I take illegal drugs for inspiration
susanblackmore.co.uk
susanblackmore.co.uk
LSD for fun, is great. Try playing an RPG while on a low dosage. You're coherent enough to play and understand it, but the realism spikes a thousand times. (I tried Fallout 3, and really felt as if I was in a nuclear wasteland.)
I've tried understanding technical documentation (on low dosages), and found it to be quite understandable and was able to retain everything. Immediately you start visualising and really "feeling" the underlying technology (even if it isn't actually that profound, it'll impact your mind in that way). I haven't done tests to see if this is more effective, but it looks like a promising possibility. (There was a thread on HN a few days back that talked about this.)
As far as the dangers, it might very well be. Wikipedia provides the indication that it's relatively safe, with patients that experienced psychosis (a few out of a thousand) to recover within a few days. The rate of psychosis is higher for people with existing mental illness. FWIW, I've been DX'd as bipolar I, with psychosis. As "far out" as LSD has made me feel during the experience, when it's over, I feel much more grounded than ever.
LSD is something everyone should seriously consider doing at least once in their life.
See, that's terrifying to me. I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
This talk of using MDMA for couples' therapy because it releases vasopressin scares me too. Vasopressin is the bonding hormone, and sure, you could probably make two people who were not in love fall in love artificially- but that's also scary. I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs.
I'm pretty libertarian, and I do think that drugs should be a choice- but these accounts scare me more than any crap about flashbacks and hallucinations.
I would have thought he meant it the other way around.
Maybe we just read it differently (hopefully the OP will step in), but I don't think he meant LSD trivialized the death of his child in any way. I think he meant that looking back, LSD had a similarly profound impact on his life. Losing a child can make you re-evaluate some things (or so I've heard). So can LSD (that I know).
I mean, if I introduced bugs into my simulation code and got results that I liked, I'd be like, "I need to fix those bugs" not "boy are these great results! Look, I can stop the HIV epidemic!" Because I'd be wrong.
I don't agree at all. Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch.
Thank you. I've tried explaining this to various people when discussing my on drug use. There's a common presumption that a person's brain, in its default state, is "OK", and that any messing with it is bad. Yet people typically do not have this same view of the (rest of the) body; few people get bent out of shape over diabetics shooting insulin. The brain is a meat machine sitting in a chemical soup and is no more or less inherently perfect than your heart, blood, or pancreas.
The stigma attached to drug use is horrendous and keeps many people from getting proper treatment or even understanding that they may need help.
People whose brains are broken by default end up self-medicating, or living miserable lives, or both, often because people believe that "drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function."
Someone famous actually said this, I forget who.
Asserting that "simply changing" the way inputs are interpreted provides nothing of value seems odd on a site where a lot of the participants are programmers who regularly take input and massage it through iterative development of software that interprets that input and produce actual value.
Cyphertext and an encryption key looks random until you apply a cryptographic transform to it. Same inputs, different output, different value.
If you are even a late beginner at meditation and go out into the woods for 4-5 hours, you'll probably have positive and beautiful experiences. No, you don't get the "trippy" visuals, but that's not the important part. Most people don't have the focus to achieve this until they start practicing, but drugs aren't a way out. I prefer meditation's failure mode, which is no experience, to that of drug use, which is negative experience.
I think psychedelics have great potential as medicines and, in ritual use, can bring lay people in contact with spiritual experiences that might not be accessible to them. The idea that these drugs are "evil" is a mixture of xenophobia, bigotry, and religious puritanism. They're not evil; they have great potential for good. On the other hand, I think the recreational use of drugs is seriously overrated.
Psychedelic dependence (of a psychological kind, because these drugs are not physically addictive) exists, but it's much more subtle than physical addiction. When you know someone has a real problem is when he starts attributing positive things (creativity, spirituality, insight) that should not rely on drugs to psychedelics. This leads into materialistic nihilism and a very unsettling style of ennui in which a person has to get further detached from reality to feel good.
I, for example, don't believe in God. But I would never be so arrogant as to claim that people who do cannot reach a more complete understanding of themselves or their potential, or that this understanding is somehow more shallow than my perspective on the world. Even if I believe to my very core that my perspective is grounded in reality, and theirs in superstition.
