Magic mushrooms are changing the lives of terminal cancer patients
thetyee.ca
thetyee.ca
Why are investigations into medicinal use of shrooms or marijuana controversial? Is it the picture of a sick old lady smokin' a massive spliff?
Hallucinogens though... aren't just drugs that change something a little. They can give people profound religious experiences. Some people become an unsettling kind of prophet for a religion of the drug. In the 60s-ish era there were people that wanted to change the world with the drugs with plans to dose populations and leaders to effect major changes. They are very powerful things and with them minds can be rewritten... any sufficiently powerful tool is dangerous. Some early signals and bad actors (basically parts the drug culture that separated from the early scientists studying the drugs) scared the shit out of many in the established society and the propaganda machine turned on and turned them and drugs in general into an evil.
Sort of a knee-jerk stupid reaction that had some basis in real issues but was distorted and exaggerated by people who didn't know much of anything and just got on the bandwagon. (remind you of any other societal issues?)
Like 0.01%?
For every McKenna, Timophy Leary, etc, there were millions doing LSD in the 60s.
And the "prophets" were mostly a fashion of the era too.
When that died, in the 80s, and 90s and so on, you still had LSD, and shrooms, and Ecstasy, and others, but no "prophets".
We can observe the behaviour in many types of interests.
This being HN, the obvious example is programming language zealotry. Other common examples are sports and cars. We see people walking down the street covered in car brand livery and think approximately nothing of it, and some of them will bang on about their chosen interest endlessly.
I tend to think it's more like a flaw in human psychology. Or maybe a strength of our inquisitive nature that sort of gets hijacked by an almost neurotic obsession.
But that doesn't mean psychedelics are especially prone to that.
Mind you I have had positive experiences with psychedelics; I wouldn't push them on anyone, and think it both creepy and unwise to do so.
Yes the experience of LSD is shattering your own reality but for me, i'm very conscious to not promote it in something everyone needs to experience.
Having a flashback on the toilet 4 weeks later and thinking 'does it ever go away, am i imprisoned now, did i break my brain' for 10 minutes, is something difficult to handle.
Also while doing it and experiencing once, i'm fine with doing it every decade once, still not promoting it to everyone.
Giving LSD to someone on their death bed without prior experience? Holy shit no.
Lying in a hospital bed and tripping for the first time might just a little bit crazy.
NOT! Saying it should be illegal, i think the current laws are braindead.
But yes you're completely right, the actual odds of an adverse psychologic reaction are much lower. My point was moreso that dealing with terminal illness can lead to its own kind of detachment from reality and all sorts of stress.
As an example of how forbidding something can make it attractive, it was re-cut into an "exploitation" film...
this means we have no clue who paid right? as in: it could still be tax money through the CIA or smth.
Shrooms play with your brain. We barely know how that works and quite frankly a lot of the research into managing the depressive episodes with shrooms may just be that you become more stupid and therefore less prone to thinking in the first place.
Other than that, I think you are absolutely right tho, mushrooms can induce severe changes. I am not for legalization. And I believe your point is why most people under legal psychedelic treatment are terminal patients.
Of course opioids play with your brain. So do SSRI antidepressants for example, whose very name is based on their most commonly accepted mechanism of action. And it's not only strictly psychiatric drugs—ADHD medication also plays with your brain, influencing dopamine pathways. But then so do gambling, and physical exercise, and meditation! Heck, even social media plays with your brain.
The mere fact that something has an effect on the brain is not in itself an argument against it—let alone when it is being proposed as a psychotherapeutic tool.
You're comparing something that happens to anyone taking opioids long enough, to the worst thing that you can imagine to happen on shrooms, something that actually happens to ~nobody who has taken shrooms, and somehow trying to table that as an argument.
Meanwhile, I can walk through tent cities in Vancouver of people getting free opioid injections from the government because they've given up so hard on this ez addiction problem. And I'm supposed to somehow see how shrooms are actually worse.
You said you're playing devil's advocate, but you still have to try to make an argument. It just sounds like you're field-testing a half-baked supposition you came up with 30 seconds ago.
Opiate harm is also not limited to addiction. Overdosing and liver toxicity from (abuse of) prescribed opiates is real and driven by their steep curve of tolerance. Opiate withdrawal for many can be harsh enough that it's worse than the pain being managed, leading to perverse outcomes like theft, violence, exploitation, and addictive cycles. Inhibitions are also altered under the influence and during withdrawal leading to riskier behaviors and accidents.
Those are the low-hanging rebuttals. We already know the societal cost of opiates far, far outweighs the damage of other recreational substances because of its availability, potential for harm, effects on interpersonal relationships and mental state, and propensity for addictive abuse. Psylocybin has mild potential for mental addiction but none of the cofactors for abuse or deleterious side effects on health.
It was unpleasant but I ultimately came out better than I went in. Maybe it doesn't work for you, but rebuilding worked for me and made me stronger.
Source needed. All the research I've seen suggest that psychedelics, nay many serotonergics, boost BDNF and neurogenesis.
However, they may artificially weaken links to fear circuitry in the brain - this is usually a feature.
This dogma has been used to enact countless bills of legislation in most rich countries, which in turn have encumbered the justice and police system, which in turn have put thousands upon thousands of people into to the correctional system for years.
After all that busywork, lives destroyed and taxpayer money wasted, it is really hard to suddenly jump ship and say "Nah, you know what... after all these lives destroyed and billions of tax money spent ... you know, we were wrong, let's rethink this".
Drug abuse should be handled as a public health issue, not a criminal issue. And it takes time and effort to rebalance the current status quo to a more humane and sane approach.
This vox article discsusses the political history of war on drugs:
Drugs, including alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals are dangerous, and utmost caution should be had if using. If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution. Either that or a professional cautious-person (doctor) will do the administration.
If you keep them illegal then you lose control. If they are made available from your local chemist then you can legislate for quality and strength.
Keeping them illegal also has a massive unwanted side effect in terms of encouraging criminal gangs and violence. All that would go away if customers could just stroll down to their local Boots and buy a packet of spliffs.
Violence and gangs and ridiculous prices are a symptom of criminalization. If in order to produce and consume you face several years prison, gangsters happen. If nobody cares if you produce, your neighbor might start producing, he might have a surplus and accept some cheese in exchange.
I know they’re safe; I know what’s in them; a year’s supply costs less than a meal in an inexpensive restaurant.
I don’t care if someone wants to make their own, but it seems like harm is minimized if these chemical substances that alter your body are treated similarly to other such substances.
it works pretty well in the case of supplements. there's no guarantee the supplement actually helps with your issue, but at least you can be confident that the bottle contains what it says it does.
the problem with legalization of recreational drugs is that the government can't seem to resist slapping on a huge tax and/or imposing arbitrary restrictions on the supply side. it is my understanding that there is still a thriving black market in most legal/medical states in the US, due to the high price and varying quality of the legal/medical buds. this is despite most MMJ practices being the weed equivalents of pill mills. it's kind of absurd that a legal supply chain can't compete with an illicit one on price/quality.
Even drugs like heroin should be fully legalised. Subject to prescription, maybe. But the harm from a clean, consistent heroin supply is vastly lower than the harm caused by the manufacture and smuggling alone, and decriminalisation of possession does not address that. Decriminalisation also does not address the cost issue which is a major problem with many drugs. A medical grade supply for a typical heroin user costs in the $10-$20 range (we know because e.g. the UK NHS buys heroin for hospital use; if you're given diamorphine for post-op pain, that's heroin).
But the biggest problem with the "drugs are evil" narrative is that it has damages serious discourse about which drugs are lower or higher risk.
LSD and psilocybin for example are certainly vastly lower risk than e.g. heroin and cocaine.
In fact, there's a famous case of a group of patients checking in after having snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. Their blood levels suggest they would have ingested hundreds to thousands of normal recreational doses. They all walked out of there with no lasting harm.
In terms of other drugs, some drugs exists largely for time-limited circumvention of drug laws or because they're easier to create or smuggle, and would see their demands crash if less dangerous alternatives were legalised.
I think the harm of legalization is only slightly below the war on drugs. Legalization means another vector of government control in my life, most likely outsourced to big pharma.
