131–140 of 185 posts
I take psychedelics a few times a year. I'm good with LSD once a year and I'm ok skipping it. I enjoy low (not micro) doses of mushrooms a few times each summer. Both have been very good for my sobriety. They aren't for everyone though. Great to see this becoming mainstream. Sad to see the number of charlatans and the industry has popped up around it. I hope that we're able to safely get these substances to those tha…
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I disagree, but ignoring this somewhat, I offer this: One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counte…
There is a not insignificant amount of evidence pointing to psychedelics as playing an outsized role in the formation of religions. A shaman brewing a mystical drink that gives you visions of supernatural forces is pretty convincing evidence of a god(s) to your any 2000 B.C. person. How else could you explain such a trip while having no concept of chemicals much less neurochemistry.
I was suffering from really bad loneliness and depression. I caught wind that friends I wasn't particularly close with were having an LSD retreat. I was raised that all 'hard' drugs were bad and potentially addictive. But I decided to join them and to try it. It turned out to be an transformative experience for me. And it wasn't from the LSD itself, the dose was too low to impact my brain in a lasting way. But it's h…
Author of the book under review here. AMA! One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces…
After reading the article, I watched the Margaret Mead bit on “The Rejected.”
Hope your book does well. I’ll buy it on Audible :)
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Of course it matters. There isn't much money in selling something where your criminal network doesn't give you any advantage over other distributors.
So then somebody who does want to be associated starts doing it, but what if they want to be associated because they've done the drug. Maybe they want to make the drug, have access to the drug, sell the drug, but not do all those other business bits like keep track of monetary flow and pay taxes.
It's not illegal to sell the drug, but they are essentially incapable of selling the drug legally.
Not saying that's the case - just saying it's not impossible in the uptight 50s for it to have been the case.
I recently ran out of gummies. Thanks to things being legal now, I just went to the handy Eaze website to do an order. $70 of goods + $30 in taxes and fees. Is this what libertarians mean by "taxation is theft?"
America was introduced to LSD via CIA's MK-ULTRA program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra 'to channel youth dissent and rebellion into more being and non-threatening directions' - FBI internal memo
I don't think your first claim is true. It was "introduced" by psychiatrists and various philosophical zealots. MKULTRA attempted to research it to see if it could be used for the purpose you describe. Without MKULTRA, LSD still hits the US and still causes some cultural tremors.
Subproject 6 of MK-ULTRA involved funding Eli Lilly to develop its own synthesis of LSD. The CIA embarked on this to ensure an adequate supply after finding that Sandoz had produced only 40 grams total of LSD. After Lilly succeeded, the CIA became the main customer, and via various other subprojects funded and supplied researchers that experimented with LSD.
In particular, many counterculture figures first encountered LSD as subjects of CIA-backed experiments, including Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and Grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
Timothy Leary himself was one step removed, being introduced to psychedelics by a fellow Harvard researcher whose research into magic mushrooms was CIA-funded.
[this is all discussed in Kinzer's "Poisoner in Chief"]
Without the CIA it might have taken decades longer.
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I disagree, but ignoring this somewhat, I offer this: One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counte…
Maybe because psychedelics wake up the part of the human psyche that understands religion
There is no religion, outside of what we imagine. We made it up. It isn’t like the water cycle, it’s not something just waited to be discovered by humans who know how to look for it. Religion is fantasy.
Author of the book under review here. AMA! One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces…
Was there any collaboration or correspondence between Mead/Bateson and Hubbard? Documentation on Hubbard can be hard to find, and he seems to have preferred it that way.