This is what you are doing though, only you believe your perspective is grounded in spirituality (whatever that means) and theirs in materialism.
Yes, psychological dependence exists, but people become psychologically dependent on all kinds of things. That some of these things exist materially, doesn't mean the individual concerned is descending into materialistic nihilism. I don't understand why drugs get singled out as such a particular evil in this regard.
What I've seen is a LOT of false enlightenment in a certain subculture. Hang out for a few hours with the drugged-out burnouts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to get a sense of it. There's a certain arrogant, self-congratulatory nihilism in the "hipster" culture, and if it's taken more seriously than it deserves, it leads to some very bad places. Is it the drugs or the casual sex alone? Of course not, because drugs and sex are generally harmless (if not possibly beneficial) in moderation. It's a certain self-centered experience-chasing mindset that, for a variety of reasons, is very attractive to young people whose personalities and ideas haven't yet formed.
If people want to use drugs, then I have no problem with that. Certainly I think these chemicals should be legal and that their possible benefits should be researched. But the false enlightenment that I've seen some people fall into is dangerous. It kills a person's work ethic and leaves that person prey to mental illness. Does everyone who uses drugs fall into this pattern? Obviously, no. Do a lot of people who don't use drugs fall into it anyway? Certainly. I think that drugs make people who are exposed to that mentality and culture a lot more susceptible to falling into it, and that's the primary danger.
For the record, I think drug prohibition (which is immoral and should be ended) makes these drugs a lot more dangerous. A lot of people have to be connected to a depraved culture even to have regular access to these drugs. I've often thought that less dangerous than the chemicals themselves are the sorts of toxic people you can end up surrounding yourself with if you want regular, frequent access, due to the drugs' illegality.
For what it's worth I have spent a great deal of time in the company of such people. Perhaps it's the case that the majority are simply living in a deluded drug-addled mist, and certainly a great many are hedonists first and last, and would be happy to admit it.
The thing is though, I see a lot of false enlightenment everywhere. There are whole swathes of people who would consider themselves spiritual for one reason or another but don't seem the least bit capable of critical thinking, open mindedness, introspection or subtlety. Ultimately, dogmatic ideology has stunted more people's personal development than drugs ever will. Not to mention the billions murdered over the centuries.
Yet in any community you will find deeply thoughtful individuals who have clearly gained and grown a great deal from their experiences and beliefs. For this reason I cannot bring myself to write any tool of potential enlightenment off, no matter what the behaviour of the average user, or if it comes in the form of scripture or white powder.
I'm a pragmatist at heart, much more than a moralist. If drugs can make peoples' lives better, they should be used.
You can actually develop 'meditation sickness', which is essentially psychosis brought on from either excessive meditation or else meditation the wrong way. It's not super common, but it's still generally advised that people not take up a meditation practice without expert supervision.
I generally think the "meditation sickness" is more scare than substance, without much evidence for a causative link, but I think it's possible in certain circumstances. For example, I've heard of inexperienced people (i.e. people who've taken one hatha yoga class) going on week-long retreats and having negative experiences (including temporary psychosis and anxiety disorders) but that's not what I'm talking about. That's about as irresponsible as for an overweight person who can barely walk a mile to try out for a marathon.
I think that a lot of "meditation sickness" comes from people who are prodromal of some sort of psychological crisis and (because of their increasingly difficult mental state) become interested in altering their consciousness, and that the psychotic break was not caused by the meditation but would have happened anyway. I can't prove that, but it's been my suspicion for a long time. For those who might argue that meditation is therefore bunk because some people who meditate end up getting frank mental illness anyway, my counterpoint would be that it's foolish to expect that a novice meditator can meditate his way out of a potentially physical mental illness; he needs medical help.
What is very dangerous is when people try to use meditation or yoga in lieu of other well-tested, scientific medical treatment, which some New Age types believe in even though most actual meditators and yogis advise strongly against it. I talked to a very accomplished yoga teacher about using meditation to treat panic disorder (didn't want to use benzos) and he said, "Meditate, but see a doctor and take his advice. You can't meditate your way out of this, right now, any more than a person with heart disease can meditate out of that."
