/lit/ - Literature

>Dude machine elves

>>11506766
>>Deliberately gives some British guy datura and says it's acid and abandons him in Burma or something, so he can fuck the dude's wife
based

>>11506766
Pretty sure you made up that burma cuck stuff

>>11506795
it's in True Hallucinations, I just read it a long time ago but now your making me want to find that part

>>11506766
>No man, I'm telling you, making your brain malfunction actually gives you a very deep insight on reality!
This is literally every book on psychedelics.
No, your synapses misfiring don't mean anything, it's literally just what happens when your brain doesn't work as it should. Yes I know it felt very powerful and maaaan the things I felt/saw/heard/ were sooooo out of this world maaaan, but it's ultimately meaningless.

>>11506953
>No man, I'm telling you, making your brain malfunction actually gives you a very deep insight on reality!

>>11506953
This. It's just good fun.

>>11506953
It can help you understand shit if you use it properly.

>>11506971
The only stuff it can help you understand is that your brain is a very delicate organ and that perception isn't necessarily accurate, and things like that.
Basically, just read Descartes.

>>11506982
It helped me understand some dense books. There's a reason it's been used in religious rituals in the past

>>11506971
>damaging your brain can help you understand what brain damage feels like

>>11506953
Sometimes absurdity can give you perspective on the mundane. It's the same sort of reasoning that the symbolic can be a vehicle for knowledge and that not everything must be literally true to be edifying.

>>11506987
Who are you quoting

>>11506987
isn't lsd super low toxic and safe?

>>11507100
I don't know about LSD, but DMT has no long or short term health problems, and you build up no tolerance for it.

>>11506987
Kek

I love watching socially and worldly inept basement dwellers squirm whenever anything drug related comes up

>>11506953
-malfunction
-misfire
-as it should

the words you chose lock you into paradigms of understanding. something drugs clue you into.

>>11506766
I really hate this motherfucker.

When you've ingested a certain quantity of Psychedelics, and by that I mean dropped X many tabs at once, say, to be crude, you'll experience what's called "ego death". Which isn't actually the death of the ego, as it's characterized.

What it is, in fact, is the dissolving of the mediating faculty between thought and action. Giving you the extremely bizarre experience of having little control over which thoughts you act out physically and which remain as psychic machinations of the cognition. You also experience rather intense ringing in the ears cause by muscle contractions in the upper jaw.

The Mckenna's believe that the ringing is some sort of extra-terrestrial fungal communication network between the mushrooms on earth and the mushrooms on god knows what planet. He also believes that this self-perceived possession is some form of inter-stellar communication as well.

Absolute nutjob. Probably set psychedelics research back 10 years.

>>11507191
Are all of your posts just unsourced, uninformed hot takes?

You're about a post or two away from the "ego filter."

>>11507200
If you've never experimented with Psychedelics it's ok, I won't tell anyone.

>>11507204
Thanks for the confirmation. You've been subscribed to /dev/null.

>>11507175
OP here, I have eaten mountains of drugs - I just think Mckenna is fag
>>11506795
I found the bit in the book. He doesn't lie to them but I get the impression that he didn't let them know how badly fucked up it would get them. They all smoke DMT and the British dude just disappears in the story and then he fucks her wife while she's on a deliriant

>Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura,
Datura metel, for the LSD.

> She seemed quite delirious,
quite unable to discuss with me what had happened only a few moments before on the
roof. It is an effect typical of Datura that whatever one experiences is very difficult,
indeed usually impossible, to recollect later.

>When I awoke it was with a start and from a deep
slumber. It was still dark. And there was no sign of my friend, I felt a stab of alarm; if she
was delirious then it would be dangerous for her to be wandering alone around the village
at night. I jumped up and threw on my jalaba and began to search. She was not on the
roof, nor near the grain storage bins.

>I found her on the ground floor of my building. She was sitting on the earthen floor
staring at her reflection in the gas tank of a motorcycle, which belonged to the miller's
son-in-law. