It seems there are plenty of unsuccessful "consciousness-tinkerers" out there:
- friends and people you've met who fell off the radar, some came back and now speak negatively about their past drug use
- plenty of homeless drug users in big city streets, clearly in a bad state of mind
- dead celebrities, their path documented by the media
So I have a hard time understanding how these articles downplay the risks and downsides, why they even pop up on HN and are so well received. On Fentanyl the straw man is "carpet bombing Mexico", the only alternative cheaper and more dangerous versions of this drug? That sounds a little tone-deaf.
It's one thing if you are well-established in life and experiment with a mushrooms from a trusted source under expert guidance - may you become a better fin-de-siècle poet. But opening the floodgates to the general public even more? Can't be good.
Many (not all) of those things were results of the criminalization of drugs, as well as our refusal to take care of people with mental health issues.
Most overdoses could be avoided by knowing exactly what you're taking, at what dose, and maybe even under supervision (like at safe injection sites; places that have gone years without a single person dying on premises).
The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems.
Fentanyl only exists on the black market because drugs are illegal. Fentanyl is kind of a shit high compared to other opioids, it's only a problem because dealers are cutting their illegal drugs with it.
I think your argument is a bit shaky if you take into consideration alcohol in society.
alcohol consumption is perfectly acceptable, very well-regulated, “safe”, and alcoholics receive plenty of support and sympathy from public health, yet that doesn’t stop alcoholism ripping through society with countless victims (and victims of victims).
You can even make the argument that many alocholics wouldn’t be so if alcohol was less normalised in society
Prohibition reduced american alcohol consumption by about a third according to most estimates, and before it, americans were drinking insane amounts of hard liquor. Like the equivalent of multiple drinks a day.
It also promoted a lot of organized crime. Just like today (but worse, because now we have narco-states vs just gangs.
I lost a mother to alcohol and a brother to heroin. Both are technically quite safe when used appropriately and lethal when not. And they're going to be used regardless of legality, so let's make it safer for those that do as well as stop funding the cartels.
I am sorry about your loss. However, if you want to talk technically, then the science over the last two decades has moved almost decisively to saying there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
Yeah, alcohol is not healthy for people. But by safe I'm talking about a glass of wine with dinner or other low intake/healthy contexts.
But my point stands: people are going to do it regardless of the law, so let's stop criminalizing it. Being overweight is unhealthy too, should we arrest every fat person in the country "for their own good"?
I'm not in favor of banning alcohol. I just want to dispel the false notion that prohibition didn't "work", when it empirically did.
We shouldn't ban alcohol because it's a hamfisted way to reduce alcoholism and harms from alcohol abuse. However, the 1910s didn't exactly have functioning rehabilitation programs.
We don't really have a functioning rehabilitation program now. The rates of failure and relapse are not exactly low. There are also often a bunch of hoops to jump through to even get access to them, most people are more interested in being "tough on crime" which really means "authoritarian".
Heroin, in a pure form, is non-toxic and as long as you don’t mix it with things and do too much you should be OK. Proper dosing is the huge part. But you could still easily die from slowing your heart down too much so I would not say “safe”. Non-toxic, let’s stick with that.
Not that ethanol isn't also neurotoxic (to a much lesser degree), but bootleg moonshines common during prohibition often contained trace amounts of methanol, the number of people irreversibly injured by methanol poisoning greatly exceeded the number who died.
By 1926, according to Prohibition, by Edward Behr, 750 New Yorkers perished from such poisoning and hundreds of thousands more suffered irreversible injuries including blindness and paralysis. [0]
This was likely the cause of the vast majority of methanol poisonings during the prohibition. You have to use exotic, hard to break down carbohydrates in your beer, wine, or mash (the pre-distillation fermented product), like tree bark, to end up with significant quantities of methanol.
Most of the methanol poisonings were from poorly "re"natured fuel alcohol.
Yeah, industrial alcohols were (and still are) "denatured" with additives to make them toxic or unpalatable and industrial alcohol was often used as a precursor for bootleg spirits during prohibition. I think modern denaturants lean more towards unpalatable than toxic.
No, I meant methanol. It's an easy contaminant to produce through improper distillation practice, and the most common of several contaminants which produced unfortunate outcomes among drinkers of illegal liquor during prohibition.
Methanol specifically is produced during the distillation process. The methanol vapors and ethanol vapors reside next to each other in the distillation column, making it a common impurity that is brought over in the distillation process. Great care needs to be taken to avoid collecting the methanol.
This simple fact is the greatest argument for distillation having much higher legal barriers than the simple brewing involved in beer/wine/mead.
Distilling doesn't produce jack-diddly-squat. It just concentrates. Methanol is a side effect of the fermentation process, and only common with exotic carbohydrates. In a normal beer, wine, or wash, you'll find less methanol than in your morning glass of orange juice.
I don't know what "exotic" means in the context of moonshine, but I've known some mountain men who weren't clever or careful about it and would ferment damn near anything - which is why I've drunk moonshine exactly once, and intend that to remain the case for the balance of my life.
Poking around the web, it seems as if making liquor at home has become popular among booze nerds. That's great and all, but I wouldn't call it moonshine, and I'd be very hesitant about how much I reasoned based on what well-informed people do today about the practices of a century ago, or indeed about the practices of today among those for whom making moonshine is more a family tradition than a hobby.
If it vaguely, and I mean vaguely resembles starch or sugar, you're not getting methanol. It's substantially harder to convert long polysacharides into ethanol/methanol than it is to convert starches and simple sugars, to the point that the less informed a person is, in the off chance they succeeded in making alcohol, the less likely there's going to be substantial methanol levels.
The vast majority of moonshine stills were just churning out unaged corn whiskey from animal feed corn. There is no risk of methanol poisoning in that scenario.
Speaking technically, methanol isn't produced during distillation, it's concentrated. Since it boils at a lower point than ethanol, it disproportionately comes out in the "heads" of a distillation run. The source wine/beer/mash already has all the methanol in it, it's just it's not a problem when present in the small quantities in a non-distilled drink, alongside with a much greater amount of ethanol. (Ethanol can actually act as an antidote to methanol since your body processes it first and can then excrete much of the methanol unmetabolized)
The risk of methanol poisoning in moonshine is grossly overrated. Simply put, you have to do some stupid shit to end up with dangerous amounts of methanol. The methanol content in a beer, wine, or mash precursor to liquor production will be absolutely trivial, unless you are are doing something ridiculous like trying to make liquor from tree bark (the Greeks have a drink like this, it's heavily warned against in home distilling circles).
So why was methanol poisoning common during the Prohibition? Renatured fuel alcohol. To stop people from drinking fuel ethanol, the government poisoned the supply with methanol. People tried to come up with jerry-rigged solutions to remove the methanol, and more often than not failed. Some less scrupulous experimenters sold their results anyway, where it worked its way into the black market supply chain.
No idea of why you quote the word. Alcohol consumption is demonstrably unsafe.
The estimate is that alcohol kills around 140 000 people per year in the USA. It's just legal because criminalisation was tried and proven to be not only useless but actually more harmful to society through its side effects, a situation similar to the one we are still having with all the other drugs which are still illegal basically.
On the other hand, you can look at the vast majority of society that drinks in perfectly reasonable moderation. Teetotalers make up a tiny fraction of society, yet civilization hasn't crumbled to barbarism. If a community is experiencing alcoholism at such a rate that it's "ripping through society", then that suggests to me that there's a greater root evil than the bottle.
Actually, you'd be surprised to learn that 20–40% of Americans don't drink. There are all different ways to define it leading to the ambiguous statistics (e.g. once a year, never, include/exclude under 21 year olds), but either way I found it very surprising how many people don't actually drink alcohol.
It was a "loud minority" type of thing. The average person simply stopped drinking, which was fine.
In today's market, 10% of the drinkers consume 90% of the alcohol. So the efforts of the 10% and the people serving the 10%, and the efforts of law enforcement to stop them, resulted in many very high profile, violent events, which made it seem like it wasn't worth the effort.
Full disclosure, I'm an alcoholic in recovery and I'd be fine with alcohol being illegal. My main beef is that the laws are not internally consistent: THC is by far a milder drug than alcohol but alcohol is legal while THC is still mostly illegal in the US (federally).
Either legalize THC completely or ban alcohol if you want to be consistent.
Also worth noting, THC (at less than 0.3% which is plenty for gummies) and many very very close, but naturally occurring (in infinitesimal amounts) are technically legal federally and companies like 3CHI are exploiting those loopholes. You can buy a vape containing things like HHC, THC-P, THC-O, etc which is virtually indistinguishable from Delta-9 THC, so obviously the days of THC being illegal are numbered.
But the people who are the problem drinkers still end up finding a source of alcohol. So now moderate drinkers have been prevented from having their drink or two, alcoholics are drinking just as much, but are more likely to be poisoned, and you’ve created a massive cash cow for organized crime. How is that anything but a total failure?
It's not useful to judge prohibition in a single dimension of "work well" to "didn't work". Sure, cirrhosis rates went down significantly but organized crime (a disease of its own) was gifted a torrent of money to fuel other activities.
How are cities with a safe-injection sites doing at the moment? Over the last decade supporting drug use in transient (homeless) populations hasn’t had a positive effect on that population.
Legalization (or decriminalization) is a possible pathway to supporting people, but the current method of helping people with myriad issues stay in their current state in life (or worse, encourage more to enter it) is one of the biggest public health disasters facing urban areas. Major cities are being gutted by this failed line of thinking.
Your understanding of the situation is pretty poor.
The reason cities are struggling with homeless populations isn't because "treat them like people with dignity" doesn't work, but rather that there are MOUNTAINS more homeless people than most cities fund helping. This is exacerbated by housing being stupidly more expensive than it has been in the past in cities. Homeless people don't have a home. Plenty of them have jobs they are desperately trying to keep. But when the average income in your city is less than the average housing cost, you inevitably get way more homeless people.
Also, the point of decriminalization of drugs is just to reduce unnecessary harm, since our justice system sees anyone in it as expendable and unwanted. If you want to actually help homeless people get off the street and back into society proper, you need to fund enough shelter beds for them, enough social workers such that they know these people by name and have the time to actually work for them, and some sort of jobs or education or enrichment programs.
