> The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students.
I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.
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 not for the lack of trying.
People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent.
The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
> 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 modern standards
The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.
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
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.
> The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.
There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.
There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.
The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.
This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.
There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.
I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.
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.
The way I think of them is as a mulligan in a trading card game like Magic.
Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.
> 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.
Meanwhile my at home treatment used Braun 250mg lozenges, which probably cost ~ $4 a pop (wholesale) and for many 2-3 are enough for a treatment session.
It's not like it's a novel drug -- the gatekeeping is ridiculous. Fuck the DEA.
i don't dispute that the "War on Drugs" was (is?) pretty much just a glorified jobs program for law enforcement but nevertheless some drugs are very bad. ironically enough alcohol, despite being the most readily available drug after caffeine, is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction.
> 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.
Set the legal drug age to whatever the enlistment age is. I’d argue 21 for both.
> 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?
I wouldn't celebrate the end of the war on drugs just yet. Even if psychedelic medicines are approved, bifurcated scheduling means that rich white people using psychedelics in clinics would be respectable medical users, but the same exact molecule used on the street by poor brown people would still be schedule 1 and used to justify continued persecution. Tails they win, heads we lose.
Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.
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?
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.
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".
Supposedly there was a time when drinking beer was often safer than drinking water from available sources, including for children. I guess there are levels
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.
I know what you meant. But the words you used apply to my reply too. It's a reminder that any attempt at an objective definition of "drugs" includes alcohol and caffeine, and that there is a huge cultural component to "good drugs" and "bad drugs". In fact, coffee was considered one of the bad drugs by many cultures it when first introduced to them - including European culture.
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.
The top comment when I clicked it does not agree with the narrative:
@rkozakand 10 months ago
The so called "southwestern motif" is found wherever people weave. Our native rugs in the mountains of Ukraine use the exact same motif, only in different colors. It is a natural outgrowth of weaving techniques, which encourage triangles. We also have ancient pottery from what is called the Trypillian culture, which includes spirals and what you call 'zen tangle' motifs, which we call 'bezkonechnyk'. This pottery looks very similar to Southwest American pottery, even being executed in the same colors. I therefore doubt that they are as tied to specific plants as you think, although patterns repeat in nature, and maybe we have similar plants.
He actually talks about that in the video and compares and contrasts the weaving based patterns, nature based patterns and hallucinogenic patterns. The datura pattern being nature based.
More likely it's not the same protocol that served these different cultures those motifs, it's the same server sending the same data over different protocols.
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.
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.
“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.”
Alcohol and fermentation have a much different role with food safety and preservation though; the inebriation is just a pleasant side effect for some (and a curse for others)
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
It's proposed in a Niven-Pournelle novel that grain domesticated humans: we gave it the largest premium territories, we carefully propogated the finest varieties, and we elevated it to a holy sacrament and a symbol of sacrifice, divinity, and unity.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
I can't quit it. When I do, after about 2 weeks I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee and sit in my open plan office,and hide my contempt for the absolute rank ineptitude of almost everyone else there. Load me up with the happy brown juice and I can pretty much make it through. I'm not convinced this is sustainable tbh.
> Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.
> In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
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 sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
> 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?
It's clear that nicotine binds to those receptors, but exactly how that plays out is far more complex in practice, depending on a whole host of variables.
- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each
- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present
- etc.
You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.
Alcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so.
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
So for mold, low enough doses aren't poison? Can't you just say this about anything. If you have poison in a low enough dose it's not poison. So it means jsut about nothing to say alcohol isn't poisonous because you can have a small dose of it.
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.
That's a good definition. Still, you can take it literally - anything small enough doesn't really harm you. and meanings can be stretched to support whatever conclusions you want.
we used to think electrons were the smallest particles, until they were not.
and I think talking about breaking molecular bonds though or bringing "fundamental forces" into this is misleading and disingenuous. the point of the OP is to say, "you can take anything in a small enough dose and its not poisonous"
And when you say prions or whatever like you were, my point is if you take small enough doses even of those, you won't be poisoned. you get what I mean, so lets not waste each others time on trying to confuse impossibilities with reality. you won't be getting hurt or die or meaningfully poisoned by ingesting one "prion" or particle of "strange matter". and now when you describe any "poison" with this model, say you ingest 1 particle of even a pure poison, you won't be getting hurt or die.