Really? In what context? Do you have a link or citation I could read?
There was a rumor a while back that some of these South Korean internet cafes were putting low doses of mood enhancing drugs in the air so that people got depressed when they left, though I'm pretty sure that was just an urban legend.
This is true nowhere more than in Northern California where we're also uniquely a land of pioneers, and eccentrics. We are all of the above and it's not clear which is cause or effect. Nevertheless, this hodge-podge has led to a center of innovation and a culture that seeks to overthrow traditions. For many individuals drugs are important in their own cultural development, how they see the world, etc.
Like the woman says in the article: drugs can help people 'see the top of the mountain', so they realize they don't need to keep on doing what they were otherwise doing. If you've personally not experienced this, that's fine, but please don't diminish important experiences from others, solely because you don't like the idea of requiring an external adulterant to achieve.
Keep in mind we're all reliant on adulterants, whether they're friends, education, caffeine, or a walk in the woods like you say. All of this is life experience, and we are life.
Having an overwhelming and profound experience while taking LSD does not trivialize or diminish other experiences in your life. The soul has plenty of room for boarding.
Experiences do not have to be equivalent in order for the end result (i.e. you changing a particular behavior or making a decision to go on a different path in life) to be quite similar.
Just a thought: can you imagine that there may be many completely different ways you could think, all of them "sane"? That the patterns of thought you take for granted are mostly there by chance? Please take a moment and think before you answer.
Because if you can't, that would explain your reaction. GP found out something about himself by using LSD, and that something happened to be important enough that it changed his life. Why is that such a hard thing to imagine?
There are pills and there are pills. For my uncle 40 years ago, "just a pill" saved his life (penicillin). There are many pills that could kill you. And apparently there are pills that can change the way you think, and at least for some people this happens to have major positive consequences. Why is this by default evil?
I share your concern about MDMA use for therapy - but I don't think we should throw away the baby along with the bathwater. Drugs are extremely dangerous, especially for young and/or uneducated people, because they _work_. They have real, consistent effects, and if you manage to align those effects with your goals, good things happen. But if you don't... and this is why you usually have several horror stories for each successful one. Still - I think there is a lot of potential here.
My particular experience is of much smaller scale - a few months ago I found out that occasional melatonin use can fix my sleep schedule long term. Not a big thing, but I see it as one battle I've won with my genetics. And that's a good thing.
I've never taken LSD, nor to I plan to, but every, EVERY, person I've talked to that have, talk about how it changed thier lives dramatically.
It seems there are a fair ammount of people on here somewhat scared of the way drugs alter you, (hey, this is hacker news, why not hack yourself? you only live once, see what happens) but it's really one of those things you will never understand until you experience for yourself.
That's not how it works. The drugs allow you to explore feelings that you're otherwise not able to explore, and work through whatever emotional roadblocks you're having with your partner. Essentially it lets you find the source of your anxiety and problems, when normally you'd just be really anxious and unhappy all the time but you wouldn't know why. And then once you know why you are unhappy it allows you to communicate these feelings with each other so that you can use them to rebuild the relationship. It does also make you love and care much more about the other person's wellbeing, which is an important part of the process, but it's not why it works. The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
"I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill."
You should take some time to learn about what the experience is actually like. You're trivializing the psychedelic experience by saying that LSD trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
How do you know how it works? It's possible it doesn't, but release of vasopressin in the brain is responsible for bonding behavior i.e. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6446/abs/365545a0...
On the other hand, there's no evidence for all this "exploring feelings" stuff.
What I'm saying is actually the currently accepted scientific theory. What we see in PET scans is that MDMA shuts down part of the amygdala, which allows people to process emotions and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Michael Mithoefer refers to this starting at 10:45 in this MAPS lecture:
http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video3.html
And Peter Oehen has a more in depth explanation in his lecture here:
http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video4.html
There's no question that couples therapy would be vastly less effective without the increased pair bonding and empathy, but if that was the only mechanism in play then we wouldn't expect the relationship to still be vastly improved 12 - 24 months after just one session. (Otherwise we'd be seeing a large percentage of marriages happening between people who met at raves, which is not the case. People who hook up under the influence of MDMA don't seem to have any lasting 'extra' feelings for each other after a couple weeks, beyond what would be normal without the MDMA.)
