Super excited to see this. If you live in California please head on over to http://www.decrimca.org/
We're working to get state wide decriminalization on the ballot in November and we need signatures! If you buy a button ($5) they'll send you a petition sheet. There are also signature locations and volunteers in every county in the state.
This strategy is taking a page out of the very successful cannabis legalization movement. First there are decriminalizations at the local level. This makes decriminalization at the state level much more palatable for politicians, who see there's political will at the local level to make it happen. Once the first state decriminalizes it, others states will find it easier to follow suit.
Apart from voting, you can also donate and volunteer, but some of the best things you can do is educate yourself and others on the responsible use of psychedelics. If taking mushrooms or other psychedelics has helped you in some way, tell others about it. Seeing people who have their act together, who admit that mushrooms have helped them will open people's eyes to their benefits and make it less likely that they'll react with dismay or disgust at the suggestion that "drugs" be legalized because they equate use with abuse.
Stepping out of the psychedelic closet is not always easy, but it has to happen (as it did with admitting cannabis use) before there's widespread acceptance of psychedelics.
I am all for decriminalization, but both with cannabis and mushrooms I feel worried about the amount of "it's actually good for you!" that comes with it. I have used both (legally, in the Netherlands). As a student I enjoyed cannabis quite a bit but when I used a lot less later I did come to feel like (looking back) the usage came with some depression symptoms. With mushrooms I feel in general that they were good experiences but I've heard enough stories (first and second hand) of people experiencing long-term effects from psychedelics that I don't think it should be encouraged (at most for specific people with a therapist or so).
Personal responsibility and liberty are great but these products should come with warnings and guidance.
I think legalisation and regulation is a cure for the "its good for you" bullshit. As it becomes legal, it is easier to argue about it objectively, and there wille be also more data since people and institutions can study and research it easier.
PACs have been a key part of the cannabis legalization movement. So it's not just that you make decriminalization more palatable for politicians, you aim for politicians who find decriminalization more palatable.
And for anyone thinking “it will never happen”, let me tell you back in the 1990’s I thought the exact same thing about cannabis legalization. Ridiculous, waste of time, a pipe dream.
Opium poppy (Papaver somniferous) is actually kind of an interesting case. At least in the US, it's OK to grow the plants, the flowers are showy and many seed catalogs sell the seeds. It's also OK to harvest the pods and consume the seeds (poppy seeds, have them on a bagel). But, if you scrape off and collect the latex on the outside of the pods, you are committing a felony.
I thought that varieties currently sold have little morphine. Or at least, I recall that one ex wife had an heirloom variety from her mother. Which supposedly had lots of morphine. Not that I ever tested it.
> While the drug test can rule out heroin, it can’t distinguish the poppy seed from other opiates. This became such an issue that the federal government raised its threshold for opiates in workplace testing from .3 micrograms per milliliter to 2 micrograms so there would be fewer cases of positive opiate testing in situations where drugs where not the cause.
> Sure, the poppy seeds you buy at the store contain between 0.5 to 10 micrograms of morphine per gram, but a dose of medically-prescribed morphine contains anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000 micrograms. So to get that same dose from the seeds you eat, you’d have to potentially eat a ridiculous amount of them.
So you'd need to consume stuff extracted from at least 0.5-1.0 kg of poppy seeds. Or perhaps as much as 10 kg. That's not impossible, if you know what you're doing, and have the right equipment.
But it'd be impractical, and expensive. And then there's the risk that you'll have other toxic stuff. Insecticides or fungicides, for example. So you'd also want to purify your morphine.
However, what's interesting is the possibility of using poppy seeds to mask usage of other opiates. The article notes that drug tests "can rule out heroin, [but] can’t distinguish the poppy seed from other opiates". So perhaps you could eat lots of poppy seed cake, and hide your oxycodone habit ;)
The resulting potency is difficult to estimate, and people have died from getting it wrong. Please don't recommend for people to do poppy seed tea without warning them of the danger.
Also, it's not that far from religion, which is constitutionally protected. Far more so than for cannabis, anyway. As I vaguely recall, that's already the case for peyote and ayahuasca, at least in some jurisdictions.
Why would they ask for my employer information in order to make a donation? My employment has nothing to do with this. Are we now owned by our employer who needs to know everything we do?
It’s the law. Technically only required when the cumulative amount of donations reaches $200, but impractical not to collect it for every donation as the org may get in a situation where they realized they collected that much from one person but now don’t have the info because they didn’t ask - given the penalties, cost/benefit sways heavily toward being safe and always asking over catering to the few pedantics who might not donate due to this.