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
> That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs, and I'd say the indiscriminate action and lack of any particular affinity is what makes it a poison as opposed to a drug. It is also generally assumed that alcohol is not exactly in the same category as drugs. ("drugs or alcohol" etc.)
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Yep, alcohol is one of a very small number of recreational drugs that can kill addicted people who quit cold turkey. Even hospitals have to provide ethanol to heavy drinkers to prevent withdrawal.
That's purely because it's usage is accepted nearly as a default, and drug in common usage is most often a pejorative term if it doesn't refer to a medicinal context.
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
Don't you mean that it's quite good? It's easily more than an order of magnitude for many people (not sure about chronic alcoholics with high tolerance). How many medications can you 5x your dose and not have some risk of ending up in the hospital?
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 substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
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 abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
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!
> 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!
7 Up says that 7 Up was using it. The primary marketing campaign of 7 Up from its inception was its lithiated benefit. Soda jerks were the baristas who sold carbonated beverages at drug-store counters. The soda pop, tonic beverage, patent medicine, and pharmaceutical industries were intertwined from the beginning.
Lithiated beverages were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s. It was equivalent to the coca beverages, which included coca wine, coca tonic, coca teas. There was lithia beer, lithia spring water (because there were natural springs containing some amount of dissolved lithium salts) and 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda was a market leader. The "Lithiated" quality was on the bottle caps and it was in their advertisements.
The FDA first banned lithium citrate in 1948. There were over a dozen deaths related to lithium toxicity. It is unclear which products caused these deaths. The FDA doesn't have to say which ones: they were identifying a controlled substance, not issuing a recall.
There was yet another FDA ban in 1949. You see, doctors had begun recommending low-sodium diets to people with CVD and related illnesses. So people cut out table salt from their diets. But lithium chloride was commonly available in the same medium. So your wife and restaurant chefs cooked with a teaspoon of lithium chloride; your dinner table at home had a shaker of lithium chloride; people "salted to taste" with this marvelous salt substitute. But the lithiated effects were, again, lethal, and this secondary ban put the last nail in the coffin for the next 20 years before anyone started playing around with manic-depressive patients.
It’s much more of a poison to some of our primate relatives. iirc the genes that facilitate alcohol metabolism evolved in great apes millions of years before homo sapiens, and we inherited them; we’ve been boozing long before we were even human.
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
I love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire).
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".
“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)
Are you thinking of the Aztecs or Mayans thousands of kilometers away? Andean human sacrifice involved customs unable to provide that level of throughput.
I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness. And it’s supported by the fact that psychedelics are also a network like the brain is. And when taking them, your brain experiences plasticity and that’s what allows profound changes.
A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?
There is no evidence of that. What you say is not supporting, but rather "conveniently makes sense".
I don't dispute the utility of psychedelics. But I have observed (and this is anecdotal) that the fanatic devotees of the drugs tend to engage in magical thinking around the power/history/whatever of psychedelic substances, no matter their intelligence or accomplishment, or rigorous critical thinking in other areas.
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.
One of the reasons this is such a long bow to draw is that, as you have absurdly reiterated and an earlier commenter posited, this is Lamarckism.
If it is true, where are all the sapient reindeer and other animals that have consumed these substances as a species for as long or longer than we have existed?
I would think it might sometimes depend on what state of mind those were in when they were writing the scripture or prophesizing the dogma that persisted or was enforced afterward.
Using actual "performance-enhancing" substances would be expected to result in a wildly different outcome compared to performance-degrading materials.
Plasticity may or may not be the intended objective in any case.
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.
You'll get more buy in on your ideas if you didn't present them so bitterly. Your comment seems like you were let down after getting highly attached to the theory.
I'm aware of the theory. I'm not aware of any explanation offered by the theory as to how those who first experienced consciousness via psychedelics managed to pass consciousness on to their descendants. It doesn't make any sense. If you cut the tail off a rat, it doesn't have tailless children.
This theory relies on not defining consciousness. My dog certainly appears to be conscious, and I doubt there is any evidence of some canine use of psychedelics.
How are psychedelic chemical compounds “a network”? Are you referring specifically to fungal mycelium? Of course there a tons of non psychedelic mushrooms and tons of non-mushroom psychedelics
Just for clarification. The default mode network is what activates when we are at rest or ”not focused on the outside world”. Ie daydreaming and mind wandering, even if it also can be active during detailed thinking.
It has also been shown to have negative correlation to networks in the brain associated with attention.
