LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison
psymposia.com
psymposia.com
It's well worth listening to.
The first episode of the series can be heard here: [1],[2]
[1] - https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-609-the-rose-garden-int...
[2] - Direct link to the mp3: https://media.blubrry.com/psychedelic_salon/archive.org/down...
Making psychedelics Schedule 1 set us back decades that could have been spent doing important research on a large number of mental health conditions.
Their most impressive work is in PTSD. In Phase 2 trials, they took people with established PTSD (for years) and undertook ~3 guided psychotherapy sessions with MDMA. Within 2 months, 53% no longer met criteria for PTSD and at 12 months 68% didn't.
Far more efficacious that anything else we have. Powerful tool for psychologic healing.
Hard to tell how effective the treatment is with nothing to compare to.
Psychedelics work at changing the mind and they work astonishingly well, provided their consumption accompanies skilled counseling.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-019-05249-5
I know some other countries have blanket bans on RCs and analogues as well.
Yes. Most psychedelics are Schedule I. Though to be fair, that's in large part due to the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, of which only 11 UN member states are not party.
I bought a bit before it was put on the controlled substances list in my country. A good demonstration that legal LSD doesn't end the world: it was legal, it was LSD, the world didn't end!
As a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years) who has never taken LSD or any psychedelic/psychoactive substance, I found your observation very thought provoking.
More likely than not, the LSD on each unit on a given sheet is chemically identical.
Therefore, the only variables are 1) the amounts in each dose, and 2) the substrate on which the drug will act (i.e., your brain at a given instant is — on the whole — the same, but functionally totally different from second to second as pathways activate and connect).
I would therefore hypothesize that, more likely than not, most if not all individuals who have a strong response to a given dose of LSD will have different responses to repeated doses from the same sheet.
I'm hoping people who've taken LSD will school me.
AL-LAD has also been spotted in recent years.
It was years apart and it's all very subjective though.
AL lad 150ug was happy ish almost no visuals, very slight mind changes
ETH lad 75ug played most with my mind visuals were weak but very distinct to lsd, touch was amazing,but was extremely easy to get afraid of smth(thought loops etc)
1p lsd 125ug was just like lsd with maybe more vasoconstriction atleast hands felt colder n hikes were more exhausting than lsd
https://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/05/27/the-government-j...
(I have no idea if this supposed workaround would actually be seen as legal if taken to court, but the company has been active and selling in the UK for over a year now, they are a sister company of the well known lizardlabs)
Always worrying ordering anything from there although I've never had any issues.
https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut...
However, in contrast, I found the This Land article "Subterranean Psychonaut" by Mason, Sandel, and Chapman to be a fascinating and in-depth read. It's replete with endnotes and provides information about Cole's actions after the police picked up Green.
She got off basically scot-free (she's on youtube and IG) because she most likely snitched, and it probably helped that she was a young white woman.
Not that Skinner doesn't deserve everything bad that could happen to him, he was the main torturer of Green, and a DEA informant and the reason Pickard got caught, and got life.
It describes a drugging, kidnapping alongside a torture, in part arising out of a love triangle and a clanenstine drug lab in an ex-Military middle silo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=r7qliVpGEk0&...
yes
In the words of Ali G: You're probably getting ripped off if you have to pay that much.
My recollection was the weight of the blotter paper was considered as the drug itself and that easily increased the federal sentencing guidelines.
They found everything else, but LSD is incredibly easy to hide from regular law enforcement.
They found everything else, but in typical stupid-police fashion, they ballsed that up too and ended up entering a nolle prosequi (do not prosecute) at the district court level.
The police prosecutor was sufficiently annoyed, and I was sufficiently elated and thankful for the woman who went before me (case unrelated) and set a strong precedent.
Any chance I get to gloat.
Edit to add: this happened in Australia in 2012. Not keen to repeat the experience.
Which was?
Not that I intend to leverage that knowledge, but you can't just write this and leave it at that. Why so? I've never seen any LSD, so I am not sure why that would be.
It looks like a paper sheet.
If you’re buying small quantities of lsd in a liquid you’d be silly to try and lay blotters from that.
