On 18 Apr 2014, at 04:40, Kim Jones wrote:
PGC - you have spoken some great wisdom in this post. Personally I
can see the time quickly arriving when it will become the self
evident responsibility of education to provide young people with the
knowledge to recreate with drugs responsibly. If anybody thinks that
drugs in society are going to go away, they need to complete their
education by a crash course run by the plant teachers themselves.
The single most pressing issue involves the skill of self-
moderation, something that humans don't seem to learn easily. This
is why Hancock in that TED talk is right on the money when he says
that psychedelics should not be used recreationally. To do so
trivialises their use and degrades them to the level of a cheap
binge on alcohol "that most BORING of drugs." Use of the plant
teachers needs to be ritualised. You need to know why you are taking
them, for what purpose, and what you are trying to achieve. Then you
need to bring the treasures thereby attained back into the baseline
state of consciousness and assess their value.
There are no drugs, only medication. Then some treatment can be daily
and repetitive, with varying degree depending of the illness or the
stress to survive the struggling of life. The illness can be
existential, spiritual, mental, or physical.
I asked my friend Swim why do you do drug? Here is what he answered to
me:
I do coffee, in the early morning, to accelerate the awakening,
I do tobacco, at work, to enhance concentration and alertness,
I do alcohol, at noon, to digest more easily the cheese,
I do cannabis in the evening, to relax and sleep well,
I do salvia divinorum, the week-end, to discuss metaphysics with the
Virgin Mary.
I pay my taxes. I don't aggress people, nor even me (I stop inhaling
the tobacco, there are many form of consumption), so who are you to
judge my medication? And who are you who seem to accept that some
other can think better than you for how you feel?
Drugs don't exist. There are only medication made illegal by gangsters
to develop an underground market.
Once illegal, the gangsters and their criminalized victims can sell
them at every corner of every streets, and indeed, all the study shows
that illegality is the main contributing factors in the consumption
augmentation and spreading of drugs.
Legalize all drugs, and tax them perhaps proportionally to the real
problems they generate: you will see alcohol and smoked-tobacco price
grow, and you will see the life insurance company encouraging you to
medicate yourself with cannabinoids and salvinorin, efficacious and
cheap.
The drugs you take concerns only you, and your possible relation with
your shaman, doctor, priest, whatever.
It does not concern at all the government.
*You* are the one who has the right to say "no" to the doctor, not the
government.
Bruno
Kim
On 18 Apr 2014, at 11:02 am, Platonist Guitar Cowboy <[email protected]
> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:21 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 4/16/2014 6:38 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
If you say psychedelics are trivial, did nothing for research in
medicine, resulted in nothing, check maps.org or for concrete
articles:
But the question was whether the produced useful ideas in those who
took them - not in whether they were useful for studying brains
function, which seems to be what all these papers are about.
Depends of course on what you consider "useful". I'll give the
effects question another personal shot for those interested, so if
you're not its ot:
One thing that the NYT article picked up concerning effect:
increased capacity to relate, which translates into the "I feel
more, but I am more vulnerable. But I'd rather feel than merely
function," of the quoted research subject.
Trivially, the increased capacity to relate, given correct dosage,
administration, settings etc, is brought about by some perturbation
of brain chemistry.
Comp as some loose, not sanctioned by Bruno's high standards,
metaphor offers a good dinner cocktail explanation: Let the first
person experience be some stream of input and output values on an
unspecified number of channels. These days I like a huge virtual
sound mixing board as an image: you get input all manner of
external signals or programs, which can be output, limited,
compressed, blended into buses, routed internally, convoluted,
processed, and effected in various ways. Master output is then
subject's first person experience.
The mechanisms of psychedelics on brain chemistry level differ in
function of subject and the molecule, its receptor sites, dopamine
regulation, inhibition + stimulation of different receptor pathways
and so on. What distinguishes them from other consciousness
altering agent, is their particularity: not merely euphoric
stimulation of some sort (cocaine or coffee to some degree) or
sedation (opiates and sleep medication) or even both at once
(tobacco), but all channels of our mixing bord being altered in
very particular ways. As if another sound mixing engineer had come
in overnight and changed the entire mixing studio of the subject in
very particular ways.