San fransisco is up shit creek because even a cardboard box on the street fetches a $500 a month rent. The best option for them is probably a bus ticket to a much smaller city and a giant donation to that city's homeless funds, but what homeless person is going to take that offer when the other city might have a climate where you get to die from exposure?
Cities with expanded funding for homeless populations are the ones with the issues. When I moved from Phoenix to Seattle in 2009 I was surprised by the level of homelessness there. The major difference: lots of support for urban homeless. I moved back and Phoenix has adopted many of the same concepts, and guess what? The homeless population is exploding here now as well.
I’m all for affordable housing and work programs and other things that allow those who have fallen on hard times ways to help themselves out. I’m also for psychiatric care for those who have mental health issues that won’t be able to help themselves. None of that involves safe spaces for recreational drug use. That only keeps people on their state or drags them down and provides incentive for others to follow (as evidenced by Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, etc.).
There are lots or organizations that will give people a place to stay, especially woman and children. The good ones will also have educational help and employment services as well. None of that needs to include trip sitters, needle exchanges, narcan, or paraphernalia vending machines.
There are many places that are doing better than the US (which is 4ᵀᴴ from the bottom). Addressing affordable housing close to places of employment seems to be pretty helpful most places it’s tried. AFAICT, NIMBYism prevents that in most large cities (though why a tent city is preferable is beyond my understanding). I agree with decriminalization, but also that individuals should be able to function within a social framework. For those that can’t (not those who won’t), services should be provided to allow that person to thrive in the capacity that they can in the most minimally invasive way possible.
> AFAICT, NIMBYism prevents that in most large cities (though why a tent city is preferable is beyond my understanding).
It's no different than "banning abortions to reduce the amount of abortions". It doesn't work that way in reality, and rather than face reality, they dig in deeper, stick fingers in their ears and go LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU. Except that NiMBYism goes strongly across both major political parties.
Though there's plenty to say about "affordable housing", many have argued we just need drastically more housing rather than a lot of government regulated housing prices. We're just not building enough in places people want to live, specifically because zoning (looping back to NiMBYism). [Andrew Price](https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20210125.php) and Strong Towns have plenty to say about this.
Yes, but often the root issue of addiction is mental health issues (and not only the drug itself).
There are many people who occasionaly take drugs without strong addiction.
It depends a bit on the drug to be fair. Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes, either you are addicted or not. You can occasionaly drink a beer and not become an alcoholic.
The people who become alcoholics almost always have some personal problems / mental health issues as a trigger.
But the world wide drug policy doesnt make any sense, because even a "evil" and highly addictive drug like cocaine is actually less addicting than smoking.
> Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes, either you are addicted or not.
I was an occasional smoker for 20+ years. Could go weeks without a cigarette. Or smoke a few daily when stressed at work. Or smoke an entire pack on a night out.
Recently went through some personal hell and now I'm on 10-15 cigs a day and find it hard to stop. Absolutely because of the recent stress and trauma.
It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
"Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes"
I know several endurance sportsmen (no ladies were met, that I knew about) who will smoke an occasional cigarette. As an ex-smoker (took up endurance sports), I was astonished when I saw super-fit people casually smoking.
> It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
I don't know about this one. Cigarettes specifically certainly have enough chronic downsides to outweigh their upsides for me, but nicotine in general serves as a pretty good, light dopamine hit, with relatively few acute downsides. You don't intoxicated, it doesn't take long to ingest, and it's available enough to not become life-consuming. It's not a coincidence that it's a very common habit.
I say this as someone who used to use cigarettes, but took up vaping nicotine instead when I realized it didn't make my clothes reek and scratched the same itch. Everybody has habits around dopamine management. Some people snack, some people spend too much time on social media, some people gamble (in casinos or in brokerages). Personally, I'm prone to snacking, and I eventually realized I could either smoke and be attractive, or snack and get fat. It was an easy enough choice.
"Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes, either you are addicted or not."
I don't think there's any factual evidence for this at all. I occasionally smoke cigars (like 1-2 times a year) and I'm not addicted to them. Multiple friends/family members do the same.
"Yes, but often the root issue of addiction is mental health issues (and not only the drug itself)."
Agree, but not everyone who has mental illness issues resorts to drugs for help so there are many other factors to consider.
Or, because of how things in cities are right now: Your rent increased but your pay didn't. Now you are homeless because it's impossible to pay rent with money you aren't getting. Now you have your job and car but no home, and are homeless, and now people want to treat you as lazy even though you work 60 hours a week for jobs you've been in for a decade.
Rent has gone up almost double in the city I live in (a small city you won't think of) and nobody's jobs decided to double their pay, so there's a lot of people who literally can't afford just to have a legal place to sleep.
> This is the result of drug addiction not the cause.
Where'd you get that? Studies I've seen of homeless addicts show that a simple majority were not addicted when they became homeless. Certainly it's a common cause of homelessness but still only accounts for a minority.
I don't agree at all. Most addicts on the streets were addicts beforehand and the reason they're homeless has a lot do with their addiction and being unable to maintain a working lifestyle.
It's DEFINITELY not a minority. They don't just randomly end up on the streets from some random cause and then turn into addicts. That rarely happens, there are too many opportunities in this country to just become completely homeless from bad luck.
There's no scientific basis for what you're saying, so it is in fact an opinion you're spouting off.
The only way to do a study on this would be to ask. They're not tracking people throughout their lives to see if they're suddenly becoming homeless and turning into drug addicts afterwards.
Use some critical thinking please. Just because some media outlet says it's so doesn't make it true.
Ooh, unexpected and interesting reference to one of the "realms" of human experience (in the terminology / model of Buddhism, in particular, to me).
"Hungry ghosts" is exactly it (as I've learned / come to view the meaning), speaking from personal experience with drives at various times morphing into the ... unhealthy.
Humans have all sorts of axes - behaviorally, environmentally, genetically. It's interesting to look at these, and look at how traits complement and contrast ... how subtle tweaks and changes in parameters can be the difference between, say, a high-performing researcher with a solid career, and a ... someone who falls off the map to greater or lesser degrees [1].
One thing I am quite familiar with, these days, is: the very traits that set people up for "(very) high performance", also set people up for addictions and other issues. AA and other related groups are quite enriched in, in my experience, high performers (as well as very interesting / idiosyncratic / "exceptional" people*) of various types. The tendency to get sucked into things ... to become obsessive, to push boundaries, "openness to experience", etc. easily contribute to someone becoming a "star" and/or a "strung-out junkie".
The Buddhist, AA (rooted in "Oxford Group" / "early Christian" ideas), etc. ideas about "spirit" and a sort of "middle way" and all of that, provide practical guidance (and practices) that can really help balance out the serious negatives that can come out of some traits / mixtures of traits.
I'll look into this book further when I have a moment. Thanks for pointing it out!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr. - not necessarily the best example, here, but, apt enough and what comes to mind this moment ... representing, to some extent, disparate outcomes in one individual (take that, dualism!)
* Note: none of this should be taken as any kind of "value judgment" - specifically, 'positive' or 'negative' ... these terms can be quite positive or negative, as reflected in almost anyone I've met, as well as myself
The tl;dr is that a lot of addiction comes from unresolved trauma. Drugs, particularly opioids, give the sensation of returning to the mother's womb. They are comforting in the moment but it passes quickly and never quite get back to the satisfaction of that first high.
The short term effects of many drugs seem harmless. Because they seem harmless, it makes the anti-drug messaging seem overblown. It's usually too late once the long term effects are noticed. I wish there was a better way to get that message through other than experience.
>I wish there was a better way to get that message through other than experience.
There is, puritanical American culture just wont do it. Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.
It's completely viable to talk to kids about risk factors for different drugs. When I was growing up they acted like marijuana and heroin were the same risk factors.
'Drugs are fun until they aren't' is something kids can understand. We should also talk about how people are different and some people can do recreational drugs and never have a problem and others can do the same amounts of drugs at first and develop an addiction.
Except abstinence education is shown to delay sexual activity [0] (and possibly drug activity). Normalizing potentially dangerous behavior under the assumption that it can be safer is not a replacement for saying you probably shouldn’t do it until you’re able to understand and handle the consequences.
Basing anything on one social experiment is not wise.
“The weight of scientific evidence shows these programs do not help young people delay initiation of sexual intercourse,” says co-author John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail. These programs simply do not prepare young people to avoid unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.” [0][1]
Further, abstinence only sex education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy rates
"After accounting for other factors, the national data show that the incidence of teenage pregnancies and births remain positively correlated with the degree of abstinence education across states: The more strongly abstinence is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rate. "[2]
Informing youth about the realistic outcomes of actions, whether its sex or taking drugs, is going to be a lot more effective than just telling them not to do it.
> Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.
This line gets repeated a lot, with the implied assumption that since X doesn't work the solution must be to invert X.
That's incorrect.
You know how you dramatically reduce teen pregnancy? You increase their socio-economic status.
The fix to drug use is not to teach kids the best way to shoot heroin or how to drug test for fentanyl, anymore than the fix for teen pregnancy is practicing putting condoms on bananas.
That was my non-abstinence sex ed experience as a University freshman. I mean there was a certain amount of reading and the usual dumb multiple choice quizzes too, but it was not a medical course.
(We actually had a wooden practice phallus, but the banana line was funnier.)
Your only sex ed was in University? That's unusual. We didn't have sex ed in university, we had "health class" all throughout middle and part of high school. It covered lots more than birth control methods too, like what signs there are you are in an emotionally abusive relationship.
Ironically, the two main legal drugs (excluding caffeine) - tobacco and alcohol - have some of the worst long term effects. Others can have long term effects though, like MDMA is somewhat neurotoxic but not to a degree that matters with infrequent acute use, but it becomes very relevant if someone were to use it regularly.
Ironically enough this is exactly what the tone for drugs was in the early mid sixties. Then the summer of love happened and people couldn't ignore tweens whoring themselves out for smack because they expanded their consciousness first.
