On Drug Use
 

Since someone bumped the old thread I decided I might as well put this out here. I feel that the general public has a grossly uneducated view of drugs, largely because most of us have chosen to accept the standard view given to us rather than do our own research. Hopefully what I have to say here might change your mind if you carry these views; however, I'm open for debate and discussion.

My background: I smoke lots of pot when I'm at school, often daily, but I usually smoke with a vaporizer because I care about my lungs. I don't really enjoy drinking, though; the only other drugs I really enjoy are mushrooms and LSD, though I have tried Ecstasy, 2c-i, 2c-e, DXM, alcohol, cocaine, opiates, and many others. I am about to begin my 3rd year majoring in neuroscience and mathematics at Rice University; I have certainly wasted all of my time sitting on Pete's couch

A lot of the disdain for drug use comes from lack of information. Most people seem to draw a line at where a 'drug' is, but they do not understand that drugs play an integral role in our day to day survival. Since we have a problem with clarity, let's make sure we know what drugs are: Illegal drugs are drugs, tobacco is a drug, alcohol is a drug, caffeine is a drug, and additionally, every single vitamin and mineral you place inside your body from eating food are drugs. If we were to go without getting a proper regiment of vitamins, our body would become deficient and our mental abilities would erode. The fact that our mental abilities are correlated with vitamin and mineral intake shows that all of us require psychoactive drugs in our day to day survival. Potassium and Sodium are required for neural firing to work. Without them, our brains would simply be a dead network of unfiring neurons. We wouldn't even have a functioning brain with which to experience all of these other drugs. Are potassium and sodium not psychoactive?

Additionally, our body produces, on its own, many drugs similar to or exactly the same as scheduled substances on the NIDA scheduling list. For example, opiorphin is a natural opiate produced in our saliva glands to ease pain on wounds. Now you see why many animals and people lick wounds; they are doing drugs to ease pain. Ironically, this drug is similar in structure to morphine and heroin but is many times more potent per volume than either. Our body also produces DMT (n,n-dimethyltryptamine) in the brain. DMT is an incredibly powerful hallucinogen that has been demonstrated to be released in small amounts in the brain during sleep. It has been conjectured that DMT is partially responsible for dreaming. DMT, however, is a schedule I (the tightest scheduling) on the NIDA scheduling list. Therefore, all of us internally possess a substance which is illegal in the highest degree of magnitude. Additionally, it appears that we all trip off of it at night.

Therefore, it is an absurd conjecture to say that drugs are 'not natural.' If they aren't, then nothing we ingest is natural. Furthermore, where can we draw the line between drugs being natural or unnatural? Whether they were chemically synthesized or not? Some drugs that are chemically synthesized can also be found in nature. We can synthesize 4-PO-DMT (psilocybin) chemically, and we can also find it as one of the main active ingredients in magic mushrooms. If we have synthesized something that we haven't found in nature yet, who is to say that we simply have not discovered a plant that contains that property. As an example, scientists synthesized 4-PO-MT (baeocystine) before they discovered it naturally occurring inside psilocybin mushrooms. It's absurd to presume that baeocystine became natural once it was discovered inside these mushrooms.

Some drugs are so natural, however, that they make us trip without even being there. LSD is a perfect example. Contrary to urban legends, LSD does not stay in your spine nor any other part of your body nor does it cause your brain or any other region to bleed or become damaged. Actually, LSD is rapidly metabolized from your system after taking it. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD wrote, "The concentration of LSD in the various organs attains maximum values 10 to 15 minutes after injection, then falls off swiftly. The small intestine, in which the concentration attains the maximum within two hours, constitutes an exception." The psychedelic encyclopedia expands on this, "After two hours, only 1 to 10 percent is still present in the form of unchanged LSD; the rest consists of water soluble metabolites -- such as 2-oxo-2,3-dihydro-LSD -- which do not possess any LSD-type influence on the central nervous system."

What's the catch? We trip on LSD, strongly, for around 6 to 8 hours before we come down. For the strongest part of the trip, most of the LSD is already gone. LSD, then, is actually a catalyst for something that occurs in the brain without any drug even being present. In fact, most of what LSD does is amplify neural processes and effects into the brain. In this sense, it takes our reality and enhances it; colors become more vivid, sensations have more depth, emotions are amplified, etc... and all of this can occur while no usable amount of the drug remains inside of our body.

