[XPKBandMaidCzun]

I just wished their was fairer representation online of impact on people's lives when drugs get brought up. I never done drugs. But still, I suffered thanks to people who chose drugs as a way cope - and it's soul sucking.

The problem with decriminalizing/legalizing recreational drugs is its interpreted as officials of the state validating drugs as a coping skill.

In almost all cases, getting high is maladaptive coping style.

My anecdote from being raised by substance abusers: Makes you think you're smart, maybe even makes you look competent to other people. Until you don't have the drug anymore, in which case you're left with an anxious person who can't cope with difficult circumstances.

It's excruciating to have to endure loved ones who become dependent on substances. It saps the energy out of you to deal with. Their brain is rewired to get high - at the expense of their social connections, family, reputation, and so on.

Suffering and enduring a drug abuser is a silent pain. The incentive for users to get high and for rehab clinics to make money show why the conversation is so lopsided.

[pmoriarty]

Drug abuse is a real problem. But not all drug use is drug abuse. It's possible to use drugs constructively, to actually improve your life and that of others (because what you do, how you feel, and how you live your life impacts others).

Mushrooms and other psychedelics have great potentials to improve mental health, if used wisely. There have been studies that show psychedelics successfully being used to treat depression, PTSD, and addiction. This kind of use is the opposite of abuse.

It is possible to abuse psychedelics, but it is rare, and one can minimize the risk by educating oneself thoroughly about them and by using them with a clear, constructive intention, in a quiet and safe setting, with an experienced person you like and trust, and with confidence in the identity of the substance and that you're taking the proper dose. I'd strongly recommend reading James Fadiman's Psychedelic Explorer's Guide[1] for more detailed suggestions.

Like the Prohibition of the 1920's, decades of the War on Drugs has utterly failed to make us safer. In fact, it makes us less safe because people have and will continue to use drugs, but because of the drug war they often are mistaken about the identity of the drugs they're using or the drug's dosage, leading to overdoses and other adverse effects. The War on Drugs also encourages and makes organized crime more profitable and leads to great violence, not to mention the effect of arrests, imprisonment, and killings by police on non-violent drug users and their families.

A tragedy and an outrage is the only way to describe the War on Drugs, and I have a very hard time understanding why anyone who's educated themselves on these issues would support it.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Explorers-Guide-Therapeut...

[akiselev]

It's important to note that when people talk about drug abuse and its impacts, they are usually referring to heroin and opioids, amphetamines, cocaine and other alkaloids, benzodiazepines, and so on. While some of those drugs are hallucinogenics, none of them are considered psychedelics, which is what the current decriminalization conversation is about.

Magic mushrooms, LSD, and cannabis are in a different universe psychiatrically, addictively, and experientially. It's like comparing viagra to chemotherapy: yeah, a blood thinner carries extra risks for certain subpopulations, but chemotherapy has visibly destructive side effects on the entire population.

[mapcars]

>which is what the current decriminalization conversation is about.

What makes you think the next demand won't be for other drugs as well?

[akiselev]

Because when Portugal decriminalized every drug, the country saw an increase in drug use that was the same as the increase in other countries that didn't decriminalize [1]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/50/6/999/40402...

[FisDugthop]

Oh look, it's the gateway-drug argument [0] all over again.

The short version is that, for those other drugs that the grandparent listed in their comment, they are already scheduled for medical usage. Only the psychedelics are scheduled away from any legal usage.

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

[mapcars]

>It's possible to use drugs constructively, to actually improve your life and that of others

Well, there is a whole lot of other things that can also improve your life. Why go for riskier and less understood ones? I think they should be allowed in some cases but I'm very pessimistic about readiness of society to mass usage.

[zelly]

> Until you don't have the drug anymore, in which case you're left with an anxious person who can't cope with difficult circumstances.

That's where you're mistaken. Psychedelics aren't for escaping reality. They're for facing it.

On heroin/meth/cannabis/alcohol, you take it and feel good, forgetting about stuff like going to work or feeding your baby.

On LSD/mushrooms, you are more likely to curl up in a ball in the corner of the room crying than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody takes that stuff for "fun".

[toomanybeersies]

I completely disagree.

I've used psychedelics plenty of times as a form of escapism. I tend to stop worrying about reality when I'm 500 µg of LSD deep. I also use it frequently for fun, in fact I can't remember the last time I didn't use it for "fun".

