Scientists need to get high
nautil.us
nautil.us
- Get Tor browser and find one of the various marketplaces, purchase small samples and send part of the sample to one of the various test labs that can confirm the quality
OR
- Find a community where people are likely to have some sort of experience with psychedelics, like self-improvement groups, hacker spaces or just visit raves
- Start talking with a person who could maybe possibly have done psychedelics at one point or another. Don't ask them outright about buying, but starts a conversation about your curiosity around psychedelics for self-help.
- If they reciprocate, you can at one point of the conversation ask them kindly if they happen to know anyone who can sell to you. If they say no, just move on with the conversation as to not make anything awkward for either of you
- Repeat until you find someone, you'll find someone for sure, in either of the groups mentioned before.
Clue: If they are a guy with long hair. Or if they are a gal they might have flowers in their hair
Change "long hair male" to "dreadlocks on a white male" and you'd have a point, but the majority of long-haired men I've known either wouldn't do drugs or are into non-psychedelics.
And having spent a lot of time in clubs/festivals/house parties around drug use, of the many many users and dealers of psychedelics I've met... I don't think I could narrow down a single "look" that's more, or less, likely than any other.
On the other hand, a) there is "a look" to facial expressions (not dissimilar to a weed "stoned" or amazed expression) that can be quite recognisable of somebody being under the influence - aided by things like super wide pupils and b) there are activities - such as being in a place where people are dancing to electronic music of some genre - where plenty of people use psychedelics and those faces can often be seen (though easily confused with expressions caused by other classes of drug).
Definitely always remember test kits are your friend.
The drugs will come naturally after that (if you want them to)
Then just ask.
Mind altering substances definitely give a new perspective on the problem.
LSD and other similar substances can offer an incredible insight to people who are equipped to handle it. Such substances create new pathways in your brain and increase neuroplasticity.
It's not the one-stop solution to everyone's problems and should NOT be treated as such (far from it!), but it does offer tremendous perspective and insight to those who know what they're getting into.
Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens.
I'm only aware of it happening a NOx trip in the 1800's
> Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens
So. You're afraid of them then. Otherwise you'd post some actual evidence.
Has worked every time for me.
I haven't met anyone who's seriously felt they'd "discovered" or solved anything serious while tripping. I know people who've left relationships or changed career paths, so as with nearly anything psychoactive, YMMV.
Lots of people claim to have solved a problem they have, and some of these solutions end up being forgotten, bad, or authentically and positively life-changing.
Hard to draw conclusions from this landscape (which is why scientists should be experimenting with them).
With some technical problems I have certainly felt that I have solved them and come out with nothing but undecipherable scribble at the end. Once or twice something useful in the afterglow, but much of it is lost (or was never real to begin with)
Did you actually feel that you had solved all major conflicts, or are you 1) parodying your own ambition of insight or 2) making the separate claim that “if the primary agents in the conflict could have the experience that I’m having, they maybe would not be so conflicted?”
(2) for example is a much, much more believable claim than “I solved all the problems” despite their superficial similarity.
I’m not really interested in what you believe, it’s clear you haven’t had psychedelic experiences, which is fine, but it’s a bit rich for you to be claiming what I could have experienced if you’ve never had your wetwear run that particular program. Psychedelic experiences are unbelievable by their very nature. At their worst (as was repeated elsewhere in the thread, and actually in the article as well) you are literally entering the state of a schizophrenic. It isn’t very nice.
And at its best you can think that you have deep insight into major world problems, the cause of conflicts and how to solve them.
In a more personal middle ground it can also be a highly fertile environment for self reflection and introspection with lasting benefits
Sometimes you had separate yourself pretty far from something to be able absorb and understand an issue, and LSD can cause that space.
I see the space, the separating, as the benefit. Gave new prospective.
Are you sure you're not confusing LSD with THC? What you're describing is well known as "stoner epiphanies"...
However, imho. altering the thought process through drugs and really introspecting on what changes and how that relates to the sober state can yield a LOT of valuable learnings.
I feel like I learned a lot about myself just by introspecting on the effects alcohol, THC, etc. had on me. Really gave me some insights on how associations are formed, what euphoria does to decision making and so on.
I use it once every month or so, and while I’m on it I did the following:
Built a triangular arbitrage DeFi trading system that made me 200k
Sped up a face recognition system to from 16,000faces a second to 1.2M faces a second
Created the first version of my nudged elastic band simulator for finding transition state energy
Learnt GPU shader coding and made my first real-time atomic force simulator
All of this while high on LSD, not having the idea and implementing later, but having the idea and then implementing while high,
I do a lot of coding while normal too, but LSD seems to remove all self doubt and makes me come up with creative solutions much much much faster, it’s not a simulation, I am objectively better while using it.
It has downsides too though, usually the day after I am more tired than usual and need a day to just rest, and it doesn't always work, sometimes while on it I just feel like chilling and reading, it's not something that can be forced
If you're around people you trust, in a controlled environment, you're not likely to develop schizophrenia.
If you just decide randomly to trip in an unknown environment with people you're not comfortable around, yeah, it's going to be a wild ride and you might not ever truly get off it even after the stuff wears off completely.
Things can go bad in any experience.
You can go zip lining and things can go bad. You can go through any experience and can be left with various degrees of physical and mental damage.
Does that mean we shouldn’t do anything?