All the issues you are pointing can be solved by decriminalization are solved by individual responsibility and boils down to answering the question: Can you trust your source? If you can't answer the question you probably need help through a government sponsored damage control program.
To be precise, I used MDMA couple of times in my youth. My source sent every batch to a lab, we knew exactly what we were taking. Then he retired, and my MDMA use with him, cause I have no trusted source.
No amount of government control will substitute for cautious and responsible use. It might even hinder it, see alcohol, see tobacco, see opioid epidemic in the US.
But lack of legalisation also leaves drug cartels and murderous supply lines, high prices and reason to carry out crime to finance those high prices intact.
Note that the DEA schedules are all over the board. The current schedule system has barely any correlation with harm (see work by David Nutt). But we are also in a weird place where access to two of the most destructive drugs in real measurable effects - alcohol and tobacco - are legal.
At bare minimum we need to overhaul the schedule system, legalize drugs with low/moderate addiction potential (weed, psychedelics, ketamine, phenethylamines, the Shulginoids), and legalize everything in personal possession quantities, and for scientific/medical research.
High-addiction drugs should probably be medically gated in some way.
Would caffeine and sugar also fall in this list?
Sugar, no, it doesn't bind to transduction receptors in the same way (it is rewarding, but not like "drugs" are).
In fact, the "gating" of heroin through law enforcement is so poor that the difficulty and cost in scoring oxy once people face medical gating due to drug seeking behaviour is now one of the larger recruiting avenues to heroin use.
It's easier and cheaper for people to get heroin as a substitute than it is to continue to use a safer, cleaner supply of oxy.
If you want to medically gate these in a manner that does not increase harm it needs to be at the kind of level that e.g. paracetamol/acetaminophen is restricted in places like the UK (limits on quantity in a single purchase, but nothing that stops you popping to the next pharmacy over and buying more, or coming back the following day) or that e.g. some non-prescription drugs are sold (under the counter, pre-requisite information given out by a pharmacist and possibly some basic questions).
You can maybe push it to a non-aggressive push towards treatment, but if you start denying access you're right back to creating a black market you'll have no control over.
The exact threshold probably needs to differ per drug, but it the level of gating we're currently at even for legal prescription drugs like oxy is actively harmful.
The idea that selling drugs is something special misses and should remain illegal seems to only partially consider the implications of what that means.
One side of safety concerns is consumption safety. An at home production facility is of lower quality, exemplified by many more cases of methanol poisoning during the US Prohibition era [0]. Another is production safety, cooking methamphetamines is real chemistry —- I would much prefer to have a factory doing that rather than my residential neighbours. Finally, we have access, growing plants indoors is non-trivial and processing them into something resembling a finished product also so. Given this, I’m convinced that limiting illegality to trafficking doesn’t stop the war on drugs, because it has always been about trafficking — the hard part is moving the product and selling it to people. If the “do as you want” resolves to making trafficking legal, then it seems the drugs are simply legal.
[0] https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-ma... (The actual source is apparently a book the writer references)
If there were a real war on drugs, pharma companies would be the nuclear superpowers.
While anti-fun attitudes probably play some role, I think it mostly comes down to a pro-productivity mindset. Caffeine is generally understood to enhance productivity, and for that reason may as well be a revered god in the American pantheon. Alcohol is borderline; it's a known quantity that generally seems to leave productivity intact except in cases of alcoholism (alcoholism is consequently seen as shameful). Alcohol bans have been attempted, and are still intact today in remote regions of Alaska where the productivity impairment alcohol induces is seen as a particularly concerning matter. Cannabis remains maligned because it's seen as making people lazy and content, not because it might be fun. And amphetamines are legalized in circumstances where doctors say it will cure productivity impairing disorders.
Furthermore anti-fun is not the sole religious motivation in play. Puritanism / American protestantism is also associated with the glorification of productivity that I describe above.
We could have some survey based study that tries to ask respondent questions whose answer could maybe begin to give us a little understanding of how much each of these angle might be at play in a given population. That would already avoid a lot of this "I think" "You think" debate.
Eh, I think this is too dismissive of some pretty deep ethical and philosophical considerations. Effectively they are giving drugs that alter ones perception of reality and then judging their effectiveness on the patients perspective. But since they alter their perception of reality it's tough to rely on patient reports.