[zelly]

You must have a pretty good life then. Or you don't have any neuroses. Usually people finally get to see a lot of issues that the ego conceals. Seeing yourself from a third person camera can change your life. For most people that is extremely scary.

Anything can be fun subjectively, so perhaps a better description is the triggering of a reward mechanism. LSD does not inherently make you want to do it again, unlike even caffeine. You do it again because of curiosity (higher-order decision-making) not your limbic system. Although one may redose cocaine out of curiosity, the limbic reward motivation is also necessarily at play.

[saiya-jin]

Nobody broken inside should ever use strong psychedelics, period. The risk of triggering nasty things inside is too high. One of my ex' father got triggered life-long schizophrenia from binge drinking at 18.

And yes, there are plenty of us who are well-balanced human beings without any lingering deep issues.

What psychedelics do to us is an experience that can't be obtained in any other way. Too intense, too deep, too profound. Life changing, really. It made me understand things about me, human nature and world that would remain forever hidden otherwise. 1 dose was enough.

The experience is way too intense to get hooked on, it would take me weeks or months to get into mental state of wanting to go back. Plus sensitivity to active substance goes down after use, so its counter-productive to repeat experience too soon. You are literally robbing yourself of the main reason why do it.

Everybody is unique. Some escape, some explore like me, some are just a bit curious. Don't throw all of us into same bag.

[pmoriarty]

Something I always wonder when I read comments like these is whether the poster got real LSD.

There are a lot of other substances being sold as LSD, and the vast majority of users don't test their drugs.

That said, yes, it's possible to use psychedelics recreationally (this goes back to at least the Merry Pranksters and their Acid Tests of the 1960's, not to mention their use in celebrations by various indigenous cultures around the world), and some people do use them superficially and sometimes even self-destructively.

500 ug of LSD, though, is a pretty hefty dose, and I'd be surprised if one's "fun" didn't eventually turn in to a seriously ego-shaking if not ego-destroying experience, which is difficult to face on a regular basis.. that's if it's real LSD, of course.

[zelly]

> 500 ug of LSD, though, is a pretty hefty dose, and I'd be surprised if one's "fun" didn't eventually turn in to a seriously ego-shaking if not ego-destroying experience, which is difficult to face on a regular basis.. that's if it's real LSD, of course.

He could just have a better brain than the rest of us. He could be at peace with himself and the world. I have heard stories of monks in Asia who, having spent the past 50 yrs meditating everyday, took LSD doses from Westerners and didn't react. Of course no one has ever proven these stories.

[pmoriarty]

"I have heard stories of monks in Asia who, having spent the past 50 yrs meditating everyday, took LSD doses from Westerners and didn't react."

The story you heard was likely a retelling of the one Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert -- a colleague of Timothy Leary) wrote about in his enormously popular book Be Here Now about his first meeting with the man who would become his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (aka Maharaji).

I don't have a copy of Be Here Now on me right now, but I watched some interviews with Ram Dass recently (after learning that he'd died in late 2019), and from my memory the story he told goes like this:

When Alpert (who did not yet go by the name of Ram Dass at this point) met Maharaji, the latter asked Alpert for "the medicine", which Alpert interpreted as being LSD. Alpert then gave Maharaji an LSD pill. Maharaji then asked Alpert if it would drive him crazy. Alpert thought about it and said "most probably". Then Maharaji swallowed the pill of LSD. They waited for an hour and nothing happened, and Maharaji asked for another, which he also swallowed, and still nothing happened.

Alpert was tremendously impressed by this (and also by Maharaji referring to the death of Alpert's mother and that she'd died of a "big belly" and mentioning the English word "spleen", when Alpert's mother did in fact die of a rupture of the spleen -- a fact he hadn't told anyone), so he became Maharaji's disciple and took on the name that Maharaji gave to him: Ram Dass.

Decades later, Ram Dass reported that he found out that Maharaji never actually swallowed the LSD, but simply used a magician's move to only make it seem like he swallowed it.

Update: Here's the story: https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-gives-maharaji-the-yogi-med...

[mapcars]

Here's a video about Maharaji, including Ram Dass talking about that exact case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrDrxkOFX0

[Nursie]

500ug isn't that much. 75ug is a threshold dose IIRC, with most street doses coming in around 150ug.

Taking 4 blotters is not that out of the ordinary is it? In the 90s in London, when LSD was cheap as dirt, I knew a lot of folks who would dose like that.

