There's so much more to our world than meets the eye. It's a shame we allow those in authoritative positions to tell us how we're allowed to live our lives and how we're allowed to explore the universe, both inner and outer. We are all born into the world as naive, ignorant and clueless as all those before us, and NONE of us has the inherent right or wisdom to tell the other what to do. We should each have real free will...it's unfortunate that no such thing actually exists.
Many of these drugs will be legal either by prescription or when taken under medical supervision in 15 - 20 years anyway due to the following factors:
- The baby boomers who were coming of age in the 60s will become the ones with the most political power in another 10 - 20 years. And the younger generations are more liberal on drug issues in general.
- The rising cost of gasoline will encourage more people to move back into the cities, where they will become more liberal.
- The exponentially decreasing cost of genetic engineering means the average high school kid will be able to modify algae and yeast to make millions of doses of LSD for no more than a few hundred dollars.
- The exponentially falling costs of LED lights means that in another 10 - 15 years people will be able to cheaply grow marijuana indoors without the risk of getting caught by heat sensing helicopters or high electric bills.
- The rise of European science, where at least so far it has been somewhat easier for scientists to study drug use in humans without excessive government interference.
- The economic costs of the drug war are becoming no longer affordable.
- There is going to be an increasingly strong outcry for new medicines that actually work due to an aging population, and due to the extremely high costs and low efficacy of the current system. It's currently politically feasible to let a few hundred thousand people die for no reason each year because no one notices, but once this becomes a few million people each year people are going to start noticing.
- Most people just favor what their friends favor and don't really think through the issues. So as more people come to favor various forms of government regulation instead of criminalization there will be some sort of tipping point, similarly to what we've seen with marijuana in many states already.
No one of these factors would be enough to tip the balance, but all of them combined are going to cause some powerful changes in society. Currently the FDA is already approving many trials with MDMA, marijuana, psilocybin, and other drugs, so the only real hurdle at this point is the DEA and the white house. And that's not going to last forever, especially since this new lawsuit the ASA is about to file is almost certain to move the needle at least a little.
People are most likely to vote between age 55 and 74. The folks who were coming of age during the 60s are only just approaching 60 - 65 years old now.
Similarly, the median age of a US senator is ~62, and 59 of the 435 congressman were born before 1943.
The exact numbers are admittedly a little fuzzy, but it's clear that the baby boomers are still going to be replacing the older generation in significant numbers for at least another decade.
Agreed. I think he underestimates the willingness of people to submit to authority and to sacrifice logical thought for comfort and certainty. Our media and government are both increasingly sophisticated in their abilities to manipulate, coerce, and mislead, and our populace in increasingly willing to ask no hard questions for fear of shattering the daily comfort of the lives we are fed.
> The exponentially falling costs of LED lights means that in another 10 - 15 years people will be able to cheaply grow marijuana indoors without the risk of getting caught by heat sensing helicopters or high electric bills.
No it won't. Fluorescent lights are already better (and always have been better) than LEDs in electrical efficiency.
"Perfect" efficiency for white light is 251 lumens/watt. A high quality fluorescent lamp does 100 lumens/watt. There isn't a lot of improvement available.
Assuming plants need monochromatic light then perfect is in the 600 range (it depends on the frequency), that still isn't a huge jump from the currently available 100.
> The rising cost of gasoline will encourage more people to move back into the cities, where they will become more liberal.
Except that rents and cost of living are higher in cities, gasoline is a very minor issue for people living in rural areas. Lack of income would be the main issue, and with the rise of the internet and telecommuting, high paying white collar jobs are going to be available anywhere.
So if anything the opposite will happen.
Also moving to a city doesn't make someone liberal, don't confuse cause and effect!
> gasoline is a very minor issue for people living in
> rural areas
I think that he was referring to the suburbs. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that there are large quantities of people currently living in rural areas (compared to the amount of people that are living in urban areas).
> moving to a city doesn't make someone liberal,
> don't confuse cause and effect!
I think there are a couple of factors at play here:
* People are less likely to convert from conservative -> liberal if they live only around like-minded people.
* Cities 'in general' tend to be more liberal than rural/suburban areas.
You're right that it's not a 1:1 conversion, though. Only a percentage of people will change their views.
Sorry but you are not exploring anything. You are just experiencing hallucinations, paranoias and what have you due to the drugs changing the chemical composition of your brain. That's it, nothing more.