Hopefully, with this understanding of drugs, we can come to a less judgmental conclusion about drug users. We are all drug users; we require drugs to survive. The delineation between acceptable and unacceptable drugs is largely made by society and the government. What one society can view as a sacrament, another society can view as a sinful vice (such as with psilocybin mushrooms in the Oaxaca region of Mexico and in the United States). Different drugs have different properties, and it is the user's responsibility to ensure that they understand and are able to handle the drugs which they choose to use or misuse.

We are quick to place the blame on the drug instead of the user. It is ultimately the user's decision which lies at the core. For me, I have used mushrooms and LSD to deepen my understanding of reality. Both of these drugs, I feel, have made me more compassionate towards other people, and they have helped solidify my notion that everything in the world is equally beautiful (because staring at a wall can be just as breathtaking of an experience as seeing the most beautiful landscapes). I believe my drug use has been an overall positive experience in my life. Though it is possible to come to these conclusions without drugs, why should we question the route we take to get there? On the other hand, mushrooms and acid have the possibility to destroy a person's perception of themself and emerge a broken shell of a person. The power of any drug ultimately rests in the hands of the user. We should blame the user for any consequences that occur, not the drug.


I would also like to address some points from the last thread which I thought were dangerously presumptuous:

This is not true for all drugs. Most drugs we ingest on a day to day basis don't. Most illegal drugs don't, too. Psychological addiction differs from physical addiction. Additionally, many drugs have anti-addictive properties. The illegal drug ibogaine has been demonstrate to almost entirely eradicate addiction to opiates, tobacco, or alcohol after use. Drugs such as mushrooms anecdotally have anti-addictive properties. Many users report not wanting to do other drugs after taking mushrooms (even if they had a good trip). I'll echo these sentiments as well. While it is true that many drugs possess addictive properties, it is the job of the user to research the drug and understand these properties before he or she takes it.

I like to vaporize some weed and then jog around campus or play DDR. Some of my best artwork has come from either tripping on substances or sparked from visuals I saw while tripping. Claims like these only continue an uneducated culture that will never truly understand the properties of drugs. The truth is, there is a diverse population of drug users. From the junkies to the weekend potheads to the psychonauts, many people use drugs for many different reasons.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Don't know if I would call sodium or potassium psychoactive, per se. While they're clearly necessary for neuronal function (and a whole host of other cells), they don't induce changes in our mental states. I don't think I've ever seen anything to suggest that ingesting a huge amount of sodium somehow affects the brain's functioning.

Better examples of natural compounds that mimic illegal drugs could probably be found amongst any number of neurotransmitters, since changes in the levels of these do alter mental states.

Re: On Drug Use
 

It's a shame most anti-drug morons won't read all that, because that is an eloquently written and important post that aperson made.

Personally, here's my addition.

I blame the media for our current anti-drug problem. When you hear about drugs on the news, it's all bad. There's also this taboo against even mentioning the benefits of drug use in any sort of popular media. With marijuana it's become more lax, but things like LSD and other hallucinogens are still highly demonized. And they all seem to have the same response to "Why do people do drugs?" The response is "I dunno, lol, but don't do them. It screws you up. Look, it's screwing them up. They must be idiots/addicted." Nobody actually EXPLAINS to kids what drugs ACTUALLY do to them - the bad effects are the only ones given, and what little good effects are given are strewn in a negative light. For example, "Hallucinations" or "Loss of motor control" or "Loss of sense of time" would all be explained as negative aspects of doing the drug - as if that isn't why people do them in the first place. They act like there is absolutely nothing good about them, which is simply not true.

What we need is ACCURATE drug education. Why are they hiding important information about drugs? If they were truly as bad as they make them out to be, the accurate information would be enough to deter an educated citizen from doing them, right? But oops... sometimes there ARE no negative consequences. What do they do about that? Well I guess they have to make some up.

The irony of the "alcohol is legal but causes more deaths than all illegal drugs combined" situation isn't lost on me. Alcohol is barely demonized in our society. We're made to believe that appropriate amounts of alcohol are harmless, but even experimenting with various other drugs is harmful no matter the amount. In addition, it's pretty easy to find accurate information about alcohol and what it REALLY does to you. They'll even tell you WHY people do alcohol.

