Zappos CEO’s final months describe drug-addicted psychosis in court documents

Sasha and Ann Shulgin famously believed that dissociatives have no safe role in psychedelic therapy:

  "We are strongly prejudiced against psychedelic drugs which cause such mind-body separation, as we are against any drug which causes separation from feelings and emotions. However, we acknowledge that the ketamine state can be highly instructive for researchers trying to understand the functions of the human mind."

Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin passed away in 2014. He is a historical figure. His lab will eventually be an official historical landmark.

Is it really so confusing that I use his nickname as a handle online?

John C. Lilly died of heart failure at age 86 in Los Angeles on September 30, 2001. His remains were cremated.

>On the other hand, there are other classes of psychedelics that are unambiguously good: tryptamines (e.g., psilocybin) and phenethylamines (e.g., mescaline).

I don't know that I would necessarily classify hallucinogenic psychedelics as unambiguously good. I suspect the potential negative effects are understudied and under reported. Beyond hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (admittedly rare), medium-long term induced psychosis (also probably rare), while users frequently report positive effects both short and long term, there are potentially profound psychological/neurological alterations occurring post use which may not be obviously detrimental. What further complicates the issue is that, because of the strong dependence on existing psychological state (set and setting), its quite possible that a user's culture becomes a significant confounding factor and that some groups of people may in fact be worse off after using some or all such psychedelics.

Personally, a year or two post experience I noticed that certain emotions are more apparent to my perception which honestly I would have preferred to continue ignoring.

I still suspect that for the vast majority of people hallucinogens can be positive but let's not make the mistake of preemptively asserting that they are harmless.

Rich is better than famous. Plenty of people are quietly rich and basically just go about their business and live their lives, secure in the knowledge that there's money in the bank if they need it.

There's no such thing as quietly famous. Many of pitfalls of being rich & famous, like greedy enablers and a larger-than-life lifestyle, stem from the "famous" part.

I wonder if Europe will ever lift its Iron GDPR Curtain to allow its residents to access free-world websites!

> According to friends, Hsieh used “as many as 50 cartridges of nitrous oxide a day, often in public, or during 'meetings' with people

I mean, it’s a lot, but I’m surprised it’s not higher. Each cartridge yields a minute, maybe two, of intoxication before a quick return to baseline.

Probably less intoxication than hits of ketamine with its half life of 1-2 hours.

But it may have been on top of other substance use. Nitrous use is just very overt.

The chronic nitrous use will make it extremely difficult to maintain adequate vitamin B12 levels. Nitrous is very effective at deactivating it, and diet doesn’t have a ton. B12 deficiency has lots of nasty neurological effects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency

Even passive (same room) exposure to nitrous oxide leads to 25% reduced b12 levels.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17951609/

Who the hell knows what else nitrous is oxidizing away over the long term.

Cartridges often have a little machine oil impurity that will add up when consuming the amount that would be in 1L of whipped cream 50x a day. Hopefully he acquired the good ones.