[rocgf]

Are you joking? You must be seriously experienced to handle 500ug. If you gave that dose to a beginner, they'd be scarred for life.

[Nursie]

Or perhaps just young, stupid and completely carefree..

(edit - I certainly wouldn't like to do that now)

[suby]

How comparable is LSD to Mushrooms?

[pmoriarty]

On the street, mushrooms have a reputation for being much more gentle than LSD, and LSD is supposed to be more pushy (ie. LSD will make you face your issues, while mushrooms might just invite you to do so). But it's questionable how strong a dose of mushrooms those who maintain it's more gentle than LSD actually took.

Also, a long time ago I read of studies that showed that even experienced users couldn't tell the difference between all the various major types of psychedelics when they were administered in a double-blind fashion.

Something else to consider is that, as I've mentioned in another comment, a lot of what's sold as LSD on the black market actually isn't, and most people don't test their drugs. So much of what you read these days about self-reported LSD use is probably actually about other substances.

[wutbrodo]

Yea, I've never noticed much of a difference between the two. I'm bolstered in this belief by the fact that everybody I know has a confident, contradictory opinion about how exactly they're different from each other.

[rocgf]

Actually, it's exactly the opposite, LSD is the gentle one.

[joejerryronnie]

Not an expert but have experimented with both several times. For me, LSD produced much stronger visuals and deeper “meaning of the universe” insight, but also more anxiety. Mushrooms were a more mellow trip but, at the same time, much more emotional.

[asdff]

imo the mushroom feels far more like a psychadelic drug and lsd is more like a very very strong high. I get visuals with both, but only on mushrooms have these fractal 'breathing' visual patterns morphed into faces and symbols. LSD feels like a fog or a filter over everything; the visual effect is pretty much the same fractals and breathing no matter the object or surface I'm looking at.

The lengths of effect are different. For LSD it takes about 20 minutes to start feeling the effects, and not much longer after that you will be peaking for 2 hours. After that you will feel quite high for 4 hours and the visuals will begin to ease, and for the next couple hours you will just feel mildly stoned. It's nice to smoke weed while tripping too, makes the come down feel smoother. It feels like more of a recreational drug, in that as long as you can keep from making yourself laugh or acting too weird you would appear perfectly normal and functional in public. Frequently I would trip with friends at public events. You can also drink quite a bit while on LSD and not feel very drunk.

Mushrooms take about the same time to kick in, sometimes longer though. They last about 4 hours and the effects wear off much faster, although like I mentioned earlier, the trip seems to have more symbolism in the visual effects. Sometimes I end up burping a lot from the mushrooms and get an uncomfortable stomach cramp, but in these cases it's advisable to start smoking weed and stymie any nausea in the process. I wouldn't use mushrooms as recreationally as I do LSD. Preferred setting is among a close group of friends in a private home or near nature for me.

I've never taken more than two tabs (200mg) of LSD or 1/8oz of dry mushrooms, so I'm not sure about the effects with larger doses, although I've tripped probably 30 times so far. One way to ensure you have actual LSD is to swallow the blotter paper immediately. Other synthetic psychadelics won't yield an effect unless you hold the tab in your mouth and allow it to dissolve in your saliva. I'm sure others will chime in with their take, everyone reacts differently.

[Nursie]

> One way to ensure you have actual LSD is to swallow the blotter paper immediately.

This seems to be an urban myth. The NBOMe/NBOH/NBF drugs can still work when dosed orally rather than sublingually. DOx too, though I don't know if those are still doing the rounds.

Other common non-LSD psychs like AL-LAD and 1P-LSD are so chemically similar to LSD that they'll work the same way as the 'real' thing.

The only way you're going to know for sure whats on a blotter is a mass spec, even the chemical test kits are unlikely to be able to tell the modern ergoloids (AL-LAD, 1P-LSD) apart from LSD itself.

But I wouldn't worry too much, by all accounts those are just as effective and about as benign. It's the NBxx you want to watch out for, and those can be discovered with chemical tests.

[pmoriarty]

"I've never taken more than two tabs (200mg) of LSD"

If you took 200 mg of what you thought was LSD, it almost certainly was not LSD because that much LSD would have probably blown you in to outer space and possibly caused amnesia afterwards as well. Even 1/4 of that is considered a very high dose. If you meant 200 ug, then that would make more sense, and that would be a moderate dose.