Anecdotally speaking, there's a lot of people in this world that think drugs make their lives better when an objective observer would pretty strongly disagree. That raises a lot of difficult questions. Most notably, do we give someone a drug that will make their life worse but also make them think their life is better.
In a medical context, we can evaluate this as objectively as we evaluate painkillers or antidepressants. We can use our normal tests for anxiety and depression, run studies where we watch outcomes, etc. From what I've seen, the effects have been very positive for these patients.
To me it sounds like complaining that your friend with cancer is objectively a worse friend because he doesn't feel like playing Mario with you anymore after taking his cancer drugs or painkillers. He thought he was a good friend, but he objectively wasn't >:(.
Maybe there's reasoning behind the trade-offs they chose that involves more than you?
Not to diminish your grief, but your aunt might not have been any more available if she had been using other pain management methods. It's just a terrible, overwhelming thing to happen to the body, and it saps a huge amount of the sufferer's energy.
I sympathize completely, and I'm sorry for your loss.
Like over the self painkillers do? Personally I don't see the philosophical difference in alleviating physical pain from alleviating psychological pain.
Of course, if the psychological pain is caused by a condition that can be fixed the fixing the condition itself is of course better. But in many cases of depression and anxiety there is no clear root cause that could be fixed.
Anecdotally speaking, there's a lot of people in this world that think drugs make their lives better when an objective observer would pretty strongly disagree.
Substance abuse and addiction are a problem, sure.
But that is entirely a different thing from providing substances that reduce anxiety and depression.
And pain killers, at least OTC ones, don't alter someone's psyche. We can, more or less, rely on their judgment that painkillers are helpful. You can't necessarily say the same for mind altering drugs.
All things are bad if not taken in moderation.
My experience (personal and thus merely anecdotal) on mind altering drugs has been only positive.
My SSRI medication was very welcome when I needed it, and I am very happy they 'altered my mind' and helped through some very dark times.
If I was hit by depression again I would not mind trying a psilocybin based medical regimen.
Like if im suffering pain, I don't want to get drug-induced quasi religious epiphanies from psychedelics. I Just want the pain managed. And what's really annoying about LSD is how it keeps getting promoted as a wonder drug here.
What happens when docs start prescribing it for back pain too?
That's you buddy. Then don't take it. Others who have chronic back pain might be totally fine with this.
You'd only say someones judgement about themselves is unreliable if they will contradict themselves later. But if it is a permanent change, then you are talking to the "new" person who is capable of judging this as well as anyone.
what does it even mean to "objectively observe" whether drugs make someone's life better? we can look at a crack addict living in squalor and plainly see how their addiction inhibits material success. we can also imagine how deeply unhappy we would be to live in such circumstances. but if we want to know how that individual person experiences their own life, all we can do is ask them.
However there is no doubt people under destructive addiction are very well aware that their condition sucks. It doesn’t mean they can overcome the addiction and the urge of scoring.
I think the parent was related to behaviours such as "pot makes me more creative when playing music" or "cocaine makes me a better dancer" or "alcohol makes me funnier". All of which can be externally appreciated with a different opinion.
agreed, and most of them will freely admit this, as long as they trust you not to use that information "against" them.
> I think the parent was related to behaviours such as "pot makes me more creative when playing music" or "cocaine makes me a better dancer" or "alcohol makes me funnier". All of which can be externally appreciated with a different opinion.
I can also agree with this, as long as we are limiting the observation to extrinsic qualities.
maybe I read too much into GP's comment. I am wary of these sorts of statements, because they are often a jumping-off point to advocate for compulsory treatment of mental health issues.
Would that be a fair wording of your position?
The super human PCP user. The window-jumping LSD user.
And drugs don't exist in a vacuum, you can't take the individual out of the equation and expect meaningful answers.
Criminalization and stigmatization cause more harm in the long-term than drugs do.
Are all drugs as innocous as cannabis or psilocybin? Gosh no.
Does criminalization and stigmization of drug use make the problem 10,000x worse? Very.
