Cool.
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine claim to have determined the proper dose levels needed to create positive changes in attitudes, mood, life satisfaction, and behavior that persist for more than a year with the psychoactive substance in so-called “magic mushrooms.”
[…] “In our laboratory, weʼre working with the pure chemical psilocybin, which we can measure out precisely,” he added. “We wanted to take a methodical look at how its effects change with dosage. We seem to have found levels of the substance and particular conditions for its use that give a high probability of a profound and beneficial experience, a low enough probability of psychological struggle, and very little risk of any actual harm.”
Would have loved to know these guys in college. We measured a “dose” by how much we had divided by how many people there were.
Fun times.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
My favorite part of the book Wildlife is the use of the term “flash” for drugs, to separate its entertainment use from prior history.
BruceFromOhio
Mushrooms were so much better than the industrialized equivalent: fewer side effects, more laughter.
And really good on pizza.
ETA: We seem to have found levels of the substance and particular conditions for its use that give a high probability of a profound and beneficial experience, a low enough probability of psychological struggle, and very little risk of any actual harm.”
Volunteers, needed? Sign me the hell up, I can use a whole lotta profound and beneficial experience right about now.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
It pisses me off that I can’t benefit from this research.
Comrade Mary
I remember being oh so tempted by ‘shrooms in high school, but I avoided them because puking before the high set in really didn’t appeal to me.
Kristine
There’s something about engineered contentment that bothers me. How is it affected by one’s surroundings and events of the day?
Am I pondering the ways in which it can be abused and employed for control purposes? Oh hell yes.
jl
Mushrooms are very good. Not that I ever did them, or didn’t, and not that there is anything wrong with it, or not wrong with it.
Well, anyway, a good friend of mine told me that mushrooms are very good.
Anyone one know what kind of diagnosis you need to get a prescription? A friend of mine wants to know.
chopper
@Comrade Mary:
you puked?
magurakurin
mushrooms are heavy duty. Nothing has ever spun me out more than mushrooms. Acid never even came close. They grow on the coast of Oregon. We had a freezer full of them for a few years. We measured our “doses” carefully based on how far down the rabbit hole one wanted to go.
One shouldn’t get sick from mushrooms. The first trick is to not eat them. Brew them into a tea and drink that. It seems to take out whatever makes the stomach queasy. It doesn’t provide any protections from visitors from the spirit world, however.
If someone is looking for a good time, I suggest smoking weed or maybe a tab of acid. Mushrooms are heavy duty and even at low doses one never knows when something will enter the portal you are opening with them. Use them with care and caution and enormous amounts of respect.
I do think there is a great deal of benefit possible from their careful use. Not that I was particularly careful…
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Kristine: Engineered contentment would probably be a vast improvement on chronic depression. I’m certainly willing to put it to the test.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary: My fraternity big brother was an amateur pharmacologist and he told me that he was willing to get me anything except the hallucinogens because I would not handle them well. I trusted his expertise and never tried ’em.
sherifffruitfly
Pretty sure anybody anywhere who has EVER done drugs did that.
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
We used to cook them up in crepes or on an omelet and sprinkle the dust from the bag on top. Back in 91 – we saw the Animation Celebration (I think it later became Spike and Mike’s or something like that) at the UVA student movie theatre. A collection of cartoon shorts. We were out of our gourds. Ren and Stimpy was one of the shorts that debuted. A top 10 night of fun all time…
beltane
@magurakurin: I agree with you 100%. Not that I know anything about this subject firsthand, of course.
cleek
i can haz pharma-grade psilocybin?
and two weeks off.
schnooten
On topic.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: In college I had a boyfriend who had a bad trip every time he did mushrooms or acid. EVERY TIME. What’s worse is that he would trip on several consecutive days during Dead tour and be one big pain in the ass.
This is why I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn he recently went over to the dark side and became a teabagger.
Atticus Dogsbody
@Comrade Mary: Ummm… what?
cleek
@schnooten:
yipes.
last time i had some, i just got really in touch with the beauty of the sea oats at the beach.
i suppose the moral of the story is: don’t dose cage-fighters.
wenchacha
And here I thought that anything that put you in an altered state of consciousness was a terrible, horrible, all-around no-good thing for people.