The rest of your description of its effects also makes me suspect you might not have actually taken real LSD, or taken a pretty small dose (likely in the 50 to 100 ug range). But psychedelics affect different people differently, so who knows...

Did you actually test what you took to make sure it was pure LSD? And how did you know how much LSD was on each tab?

[asdff]

ug*, whoops. Never tested personally but the effect has been the same across multiple disconnected sources from different areas of the country over the years, so I'm pretty confident i've had real lsd. i've had tabs that claimed to be 100ug and some that claimed to be 150ug, and the relative dose seemed accurate at least. the most common synthetic is going to be a member of the nbome family that is not bioavailable in the intestine like real lsd, and my experiences certainly felt nothing like an amphetamine-derivative or anything like that (which I have other experiences with).

[empath75]

Lsd lasts twice as long, and while the peak is substantially similar, the come up and down is fairly different — lsd tends to make things mostly funny or amusing, and mushrooms have an almost mdma like euphoria and feelings of love. I described mushrooms as being like getting a hug from the universe.

I’d choose mushrooms over lsd any day of the week.

But at their core, they are very very very similar experiences, to the point that I think it would be difficult to tell which you took if you didn’t know.

[o-__-o]

Ugh I hated being inside on mushrooms. Felt like the walls were closing on me. Being outside felt so right.. Your thoughts/ego can float freely around you until you decide which one you want to dissect. Then 5 years of relief from mind chaos.

Make sure your mind's right and you're in a good mood. If you're feeling down, 'shrooms would be a bad starting place (unless you really want to face some of your darkest shyt)

I really wish I could get mushrooms right now.

[RandomTisk]

Decades of Hollywood shows has conflated the two classes as part of the same party animal regimen. Timothy Leary didn't help either. All my (cursory) research suggests either there are parallel worlds that makes no sense to logical people in this one or much more likely, they can sometimes induce states of temporary schizophrenia. That's about the only cause for concern I think. If I voted in favor of legalization and then next year we had a lot of new Timothy Leary's walking around spewing nonsense, ruining the lives of everyone in their family because they're taking them every day or week, I'd be extremely regretful of voting in favor of it. What you see now in the community though is a reverence and fear and respect that they didn't have in the 70's, so that's a good sign.

[pmoriarty]

Timothy Leary gets a lot of flack, but the fact is that he was greatly responsible for spreading the word about benefits of psychedelics and getting people interested in them. There's a good chance that some of the people at the FDA and DEA now who are approving the current studies in to the effects of psychedelics (studies which were forbidden for decades before them) might have had their own psychedelic experiences due to the popularization of psychedelics by Timothy Leary and company.

Also, we have to remember that there were all sorts of negative sensationalistic news coverage in that day, like the suicide of Art Linkletter's daughter, which he blamed on LSD, and then there was Charles Manson, who used LSD in truly evil ways. Then there was Ken Kesey and his Acid Tests, which, if anything, were far more irresponsible than anything Leary ever did, and yet Kesey hardly ever gets the blame for that, and all the blame is heaped upon Leary instead.

Something else to consider is that LSD use was strongly tied to the counter-culture and the anti-War movement, both of which were anathema to many in power in the US. I don't think that all of that association can be laid at Leary's feet. The fact is that young people at the time were interested in these substances and they probably would have flocked to them even had Leary never existed. The time was ripe for it.

[TOGoS]

> Something else to consider is that LSD use was strongly tied to the counter-culture and the anti-War movement, both of which were anathema to many in power in the US

One of my favorite quotes from How To Change Your Mind goes like this: "There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures."

[zelly]

One of the effects of psychedelics (LSD in particular) is extreme suggestibility. This was the reason the CIA was so interested in LSD in the early days. Basically, whatever setting one happens to be in when they do LSD can potentially become the basis of the rest of their lives. It makes you imprint easily. There was this phenomenon of so-called acid casualties: People did LSD in places like hippie communes or music festivals (the only places to acquire them) and 20 years later they are chaining their dreadlocks to a tree holding a sign that says Save The Whales. I think a healthy level of fear and reverence for the drug could go a long way. It certainly isn't harmless. When they made that antiquated propaganda about cannabis ("Reefer Madness"), the drug they thought they were talking about is LSD.

LSD was initially studied by psychiatrists as a way to temporarily simulate schizophrenia. Psychiatrists took it themselves to get a better perspective on what their patients were going through. There are stories of this effect not being temporary in some people.