There may be more to the world that meets the eye. You may be right about that. I personally believe in God, so I do believe there is more to the world that meets the eye. But the implied message of your post, that we can reach that world by taking drugs makes nosense. Why would drugs make you capable of perceiving something that you are unable to perceive otherwise. You still have the same physical brain and sensing organs. Drugs are just a physical thing acting chemically on the same physical brain and the same physical eyes and ears. Why would drugs make your physical eyes and ears perceive the metaphisical all of sudden? It makes no sense. I mean I would understand if drugs made your hearing or eyesight better, or if they made you see things in wavelengths not visible when you are not on drugs. But to make you see something that cannot be detected on any wavelength even with the best instruments? Why? It makes no sense.
And if you believe in God, as I do, why in the world would God choose to reveal himself to only those that take illegal, dangerous and usually expensive drugs? Does God only like the idle rich? Nope that makes no sense either.
So, sorry again, but you are living a dangerous fantasy. What you are exploring with hallucinogens are just hallucinations somehow created in the pathways of your brain as a result of the chemical disruptions caused by the drugs. Nothing more. Nothing that actually exists in any way. And as the drugs damage your brain, your hallucinations will get darker and more paranoid and if you do not stop you may go mad.
About people telling other people what to do, I do not know about that. If you see a thousand people lose their minds doing LSD and become sad wrecks that can barely do anything with their lives between the acid flashbacks, wouldn't you want to stop number 1001?
I think what he means to say is that a lot of what is self evident to people within gears of society is not really that important or valuable. We were born into this wheel, we live within this wheel and the culture gives us no tools to look beyond it (The Proverbial Platon's Cave).
Psychedelic drugs give one a chance to experience perception and world from a completely, completely different perspective. A change of perspective may be terrifying for some, for others it may be a blessing. In either way they are a tool, that operates one's brain. If I take an atheist angle. Your belief in God also affects chemical composition of your brain and it also induces paranoias and hallucinations in some, it doesn't help anyone hear or see better. See where I am going? You are beating a straw man here my friend.
Also let me inform you that psychedelics should not and usually (except few, few extremes) are not used on daily basis. Hell they are not used on any kind of regular basis, because the experience is supposedly too powerful and one does not feel any kind of crave to do it again very soon after a trip.
And another revelation, Idle Rich are not interested into LSD - because it may shake their world a bit too much. They are interested in Cocaine, rough sex and other forms of extreme decadence. Now that shit is dangerous beyond words. Those are the junkies I am afraid of and the sad fact is that we let inmates run the asylum. They are everywhere. Every year I see more and more of proof how Cokeheads are running Western civilization into the ground.
p.s.: So you have seen 1000 people lose their minds on LSD?
While I disagree with you, I respect your right to have an opinion. Personally, I believe in God as well, but I also believe there is more to God than simply following scripture.
Regarding hallucinogenic drugs, I believe we are born with a set of filters which shape what we can perceive about the world at large. Who knows why those filters are in place, but they are. The filters are very rigid, and are constantly reinforced by the social structure of the world. Hallucinogens allow one to experience thought with those filters eased somewhat. Not removed entirely, but weakened.
Regarding number 1001...no. I'd rather show number 1001 what had happened to the thousand who went before him/her, and then say "proceed at your own peril". It should be up to that person, and not me, how they live their lives. My own perceptions and experience is fine to be offered as advice, but in no way should I use both to define laws to rule others.
What if the opposite were true and the norm was to take LSD? Wouldn't you like to have the option to not based on your own free will?
Hallucinations here are not "really" hallucinations in a sense you rarely actually see things that are not there (for that, google deliriants). It's more like, everyone is acting out a certain role or a set of role in lives, and have been doing it for so long that they have forgotten they are just acting.
LSD and such smash the fourth wall of human theater, allowing actors to realize they are actors. Once they have realized this they have several options:
1) Continue playing the role they were playing after coming down, if they like it.
2) Change the role -- hence why a lot of people change their lives after dropping psychedelics.
3) Leave the play for a while -- this is possibly why some people commit suicide after psychedelics.
It's like, imagine you're coding.. and you're just so in flow that you forget you can do anything but code: you don't go to the bathroom, forget about food, in the zone. Now somebody snaps the chair out of you, and you realize you can do more things than just code. Now imagine you've been coding for 10-20 years straight.
Well, acid is like that guy who snaps the chair out of you.
Society considers it dangerous because it has spend so much time making you exactly what it wants, training you, brainwashing you with random shit that it doesn't want you to actually gain control of who you want to be.
You wouldn't want a dog you trained for years to bring sticks and shit on the toilet to realize all of a sudden it doesn't have to follow your commands all the time.
I suppose, and I just realized this now, that psychedelics are a way of chemically disabling social conditioning for a while. Perhaps marijuana is associated with lack of motivation not because it makes you unable to do things, but because it makes you realize some things are not worth giving a fuck about.
> And if you believe in God, as I do, why in the world would God choose to reveal himself to only those that take illegal, dangerous and usually expensive drugs? Does God only like the idle rich? Nope that makes no sense either.