Sheet One is the title of it, not in a position to share the URL but please take a look. Great album and artist too.
http://music.hyperreal.org/library/publicity/plastikman/shee...
While it's very difficult to predictable dose LSD off blotter, it may be helpful to know that most folks aim to have a single "dose" be 6-8mm squares
You can literally dip a Bible in liquid LSD, let it dry and it would be impossible to tell you're carrying thousands of individual doses.
How’s /that/ for a religious experience?
This also presents problems for chemists, because measuring out such small amounts is prohibitively difficult. So typically they dissolve a measurable amount (say, 30mg) into a volume of liquid (water or alcohol) and distribute it across a sheet of blotter paper divided into 100 squares, so that when the liquid dries, each square contains the desired dose (in the example, 300mcg)[1]. This is why the image most people have of LSD is a half-centimeter by half-centimeter square of paper--they're not seeing LSD, they're seeing the paper the LSD crystals are trapped in.
Since I'm posting this under my real name, I should clarify that the reason I've researched this is that I did volunteer harm reduction at festivals. I don't even drink alcohol, let alone take drugs.
[1] To be clear, LSD at stable temperatures is a solid crystal. There's no such thing as "liquid LSD"--that's LSD dissolved in a solvent.
I had no idea the drug was that potent... Presumably some neurotoxins have the same potency? This is quite scary to think of.
This document (PDF) from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) claims:
The LD50 of LSD varies from species to species. The most sensitive species is the rabbit, with an LD50 of 0.3 mg/kg i.v. [52]. The LD50 for rats (16.5 mg/kg i.v.) is much higher [52,53], though mice tolerate doses of 46– 60 mg/kg i.v. [52,54]. These animals expired by paralysis and respiratory failure. Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) have been injected with doses as high as 1 mg/kg i.v. without any lasting somatic effects [55].
There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose. Eight individuals who accidentally con- sumed a very high dose of LSD intranasally (mistaking it for cocaine) had plasma levels of 1000–7000 μg per 100 mL blood plasma and suffered from comatose states, hy- perthermia, vomiting, light gastric bleeding, and respira- tory problems. However, all survived with hospital treat- ment and without residual effects.
https://maps.org/research-archive/w3pb/2008/2008_Passie_2306...
I met a person who, while on a ~1/2 lb dose of psylocybin mushrooms, fell face first down stairs onto a train platform without even putting his hands out, breaking his nose, smashing out all his front teeth, and getting a severe concussion--it's easy to see how this could have been much worse had he fallen off the train platform.
And that's just the physical effects. I've met a few people who were fingerprinted (moisten a finger, press it into a tray of crystalline LSD, and consume whatever sticks to your finger) and at those doses, they all reported long-term hallucinations (in medical parlance, hallucinatory persisting perception disorder or HPPD). Others were diagnosed with PTSD after bad trips (one reported being "psychically attacked" by evil spirits, another was convinced that everyone was trying to kill him).
There are numerous cases of people being assaulted sexually or violently while on hallucinogens, and feeling that they could have defended themselves had they not been tripping. That's not to say they are to blame for the actions of their attackers. People who are on drugs are vulnerable, but the reaction I'd like to see is not to blame them, but instead for communities to care for them and protect them while they're vulnerable.
Now, I'm well aware that as someone volunteering in harm reduction, I only got to see the bad cases. For every patient reporting a negative experience, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who use hallucinogens and have positive experiences. I'm not against drug use, I'm merely advocating that people do so in an educated, responsible manner, understanding the very real risks they're taking. Just because the LD50s of LSD and psilocybin are very high, doesn't mean that a high dose of these drugs is not risky.
That is incredible. For a crime that harms noone.
Is there some reason that's unrealistic?
I think a reason why dangerous things are regulated is because even though they don't always lead to harm, the harm can be grave and impossible to undo. Even if an unexpected trip doesn't technically lead to permanent brain damage, if the behavior were misinterpreted (for instance as a psychotic episode) it could permanently wreck a person's life.
This is a non informative answer. Let's talk numbers, is 20 years a reasonable time to be incarcerated for a sheet of LSD? How many years is appropriate for a pack's worth of hand smoke, then? How about carbon monoxide from driving year round?