I doubt this time we will see Timothy Learys. I would liken the Timothy Leary era to the 1999 dotcom bubble. It was something new that people didn't know what to do with. Both sides exaggerated. Majority opinion overcorrected. Now we can look at things realistically. We have the advantage of research and decades of people using it. It won't make you enter nirvana. But it also doesn't belong in the same category as drugs that make you break into people's cars.

[pmoriarty]

"I doubt this time we will see Timothy Learys"

We almost did see another Timothy Leary. I think Terrence McKenna was almost a Leary, with his advocacy of using mushrooms in "heroic doses". That's really asking for trouble, especially when you know a lot of uninformed users will do so with some of the worst sets and settings.

Psychedelics have a tendency to induce messianic fervor among some people with oversize egos (like Leary, Al Hubbard, and Charles Manson). I think it's very likely there'll be others like them once psychedelics become more popular.

The mainstream media, which bears a large share of responsibility for ushering in the moral panic which led to the Drug War, hasn't gotten any less sensationalistic since those times either. If anything, it's gotten much worse. So the potential for the psychedelic renaissance to get nipped in the bud is in some ways worse now. We're just lucky (or unlucky) that there isn't a massive anti-war movement and countercultural revolution at the moment, but that could change as psychedelic use becomes more widespread.

This is why it's critically important that the rest of us educate people on responsible ways of using psychedelics, and on their risks as well as benefits.

Someone needs to keep their feet on the ground while others are flying away in to the sky.

[joejerryronnie]

I’ve only ever used LSD or mushrooms for fun. Crazy, intense, borderline scary, hilarious, unbelievable - each trip was typically a mixture of all of these but in the end, it was always fun.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

>On LSD/mushrooms, you are more likely to curl up in a ball in the corner of the room crying than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody takes that stuff for "fun".

Consider that your social circle maybe just doesn't overlap the many people who do take this stuff for fun. As with alcohol, you just have to be careful. You wouldn't say 'On alcohol, you are more likely to curl up over the toilet crying and throwing up, or fighting a bouncer than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody drinks that stuff for "fun."'

[eruditely]

I disagree with your statement as well, psychedelics have a variety of use cases and the entire experience is difficult to describe, for example take the following statements

"I like the wall breathing" "The wall is breathing"

it is difficult to qualify and categorize whether this is "Escapism" or "Facing reality" this statement and a variety of the subclass of total experiences of mushrooms and lsd at times is that often, it just doesn't make sense, but it can induce profound thought, at least we hope is profound =)

Much love.

[armandhammer]

LOL, what? You're clearly talking out of your ass if you think smoking a bowl will make you forget to feed a baby, or taking acid or shrooms will make you cry. Is this sarcasm?

[stallmanite]

Babies are pretty damned good at reminding you they’re hungry.

[Mediterraneo10]

> Psychedelics aren't for escaping reality. They're for facing it.

Not always. Are people really facing reality when they take ayahuasca and come back claiming that the drug opened a portal to another dimension where they talked with beings there? The shaman providing the drug often encourages this interpretation of the experience, and if anyone suggests that the drug merely scrambles one's neuroreceptors for a time, users can respond very angrily.

[Nursie]

Lots of people drop acid for fun!

Yes, there are aspects of self-discovery etc, but it would never have gone as mainstream as it did without also being a very enjoyable thing to do with friends.

[krohling]

I respect that perspective as I believe it's an experience many have had with drugs. My anecdotal experience with psychedelics (psilocybin specifically) is that it is a qualitatively different substance. Non-toxic, non-addictive (experience actually discourages frequent usage), and genuinely healing. It has helped me personally and many I have spoken to with depression and a range of other mental illnesses. The key to efficacy with these substances is education and responsible use, neither of which will happen in the current environment of criminalization.

[confuseddesi]

Couldn't this be handled instead by allowing doctors to prescribe these substances like they do other medication? Why decriminalize non-prescription possession instead?

[krohling]

I will add to other comments negating the value of doctors as gatekeepers by simply referring to the state of mental health care in our country. As someone who is fortunate to have only had to deal with it for a short amount of time I was still absolutely shocked. Until you've had experience with it personally (or via someone you care about) I think it's difficult to understand how abhorrent and sad it really is.

