Magic Mushrooms Can Help Smokers Kick the Habit
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The drug allowed to me introspect and access my mind in a way which was previously blocked. From the perspective it unlocked, it was easy to see the harm I was doing to myself and others. It changed my life.
With all the upsides, it is however still necessary to warn of the dangers of taking mushrooms without knowing what to expect or taking care for set and setting. If you are thinking about taking psychedelics I can recommend the book "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys", though you should better be taking a guided trip with someone who has the experience and who you trust.
I've had one high-dose psychedelic session in each of the last three years and while the experiences themselves were sometimes difficult, the positive changes are hard to overstate. They seem mild at first, but the unshakable sense of self-worth, of purpose, and of belonging in the universe have become such strong foundations for all the positivity that I build above them that at this point I don't know how much of my beautiful life to attribute to my luck in getting into psychedelics in the first place.*
* ...in the right way, of course. The drugs themselves are a neutral technology like any other, and must be used in the right way in order to be helpful rather than harmful or merely novel.
I'd prob try looking for a counselor/therapist that has tried psychedelics and has helped others. You can probably search for them by looking for healing centers or retreats, specifically in the PNW.
If you can afford it, these 5-MeO retreats are probably a slam dunk, although 5-MeO is not for the faint of heart. Check out the psychedelic toad - hamilton's pharmacopeia for more on that.
All you really need, though, is a high-dose mushroom session with eyeshades and music, supervised by someone's that's done it before whom you trust. Their sense of attention and compassion are more important than extensive experience using them. They're just there to hold the space. Again, see James Fadiman's book for the how-to.
You can grind up mushrooms and steep them like a tea, or just eat them as-is. It's nothing like using drugs, more like consuming a food that has an odd effect then just goes away once it's passed through.
Also, start small, it's useful for acclimating to the whole experience. And you might find what you're looking for without even taking a full psychedelic dose. Microdosing shrooms is still quite active, much like drinking a cup of coffee is.
Traditionally you would do an acid/base organic extraction. But for most purposes, you can STB (straight to base) with a bit of lye (i.e. canning supply) and an organic solvent like naphtha.
Obtaining powered plant material is easy, usually available on eBay or else independent sites.
5-Aco-DMT is an analog to psilocin, and is believed to be a prodrug (converted into target by your body), but I think precursor is a misnomer in this case.
(And on a grander scale, if our modern way of living isn't helping life thrive, well, maybe it's time to make some loving changes. So I'm glad this research is being done.)
It showed me what supreme contentedness and connectedness is after this long time of seeing the world purely in differences - within myself, without myself and in the relationships between me and my environment. Unity.
Understanding what love is. Why people go to parks. How they can enjoy life. Why they bond. The beauty of life and subjectivity.
When you are in a state of happiness, everything in the past and present seems meaningful and positive in some way, because all of it brought you to this state of being. Even if it was terrible. Even if you didn't dare to consider it. In this state, you can contemplate these things because you are overloaded with serotonin.
I advise everyone to use a tripsitter when they experience this, especially for the first time. Respect the drug and it will respect you.
If you don't know anyone and think you are alone, do not be afraid, there are people who will do that for you
:)
And while serotonin definitely is involved, it is only a part of it.
The real "magic" can happen because psilocybin/LSD/etc. allows you to increase your frequency. This in turn allows you to tune in to other ("higher" and immaterial) dimensions that surround us all the time. Most of us normally do not yet perceive them in everyday life, but these special molecules can make that happen for us - for a few moments at least. Some call this state "heightened intuition", others call it "getting in touch with your guides", others call it "opening your clear-senses". The benefit of such a short "peek behind the veil" is that at least your subconscious will always remember that there is an infinite profoundness to life that we completely ignore in our current way of living/culture. This is why many people get out of their deep/long-lasting/clinical depression, sometimes by experiencing only a single dose of LSD. They have seen "it", maybe heard "it", or smelled "it", but most of all, they have experienced "it" and it will stay with them - "it" being this mysterious force of pure joy, love and deep understanding (which is much more profound that any intellectual understanding).
Word of caution: Before you go ahead with such an experience, make sure you take all the time in the world to educate yourself about all of it. Then make sure your source sells you the actual and pure substance; maybe test it beforehand if you can. Plan your trip carefully. Do it in nature and undisturbed.
It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for consultation to help me make the decision.
I'm of two minds about that. While I agree that I ought to have full autonomy over my own body, at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members.
Russia's heroin problem has been rising and rising -- apparently 2% of the population are addicted, and much higher rates for certain segments [1] -- and people talk of a "lost" generation. And it may get even worse.
I think our social contract with the state involves not allowing that to happen to its population.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792...
https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-...
> at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members
the current strategies don't work. The root cause of why people seek drugs is a complex topic and none of the strategies to keep people off drugs seem to address the root causes but to simply ban and punish.
Drugs are a public health problem not a criminal one. People are taking things like heroin primarily due to other factors in their life, which the state should address. For drugs like magic mushrooms lack of availability is increasingly looking like actively harming the availability/development of a positive treatment for many conditions.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc...
