[peace*out]

To not get "off topic" in the other thread...

...Drugs can actually be very beneficial. Lemme know if you want to discuss it haha.

For starters: I know they can relive you from pain, but i'm not trying to talk about advil. I'm talking meth, crack, you - the stuff.

I have a friend who use to do drugs, and even he says not to.

hmmmmm...so anyways, here's a new topic that may be widely argued...

[Izzy]

If you're comparing numbers and drowning's number is lower, then yeah, it's better.

What do you guys think of drugs as creative stimulants? Do you consider the artwork as "real" as something created by a sober person?

[peace*out]

If you're comparing numbers and drowning's number is lower, then yeah, it's better.

What do you guys think of drugs as creative stimulants? Do you consider the artwork as "real" as something created by a sober person?

:dry: :dry: you don't get my point...

I think it's real...just me

[unreality]

peace*out, the point we're arguing over is moot because as we've demonstrated, marijuana is illegal for the wrong reasons (see my post ), certainly not for safety reasons. They attempted to do the same thing to alcohol but because by that time it was more widespread in use, there was more resistance and eventually the government changed the prohibition back (stopping a lot of the crime that had grown up related to the prohibition). Soon the same will happen with cannabis/hemp

So let's stop arguing over semantics please lol

What do you guys think of drugs as creative stimulants? Do you consider the artwork as "real" as something created by a sober person?

Is a confession of love made while drunk any less real? A lot sloppier I'm sure, and bad form all around haha, but there's truth behind the words. A lot of drugs can really enhance our abilities to tap into creative parts of our brain, either to boost our already strong artistic ability (most artists that use drugs can already make great work while sober, they just use the drug to find some inner inspiration within themselves or some such) or to discover things hidden within the brain not earlier known. I recently saw a movie in Psychology about an old lady that developed a brain disease that ate away at one part of her brain, impeding normal function, but in compensation a long-locked-away ability to paint beautiful pictures was unlocked.

So yeah I think it's valid, mostly as a point of interest for normal people, and for people who are ALREADY artists (sober) to simply enhance their scope of vision

check this out: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/pl_arts_pendulum/all/1

[Izzy]

Yeah, I definitely agree. I suck as an artist, but one time a few friends and I decided to get in tune with our masked artistic abilities and screwed around with some finger paints. The end result was an awesome mess. Another time I used a friend as my finger-paint canvas. Again, really f**king awesome result (she wouldn't let me take pics, lmao). Today I just had the strange urge to do it again. Gotta go buy some finger paints and stuff, haha.

Weirdly enough, I'd consider myself a pretty good musician under normal circumstances, but when not sober, I totally suck. I'll *think* I sound good, then hear a recording of it, and be really embarrassed. >_>

[rookie1ja]

I advise to stick to the topic or this thread will be locked

[Izzy]

...We are on topic? Drugs have been shown to have a significant effect on the artistic ability of artists, which can be a pro whilst discussing them, and we're discussing that.

[unreality]

I just saw this:

http://www.phinneywood.com/2010/02/22/parent-watches-drug-deal-on-front-lawn/

I don't know if that really was a drug deal (probably) but like one of the commenters on the article noted, I myself have been in a situation that (if I had been an outside observer) looked fishy, but was perfectly legal.

My question is, if you saw some kind of shady exchange go down (let's say in a parking lot), what would you do? Call the police? Write down license plate numbers? Follow them? Approach them? Do nothing?

Edited June 11, 2010 by unreality

[unreality]

on a different note I just stumbled across this: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_blog/2010/may/05/a_small_bag_of_marijuana_police_

One of the saddest things I've seen in a long time. I actually don't recommend watching it, it made me rather upset haha

[Guest]

I realize I'm digging up a rather old thread, but this is definitely relevant to the topic.

I just ran across this article in the Washington Post about a mock-terrorism drill in Northern California involving marijuana growers setting off car bombs and taking hostages to rescue an associate. It sounds pretty crazy to me.

[Izzy]

Maybe the redneck in charge of the drill mispelled "Muslim"? :idk:

Above the Influence will have a ball with this. This definitely has the potential for their latest "DRUGS ARE EVIL! The lies I post on my site and out of context statistics prove it!" propaganda.