And we wouldn't want the world to not make sense, would we. No, everything must be logical.
Oh really? Yes, you can refuse to listen. There are these little things called prisons full of those who did.
I'm all for imprisoning those who violate the human rights of others: murders, rapists, assault perpetrators, thieves, etc. However, punishing those who have merely done something "wrong" in the eyes of those in "authority" is a travesty in my book.
One can make a non-ludicrous case that the most important event in the cultural history of America since the 18’60s was the introduction of L S D. Before acid hit American culture, even the rebels believed, as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman implicitly did, in something like God given authority. Authority, all agreed, derived from a system wherein God or Dad ( or, more often, both ) was on top and you were on the bottom.
Does this passage strike anyone else as over stating LSD's impact?
I wasn't there, hell my parents weren't out of their teens in the 60s but from my perspective it doesn't seem to me like a considerable portion of the population took LSD. Granted the cultural impact of the drug spread further than just the people who imbued it but the 60s had so many other factors at work.
I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued here.
"Does this passage strike anyone else as over stating LSD's impact?"
It's necessarily true, but it's not a stretch either. LSD was arguably the key driver behind the creation of the Internet, silicon valley, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc. It was also the reason why psychiatry adopted the position that mental illnesses were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.
"I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued here."
So I think the key to understanding the 60s, the hippies, and LSD is the atomic bomb. Nick Sand and many of the other high level manufacturers and distributors of LSD were the children of high level figures in the manhattan project. Nick Sand's dad was one of the key chemists that developed the bomb. And supposedly the dad of one of the other key acid manufacturers was the co-pilot of the Enola Gray, one of the planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
Most of the energy (and bullshit) behind the counterculture in general was a reaction against atomic energy and the culture of the 50s. Clearly the angst would have been there without LSD, but I think that acid became sort of the banner that everyone rallied behind and that united everyone. This is especially true since it's such a prosocial drug; one of its main effects is that it basically makes you care more about other people. (And engage with and collaborate with them, as the case may be.)
Of course the reason it became such a part of the culture is that it fundamentally changed a lot of people, especially a lot of people who later went on to contribute enormous amounts to society, on a deeply personal level. You can already read a lot about this and you'll be able to read increasingly more about as that generation gets older and starts retiring and writing memoirs. In general the ways that any drug impacts culture are really subtle, but definitely there. IIRC Terence McKenna talks a bunch about it in this podcast: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=153
For what it's worth, I also have a collection of a couple dozen or so links to people talking about psychedelics have changed their lives here:
Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the key assertions is offered.
I have found this to be typical of stories touting the awesomeness of LSD. It's inferring causation from the most likely (in the absence of any evidence, coincidence is most likely) incidental fact that LSD also happened around then.
"Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the key assertions is offered."
My understanding is that the relationship between LSD and the environmental movement and civil rights movement is discussed in Jay Stevens book Storming Heaven:
Hard to say. There were obviously mushrooms as well which were (at least...from what I've heard) equally enlightening. I think it wasn't the drugs as much as the attitude, the music, the drugs, and the timing. They all worked together to create the significant cultural shift we knew as the 60s.
Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" is a really interesting book that goes into detail about his involvement with the EFF and how it came about in the first place. It's a great read and available online at http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
As far as I know most of the people involved with the EFF were big into psychedelics. E.g. I know Stewart Brand is on the board of directors, and he has written about his LSD usage many times. So has Mitch Kapor.
I really feel like programmers could be pushing this individualist freedom/collective, memetic will forward in such a more interesting way than is happening now. I feel like we can look at the world, think about how it could be better, or what kind of system we could use to manifest our collective will, think about how we could interact in order to bring that about, and code it. I see way too many groupon clones and not enough ontological/metaphysical systems/games on the web. Maybe once thre is an established framework of federated networks that don't create massive cost when people visit it there will be more fascinating content/systems/structures on the net.
There is so much possibility for using the net as a way to dissect the structures we surrender ourselves to live within and then to use their necessary atoms to create new, more beautiful systems. We just need to get money out of the equation (I think).
The net is an amazing tool for deconstructing power systems, I would love to see (and am working towards) a net that creates the systems for building a new, flexible, federated set of linguistic/metaphysical system, or at least a marketplace where numerous possible ideas can compete and be spun as memes into the ideasphere.
The comments here are mostly supportive, but did you read as far as where he admitted to desiring suicide/terrorism and wound up on thorazine? Maybe he was being figurative, not really sure, but that throws into question any of the positive effects of such habits. Moreso, it throws into question the self-analysis required to judge the effects of them. "Yeah, I wanted to kill myself and others, but it's cool bro."
