On 22 Apr 2014, at 02:39, Pierz wrote:
I agree with you, up to the point when you start advocating (on the
other thread?) the notion that drink driving should be legal.
Well, I agree that we have to wait the politics invests a bit more in
education.
The key point relates to harm caused.
OK. I would say that the key point is harm reduction.
If you choose to smoke tobacco and thereby ruin your lungs and put
yourself at risk of lung cancer, it's your body, your choice.
OK. You do have the right to cross the ocean with a sieve. Your friend
have the right to inform you that it is risky, but they have not the
right to impeach you to do what you have decided to do (unless medical
evidence that you lost your mind, if that is possible).
But I support the right of others around you not to have to
passively inhale your drug and thereby suffer harm for your choices.
Same goes for drink driving. It'd be fine if others weren't
affected, but they are, and the fact is that many people lack
responsibility, so to try to make them be responsible for themselves
is as pointless as trying to make a three year old be responsible
for him or herself.
I am not sure. you are betting that people are stupid and
irresponsible. but most are not. If you have some right, you learn the
responsibility. If the society protects you too much it makes you
irresponsible.
I would not vote for the right to drive with alcohol in one day. This
would be a ten years program, and experiment in some willing state
before perhaps, and may be only to people above 25 years, to begin with.
My bet, is that in the long run, this would cure the real cause of the
accident, which is the irresponsible driving, and the driving codes
which encourage the responsibility. I bet this would save lives, and
diminish the harm.
You know, some automated part of the automated pilot in plane, have
lead to similar problems, and now pilot have to learn technic to stay
vigilant about that. Some circuits have been eliminated, I heard, to
be sure that the pilot reminds that he is the pilot, not the plane
(yet).
When I worked as a counsellor with offenders, we used to run a
program called "consequential thinking" in which we tried to drum
into the minds of prisoners the simple notion that actions have
consequences that they might like to think about before doing
something. Wasted breath, much of the time.
On a special audience, though.
The main point of the law is to prevent and/or minimize the harm we
cause night cause others through our ignorance, unregulated emotion,
selfishness etc. It should not be paternalistically concerned with
the harm we cause ourselves, because then we get into the realm of
all kinds of problematic judgements (like 'sinful' sexual practices)
- we can't trust "society" to know what's best for us.
OK.
Wearing a bike helmet or seatbelt is a grey area because arguably
the costs to society/the health system etc of our sustaining a
serious traffic injury are a significant 'harm' to others, and so in
any society in which everyone pays to provide services for all, we
must weight up questions of personal liberty against the
responsibility to limit the extent to which we prevail upon the
support of the health system due to bad choices.
OK.
This of course also could be argument for banning smoking, but
that's where the heavy taxation of tobacco comes in - you pay a
disproportionate tax in order to support the health system that
you're more likely to need.
On another subject, we know that swiy likes salvia. I wonder if he
has tried DMT? Swim has, and he tells me it was pretty terrifying,
whereas he enjoys salvia. With salvia he almost feels a sense of
homecoming,
Swim can relate.
a relief to be reunited with something transcendent,
OK.
whereas with DMT it's like being shot down the barrel of a cannon
into some bizarre cartoon-world ruled by a maniacal god hell bent on
busting his sanity. Or maybe he's just not hitting the salvia hard
enough... ;)
Swim never smoked DMT, but made an oral experience, which was a bit
like you describe, although rather mild, but with strong reaction from
liver/stomach.
From the reports it seems DMT is like the "magical garden or
carnival" part of the salvia experience, where you are given somehow
the choice to go through or not. I have few report of dissociation
with high doses (less than with LSD).
Now, like PGC said, different dosage => possible different experience.
With salvia it seems that there is that clear threshold, but even that
is debatable, and by salvia inverse tolerance, breaking through can be
done with smaller and smaller amount of salvinorin.
Salvia has many effects and each such effects is present or not in
different people, or even for the same people in different sets and
setting.
Swim is baffled by salvia.
I try to understand this in the comp theory, or in Plato, it is not
easy, we might need a bit help of the Tibetans.
I compare also with the NDE. The biggest difference is that some
people seems to memorize well the experience, where with salvia we
forget both the going "there" and the coming back. But there are
similarities.
swim likes the fact that the salvia experience is short (average 7
min), and you come back feeling very well (especially if in pain or
medical conditions). The salvinorin A molecule seem quite promising
for the pharmacopeia. (of course I abstract from the patent problems,
and all that).
Bruno
On Saturday, April 19, 2014 1:34:23 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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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