Until Citizens United blew the door open, if you were a corporation you had to find ways to get money to candidates.
Telling your employees to donate to $CAUSE was one of them, and offering them bonuses or matching or other "incentives" -- aka "sign here to get your X-Mas bonus" on donation form -- was a way to move money.
Indeed, it isn't your employer's business what or whom you donate to. But the more straightforward answer is that they are likely required to ask by law (possibly subject to other criteria).
That's a good question, because I've had no luck finding an example.
I do recall reading about it, but that could have been decades ago. And it's hard to find old stuff.
What I find is about contributions from employees of government contractors, and from government employees. So maybe that's been the driver for the requirement.
I wish this idea was more common in society. I hate being asked for identification in order to get a drink — I wish I just had a card with my photo on it and the official government phrase “It’s legal to serve this guy.”
I'm 100% in support of legalization, but as someone who has never lived in a country with decriminalized psychedelics, I'm very interested to see how this is regulated. The potential for chaos seems much higher with mushrooms than cannabis.
I support decriminalization of mushrooms, but I think your question is somewhat irrelevant. When considering a new law, the thing people discuss is, "Will this have terrible side effects?" rather than, "Will this have worse side effects than alcohol?"
There are side effects from the status quo, too. Having a regulated safe source of product is better than allowing amateur mycologists to go out in the field and poison themselves as they do now. It doesn't matter what the law says, people who want to do drugs will find and do drugs, so we might as well make it a little safer.
> The purpose of this article is to decriminalize the personal possession, storage, use, cultivation, manufacturing, distribution in personal possession amounts without profit, transport, and consumption of psilocybin mushrooms and the chemical compounds contained in them for any person over the age of 18, or for any person younger than 18 with parental or guardian consent by amending California Health and Safety Codes HSC § 11 390 & 11391.
I'm confused, whats the difference between legalization and decriminalization then. This sounds like legalization to me? Decriminalizaton i thought was making it a low priority to law enforcement which some places already did?
Correct, decriminalizing doesn't mean that it's legal, just that the police won't use resources trying to stop it.
Legalizing at the city or county level would run into conflict with state & federal laws that prohibit it. This is a way of getting around that conflict.
> As such, Topley, explained then, it is “very close to legalization, however, without psilocybin being rescheduled or descheduled at the federal level, it seems more appropriate to refer to it as decriminalization.”
Alcohol is legal, but you can't sell it legally without a liquor license and those can be restricted in number and limited in scope (in MA you can't sell liquor on Sundays).
Sorry for the cynicism. I'd love to donate to the cause, and want to make sure I'm not giving money to a scam or (less cynically) an inefficient effort. Anywhere I can see something to convince me this page and this group is legit and making real progress?
I can say it's definitely not a scam. I have personally been to multiple meetings with organizers in Oakland and San Francisco and witnessed that it is both well organized and well staffed. To my knowledge there are over 700 volunteers across the state in every county working on this initiative. Obviously, that doesn't mean it's going to be successful. I hope you're willing to risk $5 and purchase a button or sticker so you can send in your signed petition form :)
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
>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.
> 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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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?
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
>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."'
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 =)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Couldn't this be handled instead by allowing doctors to prescribe these substances like they do other medication? Why decriminalize non-prescription possession instead?
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.
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.
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.
> 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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?"
I am perhaps misusing the terms, it's not on purpose. I just think that based on common sense and things I see every single day around me, mixing coffee and heavy drugs in one group just makes no sense. Regardless of their clinical definitions or whatever.
Just based on the effects they produce, makes no sense.
Curious, aren't all effects they produce a hallucination of some kind? E.g. not living in objective reality?
It seems like this topic hit a nerve with you, so I will guess you are a user of these. If I am wrong, just ignore the questions.
What are these profound effects that you got from using them? Why did you need it in the first place?
Ha, I'm fortunate enough to have spent my whole life in California, so the notion of drugs being unavailable or risky is pretty foreign to me. To the extent that your comment can be said to have struck a nerve, it's as an instance of a broader category of behavior that I think does a lot of damage to society.
There are very few truly evil people in the world, but there are legions of what Lenin called "useful idiots"[1]: people who blindly and brutally enforce the agenda of others because they can't be bothered to actually look into the things they regurgitate, no matter how much this carelessness costs others. It's a fairly strongly held belief ofone that people like this are largely to blame for many of the horrible things in the world (in the example here, the Drug War as applied to drugs far less dangerous than alcohol has destroyed countless lives, and I've yet to hear an argument for (eg) marijuana prohibition that doesn't rely on sheer ignorance and laziness). This is particularly unforgivable in the Internet age; if everybody would read a couple Wikipedia articles and spend sixty seconds thinking critically before having strong opinions on an issue, our political discourse would be dramatically elevated.
