The proof’s in the pudding.
Your ‘just because’ counts for naught with me; tradition be damned.
Like all of our culture’s tightarsed, straightlaced heritage…
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I get what you’re saying, but let’s make sure we blame the right people- they didn’t ruin it, the banhammer-happy pants wetters did. If our culture had a shred of respect for personal liberty and didn’t run crying to mommy at the prospect of someone else doing something that doesn’t affect them, it wouldn’t matter.
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I’m going to call bullshit on this 2010s idea that everyone has to “stay in their own lane.” Culture – especially a multicultural society-- does not, and HAS NOT ever worked like that. We can pick literally anything and it’s syncretic. Cuisine. Music. Religion. Language. Fashion. Everything. Nothing is pure.
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A really important clarification is required here: we’re talking about reversible MAOIs. The MAOIs occurring in plants like Syrian rue and rhodiola have a low, reversible binding affinity. Pharmaceutical MAOIs—with the sole exception of moclobemide—are irreversibly binding. Using any hallucinogenic tryptamine while on an irreversible MAOI (phenelzine, tranylcypromine, isocarboxazid) will land you in ER, assuming you make it there.
@Kimmo, I know you’re not talking about pharma MAOIs, I just wanted to clarify the matter for the sake of public safety. Some people don’t always read carefully.
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I wonder if they’d be so keen for it if they knew how much their pushers despise them.
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Answer the call, get the message, hang up the phone.
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That probably explains why anybody worth talking to on a phone is only worth talking to once!
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I think we’re agreeing. I wasn’t being sarcastic.
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LSD began in the lab and was It was successfully used to cure schizophrenia. It moved from a medical treatment to a party drug and then it was taken away from the medical community.
Here is your citation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide
The public use of LSD by partiers is why in 1968 we stopped all legitimate research in to this life saving drug. But yeah, you go have your parties and write about them man… what’s the worst that can happen?
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Since we live in this culture, we are at least partially responsible for behaving as if we live in this culture. Turning a medical cure for mental illness in to a party drug? Sure, fine… have fun. Make it a public issue and the public will react. Behaving as if this is completely the fault of the pants wetters is simply an excuse to behave in an irresponsible manner while blaming others for the entirely predictable fallout from those actions.
If there isn’t anything wrong with an individual using it, then why should it be secret from the public? Isn’t whether or not to use it still ultimately a personal choice?
That is certainly debatable, and does not even reflect the consensus of researchers. Research and therapy have different goals. When a substance has deeply subjective effects, it is hard to perform research under the clinical conditions required which will elucidate the effects for non-clinical therapeutic conditions. The hospital or laboratory setting seems fairly well-known to be an obstacle. Also, medical supervision is a non-issue with most popular psychedelics (such as Psilocybin, LSD, DMT) which have a minimal body load, with use of MAOIs being an exception. And even there, physicians commonly prescribe strong MAOIs which can easily be fatal if misused, they are not used only under close supervision, so it is not clear to me why these safer MAOIs should be an exception.
Why shouldn’t people be able to do something from which they might get hurt? Hardly anybody has been hurt by using Ayahuasca. Is it really more likely to result in participant being hurt than skydiving, sexual intercourse, or skateboarding?
Not taken seriously by whom? The reason why these substances are associated with “spiritual” (literally - breathing) stuff is because they are used as sacraments. How do they suddenly cease to be sacraments just because they prove to be useful? That was the whole point! The prohibition of psychedelics has not been a medical problem, but rather a political one. Ironically, freedom of religion in the Americas has generally been practised only for Eastern religions, while indigenous ones have been systematically and deliberately oppressed. You can often find the religious and ethnocentric bias clearly printed out as these things are legislated.
My experience is that what you are describing is not readily applicable to the various “shamanic” and other traditions of the Americas, which work more by directly confronting the content of the subconscious without conditioning people to a specific doctrine.
Isn’t that contradictory? How would people be informed when you started your post by saying that such things should not be brought to the public’s attention? I agree that people should always make decisions from an informed position. But I’d say that you have not clearly outlined what seems to be hindering people from making informed decisions with regards to psychedelics. As for supervision, why should those with less experience in this area be the ones who decide what constitutes adequate supervision?
The traditions are that these things are taken under supervision at special times and places as needed. Which sounds like what you are advocating, except that you are insisting that only a Western paradigm is legitimate rather than an American one.
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People should absolutely be able to consent to do something that will hurt them.
However, it should be informed consent.
If you don’t have the correct information, you cannot give informed consent.
I read it not as “You shouldn’t tell people about Ayahuasca” but “You shouldn’t advocate that people use this thing unless you can give enough information so that the consent will be informed consent, and there hasn’t been enough study to provide that amount of information yet.”
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You really should look in to the LSD hearings. Your arguments sound just like the people defending LSD use in the 60’s. Your tactic has been tried and now LSD is schedule 1. If you want congress and the DEA interested in your sacrament, just keep doing what you are doing.
Hardly anyone… you have to know why thats a problem…
Read this snippet. I think it will help you see what happens when a drug subculture goes mainstream
Compare
casual LSD users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug’s powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness.
with
SSDD
Right, because medical problems are approached scientifically while political ones are approached emotionally and this is why you need to not scare the norms.
I agree.
This sounds ideal, but is problematic because it is still the responsibility of that individual to do their homework, and to discern what is the best available information. Correct implies consensus - even if there is objective consensus about how something works, there is no reason to expect a subjective consensus about its suitability to the prospective user.
