Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

It's not clear what you mean here?

I've taken magic mushrooms quite a few times, and it definitely had an impact on negativity right after and for many weeks.

For me, negativity was down regulated.

This might not be true of everyone's experience though.

my main issue with mushrooms is how nauseous i get -- also, i lose all my appetite for at least 12h (last time, it took 24h for me to be actually hungry again).

Of course, a few beers are much worse for you than a microdose of shrooms, so why choose the former?

Thanks for all the great info. EROWID was long before the decriminalization trend, the "right thing" to check before you trip\try any new subtance people might use for psychoactive effects. And many (including "heroic-to-crazy" sounding combinations) pharm-and-farm\forrest caffeine+substanceX etc. Look for "trip reports" section, if its still in business.

And any geek who had The Way Things Work on the (rents'?) bookshelf as a kid would get a kick out of PIHCKAL and TIHKAL, the father of "officially done right" psychoactive synthetic experimental chemistry's two compendious ½-&-½ encyclopædiæ\tomes, each split down the middle: first the detailed, timestamped group dose controlled-environment reports with friends and colleagues (maybe mainly fellow accademicians from Cal. Berkeley), then the terse Chemistry-journal style synthesis-procedure lab-8nstr7ction recipe database and huge index of subtance-nicknanes.

I lived illegally for a time in a closet-sized office I rented in OAKtown; chill RockerChik[tm] who did the same down the hall told me about the guy's public funeral and his last gift (of which she accepted a dose to take home and try).

And although probably already discussed on yc, the only other mass-market book I've ever read the didn't pander or condescend to the reader by expecting technical symbols to scare us away is essentially all of the (central-core + a bit of stringstuff) math-and-physics base-knowledge you need, from prehighschool fractions through exterior\Clifford Algebra tensor calculus and 1-forms and things, to be able to attack the real literature like a grad student. Diagrams every other page or so, including his own invention of graphic symbols which is really the only reasonable (visible notational) way to manipulate general Tensors. Flip through it and all that exotic\fancy\mysterious mathematics formula gobbledygook is dense and enticing for kids who haven't seen multiple and path integrals and PDEs before, but the explanation is well written an holds your hand to actually bring you through it. It's like 2⅜+inches of trade-paperback goodness 1st 580?\850? or so pages mainly math and relativity, rest of 1300pp or so of mainly quantum physics and cosmology, by the guy (Nobel in Phy.,PhD was math) who had the first famous bet with Hawking, wasn't it? Sir Roger (Penrose). Only complaints: stupid 1st title word, and overambitious promise RE posting solutions for the ton of easy-through-WTF-level excersise footnotes. Great for every mathscience-nonaverse 6+yo competent English reader on your list who thinks actual details scare only sissies, and if nec. you can always put tl;dr here: I personally recommend those who can afford c.$US 20(newish) to buy and READ\BROWSE\REREAD\SHARE ppbk "The Road to Reality" BY [now Sir] Penrose, Roger (RE:pre-Higgsmass edition)

The history of the CIA's acquisition and use of psychedelics and other drugs is detailed in 'Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion' (1994)

Certainly the CIA was trying to use psychedelics as interrogation tools and perhaps as part of a 'dirty tricks campaign' (secretly dosing politicians before speeches, etc.), and there was a lot of collaboration with various university psych departments in terms of research (students, prison inmates, etc. as research subjects) as well as in prostitution houses. This is all well-documented.

However, it really escaped from their control and had unexpected side effects. A good case example is that of Frank Olson, a bacteriological warfare specialist who was collaborating with the CIA in the MK-ULTRA program. After being dosed in a 'training session' with CIA members, he had apparent pangs of conscience (early 1950s) and wanted to quit the program. This was a period when the USA had an active biological weapons program, built in part on research results taken from the Japanese biological weapons program, and may have been testing biological weapons in North Korea as well. (This was all later exposed in the 1970s Congressional hearings, but at the time was top secret). It's quite likely that the CIA assassinated Frank Olson while claiming his death was a suicide, out of fear he would reveal all this to the public.

Hence, I doubt the central theme of your argument - psychedelics can have a wide variety of effects on individuals, and tend to be feared by authoritarians because of these unpredictable effects (abandoning religious belief or faith in authority is not an uncommon result). In addition, drug use is something humans have gravitated towards in every known society throughout recorded history, there's no need to invoke secretive government agencies and hidden motives to explain it.