Aaron Rodgers is speaking at a hype-based, unscientific psychedelics conference, because he’s a free thinker
Hello darkness, my old friend.
Aaron Rodgers is still all about that ayahuasca life. Now the Jets’ quarterback is continuing his uncanny spiral into Brett Favre-dom, by signing up to hawk experimental medicine at a conference.
Rodgers will be joining scientific luminaries Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith) and former Texas governor Rick Perry to extol the virtues of ayahuasca at the “Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,” in Colorado. Rodgers is planning to discuss how the drug boosted his performance, which seems to be a bold move calling ayahuasca a performance enhancing drug — but here we are.
The concept of the conference is to generate buzz, literally. Nicolas Langlitz, a historian who has studied psychedelic movements spoke to the Associate Press about this particular conference.
Langlitz said, this conference is “purely designed to promote the hype,” which can exaggerate the potential benefits but can also drive further funding. “Any kind of overselling is not good for science because science should be accurate rather than pushing things,” he said. “It’s a tradeoff. (The conference) generates interest, it generates ultimately more research, even though the research might be skewed toward positive results.”
On the surface this seems a lot more like a business conference for people looking to make money of the legalization of psychedelics, rather than truly looking at the science behind it. However, it should be noted that there is evidence of some drugs having significant effects in true studies.
In 2018 psilocybin was fast-tracked to be studied in the treatment of various psychological illnesses. Using compounds like these have shown positive results in the treatment of PTSD, as well as bipolar disorder. However, this conference also wants to legalize MDMA (ecstasy) and Rodgers is repping ayahuasca, which has previously been proven to have dangerous drug interactions with prescription medications.