6 ms·

Mushrooms can be extremely introspective, I would imagine this could easily lead people to re-evalute their life choices in a more permanent manner than normal.

allegory 12y ago
Or in a friend of mine, trigger latent schizophrenia, ruin his degree, lose his girlfriend, flatshare and end up living in the back of his car for 3 years. YMMV. I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use. That goes for a fair number of prescription drugs as well for reference.
- dleibovic 12y ago
  Would you mind explaining a bit more? This is really interesting to me.
  - allegory 12y ago
    Well he decided to take mushrooms one day due to peer pressure. Unfortunately he didn't know that he had a few problems that hadn't manifested themselves yet. The mushrooms pushed him over the edge and within a couple of days he became increasingly violent and had random personality changes. This was merely after one single session. Consequentially the chain of events is pretty obvious but ultimately everyone kicked him out, especially his girlfriend who couldn't cope with him kicking the shit out of her randomly and then being completely normal 20 seconds later. Eventually they managed to help him get control over it with a cocktail of drugs but he's not the same now. The drugs they give him take away most of his good traits as well as the bad ones. A shell of a human for the sake of one mistake. Not saying the problems may never have manifested themselves at all but the sudden change was unbelievable. Being 100% honest, I did some experimentation back in my student days and was damn lucky. Now in my late 30s, people who stayed with it aren't the same anymore. It's destroyed them entirely. I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late. One of my friends got a first in his degree (electrical engineering) but is so fucked up now from just smoking pot that he can't even hold down a job stacking shelves in Tesco. All I see is self-destruction and it makes me very sad and angry. Edit: I expect downvotes as you can't have rational discussion with the pro-drugs crowd on the Internet. I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise. Even the fact I have to suffix the post with this shows the sad state of affairs. Edit: 3 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd.
    - EdwardDiego 12y ago
      > I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise. > Edit: 2 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd. Or the downvotes could relate to your unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than your own.
    - phaer 12y ago
      You write about having a rational discussion but all you come up with are some non-representative anecdotes and the "argument" of "you'll understand when you are my age". Does that make sense to you? > . I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late. Okay, I'm gonna be that 25-year old: It seems to depend on the dosage, like almost any substance use. It's fine to smoke some hash every two weeks or maybe even a bit every evening, but if your friend is one of those who spend most of their day doing nothing besides smoking pot, then of course that destroys you just like drinking beer for the whole day.
    - wj 12y ago
      You write that "he had a few problems that hadn't manifested themselves yet". It sounds like he would have eventually reached the same behavior pattern even had he not had that experience with mushrooms. Still, sad to hear.
      - allegory 12y ago
        He may not have. Most psych issues have a trigger i.e an emotional or stress experience. Something that violently changes your brain chemistry has the same effect.
        wildgift 12y ago
        As I understand it, things like schizophrenia are primarily hereditary, and the trauma pushes you over the edge. So, people with a family history of schizophrenia or related conditions shouldn't do these drugs.
    - 12y ago
- xj9 12y ago
  I think people should be allowed to use drugs. However, I agree that its a coin toss. People should make careful decisions about what kinds of substances they choose to consume. Drug use is not always a safe hobby, maybe not ever.
  - allegory 12y ago
    If drug use affects someone else, then it should not be allowed. It invariable always affects someone else either through taking a slice of healthcare or psychiatric side effects. The whole mantra of "do unto others..." (the golden rule) goes out of the window the moment you start taking drugs. We all have a social responsibility if we like it or not and taking drugs is not responsible in any way. (neither is drinking, smoking etc but that's another debate)
    - jMyles 12y ago
      Why is it "another" debate? Alcohol and nicotine (assuming that by "smoking" you meant tobacco consumption) are both drugs. It's the same discussion.
      - beedogs 12y ago
        He's intimated in other comments in this thread that he'd like to ban alcohol and smoking, as well. I don't think we're dealing with a particularly rational person, and his replies have gone from mere rants to provocation and abuse.
    - Taek 12y ago
      Depends on how it affects someone else. Lets say I'm fed up with my life and decide I want to drop out of Stanford and go live in the wild on my own, doing my own hunting, and at large leaving society. This decision is going to greatly affect my parents, my close friends, and (if I have any) my kids. Should it be illegal though? Everything we do affects other people. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, but drugs are not much different from other major life decisions. Deciding to climb Mount Everest is dangerous; you've got a high probability of dying. Deciding to repeat this every year is exceedingly dangerous, experience won't protect you from many of the things that kill climbers. Should mountain climbing be illegal for people who have friends and family/dependents? There are responsible approaches to drug use, and how it affects me and my ability to be a person should not be your primary concern. If it makes me commit crimes, you now have a case, but until I've committed crimes, my life is my own, and the fact that my life decisions impact my friends does not mean that I do not have control over what those decisions are. Social responsibility is a construct that should be enforced socially (IE my wife pressuring to leave me and take the kids if I keep mountain climbing), not legally.
- danieldk 12y ago
  This is exactly the reason why it should be legalized. To allow for careful monitoring and warn risk groups. It's not hard to get such stuff anyway, so why not do it in a controlled fashion.
  - allegory 12y ago