What you do with that is up to you, but it's a powerful tool in some ways.
This is akin to taking meds to suppress panic attacks in order to undergo therapy to truly circumvent the panic/agoraphobia loop. The drug is a tool; it can't relieve you of the responsibility to do the work yourself (no matter what lazy people may want to believe).
Once they come down, they go back to being who/what they were, but with a whole lot more "sharing" now - they both now know how each other feel because it was expressed out of love and empathy rather than witheld or stated in a defensive/offensive manner.
Psychedelics really shouldn't be toyed with unless you are psychologically stable - if you can imagine, being "normal", then psychedelics take you to the reciprocal of "normal". I've played with Magic Mushrooms and really hated the experience, I also did two nights of Ayahuasca - extremely powerful experience, beyond LSD for sure, but a very rough ride (Ayahuasca is a shamanic "purging" psychedelic, it causes you to vomit uncontrollably while having the hallucinogenic and psychedelic experience of LSD x 5 for about 8 to 10 hours straight).
I will say this: I believe all of the benefits people would seek in the use of mind-altering substances can, without question, be found through meditation - deliberate thinking - introspection - and just "chilling the fuck out".
The other horrible event in my life was a series of severe panic/psychosis attacks. I stood next to my girlfriend, and truly did not know if I was me, if she was anybody, if I was an alien, or what. And then it was just a feeling of "absolute terror". You're utterly and completely terrified - no "reason", just a total sensation of dread. I would have cut my legs off if it would have stopped it. (BTW, this was all before I tried LSD.)
So, when I say "powerful", I mean, reflecting back on my life, looking at the events that stand out, that truly had an impact, that are "amazing" - what would those be? In no particular order:
- The birth of my children (the first time I almost fainted, not from the blood but just from sheer awesomeness of holding her in my arms).
- The loss of my first child (when the doctor shook his head, I just collapsed, not to mention the effects for years to come).
- Panic attacks
- Some of the times my wife and I have made love.
- LSD: Even just the experience, let alone the impact on my life.
How long did your panic disorder last? How'd you get it into resolved? What therapies did you pursue, how long did they take, and how well did they work?
I developed PD after making the idiotic decision to work (at a Wall Street job) through a flu-- not a cold, but actual influenza-- taking only 2 days off. Stupid macho trader bullshit I tried to pull at 24. So I didn't recover properly and ended up developing a respiratory infection that intermittently made breathing difficult: hence, panic attacks. At the same time, two very close friends (a little bit too deep into psychedelics) were having nervous breakdowns at the same time and even though I wasn't using, I started worrying that it might happen to me, because I was dealing with their bullshit every day. Which meant that the panic attacks became self-reinforcing; because I saw mental illness in my daily life, I thought I might develop it. Of course, that didn't happen because, even though it feels otherwise, panic disorder is not "going crazy". I think panic disorder is actually more like a much less severe cousin of epilepsy (an acute, intermittent, and highly treatable physical problem) than chronic mental illness, but that's anther rant.
I don't have full-on panic attacks at this point, but I still have low-level anxiety attacks (the kind that normal people get once a decade or so, which are rough but NOT panic attacks) on a 1-2 per day frequency.
It was a fascinating experience, but a deeply negative one. It doesn't help that most people think of panic attacks as the punchline to a joke. Sometimes I feel the need to say, "No, you didn't actually have a 'panic attack' when you saw Lady Gaga wear the meat-dress." This must be what people with real insomnia feel when idiots write Facebook statuses like "farmville at 2:30 am. i'm such an insomniac lol".