Look at the size of the average American. They can't handle cheese responsibly. But we're supposed to think that now they'll manage acid?
Have you ever done acid?
If you want to reduce drug use, you should legalise LSD and make it easy to buy.
Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life. With no long term health effects from one dose.
>Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life
You severely underestimate how much most people want to escape their lives, even if the experience is negative. It's silly to act like people don't self-harm.
If they want to escape their lives they'll just become an alcoholic.
I'm not denying that people will self-harm. But the argument that people will self-harm with LSD needs to ignore that there's plenty of better drugs legalised already
In a way. It has much worse physical outcomes over the long term especially if you’re drinking humongous amounts. However, alcohol/nicotine etc. don’t change your modality of thought processes or your underlying perspectives on life. Anecdotally from that perspective LSD is way, way more destructive. It can reconstruct you as a shell of the person you were, and very quickly. I’ve seen it happen so many times and anyone arguing the alcohol is worse than LSD is missing the forest for the tree.
Not to mention that due to tolerance build up, you can't take LSD/psilocybin too often. And also, they don't "make you" wanna take them often either.
This might be anecdotal, but even though they can be fun, but they're also very exhausting and make you introspective and also kinda encourage you to think about improving different aspec of your life. Sure, there's some bad trips that make people psychotic, but I think that legalisation and regulations would help protect those peope, rather than harm them, because there's usually an underlying condition that triggers such an episode. On the flip side, I've had bad trips a few times and they usually taught me a lot about myself, the people around me, and how I lived life at the, which in turn pushed me to change for the better, and improve some aspects of my life.
The Netherlands has struggled to commercialize a safe psychedelic.
LSD is not so dangerous per se if you are in good hands. It does leave you discombobulated for 12 hours or so and put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble. Mushrooms are a little better because the duration is shorter but they still didn't find the problems acceptable. They tried the stimulating and hallucinatory 2C-T2 which is somehow entirely non-cosmic but I think even that failed market testing.
After all these years a pastor I know is providing psilocybin therapy for the terminally ill which they are doing in a tightly controlled
> put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble
Funny you say that because I couldn't have wished for a better trip than roaming Amsterdam with my friends when I tried mushrooms all those years ago. The canals, the architecture.. it was a fairy tale, I remember it dearly.
Yes, and a variety of other psychedelics in my early 20s. I remember spending time on erowid and then seeking out substances. Mescaline, peyote, ketamine, psylicobin, acid, GHB, DXM, others I'm forgetting.
I had a few bad trips, one being very bad and which changed the direction of my life. It also made me realize that I was doing these things for the wrong reasons (mostly peer pressure, or a desire to fit in with certain crowds, etc.). In retrospect, it just wasn't very fun, and certainly wasn't a useful way (for me) to live my life.
"no long term health effects from one dose" does not account for the possibility of persistent flashbacks, or for bad trips that can cause lasting psychological trauma.
LSD bonds with something in the brain, such that it causes persistent flashbacks more than any other hallucinogen, sometimes years later. Taking it just once to try it might not have any effect, or might cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. Depends on your personal neurochemistry, the dosage, form of dosing, and your mental state. A friend who had taken LSD described it to me once something like this: LSD sometimes takes any cracks (neurosis or psychosis) in your mind and expands them wide open, forcing you to look into them. If you're aware of them already and they're minor, it can be helpful, sometimes expanding your mind to new capabilities. If you've been unaware or worse, in denial, or they're major, then you get a bad trip that may come back to haunt you over and over again over the years.
Flashbacks that continue to occur after the original drug effects have worn off are a medically recognized phenomenon, which is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Flashbacks typically happen in the days or weeks following ingestion of the drug but can happen months or even years after the drug use has been discontinued.
I don't believe in the "LSD binds to something in the brain and this causes flashbacks". LSD obviously binds to something in the brain during the trip, like all psychoactive substances, but after that, it is gone. LSD degrades relatively easily, you only get micrograms of it and there are known metabolic pathways.
A more convincing theory for flashbacks is that they are similar to PTSD. LSD can give really intense and memorable experiences, and in the case of a bad trip, they can be considered traumatic. Symptoms show similarities too. Essentially, flashbacks are just memories, good or bad, and in the worst cases, so bad as to haunt you for years.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is not like flashbacks. As the name suggests, it affects perception, i.e. senses, commonly in the form of visual noise, distinct from what is experienced during a trip. Think something like tinnitus. We know it exists, but the details are unclear.
I've done LSD numerous times, including "heroic" doses, as have many of my friends, starting 30 years ago (I haven't in a while as i no longer feel the need to blow open those doors).
Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.
Individual responsibility should apply here. I don't want my rights restricted because other people are fools.
If it's considered acceptable to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies because "average" people can't handle it, there's no limiting principle in place to stop our bodies from being controlled by others.
On the other hand, what to do if some people don't act responsibly and get addicted; and then for instance ruin their health or neglect their children.
Who should be responsible for helping them go to rehab, fixing their health problems or helping their children?
If it means the society has to take care of this, then isn't it also fair that society tries to prevent people from getting addicted in the first place?
And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
Prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
Has it succeeded? No.
Criminalizing it often makes it even more difficult to deal with the societal damage of addiction. Dealing with an addict is difficult, but dealing with an addict who is now a criminal is that much harder.
Society has all sorts of tools to help people who are struggling. Our criminal justice system is one of the least effective.
An addict is harming their family whether drugs are legal or not, and it's obvious from our current situation that their legal status doesn't prevent people from using drugs.
Not even Western Europe, especially Western Europe, has tried "decriminalizing drugs" yet. They might offer treatment as an alternative to incarceration for users, but they definitely don't allow police to ignore the problem (like we seem to do here in Seattle).
An addict who is now a criminal can be forced into treatment at least. An addict who can freely buy their drugs (because we aren't prosecuting dealers either) and do them on the street anywhere will just die faster (especially with fentanyl).
> And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
The war on drugs had tried and failed for decades. All it's done is enrich the cartels, fill prisons with minorities, create an oxycodone epidemic, flood the streets with cheap and deadly fentanyl, and countless other problems.
While the same government "protecting" citizens from harm is corrupt the point of the CIA becomeing drug traffickers on the side [1], making the problem even worse like throwing petrol on a fire.
putting people in jail for doing drugs doesn't do much for their children or their health either.
I also don't see why it has to be all one way or the other. I agree that people with dependent children have no business taking risks with drugs. like you say, this creates a mess other people are compelled to clean up.
but what if a person doesn't have children (or successfully raised them to be independent adults)? as long as they pay whatever taxes they owe, why care what they do with their time?
Lets imagine a hypothetical drug so we don't have to argue about the effects of real ones. This drug removes the idea of responsibility from your mind when your on it. This drug creates a paradox in your framework. You dictate that individuals have ultimate responsibility. This drug removes any internal idea of responsibility as a concept leading to bizzare and potential dangerous actions from the user.
No, it should not be banned. The drug itself isn't the issue. If a person took precautions to ensure they couldn't harm others while using the drug (consenting trip sitter who can physically handle them, proper set and setting) then they should be able to do that.
However they must also bear the cost of any harm done in that state. The problem isn't that someone took a drug, it's that they did X thing to hurt others. Punish X thing, not the drug use.
I acknowledge that this has serious problems because not everyone acts responsibly. But the alternative is to implement a system which removes the basic freedom to control what goes into your own body... and still have people acting irresponsibly anyway.
It actually is considered acceptable to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies. Legal restrictions on medicines and intoxicants are in place all over the world, and that hasn't led to "others" taking control of my body.
>Legal restrictions on medicines and intoxicants are in place all over the world, and that hasn't led to "others" taking control of my body.
If you say so. I believe prohibition exerts substantial control over our bodies, and also corrodes other aspects of personal freedom (such as the Fourth Amendment in the US).
Well if you don't believe in any medicine prohibitions, then you'd be arguing against literally every government in the world (except maybe Somalia) plus the UN and hundreds of other IGOs, NGOs, etc...
Spain for instance does not impose any legal restriction as to what you knowingly choose to put into your own body.
Not only is possession of any drug for personal use without an intent to distribute not a criminal offence in Spain, neither is consuming said drugs in the privacy of your own home. There is also no legal restriction on growing cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms on private property outside of public view, as long as the amounts are small enough that there is no reason to suspect an intent to distribute it.
> then you'd be arguing against literally every government in the world
I'd like to do that^^.
1. Imagine what would happen to the mafia etc... No more war in mexico for example.
2. Normal people wouldn't just start taking heroine for example
3. Imagine what happens to jails
4. You could use some of the new tax money (which goes to the mafia currently) to hire some medical professionals. That way you could help the really addicted.
5. 100% pure heroin would not destroy the body (it was developed as painkiller).
Those junkies are that f*ed up because of the other stuff they pump in their veins. How is that a win for society?
Ideas should be judged on their merit, not their popularity.
I don't care if my views are fringe and others choose to not take them seriously as a result. That's outside my control.
People accepting beliefs uncritically is the problem, and that applies equally to nutjob conspiracy theorists as well as people who accept the whatever the current groupthink believes.
A cursory examination of history is all that's needed to know that, at any given point in time, there are many beliefs across society which are just flat out wrong. To think that in 2023 somehow we've finally got it figured out is arrogance.
> Ideas should be judged on their merit, not their popularity.
No, ideas that need to be applied broadly should be judged on a combination of their merits and demerits, and popularity, as there are enforcement and political costs associated with any proposal (as long as the government needs to do make any changes whatsoever).
It would be different if it was a private proposal that will only affect you and immediate family.
To be entirely honest, it seems like you need to rethink this more thoroughly instead of just repeating memorable slogans.
Best comment ever. And also true. I do drugs what i feels is responsable (5 times a year) and i always feel im the only one doing it responsibly among people i know who do drugs.
> I do drugs what i feels is responsable (5 times a year)
One problem is that you can't get honest information about what is responsable, besides the "all drugs are evil" propaganda.
Like you can defenitley smoke weed more often and call it responsable, but for MDMA 5 times is already quite at the edge imo. And people don't realize that easily.