Fact: alcohol is addictive. Many illegal drugs are not addictive, physically or psychologically, incuding LSD and salvia divinorum. Salvia actually is anti-addictive: you know that tolerance that people talk about? When you are building a tolerance, you might be becoming addicted. Tolerance is the hallmark of addictive drugs. Salvia actually has a reverse tolerance - you do less drug to attain the same effect. Which is nice. It means I can trip balls off plain leaf, while all my friends need extract to get anywhere. And about LSD, well, LSD has no tolerance, and it should be quite evident why, from aperson's post.

I guess that's all I've got for now.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Well no ****, it's not like somebody is going to write an article "16 year old teen has enjoyable trip, details inside."

Anyway I have a research paper on drugs supporting its legalization due next month, keep talking guys 8)

Re: On Drug Use
 

I think a large part of the anti-"drug" movement is that, while "drugs" are not necessarily malevolent if the user knows what they're doing, your average Joe is stupid and thus is better off simply avoiding doing "drugs" altogether rather than do the necessary research. The problem is that your average Joe is indeed stupid and thus they inaccurately equate "don't do drugs" to "drugs are bad, mmmkay?" since they indeed haven't done their research and then make it their business to inform "drug" users of how said "drug" users are ruining their own lives.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Albert Hofmann, dude. Albert.

Here's a brief biography I did on him this semester for my history of science course (I was rushed when I wrote it, but it has some good quotes):

An aura of infamy surrounds the name Dr. Albert Hofmann (b. 1906), a Swiss chemist whose work inspired an entire generation to turn on, tune in and drop out, for Albert Hofmann is the father of lysergic acid diethylamide, a substance more commonly know as LSD.

As a child, Dr. Hofmann had a keen affinity for the natural world. “I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature” (Smith) recounting the mystical experiences of his childhood in which nature was altered in magical ways (Hofmann) that “shaped the main outlines of [his] world view and convinced [him] of the existence of a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight. In deciding his career, Dr. Hofmann considered the humanities and was also tempted to become an artist, but it was his childhood attraction to nature that induced him to study chemistry, “a great surprise all those who knew him” (Hofmann). “Chemistry was the scientific field which might afford insights into [the external, material world]” (Hofmann).

After graduating from the University of Zürich with a degree in chemistry in 1929, Dr. Hofmann began working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland (Erowid) with the goal of isolating the active principles of known medicinal plants to produce pure specimens of these substances to manufacture a stable pharmaceutical preparation, exactly quantifiable by weight. (Albert, Chapter 1.1). Dr. Hofmann’s specialty was that of ergot, a poisonous fungus that grows in grains of rye, which, for centuries, had been used by midwives to precipitate childbirths (Smith). Many medicaments were derived from Hofmann’s work with ergot including “Methergine, the standard preparation for stanching of post-partum hemorrhage; Dihydergot, a circulatory stabilizing medicament; [and] Hydergine, a geriatric medicine for treatment of infirmities of old age” (Hofmann). However, it was his synthesizing of the psychopharmaka lysergic acid diethylamide that ultimately gained him worldwide notoriety.

When first synthesized in 1938 lysergic acid diethylamide, at the time known as LSD-25, appeared to be pharmacologically uninteresting, and underwent no further tests. “[LSD] might have disappeared into oblivion like [the] many tens of thousands of substances annually synthesized and tested in pharmaceutical research” had Dr. Hofmann, not re-synthesized the compound during a creative midday break (Hofmann). “It was no more than a hunch!”, recalls Hofmann, “I liked the chemical structure of the substance - which led me to take this unusual step” (Hofmann) since “experimental substances, as a rule, were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest” (Albert, Chapter 1.4) It is then, Hofmann claims, that chance had the opportunity to come into play when, despite his scrupulously clean work, he accidentally ingested a trace amount of the substance (Hofmann). The following is a letter addressed to the founder and director of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, Professor Arthur Stoll, concerning the events that followed:

Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away. (Albert, Chapter 1.4)
While, at the time, not entirely sure what caused his strange reaction, Hofmann, three days later, conducted more experiments on the various substances he might have absorb during his initial experiment until he ruled them all out save for LSD-25 (Grof). On April 19, 1943, Hofmann, under the supervision of his laboratory assistant, conducted the first self-experiment by ingesting 250 micrograms of LSD-25. After a short while it became clear to Dr. Hofmann that LSD had been the “cause of the remarkable experience of the previous Friday, for the altered perceptions were of the same type as before, only much more intense” (Albert, Chapter 1.5). Immediately following the publication of his experiment much interest was aroused concerning the new drug and after testing the substance on animals, it was soon in production and administered to physiatrists for self-experimentation and other individuals curious to it’s effects, including the authors Aldous Huxley and Ernst Jünger, both of whom Dr. Hofmann befriend.