The other issue I have is that when people say that LSD can harm people with a predisposition to schizophrenia or whatever, it's frightening because it seems like a stereotyped thinking pattern that's useful for denying unacceptable causal hypotheses that might in fact be real.
I don't have a counterexample, as the allegations I was reading on Wikipedia are generally of intentionally drugging people,[1][2] but I wouldn't be particularly confident in your statement; how would one know it hasn't happened?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_po... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#LSD
If you can get 20 years for two sheets of LSD, I’d expect life in prison for everyone at the companies who continue to leak this toxic stuff, and full payment of affected people:s medical bills, for starters.
It doesn’t happen because LSD can be used recreationally, “drugs are bad,” and PFAS is only used by well-respected businesses.
They have and probably still do though[1]. Lived only a couple hours from the location of the film and my wife grew up in a city on the Ohio River they were dumping chemicals into. Was in the local paper here almost weekly during the late 90s and early 00s.
In fact, it sounds like the government was lacking regulations on PFOA.
That said, there's plenty of cases of illegal dumping out there with chemicals that are regulated.
For example: https://apnews.com/9717f8be97db4944a825088dc5eee379/US-prose...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
https://www.salon.com/2016/01/04/teflons_toxic_legacy_partne...
My post was in response to this question:
> I can see the perspective that making, having, or dealing [LSD] is an unacceptable risk of harm to people who didn't consent. Is there some reason that's unrealistic?
My point was that the factors of “unacceptable risk” in regulations are laden with things that have nothing to do with actual levels of harm to people. You corroborated that point with your post; I’m only clarifying here. This is the system we have, and it can be quite bad at actual harm reduction due to cultural factors.
It’s weird to live in a world where a substance that showed great promise in therapy, fighting alcoholism and other addictions etc. has been banned for 50 years, while another substance that makes dish washing and floor cleaning easier but causes cancer and birth defects in people close to where it’s made is broadly sanctioned.
It’s completely irresponsible to give someone a drug without consent, outside of some forms of medical intervention, regardless of your intentions.
I’m all for legalizing natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis, even coca plants) but once chemists start concentrating things or turning them into droplets it becomes extremely dangerous.
For instance, mushrooms grow on poop (and taste like sh*t), coca leaves are probably bitter to the taste (and not agreeable). So not much incentive to accidentally eat them.
One tab—the whole sheet even—of LSD tasteless and odourless, even hard to detect.
I’m dismissing “think of the children” and “equivalent to a tool designed to kill” (and that tool is completely legal in the US) lines as obvious trolls, I encourage anyone else rebutting to ignore that as well.
Edit: To dismiss your argument that you edited in about dosage size and accidental ingestion. If LSD was legal, manufacturers would want to prevent accidental ingestion and design an RoA that isn’t a tiny tab of LSD. Keeping it legal means it will remain as is now. You’re arguing for legalization and don’t even realize it.
Furthermore, a quick google search shows some academic papers from the 70s about children accidentally ingesting LSD, and a news report from 2016 where a child may have ingested LSD accidentally, but there’s very little evidence that it’s a problem.
To be frank, I have taken a decent amount of LSD in teenage years and suffer permanent effects from it (all mental stuff like anxiety and paranoia). Granted some of it was probably made in someone’s garage (legal stuff could have some sort of standards). But still, LSD is dangerous and point being it has potential to make people do things without cause for concern, and cause damage to others. It also lasts easily 8-24 hours depending on dosage.
Another point: if LSD was legal, then it would be legal for a cult to use it in rituals and as a way to manipulate individuals. Think Charles Manson—that’s a lot more dangerous than run-of-the-mill narcotics.
What proof do you have that your anxiety and paranoia are caused by your teenage LSD intake? There are plenty of people who have issues with anxiety and paranoia that have never taken drugs.
Consider that 70-90% of schizophrenics are tobacco users, and most started young. This is an astounding rate of smoking for a population subgroup. Did tobacco use cause the schizophrenia or did schizophrenics seek out tobacco?
Plenty of cults operate without drugging their members with LSD, if it was effective I assume it would be more widespread considering mental, sexual, and physical abuse are illegal and used as tools by cult leaders to maintain the cult and its membership. See NXIVM for a recent example. Giving people LSD is far more benign than beating or raping them.