To the extent that your comment struck a nerve, it was as a pretty dramatic example of this tendency, confidently drawing conclusions based on claims about a drug that nobody who's used it would recognize as connected to reality (or indeed, no one who's done ten minutes of Googling about it).
> Curious, aren't all effects they produce a hallucination of some kind? E.g. not living in objective reality?
No, this isn't true of all, or even most, psychoactive drugs. It is true of hallucinogenics like shrooms or acid, at higher doses. I've taken plenty of acid but usually take below the amount required to get sensory hallucinations. For another example of how broken your model is, stimulants (incl caffeine) can cause hallucinations at high enough doses too. You might say "you can just take low doses", but that's entirely true of psychedelics too (eg microdosing).
> What are these profound effects that you got from using them? Why did you need it in the first place?
I'd push back on the premise that them being _needed_ is relevant to the conversation. That being said, there's information all over this thread about the use of psychedelics for treatment of PTSD, depression, etc, medical Marijuana has long been established as useful (with less side effects than many competing pharmaceuticals), and at some level, recreational use of healthier drugs displaces use of incredibly unhealthy ones like alcohol. Given that psychological problems aren't binary, the therapeutic effects of these drugs are available to
I don't want this to come across as a blanket endorsement of unfettered drug use. I'd put many drugs in the same category of junk food: not especially dangerous, perhaps even salutary in moderation, but best to minimize use of. But there are situations in which drugs really help people and lead to healthier and more enriching lives. Your approach of twisting the definition of "drug" to privilege the drugs you like, avoid thinking about the ones you don't, _and then enforce this idiocy violently upon everyone else_ does immense harm.
> [1] attributed to Lenin, but perhaps apocryphal. Also, I apologize for the connotation, but it's a fairly widely used term in political science.
Our views differ so much, that I really think you are living in another reality. So this would be my last reply as there's simply no point discussing further.
At least you talk from experience as a heavy acid user, I guess that's something.
I am not trying to offend you, but if you keep insisting that coffee is the same as acid/lsd or they can cause hallucinations or whatever, without fail everyone will consider there is something wrong with you behind your back. You can be 100% sure of that.
Stop thinking about definitions and start looking at reality and consequences.
> Your approach of twisting the definition of "drug" to privilege the drugs you like, avoid thinking about the ones you don't, _and then enforce this idiocy violently upon everyone else_ does immense harm.
Remarkable use of "violently". It's like an assembly line of PC terms 2020. Curious whether this is the new thing that's being served? "Plz do drugs otherwise you are violent/bigot/nazi/Not pr0GresSiVe". Sometimes it's OK being not progressive :)
I am actually impressed by the level of propaganda being served, tbh. Must be a world record of some kind.
I don't like any drugs. Coffee might be technically grouped based on some arbitrary definition with some other "drugs", but it's far away from anything like the rest of them (lsd, shrooms, heroin, coke, alcohol whatever) in reality. Just because you've found a grouping of some things doesn't mean they are equal when used. It's just non sense to compare coffee and LSD. And "high enough doses" of bread can kill you, too. Just eat 40 pounds of it today and we'll see if you wake up tomorrow.
You didn't reply what are these profound effects that people like me cannot understand. Enlighten us, please. Because to me, people under the influence (be it heavily drunk or on lsd) are close to insane. That's a fact, in the strictest definition of the word insane.
If all you have to offer while under the influence is being insane, thank you - I'll pass and you can call me "not progressive enough", it's fine.
"what are these profound effects that people like me cannot understand. Enlighten us, please"
If you sincerely want to know, I urge you to watch these three videos of people discussing what MDMA and psilocybin have done for them: [1] [2] [3]
The first is of a woman with alcohol dependency treated with psilocybin.
The second is a report by a man with Aspergers Syndrome about what a single experience with MDMA did for him.
The third is of a woman with terminal cancer treated with psilocybin.
There are countless stories like this, including of veterans with severe, treatment-resistant PTSD being successfully treated with MDMA. Phase-3 trials of MDMA are under way as we speak, and it is likely that the FDA will approve MDMA as a treatment for PTSD as early as 2021.