I’m curious what sort of bigfooted response this will receive from all previous Drug Czars and others.
dopealope
So what was the dose?
kindness
Uh-oh…the drug admission threads can get weird.
kindness
@Comrade Mary: You get that more with peyote. Mushrooms…not so much.
transparent pseudonym
In my fairly extensive experience, LSD in adequate dosage is much riskier and “heavy duty” than psilocybin mushrooms, which always left me feeling a bit more joyous at the end.
It’s been decades for either, and I’ll never take acid again.
But I’d sure be tempted if it ever again happend that I knew someone who was growing his own shrooms.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Kristine: I’m of the firm belief that seeking altered states – be it through exercise, meditation, alcohol, pot, magic mushrooms, huffing Pam from a bag, whatever – is hardwired into us. Into all mammals, actually. I mean, when there is a fruit tree where there is rotten, fermented fruit on the ground, it is party time in the jungle. Fermenting things is one of the earliest “engineered” technological accomplishments we strove to make as sure-enough civilizations – as was the discovery of hashish, magic mushrooms, coca … these are not new substances. We’ve partaken of them almost as long as we have been (and perhaps before we were?) homo sapiens. That’s the oldest kind of “engineering” there is. It’s right down deep with the sex drive and similar hardwired urges.
beltane
I look forward to the gardening discussions here once cannabis is legalized. It will all be fun and games until Lily and Rosie knock over Cole’s hydroponic system.
Comrade Mary
@kindness: Ah. I think my lovely stoner friends may have been lumping them together. I’m off to see one of them soon, so I’ll have to ask again.
Or maybe they were just doing it wrong. (Tea instead of eating, eh?)
fledermaus
The missing ingredient is chocolate. I remember the original study John Hopkins did in 2006. If this ever gets out, the anti-depressant drug companies are screwed.
“Hell, I’d never recommend drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone. But they’ve always worked for me.”
Chris Wolf
I went skiing at Mt Snow for a long weekend. One guy bought half a Hefty garbage bag full of mushrooms. There were about twenty of us…there were so many shooms that we were using them as chips for the poker game…”I see your five caps and raise you two caps and three stems”…Best. Weekend . Ever.
And we all skied awesome.
BR
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
If I remember correctly this was one of the central arguments of Michael Pollan’s excellent book The Botany of Desire.
I should add – I’ve come to the conclusion that the mistake made with “drugs” in general is not in their use but in the alteration of them from how they exist in nature. For example, coca leaf in leaf form wasn’t a societal problem for the people of the Andes any more than rolled up poppies were for the peoples of Central Asia. But in concentrating, extracting, etc. the compounds in these natural drugs, something potentially dangerous was created.
UncertaintyVicePrincipal
In Brooklyn we used it to mean the plural of the demonstrative “dat”.
Also comment of the day, from a Digby article in The Hill about “Did the GOP con the Democrats into buying into deficit fever so they could run against them from the left?” to which someone named No Exit sez:
Scott P.
Great. Now we can just feed it to our kids, stick them in a room with some Impressionist prints, and leave them there all day.
Gravenstone
Better living (hopefully) through chemistry! Sort of reminds of a buddy of mine in college. Freshman nerd chem major having the misfortune of living in the jock dorm. One particular neanderthal, on learning his major inquired, “hey man, know how to make acid?” To which my buddy replied, “if I could make acid, would I be here?” Shut down the conversation quite nicely.
I always lived vicariously through my friends when it came to illicit drugs. Never so much as tried pot. Was wavering on the edge of having a buddy get me some coke, when Len Bias up and OD’d, and that put me right off the notion. And now, I just see another dimension in vicarious experience through you folks. Carry on, carry on.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@BR: It sounds like a book I should check out, as I’ve believed this for a long time. Thank you for the heads up.
ETA: “I should add – I’ve come to the conclusion that the mistake made with “drugs” in general is not in their use but in the alteration of them from how they exist in nature. For example, coca leaf in leaf form wasn’t a societal problem for the people of the Andes any more than rolled up poppies were for the peoples of Central Asia. But in concentrating, extracting, etc. the compounds in these natural drugs, something potentially dangerous was created.”
That’s an interesting thought, though I don’t think pot, for instance, is a good thing for everybody even in its natural state – even if you call that “natural state” its far weaker incarnation than the selectively bred flora dope smokers consume today. I’d sure not say hallucinogens like mushrooms are a good idea for everyone. And LSD? Yes, ergot occurs naturally, but would you consider that a “natural substance?”
Perfect Tommy
Dial M for Murder in 3D at the 8th Street Playhouse in the Village. Never again. nuff said…
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Gravenstone:
Best, most American attitude anyone could have if they’ve never tried these things.
