful? Over 30, 40 years that could very well add up.
Meth is also used as an ADHD treatment. I think the reason is just the dosages that are used by addicts compared to people who just need the ADHD treatment.
A typical legitimate therapeutic methamphetamine dose is around ~20mg (up to maybe 60mg a day). A typical dose used by addicts is around 1 gram. And it's usually smoked, resulting in immediate bioavailability.
There’s a difference between intoxication and treating the chemical imbalance behind depression or anxiety. For one thing, treatments for anxiety only target the anxiety: they don’t impair the person the way that weed or alcohol does. (They can have other side effects, of course.)
Drugs for anxiety treatment do wear off, but not the same way that weed or alcohol does: something like Celexa takes a few weeks to build up in the system, and don’t lose effect 12-24 hours later if you miss a dose. I’m not sure how long you’d have to stop before it loses efficacy entirely.
I’m not Nancy Reagan, though: I would not advise people to self-medicate with booze or pot if they’re suffering from depression or anxiety, but I’m not going to preach at anybody who is doing so and thinks it’s working for them. I will say that I’ve seen that end badly, though. I can think of three people I’m close to who’ve tried it and have had problems with addiction: all of them are now sober and (I believe) on regular antidepressants.
Im prescribed adderall for ADHD. It is a high. You feel more positive, more productive, more forward looking for a few hours and its back to baseline or worse when you crash.
As for impairment, it really depends. If weed removes your anxiety and lets you relax, its benefit could be greater for what youre doing than the impairment it causes. And adderall, SSRIs can cause impairment of sorts too.
I won't call you an idiot, but assuming that all cases are simply people being sad is a bit simplistic.
Some people are going to be more susceptible to depression, for whatever reasons, and improving someone's surroundings is probably going to prevent or alleviate depression to an extent, but to people who are depressed now it's somewhat pointless advice.
I think the problem is that, at least in my experience, you end up with more anxiety once the initial high wears off. Paranoia is an extremely common side effect of Marijuana, and so are nightmares with prolonged use. And once you kinda get into a routine with it, you have a hard time quitting, because your overall anxiety is raised, and you need it just to get back to a normal functioning level. My guess is that this is due to the effects that THC has on blocking your REM sleep. Without the proper REM sleep, it seems pretty common to be anxious and foggy-brained.
THC cannot both ”cause nightmares” and ”block REM sleep”, because nightmares happen during REM sleep.
People who suffer from nightmares may benefit from less REM sleep. It’s much more refreshing to sleep in a non-REM state and wake up normally than it is to repeatedly wake up in cold sweat and be afraid to go to sleep again.
Psychiatric treatments return a person to a baseline that can be managed with therapy or healthy coping mechanisms.
Chasing a high is not a treatment, it merely defers the problem. As tolerance to the high builds, patients lose the therapeutic value but have gained crippling dependency and addiction.
Doing ten shots of tequila is a 100% scientifically proven cure for social anxiety then. If you take it and your anxiety lessens, that's the greatest proof you can ask for! Let's just completely ignore the crippling morning hangover and liver damage
Sure but my point was that you cannot have an argument where you go "yeah this happens so it's good" while you disregard everything else (it's a different question on how bad it is compared to alcohol etc). But if we follow the logic of the original comment, then it's valid logic since "hey it works so its scientifically proven!" You can replace alcohol with something else to highlight that as well, like how putting out a kitchen fire with a bucket of gasoline is a good idea. It completely covers the flames for a split second! Why worry about the explosion that happens immediately after?
So my comment wasn't about alcohol vrs cannabis but rather how that kind of logic is short-sighted and faulty.
I mean... Yeah. Alcohol is very well documented and even more widely used for exactly this purpose BECAUSE it works.
The side-effects are often terrible. This is also true for many widely-prescribed drugs, and has been even more true in the past. The folks I've known on MAOIs were pretty wrecked.
Isn't the problem with psychological dependency that drugs generate basically a artifical depression, so more drugs are needed to basically feel normal again? Thus saddling a already existing problem with the same on top?
Yeah this has been my experience with THC. I never took it for depression, but it was always a temporary thing. I doesn't treat anything IMHO. its a symptom relief at best.
it works pretty good as a temporary relief from anxiety.
Walking into traffic in an undesignated crossing is rude (and illegal). Likewise with trying to cross at an intersection when traffic has the green light.
But when there’s a designated crossing area, it’s the responsibility of traffic to stop. Pedestrians should not stand and wait at the intersection for a break in traffic because it’s a confusing signal to drivers. If you’re standing at a designated crosswalk you need to be either signaling your intent to cross or moving away from the crosswalk
> I never been in a flight, or train across Europe where passengers showed just lack of respect for the others.
In my European travels I’ve definitely seen it. It depends entirely on the region. Europe is a big place. I’ve encountered it in Asian countries too. Again, Asia is huge and diverse.
Not coincidentally, it’s the same in the United States. I’ve never seen this on the local commuter train with people traveling to and from work. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it on a flight (flight attendants did intervene and request they stop).
Let’s not try to make this into another “America bad” topic because this is not a uniquely American problem.
If you expect admins of edgelord websites to respect the laws of different countries or even care about kids, I suggest checking out 4Chan’s response to various attempts to regulate them.
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