What has actually stayed with me is the incompetence of the U.S. medical system. The experience of being neglected in a time of (perceived) exigent emergency is jarring. More scarring than the attacks themselves (during a panic attack, you don't write many memories, and this is a good thing) was how much medical incompetence and don't-give-a-shit attitude I experienced when I was sick with this "mystery" health problem (the respiratory infection and panic disorder onset happened at the same time) that turned out, thankfully, not to be that serious. I'm terrified of what it will be like in a few decades (fingers crossed) when I have to deal with real, serious health problems-- I hope the system is less broken, by then.
I still keep Xanax in my pocket (I think everyone should, to be able to remain clear headed if a panic situation arises), but hardly ever need them.
People's minds are weird things.
The truth is that benzodiazepines don't really abort a panic attack-- at least not in the short (<5 minutes) term. Nothing really can. What benzos are great for is recovering from a panic attack and preventing it from rolling into another one. If your wife felt shitty for 5 minutes, but great at T=30 minutes, then it's not the drug's fault because the drug worked.
SSRIs also have a paradoxical effect. I think SSRIs are somewhat like a less risky version of electroconvulsive therapy: they induce a change of state in the brain, and the brain's response gets it out of a depressive cycle, but it's not clear why one state change ("shock") works and another doesn't. To make it weirder, when people are on SSRIs for a while there's a tendency for the drug to stop working ("poop out"). No surprise: this sounds like tolerance. However, at this point both raising and lowering the doses can work. So it seems like any change in this state variable is what can cause the improvement, but no one really knows. (That said, never hard taper on an SSRI, and definitely don't reduce dosage without talking to a doctor.)
Like it or not, if you're in a relationship you are taking drugs.
I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could
only stand because I took drugs.
It's also the fallacy of the split middle: it's not either 'you love someone' or 'you can't stand them'. If you're in a loving relationship that has gone downhill somewhat and a few medicated sessions can renew the bonds, is that really any different from going on a second romantic honeymoon, where you also create artificial circumstances to strengthen the bond? Physical forces or cultural forces: they are equally real and do equal work.
Yes, but no matter how great it sounds, you still have to consort with drug dealers to find it. Not sure that the risk of arrest (or worse) is really worth that reward.
Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds:
http://www.erowid.org/plants/hbw/hbw.shtml
Morning Glory seeds:
http://www.erowid.org/plants/morning_glory/morning_glory.sht...
Both of the above should be available from ordinary gardening suppliers and/or plant nurseries.
They contain LSA (Lysergic acid amide), which is closely related to LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide).
And another common psychedelic you can pick from a forest or a meadow:
http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms.shtml
There are many, many others as well:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2545731/Drugs-like-LS...
From the article:
"When they were interviewed again 14 months later 58 per cent rated the experience among the five most personally meaningful of their lives and 64 per cent said it had increased their well-being."
The most prolific mathematician of all time, Paul Erdős, justified his amphetamine usage in similar terms [1]:
"After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: 'Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.' After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."
What about Euler[1] for example? (I don't think he used drugs though)
Anyway, I agree with your comment in the sense that intelligence, talent or success are not mutually exclusive with drugs.
Erdos published more papers with more collaborators than Euler.
Euler published more pages of material and founded more areas of research than Erdos. (Yes, Euler has the benefit of having had people think about his stuff longer, and attribute more to inspiration from him. But Erdos won't ever come close to catching up.)
I think that Arthur Cayley is in third place on both measures.
Imagine if Erdos had been around before Euler? Who's to say that he wouldn't have discovered some or more of what Euler discovered. The earlier discoveries were the easier one, the low-hanging fruit.
If I went back in time it would be easier for me to make some ground breaking discovery, like pythagoras theorem. But today, I need to be smarter and more clever than centuries of mathematicians to add something new to our collective knowledge of the universe. All of the easy problems are solved :(
Now, go back in time and <em>take away all your knowledge</em> (and the knowledge that there was a theorom to be discovered in the first place) and see how easy it would be for you to discover that theorom.
Perhaps some people are blessed with the creativity and vision to see a blank canvas as full of ideas. Other people have to resort to aids to get to that point. Yet otherer people probably couldn't get there even with aids.
Thats a really good way to put it.