I don’t have “Anxiety” requiring meds and such—the effects taper off over the years.
Believe me, I know the effects I felt and what it did to me—statistics and external “scientific proof” are not required.
Also, true there are many ways to manipulate people. It’s what you can make them do while they are on LSD that is scary. If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear. At least if the other methods are used to manipulate people their underlying emotions, hesitations, and consciousness is intact.
Again, I agree certain drugs should be legalized. And perhaps LSD can be therapeutic in a good way. But, it is also very dangerous stuff—more so than other drugs.
That is my opinion and not based on rigorous research. But I have done a lot of drugs in my day—and I can say if I went back in time I still would have done the natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis) but never would touch the man-made chemicals.
> If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear.
I’ve done LSD a number of times, the most recent was 8 days ago. I’ve never lost the interest in self-preservation while tripping on LSD. You cannot control someone’s mind when they’re on LSD.
Please provide me with a drug that LSD is more dangerous than, keeping in mind that mind control with LSD isn’t possible. I’ve been a heroin addict and severe alcoholic, and I’ve also taken LSD a number of times. Being an addict/alcoholic is so much more dangerous and detrimental than any use of LSD than I find it hard to take you seriously when you make such claims.
When all else fails, won't somebody think of the children!!
That just goes to show how weak your argument is.
IMHO if alcohol and nicotine are legal, then anything "soft" that is not particularly addictive should be legal. It's fundamentally unjust to lock people up for using or having substances that are for the most part less dangerous than entirely legal and socially acceptable substances.
Alcohol is actually kind of nasty stuff if you look at the real statistics, especially if used in excess.
I'm not claiming LSD is absolutely harmless, just that it's not physically addictive at all and not nearly harmful enough to merit the harsh criminalization and heavy sentences it receives. LSD can be safe and rather interesting if used occasionally but heavy use or use by people with pre-existing psychotic tendencies can be psychologically dangerous.
My personal opinion is that drugs like LSD should be subject to some kind of licensing regime similar to other hazardous activities like driving a car, flying a plane, or owning and using firearms (in some states). I would also be in favor of blanket bans or at least heavy restrictions on any advertising for drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and pharmaceuticals.
I disagree. Driving a car or flying a plane can directly harm others, so the licensing process makes sense. Consuming LSD though? It doesn't directly harm others when I consume it.
USA has the lowest participation on any democracy I know.
Universal obligatory vote is something that does wonders and produce actual change.
Structural problems can cause lack of participation.
I don't know if I would want voting to be obligatory, but it certainly should be universal.
Which is of course the entire reason for switching away from using sugar cubes and to blotter paper as delivery media.
ergotamine doesn't grow on trees lol
It's not "backyard meth lab ordering 40ft container of pseudoephedrine" levels of ridiculous.
Interestingly, ET is used to treat cluster headaches and migraines.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suici...
We used to sell to quite a few people who similarly suffered from the condition, and used mushrooms to treat it - but it was an impossible thing for us to market or advertise, due to the way the MHRA (Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency) dictates what beneficial claims can be stated about retailed items.
- ed typo, grammar
If someone asked me what the typical salt was I'd say table salt
Lsd is also exclusively sold as tartrate
HCl + NaOH -> HOH (water) + NaCl
But if you mix a different acid and a different base, you'll get a different salt, for example if you mix sulphuric acid and calcium hydroxide, you get calcium sulfate:
H2SO4 + Ca(OH)2 -> 2(HOH) + CaSO4
Calcium sulfate is just a different salt.
I'm not (just) being judgmental here: volunteering harm reduction at festivals, the number 1 problem we had was that users had no idea what they had put into their bodies.
Actual chemists, no doubt, don't use any of this terminology since chemical reactions don't produce the desired results if you're vague about what you put into them.
Edit: (ratelimit, sorry)
group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.)
characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product.
TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience)
The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong?
Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compounds?
Is "TA" the same as Tax Attorney?
The punchline is that the Teaching Assistant immediately sees the intent of the question, and goes from the general to the specific and replies: [ you won't be able to synthesise LSD with that approach because ] "all of the precursors are also scheduled."
