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Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

samharris.org

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Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#131

Post by pessimizer »

hristov wrote: post #124

It is really annoying that drugs proponents ignore the obvious negative effects of drugs. Pretending that LSD is harmless is utter utter bulshit. There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful an…

What you think you know about psychedelic drugs is not true. If you judge what drug proponents say against what you think that you know, of course you'll find what they say dishonest. What many of them say is on a far firmer scientific footing than what you're saying.

LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs.

edit: and to add to what kinghajj mentioned about Philip K. Dick; Dick was on amphetamines, and amphetamines have a very established history of actually making you long-term crazy.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#132

Post by drugthrowaway »

pstuart wrote: post #52
mistercow wrote: post #23

Earlier 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).

I had an awesome visual representation that eventually made a lot more sense when I started doing some GL programming. Everything in front of me, on it's surface, was made of triangles. I could see those triangles were made of infinitely smaller triangles, ad infinitum. It was absolutely beautiful.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#133

Post by mreid »

yarou wrote: post #95
harshreality wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Steve Jobs's similar statement that taking LSD was "one of the two or three most important things [he did] in [his] life." http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-...

Well, you could extend your argument to state that one of the most important things in Van Gogh's life was to sever his own ear and hand it to a prostitute. Therefore, those who wish to become good painters ought to sever their ear. The fallacy in your argument is simply: "person x has done y, which led them to achievement z. therefore, if you do y, you will also achieve z, because person x had done so." I don't thin…

Is there evidence to support the claim that Van Gogh believed cutting his ear off was important to his life and work? If not, then this is a very different example to that of Jobs' claim and is an equally poor way of refuting a position.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#134

Post by cnp »

andrewcooke wrote: post #91

i would like to try lsd, but i don't know of a safe, reliable, legal way of doing so. it just occurred to me that perhaps someone here might?

LSD is a complicated thing to produce and very few people have the skills / knowledge to do so, hence its rarity.

What I would recommend is Psilocybin Mushrooms; they grow in the wild, and the experience, imo, is whole orders of magnitude more strange, introspective and beautiful than LSD. Its also completely "natural" and leaves your system without a trace in just a few hours.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#135

Post by shantanubala »

pessimizer wrote: post #131
hristov wrote: post #124

It is really annoying that drugs proponents ignore the obvious negative effects of drugs. Pretending that LSD is harmless is utter utter bulshit. There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful an…

What you think you know about psychedelic drugs is not true. If you judge what drug proponents say against what you think that you know, of course you'll find what they say dishonest. What many of them say is on a far firmer scientific footing than what you're saying. LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs. edit:…

> LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs.

This is very misleading at best. LSD use causes direct symptoms of psychosis, including symptoms of schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and schizophreniform disorders.

The effects of LSD resemble schizophrenia so closely, in fact, that it has led to studies on rats using LSD as a hypothetical model to represent schizophrenia. In other words, we give rats LSD and see what chemicals reduce the effects to find treatments for schizophrenia.

A very incomplete list of sources:

Aghajanian, G. K., & Marek, G. J. (2000). Serotonin model of schizophrenia: emerging role of glutamate mechanisms. Brain Research Reviews, 31(2), 302-312.

Crow, T. J. (1980). Molecular pathology of schizophrenia: more than one disease process?. British medical journal, 280(6207), 66.

Schneier, F. R., & Siris, S. G. (1987). A review of psychoactive substance use and abuse in schizophrenia: patterns of drug choice. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 175(11), 641-652.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#136

Post by [deleted] »

hristov wrote: post #124

It is really annoying that drugs proponents ignore the obvious negative effects of drugs. Pretending that LSD is harmless is utter utter bulshit. There are so many cases of serious mental problems including permanent insanity caused by psychadelics. And of course there are also the thousands of people that are not exactly insane but have their brains pretty much fried and are just not very good for anything useful an…

[deleted]

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#137

Post by pessimizer »

andrewcooke wrote: post #91

i would like to try lsd, but i don't know of a safe, reliable, legal way of doing so. it just occurred to me that perhaps someone here might?

Legal is going to be nearly impossible. In the interest of having a continuum of badness for every class of drugs, and also in the interest of condemning the 1960s, LSD has been classified as the Worst Psychedelic, usually punished with harsher penalties than heroin, for example.

LSD was at least common and cheap until the 90s (when William Pickard[1] was busted), but now it's not even that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#138

Post by Alex3917 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #119
Alex3917 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044431

" The full methodology isn't actually published anywhere. " I believe it is: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... . Is a panel of experts providing views on an objective criteria the most satisfying solution? No. But they are open about the method, the scoring system, and data used to set assumptions. Plus, it beats "experts" legislating based on subjective, opaque critera. " The rankings a…

> I believe it is

So do you feel like, after reading that, that you could replicate the study and get the same results? Because having read that I understand that the scores came from a committee, and are supposedly an an interval scale, but beyond that I have zero clue as to how they came up with the scores that they did. Also, as far as I can tell this is just a new analysis of his old data, and the methodology for that is still equally (or more) lacking.

> the data are provided to allow for one to pry apart the local and global harms

Yeah, but the local and global harms are both wrong, and combined they are even more wrong. You can break it down all you want, but it's still wrong at every single level. (E.g. do you really believe that, say, alcohol causes 2.5x as much harm to users than butane? And is it even meaningful to make that comparison in the first place?)

> In his book, he spends a good deal of time addressing routes of administration, pointing out that "the health impacts of a drug can vary enormously depending on how it’s consumed".

Then doesn't this only show that he knows his own study is invalid?

> I thought he went quite extensively into the War on Drugs

I was only talking about the validity of the study, not the book.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#139

Post by ygmelnikova »

GuiA wrote: post #128
ygmelnikova wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second that. Having done my share of psychedelics, rest assured, you will meet the devil, and he will laugh while he plays you like the puppet that you are. Just ask Adam and Eve.

Your post, while I'm sure it has many literary merits, does not bring much to the conversation. Factual accounts of your experiences might though.

What for? So some guy sitting at computer in his underwear can pass judgement with his mouse? No thanks.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#140

Post by beachstartup »

xxchan wrote: post #63
vehementi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

irregardless is not a word
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