Albert Hofmann noted about LSD in "My Problem Child", that
remarkably memory of the extreme alterations of experience stays
largely intact, which was counter intuitive to him given "the
extreme degree of inebriation". And the awareness of the extreme
degree, its perturbing horror trip anxiety aspect, is proof that
the subject becomes aware of where "normal" is to them, and how
peculiarly strange and relativistic their notion of "true
normality" is.
The upside of this perturbing weirdness is the subject learns more
about relating to a more complete weirdness of their mixing desk:
The overnight engineer might have made some valid points in that
say: molecule x at dosage y increases tactile response, sexual
appetite, general mood parameters etc. before it starts to impede
on motricity, while attention span and focus of things sexual is
increased with less daily clutter evaluations, master value of
orgasm is 7 out of 10 on these parameters, time dilation favorable
etc.
That would be horny engineer's settings. What about all other kinds
of experiences and engineers? "What would be output then?" which is
the central driver for kids trying something weird, not merely
naively but openly and hopefully seeking new experiences, and the
central question of scientists like Shulgin, pushing the envelope
to develop new psychedelic molecules with this open ended mystical
quest. Because the particularity of subject is multiplied by
particularities of the molecule in question, one trips for a few
minutes to a few days.
The connection with creativity is not somehow artificially
restricted to art and entertainment, but to the entire faculty of
whatever it is that we are; and since most creativity is derived by
combining at least two ideas (e.g. horseless + carriage; not that
Benz tripped but even Jobs himself made such a statement
"creativity is just connecting things that nobody thought of
connecting/relating") in some original fashion, the prevalence of
weird ideas and their combinations is increased when conditions are
favorable and this sort of multiplication is applied.
If something like a Nobel prize could be conceived without all the
political bs, Shulgin would deserve one; not just for his advances
in pharmacology of these substances, but because he was a careful
composer: developing some molecule from a good pharmacological
perspective, deriving structure and properties from known
substances and trying to optimize them, had one huge benefit: The
man tasted all his own works first.
On a daily basis, starting 10 to 1000 times below the active dose
of the closest derivative he would increase the dosage level in
tiny increments until he hit "activity" or gave up. Why Nobel prize
again, one could ask: his molecular designs are one of the main
sources for blueprints of everybody wanting to make a quick buck
from an unscheduled designer substance. So his daily practice and
diaries, the choices that led to them, the dosage results are to me
centrally responsible for keeping these designer substances
"relatively safe" in that we don't see tons of kids and people
dying from use of unregulated substances due to prohibition. Most
of the drug reports I read of concerning designer substances, are
mostly his work, or structurally derivative. So our kids had that
margin of error working in their favor, despite prohibition.
Unfortunately, publication wise, we seem on our own now without his
kind of work, and I'm starting to see structures revert to
seemingly more toxic tries on solvents, stimulants etc. as
everything marginally safe in this area is already scheduled. The
analog laws penned in too many countries can't be taken seriously.
I haven't to this day seen convincing criteria of what constitutes
a parallel or analogous substance, and what doesn't. It just seems
like helpless legislation to get whatever is on the dance floors
and streets swept under the rug so that more toxicity/uncertainty
is thrown into the mix.
Public safety is a useful idea it would seem to me, beside all the
crossovers between say science fiction and science, to which
prohibition is completely opposed. If Jobs had been truly hip, he'd
sue the US government with his army of lawyers for that failure in
public safety and education resulting in millions of deaths for the
money of a few; instead of just using them to scavenge the world's
databases for copyright infringements. Give the types of Shulgin
some of the cash and PR means; and this education might not save
our children, but at least make them party safer if they so choose.
PGC
https://www.erowid.org/references/refs.php?C=Hof
Brent
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