(tldr the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation, while it is extremely addictive it's also extremely hard to overdose on when taken on its own)
This is something of an exaggeration; heroin withdrawal can happen even without criminalization, for example, and is profoundly unpleasant, and constipation can dramatically reduce your quality of life. But certainly those negative "impacts" pale compared to the epidemic of drug-overdose deaths caused by prohibition, or even prohibition-induced unplanned withdrawal experiences.
This is a really, really simplistic view. Heroin will build up tolerance and withdrawals can kill you, or are at least extremely unpleasant. It's only safe as long as you have access to an ever increasing supply of heroin.
I think your example is kind of unfortunate because a lot of drugs are actually quite safe, but not the very addictive, tolerance-building, terrible withdrawal kind (opioids, benzos, alcohol). Magic mushrooms are, of course, none of those three things.
I do not think prohibition improves the well being of citizens. Heroin is easily available in virtually all major US cities.
Everybody agrees heroin is bad for the individual and for society, and that it should go away. What isn't clear to me is that putting users in jail and creating a hugely competitive profit incentive for violent gangs is actually effective towards that goal.
With heroin already illegal we see that a given portion of the population uses it anyway, so how much of the population do we think is not using it solely because it is banned? How does this compare to purely medical intervention?
I think it’s really easy to have a different stance based upon the actual drug.
I have no issues with marijuana and at no point in my life have feared of being robbed by someone trying to score money for a joint. But change that to heroin or meth and it’s a whole different situation.
https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much...
It would be akin to visiting your pharmacy.
Why does it even have to be armed? Why not jail petty theft that furthers a drug habit?
Freedom being a core tenet of rights in the USA does not me individual freedom above all else. It’s a balancing act where individual freedoms need a justification for restriction. Not that it cannot be done.
I see it like freedom of speech allowing you to speak your mind but society deciding that yelling “Fire!” in a theater is not allowed.
> If something doesn't harm anyone, should it be deterred just because it has associated behaviors that do?
Of course it can. That’s what society and laws are for, namely guiding overall behavior in complex systems. The what and how matter though.
> Should going to the shooting range be illegal because it makes people better marksmen therefore increasing fatalities in mass shootings?
The vast majority of people going a firing range for target practice are law abiding people, not criminals planning a mass shooting. Infringing their rights would not, IMHO, be a fair or constitutional trade off.
This is a good example of where the specifics matter. The vast majority of marijuana users do not commit crimes to buy marijuana.
No honest debate on this subject could say the same about heroin or meth. Both of those drugs do nothing but destroy people’s lives and drive them to a life of dependence and crime.
Lots of adults will make very poor decisions when presented with the easy opportunity to do so, at least at certain critical times. People fall on bad times routinely (job loss, death in the family, etc) and can quickly find themselves hopeless and/or depressed. In a completely unregulated environment, these bad episodes of life can quickly escalate into serious (e.g. heroin) addiction problems and spiral out of control with devastating long-term effects first on the individual, and then increasingly on everyone around them and the entirety of society.
There's the obvious and immediate costs like ER visits, violence, police calls, etc. There's also the secondary impacts: the devastating impact on friends and family (who may also fall into the same hole as a result), any children of the now-addicted, etc. All of this rolls up into big-picture economic costs and "fabric of society" issues as well.
I have a streak of independence and self-determination in me as well, but it's fallacious to think that there aren't significant tertiary negative effects on others when I do misguided things, and making it super-easy for me to do so at my weakest points in life isn't a winning idea. This is the ethical basis for societal/government regulation of "dangerous" activities and items.
You can see a mirror of these same issues in the gun control debate as well. A bunch of responsible adults reasonably don't want the government telling them they're not allowed to responsibly own firearms and make their own decisions about what firearms they own for what purpose. They can make those decisions for themselves and it doesn't hurt anybody, because they are responsible adults.
But, as above, one has to consider that some small percentage of these responsible adults will eventually have a bad mental health day (or week, or month) and things will spiral out of control. Or they'll make a simple mistake and the gun is stolen by another, or discovered by a curious child or a very upset teenager. These are dangerous items and misuse (or even minor human error in controlling access) can have huge negative societal impacts. Thus, it's ethical for society to take an interest in regulating them.
In both cases (and so many others) the magic is in finding good healthy balance, and realizing of course that law and policy can't prevent all possible harm. Banning all the guns and drugs in the country is obviously not the right answer, and neither is wiping all regulation off the books and letting everyone walk drunkenly into their local corner store and pick up a loaded M-16 and a pound of meth for $20 whenever they feel like it. Developing a good regulation regime that's reasonably-protective and also minimally intrusive on peoples' rights is hard work; much harder than soundbite-happy bans.
Talk to doctors in ER (or cops) about their experiences if you care. It is a sad and sobering report on current state of raw mankind
That doesn't mean the adult population (including the people you mention) shouldn't be given agency and the requisite respect to make decisions for themselves provided they are not harming other people.
>> Talk to doctors in ER (or cops) about their experiences if you care.
Given the number of vile, ignorant and disturbing things come out of the mouths of cops both on and off duty there are probably better ways to get an objective picture of the current raw state of raw mankind.
Some people - a much younger version of myself included - are total idiots, not to be trusted.
