Steering clear of psychoactives is a really good idea.

Mystical experiences while high are really just being high.

You're welcome to consider me an old fogey killjoy, but that's how I feel about it.

Oh, and most of the stuff on that list of things to try ... very dangerous, some to the point of lethality.

I always swore that I'd avoid the old-fogey judgementalism myself, and sometimes it is difficult to discern whether I'm just old and crotchety, or that I truly have some hard-won wisdom to impart, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, or ignore it altogether if you choose.

I started drinking regularly when I was 15. I came from a family of drunks, and so it wasn't really looked at askance. At 17, seeking to be one with my hipper friends, and to also bring my other unhip pals into the "mainstream", I started smoking pot. For me, the herb was definitely a threshold drug, and pretty much anything that you didn't have to insert via a needle followed over the coming years. I was particularly addicted to amphetamines, and would always have a couple of hundred miniwhites around.

I quit the speed after about a year because it was having some pretty profound negative physical effects...my teeth were getting loose, I was malnourished, and I exhibited some really interesting paranoid dementias. I kept up with everything else for another 15 years.

I had to quit the dope due to having to work, but drinking...well, drinking was *the* drug for me, even when I was doing the other stuff. After all, if 40 mg of valium is good, 40 mg of valium with a twelve pack is *better*!

All of this, as I now see in retrospect, was self-medication to try and make myself somehow better, or at least different. Sometimes, it was a search for cosmic inner truth, but most of the time it was simply wanting to not be *me*.

Now, a couple of years shy of 50, after a heart bypass and lacking a colon...I want those years - and body parts damaged by my consumptions - back. I wish I'd had, during those years, the clarity of being clean and sober. I now want to be able to decide that I want a couple of beers rather than having a case of beers decide *me*.

I have found more spirituality in a bottle of water and a walk through the park than I ever found in a hit of acid. I have found more insight in the struggle to not drink and do drugs than I did when I was fucked up.

My .02. I'm sure your mileage will vary. Oh, yeah...and what's with these kids and that music today? And those haircuts? And those clothes!!?? :blush:


(edited to add a bit more rambling)

:thumb: Elspode!

They say you only have one body and that you only live once. People sometimes look at me funny when I tell them I've never smoked anything, never abused drugs legal or not and have imbibed no more than 12 oz of alcohol in my entire life. Keeping the body you come with pretty clean doesn't mean you can't be incredibly creative or insightful or mean you can't have fun. Got no love for drugs, especially the illegal ones. Got no use for them either.

According to my research, the only thing on that list with an overdose danger is tobacco, the perfectly legal and socially acceptable one. Of course, with any psychoactive, there is a lot of danger in that they may aggravate any pre-existing neurosis and that too strong of a dose could lead to you doing something stupid (Trip Rule #1: Don't trip alone. Ever. Don't do it. Never, ever do it. Don't trip alone.). The only viable threat is amanita muscaria, which apparently resembles a number of other, significantly more poisonous mushrooms (Trip Rule #2: Unless you are a mycologist, do *not* go mushroom hunting. It is quite easy to fuck up, and fucking up can easily kill you.). Also, long-term, high-dosage use of damiana has been tenuously linked to liver damage. Again, I say, it is worth doing the research. This is why I stay away from things like DXM (found in cough syrups, and has been strongly linked to lesions in the brain due to swelling and decompression), the 2C and 5-MeO offshoots (hard to gauge dosage, very hard to synthesize, even slight overdose could be deadly), and jimson weed (if you need a reason not to smoke jimson weed, you're already fucked up enough that you may as well go ahead and try it). Even kava root, once commonly sold in stores as a relaxant and somnifacient, is something to be avoided (strong link to liver damage, especially with dosages heavy enough to be psychoactive). There are dangers with drug use, as with any chemical (do keep in mind that an overdose of oxygen can prove fatal), and there are benefits. Ketamine (before its significant side-effects were discovered) was used in a psychological setting to induce ego-loss and allow breakthroughs in cases of severe repression, as was LSD. Acid and MDMA (ecstasy), in smaller doses than those found on the street, were used as anti-depressants, and progress is being made as to salvinorin A (the active ingredient in salvia divinorum) as an anti-depressant also. As always, the answer lies in the middle, somewhere between "I won't do any drugs, ever. All drugs are terrible and could never possibly benefit society" and conducting acid tests in the town square. I'm not saying drugs are right for everyone, far from it, but I have had a number of pleasurable and enlightening experiences while on various substances. They help me achieve an alternative viewpoint on situations that trouble me, and I've found that for most of the truly nagging, hard questions, all you need is a new perspective or two to really find an answer that suits you. For a number of people, drugs are a viable route to self-discovery that should be explored.