BR
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
Not sure you can really get lsd from ergot without refining it. But yeah, from the evidence I’ve seen (and cases I know directly), there are people who actually do have permanent schizophrenic breaks from consuming lsd. The theory as I understand it is that there is some small set of people who are genetically predisposed to developing schizophrenia and will develop it, while another subgroup that is genetically predisposed but may or may not develop it. This latter group can be tipped over the edge by lsd, but from what I know there’s no evidence that any other substances can have that effect.
AliceBlue
Never tried the ‘shrooms; I was too awed by them. Weed and hash on the other hand …
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Perfect Tommy: I wish I could say I ever had such a highbrow experience. Closest I came was a not-all-that-great Kevin Costner movie called “Revenge.” It wasn’t an experience I remember fondly, but by that time, I’d had so many other “altered” experiences on acid that I considered it about average in terms of both weirdness and intensity.
It’s funny. I haven’t even considered dropping acid, eating shrooms or anything truly hallucinogenic since 1994, and if someone came offering the best acid/shrooms there ever was to me for free today, I’d pass it up. I have absolutely no desire to revisit it. But I wouldn’t take ANYTHING for those experiences. They were, collectively, an education that I could not received anywhere else, in any other way.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Some good memories. Some bad ones, too. The good ones were spent on skis.
cleek
@Perfect Tommy:
Aliens, on the big screen, when it was first released.
also, sitting on the set of Mr Food, while the rest of the trivia team played a match against some other high school. i was the alternate. so i got altered.
Perfect Tommy
It was a very brief dalliance. Beside the Dial M fiasco, two other memories stand out – feeling my heart pounding at the realization that V’ger was a Voyager probe. : ) and recognizing, for the first time, the hurt in the eyes of a friend that we had teased mercilessly for our entire childhood. For that moment of heightened perception, I am thankful.
cleek
@cleek:
(trivia contest and Mr Food were taped on opposite sides of the same studio stage)
Kristine
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I’m not thinking of folks with with mental health issues. I’m thinking of the reclassification of life’s ups and downs as disease states. Discontent has driven me to make a number of constructive changes in my life. I don’t think I’d want those bumps evened out.
lost in GA
@Gordon, The Big Express Engine: I was at that screening as well, probably in a similar state of mind. Great venue.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Kristine:
Me too. One of those changes was to sample mind-altering substances.
True. And I’ve heard that from a lot of people over the years – but to a person, they were saying it in the context of Prozac, Zoloft, etc. Never really heard it used in the context of something like mushrooms.
Kristine
@Evolved Deep Southerner: I’m not talking about temporary self-medication, I’m really not.
Perfect Tommy
@cleek: I saw Alien at the Ziegfeld Theatre on a big screen. There were two women sitting in front of us talking incessantly in French. They ignored all shushing from the folks around them. The place was too full to move to other seats and we were at wits’ end. Fortunately, when the alien burst onto the scene, the two women jumped up and ran out of the theater screaming. They never returned.
DougW
@Kristine: We are increasingly “managed” in ways that we can’t fathom… Our shopping, eating, drinking, play, and social drives are driven in a big way by subliminal ques we are unaware of. The pharmaceutical industry is not the most successful creator of product “needs” in the world. Look at the news out yesterday regarding the affect and effect of long term use of anti-depressives.
bago
Wow, olds did drugs dangerously. You should really review the data at dancesafe.org and erowid.org before consuming.
There’s no need to take unnecessary risks in the age of the internet.
South of I-10
Oh Lord. I remember circa 1993 going in a cow pasture with my then boyfriend, now husband, and collecting mushrooms. We brewed them up with some friends, and I swear I have never laughed that much. I would probably be scared to do it now, but we had so much fun!
Bostondreams
OT:
The Boston Bruins are holders of Lord Stanley’s Cup for the first time in 39 years.
Woohoo!
Sorry
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Kristine: Oh. Well, I’m of a mixed mind on that. On the one hand, my best friend in the world, one of the most emotionally/psychologically “together” people I have ever known, was once prescribed Zoloft and stopped taking it for the exact reason you say: He … well, not necessarily “enjoyed” the ups and downs, because downs suck, but he felt numb without them. And he’s a happy man. Not every day, of course. That was his choice.
On the other hand, my ex-wife got really down – as in chemically depressed – for no apparent outside reason, and it was a damn debilitating thing for a while. The drugs straightened her right up and she never had another problem, and her breakdown was 16 or 17 years ago now.