This is absurd and hella offensive. Why do drills even need specifics?

[Guest]

Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

[Izzy]

Mmmkay

[Izzy]

Bleh... Never mind. Shroomery doesn't like it when you upload their smilies elsewhere. =/

[unreality]

Something I read recently raises an interesting question... say a person consumes a psychedelic compound and experiences a rare transcendental divine state of existence. This does happen, in real life, times infinity, occasionally to someone who has taken such a substance. A state of mind where the entire universe is seen within a nutshell (or rather some other multidimensional concept unexplainable to us mortals) and time and space become both infinite and zero. A state of mind where the limits of consciousness are explored and surpassed. I've never experienced such but I know people who have and I know it happens.

Now... is this state of mind contained in the little atoms and energy bonds and shape of the molecule... or is this state of mind already present as a possibility within our minds, all the time? It has to be the second option, because the chemical is just a catalyst, that triggers the right neurochemical effects in the brain for our higher-level mind to experience something different from its usual reality. This potential is always there, which means, for the vast majority of our lives, our view is narrowly restricted to that which is related to our every day lives, and not fully realized.

Just something to think about. It is practical. Nobody (well at least not me) would want to live forever in a state of entire rapture, a total different set of settings in the mind, because that's boring and there are no real-life accomplishments (though ones goals and motives change then too so maybe not, or rather, such thoughts don't even apply because thoughts work in a completely different way, or whatever).

But what I'm saying is, this alternate consciousness isn't contained in the chemical itself but rather the interaction of the chemical and mind. It's just a catalyst for the mind to do something it normally could do (with the proper 'trigger'... near death experiences, out of body experiences and pseudo-spiritual experiences are similar in nature). I think most people see those kinds of substances as foreign invaders, bending a mind to their will, when it's more of an enabler of built-in functionality or at least possibility.

You see a similar thing with all kinds of naturally grown chemicals. For example, the chemicals in the opium poppy plant (morphine, codeine, etc) must have co-evolved with humans to be desirable (by fooling the mind by pretending to be endorphins and binding to those receptors) to use, so that the plant would be protected and reproduce.

Same with marijuana. Its active chemical THC already has chemical analogues inside the human body and mind, that do similar things (though less extremely), which is why it works in the first place (by binding to CB-1 and CB-2). Alcohol (ethanol) for example works by binding to GABA-A.

What I think is interesting and worthy of discussion is how these plants/chemicals come to co-evolve with the human mind. Was there enough evolutionary time for that to happen, or is it coincidence? Out of thousands of plant species, we've managed to find at least a couple hundred with psychoactive properties. So is that just happy luck for us?

Wikipedia speculates (about THC), "Like most pharmacologically-active secondary metabolites of plants, THC in cannabis is assumed to be involved in self-defense, perhaps against herbivores.[7] THC also possesses high UV-B (280-315 nm) absorption properties, which, it has been speculated, could protect the plant from harmful UV radiation exposure.[8] [9] [10]"

What do you think?

[unreality]

Here are some viewpoints on this

http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/content/human-and-cannabis-coevolution

^ It's a nice article but doesn't seem to address why THC came about in the first place.

http://blog.norml.org/2010/08/26/bbc-video-cannabis-and-human-evolution/

^ This video (good video aside from propaganda added to the end lol) also just marvels at the chance meeting of "humans and THC", but does have some interesting information on our natural every-day endocannabinoid system.

[Izzy]

This potential is always there, which means, for the vast majority of our lives, our view is narrowly restricted to that which is related to our every day lives, and not fully realized.

I agree with everything aside from the bolded emphasis on this statement. The alternate states of mind described are just different subjective interpretations of an objective world. Think of this not as a restriction, but a precaution.

Two specific examples come to mind, and I think most everyone here can relate at least to the first one. I'm purposely making them less extreme so they're easier to understand.