Imagine if the US followed Oregon's lead and decriminalized all personal use. Drug users can seek out help and get harm reduction (eg: needle exchanges, advice, etc) and get them participating in the medical system where we can help them out of addiction, no families will be destroyed because of a little weed (or heck, meth), we save a bunch of money on drug enforcement, we could close private prisons, etc.
I am not saying utopia, but maybe we should look at drug use as something besides a personal moral failing. No one wakes up and decides to be a drug addict... no one _wants_ to be an addict.
This idea that drug users are burn-outs who chose that life is absurd.
I wouldn't even limit this to patients which are actually going to die soon and have no choice. Any patient eligible for euthanasia should be allowed to take any substance they want. It is absurd to let a person die but forbid them to take a shot of a substance "because it can harm their health" or whatever. I would even suggest them to take psychedelics - this may (or may not - a proper setting can be important) bring peace of mind and even sense of meaning in both dying and living, they pretty much may even change their mind.
Mid altering substances are taboo, have been throughout modern times. Shrooms & grass are established recreationally, so controversy. Enough controversy to trump the normal medical exception from the taboo.
So yes, basically. It is really the picture of a sick old lady smokin' a massive spliff. That's the problem. Smoking spliffs is taboo. If old ladies do it, the taboo can't hold.
Taboos have two parts: the thing that's taboo and the ways a culture maintains it.... ie the controversy. Taboos dissipate unless they're forcefully guarded. Someone does a thing. No one makes a big deal. Someone else does the thing. It quickly becomes normative.
If you're old enough, think of the homosexuality taboo. How important it was (when I was a kid) to make sure no one thought you were a homo. Now it isn't, at least in my surrounds. We enforced the taboo on each other. When we stopped. It stopped.
The old lady with a spliff is like the supreme court of literal common law.
Not trying to undermine the other part, which is true and I wish more countries would move faster. But this may be part of the problem officially. Yes, people routinely seek regulated drugs from doctors by faking symptoms. Enough to create systems where you can register people receiving prescriptions so that other doctors know not to prescribe multiple overlapping doses.
Not saying anything against its medical applications, only justifying the general antithesis against mind-altering substances in everyday life.
I can see why it is frightening to many 'normal' people who are just living their lives, wanting to have a house, family, job, holidays and perhaps partially overwhelmed by all of that already anyway.
I brought weed brownies to a birthday party for me and also for good friends to try if they wanted to. They live in 'rural' areas. Its common for them to drink alcohol, a lot. Drugs? no never no interest don't care.
While i already had ~5 year of experience with weed, they didn't even see it once. why would they? They have alcohol, it works for them, its common, easy and fun.
They had a really really hard time of even trying a brownie. They didn't even get why i would smoke weed if the effects are shallow. They didn't knew that you will not see halluzinations.
i think i'm over curious. This leads me to not being happy about what i have and looking for new. They are under curious and they are happy with that they have. Is that a problem? No its just different balanced.
To be clear, not implying that weed can't be wonderful or that you can't have a bad trip on psychedelics, just speaking from what I've experienced, seen and heard from others.
A psychedelic is in my opinion not an easy drug at all.
I don't think it is a normal experience for anyone, for the first time, to realize that what you see or what you believe can be influenced that easily.
While halos around light with lsd is nice to watch, its still a crazy thing. I never had visual impairment on that level from weed or alcohol.
Or when you see moving patterns on a wall, it does break one sence you as a human have a lot of trust for.
Our neighbor is an old lady who had cancer and apparently smells sometimes things which are not here. She doesn't want to be crazy and doesn't even accept that it can easily be nerve damage or whatever which makes her sometimes smell things which are not here.
Instead she thinks we and neighbors above her are trying to get her out of her flat. We are living in a very stable modern building, there is no realistic benefit of anyone to boot her out and walls are so thick, there is no noise issue at all. She still called the policies at least twice, had an expert here and was standing in our door twice angry and pissed of because we are creating that smell. It was 2 am in the morning and i was asleep.
Getting tired, not being able to walk well anymore, loosing concentration or forgetting things are apparently easy to understand and to accept as a human.
It doesn't touch just on the social implications like fueling police states and for-profit prisons while enabling a new form of slave labor, but also largely on the economic and industrial factors which came into play as well.
An old edition available for free online on Herer's website, and there is a link to a more recently updated edition on Amazon.
