Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/24/global-recreational-drug-surve.html
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The one thing that stands out as unusual in this graph is that men seek medical treatment more for synthetic cannabis. The rest sort of makes sense–that men broadly don’t like to seek medical treatment. Makes me wonder if there’s a physiological difference in the effects of said drugs? Or young men being inherently more risk takers, and buying OTC designer drugs of unknown content and origin?
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One thing about shrooms; yeah, mostly a kinder, gentler version of acid. But, if they decide to mess with your head, shrooms can mess with you far more than acid. Acid, at least has the nifty fail-safe of “When the big hand gets here, I’ll be OK”. Shrooms? When they are being playful?? I could NOT figure how my apartment went together; I was constantly surprised that any room was where it was. Topology went out the window. And then, me and my housemate went to our respective rooms, each one of us wondering who was going to listen to the others death rattle. Interesting, but acid NEVER went that far, and I’ve had good MIT window-pane.
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This.
The thing about shrooms is. . . I’ve seen people “overdose” on them, which is to say, a little too much means a bad trip. I’ve also noticed people get super emotional on them and cry and curl up into a fetal position in the corner.
I also would sometimes worry about the source of the shrooms-- I knew a guy who would just go out into a cow pasture looking for them, but I was never sure how good of a mycologist he was.
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Same experiences here. On acid, the worst that would happen would be my perceptions were so distorted that I had to just wait it out in bed, staring out the window, enjoying the kaleidoscope. One bad mushroom trip, trying to go downstairs, I shrunk by the size of each step, so I had to stay upstairs. Which was ok until I dropped my fingers. Sounds funny now, but it was so distressing!
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I’m assuming heroin’s not on the list because the point between ‘doesn’t want to talk to anyone in a uniform’ and ‘dead’ is pretty small.
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I think education has a lot to do with it. For sure drinkers are more prone to be stupid. You have to be paying more attention if you want to do psychedelics.
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Note the demographics of the survey takers.
90% white
65% employed
29% students
This provides a view of experiences of those who go online and take surveys about their drug use for fun. It does not so much reflect, e.g. those who complete surveys about their drug use in hostpital ERs, addiction treatment facilities, etc.
More respondents said they’d taken kratom, 2cb, salvia divinorum, or “novel benzodiazepines”, than heroin.
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Upon digging into the rest of the report, it looks like the percentage of survey respondents who self-report heroin use in the last year is too small to produce reliable stats with regards to emergency medical treatment. Lifetime reported heroin use (to say nothing of the last year) in this report is only 2.4%.
The fact that 4-fluoro-amphetamine makes the cut for their used in the last year chart, but heroin doesn’t tells me that drug nerds take this survey, but junkies don’t have time for it.
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"This is your brain on drugs: you won't even label your axes."
Spoiler: Y-axis is percentage of users who sought emergency treatment following the use of the drug in the last 12 months.
Also in their other chart the second safest group is NPS or Novel Psychoactive Substances group:
Seem like SWIM was right all along! S-A-F-E. So go wild you bitcoin torrenting, bonsai tree fertilizer smoking you!
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Is there any way we can stop using this term already? Asking for a friend…
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My kaleidoscope was the RBG pattern from an old cathode-ray(?) television tube. Practically filled the sky.
Wait - what about the infamous bad trip on acid? Intense open eyed visual hallucinations of terrifying things?
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Holy shit. I assumed this was at least in part from ER / medical statistics, but it is just online survey takers. Some other gems from their demographics data:
47% report going clubbing “at least every 3 months” (only half the participants answered this at all)
46% under 25 years old
25% over 35 years
42% have university degree or higher (plus the mostly disjoint 30% of full time students)
So basically this is about drug use by white clubbing students and recent college graduates. It doesn’t even tell you what happens to them in 10 years.
So this is basically worthless in terms of drug policy. It might be worth something to marketers.
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Obviously SWIY doesn’t understand OPSEC.
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Saw the Newsweek piece on this today - I probably would have skipped it, except for the puzzling fact that, though the article is all about Psilocybin, for some reason, it’s thumbnailed with a picture of an Amanita. Shit drives me batty… WTF Newsweek?
Wait, are you a cop? You have to tell me if you are.
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I have no experience in this area, but I do have a question. Are these mushrooms all cultivated? If not, is there a danger of misidentification in the wild? That would seem to be a factor in their safety.
The synthetic cannabinoids aren’t well researched, but the general theme of the findings so far is “nasty crap, best avoided”.
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