Great. Would also be great if we could just get the spores legalized at the state level. California, Georgia and Idaho prohibit possession of the spores of magic mushrooms. In CA this is especially ridiculous, given that the mushrooms have lived here longer than the state has existed.
In many other states, you can walk into any head shop and buy a mushroom kit containing spores. Not in CA. It makes no sense.
I used to live in London at a time when the fact that mushrooms were technically legal seemed to suddenly come to light. Oxford street was full of places selling them, as were various markets. There was lots of branding and marketing that appeared as if from nowhere.
Honestly the kind of overnight switch from not being visible anywhere, to seeming to be on every street corner reminds me of being in SF when Lime and the other scooter startups blanketed the city seemingly overnight.
I'm a UCSC grad. It was great for undergrad, I had a lot of great classes and professors (much more interaction with profs than a place like UC Berkeley) and it definitely help. my career long term because I did undergrad thesis with a well-known computer scientist. The campus is completely beautiful- at the time I attended, there was a large area of secondary redwood growth that students had turned into an area called "Elfland" that really was magical.
The astrophysics PhD program is very good. Top 40 worldwide physics and earth sciences undergrad programs too.
The forest hippies are mostly harmless, though they will try to expand your mind and sneak into the dorm showers from time to time.
Is the totem pole still by the cat graveyard? What a great view up there of SC on Friday nights as the smoke, err, fog rolled in about the drum circles.
What are your thoughts on the layered nature of our government and how such efforts could do better with the many layers? Take marijuana for instance. I think it should be decriminalized, and in many states we talk about it like it is, but in reality it depends on which law enforcement officer catches you. Where I live you'll be arrested by the sheriff (county), but not the police (town), depending on which officer catches you and if they like you or not, and not state patrol. And you won't be prosecuted by the feds, but the businesses you bought it from, which pay local and state taxes, can't use federally insured banks because it's still illegal even though it's not enforced. But state law might forbid the bank from making a hiring decision on someone's marijuana usage. In some ways it feels like we've made progress, but I'm still afraid to use it myself. How do we deal with this mess of rule-of-law moving forward?
I would like the idea of proving an idea on a small scale to make it easier to sell at larger scales. But honestly, being one of the first places that legalized it, we got a large influx of "undesirables" from other places that hadn't legalized it, causing problems we wouldn't have had if we weren't one of the first states to legalize it.
I think the decentralized/layered structure of American government is great, because as you said, it allows smaller polities to test out new ideas before growing to a larger scale. I haven't heard of that phenomenon where people migrate to a new city in pursuit of the substance, and that could definitely be a valid issue.
What makes them "undesirable" though? Are they not contributing to the local economy or something else? I don't think it's a problem intrinsically linked to substance decriminalization, and might even be a benefit of decentralized government. Delaware's lax incorporation laws, for instance, encourage people to do business there, which benefits the state.
There was a very noticeable influx of homeless people in Denver immediately following marijuana legalization (or at least homeless-looking people hanging out on the street).
I use the term "undesirable" somewhat ironically, because I also don't think arresting people who have nowhere else to sleep makes any sense, but it's the only remotely understandable problem I've heard complained about from people who were against legalization.
This could be an argument against all civic improvements. Let's continue to have a horrible, expensive mass transit - otherwise there will be an influx of homeless people.
Congrats, I'm very excited to see how this affects the greater movement.
As a former Santa Cruz resident of ~4 years at UCSC, do you think this will affect enforcement at the local level? Living there between 2010-2014, there didn't seem to be much drug enforcement by the police at all, at least not for possession.
Yeah, I don't think it'll change anyone's day to day life very significantly as enforcement is pretty lax already. It's more important in the sense that it's a step in the direction of legalization, which I think will have genuine society-changing effects. There will likely be a boom in psychedelic treatments for mental and physical health when they're legalized on a state level, and that can't happen till everyone's comfortable with them being decriminalized.
Looker just sold to Google for 2 billion and there is still an army of tent cities around town due to people falling through the economic cracks coupled with a city wide meth and heroin epidemic. How-do-we-fix-this ?
Okay, enough trolling. I sent you a real email.
Bye
> "Entheogenic plants offer many in our community a way out of the addictive pharmaceuticals known as opioids. People came forward at last night’s meeting telling of the beneficial effects of how these plants changed their lives."
that's an interesting take. could the opioid epidemic be tied directly to psychedelic prohibition?
Are you arguing that dumb people _today_ can't eat mushrooms and drive? That being decriminalized will mean people will suddenly think it's okay to drive under the influence? That decriminalizing it will make a lot more people take mushrooms, thus increasing the number of people dumb enough to drive under the influence of them?