There are a number of problems with these statements, but a major one is that psychedelics are associated with reduced activity within the DMN (but increased activity between the DMN and other networks). It is not clear the direction in which this causality runs.
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.
Meth is a crystal, and crystals vibrate in synchronous harmonicity. What does this tell us about meth?
... no, the fact that some hallucinogens are derived from fungi does not give rise to consciousness. I accept that you read that somewhere; that does not make it true. But, really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Or take DMT as a crystalline, naturally produced substance. As far as I know, there's no Methamphetamine in nature, although I've become very careful with the terms none/all in biology.
Nice strawman you got there. Meth is a man made synthetic compound. Fungi cover this earth and are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity and can cause personality change.
The theory is real and, of course, controversial[0]. The formation of consciousness is still a mystery and I’m simply discussing a theory. If you have another theory you deem right, let’s argue on merit, not personal attacks.
Nowhere in my comment did I attack you personally. I made an analogous argument; reductio ad absurdum. LSD is also a man-made synthetic compound, and promotes neuroplacticity. And if you've ever known a meth addict, you'll know that the substance can cause significant and enduring personality change.
You're advancing a pseudoscientific theory, and I'm ripping it on its utter lack of merit. Please don't take that personally.
For the record, the first time LSD was created it was made using lysergic acid derived from ergot, a mold found on rye. It is a semisynthetic drug, and cannot be created without an organic source.
> really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Sometimes really bad ideas can actually turn around when taken to irrational extremes. Tons of evidence in history of people who are batshit crazy, somehow figuring out something amazing simply by being impossibly committed to something really, really stupid. But of course, being batshit crazy has other problems, and nearly all of the really stupid stuff does not turn around like that.
> The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students.
I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.
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 not for the lack of trying.
People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent.
The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
> 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 modern standards
The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.
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
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.
But we only use those as sedative. Or how ?
Except ketamine therapies are being done right now with low doses where the effects are lighter than psychedelics
> The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.
There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.
There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.
The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.
This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.
There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.
I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.
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.
The way I think of them is as a mulligan in a trading card game like Magic.
Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.
> 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.
Meanwhile my at home treatment used Braun 250mg lozenges, which probably cost ~ $4 a pop (wholesale) and for many 2-3 are enough for a treatment session.
It's not like it's a novel drug -- the gatekeeping is ridiculous. Fuck the DEA.
The War on Drugs only serves to give law enforcement unlimited extra constitutional powers.
Even the bizarre murder of Central American fishermen is justified by someone somewhere having a dime bag or something.
Who needs trials , or evidence. Drugs are bad.
Government good.
Drugs bad.
i don't dispute that the "War on Drugs" was (is?) pretty much just a glorified jobs program for law enforcement but nevertheless some drugs are very bad. ironically enough alcohol, despite being the most readily available drug after caffeine, is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction.
> 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.
Set the legal drug age to whatever the enlistment age is. I’d argue 21 for both.
> 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?
You mean a society that doesn’t give millions of people criminal records for what’s ultimately a health issue ?
Probation still doesn’t work. You don’t have a whole lot of bootleggers now do you ?
Regulate, tax, educate.
Crack is less harmful than alcohol by pretty mucch every measure so if anything we should be swapping the place of alcohol and crack.
Not fentanyl, but it used to be normal to get methamphetamine as a cough treatment from any pharmacy, and it worked out okay.
Heroine and cocaine too, coke was full of... coke at the beginning
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.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.
i can think of a way to find out :)
we'll have to take it in stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial
I wouldn't celebrate the end of the war on drugs just yet. Even if psychedelic medicines are approved, bifurcated scheduling means that rich white people using psychedelics in clinics would be respectable medical users, but the same exact molecule used on the street by poor brown people would still be schedule 1 and used to justify continued persecution. Tails they win, heads we lose.
Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.
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?
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.
could also say a corroded civilization makes vulnerable people feel bad and drugs make them feel good
drugs have been making people feel good (and messing with their sense of motivation to behave responsibly) regardless of society's state
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".
You can 100% say that European civilization was heavily, heavily influenced by the consumption of alcohol.
What do you mean "was"?
Supposedly there was a time when drinking beer was often safer than drinking water from available sources, including for children. I guess there are levels
They didn't make Arnold a saint for nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_of_Soissons
A lot of it was weaker small beer though too, like 1-2%.
Each person was going through a gallon a day though, that’s still 4-5 standard drinks which is a crazy amount to drink all day everyday.
Spread throughout the day you wouldn't be more than half a standard drink deep at a time in terms of psychological effects.