> for MDMA 5 times is already quite at the edge imo
Indeed, but I was speaking of 5 times like 1 LSD 1 mushroom, 1 coke and 1 mdma a year or something, with extremely cautious dosing..
> you can't get honest information about what is responsable
This is really debatable or even not true. There are several website (erowid, r/drugs) with literally thousands of not tens of thousands of reports and experiences of various people, including thoughts on multi-year / multi-decade drug experiences. If you sincerely look for the information there's everything you need
Your comment indicates you can't differentiate between LSD and dangerous opioids. Cheese is the opioid supplying immediate gratification. LSD, and other hallucinogens, work much, much differently.
> But opening the floodgates to the general public even more? Can't be good.
At least historically it hasn't been true[1][2]. In fact I had used nicotine gums which are easily available as OTC drug in the past to help cure my smoking addiction.
Obviously I think there are certain kind of junkies who would exploit legalization and do significantly more harm to themselves than good, but they are likely doing it now anyways. Most drug users I know of do consciously care about addiction potential.
Opioids are the most dangerous as they go straight to satisfy your deepest desires like nothing else, anyone can fall for them.
I feel it takes a certain kind of person to get hooked on stimulants, I just find them rather boring.
Those are also drugs that can be rather subtle, so it’s possible to integrate them into daily life which makes starting an African easy.
Psychedelics on the other hand are much too intense of an experience to take casually, those truly let you tinker with consciousness.
Most people will take them a couple of times a year at most and are fine.
Psychdelics are only intense and borderline overwhelming with a high dose, at low/micro doses they have a very different effect/expression. That's why microdosing is a thing, and why the term "museum dose" exists.
There's some research that shows that microdosing psilocybin isn't nearly (or at all) as effective as taking a regular dose. "Heroic" doses seem most promising from the neurological/neuroplasticity aspect, but yeah they can be... Quite something (even when you take care of S&S).
At least in the LSD world it is said that 10mcg is a microdose, 20-50mcg is a museum dose (meaning, you can appreciate and navigate a museum while being acutely affected by the effects of the psychedelic, but not to a degree that it's overwhelming/debilitating. Anything north of 100mcg is a "proper" recreational dose, and a heroic dose I believe is anything from 300mcg upwards (very dependant on person, experience, tolerance).
For the same reason you’ll see articles talking about bar hopping, or glamorizing womanizing (less common now), or the latest celebrity shitshow, or travel to exotic locations.
People like escapism and excitement and feeling good in the moment.
People like to think they’re special and they’d never suffer the negative consequences.
And, truthfully - most of them do escape the negative consequences. Either by reading and not doing, or by doing and not being the problem cases, or by being lucky. How many/what proportion varies by the activity of course.
And so People click on it. And hence articles get read. And journalists write more articles, and the Overton window shifts.
Eventually, societal backlash occurs, or it becomes normal, or it gets boring and folks find something else novel to chase.
The main societal issue is that we've conflated a public health issue with a criminal one, and created a system of perverse incentives and propaganda that ensures that it remains a criminal one. When a drug user is labeled a "criminal" by the state, the role of the state changes from "helping them recover and rehabilitate" to "punish and contain", which helps nobody. Yes we have rehab programs, yes we have non-prison methods for non-violent offenders, but getting the "better" end of the legal system requires the privilege of a good lawyer and knowledge of how to navigate a system that is effectively predatory without one.
You have not said they should be criminalized, but too often the idea "Drugs can be harmful" is followed by "Drug use should be criminalized".
Another point is that not all drugs are the same. Fentanyl is a very different drug than, say, psychedelics, and should be treated as such. A lot of that is also part of the culture of criminalization, where we treat all "illegal" drugs as the same thing, consumed by the same dehumanized "criminals" for the same hedonistic purposes. Which is totally different than "momma's little helper" that some billionaire convinced her doctor to prescribe her.
By the same token, Adderall is a different drug than MDMA, but somehow one of them I'll definitely go to jail for possessing, the other I can get a doctor to prescribe to me.
So, I had a similar reaction. I'm about as libertarian as you can get with drug regulation, but found it odd that the article seemed to ignore the public health risk management arguments for drug regulation.
Still, we allow plenty of dangerous things to go unregulated, or far less regulated than drug use. Alcohol use is a glaring example, but you could go through a litany of things that US society legally allows that are very risky: guns, motorcycles, chainsaws, BASE jumping, various chemical cleaners and solvents, all kinds of sexual behavior, and so forth and so on.
Yes there are some that develop serious drug problems from use per se, but most do not, and those that do often (although not always) tend to be polyusers in the sense that if you look at their problems, it's often difficult to attribute it to a specific substance. So empirically there's a stretch to go from any use, to use of a specific substance, to such irreparable harm that it should be made illegal.
There's also many other mechanisms society has for regulating drug use, like revocation of rights due to incompetence in decision making (legally speaking), and so forth.
This isn't even getting into our hubris in uncertainty about potential benefits of substances, as manifested by changes in public discourse around psychedelics over the last century.
Seen from this perspective, the article might have a point about drugs being treated differently, as if by absence of discussion, the author is implicitly asserting that risk management is not actually the issue. But I still think the article would have been more effective by making that argument explicitly.
Then again maybe the author just thought public health risk management was a different, additional issue.
My favorite book on the subject: Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Douglas Husak
The author argues that all drugs should be decriminalized. The TL;DR argument: going to jail is the worst thing the state does to a person so it needs to have an explanation of why. No rationalization can be given for the case of putting a person (user or "in possession of a drug") to jail.
This doesn't argue that doing drugs is a good idea, but we certainly, as a society, should not put people to jail (or even give fines for that matter).
This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering human consciousness, to the extent that such topics have essentially vanished from both the mainstream press and academia.
I've been reading a lot of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century over the past few years. The sheer breadth of ideas that were being casually discussed in magazines that regular, educated people subscribed to is astonishing. Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.
> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering human consciousness, to the extent that such topics have essentially vanished from both the mainstream press and academia.
I think you need an edit. Here:
> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering the human condition.
I actually agree with you on that. Eugenics, genetic modification of embryos, transhumanism, radical social policies, and many related topics are likewise taboo, and most people wouldn't dare to even mention such ideas in polite company.
The topics are definitely fringe but I'm sure you could find some forum or site that discusses it but I think you have things backwards. It's not that most people wouldn't dare to talk about these ideas in polite company. It's that the people who hold these beliefs aren't polite. Their personalities so abhorrent, vitriolic and unsympathetic. They hold such archaic views, reminiscing about a past that would benefit them at the expense of others.
To use eugenics as an example. Those who speak about it always, without exception end up isolating a single group that they believe is inferior. These people often hold adjacent beliefs that make the lives of other humans significantly harder, to say the least.
I have met a lot of people who support some form of eugenics that do not support "isolating a single group that they believe is inferior". I think that is unfair criticism unless you're only restricting eugenics to sterilizing a group based on a single characteristic.
This seems like a slippery slope argument, much like those who claimed gay marriage would inevitably lead to polygamy and thus should be banned for fear of making it easier to normalize polygamy in the future.
What? No one is being forced into gay marriage. And as long as they're consenting adults they can have whatever non traditional arrangements they want.
I'm having trouble understanding where this slippery slope is coming from. It's one thing if you were talking about assisted suicide, I can see the argument there, but eugenics is something that is forced upon the population. And no, having to watch two people of the same gender kiss on TV is not forced.
> And as long as they're consenting adults they can have whatever non traditional arrangements they want.
An extremely large proportion of the US population would not agree with this if you include polygamy in "whatever non traditional arrangements they want".
> Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.
It's all over the place on social media. What gives you the sense that is has disappeared?
What's on social media is memes vaguely referencing that stuff, and cranks congratulating each other for doing it, usually in a "New Age" type context.
That's a far cry from the scientific, serious, mainstream approach that was common for those topics 120 years ago.
This feels like romanticizing the past. There are plenty of people today writing articles that claim to be taking a “scientific, serious approach” to, say, astral projection and people who will casually discuss such topics over coffee.
I may be romanticizing the past, but I have been interested in hypnosis and trance phenomena for 20 years, studied with teachers, got certified, practiced for some time with clients, and have, I may say, a good deal of experience in the field.
The practitioners (i.e., not academics) back then (Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, Henry Munro, and many others) were much more knowledgeable and interested in studying the phenomena they were investigating and applying than are today's practitioners, who seem instead much more interested in fooling people and making easy money than in advancing the discipline and making new breakthroughs.
I just pulled out of my library the book "Suggestive Therapeutics" by Munro, and it is, however naive in parts, a serious and passionate investigation of hypnotic phenomena. It is evident, even just by reading the text, that these were serious people who thought they could make a huge difference in the lives of others.
> What's on social media is memes vaguely referencing that stuff, and cranks congratulating each other for doing it, usually in a "New Age" type context.
This just sound like you need to follow better social media circles. There's a bourgeoning scene around people such as Gwern, Nick Cammarata, Aella with a lot of high-quality discourse on the topics you mention.
Just came back from Rishikesh this week. That city is overloaded with meditation, drugs, mysticism and gives me fair perspective of whats happening with these phenomenons.
As these concepts became popular in the west past few years, they became very commercialized. For eg. Yoga was always about mindfulness, it became more about stretching and poses. All of these concepts metamorphised into something else. As the transition happened, the value got diluted. As it because diluted, it became taboo and sometime butt of jokes (for eg. Crazy yoga lady was thrown around quite often).
> That city is overloaded with meditation, drugs, mysticism
Overloaded with the pretense of it more likely, for the benefit of tourists who go there in search of a quick pseudo-mystical high.
> As these concepts became popular in the west past few years
That's a common misconception. Mysticism and related experiences actually have a history in Western culture going back thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal and in fact encouraged for young people to seek unity with God through direct mystical interaction, and the many mystical writings from that time (most of them authored by ordinary monks/nuns and priests) are a testament to that.
I recommend the 1915 book Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill as an example of what modern Western mysticism can look like. It's available on Standard Ebooks in a high-quality, free edition[1]. The author, who wrote during WWI, considers mysticism a natural part of everyday life, without ever feeling the need to reference "The East" or other New Age tropes.