You can be impaired by all sorts of other, legal drugs today. Is there an epidemic of say, ambien impaired drivers? Oxy? Etc.
Regardless, even if there is a slight uptick (which I doubt will happen) in the number of mushroom-impaired drivers, I think we're still much better off as a society than imprisoning people who use them responsibly.
The prevalence of this is way higher than people driving while on hallucinogens. But feeling the steering wheel melt in your hands and the brake pedal extend through the floor can be a bit disconcerting.
It wouldn't surprise me if increasing shroom popularity decreased overall alcohol consumption and also increased people's concern for the safety of others, both contributing to reduced DWI in general.
I always wonder what unintended consequences measures like this will have. (I am not opposed to it)
I remember a long time ago Montana fought the 55 mph (and later higher ones) imposed by federal pressure. Their laws favored "reasonable and prudent" over absolute limits. (How wonderful to choose personal responsibility)
Then out-of-state drivers from car clubs started driving to Montana and doing high-speed drives across the state.
Maybe that was why Montana enacted actual limits and fines later on.
>Maybe that was why Montana enacted actual limits and fines later on.
No one in Montana cared. 'reasonable and prudent' was struck down due to a simple court case where a defendant appealed his reckless driving conviction because he thought the law was too vague.
To quote Gene Hunt from Life on Mars: "Drugs eh, what's the point? They make you talk funny, they make you walk funny, they make you see things that aren't there. My nan got all that for free when she had a stroke."
In all seriousness, I think people who use drugs like this have something missing in their life. Instead of getting hopped up on mushrooms, why not look at your life and work out what you are using mushrooms as a subsitute for.
Okay, lets say you're right. What does that imply about all the other things people do? Why are you watching movies - what is that a substitute for? Why are you exercising so much - what do you have to hide from yourself?
Given that you could (and should) ask these questions legitimately, why focus on recreational psychadelics? I think the answer is that you've internalized a particular cultural story about drugs, and you probably have Nancy Reagan to thank for that.
Being against mushrooms seems particularly odd, since every human being on the planet involuntarily falls unconscious and hallucinates for hours every single night, including you. In the hierarchy of damaging escapist behavior, it's pretty low I think (far lower certainly than say, Facebook or Twitter usage).
There is some truth in the Buddhist truth of "Dukkha" (that life is suffering).
Most of us are simply seeking ways to enjoy the ride and have a meaningful existence while we're here. Some people try mind-altering substances in small doses to explore different states of existence, cope with pain, celebrate, meditate, etc.
We all do things to numb our pain don't we? Medication, activities, work, family, hobbies, art, music, whatever.
I believe legalizing psychedelics will give us a chance to better study and understand what precautions we need to give to people curious.
I disagree with that "life is suffering, so lets do whatever we want".
Also I have no pain (luckily) in my life. I've never had other than when family members died. And I enjoy every day without doing drugs, alcohol or something like that.
In my opinion (and I am aware this is harsh) most of the problems people claim they have are pure nonsense and incredibly trivial. They want to blow them out of proportion so they can add some meaning to their life. It's like trying to deal with boredom in the most destructive way imaginable.
In my mind, the only non-trivial problems are generally health issues (death of a loved one etc.)
What kind of pain do you have that you need mind-altering substances?
We are at the height of our civilizations, we have billions of things to do and billions of hobbies to choose from and research, and explore and.. I don't know what else. We live better than ever, and better than kings used to live.
I can't understand how someone that is healthy, has money to live life somewhat comfortably needs to do these drugs to survive.
It’s true WRT to most drugs eg coffee, alcohol, marijuana etc. But a mushroom experience is something really special which can help you love yourself and accept yourself more, plus you do t really want to do it frequently.
It's mind-boggling to me how things are changing. In my surroundings, I am a tiny minority that never does drugs, smokes or drinks alcohol. Nearly 100% of people do that and if you don't do that, you are the weird one. Same thing goes for eating crap food. I eat clean (got 8 pack etc.) and that's another thing that changed.
I can't claim that I know the exact reasons why people insist on this, but to me it looks like deeply unhappy people trying to find quick happiness in drugs or alcohol. But I have yet to meet a single person that is truly happy (and isn't faking it on Instagram posting "life is good!111" pictures) that is fat/out of shape or does drugs. Not a single one. When I was younger, I just couldn't tell, until I started getting closer to people and see how unhappy they really are. You can't see that on the surface.