Terrible for your liver though.
Yeah, like this zombie civilisation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i2k7KQ5L5Jg I am not sure if you can say it’s raising or falling by their posture
My spidy sense is tingling on this video. The related recommendations on the side include these videos:
In particular it is the thumbnails that look identical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NeLNYCGo0 The Zombies Of America! (i have never seen anything like this..) by Frank van Dam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snN0PNZVWNA Inside Philadelphia's Real Life Zombie Outbreak by Tyler Oliveira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htZCX1Y0ZiA THE ZOMBIES OF AMERICA (I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS) by Joe HaTTab
fun fact - "drug" - german "droge" originally means "dried plant" - e.g. herbs, teas etc
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.
I meant the graffiti and needles in tunnels and under bridges etc.
I know what you meant. But the words you used apply to my reply too. It's a reminder that any attempt at an objective definition of "drugs" includes alcohol and caffeine, and that there is a huge cultural component to "good drugs" and "bad drugs". In fact, coffee was considered one of the bad drugs by many cultures it when first introduced to them - including European culture.
"If I couldn't, three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweigt_stille%2C_plaudert_ni...
Correlation and causation...
I think there might be multiple groups in play there
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.
Drinking culture changed more dramatically in English-speaking countries in late 1800s/early 1900s (temperance movement) than elsewhere.
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
The top comment when I clicked it does not agree with the narrative:
@rkozakand 10 months ago
The so called "southwestern motif" is found wherever people weave. Our native rugs in the mountains of Ukraine use the exact same motif, only in different colors. It is a natural outgrowth of weaving techniques, which encourage triangles. We also have ancient pottery from what is called the Trypillian culture, which includes spirals and what you call 'zen tangle' motifs, which we call 'bezkonechnyk'. This pottery looks very similar to Southwest American pottery, even being executed in the same colors. I therefore doubt that they are as tied to specific plants as you think, although patterns repeat in nature, and maybe we have similar plants.
He actually talks about that in the video and compares and contrasts the weaving based patterns, nature based patterns and hallucinogenic patterns. The datura pattern being nature based.
More likely it's not the same protocol that served these different cultures those motifs, it's the same server sending the same data over different protocols.
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.
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
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.”
Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?
Alcohol and fermentation have a much different role with food safety and preservation though; the inebriation is just a pleasant side effect for some (and a curse for others)
Beer may have lead to the domestication of cereal grains. This is not my theory, here's an article about it: https://nautil.us/beer-domesticated-man-234697
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
It's proposed in a Niven-Pournelle novel that grain domesticated humans: we gave it the largest premium territories, we carefully propogated the finest varieties, and we elevated it to a holy sacrament and a symbol of sacrifice, divinity, and unity.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
> we gave it the largest premium territories
Not premium to humans.
yes coffee is reason behind our current civilization
I can't quit it. When I do, after about 2 weeks I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee and sit in my open plan office,and hide my contempt for the absolute rank ineptitude of almost everyone else there. Load me up with the happy brown juice and I can pretty much make it through. I'm not convinced this is sustainable tbh.
> ... I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee ...
Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806
> Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.
PBS Eons Why Does Caffeine Exist? (5:13 for the bit on bees) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI
> In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
Chesterton called it, quite fittingly, "The Puritan's opium".
And nicotine, don't forget that. Smokers built the modern world (and then developed lung cancer for their troubles).
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 sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
> 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.
It's clear that nicotine binds to those receptors, but exactly how that plays out is far more complex in practice, depending on a whole host of variables.
- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each
- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present
- etc.
You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.
Alcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so.
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
As the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
> Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
Tonicity matters too. Deionized water will suck the ions right out of you. All the way to your death if you're so determined.
So for mold, low enough doses aren't poison? Can't you just say this about anything. If you have poison in a low enough dose it's not poison. So it means jsut about nothing to say alcohol isn't poisonous because you can have a small dose of it.
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.
That's a good definition. Still, you can take it literally - anything small enough doesn't really harm you. and meanings can be stretched to support whatever conclusions you want.
> anything small enough doesn't really harm you
What about prions, or strange matter?
You think you can't make those any smaller?