I'm not saying you shouldn't do drugs. I'm saying that many of them require way more respect than most people realize they need to give them, and trying to downplay that is not good. I can tell you from personal experience that it's easy to get yourself and people you care about in dangerous places.
Certainly safer than your average road car in most circumstances.
Yeah...I'm going to need to see some numbers to believe that.
Sorry but this is the biggest load of garbage. You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues. It's like writing randomly to memory from ring 0 and hoping you don't irreversibly wreck your install.
Yes, but the question is: how likely are "trauma & psych issues"? How dangerous is the drug in comparison to going out and having six drinks over the course of the night, or (if you do LSD say once a year) a year's worth of drinking? Or, how about in comparison to living somewhere that means you need to drive to work every weekday?
-- My friend took drug X and he had an accident!
-- Set & setting?
In other words, we don't care about your friend and his accident, we're just trying to counter any suggestions that he had an accident because of drug X. It was his fault for choosing the wrong set & setting.
Which should tell you all you need to know about the "communities" that form around those substances. People ready to blame each other for whatever happens to them just in case their favourite drug gets a bad name. What a community.
I would bet that people who are predisposed to e.g. schizophrenia are, for the most part, going to experience some insult that makes it come on at some point before 30 years old. It's just a question of when, where, what, but it'll happen.
I bet the group of people who could develop schizophrenia were they to experience the right insult, but don't, is very small.
I’m happy to let people enjoy them but it is not something I can do. It does bother me when people say that they’re all harmless with no problems though. As with all things there are adverse reactions and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise. I don’t advocate prohibition to be clear, just actual truth and honesty.
It's a sample of people who were admitted to the hospital for "LSD psychosis" compared to people who were admitted for a first schizoid break. They conclude that there are a lot of similarities.
What you really want to know is: the probability of a schizoid break given you have a predisposition P(break|predisposition), the probability of a break given LSD use P(break|LSD, predisposition), the prevalence of predisposition to schizophrenia P(break), or P(break|human). And maybe P(break|LSD), too, for kicks (probability non-predisposed person gets a schizoid break given taking LSD).
With those pieces you can come to some sort of reasonable conclusion about the risk. The paper tells you very little to nothing about it since the samples don't tell you anything about the population. It's like a mechanic concluding Toyotas all need work because all the ones he sees need work.
Humans do need a better language to describe certain areas of experience though, states of mind and emotions. Poetic language is a good approximation, but it uses various quirks and undocumented properties of the "normal" language to get its point across. It's a poor fit even for philosophy, to say nothing of scientific research.
I tend to believe that the obsession with drugs in our cultures can be traced back to the reformation and the going away from religious experience as a form of wisdom and a valid way to access reality. When one reads the texts of christan, muslim or jewish mystics from the middle ages, one can only wonder at the depth of experiences and the care that is taken to interpret those experiences and build a model of the world that includes them. My feeling is that with the shift to stronger and stronger materialism, mystical experiences were more and more seen as suspicious and potentially a sign of mental disorder. As such, drugs are more acceptable, as one can always explain things away with "neural pathways" and "neurotrasmitters" and whatnot. The experience can be seen as interesting, but what is finally "real" are just electrical signals in a big meatball.
While continuing research from this materialistic perspective is essential, there is a growing recognition that one should allow other ontologies and epistemiologies, that allow the use of direct experience to derive knowledge. This means accepting that some researchers and philosophers explore world models where consciousness is not just an phenomenon emerging from physical process in the brain, but potentially has an existence of its own, or even is primary. If you are interested in this topic I would recommend reading the Galileo Report, written by scientists and philosophers who work with consciousness, and in particular Near Death Experiences: https://galileocommission.org/report/
Side note: I also think that this materialistic view favors the conception some have that drugs can be the only path to accessing some insights. In other cultures, such as the Ayahuasca consuming tribes of south america or the Amanita Muscaria consumers of Siberia, drugs are seen as powerful helpers for establishing contact with the spirits, but are by no means mandatory or necessary to this end. In Siberia for instance, Amanita is mostly consumed in "heterarchical" societies, where non chamans are "allowed" to contact the spirits. It is just something that can help, when one misses the necessary training or gift. In "hierarchical" societies, where the chaman is seen as being of a different species, use of drugs is actually seen as illegitimate, as the chaman should be able to communicate with the spirits thrpugh his/her skills alone. The difference with our culture is the ontology of the experience: one is not tripping for the trip, but to take contact with spirits and ask them something. Whether this happens with fireworks or more silently is less relevant. But we do not want to entertain the idea of spirits, so we are only left with the fireworks. But the real gift from those experiences is not the experience itself, but the opening of potential ontologies it allows, and the practice with choosing the right ontology in the moment to sustain and open the experience. Which is something that, again, also does wo der without drugs.
TL;DR: what we need is to accept non-materialist ontologies as legitimate in a research setting
Edit: I meant to say “harm and help”, not “harm and hurt”.
Evidence? (Other than tiny doses of anything potentially can cause harm and hurt, assuming harm and hurt are 2 different things, not perhaps the same thing repeated in different ways to make an emotive appeal)
However you may be sold something that's not LSD at all but is advertised as such.
> We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans.
We don't know that tiny doses of LSD can harm or hurt humans. What we do observe is that smaller amounts of things tend to have smaller effects than larger amounts of things.