zezt a dit:
I am wondering why my question is being seemingly ignored?
Sorry for the delay, I had a very busy weekend and didn't notice your question until now.
The answer for "who decided" is a network of psychotherapists, most famously Grof and Zeff. Many different approaches were attempted (combining LSD with hypnotherapy, conventional psychoanalysis, abreaction therapy, etc), and total introspection facilitated by music and eyeshades in a supportive, beautiful environment was settled upon as the most reliable. Since the people doing this deciding were pretty much all coming out of a therapeutic background, and were often treating people who were seriously disturbed in one way or another, they no doubt had biases to therapeutic modalities, and there are no doubt countless settings they never tried, certainly not in a systematic way.
Note that even as part of this setting, they would typically take the people out into nature towards the end of the trip... they'd go for a walk to a nearby lake or pond, that sort of thing. But only late in the experience. That's for LSD, of course, which lasts for long enough that you really can get a good variety without rushing... so there might be 4-5 hours of total introversion, maybe a couple hours of conversation, drawing or other activity (depending how the trip was going), and still time for another couple hours in nature before the drug was really wearing off.
For the purposes of the scientific experiment, Jimmy is quite right: they needed it to be reliable and reproducible. This is a problem in science, that certain modalities, even ones which might have more beneficial results, will not be considered because they cannot be replicated. The idea behind experimental procedure such as implemented at Hopkins is that if somebody in another country thinks they're full of shit or their data is wrong for some reason, they can run the experiment to the specifications described and see what happens. What happens is that ~60% of participants have a "full mystical experience."
That 60% number is very important, because it's stable. Do it in nature and some people might have a mystical experience who would not otherwise, or those that do have one might have a better one... but as the weather is different every day, or as different parts of forest vary, you won't get a stable figure, and thus can't do quantitative science on it. Again, that's a downside to quantitative methods: you can only do the experiment in certain ways, and certain types of questions will be excluded despite seeming important.
Outside of a scientific context and into personal practice, my take is that the psychotherapeutic setting provides the ideal first trip, because of its safety, reliability and intensity. Once you've had a couple trips that way and become more comfortable with psychedelic experience, doing other things like tripping with a lover or tripping in a forest can be pretty amazing and, if you want to make tripping a semi-regular part of your life, you should try them sooner or later. But not for your first time.
(remember on these lines that the Hopkins subjects were drug-naive; it was their first time. In this way I approve of their methodology, objecting only insofar as it gives the false impression that theirs is the only good way to do things, or that they were the ones to "discover" the effects/benefits)
Does that help?