Take alcoholic consumption into consideration. Most people, when intoxicated, behave differently. A lot of people are more sociable. Some of it may be placebo, but alcohol has a very serious effect that enhances parts of a person's personality (or brings to light underlying traits) while motor skills are compromised. The world is seen through the eyes of a more relaxed person, but there's no doubt that the alcohol doesn't actually change this person's personality. Everything this person is doing is something they were capable of doing before. What's the saying? "Drunken actions = sober desires" or something? You can't deny that there is some truth in that. Now, a lot of drunken actions = stupid. So, rather than seeing it as my body restricting my view of the world, I think it's more like my body taking an evolutionarily ingrained precaution to keep me safe. One subjective view is simply better, evolutionarily speaking, than another.

..I forgot my second example, so this one will be harder for people not very familiar with the properties of psychoactive substances to understand, but here goes:

DXM. Dextromethorphan. It's a dissociative hallucinogen, which means, bluntly, that it can make you feel like you leave your body and can make you see pretty things (fractals, as opposed to unicorns ). Similiar to the effects of LSD, it can make it feel like parts of your brain merge, and you will hear colors and see music. It's all very cool, and if we weren't accustomed to our current reality of seeing colors and hearing music, it might be an alternative that makes sense. But, both going on at once is ridiculous. If you see and hear sounds and see and hear noises, how can you differentiate the two? (This may be a biased question. Are their differences even notable? I think so.) So, again, this 'restriction' isn't really a 'restriction' at all: all the same things one experiences whilst high are still experienced, just differently. Instead of paintings being music, paintings are paintings.

Though, subjective reality or not, I honestly have to question some drug experiences. Normally, my ceiling is a ceiling. I cannot for the life of me imagine how, even in a subjective world, it would make sense that it is instead a particle dragon named Steve. I mean, it could be. I can't see into the objective world and know for sure, but the point is that some time in our evolutionary history, our brains decided that this method of interpretting our world is better than the other possible methods. If this restriction? No, we're still capable of it, aren't we? In fact, it's the same view. If we were used to hearing colors instead of seeing them, everything would seem the same and what we're experiencing right now would be trippy and awesome. We're.. not really missing out on anything substantial. Whether or not a person can see colors doesn't change the objective truth going on or provide any further insight, honestly. It's just fun to mingle your senses every now and then.

[unreality]

Yeah I agree, and I think a person can go through life without even hearing what a psychedelic is, and still appreciate life to the fullest. But you're also missing my point by focusing on the audiovisual aspect of psychedelics. First of all most hallucinogens, contrary to popular belief, don't actual make you see things that aren't there. Rather your standard vision is distorted and maybe abstractified or seems cartoonish or altered in some other way.

But my point wasn't about seeing and hearing; I agree that our sober vision and sober hearing are pretty close to objective reality as far as we can tell. Most drugs that alter those, alter them negatively, away from what we would call reality (even if that's the intended effect).

So I didn't mean the audiovisual. What I meant was the mindset, outlook, the way of thinking & doing & handling problems. In that way we are "stuck in a rut" so to speak, through our current narrow viewpoint. The rut of our day-by-day fleshing out of our routine and our routine personality. That's not a bad thing, I like my viewpoints although they are constantly evolving like everyone's (I hope), but it's just not the whole picture, not the full story that could be told. That's what I meant.

But the second half of what I was talking about is more of like, do you think it's just chance that plants (ie cannabis) develop chemicals (ie THC) that happen to be psychoactive, and why. This is more of an evolutionary question

[Izzy]

Well, on that point, again, I must disagree. Bleh, I don't want to sound like a druggie (silly negative connotations, society, I thank you ), but I don't know how to speak from anything aside from personal experience.

From what I've been able to ascertain, there is no truth in any of the amazing revelations I've had while high. I have not divided by zero and I have not seen the universe from the outside as much as I feel I have. I don't think people are any more open-minded on drugs than while not on them, they're just more comfortable. I think that stems from anxiety, which is limiting, but arguably more psychological than a physical limitation. Yeah, on drugs we think differently, but that's also because our brain is forced to respond to entirely different stimuli. This is not because we were restricted in the first place, again, we were always fully capable, but because we weren't in an environment that asked for that sort of thinking.

So.. I mean.. The mindset is phenomenal, eugh this is hard to phrase. We only *think* we're restricted. Drugs only *seem* eye-opening. If we were given the same tasks sober, I don't doubt that we would respond much the same way.

