Denver to vote on whether to decriminalize 'magic mushrooms'
reuters.com
reuters.com
When ever i consumed high doses I always marked the expected peak time and eta to near baseline so I could use that to calm myself if I became too high. I don't expect this approach from most people. And that worries me.
It's a amazingly calming feeling to be able to say to oneself "wow I am really fucking high only 1.5 hours to near baseline" while staring at a third eye on your best friends forhead.
I don't really use them any more as I am enjoying sobriety more and more as I get older.
I agree about average Joe access. I live in Colorado and a lot of people, “adults,” cannot even responsibly take marijuana edibles.
Lately there has been some promising research into psilocybin's long-term effects on the brain and specifically depression - it's becoming clear that the drug has a unique effect in breaking down old (potentially negative) pathways/connections and allowing new (potentially healthier) connections to form in their place. Really interesting stuff.
Nothing but good things to say about the practice provided you keep dosage and frequency at the 'micro' threshold. My roommate and I ran a pseudo-blind study (50% chance we'd get LSD on a microdose day, 50% water) and both noticed increased energy, empathy, creativity, and general quality of life.
How to Change Your Mind as someone else suggested is a great place to start.
I'd say 24 to 48 hours. Though at 8 hours post consumption you are pretty much back and I think most of what remains is system shock. LSD is an entirely different story as the trip can last twice as long as shrooms. Despite the effects being less physically severe (i.e. no stomach discomfort) I was never a fan. Twelve hours of being high is just too long for me. Would be nice to get thoughts from someone who has taken lots of LSD as my experience is limited to about 3 trips.
The deeper insanity is that physically speaking, magic mushrooms are one of the safest known drugs to man. Nobody's dying from magic mushroom overdose, flying into violent rages, dancing until they pass out from dehydration, or robbing stores to pay for their next mushroom fix. Along any metric you'd care to name, psilocybin is a much safer drug than, say, alcohol.
Cannabis approaches that point where if it were any easier to grow, everyone would. But it's not quite there yet.
Water requires organization but is plentiful enough to be mostly free for typical amounts. Companies that do the organization are heavily regulated and the people running it aren't getting rich.
Nobody wants willow bark (not totally accurate, but let’s accept it) because aspirin was formulated. That’s not a defense of your argument, it’s the hole in it. Why do you think that mushrooms, unlike willow trees and a thousand other natural sources for what would eventually be synthesized, won’t be made into a superior form by a drug company? Legalizing one opens up opportunities for the latter, which then displaces the old.
Why do you think mushrooms are somehow the exception?
The same mechanics are at work in the current push for cannabis decriminalization and ultimate legalization. It takes the building of a tax base in order to get politicians to take the cause of cannabis seriously. Political economics neatly explain everything about the world we live in.
We already have plenty of regulated drugs which are used recreationally. Adderall, narcotics. You're saying psilocybin isn't special compared to other drugs. You'd be right, except for the fact that there isn't already an industry that exists to cultivate and bring psilocybin mushrooms to people, simply because anyone can go out and pick them themselves. There already was a cannabis industry before legalization, albeit an illegal one. Where is the illegal mushroom business? It's just random people doing it for side profits. Nobody's getting rich off of it.
Because nobody can get rich off of it, there isn't a political economic reason for legalizing it. There might be a public-interest reason, but that means the public has to actually generate more political capital than the anti-drug crowd generates from saying it's horrible in order to get it legalized.
I'm not saying nobody can make money off of psilocybin or that research can't be done. I'm saying that because nobody is already getting rich off of it, its political heft is forever going to be limited to 'mere' public interest.
Cannabis required a public-interest campaign before it could be regulated in one state, because the existing black-market industry had a vested interest in cannabis remaining illegal. Once the regulation enabled taxes, now we're seeing more regulation and legalization.
My opinion is that those people could end up there via different ways (alcoholism, mental shocks like car crash or other mental traumas), but this is definitely one way.
It is extremely powerful substance and can take you very far from common reality, not something most folks are prepared for. I know I was not, and having every single aspect that makes me me taken away, both on physical and personality level was by huge margin the most intense experience of my life.
I believe it should be legal (maybe with some huge warnings/education about potential consequences), but from all I've heard LSD is just synthetic variant of the same - why would that be illegal then? If that is OK, what about mescaline, that's also just a plant? Ayahusca? Cocaine is also a plant extract, and so is heroine (with some chemistry on top of that, but coca itself has quite an effect on its own). A bit slippery slope...
No link found between psychedelics and psychosis:
https://www.nature.com/news/no-link-found-between-psychedeli...
I think I still agree that they're certainly safer than most other drugs
Decriminalization is a half-assed step from horrible situation, but its still a bad and unfair situation. We can do better once we recognize that some substance is not the end of the world (like weed recently).