But hey, personal responsibility and all that... .
Well, with all due respect, you've lived either a short life or a sheltered life.
People have weak moments in their life.
The argument is simple: ask "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users.
All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...
[1]https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exce....
Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Doug Husak
The argument is simple and comes from the legal perspective: every person who is put in jail should have a satisfactory answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author (philosopher) points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users.
All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.
so what is your take on those? should they be controlled substances? because it certainly seems we need to have a discussion at the level of the nation about how we're going to pay for universal health care consumed by those taking part in these behaviors going forward if this is going to realistically work.
On the other hand, if you want to reduce the economic cost of healthcare by killing opioid addicts with accidental overdoses, you may not be persuaded. But I am not on your side.
Wow. I knew the unpredictable quality was bad, but didn't know that the damages were almost entirely due to them. Any chance you have a source there?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21270553
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc...
I don't know if heroin has a safer therapeutic index than fentanyl. Possibly. The Grauniad article is correct about the relatively low risks of properly prepared heroin and the dangers of adulteration. I wouldn't be confident that fentanyl in properly prepared doses is equally safe; it might be safer or less safe, but the major difference is in ease of smuggling, which is associated with lack of accountability.
The article mentions amphetamine briefly in an unjustified aside: "It is the same with black-market amphetamines: speed alone may not kill, but speed with a blindfold is highly likely to finish you off." The truth is that amphetamine is fairly safe at therapeutic doses—safer than many common psychiatric drugs, anyway—but at the much higher recreational doses, it reliably generates progressive damage to multiple organs, including the brain. This is not a problem shared by the opiates, aside from the much milder constipation problem.
I had seen somewhere an empirical study comparing deaths from prescription opiates and black-market opiates. I'd like to find it again.
If I understand your comment right, you are saying that the opiod crisis shows that people do choose drugs if they can and if there was univ. healthcare, then the system would go down under the costs.
The problem with this, as I see it: A good chunk of people addicted in this opiod crisis didn't choose to get addicted. They were all too readily prescribed hard painkillers for ailments that did by no means require such a treatment (e.g. backpain of various degrees). This is fentanyl as a gateway drug, so to speak. Those people would not have been addicts otherwise. But they got hooked on the medication and when their prescriptions comes to an end, then they would seek a replacement.
That is why doctors and pharmaceutical companies are getting sued - and are losing.
Further: If psychedelic drugs are indeed this helpful with issues like smoking and depression, like recent research suggests, then controlled administration would surely be a great relief to an overwhelmed healthcare system: saving e.g. on expensive anti-depression drugs or on cancer treatments, where the cancer was caused by smoking.
>I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for consultation to help me make the decision.
The opioid crisis is evidence that this can lead to trouble. There's an easy counter argument that it only causes trouble for the people who choose to start using those substances, and so it's still the right thing to allow someone to do. I tried to present an externality imposed to counter that counter, and healthcare is an easy example.
This is why many industries & sytems in US are broken: medical (including psychiatric), educational, drug & criminal justice, etc.
[0] - Skin in the Game (book), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)
I quoted Leary on 'set and setting' the other day on an LSD history thread and mentioned Leonard Orr used to get great results with nothing more exotic than oxygen, so rather than repeat that ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264919 ) I'll say this:
If you have a modality of therapy that works, it will work without the drug (which, at best, serves as an amplifier and a "convincer".)
If you don't have a modality of therapy that works reliably, then it's irresponsible to add drugs and hope for the best. You're banging on the side of the box hoping to reseat the vacuum tubes.
The "convincer" effect can be achieved without drugs. Not to be too mysterious but I mean hypnosis. You can e.g. quit smoking using hypnosis. It's not even hard.
I'm not against drugs per se I'm just against using them in therapy. It's irresponsible. It's like advocating zeppelins over bikes for personal transport.
(I'm great friends with Mushroom, and a little 'shroom tea can be great fun. But cramming 'im into a wee lil pill and then claiming "quit smoking" magic is in it... That's bad science and lousy magick.)
My concern is when people get confused and think that the "magic" is in the mushroom.
From the conclusion: "If a benefit is present, current evidence suggests the benefit is small at most."
The effect size and certainty with mushrooms seem much greater.
I actually only ever tried smoking cessation once, at a party, to demonstrate hypnosis. A friend of a friend went from two packs a day to two cigarettes a day, and a month later she was still barely smoking. YMMV.
Oh man! I just remembered what happened: I went into an online quit-smoking chatroom and offered to help people quit and they tore me a new one. People were howling for my blood! That's why I never went into business as a therapist. (That and I'm kind of an anti-social curmudgeon.)
Only in certain areas.
> So you think that you 'hypnotized' the person to gradually stop smoking over a month from a sort session?
No. The change in rate of smoking (2 packs a day to 2 cigs a day) was immediate and durable (at least up to a month, I didn't talk to her again beyond that.) Interestingly, at the very end of the session there was a momentary unconscious movement of the hand in a holding-cigarette gesture. I think the reason that she didn't stop smoking entirely was somehow connected to that gesture, FWIW.
> You have some 'magical' powers.
Maybe..? Certainly, to myself I seem nondescript.
> Sorry for the skepticism...