    Hell no. Legalize nothing. Allow research but nothing more. My wife had to quit her job as a psychiatric nurse because of the violence from drug addicts. She was punched in the face five times by someone who wanted his methadone. Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized. I'm in the UK as well. The last thing we need is more health expenditure on this. Edit: 1 downvote from the pro-drugs crowd. Edit: seeing as HN has restricted by posting rate... He wasn't in the hospital because he needed methadone. He was in the hospital because his drug problem had lead to him passing out in the street, flies had laid eggs in his legs and maggots were crawling out of them and he was going to die from infection. My wife was trying to help him. The only reason that he wanted methadone is because they won't give him the real stuff in the hospital, which he could get his hands on without any trouble outside the doors so availability is not a problem. Another edit: work in a psych ward. 95% of people in there are violent addicts of various substances. This is not a coincidence.
    - EdwardDiego 12y ago
      > She was punched in the face five times by someone who wanted his methadone. > Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized. Well, presumably he wouldn't have needed methadone, because the drug he was addicted to would've been available for a reasonable price at a known potency.
    - drewblaisdell 12y ago
      I don't eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, but I downvoted because you countered someone saying that they should be legalized with an anecdote about your wife encountering a violent opiate addict. Conversations like this require clarity.
      - 12y ago
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Had a relative that was given intravenous penicillin by a GP and it almost killed her. Knew a guy once that almost died by bee stings. Had a friend in school who started smoking pot at age 12 and it destroyed his life. Life is about risk, and everything we ingest has the risk to do terrible things to us. You can die from too much water. So the question isn't whether things or good or bad, rather who gets to assess the risk and what tools do they use? Would I want my 16-year-old assessing the risk of magic mushrooms? Hell no. Would I want my drug addicted 35-year-old cousin? Yeah, probably. So the real question is who gets to decide. And why. I'm completely comfortable with some kind of psyilocybin addiction treatment coordinated (but not approved by) a GP or LCSW. I also would rather not flip the coin on drug use, including a fair number of prescription drugs. But as a voter I remain convinced of my right to change my mind and not have others make that choice for me. The problem we're seeing now, that is only just getting started to be addressed, is that vast numbers of chemicals have been off-limits for even scientific exploration of benefits. That means nobody can assess the risk -- of things that might have great benefit to mankind. That's whacked.
  - allegory 12y ago
    The thing is that health expenditure and legalisation are proportionally tied. Thou who bites off the latter, increases the former in psychiatric and general healthcare. And that's not fair on everyone else. So perhaps you should forfeit your right to free healthcare when you make that choice? (I speak with respect to the NHS in the UK). For ref, I'm allergic to penicillin as well. Fortunately because we have research budgets, we have other antibiotics. Perhaps expenditure on drug related problems (crime, psych, healthcare) should be diverted into that?
    - drewblaisdell 12y ago
      > Thou who bites off the latter, increases the former in psychiatric and general healthcare. Do you have data on the overall cost of legalization/decriminalization? Surely the decrease in the cost of incarcerating drug offenders is significant.
    - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  "I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use." So, you like to make decisions for yourself do you? That's interesting because you seem to want to take away everyone else's capacity for making this same decision, by keeping all drugs illegal. Maybe we should make Penicillin illegal next because my mum is allergic to it.
  - allegory 12y ago
    I can't make every decision for myself, as it's not possible unless we go back to caves. So I contract some out to society which has experts to do the job for me to some degree. They know which side of the road is best to drive on and they know (because they fund research on the matter) what things fuck up a society. Drugs is one. And yes I'm quite happy for this decision to be made for people. The allergic to penicillin is a stupid comment. I'm allergic too but thanks to public funding and study, there are alternatives. If we had to put public health funding into addiction related problems, perhaps there wouldn't... Also when drugs are legalised, what is to stop a pharmaceutical company trying to provide a superior experience with addiction so you come back (nicotine v2)? where does the ethical line lie? Right at the start.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Penicillin is a bad example to use because it is controlled in many countries and places where it isn't are having problems which will cause severe trouble world wide.
Alex3917 12y ago
The key mediating variable here was whether people had a mystical experience, so this doesn't look like it was necessarily related to the introspectiveness of the experience; that would happen at much lower doses, and it would happen to everyone regardless of whether or not they had a mystical experience.
dan_bk 12y ago
> this could easily lead people to re-evalute their life choices in a more permanent manner than normal What if more people would realize that they're constantly being controlled by fear created by commercial and governmental interests? This loss of power probably contributes to the fact that such substances are mostly banned.
- kordless 12y ago
  What if was simply a choice to face your (own) fears, and the 'loss of power' issue you mention is simply opportunists taking opportunity? Cognitive dissonance in those who make laws banning substances is more likely to be at cause here for the banning of substances. I don't want to believe people want to keep others from their own choices, but I also know they exist.
- Taek 12y ago
  I think there's some validity to that. During the Vietnam War, LSD was associated with the same groups of people that were trying to stop the US from being involved, something that was pretty annoying to American military interests. While do think that that's part of the reason LSD got banned, I don't think that really contributes to why it's still banned. I've been on the anarchist side of things for a lot longer than I've been doing psychedelics, but certainly on psychedelics you are more aware of the things constraining you. I remember being in a convenience store on 300ug of LSD, and seeing rows and rows of products. And my mind would look at a box of food and think "wow! that food says it's healthy for my family - I want to buy it", and looking at the next box of food and thinking "wow! this reduces heart risk - I want to buy it", and then being able to also take a step back and realize that this was all processed food and utter garbage, yet in my vulnerable state I was completely being manipulated by the branding. And I was horrified that this was considered a 'normal' way to shop. Misleading information (even if technically true) was being thrown at me left and right.