I suspect that the dopamine feed of modern media and internet has left people without so many quiet moments in which they could practice contemplation.
I am not a big Marshall McLuhan fan but this is what is meant by the medium is the message.
You are not going to have the same discussion in print that you have electronically and on social media. It doesn't matter what the subject is.
"Public discourse" really doesn't even mean the same thing to compare today with a 100 years ago.
A 100 years ago the person batting an eyelash would have simply not bothered to consume the media.
You also can't forget that we were a deeply religious society a 100 years ago and all those subjects listed had the appeal of forbidden fruit. That might even be a bigger change than the medium.
As other have pointed out, this stuff is massive still! Nootropics, keto, mindfulness, microdosing, juicing, crystal healing, the list grows endlessly.
But it’s interesting to note how these practices have evolved to meet new cultural circumstances. It feels like more of it is motivated by goals of productivity and status on one side, and distrust of authority on the other, new age, side.
It’s all still absolutely mainstream and in public discourse. But of course, it’s changed. We shouldn’t expect cultural practices to not have evolved since the turn of the 20th century. After all, the culture has changed a LOT since then. These cultural practices exist to meet the needs of people and communities. Those needs change, the practices will change with them.
Then why is there no serious discussion about it to be found anywhere? All I see is bland self-help books and an occasional vague article in a psych journal.
Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?
I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.
There's Daniel Ingram's stuff, I liked his book and there's a forum at https://www.dharmaoverground.org/ , haven't checked out how cranky it is.
Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.
Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.
> Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?
Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains
Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)
I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.
> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).
> I have seen no evidence of this.
That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.
I'm not sure that singing is really that separated from religious context. You'd have a hard time becoming a classically trained singer without singing a lot of classical Christian music. You wouldn't get far in Blues or Bluegrass without being exposed to traditional spirituals.
I have never encountered a form of meditation that wasn’t heavily inspired by a religious context, most often Vedic traditions or Buddhism. Can you give an example of a historically completely secular form of meditation?
Our earliest written records mention meditation within religious contexts. Both predate history. All modern organised practices of meditation derive from religious sources, but organised practices of meditation is a subset of meditation—mindfully training attention and awareness to achieve “a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state” [1]. (Seen another way: almost all our historical sources about medicine mention it in a religious context. That doesn’t mean medicine comes from religion.)
This contradicts your singing example, since not all singing derives from religious sources, so why bring it up? You are making the same point as me right now: all modern meditation comes from religious sources
If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.
In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.
> all modern meditation comes from religious sources
I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.
Also: consciousness is the core part (equivalent to God) of Hinduism (where a lot of Eastern meditative traditions originate from) and hence it is intertwined with religion.
With practice one is able to carve out a stable pleasant mind mind set that is like an art work, a sculpture, a statue, a bit of music or just like a song, only it is constructed out of a carefully measured mix of moods and emotions. It is like a place you can visit just by thinking of it. We (quite hilariously) only know a flavor of this called being in the zone. (from repeatedly doing a thing and cultivating the mind set along with it) Our culture is about productivity after all, its quite suitable. A weird cult worshiping banks and corporations. Money is like a voodoo doll, you can have other believers do almost anything for it. I wouldn't even know where to begin taking care of myself. ha-ha
I don't think there's any taboo on meditation, and it's not associated with any religion or cult. Your doctor most likely would tell you to go ahead, it can't hurt, it has research behind it, and lots of his/her patients do it.
I think you missed mindfulness - it's being integrated into a lot of psychological therapies (DBT, MCBT). It's strongly based on meditation, if not meditation repackaged.
I don't think "Buddha nature" is a supernatural belief, but Sam Harris certainly subscribes to (some of) Dzogchen Buddhism. If his site doesn't mention it he's just worded differently.
A bit off topic, but if you are into this kind of literature i can really recomend Sigmund Freud.
"Die Traumdeutung" (Interpretation of dreams) is one of the best books I've read. Its really philosophical masterpiece. I mean the ~500 site book, not the small one.
I'm quite averse to that because I believe that myself and significant portion of other people tread a very fine line on the edge of sanity and I wouldn't want to risk anything that might tip us over the edge.
I've always personally been of the opinion that people who don't entertain any thoughts of poking their consciousness in some way are missing the point of life. If you don't ask "why am I here" or "what's this all about" then things get pretty bland pretty quickly. And as soon as you do ask these questions then techniques to properly get into the exploration pretty soon lead you to techniques to expand horizons - therapy, meditation - and yeh, drugs.
Dependency (on anything) is clearly bad but a gentle dabble in order to explore our world, our brains and the relationship between them seems to me to be necessary, healthy and ...well, fun.
That's like saying that only studying the universe with the frequencies of visible light will be more effective.
It's probably the most effective, since we're biased towards being capable of analyzing data from those wavelengths, and the atmosphere is transparent to them.
But why would that imply that we can't use tools that let us view how the universe looks with different wavelengths of light to effectively discover new things we otherwise wouldn't?
I think it is largely a mirage. Certain drugs make us feel like we’ve “broken through” or “figured it all out”. We might write down these incredible insights, hoping to share them with the sober world as a kind of prophet. And the next day we read these words of truth, “Purple banana, awesome blofohga!”
Eh, your brain is a lot more complicated than that.
Your brain is the most powerful filter we've discovered in the universe. You can take immense amount of noise and separate information from it. The issue with these filters is most of the time you don't realize you have them. How you were raised, the people you're around, the culture you're in can all present bias filters that are impossible to see around since you don't even realize they exist.
It may not be 'figuring it all out', but sometimes just having a filter lowered for a bit letting you realize there is another part of the world exists behind it can be a breakthrough.
That was kind of my initial reaction. Like the idea of "breaking through" seems to rely on there being some other coherent world to break through to, ie the basis of most of what we call religion. Which, at least to me, isn't particularly compelling.
But on second thought, we certainly are experiencing some kind of phenomenon of consciousness, even if it's purely an emergent phenomenon of the physical world. And tweaking the experiencing of that consciousness will tend to expose the boundaries of it, even if just at the level of running a fuzzer on a C program or blowing up a balloon too far.
That indeed might happen. Also, something else might happen.
Each individual human doesn't know everything that happens, consciousness + culture just makes it look like they do, as demonstrated in numerous comments in this thread, and all other threads, on TV, in conversation, etc. Reality itself is composed of various mirages.
Some substances help me ask that all important question in the first place. Waking up, brushing teeth, going to work, doing chores, raising kids, family time, rollerblading, gardening, studying... These activities don't help me ponder my existence with the same efficiency as some substances can offer. I mean, who has the time to ask these questions in the first place?!
I'm reminded of a quote from the TV series "Weeds". A bit on the nose, I know, but when discussing peyote in the show, one character said, "It's like 30 years of psychotherapy in one night".
In the real world, the scientific community's recent renaissance around the use of psychoactive drugs like psilocybin or MDMA in therapeutic settings is further proof that "substances" can be good.
If someone doesn't have time to ask existential questions, then how does that person have time to do drugs?
I guess your point is that psychoactive drugs can speed up thinking about these questions. I guess I could see that. It sounds a bit like how Adderall can speed up people's programming ability.
Does having a greater variety of life experience broaden one’s horizon? I hear travel can expand the mind. Reading books by diverse authors on varied subjects is believed to be valuable even if those books aren’t on metaphysics. Why wouldn’t psychedelic experiences be similar to travel or reading or joining the army or falling in love or any other of the many experiences we can know?
I’m not advocating for or against the use of mind-altering substances. But a scientist with two microscopes is going to have an edge over one who dogmatically subscribes to their one and only favourite. Even something as simple as observing the sky turns on knowledge of the failure of our neuro-optical pathways qua optical illusions.
The scientist whose second microscope has fun-house wonky lenses may only have an edge when it comes to discovering canals on Mars, researching N-rays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray), and similar.
Yes. If you don't want to use chemical substances, try fasting without water or food for large periods of time. Highly recommend The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley for you.
Wouldn't a sober study of the universe and history be more effective?
Once upon a time, people painted with oil paints as closely as they could to still life reality. But something was missing. Cue impressionism. After impressionism, an increasingly vanishingly small proportion of the art world tried to paint still life as an arts career and be taken seriously.
And so, then along came cameras. So now why should anyone bother with art at all, wouldn't sober photographs taken by cameras more effective at depicting reality?
(No offense to photographers.)
Not all of life is about being more effective and efficient all the time. Sometimes it's worthwhile to see things in a different way, and to open up new ideas.
We are in agreement. Personally I went through a history phase, and photography phase, and a Wikipedia phase: now I'm doing watercolour. I find art history to be very interesting, but mostly only the generalities.
Hmm. It seems to me that the switch from still life to impressionism was due to a change in the goal.
With study vs drugs, the goal is still the same: find out why we're here. Since there isn't a goal change, it's not clear there should be a strategy change.
The problem is the only reasons to suspect drugs can provide "insight" into "why we are here" arise from mysticism and other basically non-scientific things. How does making your brain work differently help us understand reality? Weed doesn't make the ruler more accurate or change size, it just makes you feel good.
Coffee benefits some people (I'm not sure it really provides me benefit though).
But do psychedelic drugs help? If I want to write code, would a psychedelic drug help there? If not, why would a psychedelic drug help in finding why I exist?
What is the value prop? I usually ask my friends who have tried various drugs about their experiences / how they felt.
I find out for most things I’m able to do them without drugs: introspection, joy, shamelessness, behavioral changes, appreciative for small things, etc.
Yesterday, I just “randomly” texted some of my friends that “I loved them” (they thought I was high). Similarly, when I’m in a club I can dance for 5 hours straight —- almost as if nobody was there. I feel (light) depression sometimes but appreciate that it’s a part of life. Etc.
Maybe the thing I’m missing is an out of body experience or completely “losing control”? But what is the value prop for me is something I can’t answer yet.
The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.
Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.
It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.
It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.
But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.
The comedown is more taboo than the high can ever be.
I think this is the root of the social calamity. It’s an unwillingness and inability to be candid about the entire process that perpetuates the situation.
