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Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

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Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#141

Post by mihaic »

My general gripe with results like this is that it seems to be interpreted in a biased way by the people that already use psychoactive drugs, who want to argue for them in the modern world.

I do agree that drugs were often needed for people to ensure the hardships of civilization (alcohol is not just a disinfectant). My main problem though is that this is too often used as an argument to shove a bunch of drugs in the general population, when we maybe could achieve some better results by just improving society.

The people that take psylocibin/mescalin/whatever always tell other how much it expanded their mind, yet often they seem just as narrow minded to me as they did before, just in a different way

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#142

Post by AngryData »

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #131
999900000999 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Crack is less harmful than alcohol by pretty mucch every measure so if anything we should be swapping the place of alcohol and crack.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#143

Post by AngryData »

CPLX wrote: post #107
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.

Pretty sure we have a a couple examples of what happens when a huge swath of the people in charge are using prescription amphetamines. Berlin in 1939 and Silicon Valley jn 2026 come to mind.

And every year inbetween. Cocaine never stopped being popular.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#144

Post by whakim »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #116
whakim wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure; total blinding is an issue with many drugs (however active placebos which can make you feel dizzy/sedated/whatever can help); opiods/fentanyl/etc sometimes have to make do with imperfect blinding. The fact remains that the psychedelic state is so distinct from normal consciousness that the challenge is qualitatively different.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#145

Post by bitexploder »

RangerScience wrote: post #137
bitexploder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense. I think I have approached becoming stuck. I reached a kind of extreme disassociated state once where I felt like I didn't exist and part of my brain started to panic. I meditate a lot. I reminded the part of me that was becoming anxious that we are okay because we are somehow still observing ourselves so we must still exist. That was apparently adequate to calm it lol. It is truly weird to negotiate with some part of your brain and see it work in real time. I think it was a particularly sticky day for my DMN and or some particular loop it was hanging on to? It is always hard to say.

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#146

Post by cindyllm »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #134
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?

[dead]

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#147

Post by Ccecil »

pmarreck wrote: post #138

I would love to know how many human conceptions were assisted by the more well-known mind-altering drug, alcohol.

Funny you mention that...

I know a local bar where there are 4 bartenders who have all been there over 25 years.

Recently I started asking them "How many pregnancies do you suppose you have caused throughout your career?". The most common response was to laugh but all of them also said "I know of a few at least".

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#148

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

#149

Post by vikramkr »

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…

There are plenty of other cases (e.g. ultra rare diseases) where we don't do RCTs for various practical reasons. So it's not really a problem of the existing framework - there's a ton of room for "we can't do an rct because like, duh they know they're tripping." But as other comments pointed out were really hampered by the lack of understanding of how and why these do or don't work - why some people get positive outcomes and why some get negative (preferably we'd like to know before prescribing broadly!) a ton of this basic research/mechanistic understanding etc has not been possible because of the war on drugs. If research had been possible we would be in a much better place of understanding how they could be regulated and used today - even with the more limited technology available a couple decades ago more openness around this could have at least enabled e.g. more and larger observational studies that could elucidate things today but we're stuck with a very fragmented and incomplete picture
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