If I felt inexplicably fucking miserable fairly often and there was a thing I could take to ward that off, damn right I would. It’s what people do when their “downs” are REALLY fucking down. I think everyone’s different that way, the line gets drawn in a unique place for all of us, and those lines move around over the course of your life, you know?
Daddy-O
Only one word comes to mind when I read this:
Soma.
karen marie
@beltane: Forget knocking it over, wait till they eat the plants. Good times!
tkogrumpy
@schnooten: On topic maybe. Off the wall? Definitely.
Tom
Never done drugs. (shrug) I like the weirdness of my headspace the way it is.
I have had a hallucinatory dream once, the result of puking so hard from food poisoning that I pulled every chest muscle I had and had to take some strong painkiller just so I could sleep. I’m guessing the illness, the pain, the meds and the low blood sugar did something in my head.
Most of my dreams have a plot, even if its really stupid it makes sense in the end. This dream didn’t. Most of it was not really describable, but at one point I was being sued by the Norwegian government for moving a mountain range without a permit.
Speaking of not sleeping well, Sleep deprivation has had some interesting side effects. I tied for highest honours in high school english in my grad year by writing essays at 3 am Saturday night, then editing all day Sunday before handing it in.
Bethanyanne
It’s off topic, but I just saw this. I was browsing Kickstarter, and Lee Stranahan is trying to get money to make a Weiner movie. Fail.
Dr. Morpheus
@magurakurin:
HUH!?!?!
Having tripped on acid over half a dozen times and mushrooms about the same I’d say you’ve got that exactly backwards.
Acid trips, at least for me, have always resulted in a nightmare scenario while mushrooms have been very, very gentle by comparison.
Could be a difference in brain/body chemistry though…
General Stuck
@Dr. Morpheus:
General Stuck
@Dr. Morpheus:
Similar experience for me. Never had a “bad trip” doing acid, but it wasn’t all that much fun either. Mushrooms were just the opposite, and I can see were there might be medicinal properties in it’s active ingredients.
Montysano
@magurakurin:
DMT (dimethyltryptamine)-based substances, of which psilocybin is one, are remarkably uniform in the experiences they create (in higher doses), which usually includes some sort of portal, and the sense that there are “others” present. Terence McKenna’s book “Food of the Gods” speculates that psychoactive plants helped early man make the jump to spirituality and self awareness.
I know all this because we have a 23 year old son.
Back in the day, we just took ’em because they were fun.
El Cid
In other science news: a proposal that may or may not be good, but we need it for the name alone.
Amanda in the South Bay
Shrooms always made me anxious and pukey coming up, and one time I had really bad muscle tension whilst tripping-like, I felt like i had to do calisthenics in order to get the tension out of my body.
Acid and DXM are sooo much better on my body for psychonautical tomfoolery.
Ruckus
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
If I felt inexplicably fucking miserable fairly often and there was a thing I could take to ward that off, damn right I would. It’s what people do when their “downs” are REALLY fucking down. I think everyone’s different that way, the line gets drawn in a unique place for all of us, and those lines move around over the course of your life, you know?
Nicely stated. Some days a person just needs to take the insides of their brain somewhere else for a while.
Ruckus
@Tom:
Once was prescribed a medication for migraine. Had a nice side effect of hallucinations with the main effect being the 3 days of headache ending in a migraine was gone in 15 minutes. Not the interesting part. The hallucination was like picture on picture. Was alert, could hold a conversation, probably could drive, absolutely could tell what was real and what wasn’t but transparently imposed on reality were very movie like scenes. Same result every time I’ve used it.
Jim
My 2 cents.
Weed: Loved it as a teenager, now (26) it makes me paranoid and stupid. Dunno what happened but I feel like I’ve outgrown it, for better or for worse.
Mushrooms: My first trip was the greatest experience of my life. Snapped me out of a crippling depression. I’ll never forget it. (But then who forgets an hours-long sex marathon in the dark with god-knows-what watching from the darkness?) I’ve had good times and bad times on subsequent trips, but nothing like that.
Cocaine: Fun but ultimately overrated. On the other hand, the DARE stuff about “1 IN 10 PEOPLE INSTANTLY DIE!!!!!11” is ROFLOLMAOMFG-worthy. Uhh, let’s see, get 10 people together, sniff some coke… anyone die? No.