Drugs, like LSD or DMT, are not at all like seeing things from a helicopter. Sure, they are from a "new perspective", but unfortunately it's all in your head. My closest analogy is to dreaming--it seems to make perfect sense when you're dreaming, but when you wake up, you realize that all your thoughts were nonsense. I've had high ideas before. The feeling of revelation is unparalleled... even if it's all in my head. Once I sober up, though, I suddenly realize that they're a load of crap.
Rather being a helicopter to check out what's up there, drugs more so resemble staring out the window and pretending to visualize things past the horizon. You don't come to your senses until you realize it's all in your head.
I've quit them all now and honestly I only miss acid from time to time. But the fact that it's just eight hours of false epiphanies makes sure that I don't care to ever trip again.
That's your experience. A lot of other people have really good ideas when they are high, and those ideas are still really good while sober.
Part of this is that normally when you have an insight while sober, there is a unique feeling of pleasure you get in your brain. This is because part of the way we identify when we've had an insight is when we get this feeling. However, when we're high we get this feeling much more easily, even if what we're thinking about isn't actually at all insightful. Thus you need to sort of reteach yourself how to think and evaluate the quality of your ideas in a way that isn't reliant on whether or not something 'feels' insightful.
It's a big step once you can divorce the depth of insight from the intensity of the eureka feeling. They are not necessarily linked.
edit: in light of this: http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/NS2000.html I'd have to agree that the coverage of the matter in the book was rather insufficient.
I just don't buy it. IMHO, saying that using drugs to get to ideas/inspiration is like saying a wheelchair can help you get from one place to another even though your limbs are perfectly adequate. Maybe it'll help you get here but you could have gotten there without it.
If you like to get high, don't make excuses for it. Just admit to yourself that you like to get high. People who like to go to strip clubs don't say they go there for the lighting and it helps with design. People who watch TV don't say they watch for the education. Why do people who like to get high make up excuses to make their behavior socially acceptable. If you like to do it, own it.
</soapbox>
It's definitely possible that I am completely wrong as I haven't done LSD, Coke, etc.
The amount of weed you need to consume to get extra creativity is far below the amount weed you would consume for recreational purposes. For someone without a tolerance looking to get the benefits of creativity, the proper vaporized dose would be around .03 grams. Whereas to get 'high' the proper dose would be around .1 - .2 grams.
It's the same as how the analgesic dose is below the recreational dose of every drug. Which is why you can take opiates for medical purposes without getting addicted as long as you don't abuse them. This also includes marijuana; people using marijuana for medical purposes use way less than those using the drug for recreational purposes, though different conditions warrant different doses. For example, those using marijuana to treat cachexia generally need a higher dose than those treating anxiety or insomnia.
Consuming marijuana through ingestion vs inhalation results in a completely different mental experience as a function of how these consumption methods throttle dosage over time. Ingestion will spread a dosage over 4-6 hours, whereas inhalation will expose your mind to this same dosage in in .5-1.5 hours. Also, inhalation has a THC absorption threshold that is much lower than ingestion.
And, of course, cannabis strains themselves each offer completely different experiences. Small doses of sativa strains vs large doses of indica strains produce a light, highly energetic feeling vs a stoned feeling, respectively. http://www.leafly.com/explore#
Combing these 3 dimensions, dosage, consumption type and strain produces a broad range of mental states that can be anywhere from empowering, to euphoric, to self-destructive. Like anything else in life, the key is to be disciplined and adjust these 3 dimensions for your personal goals (of course, being disciplined about adjusting dosage to 0 as a bias).
But consider work, play and deliberate practice (http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). Marijuana affects the hippocampus, and our ability to form memories while under the influence of the drug - this can be a positive in some contexts and a negative in others. For instance, when doing repetitive work, low doses of ingested sativa can actually enhance productivity of results for mundane work - no learning is necessary, just execution. For play, low doses of inhaled sativa or indica can inspire creativity for hours - leveraging the cognitive cycles previously reserved to querying and storing memories for your mind to test new hypotheses about incoming information. For deliberate practice language learning is key, so most contexts of deliberate practice would likely be harmed by introducing marijuana. Of course, some individuals may benefit from low doses that offset the mundane repetition for a net benefit.