I would assume you can't generally just shrink the size of basic particles, molecular bonds or fundamental forces, but maybe you can, who knows.
we used to think electrons were the smallest particles, until they were not.
and I think talking about breaking molecular bonds though or bringing "fundamental forces" into this is misleading and disingenuous. the point of the OP is to say, "you can take anything in a small enough dose and its not poisonous"
And when you say prions or whatever like you were, my point is if you take small enough doses even of those, you won't be poisoned. you get what I mean, so lets not waste each others time on trying to confuse impossibilities with reality. you won't be getting hurt or die or meaningfully poisoned by ingesting one "prion" or particle of "strange matter". and now when you describe any "poison" with this model, say you ingest 1 particle of even a pure poison, you won't be getting hurt or die.
> misleading and disingenuous
It was a joke.
sarcasm is often a joke on you, lol. I get it now. but it can be hard to get across, especially if someone doesn't know you.
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
> That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
And at the right dosage.
Poison is a function of dosage. Water is a poison in a high enough dose.
What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?
Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs, and I'd say the indiscriminate action and lack of any particular affinity is what makes it a poison as opposed to a drug. It is also generally assumed that alcohol is not exactly in the same category as drugs. ("drugs or alcohol" etc.)
"drugs or alcohol"
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Yep, alcohol is one of a very small number of recreational drugs that can kill addicted people who quit cold turkey. Even hospitals have to provide ethanol to heavy drinkers to prevent withdrawal.
That's purely because it's usage is accepted nearly as a default, and drug in common usage is most often a pejorative term if it doesn't refer to a medicinal context.
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
> Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs
That's primarily because it's most commonly diluted 90%. Spirits (or everclear) have much lower intake required.
I did not say alcoholic beverages, I said alcohol. Even pure ethanol still requires a far higher dosage than most drugs.
But the "Active dose" to "lethal dose" ratio, aka "therapeutic index" of alcohol is pretty bad.
Don't you mean that it's quite good? It's easily more than an order of magnitude for many people (not sure about chronic alcoholics with high tolerance). How many medications can you 5x your dose and not have some risk of ending up in the hospital?
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 substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
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 abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
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...
> 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!
Did the FDA ever say if 7Up was the one using it?
7 Up says that 7 Up was using it. The primary marketing campaign of 7 Up from its inception was its lithiated benefit. Soda jerks were the baristas who sold carbonated beverages at drug-store counters. The soda pop, tonic beverage, patent medicine, and pharmaceutical industries were intertwined from the beginning.
Lithiated beverages were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s. It was equivalent to the coca beverages, which included coca wine, coca tonic, coca teas. There was lithia beer, lithia spring water (because there were natural springs containing some amount of dissolved lithium salts) and 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda was a market leader. The "Lithiated" quality was on the bottle caps and it was in their advertisements.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog...
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-toxic-history-...
The FDA first banned lithium citrate in 1948. There were over a dozen deaths related to lithium toxicity. It is unclear which products caused these deaths. The FDA doesn't have to say which ones: they were identifying a controlled substance, not issuing a recall.
There was yet another FDA ban in 1949. You see, doctors had begun recommending low-sodium diets to people with CVD and related illnesses. So people cut out table salt from their diets. But lithium chloride was commonly available in the same medium. So your wife and restaurant chefs cooked with a teaspoon of lithium chloride; your dinner table at home had a shaker of lithium chloride; people "salted to taste" with this marvelous salt substitute. But the lithiated effects were, again, lethal, and this secondary ban put the last nail in the coffin for the next 20 years before anyone started playing around with manic-depressive patients.
> an acetaminophen-containing product
Careful because that's some opioids as well.
It’s much more of a poison to some of our primate relatives. iirc the genes that facilitate alcohol metabolism evolved in great apes millions of years before homo sapiens, and we inherited them; we’ve been boozing long before we were even human.
if alcohol can damage your short term memory,
Imagine what effect alcohol has
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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
I love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire).
It’s amazingly coherent.
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".
“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.
Terrence McKenna had a theory that psychedelics jump started civilization by making us more open to cooperation.
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Give me enough drugs and I'll create civilization too
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
Are you thinking of the Aztecs or Mayans thousands of kilometers away? Andean human sacrifice involved customs unable to provide that level of throughput.
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?
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I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness. And it’s supported by the fact that psychedelics are also a network like the brain is. And when taking them, your brain experiences plasticity and that’s what allows profound changes.
A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?
There is no evidence of that. What you say is not supporting, but rather "conveniently makes sense".
I don't dispute the utility of psychedelics. But I have observed (and this is anecdotal) that the fanatic devotees of the drugs tend to engage in magical thinking around the power/history/whatever of psychedelic substances, no matter their intelligence or accomplishment, or rigorous critical thinking in other areas.