Hmm. This can be shown empirically through a very simple experiment, actually. Give two different groups of people a set of problems and monitor how they solve them.

[unreality]

Well, on that point, again, I must disagree. Bleh, I don't want to sound like a druggie (silly negative connotations, society, I thank you ), but I don't know how to speak from anything aside from personal experience.

From what I've been able to ascertain, there is no truth in any of the amazing revelations I've had while high. I have not divided by zero and I have not seen the universe from the outside as much as I feel I have. I don't think people are any more open-minded on drugs than while not on them, they're just more comfortable. I think that stems from anxiety, which is limiting, but arguably more psychological than a physical limitation. Yeah, on drugs we think differently, but that's also because our brain is forced to respond to entirely different stimuli. This is not because we were restricted in the first place, again, we were always fully capable, but because we weren't in an environment that asked for that sort of thinking.

So.. I mean.. The mindset is phenomenal, eugh this is hard to phrase. We only *think* we're restricted. Drugs only *seem* eye-opening. If we were given the same tasks sober, I don't doubt that we would respond much the same way.

Hmm. This can be shown empirically through a very simple experiment, actually. Give two different groups of people a set of problems and monitor how they solve them.

Speaking of personal experience - Forgive me if I'm wrong but you haven't actually tried one of these true psychedelics yourself have you? DXM is a dissociative, a different class from the psychedelics we're talking about. (tryptophan binders like LSD, psilocybin (and other DMT relatives), etc). Neither have I so neither of us can say "from personal experience" which is what we're working with here.

But my point was that the chemical processes leading to the "tripping out" mindstate already exist in our brain, they're just not triggered. It's not a big deal for them not to be, like you've pointed out (and I pointed out in the original post) it's not all that useful practically, to be "trippin balls". But the machinery is there so to speak, and the chemicals just act as a catalyst to let the brain alter its own chemistry and those effects are the result. So when I said "restricted", I didn't mean in the practical sense: we're not living life any less fully with or without; I meant in the experience-sense. For the majority of our lives we're not experiencing the feedback as richly as is possible when your mind is in some states. Again that's not a bad or good thing, you don't want to be sensory-overloaded all the time or you lose touch with the more practical side of reality.

[Izzy]

Well, true, but I think DXM is more than a dissociative. It has those properties, sure, but OEVs and CEVs *are* hallucinations and it also has some of the audiovisual properties I've described. Hence, dissociative hallucinogen.

But yeah, no shrooms or LSD. I'll probably never do DMT because it scares the s'hit out of me. (Not the drug itself. It's just so hard to ensure purity, and a slight f'uck up in the procedure could keel you. It's what most kitchen chemists start with (lol), and I don't want to be on the receiving end of some noob's creation.)

Though, these are almost exclusively audiovisual, so why are we confining the discussion to them?

"As richly as possible" is totally an opinion, though. I find life, as it is normally, much more detailed with myself able to think much more clearly (unless we're getting into amphetamines). The appeal of psychadelics comes from that being brought to an end and the world becoming a trippy mess where everything seems to defy the laws of physics and nothing makes sense. So, yeah, I totally agree that the material for this is there to begin with. I disagree on restriction. You're still not restricted. You could be experiencing the world like this right now if you wanted, but you're choosing not to (I assume, lol).

Unless I'm still totally missing your point? I'm not entirely certain what you mean.

[unreality]

Yeah still missing the point. In each of my past 5 posts I've repeated that (a) life is same or better without hallucinogens, you aren't "missing" anything, (b) you can practically function better in what we think the objective world might be, when sober. Because natural selection has found that the mindset most promotive of survival.

But what I am saying is that the additional detail or revelation or "perspective" (or multiple-angled viewing of something - whether visually or conceptually) is something gone normally without when sober. That's all I'm saying lol - that we have the inherent ability to see extra but don't. Our sober mindset is a filter, filtering out what may be useless junk to an animal just trying to survive (evolution), but for a self-conscious mind who has assigned itself a purpose that may be more than just survival and reproduction, this extra "unfiltered" input may be sacred or at least, interesting.

[Izzy]

And, since my first post, I have agreed with you on points A and B.