It's fine. You're nicer than most. I sometimes think I should write an autobiography, but then I think, who would believe it?
However, what we know about psychs is that there is a huge release of BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor) and a shutdown of the DMN.
The BDNF enables a ton of new neural connections to be built. It's like you have about 6-8 hours of a period where your brain plasticity goes back to that of an infant, just absorbing everything. So in this accelerated learning state, it's possible to work through one's emotions.
So it makes sense to prepare for several weeks to receive therapy and to outline goals and memories to revisit to process them during this heightened period. Then when the drug wears off, you're still left with the new neural connectivity and perspectives and the other benefits that were derived from the session.
Rather than hitting the vacuum tube, this is more like re-running the radio scanner in your car to find radio stations when you've moved over to a new city and the old radio stations are now out of range while one isn't tuned to the current set of radio stations.
Which is perfectly ok and probably preferable for most who waste trips by thinking that you must think deep and just get uncomfortable.
And while obviously there are results where people make large changes my own experience about those people is that a lot of insights are like New Years Eves resolutions said when drunk and happy; the change or insight goes away when a short time has passed.
The you're describing sounds great. All I'm saying is, a sweat lodge (for example) can take the place of the drug. The "magic" is in the "set and setting" not the pill.
I think it’s appropriate to try something else when you’ve tried therapy, support groups, etc. Sometimes the best thing one needs especially when they’ve been focused on changing their mind and habits for a long while is something to open up all the calcified pathways.
The idea that psilocybin "cures" smoking addiction is like the "Virtus dormitiua"
> I am asked by the learned doctor the cause and reason why opium causes sleep. To which I reply, because it has a dormitive property, whose nature is to lull the senses to sleep.
We have no idea why magic mushroom do what they do, nor any solid scientific idea of how they do what they do. The best we can say is, "By breaking down those networks, there's a chance they won't re-form." and "It seemed to work..."
A neuroscientist friend of mine likes to say, "Psychiatry is not a branch of medicine." This still isn't it. For example: at any point were the subjects of the study given a blood test?
Of course, caution is certainly warranted with such powerful tools, especially as we try to understand them better. But if they are effective and can be used safely in the right context, then we should use them. And we have indications that this is the case.
So we must proceed carefully forward. I'm so glad that the multi-decade blockade on research is finally lifting.
https://maps.org/research/mdma/ptsd/phase3
Drugs used in therapy can resolve decades of treatment-resistant PTSD. Would you reconsider your position against drugs in therapy?
Would you be willing to look at the scientific results? Would you take a chance on closing your eyes momentarily to the word "drug"? This is therapy. Therapy is scientific results applied to the betterment of mankind.
To me, it would be deeply unethical to stop or ignore this work.
I've actually seen the results of "street therapy" for PTSD using MDMA by responsible adults. It was ... staggering. It's hard to express the boundless privilege of seeing PTSD melt off a person you love in an evening. And stay gone. Treatment-resistant PTSD. Decades of it. Gone. Because a substance was ingested. After endless therapy and doing all the right things. Sure, therapy worked. Glacially. There was constant pain. Constant anxiety. Gone. Just like in the studies. Rigorous, careful studies, taking decades of careful preparation in all spheres, political and medical.
But the anecdote doesn't matter. We have the studies.
I don't want to take anything away from people, I just want us to think clearly about what's really going on when these kind of excellent results occur.
In the excitement over the successes with MDMA we shouldn't overlook things like Emotional Freedom Technique or Feldenkrais Technique that have also had wonderful successes with PTSD and yet don't involve ingesting substances. If we do, we risk missing out on the essential aspects of effective therapy.
(I want to note that I was replying to this specifically: “ I'm just against using them in therapy. It's irresponsible.” It was a rather crystallized statement, but we clearly see nuances here :) I take it that we both fully agree that drugs must not overshadow therapy, and that there are great temptations for shortcuts.)
Well met! :-)
I can only assure you I'm not. Your brain can already make all the psychoactive drugs you need.
These chemicals (LSD, Psilcybin) are like electroshock therapy, just a little more subtle. There are more precise and/or delicate modalities that are effective. I don't think it's too controversial to believe that we should concentrate on the precise and delicate therapy, eh?
No we don't; you're just moralizing against what appears to be effective treatment. No one is saying psychedelics are panacea, that's just a strawman.
Stop projecting your own misguided personal ethics. There are real people that need real help.
Fortunately that's not what they're finding for these classes of drugs. See the incredible stats coming out around MDMA + PTSD + therapy.
You go out of your way to say you're not against drugs per se, but based on this statement and I can say that your attitude towards psychedelics is probably antithetical to their therapeutic potential. Having used mushrooms only once (admittedly in a larger-than-probably-responsible dose), I can say that viewing the trip as a recreational experience is misguided at best and damaging or dangerous at worst.
The whole recreational, non-study-able drug use phenomenon, the societal wave of recognition of the value of these experiences, it's all due to the fact that these have a real positive impact on the neurochemistry of the majority of people. Set and setting is important in all branches of medicine and self-improvement, but it's undeniable that these drugs will do wonders even with loosely structured goals at the outset, given proper set and setting as a baseline.
