Mind Altering Drugs Thread - Therapy, Legality

[Sci-2]

Psychedelic Sovereignty - Graham Hancock

War on Drugs = War on Consciousness?

[Ulthosian Stark]

Yay this. Ive been writing papers and researching this stuff for a long long time. First time I wrote a research paper on hallucinogenic therapy my young hardcore catholic teacher was utterly convinced of their efficiency and effect.

And to be honest, Im not sure if I'd be alive if it wasn't for this stuff. I partly attribute it to ending my decade long depression from watching my father slowly die for 3 years. No joke.

I highly recommend the book Breaking Open the Head. The author goes through DMT ceremonies in south america, ibogaine rituals in Africa, gets this synthetic crap called DXT and gets haunted (yeah), goes to burning man, its awesome.

[Ulthosian Stark]

Ibogaine is comparable to a long salvia trip, its not very enjoyable and downright scary at times. I extracted it, did it, crossed the street and looked back and saw 6 copies of my self walking lol. It was a hell of a trip altogether.

Its used a lot to break addictions and such. It is sort of like an automatic bad trip though

[Sci-2]

As always, check out sites like Neurosoup for advice on safe usage.

Are psychedelics the next medical marijuana?

In March 2014, for the first time in over 40 years, a study of the therapeutic benefits of lysergic acid diethylamide — more commonly known as LSD — was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. It showed that LSD-assisted psychotherapy significantly reduced anxiety in individuals with "life-threatening diseases," including Parkinson's disease and breast cancer.

This study is part of a recent wave of clinical research on psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin — the psychoactive component of "magic mushrooms." Although they are illegal for the general public, researchers at some of our most reputable academic centers are securing government permission to study them as a powerful new drug therapy for a host of illnesses for which our current pharmacopeia does not always work, including post-traumatic stress disorder, cluster headaches and alcoholism.

It is worth revisiting how they were introduced to the general American populace and how they became classified as illegal "Schedule I" drugs, which are considered unusually risky and lacking in medical benefits. Why they were outlawed — and our long-held attitudes about them — have more to do with the culture wars of the 1960s and '70s than their medical harmfulness.

[Sci-2]

How Ibogaine Fights Stubborn Prescription Painkiller Addictions

While Sutton and a friend who also abused prescription opiates continually made plans to get clean, these plans never stuck. The friend mentioned an alternative addiction therapy he had heard called ibogaine, but they had no access to the underground treatment. When he was 25, Sutton checked into rehab. It was here that he met a fellow patient who told him about her experience with ibogaine.

“Obviously this person was in rehab, meaning that they had relapsed,” Sutton says, “but their testimonial was incredible.”

Weaver emphasizes that it is essential to have a group of facilitators for each patient, as treatments are long and demanding, often multi-day ordeals. “Not just for sleep relief,” she says, “but energetically, if everyone is together rooting for this person, it has a big impact.” Surrounded by facilitators, Sutton ingested gradually higher doses of ibogaine, administered via capsules, until a predetermined dose based on his weight was reached.

“The first thing I experienced was anxiety and a feeling of electricity going through my whole body. It felt like my heart was beating out of my chest, but they took my blood pressure and everything was in order.”

Sutton then descended into the journey. After taking his third and final capsule, he began losing his motor skills. “I couldn’t lift up my head and was very light sensitive. I noticed a buzzing sound, and it felt like someone had plugged me into an electrical socket. My vision became static, like a static television, when my eyes were shut. I became very nauseous and even more scared. I was starting to lose sensation in my body.”

At this point, however, this period of electricity and frantic thinking to a slowed to a visionary state.

“The vision aspect seemed like I was traveling through the corridors of my own brain. The whole time there was a voice saying, ‘It’s okay; we don’t care what you did. We love you. We’ve always loved you.’ It was very frightening because of the circumstances, but there was always something in the back of my head telling me it was okay, and to relax.

[Ulthosian Stark]

Psychedelics are starting to get the attention and recognition they deserve. I credit them with saving my life from a terrible depression in which I attempted suicide several times

[Sci-2]

Psychedelics are starting to get the attention and recognition they deserve. I credit them with saving my life from a terrible depression in which I attempted suicide several times

Hope you're feeling better now. I think there's going to be a definite paradigm shift regarding psychedelics and therapy.

The Multidisciplinary Associations of Psychedelic Discourse

I was fascinated with many of the substances, but what really attracted me to these gatherings was the variegated tapestry of their discourse: the stories, conversations, insights, rants, reports, visions, myths, data, and debates that made up the wild chatter of the scene. I encountered a powerful paradox: though personal encounters with psychedelics are often characterized as ineffable--something that must be known through experience rather than words--these encounters nonetheless seemed to generate an enormous amount of text and talk.