That means that people who are more predisposed to mental illness or under stress should be cautious around drugs (whether legally available or not), just like people with diabetes should be cautious about their blood sugar. It doesn't mean that drugs can't have beneficial effects and be used safely.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis%E2%80%93stress_model (2) https://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/05/mental-illness-1/
Result: fewer challenges to the status quo when fundamental change at near-revolutionary levels seemed a real risk for those in power. Turns out society's elite were a bunch of squares.
As crime has fallen and society has become less violent, Politicians have to look for ways to keep the steady flow of Meat into the Prisons since they don't fill themselves and billions of dollars at stake, 10's of thousands of jobs, generous campaign donations, etc. So these Politicians have to make the door as wide as possible to keep the game going, Marijuana, psychedelics, etc, keep that door wide. Throwing kids in jail for being late, missing school, having a joint or prosecuting sick or dying patients who need help (that Morphine shot costs how much in the Hospital?).
It's a game being played on the American People and year after year they keep voting/electing the same people who are running the game.
This process provided arguments to opponents of medical marijuana, who claimed that it is just a “pretext for stoners”. As a supporter of both medical use of marijuana and derived substances, and of legalization of recreational use, I think that a clearer separation between the two would benefit all users and provide a better legal environment.
- Ken Kesey, 1966
Culture evolution slows further when large institutions (primarily "the state" here) adopt the same beliefs and make them concrete (by being codified in many laws in this case). This particular effect worsens when the core belief is that some thing is bad and can be outlawed/fought because you get droves of self-righteous politicians who want to make a name for themselves piling on against this Bad Thing.
Those processes need to be reversed and unwound to move past the erroneous core belief.
Bad ideas do die, but they almost always survive much longer than they "should" because of a litany of flaws in human nature/culture/information-flow.
Did you take SSRIs or similar medicine at the time? Did you feel the same effect in the first time?
First time I took it, half a dose, I felt like a 12 year old child. It was a lot of fun.
Second time I took it, a full dose, I had a bad trip. But I was with my girlfriend, so it was never too bad. I also learned that I trust her completely emotionally. I relied on her a lot.
Third time I took it with a very close friend (15+ years of knowing, inspired each other to study psychology), a full dose again (I thought it would be fine by now), my trip was so bad that I had strong feelings of ending it all. Luckily enough my intelligence was waning fast as well, so I locked myself in a room. 10 minutes later I didn't know what was what, but I cried for 30 minutes and I didn't know why I cried. When I got out of the trip it did spur a soul search questioning myself, looking inward more deeply and that was beneficial but I was flying a bit too close to the sun for it to be worth it.
I should've gotten a trip sitter. I was naive at the time.
I recall one afternoon my friend and I picked and took some mushrooms (they grow in abundance at a certain time of year where I live), when I was perhaps 15 years old. We didn't take a huge quantity, but enough for a mild, pleasant experience.
That same evening I realised that I had to write an essay for school - it wasn't like me, but I'd completely forgotten about it, and now had a single evening to write a whole essay... bah, how could I possibly do that?!
I sat down, and... it just flowed. Words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, characters, just sprang to life on the page - and it was good, really good! My mind felt amazing - like my consciousness had been expanded. I'd never felt such pure imagination and joy of knowledge before.
By the end of the evening I had unquestionably the best essay I'd ever written, and about twice the target length.
A week or so later when I got the results, it was a B, and I was kind of shocked - it was a masterpiece, dammit, and normally I pretty much got straight A's in English regardless! The teacher called me back after class - he told me what I submitted was way better than A+ work, more what would be expected at university level, or by a published author. He also asked who wrote it, because "it obviously wasn't you" - he didn't believe my insistence that I'd written it. He couldn't prove anything, so gave it a B and strongly warned me not to "pull a stunt like this ever again".
Of course, people can have great ideas and do great work without hallucinogenic drugs - that should really go without saying. But the results with such drugs can be utterly incredible - also keep in mind the effect is not only while using the drug, but afterwards too. The first time I k-holed on ketamine (many years later), it felt like I somehow understood the universe itself, and my mind felt incredible for 2-3 weeks afterwards.