The ten years that followed consisted of “uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use” of LSD (Hofmann). “We had a positive reaction from everywhere in the world. Around two thousand publications about it appeared in scientific journals and everything was fine [sic]” (Grof). That was until “LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s” (Albert, Chapter 5). “The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm” and in 1965, Sandoz halted its distribution of LSD, but by then LSD’s reputation had become irreversibly tarnished (Albert, Chapter 5).

Despite the demonization of his work, Dr. Hofmann still holds LSD in the highest of regards and believes it to a “medicine of the soul” (Smith) that can remedy the deep-seated ailments that plague Western society such as “materialism, [the] alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, [a] lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society, and [the] lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life” (Dr.). “It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature” warns Dr. Hofmann (Smith) and it should come as no surprise that he is immensely opposed to modern Western ideology as best demonstrated in an exert from his book:

[the Western] concept of reality that separates self and the world has decisively determined the evolutionary course of European intellectual history. Experience of the world as matter, as object, to which man stands opposed, has produced modern natural science and technology- creations of the Western mind that have changed the world. With their help human beings have subdued the world. Its wealth has been exploited in a manner that may be characterized as plundering, and the sublime accomplishment of technological civilization, the comfort of Western industrial society, stands face-to-face with a catastrophic destruction of the environment. (Albert, Chapter 11)

And furthermore Hofmann believes that the Western industrialized world is in the midst of a spiritual crisis that can only be cured by “changing our world view” (Albert, Foreword) for it is in “field and forest, and in the animal world sheltered therein, indeed in every garden, a reality is perceptible that is infinitely more real, older, deeper, and more wondrous than everything made by people, and that will yet endure, when the inanimate, mechanical, and concrete world again vanishes, becomes rusted and fallen into ruin. (Albert, Chapter 11).

On January 11, 2007, Dr. Albert Hofmann celebrated his 101st birthday.

tl;dr version: For ten years LSD was loved all around the world by psychologists and psychiatrists. Then it was high jacked (while still legal) by the counter-culture and demonized by the United States government.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Ugh, so what if I don't want to use drugs simply because I just don't feel any desire or need to do them?

It's rare for me to meet a drug user that I actually like. Many of them have that high-and-mighty know-it-all personality, and that gets really annoying. I don't get why drug users can't simply do them alone and just leave the people who don't choose to use it alone. I mean, I know you're not doing that here, but I've always had to put up with this nonsense of people trying to get me to use them when I just never really had the desire to do so.

I mean, I'm fine with them as long as people don't bother me about doing them. I mean yeah, I have people going like "hey, you should go and drink with me" and stuff, but it isn't a fraction of as frequently as when people are like "hey, you should go out and do drugs with me". Yeah, I know alcohol is a drug, but I'll assume you know what I'm talking about regardless.

What I understand is why they can't keep it to themselves more often than not. I mean, of course it varies from person to person a lot, but I'm just saying this off of my personal experiences.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Is locking them up helping them?

Of course we should educate people about the dangers of drugs, but it's inhuman to lock people up for minding their own business, whether it ****ed them up or not.

Re: On Drug Use
 

drugs are all good

Re: On Drug Use
 

If a drug user gets thrown in jail then presumably they were doing something else dangerous.

Re: On Drug Use
 

That's your choice; I respect that, and I think all people should.

If someone offers you a drink or a drug, it doesn't mean that they're pressuring you into being a drug user. I offer people my weed or drugs from my stash because I like to share and have company. I'm doing it out of politeness, and if you decline or show that you don't do drugs then I won't bother you with it again. Maybe you should view other peoples' offers as more along this nature rather than as a pressure to do drugs.

It's true that some people will pressure you into doing drugs. Those people are pricks; you should probably avoid them. But you're generalizing about all drug users, and by doing this you've created quite a similar high-and-mighty attitude for yourself that is quite similar to the attitude you categorize onto drug users as well.