Anyhow, I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, but simply to point out that judging Marijuana users as simply people that like to "get high" is utterly and completely ignorant of the reality. It is a judgement, a prejudice and a symptom of pervasive mis-education in our culture.
Of course, these are "opinions that [I] would be reluctant to express in front of a group of peers" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) - present company apparently excluded. Rationally, it makes sense to me that drugs exist that allow me to exercise discipline and tweak my mental state for the task at hand - from caffeine, to ritalin, to THC - and everything in between. However, due to the legal status of marijuana, and people's own experiences with using the drug to get stoned, avoiding judgement and prejudice in todays world (even amongst the highly educated and successful) is a taboo. I look forward to the day when I can have open, educated conversations about the effects, benefits and harms of marijuana. I also look forward to the day when I can have educated conversations about marijuana with intelligent people and not be judged as someone who simply "likes to get high".
People are different
Some people like to eat for the taste, not the sustenance. Some people like to get high for the shift in perspective, not to get high. Some people like to drink wine for the taste, not to get sauced.
And some people do go to strip clubs for non-standard reasons. When I was going through my nude photography hobby phase, I went for inspiration and ideas. Of course, I met my wife there so I went for that as well.
Some of the most "beautiful" code I've written has been under the influence. The document and video encoding system we used at massify, a self-scaling multi-format disconnected conversion cloud, was designed and built in a very stoned haze. It's been running by itself with 100% uptime and without human intervention or maintenance for 3 years now.
If you haven't done drugs, then you can't really comment on them. That would be like me having a strong opinion on a topic I've never studied or have practical experience with. In fact, probably everything you know about drugs is wrong.
That doesn't sound right. What if I put it this way:
"If you haven't got cancer then you can't really comment on it. In fact, probably everything you know about cancer is wrong."
But in fact cancer is being studied by people who don't have it - should they not be allowed to comment on it?
It's like someone criticizing the taste of a mango without ever experiencing eating a mango directly, or other life experiences like sex, having a child, riding a bike for the first time, etc...
It's more like: "If you haven't ever tasted a mango, you can't really comment on the experience of it."
Then I have to ask, on what do you base your opinion?
Some people take drugs as enhancers; perhaps that's like your analogy (though I'd replace "wheelchair" with "bike" or "car").
Some people takes drugs as normalizers. For example, people who have insufficient levels of serotonin or dopamine and are prone to clinical depression. That's like someone with broken legs using a wheelchair. Or like a diabetic taking insulin.
It's hard for people to know quite where they stand. To the best of my knowledge there's no good way to determine if someone has low levels of dopamine. Judging people as if they are taking drugs for the sake of enhancement presumes that person isn't in fact trying to compensate for a deficiency.
Curious that some people dislike the idea of chemical enhancement but have no problem with mechanical enhancement.
If taking drugs is like riding a bike or driving a car (or even using a wheelchair) instead of walking, why don't people disparage bike riding, etc.? I mean, you could have travelled that same distance without it, right?
No one gets upset because someone rides a bike for the fun of it, but somehow taking drugs for the fun of it is suspect, something you have to (gasp) admit to.
Let me explain what I mean. There are just laws, and there are unjust laws. Just laws should be obeyed. Unjust laws should be changed. If you think a given law is unjust, you should be campaigning to change it, not breaking it willy-nilly. The cost of people taking illegal drugs is huge, from the drain on police and prison resources to the creation of the organized crime rings which support the drug industry, and if you're taking illegal drugs you're responsible for all of that. If you are correct and drug laws are unjust then... well shit, changing them is an important task for you, and you should get cracking on that.
Right now there's no great consensus over whether drug laws are just or unjust, but the majority wants to keep drugs illegal, even in California which recently failed to pass (by a huge majority) a legalization of marijuana. If you choose to live in a democratic society, why not obey the democratically ordained laws?
Yes, there are circumstances when it is acceptable to break a law which you regard as unjust. One such circumstance is civil disobedience, where you break an unjust law with the intention of getting caught and punished so that you can bring attention to how unjust that law is, but if you're not (courageously) trying to get caught and punished you're not a civil disobedient. Another such circumstance is if the law is so horrendously unjust that following it will directly harm others, but that certainly doesn't apply in this case.
