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Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

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Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#131

Post by wellthisisgreat »

999900000999 wrote: post #98
klrefg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction. We are yet to observe a society where the overwhelming majority of the population regularly uses fentanyl, crack cocaine or meth-amphetamine. I bet that if we try comparing apples to oranges alcohol would end up being relatively harmless.

If Crack was legal today would you light up a pipe ? Maybe right after filing your taxes ? The most dangerous part of any illegal substance is the illegal economy existing to support it. Drug dealers generally can’t sue each other so they resolve disputes via other means. Law Enforcement has the right to suspend all your so called rights because someone you may or may not know might have an unauthorized substance. Se…

> If Crack was legal today would you light up a pipe ?

I wouldn’t but I don’t drink either, while many ppl drink themselves to incapacitation.

The difference between crack and a bottle o’ Jack though is that consequence of a crack-filled weekend isn’t just a hangover.

Maybe a society with all drugs legal would eventually figure out tolerable dosages for heavy recreational crack use (I really did write this ha), but do you want to live through the couple of decades of that discovery phase?

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#132

Post by freebsd_lovefes »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #129
freebsd_lovefes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's glaringly missing. Nicotine. It's extremely mind-altering, and it's been u-bi-qui-tous in the Americas for millennia - and for centuries in Europe and the world. Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more s…

> nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it * nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations. To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?

> But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.

In boxing, you do not talk your opponent through as you knock him out.

In research, pick any field, say, astronomy, you do not mention that Earth is not flat and that the Earth orbits the Sun.

In biochemistry research, you do not spell out that nicotine binds to NICOTINIC acetelcholine receptors as an agonist, that's literally Biochem 101.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#134

Post by wartywhoa23 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #5

So if you take a lot of psychedelics you end up with a civilization that ritually murders 20,000 people every couple of months. Just imagine the power you could wield as a shaman with drugs like DMT and psilocybin it would look like a literal magic

What kind of a psychedelic created a civilization that ritually murdered 80,000,000 people over the course of 6 years, or ~ 37,000 a day, in WWII?

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#135

Post by arjie »

lisp2240 wrote: post #133

People do drugs in abandoned buildings. In a few hundred years archaeologists will think the purpose of shopping malls was fentanyl.

Haha that’s great.

“Artificial General Intelligence arose from the streets of San Francisco ca. 2027 possibly due to the high use of opiates among the population. Scientists have found that many locals at the time (of the dominant natural species - Homo sapiens) would consume vast amounts of fentanyl on the city streets - an incredibly dangerous drug originally used at the time as painkiller - which might be the source of artificial intelligence.”

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#136

Post by slowin »

webern777 wrote: post #118
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…

That's not what he says. The geometric designs are influenced by weaving. The patterns that look like datura, an ayahuasca... are influenced by nature, and some of the patterns in Mexico are influenced by actually hallucinating (he calls those zentangle patterns). The natural patterns aren't what you see when you take the drug, it's what the plant looks like. Imagine a box someone is storing marijuana in that has a marijuana leaf on it.

Here's where he breaks down all three: https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=ZURxNd189w7_Rzfg&t=870

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#137

Post by RangerScience »

bitexploder wrote: post #81
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…

We have pretty strong indications of when and why things go wrong. Openness vs rigid thinking are an axis that are very strong correlative factors. A lot more nuance but there is a lot we do know about risk factors so it isn’t a complete question mark.

Anecdotally / personally experienced; bad trips happen “when you get stuck”. The #1 thing to do in such a situation is to change the music. The #2 thing to do is, quite literally, go to the bathroom and take a shit.

It’s extremely analogous to anything that would make a normal day into a bad day.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#139

Post by GuB-42 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #92
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…

> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. We are struggling to pay for the research that would result in these being effective treatments (not subscription medicines) that would start out as generic drugs. > ketamine Great example, SPRAVATO, is a brand name patent protected version of this drug (enantiomer) that as a dose cost over 500 bucks.

You just gave your own counter argument. If they find a promising way to use psychedelics for instance, they are not going with straight LSD, they will find some analogue that they show is 0.1% better and patent it.

Just like that special ketamine. Or all these ADHD medicine that is just tweaked and patented amphetamine.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#140

Post by ButlerianJihad »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #123
aeonik wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

7-Up contained lithium citrate until 1950. The soda jerks were literally treating manic depression during WWII. There were advertising signs for it at crosswalks on city streets. Make 7-Up Yours, Baby! Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abu…

By the way, Wikipedia attempts to contradict the claim about 7Up containing lithium citrate and says it was never an ingredient. There is no source supporting this claim. An unreliable source, by "Bill Lockhart and Bob Brown" never makes any claim about 7Up's ingredients, but focuses on weirdly-long names that had never been used by the company.

On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/7up/

https://medium.com/wise-well/lithium-the-nonessential-elemen...

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