When you do a reaction on a chemical, the reaction can often affect multiple different parts of the structure, even if you only want it to affect one site. So, you can pop a "protecting group" onto the site you don't want modified, and then remove it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
A TA is a teaching assistant; typically a grad student with lots of knowledge teaching a class to undergrads.
You would want to characterize any synthesis- verify your work to make sure you got high quality product that is pure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group
You design your synthesis around this and try to pick pathways that are easy, have the highest yields, and don't produce undesirable products you have to remove.
that said, it’s hardly a cash cow in the way meth and fentanyl are; and as someone said elsewhere on this thread, one person could probably suppy the whole country.
I’m curious about your last statement. Scaling makes sense as a cost factor, but are you saying that lower barriers for production would increase the cost? That seems backwards to me.
About the cost, the way I understand it, the definitive factor is scalability. It's MUCH more scalable than the production of other drugs. If this was not the case, it probably would be VERY expensive, because of the very high barriers to entry and very low and distributed demand.
My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
The physical harm was little to none. The mental harm varied greatly, there were even some people who got improvements in pre-existing mental conditions; with lsd in general, but also with large overdoses in particular.
We know the LD50 of LSD in rabbits, rats and mice [1]. Surely, there exists a human LD50 as well, it is just that hopefully nobody will ever be evil enough to do the necessary human experiments to determine it. (That's true for all drugs – just because we can't ethically discover the human LD50 doesn't mean one doesn't exist.)
What's the biggest overdose anybody has ever taken? This case report is the biggest one I know about. And yet, they each only consumed "two lines" of 3mm by 4mm by 30 mm, which is less than a gram, administered nasally. They were hospitalised. Would they have lived without medical attention? We don't know, but quite possibly not. And surely it would have been physically possible to take an even bigger overdose than that. How do we know an even more massive overdose would not have been fatal?
People rarely take LSD intravenously. I think a fatal overdose of LSD would most easily achieved with intravenous administration. That's what the animal study LD50s are calculated based on.
Unless you are trying to commit suicide or murder, you wouldn't do it. And if you are trying to do either, there are far more practical methods than massive LSD overdoses.
[1] https://maps.org/research-archive/w3pb/2008/2008_Passie_2306...
EDIT: I deleted my back of the envelope calculations about how much the people took in mg/kg. I don't have confidence I'm doing it right so better not to.
It might take a lot but physical harm from overdose is likely possible, with determination.
i once took 82 hits of acid. ahh, to be 17 years old and think you're invincible again. each hit was a gellcap with about 4 hits like blotter paper. this was at an outdoor rave-festival.
i was curled up in a ball in a tent for 2 days. fully immersive hallucinations. the good thing is when you are so incapacitated, you cant get up and move around to hurt yourself and others. i had sitters watching me and feeding me water.
nothing happened. i slowly returned to sober consciousness with zero bad physical side effects. except dissappointment that i had missed the entire rave.
that was the greatest spiritual experience i have ever had. none of the hallucinations were scary or negative, likely because the setting was outdoors on a rural camp ground in nature. i was talking to the Sun. and the blades of grass. and they talked back. i felt an indescribable oneness with all living beings and a realization that all life is sentient. meaning that our "human consciousness" model is just a tiny sliver of the full spectrum of "living consciousness", only we dont see the greater consciousness while we go about our daily lives trapped inside our limited minds. as an analogy, think of human consciousness like a language--C or assembly. then Universal Consciousness is like Leibnitz's mythical Perfect Language which simultaneously describes and creates our Monadic world.
decades later, that experience is still one of my happiest and i can remember it more vividly than more recent milestone events.
i understand why Steve Jobs said his first time tripping was his #2 greatest life experience.
if you ever have the opportunity to take 360 hits of acid, i recommend you go for it. you will see God and it will permanently reprogram your brain.
Having said that, I think LSD is a fantastic drug but that is not for everyone. I’ve got a friend who did it constantly for over 2 years and he is a completely sane person. He claims it was one of the experiences that put an end to his alcoholist tendency which might as well be genetic. His dad died due to alcoholism.