A cautionary tale though. Later as a 15/16 year old again, we took an insane amount of mushrooms one night after something terrible had happened. Hundreds of them. I kept finding myself in the corner of the same room, staring at a troll (an hallucination). It seemed like it had happened a hundred times, and was pretty frightening. It was like being trapped in a never-ending nightmare. I later spent several hours shivering uncontrollably on a bed. It was a long time ago, but I guess the whole thing lasted at least 12 hours. I've never touched mushrooms or any other hallucinogen since, and I doubt I ever will, even if as an adult I wouldn't be as irresponsible as I was as a kid.
So I have to ask. Do you still have that essay? And can I (email in profile), or we (HN), read it? I get it if you don't want to. Just asking if you're open to it :)
I think your story isn't properly finished ;-)
You should have gotten your A+… This seems really arbitrary and unfair. The teacher could not prove anything, but gave you a worse grade based on what? His personal opinion of your abilities? Dick move.
You should definitely try and get in contact with that teacher! Go to the school and ask around, try to cross reference the years you studied with the teachers around, they must keep records surely
From my experience of the event, I can say with complete confidence that when they were drugged and this ritual was done to them, they had no will-power to break away because the potency of the drug is quite high and the power of suggestibility is through the roof. You become the group on LSD. I think to perform such a evil thing another person, you absolutely need to have lost your soul and I'm pretty sure they were hard-core devil believers at that point.
The moment I started getting the "bad vibes" I just got the out of that house and had to trip alone by myself in a strange area for the next 12 hours. I had one of the worst experiences of my life for that 12 hours where I was rampantly paranoid about what went down and couldn't trust anyone for a week. Currently seeking therapy for this now.
I've thought about this a lot since, and I think much of it was being a situation where boundaries and intentions were unclear, and having that crash headlong into the belief systems I'd been raised with. My mind was reaching for explanations for my sensory overload & the firehose of novel data coming in-- so the war between 'demons' and 'angels' I had been repeatedly taught was real as a kid was what it latched on to.
I have learned since then that this is one of many common adverse reactions to tripping in a bad situation. I strongly, strongly encourage therapy! Uncertainty in this area can lead to misguided forays into cults, conspiracy theories or even a psychotic break.
By the way, I had never heard of darkpsy, so I decided to check it out. It's definitely interesting to me sober (I like weird stuff), but I would absolutely not want to listen to this back in the days when I was tripping. What was done to you was cruel, whether it was really meant that way or not.
For anyone that's going to use mushrooms, LSD or any other hallucigen, I'd strongly recommend having a trip-sitter. This is someone who stays with you, remaining sober throughout proceedings), and can help guide the trip, and get you back on track if they start going wrong. Oh, and of course I'd recommend considering your tolerance level, and only taking a sensible amount.
Mushrooms are the opposite of “fucked up” they’re “tuning in”.
Widipedia article here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL
Electronic copies of the book used to be widely available online, but I can't vouch for any links that have turned up in a quick search a few minutes ago. Hard copies are still available, and are probably more complete and/or safer.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and....
Nowadays, I know how to use meditation as a tool that purely benefits me. I use it sparingly, since I'm a bit lazy. But I've noticed that using it sparingly is erring on the safer side while still getting the benefits.
In my case, I notice the benefits after each session. My mind is calmer and I get less easily upset. In another meditation I'm more empathetic. In another meditation I'm more easily loving.
All effects last for about half a day to a day, but they have ripple effects (i.e. had a good day yesterday? Chances are your day will be great as well today).
However, zazen (zen meditation) saved my life. After a few months of dedicated practice my mental wellbeing was better than ever. I practiced a lot, and on top of doing formal zazen at some 1h - 2h per day, I tried to carry on the practice in physical daily activities like walking, in the gym, doing house work and so on. This is not to say it was easy, but I had nothing to lose basically. I didn't know if it would help me or worsen my condition, I just took a leap of faith. And like I said, just after a few months I have started to experience good effects, I was doing zazen like I had a gun to my head, I either solve these issues or my life is over. However after some 6 months, when my problems disappeared I got sloppy with the practice and the problems soon re-appeared, and when I re-started my practice, I was cocky and delusional about it.