Why did that person lose interest in aspects of life that other people find perplexing? Haircuts or hard shoes, for example.
We can’t advance until we’re willing to address and enhance the wax wings.
> The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world.
I think for many, it's that they're not able to do those things you do without some form of help. I know many people with major social anxiety that (for better or worse) use alcohol (modest amounts, none are heavy drinkers) to get over that to dance and talk with people.
They've expressed that the experience has lessened the fear for them, and they're better able to do those things (to a small extent at least) without drinking, but would never have been able to so without the initial nudge.
FWIW, I've got a friend that sounds exactly like you - he's pretty much always sober, but is super outgoing, dances all the time, and talks to anyone enthusiastically. He's sometimes been asked to leave clubs we've been at as bouncers assumed he was high on something, and been refused alcohol as bar staff thought he'd had too much already.
Can I rephrase this to: It’s a completely different experience that people usually can’t find accurate words to describe to someone that hasn’t been there?
Another question I have, If the experience is short-lived, what is the point?
No, you can't describe it. Your senses are overwhelmed in ways that don't have a real-world analog so there is no description that you can convey to others that's in any way accurate. It's the entire point of an altered state and is something that has to be experienced.
Many human activities are short-lived mood alterations.
I see. But to my original question, what is the value prop of experiencing this beautiful indescribable short-lived thing?
The experience itself might be a value prop. But I’m more interested in things that can improve my “normal” life. For context, psychedelics sounds interesting to me cause people say they can affect/improve normal life.
> Many human activities are short-lived mood alterations.
I think of it like this: for psychedelics, the change to your brain chemistry is like changing the hardware architecture leading to changes in software behaviour. The fundamental processes of thought in your mind work differently and so the psychological responses you have to everyday sensory stimulus are completely changed in unexpected ways and you can reach conclusions and insights in thought that you hadn't before. This may be temporary but the experience does change how you understand things once you return to normal brain chemistry function. The simple fact of knowing and experiencing how broad the space of modes is in which your consciousness could operate is very powerful in my opinion.
> If you don't ask "why am I here" or "what's this all about" then things get pretty bland pretty quickly
Better question: Is it possible to escape this rat cage, and if so, how? If I am the universe experiencing itself, how do I perform a sufficiently perfect playthrough against the gradients that constitute its walls?
Nevermind drugs. Let's get BCI -- the end-all, be-all of humanity -- properly off to the races. Invasively or not, get these thoughts out of the rotting confines of our skulls.
If it doesn't work out, whatever. It's not like that's a different outcome than the rest.
> Let's get BCI -- the end-all, be-all of humanity -- properly off to the races. Invasively or not, get these thoughts out of the rotting confines of our skulls.
For what (ultimate) purpose? What's the end goal here? The brain already is a computer. What do you think moving its contents to a different type of computer will accomplish?
Besides kicking off just another "think even faster", "calculate even better", "remember even more" rat race, that is.
We all have heard the reports of people losing their minds on drugs and worse.
The subtle dangers are starting to believe that the fun is in the drug.
Drug enthusiasts often glue together the beliefs formed when under the effects, with the pill and chemical reaction itself.
It's not always as explicit as the hippie who preaches a transcendent drug. Often people start to glue together the internal experience of fun, with the drug, unconsciously.
Unfortunately it can subtly dull your day to day life, if you accidently over-allocate associations of fun with chems.
"If you don't ask "why am I here" or "what's this all about" then things get pretty bland pretty quickly."
I agree with you. I've always thought the drug problem should be a medical matter handled by doctors and that the law, drug enforcement and cops ought to keep out one's lives when it comes to drugs, but things are never that simple.
The range of drugs is phenomenally broad from essentially harmless to extremely dangerous—some drugs you're never going to OD on to others such as Fentanyl that kills thousands evey year.
How one controls all this and brings order to it in a modern complex society seems overwhelming complex. You can't blame non-drug using people for not wanting intoxicated people driving or in charge of machinery etc. And there are just so many variables involved, the problem seems almost insurmountable.
For example, the effect on those who are around a drug user, family, friends, etc. can be devastating. About a year ago a colleague and friend of mine died from long-term alcohol abuse. What made matters worse he was an organic chemist and he knew what the alcohol was doing to him. We couldn't stop him drinking and many of us tried. Yes, he had the right to do with his life what he wished but at the same time we, his friends and colleagues, had to suffer too by watching him deteriorate.
Essentially, drug taking is not a thing people can do in isolation, drug takers are not decoupled from society, their actions flow-on to the broader community in very complex ways.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly know that banning drugs and treating drug users as degenerates and criminals as we have been doing for over 100 years is stupid and very counterproductive.
"I certainly know that banning drugs and treating drug users as degenerates and criminals as we have been doing for over 100 years is stupid and very counterproductive."
> people who don't entertain any thoughts of poking their consciousness in some way are missing the point of life. If you don't ask "why am I here" or "what's this all about" then things get pretty bland pretty quickly.
I didn't get anything "spiritual" out of them. If anything, it made me realize that spirituality is a complete sham
Hot take, the "spiritual" reason for doing psychedelics is this: they hate their own lives and think that some "transcendental experience" will change that
There's only one legit reason for doing them: to get high. The "spirituality" reason is just a bunch of BS. The people who buy into it are the last ones who should be doing them
Step 1 is to get rid of the idea that some people are "criminals" who you shouldn't be interacting with. Over half of Americans have used illicit drugs.
Chances are, someone you already know can hook you up with psychedelics. Try talking to your best friend about it. If he doesn't know, try another friend. You won't need to ask a third friend.
Very wise and courageous men have pondered and bled over the meaning of life for thousands of years.
Some of their best wisdom made its way into books that are still around today. If you read these books, you may find throughout they have something to say about the meaning of life and drug use, if only indirectly. You may find their ideas about the meaning of life have nothing to do with drugs.
Their meaning-of-life wisdom has existed for a very long time. In a word, it's Lindy. Your meaning-of-life wisdom is untested by time, theirs is. Time is the greatest filter. We can't say with absolute certainty that your ideas about drug use and the meaning of life are wrong relative to theirs, but we can say so with a very high degree of certainty. People have been testing your ideas about drugs and the meaning of life since the 60's. Many would say it's not going so well. Contrast that with people who've been heeding the old wisdom - there's a reason it's survived for such a long time.
You're of course welcome to forego the age-old wisdom on drugs and the meaning of life in favor of your own, but it may not work out too well for you.
Even single doses of acid are enough to change your outlook on life _substantially_. Imagine running a db migration on prod while it's live and you have no backups.
This is what consousness tinkering with drugs is like.
Drugs can be great, I think weed, LSD, and MDMA all have medical/theraputic uses.
I think the biggest issue is that people don't understand what causes addiction.
If we had guidelines like: "Don't do drugs more than 2 times per month", it would let people have drugs safely and without addiction.
Instead we get a 'drugs are bad...mmk?' approach, and we think alcohol is safer than weed, and that if you did illegal weed, why not do all drugs? "Clearly whoever said drugs were bad was lying."
Guidelines on safely taking drugs are needed, and not from some random website either.
Personal experience with addiction doesn’t generalize to everyone. Yes more exposure is more likely to result in addiction, but it’s not a simple easy to predict calculation.
I have had something like 5 cigarettes in my life and still get occasional cravings 20 years later. Meanwhile alcohol has almost zero draw for me while I know people that are the opposite enjoying a few cigarettes a year but have a serious alcohol addiction.
My source is the book Power of Habit. Wish I had a more concise way to point to the brain science, but basically how the "basal ganglia" works is what I think we need to teach people.
Or at least give them tangible tips like 'dont do bad habits back to back'
Yes the basal ganglia, extended amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex play major roles in addiction. The risks are also higher for adolescents, the classic binge/intoxication, withdrawal/negative affect, and preoccupation/anticipation cycle generalize well etc.
However, there’s a massive genetic component to addiction which drastically changes how addictive various substances are for each individual. As bizarre as it sounds there are casual heroin users out there who have been using for years and a few even last decades.
Watch how quickly anyone with a sensible approach gets blamed for other people's addictions and bad experiences for being the one to say it might not be so bad
whilst at work I count down the minutes until I can get home and have a nice drink. the booze soothes, and helps me forget about.... everything. what is there to live for in a life without substance, without substances? nothing. so i'll scurry away to make a wage to pay for these substances to soothe my soul until one day the flesh and bone around it collapses and i'm finally, finally, set free.
Amen, I’m in the same boat. I feel constantly surrounded by people who don’t get it. Don’t follow instructions, don’t communicate, don’t think critically. I know it’s me and my expectations, and I try to cope as much as possible, but it’s always creating more work for me to get to what I’m trying to accomplish. And thus, reliance on substances to get past the mundane is the cure, for now. I try to put down those substances time to time, but it seems they keep coming back.
I've felt this way for the better part of a decade. Then I read about how alcohol causes anxiety and then temporarily relieves the anxiety that it causes. I've been a little over two weeks without it now and I've noticed a decrease in my anxiety. Just not having the constant thought of when my next drink will be is relieving.
Alcohol is an interesting beast, certainly bad for your physical health but IMHO it's invaluable for your mental health in small doses.
I'm not exactly a drug expert, my experience is limited to a few substances but nothing ever comes close to alcohol. It melts away all the fake constraints(the limits and problems which you only imagine to have) that cause stress and break your flow. All this in moderation of course, being completely drunk doesn't help.
I will be send to oblivion for this but the worst is the weed, it lowers your IQ so much that you think you are so creative for each dumb idea(and you can't have any ideas with depth in that state). Alcohol is not like that, up until a point your mental capabilities(not the reflexes) are intact.
I've experienced the Ballmer Peak most often when gaming. I'm a good player most of the time in most games, but if I hit just the right amount of intoxication I reach a whole other level. It's like being in a flow state for head shots. I'm guessing the mechanism is tamping down on anxiety and second guessing which happens. Since I've played these sorts of games for the last 20+ years, the reflexes take over and I'm thinking a lot less. The drop off post-peak is steep though.