Part of what makes psychedelic discourse so compelling is its kaleidoscopic diversity. A thorough assessment of the topic would ideally engage history, poetry, ethnobotany, religion, law, pharmacology, occultism, neuroscience, anthropology, cultural politics, mythology, literature, psychology, mysticism, and--crucially--first-person testimonies.

Many of the most significant and entertaining psychedelic texts are defined by such diversity--here I am thinking of the encyclopedic poetics of Dale Pendell's Pharmakopoeia series, or the magisterial scope of Stephan Beyer's Singing to the Plants, which, despite its scholarly sobriety, looks at ayahuasca through a dizzying array of lenses, including the author's own experience as an apprentice of mestizo shamans. This sort of multidisciplinarity is evident in the bookshelves of most entheophiles, in online repositories like Erowid, in the seminal texts of Jonathan Ott, and in the fascinating texture of psychedelic conferences, where cross-talk takes place between painters and botany nerds, skeptics and mystics, the underground and the overground.

I came away from the conference with a renewed sense of the importance of psychedelic heterotopia. Beyond the fun of meme-swapping with smart heads, conferences like Breaking Convention also serve as theaters for socially embodied ways of knowing and understanding the world--something that is rare in today's intensely fragmented and professionalized global society. Despite decades of critique, the official picture of reality remains one that violently severs the "subjective" world of vision, emotion, and mythopoetics "in here" from the "objective" world of naturalistic knowledge "out there". In addition, the objective pole of knowledge is chopped and balkanized into domains of expertise, jealously defended by turf guardians who are professionally obligated to demonize or ignore alternate modes of understanding and being in the world.

I believe that psychedelics, by their very nature, frustrate these supposedly clear divides between disciplines, especially as it relates to what Bruno Latour refers to as the "Great Divide" between nature and culture. After all, psychedelics link some of the most exalted, socially transformative, and infernally enigmatic zones of consciousness with material molecules that themselves need to be seen simultaneously as natural products, chemical agents, global commodities, and conversational allies with a point of view and a life of their own. By weaving "in-betwixt and in-between" so many perspectives, and especially by jerry-rigging "gentle bridges" between nature and culture, science and spirituality, psychedelics become a trans-disciplinary tutelage in integral and kaleidoscopic knowing and being. Think of it as the art of wearing many hats: the explorer's pith helmet, the PhD's tasseled black mortarboard, the bohemian's beret, the shaman's feathered headdress, the futurist's head-mounted display.

Indeed, one of the biggest fibs bandied about in discussions of the current research revival is the (often self-serving) claim that psychedelic science ground to a halt in the 1960s and is now "back". This is true only if you somehow believe that science needs the imprimatur of the state in order to actually be science.

What actually happened was that droves of individuals (with and quite often without academic pedigrees) pursued all manner of hard-nosed research, including ethnobotany, chemical analysis, novel synthesis, extraction methods, and therapeutic protocols. Many DIY researchers were driven to share their results as well, not only through underground publications, mail networks, computer bulletin boards, and friendships, but through formal and semi-formal gatherings devoted to open dialogue. Perhaps the most well known and influential of these smaller gatherings were the annual Entheobotany gatherings produced by the Botanical Preservation Corps. These seminars, held in the 1990s, mostly took place at a legendary hotel in Palenque, Mexico. Though Terence McKenna's eclectic and incandescent raps were a big draw, the Entheobotany seminars were, like the two recent Psychedelic Science conferences, largely devoted to psychopharmacological research--albeit with a more outlaw relationship to professionalism and a much greater love of plants.

[Ulthosian Stark]

Hope you're feeling better now. I think there's going to be a definite paradigm shift regarding psychedelics and therapy.

The Multidisciplinary Associations of Psychedelic Discourse

I love bumping this thread. For sure am feeling better! I still trip a few times a year (with whatever happens to come to me) to keep things in the right perspective because I tend to get tunnel vision on certain activities/situations that always ends up being detrimental to my life in some way.

Just great. They're just fucking great. (May be on a legal one now)

[Sci-2]

I love bumping this thread. For sure am feeling better! I still trip a few times a year (with whatever happens to come to me) to keep things in the right perspective because I tend to get tunnel vision on certain activities/situations that always ends up being detrimental to my life in some way.

Just great. They're just fucking great. (May be on a legal one now)

Good to hear. In case you need it, there are varied mental health resources linked to from my sig.

