[deertick1]

Agreed. For at least some people, there is something deeply, deeply wicked about acid. I can't put my finger exactly on it but I always felt that it changed your perceptions in such a way that made you feel like you were being enlightened and embracing universal love while at the same time making you capable of justifying enormous evil.

Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.

[marcosdumay]

Every time I read somebody describing their experience with something I wonder if the reduced drug usage is one of the lead causes of the lack of warmongering we got since the late 20th century.

[fragmede]

Reduced? Alcohol consumption is down (depending on how you view the stats), but drugs are winning the War on Drugs. Everyone else is losing. Legally, oxycontin is more highly regulated today, but the opoid epidemic is, well, an epidemic. Cannabis is legal for recreational use in many states. I willing to buy that something that's widely available in today's society has lead to less war (Internet porn, perhaps?), but I'd be surprised to hear in what ways drug use is down.

[marcosdumay]

> but drugs are winning the War on Drugs

Drugs used to have institutional usage. They used to be distributed by armies, take part on religious practices, have explicitly regulated import quotas to keep the population "calm".

We have nothing like that today.

[denton-scratch]

> lack of warmongering we got since the late 20th century

Srsly? Where have you been hiding? Where is this place where wars are not being fought?

[hindsightbias]

lead or lead lead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis

[marcosdumay]

Lead doesn't explain it, warmongering is something that has been high since ancient times, but airborne lead dates to the 20th century.

[hindsightbias]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/did-lead-poisoning-c...

[chownie]

Dietary lead in the form of sweeteners for wine plus a little abraded from cups and pitchers has been present since antiquity, so could still stand?

[ParanoidShroom]

Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?

[ipnon]

It makes the standard 9 to 5, hour long commute, and retire at 65 shtick unpalatable, but we in the West live in a radical society where you can already smoke pot, drive fast cars, play loud music, not start a family, and so on. Part of that is attributable to us living in a post-psychedelic world.

[blululu]

Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It changes people in interesting and unpredictable ways. Sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. I know people who became much more grounded through their use of psychedelics. Others much less so.

[ipnon]

Some changes are predictable. For instance most people will stop abusing drugs after strong psilocybin trips. See the work of Rolland Griffiths.

[blululu]

Most but not all. The opposite trend is less common but totally possible from personal observations. saying that a psychiatric procedure will result in specific changes would be stretching the truth from probably to necessarily. The first result I found in Google related to Griffiths is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ They are doing an anonymous online self selected reports and they find a strong effect but also 17% do not appear to exhibit the trend.

[ipnon]

For some perspective, this is the current state of the art pharmacological treatment for substance abuse disorder, as in no other available treatment has a stronger effect.