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It's unfortunate that the path of psychedelic normalcy just led to people more publicly bragging about surviving one chemical or another like fucked up merit badges.

A single small dose of any given psychedelic can be enough to generate new mental benchmarks to process the world with (love, empathy, timelessness, selflessness, etc)

The drug itself is often irrelevant to the experience and it's impact, but we've unfortunately dragged along the ego of the underworld where each dose needs to be bigger and more exotic for bragging rights. In that light it's just another drug, and quite sad in my opinion.



I almost saw this movie last night

https://thefilmstage.com/john-lilly-and-the-earth-coincidenc...

but we had a visitor at home and enough to deal with. I read Lilly's books like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_of_the_Cyclone

and they were a bit of a hoot as he nearly killed himself multiple times injecting LSD and then testified that LSD was perfectly safe. I've known a few people, all male, who took LSD and developed a sort of "messiah complex" where they felt not a general spiritual "sacrament" experience but rather the opposite and some kind of hypertrophy of narcissism like the 'False Self' that Kohut warns about.

The article mentions 2-C-T-2 which I got in Europe which I understand was the closest people got to a commercially viable psychedelic in that it has a nice stimulant effect (easy walk from the German border to Děčín) and very nice visuals but seems to have little cosmic element so you are sitting on the toilet and feeling like a constipated sinner and that's about it.

Myself I don't have a lot of interest in LSD and company these days because for a while every time I take it it makes me aware of how I have many more nerve endings in my gut than I have on my skin so I feel turned inside out which isn't quite a "bad trip" but isn't very good either. Best thing that happened the last time was I laid down in the leaf litter and watched a pair of snakes having sex but I later picked four ticks off myself.


Why would anyone inject LSD? Skin contact with a few micrograms is enough to trip.


Beats me. The only dosage forms I've seen are blotter and sugar cubes, maybe some of the blotter diffuses through the lining of your mouth if you keep it under your tongue but it also works great if you just swallow it -- it's very orally available.

Lilly though had a bad relationship with drugs, he crashed his bike when he was high on ketamine long before ketamine was fashionable.

In the early 1990s accounts of drug experiences on Erowid were mostly positive ("I smoked weed and got high and had a good time") but by the early 2000s it started to look like anti-drug propaganda but I think it was a lower quality tranche of users [1] and you started seeing negative ones ("I took a fistful of random pills, went out on the street, lost motor control and was laying flat on the ground, everybody was really sympathetic until I rolled over and a huge baggie of pills came out of my pocket, then I got kicked by a cop.")

[1] y'all know I am not inclined to believe in natural hierarchies but I think that early adopters of most things are "better" than later adopters however you define "better"


Hypertrophy of narcissism.

I needed this phrase 20 years ago. Very well put.


What do you mean by mental benchmarks? LSD and the like are just drugs. Petty weird to make them more than that. What are they in your opinion? I like taking LSD, but I do NOT like it as something "holy" or "otherworldly".


> LSD and the like are just drugs.

And near death experiences are just experiences and miracles/murders are just events.

Some people are not spiritual/mystical, others are.


It's not fucked up to want to maximize results while minimizing risks.

The drug itself might actually be relevant. I suspect far more people per 100k have had negative reactions to say DMT than mushrooms, due to speed of onset, other receptors hit, etc.


People don't like to get lost. At least with shrooms/LSD, the reality doesn't melt away around you. I've heard that happens on DMT, which is...unsettling


It's like a psychedelic hot dog eating contest!

The Great Smoke Off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCdCfJ3B4ok


what’s more sad and worrying are the folks doing themselves lasting damage by doing these things in the wrong situation (mentally or physically) and without appropriate guidance.


When I was a younger lad, I'd take something like 75 mics of an acid analogue and just have a normal night out. As juvenile male simians are want to do, sometimes that involved getting into a fight. Turns out that is uniquely fun on psychs, even when you lose badly. A couple years later, I took up dropping acid in the dead of night and terrorizing packs of coyotes that prowled the outskirts of town, that was also really fun.

Psychs are just drugs like any other. I think people get too wrapped up in the mysticism of them, or think the debilitating effects of heroic dosing is unique to them. How many uncs in the chat can't smoke weed anymore because it makes them have an awful time emotionally? How do you think dabbing a gram of wax would work out?


Lol dude, lets hang out some time.


[flagged]


> Like dosing on ketamine then getting up on stage and making Nazi salutes.

Elon Musk is a clown, but nobody on a dose of ketamine is doing anything, least of all making coherent gestures and political grandstands. Drug naive people should avoid having any degree of commentary on them, you always say the most ridiculous things.


People don't take K and go dancing?


Go dancing? No. You can take ket in the vicinity of dancing, at an event where dancing is the main attraction, but the nature of the drug makes participating on the dance floor a non-starter. "Ketamine is killing dance floors" was a very common sentiment some 8 years ago.

Here, have a nice video of Aphex Twin on a light dose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqega6a2g6A


That video shows far from a light dose. People regularly dance, talk, act normal on low doses. Your post is strangely confident and inaccurate.


If you have enough coordination to walk to the store, no that's absolutely a low dose of ketamine. What you are asserting is that Elon Musk's behavior is consistent with any dose past the threshold, context that I think you may have overlooked. If you think that holds, I have nothing to say to you dude.


Is this a “no true ketamnine user” fallacy? Not everyone is after the k hole every time. Plenty of people take doses that allow activity.


If you can call this dancing:

Elon Musk jumps around on stage as he joins Trump at rally

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5pB0QXm64


I’d venture to assume the downvotes are simply because you’re taking a relatively neutral topic and mapping it onto a polarized political subject


> Like dosing on ketamine then getting up on stage and making Nazi salutes.

It's much more likely to be the Adderall.

"One reason that narcissists so commonly abuse drugs and alcohol is because the substances amplify their feelings of grandiosity and invulnerability. More so, narcissists often get stuck in the cycle of drug abuse because drugs readily cause the brain to deny there is a problem." https://illinoisrecoverycenter.com/narcissism-and-addiction/

Impulsivity mediates the association between narcissism and substance-related problems beyond the degree of substance use: a longitudinal observational study "A grandiose self-enhancement strategy should be reflected in motives of self-enhancement, such as increasing confidence through substance use." https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...

Personality Disorders, Narcotics, and Stimulants; Relationship in Iranian Male Substance Dependents Population "correlation between stimulant use and histrionic personality disorder (P < 0.001) and antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders (P < 0.05)" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4553170/


While Musk is one of the richest aholes on the whole planet, i don't think its Ketamine who made Musk do shitty things.

I think Musk alone is just a really depressing ahole who has no longer any social feedback due to his position.


He seems to lack the ability to admit he was wrong. (And smart as you might be, nobody is immune to error). He wanted to port the PayPal production stack to windows. He refused to listen to reason and bulled ahead. It was about this time that the revolt and ouster happened. Could you imagine trying to run a production stack on win in the early 2000s? (Or ever) had he got his way we wouldn’t even be talking about him because he would have failed and disappeared into obscurity.




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