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Ayahuasca, the Unrivaled Healer

Just one night with ayahuasca can be life-changing. The kinds of psychological breakthroughs that people desperately hope their years of talk therapy will result in come into full bloom in just hours (although it can feel like an ever-expanding eternity).

Chris Kilham, who unshackled himself from years of bitter grief and anger, speaks to the unparalleled experience:

"True healing puts into orbit the body mind and spirit with the past the present and the future. And ayahuascas thoroughness is unrivaled. When you have a healing experience with ayahuasca, its not some cerebral thing that comes to mind and you mull it over and then it passes. Its a total integrated thing that happens in every part of your being and all of the vastness and integrated space around you ,and everything to which youre connected in your whole life."

[Summah]

The article is talking about serotonin transporters, not serotonin, so the list of foods is probably not applicable.

[Sci-2]

What's In My Baggie? [FULL DOCUMENTARY]

"What's In My Baggie?" is a documentary on the rise of misrepresented substances, as well as a critique of ineffective drug policy.

For more info, visit whatsinmybaggie.com

From the site:

According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, over 250 new drugs have been discovered since 2009.

There are so many different psychoactive drugs floating around that people don’t even realize the complex nature of the current situation.

To document our findings, we filmed substance test kit results at music festivals, as well as interviews with harm reduction organizations, law enforcement officials, and distributors of these illicit substances.

We quickly discovered that most of the time people were surprised to find that their bag of drugs was not what they paid for.

[Larry of the Lawn]

So true on the contents of many drugs. Some friends had test kits a music festival I attended last summer a and the amount of bunk E and Molly floating around was excessive but not surprising. I stick to things that can't be misrepresented these days, like licking toads.

[Sci-2]

Iboga and the roots of Self-Destruction

Today, heroin is more available than ever in the U.S., even though 75% percent of the world’s illicit opiate products originate from a nation that has been under U.S. military occupation for over a decade. Now, Afghanistan is seeing record poppy crops, up 36% from just 2012, while the U.S. government is spending more than $51 billion annually waging the global war on drugs. The U.S. already has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than any other nation, yet that does not appear to dissuade users, and heroin production and availability continue to increase.

Killing pain is big business, and addiction to FDA approved opiates and opioid pain killers has completely overturned the stereotypical image of the dope fiend, who is now just as likely to be a soccer mom. Pharmaceutical opiates are available legally and illegally from friends, doctors, pill mills, online shops and street dealers, and have become such a game changer in the increase of opiate abusers that the U.S. attorney general recently declared that prescription pain meds are the new gateway to heroin use.

Oxycodone, vicoden, codeine, percocet, morphine, fentanyl and more, take your pick, there are plenty of painkillers available today, and deaths resulting from opiate abuse are rising in many major cities. State and local governments are reacting to the crisis, and police departments across the nation are now equipping officers with the opiate anti-overdose drug naloxone. The governor of Massachusetts recently declared a public health emergency over opiates and granted emergency powers to block the prescribing and dispensing of the new pharmaceutical drug Zohydro, a super-potent painkiller now hitting the market.

Massachusetts is already being sued by Zogenix, the maker of Zohydro, so it appears that even an executive order can’t keep the pushers off the block.

“Heroin and opiate addictions are now claiming more lives in many U.S. neighborhoods than violent crime and car crashes.” [Press TV]

The pharmaceutical industry aggressively lobbies the government, and in 2013 alone, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the strategic effort to affect public policy. Substance abuse treatment is multi-billion dollar a year industry, and savvy investors like the infamous equity firm Bain Capital are betting on more growth in this sector of healthcare, buying up rehabilitation centers for their portfolios.

It is nearly impossible to kick opiates alone, and relapse rates for opiate abusers are extremely high. Typical rehab or detox may consist of a week to 30 days or more in an in-patient facility which provides monitoring, psychiatric care, counseling, support groups, and 12-step programs. To mitigate the physical withdrawals, most patients are given substitutes, switching from heroin and pills to the controlled pharmaceuticals methadone or suboxone, which can be shockingly more addictive and dangerous than heroin or painkillers.

“Methadone is a highly addictive synthetic opiate, more addictive than heroin and harder to withdraw from, but it survives the digestive system and so does not need to be injected… All of today’s addicts have been coming to the pharmacy for months, some for years. And that’s the problem.” [The Guardian]

“Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.” ― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

Of all the interventions available to opiate addicts, one is entirely unique in how it helps people to survive and conquer this demon; a visionary shamanic medicine from the rainforest of West Central Africa, iboga.