allegory 12y ago

Or in a friend of mine, trigger latent schizophrenia, ruin his degree, lose his girlfriend, flatshare and end up living in the back of his car for 3 years. YMMV. I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use. That goes for a fair number of prescription drugs as well for reference.

dleibovic 12y ago
Would you mind explaining a bit more? This is really interesting to me.
- allegory 12y ago
  Well he decided to take mushrooms one day due to peer pressure. Unfortunately he didn't know that he had a few problems that hadn't manifested themselves yet. The mushrooms pushed him over the edge and within a couple of days he became increasingly violent and had random personality changes. This was merely after one single session. Consequentially the chain of events is pretty obvious but ultimately everyone kicked him out, especially his girlfriend who couldn't cope with him kicking the shit out of her randomly and then being completely normal 20 seconds later. Eventually they managed to help him get control over it with a cocktail of drugs but he's not the same now. The drugs they give him take away most of his good traits as well as the bad ones. A shell of a human for the sake of one mistake. Not saying the problems may never have manifested themselves at all but the sudden change was unbelievable. Being 100% honest, I did some experimentation back in my student days and was damn lucky. Now in my late 30s, people who stayed with it aren't the same anymore. It's destroyed them entirely. I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late. One of my friends got a first in his degree (electrical engineering) but is so fucked up now from just smoking pot that he can't even hold down a job stacking shelves in Tesco. All I see is self-destruction and it makes me very sad and angry. Edit: I expect downvotes as you can't have rational discussion with the pro-drugs crowd on the Internet. I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise. Even the fact I have to suffix the post with this shows the sad state of affairs. Edit: 3 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    > I'm not interested in your opinion; experience says the opposite and your lack of experience says otherwise. > Edit: 2 downvotes from the pro drugs crowd. Or the downvotes could relate to your unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than your own.
  - phaer 12y ago
    You write about having a rational discussion but all you come up with are some non-representative anecdotes and the "argument" of "you'll understand when you are my age". Does that make sense to you? > . I'm sure I'll get some 20-year old jump in now and say that smoking hash is fine but it's not - you won't know it until you're that fried person in your 30's and it's too late. Okay, I'm gonna be that 25-year old: It seems to depend on the dosage, like almost any substance use. It's fine to smoke some hash every two weeks or maybe even a bit every evening, but if your friend is one of those who spend most of their day doing nothing besides smoking pot, then of course that destroys you just like drinking beer for the whole day.
  - wj 12y ago
    You write that "he had a few problems that hadn't manifested themselves yet". It sounds like he would have eventually reached the same behavior pattern even had he not had that experience with mushrooms. Still, sad to hear.
    - allegory 12y ago
      He may not have. Most psych issues have a trigger i.e an emotional or stress experience. Something that violently changes your brain chemistry has the same effect.
      - wildgift 12y ago
        As I understand it, things like schizophrenia are primarily hereditary, and the trauma pushes you over the edge. So, people with a family history of schizophrenia or related conditions shouldn't do these drugs.
  - 12y ago
xj9 12y ago
I think people should be allowed to use drugs. However, I agree that its a coin toss. People should make careful decisions about what kinds of substances they choose to consume. Drug use is not always a safe hobby, maybe not ever.
- allegory 12y ago
  If drug use affects someone else, then it should not be allowed. It invariable always affects someone else either through taking a slice of healthcare or psychiatric side effects. The whole mantra of "do unto others..." (the golden rule) goes out of the window the moment you start taking drugs. We all have a social responsibility if we like it or not and taking drugs is not responsible in any way. (neither is drinking, smoking etc but that's another debate)
  - jMyles 12y ago
    Why is it "another" debate? Alcohol and nicotine (assuming that by "smoking" you meant tobacco consumption) are both drugs. It's the same discussion.
    - beedogs 12y ago
      He's intimated in other comments in this thread that he'd like to ban alcohol and smoking, as well. I don't think we're dealing with a particularly rational person, and his replies have gone from mere rants to provocation and abuse.
  - Taek 12y ago
    Depends on how it affects someone else. Lets say I'm fed up with my life and decide I want to drop out of Stanford and go live in the wild on my own, doing my own hunting, and at large leaving society. This decision is going to greatly affect my parents, my close friends, and (if I have any) my kids. Should it be illegal though? Everything we do affects other people. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, but drugs are not much different from other major life decisions. Deciding to climb Mount Everest is dangerous; you've got a high probability of dying. Deciding to repeat this every year is exceedingly dangerous, experience won't protect you from many of the things that kill climbers. Should mountain climbing be illegal for people who have friends and family/dependents? There are responsible approaches to drug use, and how it affects me and my ability to be a person should not be your primary concern. If it makes me commit crimes, you now have a case, but until I've committed crimes, my life is my own, and the fact that my life decisions impact my friends does not mean that I do not have control over what those decisions are. Social responsibility is a construct that should be enforced socially (IE my wife pressuring to leave me and take the kids if I keep mountain climbing), not legally.