Ecstasy: Even more overrated than cocaine. You’ll laugh for no reason, sure, and then wake up the next day feeling like your mom just died. Don’t chew gum if you value your tongue.
DMT: Okay, you know how you watch movies or cartoons and people take some drug and suddenly they’re seeing weird colors and they’re in la-la-land? This is it. This everything you’ve been told a psychedelic should be. You will feel music, see ripples and stars around everything, see whatever you want to see (or sometimes things you don’t want to see… and sometimes in 360 degrees) when you close your eyes, converse with spirits, and best of all, it all starts when you PUKE YOUR GUTS OUT. Unless you smoke it, in which case all of this stuff happens in a few minutes.
Salvia: No. Just… no. I mean, in a choice between smoking salvia and huffing duster, sure, smoke the salvia. You’re a drooling retard either way.
Acid: Not sure what to say. Did it once, waited hours with little effect, finally smoked a bowl, and the world went mad – every straight line was blinking like those lights next to a runway, things looked green and purple when I knew they were not green and purple, then I threw up and spent the rest of the night in the fetal position. From what I hear, this might have not been acid at all.
Anyway, I don’t do any of this shit anymore, it seems like I’m just too prone to depression and anxiety to avoid bad trips.
But I definitely have a soft spot for shrooms, and not just because I live near cow pastures. They really did help my life. Friends and family told me they were happy to see me snap out of that funk. I feel vindicated whenever I see these studies, because it’s reassuring to know that what I experienced was real – and that other people in need of help can experience it too.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Jim:
I feel the same way about MDMA and other stimulants. Used responsibly, they really do help someone like me-low self esteem, depression, shyness, etc.
Jim
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Yeah, that weird chest tension is awful. Never had any nausea though.
MikeJ
@Jim: Ecstasy is great if you get real live pharmaceutical MDMA. I haven;t looked for it lately, but back when I did such things you had to know your source well. People would sell any damned thing and call it ecstasy.
The most fun I had with acid was Comdex. Vegas was just made for it. E3 wasn’t as good, but I had a cold and had had a fight with my gfriend who was back east. The elevators in the LA Westin were lots of fun though.
Jim
@Amanda in the South Bay:
There seem to be two kinds of people in this thread: those who feel physical discomfort from psychedelics, and those who feel physical discomfort from stimulants.
Science COULD potentially figure this out, but it seems pretty unlikely in the foreseeable future.
@MikeJ:
Yeah that’s a valid point. I mean, I felt happy, I felt nice, but the hangover was just overwhelmingly depressing. I’d just as soon have slept another 24 hours straight. I take it pure MDMA doesn’t have that kind of hangover?
moe99
When I was in college, a group of us got stoned and went to see Deep Throat. One of our number, who later came out, dropped acid but didn’t tell us before we went. I understand from him that he was thoroughly miserable through the experience.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
there was a point in my life where not spending some part of a day in some form of intoxication seemed like a wasted opportunity. now being more or less sober, with occasional intoxication, but being 100% cool with staying home, even on big party nights, and not feeling like, or wondering if, i am missing out on something, is amazing.
Don K
@MikeJ:
Back in the mid-late 80’s one of my camping buddies was teaching at a large, research-oriented university, and one of his friends was researching the effects of LSD and MDMA. For several years running we had either LSD or pure MDMA for a free day during our summer backpack.
Both were truly awesome experiences when done on a day hike in the mountains of Colorado/Wyoming/Utah on a perfectly clear summer day. With one you can have a chat with god, and with the other you just feel really, really, good, like there are no problems in the world. And no ecstasy hangover (I’d never heard of such a thing until now).
I don’t feel the need for chats with god anymore, but if I had access to pure MDMA I’d drop it in a second. And no, I’d never touch any of the stuff on the street that’s called ecstasy.
I’d agree with the commenters above who said coke is way over-rated. I did it a few times and it mostly just put me to sleep.
These days in retirement pot takes care of my self-medication needs. A hit or two and I’m good to go for an afternoon of relaxation.
sylvainsylvain
I had a bad experience on LSD once, and to this day I can’t take any hallucinogen without going back to that bad trip. So I don’t do that any more.
In ’04 I went to a fabled European city with a reputation for partying, took some E, and sorted out all my issues while dancing at the club. When I came back I went back to school, quit my soul-numbing job, and started down a better path.
I wish there was more research done on MDMA and depression. In my case, one dose helped for years, which sounds better than a daily pill of Prozac et al.
