Drug history is a backdoor to cultural history | Hacker News Reader

Drug history is a backdoor to cultural history

resobscura.substack.com

53 pointsbenbreen22 comments

The absurdity of defining a psychoactive drug was played out in the UK when the Psychoactive Substances Bill was passing through Parliament in 2016 [0]. Indeed, food (spices etc.) is consciousness altering.

> The Act was due to come into force on 6 April 2016. It was delayed indefinitely due to a lack of clarity as to what the meaning of "psychoactive" is, and what substances are covered by the law. It eventually came into effect on 26 May 2016.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoactive_Substances_Act_20...

This is an excellent reminder to read @benbreen's new book.

I'd argue that our inability to deal with the fact that drugs are a natural aspect of humanity is at least as damaging as any harm that comes from said use.

The "Just Say No" campaign (and others of its ilk) has helped condition the general population to reject any thoughtful discourse on how to properly integrate this behavior in a way that minimizes the damage and maximizes the reward from such use.

For others reading this comment, the book referenced is __Tripping on Utopia__

https://benjaminpbreen.com/books/tripping/

Thanks, I should have noted it!

You're really not saying anything meaningful. Whether something is a "natural aspect of humanity" doesn't mean anything at all about how we should discuss and handle it.

Humans have murdered each other for as long as we've existed. Would you advocate for "thoughtful discourse" on how to better integrate this fully natural aspect of humanity into our society? Has all of our generations of telling people "just say no" to murdering each other just conditioned our society to reject thoughtful discourse on murder?

Integrating murder? No. But pretending it will go away at some point is still effectively delusional. Violence? There are endless ways of integrating violence or the need to commit it into culture in moral ways. Martial arts for instance. Finding healthy outlets for violent urges is an important part of human culture.

What it means specifically is that we will always have to deal with it, and can't ignore it or hope it goes away someday.

> Would you advocate for "thoughtful discourse" on how to better integrate this fully natural aspect of humanity into our society?

We kind of did do it, though. Between state monopoly on violence, exercised by leaders and courts through armies and law enforcement, and all exceptions and extenuating circumstances around e.g. self-defense, we managed to integrate even murder into our society.

Regardless, it's not very useful to bucket murder and drug use in the same bucket. It would perhaps be better to consider alcohol, tobacco and coffee as the mind-altering drugs they are, as this should shine light on alternative approaches applicable to the same category of consumables.

We integrated killing/violence.

“Murder” is a word that means intentional wrongful killing — and “murder” is only defined within the context of integrating violence into society.

Murder presupposes that violence is wrong — as murder is specifically a term for wrongful, intentional killing.

A better example is “zero tolerance” for violence in schools — which has led to many documented cases of punishing victims defending themselves.

We regularly debate the “zero violence!” crowd about how their beliefs are unethical and damaging.

The same as with drugs.

Yeah, it's easy to undo the war on drugs in terms of laws; just write new ones.

To undo the cultural damage will take generations.

In Norway there's increasing political support for decriminalisation of drugs after the Portuguese model, but culturally I see much less progress. Because now the debate is couched purely in medical terms. "Imprisoning addicts is wrong", "replace fines with medical treatment", etc. While not wrong, these perspectives are missing the bigger picture. We're merely changing drug use from being something we want to eliminate by law enforcement to something we want to eliminate by medical treatment.

The "want to eliminate" part is the real problem. We shouldn't want to, because we fundamentally can't. We need to instead have a culture of responsible drug use, like we already do for alcohol. Most people who drink don't drink very often, because that's the cultural norm. For illegal drugs, the dominant cultural norm is total abstinence. The problem occurs e.g when you try to give advice to a young person who just discovered they like weed. When you come at it from a total abstinence point of view, you will seem out of touch to them, and they will subsequently ignore everything you say, even if a lot of it is true.

>>We need to instead have a culture of responsible drug use, like we already do for alcohol.

140,000 deaths per year in, just in the USA, from alcohol use and abuse - not sure I would call that a responsible culture of use and certainly not a worthy goal to mimic for drugs.

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

People still get alcoholism, yes. That doesn't mean that everyone is part of a bad drinking culture, that's just a non-sequitur.

Being irresponsible with alcohol is baked into the culture. I don't think that is a good example to use.

Another good book on drug and culture history is Sadie Plants' "Writing on Drugs" (1999). It's full of great short clips of history and analysis drug-fueled/-inspired literary efforts from Coleridge and Baudelaire to Burroughs & PK Dick.

P.S. Richard Evans Schultes is a very interesting figure in the field of ethnobotanical psychedelic pharmacology, and he was as interested in the plants themselves (peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca and others) as in the cultural traditions that surrounded them (One River by Wade Davis is a good partial biography).

I have mixed feelings about drug politics and its societal impact. My main confusion stems from the fact that, while drugs are pervasive in contemporary culture (such as in the electronic music scene), they remain a taboo topic, no addressed openly by mass media. This lack of a real discussion extends to drug usage, its effects, and dangers. I also consider alcohol as a drug, and I'm alarmed by the level of alcohol consumption among teenagers and young adults, which would even shock my relatives from Kiev.

I believe the primary issue with drugs is their ability to alter perceptions of reality. This aspect makes them inherently dangerous to political and societal systems, regardless of their health impacts.

> I believe the primary issue with drugs is their ability to alter perceptions of reality. This aspect makes them inherently dangerous to political and societal systems, regardless of their health impacts.