It took me another year to figure this out, but since then things are pretty stable. If I ever get bad anxiety, I can eliminate in some 20 minutes, but it just happens less and less often. If I start feeling depressed, or have depressive thoughts - I have basically a hardwired reaction to cut that off - it's like what I was doing was automated (have shitty thoughts -> focus on zazen and stop thinking, absorb the pain). And that too, happens less and less often. And of course, I still do zazen 1h every day, and try to stay present and engaged in daily activities and cut any useless mind wandering. It's nowhere near perfect and I have a lot of work to do, but anxiety and depression is not something I have to bother with anymore, and I'm very thankful for that and feel like I don't have the right to complain about anything.
The reasoning for why it worked so well - I think - is pretty simple. The problems I had with depression and anxiety were problems with my physiology and nervous system alignment. Being a programmer, I spent a lot of time in the intellectual world, eventually I got locked in and imprisoned in my head. I didn't have a sharp perception of the outside, everything had to first go and be filtered by the thinking mind, I was in a fog and I was kinda dead in the body. And my thinking mind was running wild, I think I have had some sort of OCD as well. This was a pretty low level of existence and this state of things gives plenty of room to welcome anxiety and depression. I also started to get somewhat socially awkward, which further contributed to the depression and it was on overall downward spiral.
Now with zazen I could fight back. I could cool off the thinking mind effectively, and it didn't take long to start seeing beyond the fog. With this I also could develop basic focus abilities, so I could further train my physiology. Little by little, I could unlock more and more of "the nervous system real estate", took control and feel of my body, and that eventually improved my ability to feel emotions.
Be aware - there are risks. My practice wasn't all flowers, there is such a thing in zen called "makyo" which are hallucinary sesnsations. Like I said, I had nothing to lose, and just took my chances despite fear. I had experienced a bit of makyo, but it was nothing that bad. The important thing in zen practice is to have faith in the long-term view and allow short term pain. For me the most dangerous thing was trying to interpret zen intellectually, which I have did to some extent, and the result was that my practice was broken - I was thinking I was practicing rather than actually practicing - it also has caused a worse comeback of depression - trying to interpret some of the zen teachings intellectually contribute to that 'life pain' thing, at least it did for me. So there could be some risks of course, just like with any unconventional way to do things, but the journey, the lessons and the long term reward could be well worth it.
If you are interested, check "3 Pillars of Zen". There are detailed information on how to practice. Also be aware of some of the esoteric stuff and try to not take it too seriously. And the kind of zazen I would recommend is the : counting of breaths -> observing breaths -> shikantaza rather than zazen with a koan.
https://quotes.dilanka.com/post/159729327755/a-man-moved-nea...
:)
He's been sober since.
He told me that it got to a point where he got mad and literally blacked out! He found himself in a black void which he described as very disturbing and hellish because all he could feel was dread and the sound of screams.
He never touched any substances after that and was shook up when he told me that story.
"Chet", if you are reading this, I hope you are well.
https://www.notion.so/quant/Johns-Hopkins-Playlist-for-Psilo...
It’s good, and there are a lot of other interesting trip playlists on Spotify too.
While obvious, the ongoing harm done by ascribing medical responsibilities to an LEO doesn't capture the interest of elected officials. Unless the electorate forces their interest, that won't ever change.
And it’s positioned kind of like the “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
I don't think I've ever seen a study comparing this in the way you describe, but from piecing together other papers I recall seeing I would say probably psiloc(yb)in, possibly DMT ("ayahuasca"), with LSD and mescaline (peyote/san pedro) being qualitatively similar. All of these are primarily serotonergic.
I'd be surprised if Salvia does jack shit in that domain, regardless of how trippy the experience can be. It acts very differently.
Yeah, I don't think people who say that have done a high enough dosage. :P
subjectively, I find psychedelics to have more of an "organic" feel and dissociatives to have a more "synthetic" feel, although I imagine others might describe it differently.
I went from years of depression to zero depression in the first profound session. And I'm not a religious guy.
I highly recommend.
What I mean by my comment is media keeps repeating the same research about the benefis of psychedelics - it's beyond old news at this stage and I'm being generous with my ten year timespan it's closer to 15.