Additionally, I will add that for a drug like psilocybin the financial incentives are unlikely to ever line up. Large pharmaceutical companies will have no interest b/c it would cannibalize existing product lines. Psilocybin would never be a cash cow b/c it's so incredibly easy and inexpensive to produce. Microdoses can literally be manufactured by amateurs for fractions of a penny per dose and a bit of internet searching.

Mental health care is in an awful state and people are suffering terribly from illnesses that this drug can help with. It's cheap and easy to produce. Trusting it to the current system of us pharma and healthcare is too dangerous in my opinion.

[Bud]

Because the medical profession is demonstrably hostile towards this sort of thing and unable to act as a functional conduit for such substances.

So for purposes of what is going to be legal vs. what is going to get a lot of (almost entirely black) people tossed in jail, doctors are NOT the right gatekeepers.

[wutbrodo]

Expecting medical institutions, taken as an entity, to prioritize the well-being of their patients is a fool's errand. I want to be very clear that I don't believe this about any individual doctors I've met. But there are a lot of doctors in my family, I've had minor to moderate brushes with the medical system, and I have immediate family that's significantly and chronically ill, and all those experiences and conversations have exposed me to the combination of a poisonous culture, institutional rot, insane legal restrictions, and doctors' (somewhat understandable) anti-patient biases adding up to a system that really doesn't give that much of a shit about your well-being if you don't fit into a clean box. Psychiatric issues in particular almost _never_ fit into a clean box, and the medical establishment is somewhere between criminally incompetent, negligent, and malicious when it comes to psychiatric issues.

Now despite all that acid cynicism, I'm not actually suggesting that you fully refrain from medical or psychiatric treatment. It's just not a system that's amenable to the kind of blind faith and surrendered autonomy that you describe, especially in the case like psychedelics where they've aggressively abdicated their responsibility for half a century.

[rollo]

This article is about psilocybin mushrooms though, not whatever abusable substances you're talking about.

[DanBC]

To support your point there's this bit of survey work.

https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wp-content/themes/globaldru...

> Out of almost 10,000 last year magic mushroom consumers only 0.2% (n = 17, 13 men and 4 women) reported seeking emergency medical treatment. Magic mushrooms were the safest drugs to take in terms of needing to see emergency medical treatment according to GDS2017. There was no significant different in rates between male and females.

> The rate is considerably lower than with LSD presumably because of intrinsic safety of magic mushrooms ( the greatest risk is picking the wrong type), the smaller dosing using units (a single mushroom v an LSD tab) and greater understanding of how many mushrooms may constitute atypical dose for a desired effect in your region. People who use psychedelics are generally very sensible and show some of the best preparation and adoption of harm reduction practices of any drug (see the Global Drug Survey highway https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/...

[empath75]

Mushrooms also wear off a lot sooner. You’d be just getting going with lsd by the time you were almost done with mushrooms.

[thelittleone]

I used to work 80 hrs a week. Get drunk with colleagues 3 or 4 nights a week and took recreational drugs. Even though my team was crushing it, this Life wasn’t for me, I was miserable inside. I lost my marriage, kids moved to another country with the mother.

Fast forward a few years I take LSD first time. This experience compels me to clean up my diet. Over the next 24 months I completely stop drinking and recreational drugs and have a healthy diet.

Inspired, I go to Peru to study Plant medicines with a Shipibo Maestro Shaman. And now after years of training I serve this medicine to people walking my old life in the cities. I can’t consider it work because it’s my passion, it’s a self perpetuating energy loop. I’m so happy that I just don’t want to escape anything.

Without having tried recreational drugs I doubt I would have tried LSD. Without LSD I would not have ended up with in the Amazon. Money is no longer a concern, it’s a by product of my passion.

[evjim]

The fact that doing a drug once compelled you to move countries and become a distributor for drugs does not convince me that it is a good idea.

[wutbrodo]

If you'd like to step outside of narrow-minded pattern-matching for a second, there was a period in my mid-20s during which I took LSD once a month or so, and I literally had an epiphany every time. These weren't unfalsifiable philosophical larks about the universe, they were things like "I can be pretty self-centered" and "do I have a healthy relationship with drugs?" and seeing relationships from the other person's perspective that stuck with me in the longterm and improved me as a person. I had a pretty messed up childhood, and while I wouldn't give all the credit to LSD, I'd say it deserves more than half the credit for repairing the toxic relationships I had with my parents.