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_theory
One of the reasons this is such a long bow to draw is that, as you have absurdly reiterated and an earlier commenter posited, this is Lamarckism. If it is true, where are all the sapient reindeer and other animals that have consumed these substances as a species for as long or longer than we have existed?
I see what you did here - you assumed sapient animals HAVE to create technological civilization, didn't you?
Maybe they are sapient - you know, like the dolphins from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy :)
How are these traits inherited by descendants who don’t consume drugs that increase the plasticity of their brain themselves?
Good question.
I would think it might sometimes depend on what state of mind those were in when they were writing the scripture or prophesizing the dogma that persisted or was enforced afterward.
Using actual "performance-enhancing" substances would be expected to result in a wildly different outcome compared to performance-degrading materials.
Plasticity may or may not be the intended objective in any case.
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.
You'll get more buy in on your ideas if you didn't present them so bitterly. Your comment seems like you were let down after getting highly attached to the theory.
I'm aware of the theory. I'm not aware of any explanation offered by the theory as to how those who first experienced consciousness via psychedelics managed to pass consciousness on to their descendants. It doesn't make any sense. If you cut the tail off a rat, it doesn't have tailless children.
This theory relies on not defining consciousness. My dog certainly appears to be conscious, and I doubt there is any evidence of some canine use of psychedelics.
Reconciling the profound interiority of the experience with a mere external catalyst can be quite challenging.
Consider the question yourself next time you are in the throes of an exoerience and see how hard it is to maintain objectivity...
How are psychedelic chemical compounds “a network”? Are you referring specifically to fungal mycelium? Of course there a tons of non psychedelic mushrooms and tons of non-mushroom psychedelics
Just for clarification. The default mode network is what activates when we are at rest or ”not focused on the outside world”. Ie daydreaming and mind wandering, even if it also can be active during detailed thinking.
It has also been shown to have negative correlation to networks in the brain associated with attention.
There are a number of problems with these statements, but a major one is that psychedelics are associated with reduced activity within the DMN (but increased activity between the DMN and other networks). It is not clear the direction in which this causality runs.
> psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness
This reads like recycled lamarckism.
"This reads like recycled lamarckism."
Recycled Lamarckianism would be Lysenkoism. :)
> I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness
I have never taken psychedelics but I believe myself to be conscious.
This hypothesis was clearly written by someone who was on psychedelics when they wrote it.
> psychedelics are also a network like the brain is
Sorry to be rude, but what the hell does that mean?
Fungi grow as a vast interconnected network and can communicate to other fungi. Similarly to how the neurons in the brain communicate.
In fact, when you take fungi, it tones down common neural pathways and allows new ones to form between new places.
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.
Meth is a crystal, and crystals vibrate in synchronous harmonicity. What does this tell us about meth?
... no, the fact that some hallucinogens are derived from fungi does not give rise to consciousness. I accept that you read that somewhere; that does not make it true. But, really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Or take DMT as a crystalline, naturally produced substance. As far as I know, there's no Methamphetamine in nature, although I've become very careful with the terms none/all in biology.
Nice strawman you got there. Meth is a man made synthetic compound. Fungi cover this earth and are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity and can cause personality change.
The theory is real and, of course, controversial[0]. The formation of consciousness is still a mystery and I’m simply discussing a theory. If you have another theory you deem right, let’s argue on merit, not personal attacks.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory
A theory can be "real" in the sense that people believe it, and also controversial because it has little consistent evidence behind it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
Nowhere in my comment did I attack you personally. I made an analogous argument; reductio ad absurdum. LSD is also a man-made synthetic compound, and promotes neuroplacticity. And if you've ever known a meth addict, you'll know that the substance can cause significant and enduring personality change.
You're advancing a pseudoscientific theory, and I'm ripping it on its utter lack of merit. Please don't take that personally.
For the record, the first time LSD was created it was made using lysergic acid derived from ergot, a mold found on rye. It is a semisynthetic drug, and cannot be created without an organic source.
Methamphetamine can be synthesized from the ephedra plant, and a total synthesis of LSD exists.
> really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Sometimes really bad ideas can actually turn around when taken to irrational extremes. Tons of evidence in history of people who are batshit crazy, somehow figuring out something amazing simply by being impossibly committed to something really, really stupid. But of course, being batshit crazy has other problems, and nearly all of the really stupid stuff does not turn around like that.
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.