Just say "Know"

Never tried amanita. Do know that it contains strichnine and enough of that will kill you as good as any other poison. Same goes for Datura. The Spanish call it "widow's weed" for good reason. LOVED amphetamines in college. They were great for finals and all nighter term papers. Loved 'em so much that I knew I'd better stay away from them. Alcohol - went through a time when Jack Daniel's was the best lover I ever had. Then Jack proved fickle and turned on me. Giving him up was one of the hardest things I ever did. Now I stick to a couple of glasses of wine. Pot always just made me paranoid. I guess it's great for some folks, but I'm not one of them. Valium, and the other tranquilizers I liked almost as much as Jack, but they gobbled up too many of my memory cells and these days I need my last two remaining memory cells desperately, so I refuse when a doc want to gives me a script for ANY tranquilizer. Psychedelics I wouldn't go near when I was young. I figured I was teetering close to the edge as it was. Why risk going on a trip to a foreign land that might prove highly unpleasant and find that my passport had been revoked when I wanted to go home? I saw this happen to a couple of my friends who ended up in psych wards. No thanks.

I have had two very profound spiritual experiences in my life and each time I was neither stoned, drunk, nor high. Those experiences impacted me profoundly and neither I nor anyone else can merely write them off as some drug side effect. I have friends, however, who swear that psychedelics brought them closer to God. Well, who am I to question someone else's spiritual experience? If they feel it helped them, great for them.

Its true enough that there's tons of information on various drugs out there everywhere. People just have to live and learn, and hopefully survive the learning experience.

What better way to live and learn than to let everyone else try the stuff and watch them slowly go crazy? :D

OK. So drugs won't bring you closer to spritual enlightenment. Only you can do that, and as Mari says, it is possible to have amazing spiritual experiences stone sober. But what drugs can do is act like a painkiller. Like aspirin for a headache, drugs can facilitate spiritual experience by removing the intial blockages (stress, anxiety) that are preventing spiritual exploration. To use the headache metaphor: if your headache is caused by dehydration, you drink water. If it is exhaustion, you sleep. If it is because you banged your head on a 2-ton water heater (don't ask) then you know the cause of the pain, there's not a lot you can do about it, so you might as well treat the pain and allow your body to recover - excess pain will only increase the amount of toxins and stress hormones your body produces thereby slowing recovery.

I think I may have rambled slightly there (damn weed) but my point is that there is no harm (really) using drugs to facilitate thought and perspective; just as long as you know when to stop.

Now where's that spliff?

.


IN ALL SERIOUSNESS I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE.

Like I said, who am I to argue with someone else's spiritual path? It DOES concern me, however, that some young people might get the wrong idea and OD on a substance that contains strichnine like amanita and the like.

This is where it all gets tricky and, for some, all goes to hell. One person can get these incredible highs off X dose of acid and come back with little problem when it's over. The next person could drop dead from the same dose. Of course, then you get the folks who figure if X amount was This cool and didn't kill them, then 2X should be twice as cool with no ill effects. Unfortunately, the only way you'll know your limit is to try it and push it and, unfortunately, that's when we get the tragic results, people so far gone they never come back, in the figurative and terminal sense.

IN ALL SERIOUSNESS I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE.

Megatron, get referred to a neurologist and he can order an EEG for you. Your normal brain activity will show if you're prone to small seizures (and don't be too quick to self-diagnose in the meantime: psychologically-rooted "panic attacks" share a lot of similar symptoms with temporal lobe seizures.) More importantly, if your EEG comes back abnormal, get an MRI, because sometimes temporal lobe seizures are just genetic and sometimes they're the result of a tumor.

Then he was probably surfing an entirely legal teen hormone high. ahh to be young again...

On Weed:
Last night my lover and I smoked a bit of weed and started having the most passsionate sex of our lives. Ours souls were in complete harmony, every subtle gesture and movement of hers was met by a perfectly resonating response from me. we explored the depths of each other's passion like no couple ever had before. it was as if we had one, delicious, orgasmic mind. Our connection was so profound I could anticipate and fulfill her every pleasure and desire.

Then she turned to me and said:
"Look, if you're bored why don't you just go to sleep?"

I'd love to see a source that says that amanita muscaria, muscaria var. formosa, pantherina or other amanitas used psychedelically contain strychnine (not other species, as it is common knowledge that a large number of mushrooms will easily kill you). This is not a challenge, I am not trying to disprove you. I'd just really like to see a source before I go ahead and try some of this stuff.

footfootfoot, that's fucking hiliarious. That about sums up my impression of what all drugs trips are like (seeing as I've never had any myself...)