Casey Jones
@magurakurin: I think its important to distinguish the deep, dark and murky journey you described from liberty caps which grow in fields in NW OR and WA from the visceral gigglethon with cubensis. Two very different mushrooms and two very different experiences. While my friend would probably never take the risk dabbling with liberty caps again because the experience is so variable and difficult to control, with the slightest seed of thought in your mind potentially sending you someplace you never thought existed, doubted you could return from and would never want to return, my friend firmly would always pop a couple cubensis caps and stems covered in crystalline blue goodness.
BR
@Jim:
I don’t know what you had there, but Salvia can be a great tool for introspection. Just don’t go macho and get the 100x concentrate or anything. The tincture / extract that you hold in your mouth and/or chewing the leaves is better. It tastes a bit gross, but it provides a mellow, longer (~1 hour) experience. You really can learn a lot in that hour.
kindness
@Comrade Mary: I didn’t have the issue myself. Growing up in the Northeast, we never really got any cacti. But from my experience with what we were able to get, all those Grateful Dead shows and what not…well, sometimes ….
T
I anecdotally knew this was true, for years I have scored some shrooms and get down to the desert usually just trip for one day, but that one day within a week of desert living (southern Utah most beautiful place in the US) is enough to keep me happy for a whole year. Real shit has gone down in my life, but if I get my one trip a year I am happy as a clam.
chopper
@bago:
now you tell me.
chopper
@BR:
it’s all about the concentration. if its anything less than like 10X or something you’re huffing and puffing for nothin’. but baby, when its full-on concentrated it’s pretty sweet.
Cris (without an H)
It’s worth noting that all edible wild mushrooms have the potential to upset a person’s stomach. I’ve seen people vomit up fully-cooked morels and oysters.
It doesn’t affect everybody, but the experience is so unpleasant to those it does affect, it’s worth avoiding if you can.
DFH no.6
Always stuck with the psychotropic side of things, never the stuff (like barbiturates, methamphetamine, opiates such as heroin, angel dust, cocaine, etc.) that had an overdose potential, including the potential to kill you either on its own or in conjunction with alcohol.
Started doing all this a long time ago as a young teenager, and I did my homework.
No one has ever OD’d on weed (THC is a psychotropic drug, not a narcotic), or ‘shrooms or acid or mescaline. Nor has anyone ever become addicted to any of these (I mean truly addicted, like people can be to nicotine or opiates or meth, not the “addiction” – so-called – of some stoners who, say, feel the need to smoke pot all the time).
I’ve heard, going back over 40 years, and from some of the comments here, of course, about “bad trips” and possible ties to things like schizophrenia and the like, but I never experienced any of that myself (other than puking on peyote the one time I did that, which I understand is normal). Neither did anyone who I ever tripped with.
I believe bad trips do happen for some, and it certainly seems possible that some very small set of people might be prone to psychosis of some kind associated with taking psychotropic drugs. Sure, and there was that one guy that someone’s friend’s cousin knew from college that jumped out a window when he took LSD.
But the actual potential for harm from psychotropics is so tiny compared to meth or smack or, dare we say, drinking alcohol, as to be negligible.
I dropped acid well over a hundred times (a long time back, now), and did mescaline back then quite a bit less than that, and ‘shrooms probably 30-40 times over the years (including on a camping trip a couple years ago in the area now being destroyed by the Wallow fire).
I found LSD to be the best – euphoric, laughing-your-ass-off, along with the whole “electric-trippy” aspect of the drug (like the very altered perception of the world around you, such as the dark night sky appearing purple rather than black). Not something to be done lightly, though, like smoking weed. Coming down from an acid trip (same with mescaline and ‘shrooms) could resemble a slight hangover, mostly in feeling dragged out, but that was minor.
I’d do LSD again if I could find a source (I’m too lazy to try to make it myself). I still do ‘shrooms now and then because I know a guy I trust who occasionally grows his own (though it would be handy if I lived near some cow pastures like I did for a while in Florida back in the ‘70s).
This is all fiction, of course, Mr. DEA Agent.
LanceThruster
HyperIon
Still no reply functionality…
#50 (South of I-10) wrote:
In Florida, no? That’s where I found ’em when in college: in the cow turds. But out here in the PAC-NW they are kind of wimpy, small and low wattage. And not found in cow manure. I think the FL variety was better (more potent).
nicteis
So, the one benefit of global warming is that the more potent cow patties will move north?