> I will be send to oblivion for this but the worst is the weed, it lowers your IQ so much that you think you are so creative for each dumb idea(and you can't have any ideas with depth in that state).
Consider the epistemic quality of the ideas plain old consciousness puts in one's mind, like this perception of omniscience you and many others in this thread are experiencing.
On certain topics, this being one of them, I do my very best thinking when I'm on drugs, though it did take several months to become properly acclimated to the environment.
Do you have adequate experience to judge this realm accurately? How would you know (as opposed to believe)?
Alcohol seems to interact with the body's various endogenous opioid systems [1], and not always to the same degree from person to person. What for you is a substance that "melts away all the fake constraints" for me it just makes me foggy, sloppy and tired.
Cannabis with a high THC content will have a significant cognitive penalty, which is much reduced/mediated when enough CBD is available. Due to prohibition, a lot of Cannabis has an absuredly high THC content, it's as if all available Alcohol was hard liquor.
> Alcohol is not like that, up until a point your mental capabilities(not the reflexes) are intact.
That point is VERY quickly reached, and I would argue much, much quicker than you care to admit. Even a buzz will tank your cognitive abilities.
You and I have the same poison of choice and we are probably both working our way to having a problem with it…most people who use it to forget are.
I know HN users on the whole dislike alcohol while being open minded about other drugs, but it really does make things just a bit more tolerable. It lets me destress after work, actually enjoy my free time, and lets me ignore my problems for a bit.
I’d never drink while working, but the moment work is done? Sure, why not drink the rest of the day? I have to cope with life somehow.
That's why they invented Irish coffee and hip flasks. To maintain a wicked glint in the eye, quirky sense and bit of mischief at the end of the rainbow. Reminds me of an Irish dancing lass that I once knew. Ahh, must be getting old... :)
Wow, I must be the most boring person on Earth. I don't drink, smoke, do drugs, or otherwise alter my consciousness or mood by way of substances, and yet I can enjoy the 'little things' like the adrenaline rush when flooring it on a powerful car, or montane scenery, or the smells of a bakery.
The way the comments here put it, it seems like people have got to get wasted/stoned before they are able to be remotely 'happy'...
The way your comment puts it, it seems like people who cannot experiment happiness nor enjoy 'little things' just need to suck it up and just experience them naturally like you do.
Now in a more serious way: everybody is different and many people tend to describe their life experiences as if they were universal. Turns out out perceptions are vastly different and therefore it’s up to the (informed) person to take over their life and do what’s necessary to not be miserable.
I think it’s more just that some people have fun doing drugs and are irritated at the hoops they have to jump through to have that fun. I’m sure you can live without the smells of a bakery, but I presume you’d be irritated if you weren’t allowed to enjoy those smells.
What if you're right and they actually have a chemical divergence that keeps them from being happy, or counter, your brain has a chemical divergence that keeps you far happier than them.
Would this difference between you and them dictate your ability to deprive them from that happiness you have? "Sorry, you ain't got it, tough luck for you"
A doctor from a local dispensary (recreational cannabis isn't legal where I live, but medicinal is comically easy to obtain) once told me:
“What do you do? Ah, a software engineer. I guarantee you most people in your industry are on it all the time.”
He paints a picture where every highly functional modern worker these days is on a steady diet of CBD and THC products, perfectly calibrated to fit their lifestyle and the demands of their profession.
Thinking about it, this might explain some of the odder Zoom/Slack interactions you may have with colleagues at work.
> I guarantee you most people in your industry are on it all the time.
I guarantee you that they aren't. This is the standard occupational bias of someone who interacts with a highly specific subset of the population all day, and then generalizes from that experience. Same as cops who see violent criminals everywhere, even though in reality they make up a tiny fraction of people overall.
Some people believe "everyone is on drug X all the time" because they are themselves on drug X all the time. I see this quite a bit. It's just projection most of the time, but sometimes it can be true.
I hope weed and software is not one of them...
I'd argue quite the opposite for the most part. Sure, the actual process of typing out software while stoned is basically a non-starter but the context-shifting nature of the substance has been responsible for a number of fascinating personal insights related to programming. If any drugs in particular are responsible for the "abysmal" quality of contemporary code it is the stimulants! (e.g. caffeine, speed.) I would wager that the way these substances allow people to consistently exceed their standard capacity for operating in complexity especially in states of stress and fatigue does not effectively translate to the sober person (then, _especially_, the sedated person as well). Thus a world of sober men is crushed by the designs of a cracked out minority of 10X-ers tasked with integrating the uncertain technology of tomorrow with the half-broken tools of yesterday.
Definitely agree that some intense insights could be gained. Some of my most brilliant insights into stuff i was working on happened while stoned. Though, it happened getting high after work, having done a ton of leg work digging into the problem at hand. Leg work that was both completely necessary, and would've been impossible to do while stoned.
I never got anything out of being chronically stoned other than general dysfunction.
For me.. at least... hard to imagine writing code under that particular influence. Not exactly a bringer of good concentration and mental clarity.
I've known people who could do it, but nobody I know personally who is a really good developer is doing this? Esp during work hours? Seems counterproductive.
THC affects people very differently in my experience. It can really run the gamut from sedative to stimulant to psychedelic depending on the person. I don't think the sativa-indica dichotomy can fully explain this because the same variety of effects can be seen from a single bowl or bag of edibles.
Yeah, for me, just not a chemical I enjoy, so. Clouds my thinking, which isn't unexpected, but also seems to do the opposite of what it does for other people: I get anxious and paranoid, and background body pain (I have a lot) becomes mentally attenuated. And yes, tried different strains, etc and it's legal here so I could have whatever I want whenever, but I really couldn't be bothered.
Idk it works for me. Cant really explain it. I get more excited sometimes, in the zone, makes the tedious parts bearable,think about solutions differently.
I don't do it often though. It's never like, I need to get high to code. Its usually like, I'm high and some interesting coding thing comes up.
Big if true. I only know of a couple of SWEs who get high on THC regularly, and they both claim to not get high during work hours.
I don’t use anything to aid in my work, be it Adderall or THC or alcohol or anything else… but if y’all do, what does that say about or society and the pigs who run it?
I'm a SWE that loves THC. Honestly, I can not accomplish anything cognitive while high. I lose my train of thought much too easily. I've tried programming high and there's no way I could make that work. Cleaning however is a different story.
A lot of people smoke weed, almost everyone I know has at least tried it.
What I find is many engineers abuse Adderall and similar medications. People at work openly talk about their strategy to get a larger dosage from their doctor.
I am not anti drugs but I can't help but see this as a race to the bottom.
I've worked at a fair few companies of various sizes. I've never seen this behavior. Many SWEs I've known are on stimulant ADHD meds, but I've only ever found out about it after knowing them for awhile. The same goes for people in other professions though - I think I actually know MORE people outside of tech than in it that take are prescribed ADHD meds. And I definitely have never heard people sharing strategies for getting their dose upped. TBH most ADHD people I know (but not all) seize any chance they can to skip taking their meds. I wonder if you work in a particular field? I've never worked in finance but that aligns with the totally unjustified stereotype of that industry.
They didn't say all engineers, and I certainly wouldn't assert that. But I've definitely seen it personally at 2 early stage startups, a moderate-ish size business, and a Fortune 100. Just a handful of people, but they were very open about it. Those around them simply participated in the conversation and didn't judge.
It was never framed as "abuse." It was talked about very casually as a tool to get more work done, and they deliberately sought out an ADHD diagnosis for access.
I'm in no way judging. They DID get a diagnosis and are using it as treatment. The reason it's relevant is because _they_ talked about it as a tool to get more work done, or a way to be "on" after a late night. Not as part of treatment. But there are tons of reasons why that could be, none of which can be assumed.
I can attest. A lot of people with ADHD will gravitate towards cannabis because of the focussing effect. Cannabis affects everyone different and some people need to sink into the couch after smoking, but myself I usually find myself going for a bike ride, working in excel, code, or cleaning, which is a big one.
That said, I have worked for one of the largest cannabis companies in the world (at the time) and I can say, some of the most productive people I know are all day, every day smokers. A lot of them should have been on some sort of adhd meds for sure but if the cannabis is working, and it keeps them off pharmaceuticals then what’s the harm? It really did change my perception of how some people operate while stoned.
All that said, it’s easy to use cannabis as a crutch, it’s definitely not healthy in other ways but there are worse things to be hooked on.
I find weed helps eliminate the "choice paralysis" that I have with my ADHD, but the other things it does, like making boring and tedious and repetitive things fun, make it TERRIBLE to self medicate with.
> “What do you do? Ah, a software engineer. I guarantee you most people in your industry are on it all the time.”
No, most people aren't on it all the time. And those who are aren't "highly functional". They think they are, but they aren't and it shows. Most of those who are are ridden by mental health issues, and stuck in an endless loop, living a rather boring and average life, with delusions of performance and greatness. Thinking that somehow being a drug addict is hip and goes with the software industry is a little bit daft.
It seems like all kinds of toxic, dangerous substances were socially acceptable to use until the 50s and 60s, when recreational drug use became a symbol of the new culture war. From Jamaican immigrants in the UK using more cannabis, to Mods with amphetamines, Hell's Angels with cocaine, Beatniks with jazz cigarettes, Hippies with pot and LSD, and eventually homeless veteran junkies and segregated inner-cities with heroin (later crack), the entire world's straight-laced societal norms were being uprooted, and one common thread ran among all the different non-conformist groups: drugs. "Drug culture" became synonymous with the other, bad, low, foreign, corrupt, criminal, and those seeking to supplant old social norms and conventions.
Before then, drugs were widely used by all classes (although not much recreationally). Housewives took "pep pills" to clean longer without getting tired. Airmen were given amphetamines to fly for 36 hours straight. Cocaine was in coca-cola. Laudanum was the West's miracle pain killer and palliative. Cocaine was only made illegal in 1920, and heroin in 1924. And of course I'm completely ignoring alcohol, despite it being the world's most abused intoxicant, with its own share of bizarre social norms and demonizations attributed to social class.
