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Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

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Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#111

Post by gchamonlive »

AdamN wrote: post #108
gchamonlive wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you can really say is that negligence is corrosive to civilization, and maybe that drugs act as an amplifier of sorts for society's illnesses and qualities.

That's focusing on low class drug use. Elite drug use leaves a very different trail and has a different impact.

Right, and the elites can deal with it them selves, they have money. They are definitely not directly responsible for the "subterranean environments covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia".

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#112

Post by go_elmo »

clickety_clack wrote: post #2

Given that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?

fun fact - "drug" - german "droge" originally means "dried plant" - e.g. herbs, teas etc

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#113

Post by go_elmo »

“This was a time of huge levels of creativity and competition,” he said. “If you didn’t innovate with the latest psychoactives, you were left behind.”

Why does this sound familiar? Silicon Valley, microdosing, everyone trying to be creative in finding best applications for AI (more or less creative, I must flag here)

Guess history repeats itself.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#114

Post by webern777 »

klrefg wrote: post #96
sophacles wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's really gross that coffee cups are left all over the place. But yeah, rise in caffeine consumption in place of ethanol is thought to have enabled and fueled the enlightenment, and been a major factor in the industrial revolution.

Look up how much the signatories of the constitutional convention drank the night before signing the constitution. Alcohol consumption remained massive during the 1800s by our standards, people just drank we more than we do and probably more than in the 1600s and 1700s because distilled alcohol became cheap and widespread while you only had access to beer and wine before that.

I believe in the US alcohol consumption peaked in the mid 19th century. It was common for alcohol to be provided on the job and for drinking breaks like coffee breaks.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#115

Post by webern777 »

klrefg wrote: post #97
theturtletalks wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a controversial theory, but it does exist[0]. As far as I know, there is no prevailing theory about where consciousness came from so speculating based on existing theories isn’t claiming it’s the truth. Is it such a leap that fungi are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity so maybe our early ancestors took it to get the evolutionary process started. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_…

How are these traits inherited by descendants who don’t consume drugs that increase the plasticity of their brain themselves?

This is from the intellectual con artist Terence McKenna. McKenna never let things like this get in the way of his theory. There was a flaw in the math of his ridiculous Time Wave Zero idea that when pointed out to him, didn't change anything. I was super into McKenna as a dumb teenager. I even had the dos program of Time Wave Zero. The idea McKenna would be taken seriously on anything after December 21, 2012 is really an interesting study in the power of the cult of personality. The stoned ape idea has more holes than swiss cheese. None of the least being that the actual study he based this idea on with edge detection didn't even say what he claimed it did. Distorted form perception as opposed improved edge detection, something that makes perfect sense to anyone who has tripped. He is not even a clever fraudster. It is just hard to know as a dumb teenager that James Joyce and Whitehead's Process and Reality are intentional choices in the unintelligible and the obscure so they could mean whatever McKenna needed them to mean.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#116

Post by heavenlyblue »

whakim wrote: post #90
GuB-42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases. The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. We can't tell "in your case you should take this dose, the risks are quantified and acceptable, and this is what we should do if things go wrong". And it is n…

> The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped. This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging. > but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to moder…

That's really wrong though: it's really hard to not feel effects of fentanyl, opioids, ketamine either.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#117

Post by webern777 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #23
titanomachy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but there are plenty of psychedelics that don't come from fungi.

True, but my point isn’t that. It’s that fungi operate as an interconnected network so it makes the connection between them, neural networks, and consciousness interesting.

Most things can be presented as nodes and edges. It is why graph theory is powerful.

Spider webs and auto traffic also have a relationship in this sense but that doesn't say much about the relationship of cars and spiders.

Maybe you need to read less bullshit from McKenna. He was a con artist, not even a good one at that.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#118

Post by webern777 »

slowin wrote: post #46

It's thought that a lot of the geometric designs in Indigenous pottery and architecture are directly influenced by hallucinogenic plants like datura. There's a really great YouTube channel called Desert Lore and he covers this topic in depth in this episode. It was really fascinating: https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=j8gH0WnHRpeo1BJu

It doesn't even make sense that geometric designs would be influenced by datura.

I have read every trip report on Erowid in relation to tropanes.

Art influenced by datura would look like Clive Barkers Hell Raiser. The trip reports are incredibly consistently dark because the person taking the substance is being poisoned. Not figuratively, literally.

The more interesting thing if you look into it is how ayahuasca use might be a modern phenomena. Maybe a few hundred years old.

Even more interesting is how there is a mindset that would not want this to be true and would never accept the evidence for it.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#119

Post by aeonik »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #76
aeonik wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroin (IV) ~6x GHB ~8x Ethanol ~10x Methamphetamine ~10x DXM ~10x Cocaine ~15x MDMA ~16x Codeine ~20x Methadone ~20x Mescaline ~24x Flunitrazepam ~30x Ketamine ~40x Phenobarbital ~50x Nitrous oxide ~150x LSD ~1000x Cannabis/THC ~1000x or greater Citation: Gable RS. Comparison of acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused psychoactive substances. Addiction. 2004;99(6):686–696. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00744.x

Well given "therapeutic index" I had said "medication" as opposed to "commonly abused substances". I think your list skews heavily due to psychedelics tending not to be acutely toxic to the same extent as other chemical species. Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC. Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other sub…

Two things:

1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses.

Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely).

2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls.

>80,000 U.S. Poison Control exposure cases in 2021 involving acetaminophen or an acetaminophen-containing product.

https://poisoncenters.org/news-alerts/13244374

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#120

Post by LoganDark »

aeonik wrote: post #119
fc417fc802 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well given "therapeutic index" I had said "medication" as opposed to "commonly abused substances". I think your list skews heavily due to psychedelics tending not to be acutely toxic to the same extent as other chemical species. Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC. Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other sub…

Two things: 1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses. Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely). 2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls. >80,000 U.S. Poison Control exposure cases in 2021 involving acetaminophen or an acetaminophen-containing product. https://poisoncenters.org/news-alerts/13244374

> an acetaminophen-containing product

Careful because that's some opioids as well.

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