One of the weird things about psychedelics is that you'll often think "why don't I take better care of myself?" which often includes not doing the drugs or living the lifestyle that gave you that insight.
I also think I enjoy weed less since I've had that experience, which I'm a little disappointed about, but I feel like I have a much better compass for making good decisions now. I replaced grams in blunts with small amounts of whole leaf vaporization after that.
Despite not using them in a clinical, supervised environment, or in conjunction with therapy, the experience actually had me somehow understand where my depressions came from and helped overcoming them like nothing else did.
Of course it didn't "cure me", managing depression has been a way longer journey - but for me it changed my life from "barely able to get up" to a state where i was actually able to do things, start working, live my life and care for myself almost overnight. Literally felt like it had re-wired my brain, never since relapsed into quite such a dark and hopeless state i was living in back then.
While I realize that it is an entirely personal matter, I can't help but ask if you can perhaps share some of your insights?
A major reason for my depressions where my fathers early death, which i hadn't really processed up to that point. In my first ever trip, some hours in i fell into a state where all that sadness and regret just overpowered my conscience, quite literally myself. Yet at the same time i was calmly observing myself, and i was able to reflect quite deeply onto my emotional state, ironically all whilst beeing utterly unable to control it.
This "loss of ego", i could maybe describe it as an "out of body experience" made it incredibly obvious to me how to put my regular emotional state into context and understanding how rejecting the process of grief and feeding my fears of loss had created the state i was living in.
Afterwards all those things that had an unshakeable grip on me started to become understandable in a way you'd understand ANOTHER person going through this, reasoning wasn't clouded anymore from my affection. I think that was the tipping point
It's helpful to be able to experience the world without the influence of the ego, because then you are able to experience the world in a completely unfiltered way. You are able to get closer to an experience of objective truth.
Many people who have used psychedelics or work deeply with meditation all come to similar conclusions: the ego is an illusion. All beings are one and the same. Your sense of "separateness" from every living thing on this planet is a function of your ego-filter — and your ego-filter is wrong.
As an example: given that you have free will, at any moment you could say to yourself, "hey, there are X and Y habits/traits I have, let's not do those anymore and do Z instead." Maybe it's smoking, eating badly, you don't treat people the way they deserve, being a doormat, whatever. You could absolutely choose to become an entirely different person overnight. You might also change your career/lifestyle overnight (not everyone is so lucky though).
Now the ego swoops in and says, "Hold on, let's not do anything crazy, it'll be scary and embarrassing if I suddenly act differently, what will my friends think? It's easier to keep on keeping on. These habits are just things that I would do. It's okay when I do these things because I'm me." and so on like this.
It's strikingly similar to death experiences I've had slowly waking up as I die in morning dreams ...
No one I knew had any leads, not really shocked by that. But I quit dipping anyways, about 6 months ago. Moral of the story: sometimes your friends don't have illegal drugs and you have to suck it up and do right things the hard way. Second moral: having friends that have drugs would have made all this so much easier.
And I've picked and eaten A LOT of supposedly dangerous ones, as well as other plants; something I suspect most people speaking out on the subject haven't.
As a matter of fact, I just got some red amanitas out of the freezer that I picked a few days ago. I'm going to fry them in butter with onions and garlic and make a lovely shroom sandwich.
Like amanitas, liberty caps have a very distinctive look. Soak them in water for a while if at all unsure, and only eat a small amount to begin with.
The really dangerous stuff is pushed by "science" and the people who come up with this FUD to sell their artificial, truly poisonous and addictive chemical cocktails for awesome profits instead.
In other areas it may not be that simple, that being said, it's pretty sage advice to not just go out and pick mushrooms to eat.
Personally I never did them or any other hallucinogen, but helped gather them for my friends when I was a kid. My dad is slightly schizophrenic and everyone says he was never the same after they scored some LSD in the 60's. While I am fine, save some depression and ADD, I figured with the family history why risk it, and with the anxiety disorder that comes from depression the thought of having a panic attack while hallucinating pretty much guarantees that it would happen. The one time I tried pot, was an absolute nightmare and that's not even a true hallucinogenic, just has some properties.
It's perfectly safe to pick any mushroom. You can take them home, take a spore print, dry them, and carefully identify them with the help of the internet at your leisure.
All that's important is that you know not to eat them until you've done so.
And when you do think you've identified them, and want to eat them, first eat a small amount just to play it safe.
Picking mushrooms is not playing Russian roulette. It's completely harmless, no mushroom kills you on contact, you're being ridiculous.
It's actually a quite fun hobby to forage and collect mushrooms when in season, take them home and try classify them. Even if you just throw them all away afterwards. In the process you've dispersed their spores too.
This is always a good read, it's what happens if you do this wrong: https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2006/11/22/i-survived-the-...
EDIT: I should say that I mainly said this because I thought it was funny. I actually think it's fine if people to take risks like that if they understand the responsibility and do their own research. I also think it's fine if people occasionally die from things like those, so take that as you will.
Between spore syringes and mushroom hunting.
Plus the fruits really are medicinal for the mind body and spirit. It’s so good seeing the world starting to wake up to these natural technologies..