It seems that all of your problems stem from the drug users you know, not the drugs. Don't bash the drugs for the people; using that logic got us in much the same scheduling predicament we're in today


I feel that a lot of the problem, though, comes from the fact that most of our information about these drugs is absurdly inaccurate. I think that simply by giving kids proper drug education in high school we'd have a lot more intelligent people making decisions for themselves. By proper education I mean factual information about the effects and dangers of all commonly abused substances. I have a feeling that if we stop demonizing weed and other weaker drugs as hard as we demonize the truly horrible drugs like meth and heroin we'll have less people slipping into the lure of drugs like those.

To Jewpin: I don't know why the hell I did that. For some reason I always blend those two names in my head. Fixed.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption alcohol was only addictive if you were genetically prone towards alcoholism.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Well, you are wrong. While it's true that people are who have a history of substance abuse are more prone to abuse substances (obviously), Alcohol is a drug and habitual use can lead to addiction....like any drug.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Well, I remember reading somewhere that heroin isn't really that bad at all if you know how to titrate your doses. There are a lot of people out there saying that heroin leads to HIV and various other diseases but that's all because fools share needles with other people or use dirty ones. Apparently one of the most negative effects of heroin usage on your organs is constipation, dunno bout you guys but that ain't all that scary to me.

On the other hand, the horror stories you hear in the media about heroin addicts comes mostly not from the drug itself but from the lifestyles that addicts lead. Often addicts are not very rich and may need to do some crazy **** to get their hands on the drug. Sure it's addictive, but if you are educated enough to use it properly, I really don't think heroin is that bad at all. Media only shows you the worst of the heroin users, and you never really see the normal everyday individual using heroin (though it most certainly does happen).

Anyways I heard this all from my research methods teacher, here's the link to an article i found about it I guess.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...5/ai_101174758

Re: On Drug Use
 

Uh, I don't think I've ever heard a story of a long-term heroin user that ended up well. Addictive drugs in general... why bother?

Re: On Drug Use
 

That would be a psychological addiction, though, because by ingesting alcohol, your body doesn't actually develop a physical need for it. I'm convinced that the only way you can become psychologically addicted to something is through lack of self control.

Re: On Drug Use
 

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/perso...ted/index.html
"Law officers made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.7 million arrests and 12.5 percent of all arrests) than for any other offense. (See Table 29.)"

Interesting. Now, of course, it doesn't state how many arrests were for drug abuse alone, sadly. Of course, it wouldn't imply that drugs should be illegal if the statistics showed a positive correlation between drug users and people who get arrested for other crimes due to the black market caused by the prohibition of the drug, but it'd be very interesting to see no correlation or even a negative correlation, hmm?

http://www.mises.org/freemarket_deta...er=articledate
http://www.alternet.org/rights/47815/

$1.2 billion dollars annually merely from the druggies in jail! That's not even including how much the war on drugs costs us in general, over 6-7 times more than that:

http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-07-00.html

I'll save you the mumbo-jumbo about how legalizing drugs would allow us to tax drugs and save taxpayers a lot of money and go straight to the moral benefits of the legal sale and distribution of drugs. Guess what: we could possibly keep kids off drugs easier because street dealers don't check for I.D.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/speci...juveniles.html

Already about 12.4% of them are juveniles. Would keeping it out of their hands as youth keep them from doing it as adults, or would it make it allow those of legal age to get their hands on it legally and give it to youth illegally? It's hard to say. If a teenager is willing to do drugs when its illegally passed down from someone who bought it legally, who's to say that person wouldn't be at least decently likely to do drugs as a black market commodity?

Or as aperson said, information is the key.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Anything that's legal under some circumstances is always easier to get than things that are illegal. Legalizing drugs would make it ten times easier for a juvenile to get them.

Re: On Drug Use
 

Only if legal distribution was open to minors, which it wouldn't and shouldn't be if ever legalized. Did you even bother reading my post or did you just skim over it?

Of course, you can always look at tobacco: how many kids regularly smoke and have tried smoking and how many adults who regularly smoke and have tried smoking. Same for alcohol, which could give a rough estimate.

The statistics will most likely favor you, but I doubt by an overwhelming amount.

Re: On Drug Use
 

What qualifies as "drug abuse"? Also, how many of those people were arrested for, say, LSD in their own home, and how many people were arrested for going off the deep end with cocaine or heroin or whatever, thereby endangering themselves and possibly others around them?