danieldk 12y ago
This is exactly the reason why it should be legalized. To allow for careful monitoring and warn risk groups. It's not hard to get such stuff anyway, so why not do it in a controlled fashion.
- allegory 12y ago
  Hell no. Legalize nothing. Allow research but nothing more. My wife had to quit her job as a psychiatric nurse because of the violence from drug addicts. She was punched in the face five times by someone who wanted his methadone. Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized. I'm in the UK as well. The last thing we need is more health expenditure on this. Edit: 1 downvote from the pro-drugs crowd. Edit: seeing as HN has restricted by posting rate... He wasn't in the hospital because he needed methadone. He was in the hospital because his drug problem had lead to him passing out in the street, flies had laid eggs in his legs and maggots were crawling out of them and he was going to die from infection. My wife was trying to help him. The only reason that he wanted methadone is because they won't give him the real stuff in the hospital, which he could get his hands on without any trouble outside the doors so availability is not a problem. Another edit: work in a psych ward. 95% of people in there are violent addicts of various substances. This is not a coincidence.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    > She was punched in the face five times by someone who wanted his methadone. > Go figure where we'll be if it gets legalized. Well, presumably he wouldn't have needed methadone, because the drug he was addicted to would've been available for a reasonable price at a known potency.
  - drewblaisdell 12y ago
    I don't eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, but I downvoted because you countered someone saying that they should be legalized with an anecdote about your wife encountering a violent opiate addict. Conversations like this require clarity.
    - 12y ago
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Had a relative that was given intravenous penicillin by a GP and it almost killed her. Knew a guy once that almost died by bee stings. Had a friend in school who started smoking pot at age 12 and it destroyed his life. Life is about risk, and everything we ingest has the risk to do terrible things to us. You can die from too much water. So the question isn't whether things or good or bad, rather who gets to assess the risk and what tools do they use? Would I want my 16-year-old assessing the risk of magic mushrooms? Hell no. Would I want my drug addicted 35-year-old cousin? Yeah, probably. So the real question is who gets to decide. And why. I'm completely comfortable with some kind of psyilocybin addiction treatment coordinated (but not approved by) a GP or LCSW. I also would rather not flip the coin on drug use, including a fair number of prescription drugs. But as a voter I remain convinced of my right to change my mind and not have others make that choice for me. The problem we're seeing now, that is only just getting started to be addressed, is that vast numbers of chemicals have been off-limits for even scientific exploration of benefits. That means nobody can assess the risk -- of things that might have great benefit to mankind. That's whacked.
- allegory 12y ago
  The thing is that health expenditure and legalisation are proportionally tied. Thou who bites off the latter, increases the former in psychiatric and general healthcare. And that's not fair on everyone else. So perhaps you should forfeit your right to free healthcare when you make that choice? (I speak with respect to the NHS in the UK). For ref, I'm allergic to penicillin as well. Fortunately because we have research budgets, we have other antibiotics. Perhaps expenditure on drug related problems (crime, psych, healthcare) should be diverted into that?
  - drewblaisdell 12y ago
    > Thou who bites off the latter, increases the former in psychiatric and general healthcare. Do you have data on the overall cost of legalization/decriminalization? Surely the decrease in the cost of incarcerating drug offenders is significant.
  - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
WorldWideWayne 12y ago
"I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use." So, you like to make decisions for yourself do you? That's interesting because you seem to want to take away everyone else's capacity for making this same decision, by keeping all drugs illegal. Maybe we should make Penicillin illegal next because my mum is allergic to it.
- allegory 12y ago
  I can't make every decision for myself, as it's not possible unless we go back to caves. So I contract some out to society which has experts to do the job for me to some degree. They know which side of the road is best to drive on and they know (because they fund research on the matter) what things fuck up a society. Drugs is one. And yes I'm quite happy for this decision to be made for people. The allergic to penicillin is a stupid comment. I'm allergic too but thanks to public funding and study, there are alternatives. If we had to put public health funding into addiction related problems, perhaps there wouldn't... Also when drugs are legalised, what is to stop a pharmaceutical company trying to provide a superior experience with addiction so you come back (nicotine v2)? where does the ethical line lie? Right at the start.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Penicillin is a bad example to use because it is controlled in many countries and places where it isn't are having problems which will cause severe trouble world wide.