Since this seems to matter to people, I'm about as normal as you could expect. I have a high-paying 9-5 job that I'm passionate about, I'm in a leadership role that requires me to be reliable and stable (unlike when I was a junior engineer and could randomly take days off on a whim), I play sports and eat healthy and have a couple long-term hobbies.

Letting the word "drug" do all the thinking for you is a really bizarre embrace of the brainwashing that you've been subjected to. It's not even consistent brainwashing! Anyone with a couple of brain cells should be able to figure out that alcohol is a central example of a drug and yet magically nobody terrified of "drugs" had trouble accepting that alcohol can be responsibly enjoyed despite its potential for immense social damage.

[elevenoh]

The least generous interpretation.

You could use a little more open mindedness ;)

[thelittleone]

I don't recall trying to convince you of anything. I simply share one perspective. Things I have seen transform in one night:

1) Chronic depression with year of taking pharmaceuticals 2) People with anxiety stopping taking xanax 3) Bitter marriage disputes resolved. 4) People letting go of child hood sexual abuse trauma.

Unlike the medical and pharmaceutical industry, the end goal with this plant medicine is that the client does not need to come back.

If it makes you feel better to lump this into the same category as drug distribution by all means go ahead.

[tsukurimashou]

You seem to put all drugs in the same basket, you say it yourself "I never done drugs".

Well I can tell you what you described doesn't apply to psychedelics, things like "Until you don't have the drug anymore, in which case you're left with an anxious person who can't cope with difficult circumstances."

There might be a very few people addicted to LSD / shrooms, but I've never seen it myself, I tried both multiple times and never felt a sense of addiction. I want to do it again, but it is very different from cannabis, with cannabis I feel very much the addiction.

[wutbrodo]

> You seem to put all drugs in the same basket, you say it yourself "I never done drugs".

This likely isn't even true, unless OP has never touched caffeine or alcohol, the most widely used drugs in the world. There's no reasonable definition of drugs that doesn't include those two, beyond the one meant to trick simple-minded pattern-matchers from thinking critically about either their alcohol use or their potential use of other drugs.

[newnewpdro]

You're grossly lumping all drugs into one pile. Presumably you mean illegal drugs when you say "I never done drugs", because I'm certain you've done drugs like caffeine, probably alcohol too.

If that's how you define drugs, by those which are illegal at the time, then get ready to accept psilocybin as a non-drug in the future.

[ph4]

It's ironic that you ask for a "fairer representation", and then go on to deliver an inaccurate, "reefer madness"-esque, culturally and personally conditioned caricature of psilocybin.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

True as that may be, there's a spectrum. When I'm regularly really stressed, I find myself eating more desserts and junk food. It's a coping strategy. So is heroin. It's good that the government doesn't mandate that I don't use sugar to feel good, and frequently argued as good that the government does mandate that I don't use heroin to cope. The question is where each drug lands on this spectrum. We have collectively decided that you can drink alcohol, but that can be a horrible way to cope.

My experience with mushrooms puts it pretty close to the marijuana/alcohol end of the spectrum.

I'm sorry if mushrooms contributed to a difficult upbringing for you.

[wutbrodo]

Heroin probably isn't a great example, since kicking it is so much more excruciating than temporary increases in junk food or alcohol consumption. Weed is a much better example; I'm pretty strict about my diet, so during stressful times I notice myself leaning on weed in the way people do with junk food: unconsciously and moderately, rolling it back as soon as I notice it.

[jswag]

I think that largely depends on the class of drugs and their addictive potential. Generally psychedelics are viewed as having lower potential for addiction or abuse than other classes of drugs, such as opiates or even alcohol and, I think most importantly, steps such as decriminalization may help with broader arguments that would allow for more research in to the medicinal uses and effects of these drugs.

Psilocybin in particular shows great promise in helping people cope with addiction to other substances in rather productive ways. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201705/radical-n... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6007659/

[SirFatty]

I don't disagree with you on this, but I hope you are also including alcohol?

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

And potentially, just barely, coffee.

[rofo1]

Why coffee?

I've both drank coffee and not drank coffee for years. The only difference is you are more alert (blocking adenosine).

How do you go compare it to drugs?

If it's a joke or sarcasm, it's not clear (to me at least).

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

The top level comment is about using brain-chemistry affecting substances to maladaptively cope for difficulties in life. Some people use substances to work around the root cause rather than addressing it head on, which is generally bad.

With alcohol, you can drink and feel loose instead of dealing with whatever's got you stressed and pushing your boundaries. Maybe you can't keep up at work. You should fix that instead of drinking, but drinking lets you get by well enough, so you're less likely to fix whatever's causing the problem in the first place.