In European Snus is more popular and funny enough due to being water cured has less carcinogenics in it.
Here it is:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment
* There seems to be a large degree of choice in which changes one wants to take away from the experience but this is a highly subjective, personal conclusion.
IME mushrooms cause any low-consciousness activities like smoking/drinking/mindless partying to seem repulsive.
Edit for one more thought on this: it also gave me an appreciation for vegans and vegetarians. I was eating chicken while tripping once and really had some inner conflict over if it was ok to eat another animal. I'll never be a vegetarian, but for a brief moment I understood what all my hippie friends are on about :)
BTW, the fun starts when they introduce PvP honor and battlegrounds. Other than that it's a true grindfest.
As for the OP topic, shrooms are great, got me out of depression during my late teens. No preparation or anything, just took some with friends and embraced it with positive curiousity.
If there's one game that does "not very fun (occasionally) but incredibly addicting" for me it's Old School Runescape. I started playing Runescape in 2006 and I still play in 2019 (with some breaks in between). I'm 21. That's most of my life.
Same with alcohol or even meat products in particular. You can feel becoming stupid eating those. I think microdosing for 30 days is an effective way of kicking off habits or forming new healthy habits.
They have experienced guides/facilitators who can help in case someone is having a challenging experience while on psilocybin, and they have medical staff on premise if anyone needs it. The one caveat to note is that even though I'd say the retreat center is 90% secular/scientific, there's still a 10% remnant of non-scientific woo such as "shamanism" and "energy flows" and "cosmic surgery" that might be a turn off for the atheistic scientist crowd. Worth taking a peek though.
(And to second the warnings: please read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind first, and be extremely careful if there's any history of schizophrenia in your family before trying any psychedelic)
Of course, you can't easily alter your own beliefs, so if you have a lot of trouble suspending your disbelief for these things it might still be a turn off for you. But some such things can be useful to "believe" even if you do not think they reflect objective reality.
One of the reasonably well known side effects of smoking pot is sometimes a feeling of intense paranoia. Well, over a period of a few months, I was regularly smoking pot in the evenings and convinced myself that smoking cigarettes would kill me and while stoned I was able to exaggerate these feelings to the point of paranoia (I was thinking very, very hard. Overthinking, another well known side effect).
Subsequently, even during the day when I wasn't high, I could still "feel" that paranoia whenever I lit up a cigarette.
It took maybe 2-3 months, but eventually I stopped smoking cigarettes all together, and even now almost 20 years later, just one drag starts to make me feel sick.
Of course, then I had a pot smoking problem, but that's a different story, which required a different solution.
I didn't move to another country to give up cannabis, it was just a happy co-incidence.
Thinking they'd kill you with cancer sounds reasonable.
I was addicted to smoking, but not addicted to alcohol. Now, trying either leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Although, for health reasons, ironically, I am trying to pick up drinking Pinot Noir on occasion!
Interesting to see it might also help with depression because antidepressants are sometime prescribed to help quit smoking.
This is related to the "entropic brain" theory, see https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002...
Psilocybin Lead to (permanent) Increases in the Personality Domain of Openness.
where is the control group for 'going into a special place with the expectation of a spiritual/transformative experience and spending several hours meditating on letting go of the problem'?
pretty sure that might also have a nonzero statistical success correlate.
It seems to help with my psychological and spiritual development and make me more conscious, more purpose driven in life, and more aware of the shadow/devil side of my selfish personality.
I've also had a few enlightenment experiences that vastly deepened my understanding of what reality is and why we're here.
If anyone's curious; Elon Musk was right when he said:
"Love is the answer."
I don't really think using a seriously psychoactive substance for smoking is good at all; it is something that can be done by other means which involve much less risk or even personality change
The stories of personality change or risks are so overly reported on you forget that millions of people are using psychedelics daily without losing their personality.
i don't think it's smart even granting their argument to have a drug with powerful effects being used to solve problems. And this is assuming it wouldn't also amplify and mental issues a person has or cause psychotic breaks, etc.
The argument about cost on society also doesn't hold up since we seem to be fine with other "risky" behaviors. Such as extreme sports. Heck we actually encourage it.
Why?
A a more accurate headline would be "Months of intensive therapy set the stage for Magic Mushrooms to help smokers kick the habit"
I know people will see headlines like this, try to "cure" something with psychedelics, end up getting themselves into some sort of trouble and then blame the substances for their problems.
My later trips have been much deeper and more profound after lots of this type of work.
> ... Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[79] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine's addictive side-effects.
It's hugely psychological. I don't have the shakes or anything, but I'm drowsy, unalert, and feel slow. I can definitely understand how a shroom trip would "reset" my brain to a non-needy state.
I formed a vaping habit during a stressful period at work, which is much more nicotine (a pipe gives you the amount of nicotine as about a quarter of a cigarette, delivered over about a half hour), and I plan to go back to my occasional enjoyment of a pipe at home, refraining from using vaping as a coping mechanism.
If you want to stop smoking there's only one book you need, Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking.