This, too, is an armchair diagnosis and unnecessarily sensational language. According to Wikipedia:
> Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum".
> Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."
https://www.aclu.org/other/death-penalty-questions-and-answe...
It's so fucked up, it makes me disgusted even thinking about it.
- Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases.
- It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs
- Purification is challenging as well.
> [...] experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers—"people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.
So does meditation... just that it typically takes way longer :)
And LSD and other psychedelics definitely make you rethink the validity of government, period. Let alone the efficacy of the powers that be to ensure safety and prosperity
What holds the country together is a lot of people have a lot to lose.
> And LSD and other psychedelics definitely make you rethink the validity of government, period. Let alone the efficacy of the powers that be to ensure safety and prosperity
But this is just the crux of it - it is an illusory experience that has some impact on the user. It isn't any arbiter of truth or knowledge.
> What holds the country together is a lot of people have a lot to lose.
There are many things that "hold a country together" - some of them are known (here we have two examples), and others are unknown.
> it is an illusory experience that has some impact on the user. It isn't any arbiter of truth or knowledge.
It is surely illusory to a very large degree, but "what it is", really, is far beyond mankind's ability to judge such things.
I really like how Jordan Peterson describes what psychedelics "are":
Exactly - that's a far cry from your claim. It's likely that the two reasons we posited on their own are meaningless.
> It is surely illusory to a very large degree, but "what it is", really, is far beyond mankind's ability to judge such things.
And yet in this very thread claims and judgements are made how it can topple governments, makes free thinkers, is the panacea to everything, just like weed cures cancer and saints cured the sick. How the government suppresses it because it will hurt those in power and prevent the utopian LSD world that is clamored for.
It borders on religious fanaticism - plenty of drugs and visions lead to jihad as much as kindness and love.
This is why the sentencing was so harsh.
Please provide evidence for this claim.
I’m well aware of MKULTRA and the CIA’s involvement in that program.
Please provide a source that shows mind control is possible with LSD.
Psychedelics = hippies = anti-war left.
A well-known and somewhat similar "unusual interest" was in prosecuting crack versus coke.
I know that perfectly well, hence the scare quotes. I was referencing the term used by the person I replied to in order the draw a parallel between the two.
When you look for racism everywhere, you find it everywhere. Let's be more objective, eh?
Plus the duration of the high means that you'd necessarily have to spend more time (relatively) chasing that high or ways to achieve it.
There are chemical differences between crack, meth, and cocaine, so it's likely that, ceteris paribus, crack users are more violent than coke users, but it's not the only factor. It's really hard to tease out differences in the effects of the drugs when the populations of users are so different.
Oh wait, here we go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20560836/
[...] The likelihood of violence associated with crack cocaine users was greater compared to powdered cocaine users at the bivariate level. However, these differences were almost uniformly statistically nonsignificant when demographic, mood and non-cocaine substance use disorders were controlled for. [...]
In the world of use it or lose it budgets cracking down on psychedelics seems like a pretty safe way for the DOJ to keep burning money without incurring too much negative publicity.
I don't want to sound like a crazy 'conspiracy theorist' or a 'hippie', but I don't know to distill this sad and truthful statement more simply than that.
There are many drugs that kill people but keep them subdued that are illegal. It seems to me that is not the reason for which are legal and which ones are not.
Considering the counter culture and anti war (and thus anti military industrial) sentiment being highly correlated with hippies getting lit—I think it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that the powers that be consider mind expanding drugs to be a threat to the order of things.
As far as I know, marijuana was mostly made illegal in the 30s and earlier in the US, mostly due to racist origins and with arguments mostly opposite those of hippies (e.g., creating bloodlust).
I forgot about Caffeine, that's true, as it is often not considered a drug by many (or at least not taught as one). But it's also not one of a dulling effect, as far as I can tell at least.
That they tried to make alcohol illegal and failed because of it's societal acceptance is another indicator that the original claim is not so obviously true:
> It's more acceptable and state-sanctioned to sell drugs that kill people while keeping them subdued, than ones that keep them alive and open their minds.
Overall it feels more that the general Zeitgeist of regulating narcotics failed on alcohol but succeeded with often racist propaganda for other popular drugs.