Personal example - a friend brought from US a vaporizer with weed oil inside. Its much less health-damaging compared to usual smoking - even compared to plant vaporizers, the potency and effect is predictable, you know what to expect. This is how things improve when market is legal, in just couple of years. And this product is illegal everywhere else, including Amsterdam...
Legalization is not the solution to everything either. Since weed has been legalized around here (Canada) a couple of big cities moved to literally ban smoking it everywhere. Current Quebec government is also pushing to ban smoking it outside province wide. They also let landlords ban marijuana use property wide. So basically, in these cities (and if the current Quebec government gets its way, which it definitely might considering its a majority government), marijuana is now legal to own, but renters now can't legally smoke anywhere.
We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.
We saw what happened in the Prohibition. When alcohol was criminalized, gang violence spiked, production was accidentally mixed with ethyl -and- methyl, tax revenues went down, and we as a populace was generally unsafer after than before. There were even cases where the US govt poisoned rumrunners' stocks to kill drinkers - they were doing something illegal, so US officials deemed it OK to kill people. It was bad enough that Congress and the president did another constitutional change to remove the ban.
With cannabis, it is mostly harmless and makes you feel weird. But as noted by Nixon and other republicans, banning and punishing cannabis users was being equated with targeting hippies and blacks.
And of course, cannabis usage completely ignores many health positive effects like prevention of nausea, glaucoma, and many others. It's not a cure-all, but the downsides are very very limited. Just compare this to say, the Sacklers' pushing of Oxycontin. I don't think "near harmless" can be used to discuss that.
When we look at harm minimization, making drugs illegal only pushes them underground, deprives tax dollars, increases violent groups to maintain illicit trade, and further reduces public safety. So yeah, you do have to look at the whole issue rather than "My uncle Jimbob sits around gettin' high". Whereas alcoholism and alcohol overdose is a significant issue which can kill people.. Yet we had that discussion a century ago, and we learned our lesson then.
Yes, he's terrible.
Putting him in jail, and destroying any possibility of him getting a decent job, forever, hardly seems a constructive way forwards there though does it?
stoned fathers still exist, during the current prohibition.
> a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
Have you ever wondered why they're drunk/stoned all the time? They're not a drunk because they're a drunk. They're a drunk for different reasons. They're depressed. They're not satisfied with their life or themselves. They're hurting. They're scared. They're angry. There's a reason for it and it's not because they can buy alcohol or drugs.
Not all drugs are equal in my mind in that sense.
Granted I've no issue for being measured with how to handle folks who are caught with it.
The former means you won’t get a criminal record for it but it’s still illegal.
Criminalizing addicts is not helping anyone. Throwing addicts into jail doesn't solve their addiction problem, and distributors are still out there.
Yay selective local enforcement! What a huge leap forward! /s
While I am happy any effort and attention is here, it doesn't do anything even for people who get busted. The colorado courts are still happy to assume any more than one is intent to sell, and weigh the box the came in to charge you. I welcome a step forward, but this is closer to a twitch.
Most police are happy to confiscate and personally use or make use of contraband as an alternative currency.
When arrests are incentivised as paths to promotion, most police seem to be fine with them, and when they are disincentivised to skew statistics and optics they seem fine with that as well.
>It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual "from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships" and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.
Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more...
Magic mushrooms scored a 5.
He lost his job after publicly calling out the government for ignoring the conclusions of the study.
>Nutt was sacked last year by the home secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, for challenging ministers' refusal to take the advice of the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which he chaired.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more...
Slow your roll, Jeff. Denver is pretty far from Amsterdam.
Pretty sure weed hasn’t hurt Colorado’s reputation whatsoever. We still have tons of people moving here, including large businesses.
All the hyperbole these people shouted about prior to legalization of weed has not come true.
Instead of the majority of people mindlessly consuming media and products without questioning the impact it's having on their minds, their future, the environment, other cultures, etc, they might pause to ponder these things.
Rather than accepting society as an immutable construct that they couldn't possibly influence in a positive way, people might choose to participate in challenging the status quo.
In lieu of othering demographics that they don't understand, people might realize that despite some minor cosmetic differences, we're all humans that have a pretty vivid subjective experience of pain.
The elite benefit from a complacent majority. I would even go so far as to say they rely on a complacent majority to maintain their position. You don't have to venture very far to read stories about people who experience tectonic shifts in their patterns of thought after taking psychs.
The current fully legalized and regulated substances just don't have that kind of effect. Alcohol just lowers your inhibitions and arguably makes you stupider.
Never met a drug user who did that. Met scores of drug users who thought that they did.
Regarding general trends in the legalization movement and related spaces:
> The interest in CBD currently seems like a soft, first step for many people into the realm of what was once perceived as very bad or dangerous (e.g. Reefer Madness). Plus the wave of recreationalization in the US.