Iboga is a psychoactive plant medicine derived from the root bark of a small African shrub, tabernanthe iboga, and has been used for perhaps thousands of years as a shamanic medicine and healing sacrament for tribal Africans of the Bwiti tradition and Pygmy peoples. The bark of the roots is removed, shredded, then ingested in raw form, or an extract of the primary psychoactive alkaloid, ibogaine, can be produced. Discovered as an anti-addictive medicine and potential cure for heroin addiction by Howard Lotsof in 1962, when properly administered as part of a comprehensive opiate detox program, it interrupts chemical dependence, remarkably stopping withdrawal symptoms almost immediately.

Most importantly, though, iboga reveals and can heal the root causes of addiction by triggering an intensely profound spiritual journey that can uproot and overcome the psychological basis of compulsive behavior.

[Ulthosian Stark]

So true on the contents of many drugs. Some friends had test kits a music festival I attended last summer a and the amount of bunk E and Molly floating around was excessive but not surprising. I stick to things that can't be misrepresented these days, like licking toads.

Isn't it sad? I'm a tester and have seen the decline from the in it I molly craze in the early 2000s chemically.

5 or so years ago a cap of molly from a good source was pretty pure, now your lucky to find pure MDMA at all. Mephedrone (bath salts) is a common one fakely sold as molls, MDPP, MPA, Meth, cocaine, all the crazy research chems you can easily get online that are stimulants like Ethylone, PHP, Methopropamine etc can all be found under the name Molly on the street.

That's why you should either always test, or be REALLY good at looking for the signs of it being pure. Taste is best IMO, as different variables effect color and such, and still be pure or mostly pure MDMA has a very distinct taste.

The shit that scares me is the research psychedelics, at least with a molly cap it's a stimulant most of the time but someone giving you a blotter or a cap or gel or liquid of a psychedelic scares me without testing

There is shit that won't kick in for days, DAYS. So you might take a bunch thinking its weak acid or whatever. Then all the sudden 30 hours later your shot out of a cannon into trip land while working or some shit. The N-Bomes, Bromo Dragonfly, DALT, DXT, STP, 2C-T Fly, etc you want to avoid. Very powerful trips and not fun. Imagine a salvia/DMT/molly type deal and if you've done those things it sounds weird and horrid.

I read a book called Breaking Open the Head and the author had ordered DXT online. Smoked it alone at home (NYC apartment) over some weed as per usual with DMT and found himself in an alien bar. The bar was empty save a reptilian like barkeep that looked at him and said what are you doing here?

It faded into "evil" patterns and he was back, but he thought he "brought something back" with him and weird shit started happening in his place. So he called in some spiritual healer friend and they burnt sage and such and I guess it went away.

This wasn't fiction, this guy also went to south america for a real Ayahuasca ceremony, went to Africa for an Iboga ceremony, smoked DMT at some huge convention on proper Psychedelic use, the rest of the book was all normal shit (as far as normal can go whilst under such substances) but that stuck out at me

There is the notion that Psychedelics can give you peeks into different dimensions, there may be truth to this there may not be but with the lab made Super Psychadelics getting churned out we really might be able to

[orabella]

LSD only causes problems with those who have a family history of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Personally, the acid trips I've had have been some of the happiest moments of my life. I never understood the whole "bad trip" thing, but I have seen people affected by them.

If you're excessively self conscious I would not recommend hallucinogens.

That must be why, the few times I experimented, it was facking hell. I wondered why in the world anyone would find it fun. Of course, since I was a teen it took me 3 tries to realize it wasnt something I should be doing..ever.

[Sci-2]

Sanjay Gupta MD: Psychedelic medicine gets a closer look

Interesting...

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

So true on the contents of many drugs. Some friends had test kits a music festival I attended last summer a and the amount of bunk E and Molly floating around was excessive but not surprising. I stick to things that can't be misrepresented these days, like licking toads.

On that subject, I'm going to a music festival soon and I'm wondering how to get said kits and whether or not they're legal in Texas.

In other words, if I order a kit from Dancesafe, would that put me on any watchlists?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

http://www.vice.com/read/quit-smoking-with-lsd-876

An LSD Trip Helped Me Quit Smoking

[Sci-2]

http://www.vice.com/read/quit-smoking-with-lsd-876

An LSD Trip Helped Me Quit Smoking

Ah good stuff - I see some other Vice articles I missed on the healing power of psychedelics. Thanks!

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Since I don't know who reads these threads, I feel obligated to mention Neurosoup as a site for information about safe use.