Alex3917 12y ago

The key mediating variable here was whether people had a mystical experience, so this doesn't look like it was necessarily related to the introspectiveness of the experience; that would happen at much lower doses, and it would happen to everyone regardless of whether or not they had a mystical experience.

dan_bk 12y ago

> this could easily lead people to re-evalute their life choices in a more permanent manner than normal What if more people would realize that they're constantly being controlled by fear created by commercial and governmental interests? This loss of power probably contributes to the fact that such substances are mostly banned.

kordless 12y ago
What if was simply a choice to face your (own) fears, and the 'loss of power' issue you mention is simply opportunists taking opportunity? Cognitive dissonance in those who make laws banning substances is more likely to be at cause here for the banning of substances. I don't want to believe people want to keep others from their own choices, but I also know they exist.
Taek 12y ago
I think there's some validity to that. During the Vietnam War, LSD was associated with the same groups of people that were trying to stop the US from being involved, something that was pretty annoying to American military interests. While do think that that's part of the reason LSD got banned, I don't think that really contributes to why it's still banned. I've been on the anarchist side of things for a lot longer than I've been doing psychedelics, but certainly on psychedelics you are more aware of the things constraining you. I remember being in a convenience store on 300ug of LSD, and seeing rows and rows of products. And my mind would look at a box of food and think "wow! that food says it's healthy for my family - I want to buy it", and looking at the next box of food and thinking "wow! this reduces heart risk - I want to buy it", and then being able to also take a step back and realize that this was all processed food and utter garbage, yet in my vulnerable state I was completely being manipulated by the branding. And I was horrified that this was considered a 'normal' way to shop. Misleading information (even if technically true) was being thrown at me left and right.