> Canada is an interesting position due to the legalization movement; I'm curious if they are poised to become the global leader in "mj" research and the pharmaceuticals/medicines derived from that research. Or is the market just waiting for the US to become federally unfettered ("sleeping giant")?
https://www.amazon.com/Legalize-This-Decriminalizing-Practic...
The gist: whenever someone is about to be put in jail for any reason, they ought to be given a reasonable answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?" There simply is no satisfactory answer for current drug charges.
Bad answers to this question would require, out of consistency, criminalization of alcohol, tobacco, skiing (dangerous!), pizza (bad for your health!), etc.
I remember little mushroom stalls in Camden market which sold all kinds of interesting fungi, packaged and shrink-wrapped just like you’d see in a supermarket.
I fear this gives rhetorical ammo to folks who don’t want any “drugs” (besides caffeine and alcohol, of course) in their communities legal. I can hear the argument now. “Maybe you want weed, because it’s harmless? How about magic mushrooms? Where do we stop? Cocaine? Meth? How about we empty out the pharmacy for all to get high on whatever they want!” Slippery slope.
I fear the successful movement thus far is about to have breaks applied in the “on the fence” states after this news.
From following the discusssions here on HN it seems a number of people are actually arguing to legalize everything for personal use.
I am. You should be able to walk into a doctor's office and ask for a prescription to treat your addiction and withdrawal symptoms. If there's no methadone type reduced-harm variant of your drug of choice, it should be straight up prescribed to you so you can buy it in a metered, safe and pure form from a pharmacist. And your doctor should continue to try and keep you safe even if you are never able to beat the addiction.
The moral hazard into turning doctors and pharmacists into pushers and dealers is obvious, but bringing it above board should make the problem tractable.
You'd definitely save tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives per year in reduced overdoses, elimination of the drug war and reduction in gang warfare.
The other thing legalization does is eliminate the need for a seedy underbelly of dealers and thugs. The thugs exist because nobody can risk going to the cops and asking for help. You don't want to get arrested for reporting a robbery or assault. A lot of the bad things associated with drug sales are a result of the drug sales being illegal.
I am. Criminalization has proven to be a dead-end strategy, inflicting serious harm on people to people and society. Several studies have shown alcohol to be on par or worse with heroine and cocaine in terms of harm inflicted and it's still legal to sell to adults. The opiate epidemic has all but proven that OTC and prescription medication can have effects at least as bad as cocaine and meth. Criminalization fosters crime and leads to drugs that are worse in side effects, leading to increased harm.
Criminalization makes it substantially harder to reach affected people and get them into treatment since we treat the addicts as criminals- Portugal has proven that decriminalization is an effective harm reduction strategy. I'm all for it "make all recreational drugs available to adults" and at the same time invest in educating people and helping them to leave the circumstances that lead to the addiction.
Methamphetamine and cocaine are both schedule 2, meaning they are legal with a prescription. Pot and shrooms, arguably way safer, are schedule 1, meaning there are no valid medical uses and are outright prohibited in the US.
"Then don't do drugs"
Those boundaries are likely very different for a drug that detaches you from reality, and discussions around that are where concerns can be met and middle ground can be found.
but yes, psychoactive substances should be made legal and controlled in a similar fashion where one would need to be of a certain age to legally purchase them. I don't understand how people think "oh well kids would just be high on meth all the time!" when that thought process in itself, is the one detached from reality.
Are you fine if your child has easy access to drugs and it being 'cool' to have drugs?
This is about not taking a clear public HEALTH issue into a criminal justice one.
Why do so many Americans think we can jail or kill our way out of every single problem?
I think a lot of this fear that legalizing drugs will lead to a bunch of non-drug users suddenly becoming drug addicts is simply hysteria. People use illegal drugs to self-medicate some other problem; healthy people are not suddenly going to want to be crack users.
A lot of the hysteria in Colorado prior to marijuana legalization was that youth consumption rates would increase. The opposite happened:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/11/follo...
Yes, the logic is faulty, but guaranteed you'll see it on social media memes and the evening opinionews.
And if you don't know anyone who thinks like that, consider yourself lucky, then know that they are out there and they vote in force.
I found that to convince them of the mutual benefit of the humane approach required beginning the conversation from where they were at and slowly working our way toward the understanding of pursuing better outcomes through a thoughtful reimagining of our reaction to antisocial behaviors. If you just dump on people and tell them they're wrong they stop caring about the idea and only want to fight you off.
So, oddly enough, actually making progress toward convincing people to be humane requires being humane in the doing of the convincing.
We could stop wherever there's actual evidence of harm. I know, radical notion.
This also puts the stereotyped rural, underemployed, farmer back in a lucrative industry. Provides a solution for the Opioid epidemic. Lowers the cost of healthcare.