But that's just my understanding and I am not very well versed in any of those topics, so I'd be happy to listen to a better explanation. (I wouldn't be surprised that anti-establishment gatherings with strong drug usage correlation wouldn't exactly make legalisation popular in the establishment. But the history article I read on that just now claimed that sentences were reduced during the 70s because of the wake of hippies.)
The thing is that for people whose normal life does not include pursuing knowledge and understanding just for the sake of it (and I think this might be most people), it's unlikely that they'd end up with the right perspective shift through some other circumstance.
It's likely a futile search: Research into these topics is difficult to get approval for, even when it's more "tangible" things like effects on depression or PTSD. In my opinion, we'll probably need another few decades to get there (though there has been some encouraging societal progress in some places recently).
We won't get anywhere in this conversation because we're on two different sides of a fence, and I certainly can't describe what being on this side is like and can only invite people to come over here. It'd be like asking you to describe what the colour green looks like to you.
Which path around, or over, the fence they choose is up to them ...
Which is quite remarkable given the stability these personality traits usually have.
Overall while it seems to be clear that people who take psychedelics don't become saints spreading love for the rest of their lives, there's some solid evidence accumulated by psychologists that psychedelics have some real effect.
As for where to point skeptical-minded people, I agree with others that Sam Harris is one of the better resources.
Here is an article on his recent 5g "heroic dose" mushroom trip:
https://thethirdwave.co/neuroscientist-sam-harris-reports-on...
> “There’s no denying that there were parts of the experience that felt like an encounter with something other than my own mind,” Harris says, something that guided him “across the landscape of mind.” Many trippers, Harris notes, interpret this something as god or a universal consciousness. Harris suspends judgment. “My day job is not to be fooled by spurious ideas passed down from our ignorant ancestors, so I’m very slow to make claims about what I think is going on here,” he says. “I’m just reporting the character of the experience.” In the end, Harris says, “I thought of this as the mushroom itself.”
> Thus Harris captures the magic and intrigue of psychedelics: the parsimonious explanation for the encounters you feel on a big mushroom trip is that you’re being guided by a fungus. Harris himself is astounded. “The fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous,” Harris goes on. “It’s as though we lived in a universe where, if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet, you’d pull out the Andromeda Galaxy.”
His full trip report (19 minutes long):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKGddvmU0fA
Other trip report resources, etc:
https://michaelpollan.com/resources/psychedelics-resources/
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp_list.shtml (37,822 Reports Total)
https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Mushrooms.shtml (2,763 Total)
https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD.shtml (2,195 Total)
https://www.shroomery.org/6255/Trip-Reports
When I first heard of Harris about 15 years ago, back when psychedelic use was still a relatively underground phenomenon and the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance was just beginning, I never dreamed I'd ever see a militant atheist like him transform in to a psychedelic advocate taking "heroic" mushroom doses and having what could be described as powerful mystical experience, even if he's not comfortable using such terms for what he experienced.
I do wonder if his atheism would survive more such powerful experiences. Already, from this one experience, he speaks of understanding how such such an experience could be interpreted in religious terms by those who were already religious. Again, such empathy and understanding is not something I would have expected 15 years ago from such a militant atheist.
Even if he never trips again, I have to commend him for being open-minded enough and curious enough to try psychedelics multiple times, and once at a relatively high dose. Many more close-minded people, who feel completely confident in an extremely one-sided world view, would never chance having their perspective radically altered with psychedelics. Yet he did. Kudos to him for that. If more people were so inquisitive and open-minded the world might be a much better place.
That's not to say that I view psychedelics as a panacea, and I agree with Harris that they're not for everyone. Their use entails real risks, and they can easily be misused by taking them without an experienced guide, without preparation or respect, or in the wrong set and setting. But at the same time, when used constructively, they have a profound potential for encouraging empathy, open-mindedness, improved cross-cultural and cross-denominational communication and understanding. Harris' experiences and transformation are evidence of this.
15 years ago? Huh, I thought it had only started a couple years ago.
I suppose there's nothing terribly transcendent for observers about seeing Doom run on an iPod, but it's definitely surprising to see how the flexible the hardware/software can be.