Well, it is called here the “Ancient psychedelic Ayahuasca”, so claiming that nobody really knows anything about it can be interpreted as an ethnocentric bias. Is it surprising or irresponsible that people might advocate something which has been used in one form or another for centuries? There also seems to be a real double-standard with regards to evidence and legitimacy when sacraments are concerned, compared to other plants/foods. Is eating maca root or goji berries “abuse” if there is no “medically accepted” reason for ingesting it? Most people I know routinely ingest things based upon taste and tradition with little concern for their possible medical significance, and people don’t fuss about this.
Why should I, as an American, not be free to credit those who have used it for centuries as being more informed in comparison to the institutions of western medicine who readily admit to not knowing much about it? In either case, it is not as if the pharmacological action of the stuff is obscure.
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I have done. LSD is an exception because it is a recently synthesized compound which was only briefly researched and no tradition of use. Yet the same arguments were used against traditional substances such as psilocybin and DMT. It is not difficult to demonstrate that legislating sacraments is not in the DEA’s jurisdiction, and is unconstitutional. Of course I am not the first person to notice this, because it’s rather obvious. What is the substantiation of danger and abuse claimed by the DEA? I don’t want them to be interested in it, because it isn’t any of their business. Why should I credit their judgement of a substance with a long history of productive use which they admit ignorance of?
Much of the problem seems to be a cultural one, that unquestioningly labels a molecule which facilitates how your own consciousness works as “recreation”! That makes it sound like mere entertainment, when the tools are about as entertaining as using a microscope or telescope. And for all of your “party drug” concerns, an observatory telescope or electron microscope is about as easy to casually party with as a dose of DMT is. Nobody is doing keg stands or watching television on this stuff. Beyond a minimal dose, these things are counter-partying, because they require too much introspective attention and participation. They are tools, and suggesting that they need to be controlled because somebody might try partying with them misses the point of their use. It is horrific to imagine somebody being hurt because they want to juggle chainsaws, but this edge case doesn’t result in the criminalizing of those or other power tools.
What you think of as a “drug subculture” sounds pejorative to me. Again, you are going out of your way to insist that the use of these substances is abnormal. I don’t accept operating from that assumption. Why is classifying this as a drug (whatever that means) seen as the primary distinction of people’s whole culture? It’s a circular argument. “All use is abuse, because this is a drug, and any culture which uses it is therefore not a legitimate culture”. But this is what drug legislation hinges upon - blatantly ethnocentric/racist attacks upon the legitimacy of certain traditions by avowed outsiders who yet assert the right and duty to police others. Marijuana was largely criminalized upon the pretext that it is for brown people who if not regulated will soon be screwing your spouse in seedy jazz clubs (not hyperbole!). And many other American drugs were likewise criminalized mainly for not fitting into a Eurocentric worldview and Christian ethics. It so happens that I am neither European, nor Christian, so I find those to be neither relevant nor compelling arguments.
And if you read actual federal US documentations upon the dangers of LSD use, you will find that they had to make it all up. Vague hints that it “could possibly” cause neurological or chromosomal damage - despite a lack of any clinical evidence to this effect. To demonstrate how transparent the anti-LSD agenda was, there were FCC rules forbidding positive references to psychedelics in broadcast media well into the 1970s - long after they were aware that their professed dangers were factually incorrect.
Not entirely dissimilar, but I am not clear what your point is there.
I wish it was as simple as that, but it really isn’t. If medicine was strictly scientific, it would not need to be regulated. Regulation is a political process. The western medical establishment has been well aware of the relative safety of most psychedelics for many decades, but their prohibition in some circles has not had a medical basis. The DEA uses their lack of medical application as an excuse for a political agenda. I could just as easily say that eating grapes is abuse since nobody prescribed them to you. People don’t “just happen” to fear that psychedelics are unsafe, this scare has been purposefully pushed by feds and broadcast media for decades based upon no evidence. Your concern about whether people take these substances seriously is at its root an entirely political problem, the controversy has never been medical or pharmacological.
Yes, in the Americas, American drugs/plants/sacraments are as “mainstream” as anything else because this is the geography and culture we live in. If I wanted to worry about how they fit into European culture or Near-Eastern religion then maybe I would move to those places.
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Perhaps you misunderstand me, I have no problem with an adult doing whatever they choose with themselves, excepting harm to others of course. I’ve personally experimented with anything I could get my hands on. Some of those have become an important part of my life. I’m also pragmatic and know that nothing is new and nothing human is alien. Arguing that a culture is incorrectly viewing any aspect of life is academically interesting but fruitless without something to change that culture. My concern isn’t the use of a substance but rather what will happen to a potentially useful substance when it enters the public consciousness. We saw it with cannabis, LSD, and others with kratom being the most recent. The chemicals which are not banned are those which enter the public consciousness via the currently accepted model of scientific research.
Much good work has been done with DMT and the various native preparations but we risk squandering those efforts when we seek to popularise the use of them. This effect is especially apparent when the substance is also associated with spirituality and subculture which in this country are dangerous subjects. I think we should learn from the story of how we lost LSD and behave more responsibly by considering the likely outcome resulting from our need to proselytize.
Enjoy what nature and the world offers you. Explore and be made aware. But please, keep it out of the public discourse and let the research continue until it becomes generally available. No matter how correct your point of view or strong your argument, the machine we live in will turn its wheels. Let’s be careful not to let it crush something good.
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