The idea that people use drugs to "alter their consciousness" is intoxicant romanticism. People use drugs because it's a fun distraction. Drugs as a concept have never been a societal sin, they are medicine. It's the association between an unpopular social group and a particular drug that causes the drug to be demonized.
I think you're off by a couple of decades. The propaganda blitz got underway in the 30's. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger for example, or consider Prohibition (of the highly toxic and dangerous consciousness altering substance alcohol.)
I have these ambivalent feelings toward it. I worked in public sector digitalisation for a decade during the “transition” where alcohol went from being normalised to banned in the work place. This was obviously a good thing for soooo many reasons, but one of the unintended side effects could have been an impact on decision making.
Now this is, very, very, anecdotal, I have no research to back it up and I’m sure a million other factors had an impact as well. But along side the ban of alcohol we also seemed to lose the ability to make decisions and simply get things done. Upper management and political leadership became much more risk aware and we lost the “bang in the table, I’ve had enough of this talk, let’s just get it done” decisions. When I later moved into the green energy industry, in an investment bank that turns investor money into profit by building/buying+renovating solar plants and eventually selling them. I saw this “let’s just get this done” attitude again, once again coupled with rampant alcohol consumption.
I think it would be interesting to see if there was any research on the impact substances have on “just getting shit done”, but I’m in digitalisation and I’m never going to do it. I do personally think the work place is a little more boring with the puritan take on substances, but on the flip side, you don’t have to look into many statistics to see how the ban have helped soooo many people to not ruin their lives.
I read a study once that regular alcohol consumption has a negative impact on long-term planning/decision-making (or on the part of your brain typically associated with that?)
So it's interesting to look at your comment through that lens, because at least in my eyes they seem to align.
A lot of times the quality of a decision is less important than the decision gets made and a course set. When work begins, the real problems start making themselves apparent and you can change direction. But I've seen so many companies that spend months to years going back and forth trying to ensure they make the Correct Decision. By the time they decide, their competition has made the wrong decision and corrected back to something that achieves what they wanted. I could see how alcohol use, even if it leads to worse overall decisions long term, could kick the project into motion which leads to better results.
> In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Users of drugs are not necessarily abusing drugs nor are they necessarily reliant. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you don’t “get it”, but your assumptions here certainly don’t indicate open-mindedness.
For years there was a viewpoint commonly expressed that the prohibition on drugs was more harmful than the drugs themselves and that might have been true.
Since the post-2000 opioid epidemic and the proliferation of Fentanyl it seems the danger has increased. In Ithaca we are seeing people go to the needle exchange, shoot up right there, and then drop down with an overdose a block or two away on a regular basis. Fortunately there is a lot of narcan and people who know how to use it in that area.
It's scary.
I think we're also going to see concern increasing about behavioral addiction, particularly with gambling. Other parts of the anglosphere were quicker to make sports betting ubiquitous and there is a movement to curtail or eliminate the advertising thereof because it rapidly progresses to seeing nothing but gambling ads for the whole break.
I think it can be true that prohibition against many drugs was more harmful than the drugs themselves, while also being true that opiates are so dangerous that they elude that rule of thumb. Cannabis is certainly far less dangerous than Nicotine, Caffeine, or Alcohol (or even acetaminophen), and many substances have enough potential benefit that they should likewise be readily available for at least some uses (psilocybin or MDMA for therapeutic use). Opiates on the other hand are perhaps appropriately hard to obtain.
And even then, addiction is likely indicative of larger problems in a person's life, and the problems are getting worse so prohibition doesn't seem to be helping anyway.
Cannabis is not physiologically addictive, and an overdose is both tough to manage and only really results in nausea and can be safely slept off. Caffeine is physiologically addictive, not that hard to overdose on, and can be dangerous to quit cold-turkey.
I don't think either substance is "dangerous", but caffeine is definitely closer to dangerous than cannabis. I also wouldn't say I'm biased against either; I'm a big fan of both substances. I drink coffee about daily and use cannabis about weekly.
How many cups of coffee does it take to od on caffeine?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say cannabis + driving kills more people per year than caffeine (via overdose or whatever). Therefore cannabis is more dangerous.
The bigger pictures is that potent drugs have an effect that is hard to one-up, and that gives drug providers an edge other any other authority figure.
That's how it played in the Opium wars between the British Empire and China, that's probably a main reason why alcohol and other drugs are prohibited in so many religions, or why they're limited to the leaders of the religion (shamans etc.)
Drugs have an edge over any other source of pleasure. The biggest problem with opiate rehab is that nothing at all can compare in terms of pleasure they deliver.
Today you're a productive member of society, seeking pleasure and satisfaction in family, career, hobbies and curiosity, tomorrow you're an absolutely happy wreck in the corner.
No, of course not, it's all stinky emperors trying to maintain dominance.
> Today you're a productive member of society, seeking pleasure and satisfaction in family, career, hobbies and curiosity, tomorrow you're an absolutely happy wreck in the corner.
By that token, anything that could disable a healthy member of society would be a huge problem warranting a war on it.
Cars litteraly killing people fits the description but you don't see governments pannicking. Same way severe disabilities from workspace risks are mostly seen as a business risk and the OSHA won't have half the budget of what is spent on anti-drug efforts.
>By that token, anything that could disable a healthy member of society would be a huge problem warranting a war on it.
Er, yes? You might have heard of this whole "healthcare" thing that is war on diseases, for one.
Cars are a bit more complicated, sure they kill ~40k people per year in the states, stealing let's say 30 years of productive life per casualty on average = 1,2M man-years per year.
In order to offset that, they'd have to save 1.2M man hours over the entire US population (let's say 300M) = 35 hours a year per person. I'm pretty sure cars save 6 minutes a day for an average American, compared to any possible alternative, so the bottom lines is that cars are worth it. (Kick me if I stuffed up my maths)
> Er, yes? You might have heard of this whole "healthcare" thing that is war on diseases, for one.
I heard about rising prices of healthcare and how much of a business it is in the US. "war on diseases" would never be how it's qualified, it's more like a "diseases business" at this point.
On cars, the math should not be limited to deaths, any accident that results in a disability would enter the count. I wouldn't try to do such complex calculation, and look at countries that have similar geography but a history of actually caring about the human cost: Canada's average mileage per driver is short of 10 000 miles [0], that's 25% less than US drivers, and Canada already has 25% less cars per capita [1]. The US is at least that far from the equilibrum, with little political will to do something about it.
There are some 1.2 million car-crash-disabled people in the US, let's say they've accumulated over last 20 years on average, basically we need to triple the road toll and add for maintaining the disabled, so maybe cars need to save people 20 minutes per day. Still an easy win for cars.
Reducing car use and other measures to reduce car fatalities i.e. speed limits are only meaningful in this "productive man-years" dimension if you don't end up stealing more time from people's lives waiting for buses and driving 40kph.
In terms of fighting diseases that reduce productive man-years over say last 80 years, it's a very successful war, and there's little surprise that business is the best way to do it, just like many other things.
Looking at age-at-death, all causes plots for the US [0], where most people die past productive age, one can reasonably guess that the war on disease is in some sort of diminishing returns equilibrium, where saving an extra man-year costs more than one man-year, go figure.
Setting aside that there are plenty of viable alternatives to building a city that requires cars, our cars also have plenty of room to get safer with no loss of utility. We really could get by with 95% fewer ginormous pickups, and cars don't need to be able to go >80 mph.
I feel like it would be pretty easy to artificially limit cars to 75mph.
Also I drove a car that took 15 seconds to get to 60 throughout high school and it was fine.
Wearing a motorcycle helmet inside a car does nothing for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. Also I would argue there's a loss of utility because it probably interferes with peripheral vision and messes up your hair. But sure, make people wear a helmet, fine by me. The point is that there's room for easy improvement in car safety, and a helmet counts, I suppose.
Tinkering other than alcohol, caffeine, sleep aids? Which have profound effects on consciousness? Ok. I guess that's news kind of. Been going on since 1000BC (caffeine), 7000BC (alcohol)
Some thing like 40 to 60% of incarcerated individuals in the US were either drunk or high when they committed their crimes. It also probably doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people under the influence are more likely to do violence to others, including their spouses, behave, recklessly, potentially injuring, bystanders, or coworkers, or check out, mentally not showing up to work for living up to their obligations ( e.g. taking care of their family). I don’t say this as someone that’s for the illegalization of drugs and alcohol, but any advocacy that doesn’t confront the harsh cost inflicted by substance-abuse, feels simplistic, and un-considered.
My own independent research suggests the true statistic is that 40% were drunk. Not high.
I highly doubt many felons were high on mj, in a k hole, rolling, or tripping. Alcohol is way more conducive to violence. Some other substances like PCP may also lead to violence. But let's not come up with bs statements like "drunk or high" to tar marijuana with the same brush as alcohol, and let's do consider that alcohol is the most legal and normalized of all these substances. We can consider the societal harms of each substance separately.
This article in question does not constrain itself to marijuana but is inclusive of everything from nitrous oxide to heroin. Why would we constrain the conversation to just marijuana?
I posit there is no such thing a s teetotaler. That same person saying all drugs are bad will happily load up on turkey and carbs then go into a comfortable deep sleep while the chemicals manipulate them.
Simply put we are continuous chemical reactions being modified by our environments of choice.
Yeah, if you count teetotaling as anything which substance which causes you happiness you will have to look at ascetics. A few would fit this.
I was thinking of any intoxicating substance which quite a few religions fit.
In some way other than using its naturally produced substances to alter your brain chemistry, I imagine you would go on to say? Seems to be an arbitrary restriction.
- friends and people you've met who fell off the radar, some came back and now speak negatively about their past drug use
- plenty of homeless drug users in big city streets, clearly in a bad state of mind
- dead celebrities, their path documented by the media
So I have a hard time understanding how these articles downplay the risks and downsides, why they even pop up on HN and are so well received. On Fentanyl the straw man is "carpet bombing Mexico", the only alternative cheaper and more dangerous versions of this drug? That sounds a little tone-deaf.
It's one thing if you are well-established in life and experiment with a mushrooms from a trusted source under expert guidance - may you become a better fin-de-siècle poet. But opening the floodgates to the general public even more? Can't be good.