Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization
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I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.
The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. We can't tell "in your case you should take this dose, the risks are quantified and acceptable, and this is what we should do if things go wrong". And it is not for the lack of trying.
People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent.
The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
i can think of a way to find out :)
we'll have to take it in stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial
There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.
There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.
The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.
This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.
There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.
I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.
Even the bizarre murder of Central American fishermen is justified by someone somewhere having a dime bag or something.
Who needs trials , or evidence. Drugs are bad.
Government good.
Drugs bad.
We are yet to observe a society where the overwhelming majority of the population regularly uses fentanyl, crack cocaine or meth-amphetamine. I bet that if we try comparing apples to oranges alcohol would end up being relatively harmless.
Maybe right after filing your taxes ?
The most dangerous part of any illegal substance is the illegal economy existing to support it. Drug dealers generally can’t sue each other so they resolve disputes via other means.
Law Enforcement has the right to suspend all your so called rights because someone you may or may not know might have an unauthorized substance.
Set the legal drug age to whatever the enlistment age is. I’d argue 21 for both.
I wouldn’t but I don’t drink either, while many ppl drink themselves to incapacitation.
The difference between crack and a bottle o’ Jack though is that consequence of a crack-filled weekend isn’t just a hangover.
Maybe a society with all drugs legal would eventually figure out tolerable dosages for heavy recreational crack use (I really did write this ha), but do you want to live through the couple of decades of that discovery phase?
Probation still doesn’t work. You don’t have a whole lot of bootleggers now do you ?
Regulate, tax, educate.
Berlin in 1939 and Silicon Valley jn 2026 come to mind.
It’s extremely analogous to anything that would make a normal day into a bad day.
This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging.
> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards
The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.
Except ketamine therapies are being done right now with low doses where the effects are lighter than psychedelics
Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.
We are struggling to pay for the research that would result in these being effective treatments (not subscription medicines) that would start out as generic drugs.
> ketamine
Great example, SPRAVATO, is a brand name patent protected version of this drug (enantiomer) that as a dose cost over 500 bucks.
It's not like it's a novel drug -- the gatekeeping is ridiculous. Fuck the DEA.
Just like that special ketamine. Or all these ADHD medicine that is just tweaked and patented amphetamine.
Terrible for your liver though.
In particular it is the thumbnails that look identical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NeLNYCGo0 The Zombies Of America! (i have never seen anything like this..) by Frank van Dam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snN0PNZVWNA Inside Philadelphia's Real Life Zombie Outbreak by Tyler Oliveira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htZCX1Y0ZiA THE ZOMBIES OF AMERICA (I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS) by Joe HaTTab
I think there might be multiple groups in play there
There's a really great YouTube channel called Desert Lore and he covers this topic in depth in this episode. It was really fascinating:
@rkozakand 10 months ago
The so called "southwestern motif" is found wherever people weave. Our native rugs in the mountains of Ukraine use the exact same motif, only in different colors. It is a natural outgrowth of weaving techniques, which encourage triangles. We also have ancient pottery from what is called the Trypillian culture, which includes spirals and what you call 'zen tangle' motifs, which we call 'bezkonechnyk'. This pottery looks very similar to Southwest American pottery, even being executed in the same colors. I therefore doubt that they are as tied to specific plants as you think, although patterns repeat in nature, and maybe we have similar plants.
I have read every trip report on Erowid in relation to tropanes.
Art influenced by datura would look like Clive Barkers Hell Raiser. The trip reports are incredibly consistently dark because the person taking the substance is being poisoned. Not figuratively, literally.
The more interesting thing if you look into it is how ayahuasca use might be a modern phenomena. Maybe a few hundred years old.
Even more interesting is how there is a mindset that would not want this to be true and would never accept the evidence for it.
Here's where he breaks down all three: https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=ZURxNd189w7_Rzfg&t=870
“Artificial General Intelligence arose from the streets of San Francisco ca. 2027 possibly due to the high use of opiates among the population. Scientists have found that many locals at the time (of the dominant natural species - Homo sapiens) would consume vast amounts of fentanyl on the city streets - an incredibly dangerous drug originally used at the time as painkiller - which might be the source of artificial intelligence.”
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
What about prions, or strange matter?
and I think talking about breaking molecular bonds though or bringing "fundamental forces" into this is misleading and disingenuous. the point of the OP is to say, "you can take anything in a small enough dose and its not poisonous"
And when you say prions or whatever like you were, my point is if you take small enough doses even of those, you won't be poisoned. you get what I mean, so lets not waste each others time on trying to confuse impossibilities with reality. you won't be getting hurt or die or meaningfully poisoned by ingesting one "prion" or particle of "strange matter". and now when you describe any "poison" with this model, say you ingest 1 particle of even a pure poison, you won't be getting hurt or die.
It was a joke.
What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
That's primarily because it's most commonly diluted 90%. Spirits (or everclear) have much lower intake required.
GHB ~8x
Ethanol ~10x
Methamphetamine ~10x
DXM ~10x
Cocaine ~15x
MDMA ~16x
Codeine ~20x
Methadone ~20x
Mescaline ~24x
Flunitrazepam ~30x
Ketamine ~40x
Phenobarbital ~50x
Nitrous oxide ~150x
LSD ~1000x
Cannabis/THC ~1000x or greater
Citation: Gable RS. Comparison of acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused psychoactive substances. Addiction. 2004;99(6):686–696. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00744.x
Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC.
Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses.
Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely).
2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls.
>80,000 U.S. Poison Control exposure cases in 2021 involving acetaminophen or an acetaminophen-containing product.
Careful because that's some opioids as well.
Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/7up/
https://medium.com/wise-well/lithium-the-nonessential-elemen...
Did the FDA ever say if 7Up was the one using it?
Lithiated beverages were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s. It was equivalent to the coca beverages, which included coca wine, coca tonic, coca teas. There was lithia beer, lithia spring water (because there were natural springs containing some amount of dissolved lithium salts) and 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda was a market leader. The "Lithiated" quality was on the bottle caps and it was in their advertisements.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog...
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-toxic-history-...
The FDA first banned lithium citrate in 1948. There were over a dozen deaths related to lithium toxicity. It is unclear which products caused these deaths. The FDA doesn't have to say which ones: they were identifying a controlled substance, not issuing a recall.
There was yet another FDA ban in 1949. You see, doctors had begun recommending low-sodium diets to people with CVD and related illnesses. So people cut out table salt from their diets. But lithium chloride was commonly available in the same medium. So your wife and restaurant chefs cooked with a teaspoon of lithium chloride; your dinner table at home had a shaker of lithium chloride; people "salted to taste" with this marvelous salt substitute. But the lithiated effects were, again, lethal, and this secondary ban put the last nail in the coffin for the next 20 years before anyone started playing around with manic-depressive patients.
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Imagine what effect alcohol has
Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806
> Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.
PBS Eons Why Does Caffeine Exist? (5:13 for the bit on bees) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI
> In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.
To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?
In boxing, you do not talk your opponent through as you knock him out.
In research, pick any field, say, astronomy, you do not mention that Earth is not flat and that the Earth orbits the Sun.
In biochemistry research, you do not spell out that nicotine binds to NICOTINIC acetelcholine receptors as an agonist, that's literally Biochem 101.
- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each
- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present
- etc.
You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
Not premium to humans.
I do agree that drugs were often needed for people to ensure the hardships of civilization (alcohol is not just a disinfectant). My main problem though is that this is too often used as an argument to shove a bunch of drugs in the general population, when we maybe could achieve some better results by just improving society.
The people that take psylocibin/mescalin/whatever always tell other how much it expanded their mind, yet often they seem just as narrow minded to me as they did before, just in a different way
It’s amazingly coherent.
I know a local bar where there are 4 bartenders who have all been there over 25 years.
Recently I started asking them "How many pregnancies do you suppose you have caused throughout your career?". The most common response was to laugh but all of them also said "I know of a few at least".
Why does this sound familiar? Silicon Valley, microdosing, everyone trying to be creative in finding best applications for AI (more or less creative, I must flag here)
Guess history repeats itself.
Just imagine the power you could wield as a shaman with drugs like DMT and psilocybin it would look like a literal magic
A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?
It has also been shown to have negative correlation to networks in the brain associated with attention.
Sorry to be rude, but what the hell does that mean?
In fact, when you take fungi, it tones down common neural pathways and allows new ones to form between new places.
... no, the fact that some hallucinogens are derived from fungi does not give rise to consciousness. I accept that you read that somewhere; that does not make it true. But, really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Sometimes really bad ideas can actually turn around when taken to irrational extremes. Tons of evidence in history of people who are batshit crazy, somehow figuring out something amazing simply by being impossibly committed to something really, really stupid. But of course, being batshit crazy has other problems, and nearly all of the really stupid stuff does not turn around like that.
The theory is real and, of course, controversial[0]. The formation of consciousness is still a mystery and I’m simply discussing a theory. If you have another theory you deem right, let’s argue on merit, not personal attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
Nowhere in my comment did I attack you personally. I made an analogous argument; reductio ad absurdum. LSD is also a man-made synthetic compound, and promotes neuroplacticity. And if you've ever known a meth addict, you'll know that the substance can cause significant and enduring personality change.
You're advancing a pseudoscientific theory, and I'm ripping it on its utter lack of merit. Please don't take that personally.
Spider webs and auto traffic also have a relationship in this sense but that doesn't say much about the relationship of cars and spiders.
Maybe you need to read less bullshit from McKenna. He was a con artist, not even a good one at that.
I don't dispute the utility of psychedelics. But I have observed (and this is anecdotal) that the fanatic devotees of the drugs tend to engage in magical thinking around the power/history/whatever of psychedelic substances, no matter their intelligence or accomplishment, or rigorous critical thinking in other areas.
Is it such a leap that fungi are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity so maybe our early ancestors took it to get the evolutionary process started.
Maybe they are sapient - you know, like the dolphins from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy :)
I would think it might sometimes depend on what state of mind those were in when they were writing the scripture or prophesizing the dogma that persisted or was enforced afterward.
Using actual "performance-enhancing" substances would be expected to result in a wildly different outcome compared to performance-degrading materials.
Plasticity may or may not be the intended objective in any case.
Consider the question yourself next time you are in the throes of an exoerience and see how hard it is to maintain objectivity...
This reads like recycled lamarckism.
Recycled Lamarckianism would be Lysenkoism. :)
I have never taken psychedelics but I believe myself to be conscious.