Subjectively, though, it can feel pretty transcendent when its your runtime being hacked in new and different ways.
If the iPod had a sense of self like we do then maybe it would be floored seeing itself run Doom (though hopefully it wouldn't confuse Doom for ultimate truth).
"The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed."
https://samharris.org/podcasts/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life...
Opening the mind is used a lot in Buddhism and meditation to describe how consciousness is not inherently stuck in loops of negative thought, but that by opening the brain's perception of anything happening, we can see more clearly and without egocentric concern.
If anyone reading is thinking psychedelics and meditation are just hippie mumbo jumbo, check out Sam Harris or Dan Harris or Joseph Goldstein, who will show you how meditation is useful and not woo woo.
My understanding, looking at the history of psychedelic regulation, is that it had nothing to do with preventing people from opening their minds: the people who did the regulating don't think the concept of "opening your mind" even exists. I'll let John Ehrlichman (Nixon aide) explain:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. [...] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
You might say, "well that's the same thing as being against opening minds" but it's really not. Keep in mind, a lot of times cops simply planted drugs on people to arrest them: why would they wrongly accuse someone of trying to open their mind if their intent was to prevent people from opening their minds? The answer is, that wasn't their intent. They didn't plant drugs on people to prevent them from opening their minds, they planted drugs on them because they were black or antiwar.
The intent of the beat cop and the high-level official isn't always 1:1.
Reality is always more complicated than anyone says.
> 1 gram or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
By all accounts, Pickard had produced kilos of LSD.
Not defending the life sentence (let alone two concurrently), but it's a logical consequence of the US's fucked up laws & sentencing guidelines.
> Wonder what people were getting for drugs that actually kill people.
Depends, were they "black" of "leftist" drugs that "actually kill people"? I don't think anyone got jailed over leaded gas.
“The court concluded that the 20 years served are sufficient for meeting the goals of incapacitation, deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation.”
Deterrence and rehabilitation (yeah, right) I knew were “goals” of the US prison system, but I never realized that “incapacitation” and “retribution” were actual legally-stated goals.
Giving someone a life sentence means you (or the justice system at large) are either unwilling or unable to rehabilitate that person.
This can be applied to seatbelts, helmet laws, etc.
Drug use has one victim : the user. Time and time again it has been shown that legalization and cure are far more efficient and cost less to society but still many countries cling to the idea that beating up somebody who is down will magically solve the problem.
If you think the impact on a counterparty in a car accident should be taken into account, I would think family should be top-of-mind.
That has a much higher likelihood than my not-wearing-a-helmet affecting someone else but very few people would support alcohol prohibition.
People may think LSD or cocaine is all well and good, but there are far more dangerous substances out there. Things like Carfentanil need to be regulated. So too all the so-called "date rape" drugs. Just because some guy wants a powerful, tasteless, anesthetic that can be readily dissolved in water doesn't mean we should let him have it. Even if it has personal uses, the danger of such substances means they need controls.
That was what the legal system did in the 18th century. It didn't work. Allowing people to buy poisons, weapons, even explosives and only punishing them once they harmed others has been deemed unacceptable. We now prevent crime by limiting access to such substances, hand in hand with governments licensing who may access them. Don't like not having access to something? Become a doctor/chemist/soldier/miner and you will be legally free to play around with all sorts of dangerous things.
An example that comes to mind is Redbull and strike anywhere matches are banned in several countries. Both of these substances have been shown to be used responsibly in the majority of other countries.
If all good/bad decisions were made by individuals, we'd basically have anarchy and rule of the strongest - as most people would probably decide that "good" is what benefits themselves and their close friends.
oof...
I’m simply arguing that individuals should have the freedom to choose.
Will you also demand that individuals be capable of choosing - in that they have all the sufficient information to make an informed choice and are not manipulated by psychological tricks?
I can’t think of any. That doesn’t mean I would take that choice away from people that have a reason.
Only being half humorous here.
The NYT OCR game is weak: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/30/archives/swiss-reject-ple...
In 1971 reaction GIFs had very few frames; I believe this is Leary after the decision: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/EfA-aysZvcNpE84iYc8A...