But... it isn't extra, which is what I'm trying to say. It's alternative. Extra would be like optional x-ray vision. The detail isn't additional, it's just different. We have the inherent ability to experience things differently - and we do, sometimes. I definitely agree that it's interesting, and yeah, I would consider this a different "perspective", but nothing is filtered out and we're not picking up on anything that we wouldn't have sober. We may pay more attention to details because now we're hunting for them, but that doesn't really count.

So, if you're saying only that drugs can offer another perspective, I agree.

[Guest]

I don't know much about drugs in part because taking them have never interested me. The sober world is crazy enough in my opinion, such that it doesn't need drugs to make it interesting (plus, there's no more potent drug than adrenaline, produced from playing "Halo" or a really well-matched soccer game ).

I will say a little about alcohol. I've heard (don't exactly remember the source) that alcohol is something to which humanity developed a tolerance that didn't always exist. In part because there was no such thing as sanitation in early human history, the best way to make sure that something was safe to drink (or to preserve food) was to ferment it (or pickle it). You couldn't safely drink the water in the stream, but you'd be okay drinking the mead (at least in terms of getting enough hydration, if the enemies attacked, that would be a different matter ). I think that was something that I picked up in my Humanities/History class in high school. So it's possible that humans developed the tolerance to ethanol over the centuries.

However, it does raise the question in my mind (that I didn't think of at the time): How come all humans have roughly the same tolerance? A quantity of ethanol that would be toxic to most animals in % body weight won't kill pretty much any human, but I doubt that alcohol was used universally in every culture to preserve food. Some cultures probably found alternative methods to make food safe to eat and drink. So it would seem like some societies would build up an immunity to the toxic effects of alcohol, while others would not fare so well. But that doesn't really seem to be the case today. So I could be way off mark regarding why humans react to ethanol the way they do.

[Izzy]

Happy 1000th.

Hmm. I recall my history teacher telling us sometime the first week of school (it has him or The Simpsons) that alcohol is why people finally decided to settle. When they discovered it, they had little reason to move around. As trade routes developed, I can imagine it being a popular substance that spread fairly quickly and well. With this distribution, it.. seems possible?

From a different perspective, tolerance in substances differs so vastly among humans and animals (elephants are much bigger than mice, but need faaar less LSD to kill them), that it probably wouldn't be a stretch to say it just happened that way? I don't really know.

[unreality]

However, it does raise the question in my mind (that I didn't think of at the time): How come all humans have roughly the same tolerance? A quantity of ethanol that would be toxic to most animals in % body weight won't kill pretty much any human, but I doubt that alcohol was used universally in every culture to preserve food. Some cultures probably found alternative methods to make food safe to eat and drink. So it would seem like some societies would build up an immunity to the toxic effects of alcohol, while others would not fare so well. But that doesn't really seem to be the case today. So I could be way off mark regarding why humans react to ethanol the way they do.

it's possible we've evolved our receptors to match common plants or substances, instead of kind of vice versa. Or a mutually beneficial co-evolution. This is the same concept as the cannabis mystery I was talking about on the previous page. How did it happen?

And I feel obligated to respond to this:

The sober world is crazy enough in my opinion, such that it doesn't need drugs to make it interesting

There's a lot of misconception out there, one of the biggest ones is what you're getting at in the above quote. Most people I know that use drugs wouldn't say that the world isn't interesting or needs to be 'made interesting'. Instead their drug of choice (esp. marijuana) is used when they want to just relax, appreciate music, etc. As a way to enhance life further, in certain circumstances. Not to override it, nor because life is normally boring... it's also a misnomer to think of "normal life/sober world" and "drugs" as separate things, like you imply. Most of your life is heavily affected by chemicals, hormones and neurotransmitters that you might consider "artificial". When you're having a bad day, when you're having a good day, love, infatuation, sex, medicine, most of all your morning coffee (and the cycle of tolerance & addiction with caffeine), when you have a beer, when you're sick and feverish, when you use a sleeping pill or drink an 'energy blend' drink.

I don't do most of those things (I don't use caffeine for example) but I understand how much that can affect me and treat substances (especially more harmful common ones such as alcohol, caffeine) without the blindfold of social stigma