With coffee, you can drink and feel alert instead of dealing which whatever's needing your alertness past your boundaries. Maybe you can't keep up at work. You should fix that instead of drinking, but drinking lets you get by well enough, so you're less likely to fix whatever's causing the problem in the first place.

The point is that, yes, many people use mind-altering substances to cope with life and, yes, it can be a maladaptive coping style. But that includes benign stuff like coffee where people would laugh if you suggested outlawing it. So the criteria of "people use this mind altering substance to avoid dealing with problems in their lives" is a bad criteria alone.

You have to put substances along a spectrum from benign coffee to malignant heroin and figure out where to put each substance and where to draw lines of government control. I hope coffee and potentially alcohol establish that a black and white approach doesn't cut it.

[rofo1]

I mean, I get what you are saying, but just somehow comparing a deep reason for drinking coffee (alertness/greater focus that apparently needs fixing) vs. heavily tripping on an acid trip (when you are experiencing hallucinations) is in bad taste.

When discussing these things, coffee should not even be mentioned in the same group as the heavy hitters, and just the fact that a lot of people posting here mentioned it makes me super suspicious about the whole thing. Just based on that alone. Regardless of whether it fits the actual, technical, dry definition of "mind altering" because it's adenosine-receptor antagonist.

I completely agree about alcohol. All alcoholics are trying to numb or drown the pain. And of those I've seen a lot. There are no exceptions, just like heavy drug users. Everything else is a lie - regardless of how deep the lie goes, or how organized it is, or how eloquent it sounds, or how popular it is at any given time. It's still a lie.

We should fix the reason they need those powerful drugs in the first place. And it seems like the best we can do is "lEgAlIzE" it, e.g. ignore the problem.

Why is nobody asking the question: why do you need alcohol/drugs/whatever in order to live another day and not jump off a building or something? How can we fix that? Is it fixable? How did it come to this? And so on..

What a society!

From "War on drugs", to "heh, fuck it, legalize everything and hope for the best" in less than a few decades. Jesus Christ, no wonder the propaganda is mixed up and lacking logic or consistency.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> Why is nobody asking the question: why do you need alcohol/drugs/whatever in order to live another day and not jump off a building or something? How can we fix that? Is it fixable? How did it come to this? And so on..

Maybe I live in a different social circle than you do, but mental health seems to be a pretty big topic these days.

>From "War on drugs", to "heh, fuck it, legalize everything and hope for the best"...

Legalizing pot and mushrooms is a far cry from what you said. The points being made here are A) drugs exist on a spectrum from dangerous to benign and B) abuse lies on a spectrum from dangerous to benign and C) mushrooms are towards the benign end.

That's not to say legalize the whole spectrum or throw in the towel on mental health. Not sure where you're getting that.

[intarga]

And the only difference with mushrooms is that you're more open minded. Caffeine also has withdrawal symptoms which psilocybin doesn't, and the LD50 (overdose threshold) is orders of magnitude lower for coffee than mushrooms.

[rofo1]

Funny how you characterize hallucinations as "open minded". It's par for the course for 2020 anyway. We seem to invent better sounding words for things that we already had words, which contained (generally) truer meaning.

As I mentioned, I stopped drinking coffee one day out of sudden and I had zero, I repeat: zero symptoms of any kind. Nothing at all.

Doesn't seem right to me to put coffee in the same group with mind-altering substances.

[wutbrodo]

> Doesn't seem right to me to put coffee in the same group with mind-altering substances.

Not sure how to say this more bluntly, but this is nothing but your own ignorance talking. Literally look at the first sentce of the Wikipedia page for caffeine: it's a psychoactive drug. Complaining about people not adhering to your bizarre redefinition of an extremely well-defined term is very odd.

> Funny how you characterize hallucinations as "open minded"

There's that confident ignorance again... It seems obvious that GP is describing an effect of mushrooms other than hallucinations, not describing hallucinations themselves as open-mindedness. This complaint is about as nonsensical as someone describing that they unwind with a couple drinks and you saying "how do nausea and bloating relax you?"

[ur-whale]

There's not very much in your diatribe that considers the individual freedom aspect of the problem.

[lowdose]

Problems with mushrooms?

[kleer001]

A problem with complex categories and propaganda and probably personal experience lumped in there too.