While using weed, I’ve come to many realizations that I’m not sure I would have been open to normally. Most of those realizations were of the kind that those in power would like to tamp down, in general, to prevent unrest. I agree with your assessment in that last paragraph.

Perhaps with the crazy amount of school shootings, homelessness, wealth inequality, political corruption, etc. the ability to rethink reality might be a feature and not a bug...

Using drugs as such isn't a crime, you're hurting nobody but yourself. An addict may steal to feed their habit, but it's their theft that's the crime, not having shot up that morning. It's clear that the act of taking drugs, however hard, is victimless.

The enforcement of laws against victimless crimes attracts bullies to the police force, and that's a huge problem. As bad, if not worse, than the damage done by petty thieves feeding their habit. Because now we have a culture where the drugs are a crime worth breaking into strangers' homes, guns a-blazin', to punish and prosecute. And it's hard to convince the public and the lawmakers to reverse course when the common argument is that people should be able to do drugs if they want to, or that maybe some are ok because they aren't as hard, etc.

The early emergence of "Better Living thru Chemistry" societies that emerged on the early drug internet in places like "The Shroomery" where DreadPirateRoberts (silk road founder) got his start as "Altoid" there growing mushrooms. I had some personal interactions there with him when I was in my early twenties (2005-2007) and he was on an elite level of psychedelic mushroom cultivators among the community. Eventually after interacting with certain personalities on "The Shroomery" and displaying some of my early attempts at cultivating Amazonian strains which were quite successful but the scale was tiny in comparison to most...I saw the emergence of what would become the silk road start to emerge.

First it started out as trusted members of the community trading drugs thru the mail without ever bringing money into the equation. Usually thru secretive methods using the mail system. But eventually it did evolve specifically between TheDreadPirate & another personality from Vegas (I wont mention names) Heroin and other drugs started being sold among the small trusted groups. As well as Japanese members contributing some odd but fun drugs they could get in Japan that we simply couldn't here in the US. I recall them "inducting" me into the club by sending me hermetically sealed packages of pure Xanax powder & Phenobarbital.

Fortunately at that point in my life I had moved away from opiate abuse otherwise I may have fallen in deep with them. But when the beginnings of the silk road begin to emerge as basically word of mouth deals between trusted members I withdrew from the community. I had learned what I wanted which was to grow my own psilocybin in small personal amounts basically in order to use once or twice a year for spiritual journeys really to help myself overcome my previous opiate addiction.

So when the heroin and other things started to flow I stopped engaging with them. It was a wild time and I know it sounds crazy for me to say I had personal interactions with TheDreadPirate but I knew him then as "Altoid" and as an elite mushroom grower and he mentored me.

But he had picked up a philosophy that emerged there at the same time I mentioned before "Better living thru chemistry" which was mainly basically a group that thought if all of us Opiate users could openly and easily access them we could in fact operate as better human beings. And personally I still believe its true, opiates helped me overcome my social anxiety but the addiction aspect was the part that really hurt the community but the idea that we could somehow create a community where the idea of running out would never again become a reality.

But as I grew I realized the benefits of opiates are far surpassed by sane controlled used of amphetamines & other substances like 2CI or 2CB (derivatives of MDMA) you could truly elevate your thinking. There were times when I practiced this that I would be hit by what I can only explain as lightning bolts of knowledge that gave me understandings of extremely complex sciences that I had no previous education or reason to suddenly understand. Some of the most profound moments in my intellectual journey came from those strikes of bolts of intelligence emerging from a place I cannot explain. You'd suddenly understand quantum physics and have theories that to this day hold up. I remember after one such event writing 65 pages in my journal about the quantum wave decoherence before which I had no understanding of. I still to this day have theories I made during those events that I still believe are very profound.

One such example which may sound like insane rambling but I called it the theory cyberizing the brain breaking reality as seen in things like ghost in the shell. Imagine a future where we have a cyberbrain...an AI creation that lives in the cloud and is essentially a clone of your brain but functions in a way that simply carries out your unconscious will. Combine that with a cyberized brain, you could in theory adjust your conscious perception of time to milliseconds and lower. What would happen if you reduced that perception so low that you get close to absolute zero ( the point at which atoms even stop moving ). What happens then? In your perception of reality you'd be perceiving things so quickly or slowly that eventually everything around you would stop...simply because your sampling reality in time frames so small that the world appears to stop. What happens at this point? Does reality then become the result of two possibilities....A. something happens in the real world in real time that nudges you back to real time in which you stay in your current reality or does B. everything ceases and at this point does reality split into a new universe where that nudge never happened?

I believe the race to cyberizing the brain is to answer questions like these? If you could slow your sample rate of reality to such a point of even atoms cease to move what then happens?

I believe that the answer to brain computer interfacing is the very idea addressed in ghost in the shell....the hard question of BCI is the fact that we cannot biological equal the rates of which computers can transfer data but with the introduction of a cyberbrain...a clone of your brain that carries your will within cyberspace...is the answer this is where we could build the interface between the computer and our brain. The AI governing the cyber-brain can exchange information at the rate of computing and that cyber-brain can also transfer that information back into your physically modified brain. Thus solving the computing rate vs brain computation rates.

These are the kinds of things we explored during these early times in those forums and why TheDreadPirate started the silk road. Bc he truly believed that proper use of the proper substances could give us insight into things our naturally operating brain cannot.

He wasn't a bad guy at the beginning but he lost the vision and the money and power took hold.

Its truly sad that those communities have largely evaded to private groups that don't allow outsiders in bc we were on the frontier of discovering things about human physiology and consciousness that hadn't been explored before or since.

Modern slavery.

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