Seriously no. This is not science. Hallucinogenic drugs also make people psychotic on occasion. Please don't take them, you'll be better off. Take the word of someone who's worked with recovering acid addicts. This shit ruins real lives.
its like if prozac was a lab made compound where the anecdotes were that some people experienced cognitive benefits and some people wanted to commit suicide. except thats exactly what happened and instead of keeping this a mystery with a few dismissive anecdotes from people with good experiences and people with bad experiences, many trials were done and it came out with warning labels for some people to objectively avoid it.
hallucinogenic drugs can be treated with the same standard.
In what way is it like that?
- Racist origins which disproportionately targeted minorities. It allowed police and prosecutorial discretion to arrest more minorities and give them longer sentences.
- Stopped medical progress. Finally a flood of studies are showing us mushrooms, marijuana, MDMA, acid, and more have positive medical uses.
- Gave law enforcement massive budgets which are further inflated with asset forfeiture. We see SWAT raids based on lies ruining lives and killing innocent people.
- Prevented people from relaxing with safer alternatives to alcohol.
The war on drugs needs to end.
No drug should be illegal. Drugs are a health concern, not criminal.
Replace public funding of law enforcement with public finding of rehab and other mental/physical healthcare services. It'll be cheaper and society would be healthier.
"what’s the significance of dreams and What can they teach us?"
From what I understand about dreams, no one has the answer to that question. It seems like they're going to make unfounded claims which makes me worried about their info.
Do they tend to pose speculation as truth or are they avoiding pseudoscience?
Is there evidence to prove that legal cocaine/meth/heroin being readily available for citizens would be good for society?
I mean look at the opioid crisis. There is no insurance policy for addiction, plus, you are labeled as a dedbeat by the society. And only because doctor prescribed you something they should not have.
Without criminalization of addiction the opioid crisis would have been much easier to deal with.
You can use that as a template for other things as well.
Besides, I would much prefer people got addicted to mushrooms and cannabis rather than alcohol. The damage alcohol does to an addict is total and eventually lethal and irreversible.
Can't you argue that by making it illegal, you make it less available, therefore ending up with less people addicted?
If you can't even keep them out of prisons, how effective do you think making them illegal has been on availability?
Now addicts are 'taken care' by the justice system which is less effective and more expensive than social and healthcare programs would be if applied to the same population.
I fact I am pretty sure that since the alcohol prohibition era there's evidence that turning markets with a lot of demand into illegal markets is worse for society .
Look at Portugal. They treated drugs as a social issue and are making great progress.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...
Now imagine if we took all the money we dump into stopping people from getting high, and put it into helping people with addiction issues. Not saying it would work, but it seems like a good thing to try given that the current approach is a failure
Making an accidental error on your taxes is illegal, but it is not a crime. You're given the chance to fix it, or assessed a small fine.
Setting up a lemonade stand without a license is illegal, but it is not a crime. You're told to shut down, or assessed a small fine (or more likely, not bothered by the authorities at all).
This is why people advocate for decriminalization, not legalization. Keep it against the rules, but make it a slap-on-the-wrist civil offense, not a crime you can be thrown in jail for.
This is how illicit drugs were treated before the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 added production, possession, sale, and use to the criminal code.
As it stands, the prohibition on drugs has created a business that many find worth resorting to violence over, and it impacts people in Mexico who would never have chosen to get involved.
There's no good answer here, but letting addicts drop out of society and damage their health with legal drugs seems more moral than banning drugs and having bystanders suffer.
The fact that researchers can barely study schedule 1 drugs to determine if they should BE scheduled 1 drugs is a big red flag.
The disproportionate response, the people sent to jail for minor offenses, the....well, all the points in the post you are replying to that you didnt address.
How can you stick to your claims of morality if you don't consider ALL the impacts?
tl;dr Legalization makes sense, because even though more people end up negatively impacted, they are generally only hurting themselves.
The bad people in the cartels very well may just continue being bad people- but without the lucrative illegal drug trade they will no longer be the most rich and powerful people in their society.
That the elites of the world are happy to have drugs being illegal, as it is a way to channel unemployed, violent youth who want to make a quick buck.
I mean, think of it this way: If you are a poor, violent and traumatized youth, and drugs were legal and you wanted to make a quick buck, you'd turn to robbery or worse, kidnapping/murder. As long as they prohibit something that people want, that cohort will always have a way to make a quick buck without turning to robbery/kidnapping/murder.
Well, if you start talking about Reagan in the 80s, there's significant evidence. Not as a way to channel unemployed, but to have extra governmental funding for covert operations.
If individuals mostly make decisions based on a number of internal currents, conscious and unconscious, the same must apply to collectives.
Is there any evidence of such a "rise the lowest forbidden fruits won't impact the crop"?
Without data, one could just as well argue that it favors criminal paths by smoothing the road.
Think of it this way: if you rule death penalty for illegal music download, you further banalize evil by broadcasting the message that the worst social behaviors is ethically equivalent, as far as law pretends to pursue some ethical aims, as something as harmless.
Nota bene: I don't imply that death penalty is acceptable for any kind of judicial sentence. Human errors and possibility of political abuses should be sufficient points to definitely end such a practice out of any legislation that pretends to respect its citizen dignity.
I would like to make a point that the effect doesn't have to benefit everyone equally. Historically powerful factions of society have pushed things to the detriment of the majority and the furtherance of a tiny minority.
