Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Are you honestly arguing against doing something because intellectuals that inspire you advocate it? That's a fantastic reason to seek out a new experience.
Go on… actually make your case…
Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
61–70 of 278 posts
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#62I don't think people are fully reading this article looking at the top comment... >There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug like LSD is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it. >I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasa…
Alcohol has a greater potential for harm than a variety of other recreational substances, legal or otherwise. That's basically it AFAICT. It has significant addiction potential, people do abuse, and there are long term harms associated with that abuse.
>greater potential for harm than ... other substances
Uh ... this style of description would need more parameters for a proper classification of alcohol's 'abilities' in relation to other substances.
>significant addiction potential
This is PURELY on an individual basis i.e. that potential is relative per person.
>long term harms associated with ... abuse
Yep, very true. It's also true of almost ANY type of abuse.
EDIT: Although, I do realize that this is just another: "Come on, marijuana is not any worse than alcohol" style argument. And for that singular case I would say: yeah sure your case holds up alright.
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have much of a sense of humor, do you.
If nobody gets your joke, the failure in communication was yours - and probably your own sense of humour.
Irregardless of that, the reply to OP's comment is representative of the attitudes that are common of HN. Sometimes I feel people just disagree and take apart anything for no other reason than longing for plain acknowledgement.
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#64>"Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect"
I'd say stigmatization and legalization tend to correlate well, but sadly neither law nor cultural attitude have much to do with actual danger.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
LSD remains a Schedule 1 drug, even though it's about as dangerous as caffeine.
>"...if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience."
I couldn't agree more; reading the statement above made me want to stand up and cheer.
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#65I recommend David Nutt's Drugs Without the Hot Air [1] on the subject. Nutt, a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, headed up the U.K.'s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (a British DEA/FDA hybrid). He was canned when he suggested that alcohol may be more damaging than many controlled substances. Amongst the goodies from the book are this chart [2], which plots dependence risk against toxicologis…
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LSD probably did not assist Francis Crick in discovering the double helix. Although LSD was available in 1953, it wasn't widely known or used until the 60s, and there's no evidence Crick would have had access to it (see the excerpt from Matt Ridley's book at http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6835/was-francis...). This story seems to have originated with a Mail article published after Crick's death (http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/francis_crick_dna_lsd.html), and AFAIK has never been verified. While other evidence suggests that Crick experimented with LSD later in his life, he probably did not discover the double helix under its influence.
OTOH, Kary Mullis explicitly attributes PCR to his LSD use. I'd ordinarily believe the primary source over uninformed speculation, but Mullis is also an AIDS and climate change denialist who claims he once spoke to a glowing green raccoon, so he is probably not the most reliable source either.
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#66I recommend David Nutt's Drugs Without the Hot Air [1] on the subject. Nutt, a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, headed up the U.K.'s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (a British DEA/FDA hybrid). He was canned when he suggested that alcohol may be more damaging than many controlled substances. Amongst the goodies from the book are this chart [2], which plots dependence risk against toxicologis…
>which means that there was effectively no relationship at all.
This is in large part because Nutt's research is entirely fraudulent. C.f. my previous analysis here:
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#67> "Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect" I'd say stigmatization and legalization tend to correlate well, but sadly neither law nor cultural attitude have much to do with actual danger. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus... LSD remains a Schedule 1 drug, even though it's about as dangerous as caffeine. > "...if I kn…
Exactly.
The only thing that bothers me about stigmatization and legalization is the 40+ year old crowd that feel marijuana should not be legal.
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#68I don't think people are fully reading this article looking at the top comment... >There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug like LSD is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it. >I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasa…
Alcohol has a greater potential for harm than a variety of other recreational substances, legal or otherwise. That's basically it AFAICT. It has significant addiction potential, people do abuse, and there are long term harms associated with that abuse.
Not to mention the high correlation between violent crimes and alcohol.
[0] http://ncadd.org/index.php/learn-about-alcohol/alcohol-and-c...
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#69"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues." We study and work for the purpose of altering the bits representing our bank account balances. Is that equivalent to hacking the bank and altering the bits directly? We make friend…
You seem to be making the case that taking drugs is in some sense "cheating" your way to a psychological experience, and therefore somewhat immoral or superficial. That's a valid perspective, but consider this: do you consider drinking coffee to be cheating? Do you consider the ingestion of caffeine to reduce fatigue and aid in cognitive performance as a bad thing? There's certainly a difference between being more al…
Indeed the debate doesn't end there. Is doing meditation cheating? sports?
Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, that's purely hypothetical.
Even if it's true it really doesn't mean anything. DMT was the most intense psychedelic experience I've ever had, but came away with zero insights or spiritual change (unlike as from the usual suspects).
It effects everybody differently.I highly suggest Rick Strassman's book 'DMT the spirit molecule'. It shows how different and similar they are