In conclusion, if you want to take drugs then campaign for drug legalization. But don't go round breaking the democratically-devised law in the meantime.
As opposed to choosing not to live in a democratic society? Is there some psychedelic-utopian society out there that's just like a standard first-world social-democratic country (high standard of living, good education and job opportunities, I can speak the language, etc, etc) except that drugs are legal by fiat?
Get a clue and stop bothering people.
It can be irresponsible, in that a parent should not be engaging in activity that can lead to jail time, but it's not "immoral" and these laws shouldn't exist in the first place. The "drain" you speak of is the cost of drug prohibition, not use.
edit: As for "what's with the rash of...", I think there is a significant subset of hackers that are very interested in the workings of their brains, since we have typically been dependent on and defined by what our brains are capable of since childhood. In turn, there is a very powerful affinity between many of those who are fascinated with the brain, and psychedelic drugs.
If I were to heed that advice, I couldn't do anything productive. Heck, even as it is I'm worrying about stupid laws far too much, even though I'm not breaking any (that I know of), and it's taking time away from my productive behaviour. Your argument doesn't hold water in an environment where there are many, many stupid laws.
I'd argue that the legislators who made the consumption of these substances illegal are responsible for the current situation.
I hope you are one of few that thinks it's morally wrong to do something that is illegal.
Legality should reflect a subset of morality, not the other way around.
The idea that you are morally obligated to follow unjust laws is absurd. Especially in a country where the laws are so obviously controlled far more by corporate interest rather than genuine democratic consent.
I will continue smoking pot and any other drug I fancy and shaking my head in disbelief that anyone can believe marijuana in particular should be illegal.
oh, to put it another way:
geeks align hard towards chaotic good.
"Oh" you say now, "I mean I just follow the laws that are still enforced actively". To that I say, "so do I". But I might just have a different set of laws I consider enforced than you do. That doesn't make me more or less moral than you. We both break the letter of the law. And we both hold ourselves to our own moral standards.
I definitely reject the notion that drug users are solely responsible for the high cost of enforcement when you look at the obscene and disproportionate amount of resources that are poured into the "War on Drugs." What has it ever truly accomplished? It's a failed policy. Yes we should change it, but society shares some of the blame with drug users for criminalizing something as harmless as pot use in the first place!
If you live in a jurisdiction where sodomy is criminalized, then that is an intolerable situation which should not be allowed to stand. Even if you personally are smart enough to get away with it then undoubtedly there's some poor innocent who isn't going to get away with it. If you find yourself in a situaion like that you're morally obliged to either:
a) Leave, or
b) Actively campaign to change that law. If you choose to do it via civil disobedience then good luck to you... otherwise just get to work on campaigning.
Each person needs to make these decisions for themselves while you are getting all high and mighty and calling people immoral for not either:
A) submitting to authority unquestioningly
-or-
B) risking everything to change the laws.
Most people would agree that in general, when living in a society, you should try to behave in a way that does not adversely affect that society. Is that the same thing as never breaking the law? People have different moralities, and they do not always closely track with the local laws where they live in all cases. Many people judge that their personal consumption of drugs does not adversely affect society in any significance, especially given that drug taking is common in society, and that there are legal drugs that are bad for society.
Judging whether something is good or bad is fairly easy with something like murder. Judging whether it's OK for you to smoke some of the weed your friend grew is very different. Morality is more complex than "is it illegal?".
The danger from the consideration that illegal acts are immoral is the reverse - legal acts are moral. I'm sure we can all think of legal acts that we would consider immoral. Is it immoral to smoke a Cuban cigar? Is it immoral to use a differently-sourced cigar the way Bill Clinton did? One is illegal, the other is not.
There are some effects (often visual effects) that persist. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percept...
(Good bye karma)
SF drug propaganda FTW!
Doing drugs for "enlightenment" is for the lazy and stupid. There are many other ways to achieve this. Just ask a devout Hindu or Buddhist monk.
Typical Westerner attitude...