Then when something is that addicting and you can't afford it anymore... then what? Wouldn't it create more crime, more robberies, thefts, possibly murders in the process?
I think we have a pretty good balance, and some drugs are slowly becoming legal as we learn more about them and we can setup systems to control their distribution.
Regarding your other speculation about decriminalizing drugs, we don't have to speculate. Other countries have already done it and seen improvements in their society. Crime and addiction rates go down.
We have a horrible balance. Every single day we have prohibition, drug convictions ruin more people's lives and it makes it harder for them to get help for their addictions.
Every day we have prohibition, SWAT teams have another chance to run wild with lies https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/10/14/l...
Power should be challenged at all times.
Addiction is not a personal failure but a coping mechanism in the face of trauma and failed social contracts.
Drug enforcement is a tool of selective oppression and unchecked profit for many actors, from enforcement agencies to incarceration. Prisoners are extremely expensive in tax money, and are treated inhumanely + used for forced labor. We as society seem to be happy to pay very high cost, including in money, to treat people horribly.
Prohibition is the main reason for substance prices to be high enough to support a powerful structure of organized crime which permeates and corrupts our society.
Money continues to be the major force behind policy changes in the US and until we make corruption illegal (lobbying and campaign finance are out of control), our politicians and laws will serve corruption.
Unless I misunderstood and you were meaning to say that psychedelic experiences can cause you to face your own death and have glimpses of enlightenment, then yes, but the metaphor will be lost on most people.
I mean literally, guillotine heals headache 100%, but that's not a sufficient reason to practice it.
The same with psychedelic mushrooms, even if they work against smoking, it's not necceserily a sufficient reason to use them.
If you believe there are no downsides, FYI, around a century ago heroin was marketed as a "no downsides" cough suppressant. With time (very soon) the downsides became apparent. This may happen to the psychedelic you now consider safe.
The idea to alter one's mind with substances to have more pleasant / interesting / euphoric / hallucinogenic experience is vicious in principle, even if there were no other downsides.
Schedule 1 says something to effect of "No medicinal value". That is a lie, as much as 2+2=5. It's becoming increasingly clear through (slow) research and many anecdotal reports that the knee-jerk reaction most people (including myself) had to natural mushrooms is just flat out wrong. Every month we get more results about people having the worst parts of their lives changed, almost miraculously, almost as if God created a substance for healing and called it good, and for Humans to use. And then Luddites come along "drug bad always, God wrong about creating and calling it good, man ban drug it hurt man once in some circumstance" and the same Luddites leave a swath of suffering in their ignorant wake.
We have a long history and data on how drugs in general can treat problems, but often come with side effects and other issues when they work, often serious. And sometimes per person they just don't; finding the correct drug treatment for a person is a very hard.
When i hear all this about LSD as a perfect miracle drug, I get VERY suspicious.
These drugs are mysterious and powerful and some of the most irresponsible and foolish and loudest people on the planet got their hands on them. But there is a lot of promising research that suggests the baby shouldn't have be thrown out like it was in the 70's.
You can basically say "there have been tragic results" about anything because there will always be irresponsible use.
I could argue that this is irresponsible use of reasoning.
Psychedelics, used responsibly, have overwhelming positive results in my experience, in scientific literature, in popular culture, in human spiritual history. The problem is that you have to validate this in your direct experience, and many people will either not have the requisite knowledge or open-mindedness to use them properly or to overcome the fear of them in the first place.
Personal experience and scientific literature could be, but I personally don't know such info.
This idea is based on a false dichotomy between "drugs" and "normal stuff". Chocolate is a substance I take with the sole intent of altering my mind to have more euphoria. That's just using big words to say I eat it only because it tastes really good. There are people who think that that is "vicious", but I assume that you are not one of them, and if you are then you should probably make reference to the fact that you're approaching this from a very unconventional angle in your post itself.
"even if they work against smoking, it's not necceserily (sic) a sufficient reason to use them"
This I can respect and agree with ^
Of course noone can be 100% sure, the same as with existence if reality outside of ones mind. We just suppose.
Imagine this being used in concentration camps or interrogations. Getting people to a mental state where they have no choice but to confess or conform because their minds will no longer let them "touch the cigarette".
This is very scary.
These will break down weak peoples' ideas of what their reality is... and they prob won't be able to handle that.
Opened minded people of course can, because they are used to going with the flow of life.
Good for that woman that this helped her, but, as the article said, it takes you a few months and a whole lot of money to do this, as well as a host of other factors. It's hardly a cure-all.
It might be expensive but so is smoking. Between the cost of cigarettes, healthcare, and lost productivity, I'm sure smoking is more expensive.
I never claimed they claimed it was a cure-all.
> It might be expensive but so is smoking. Between the cost of cigarettes, healthcare, and lost productivity, I'm sure smoking is more expensive.
I don't know, the cost of the entire treatment wasn't mentioned in this article.
I wasn't planning to do that. However, I'm not going to be part of any initial test-set either.
I will say, however, that I'm sceptical of the long-term prospects of this technique vis-a-vis remission. Furthermore, I'm not a huge fan of solving problems by taking strong psychotropic drugs.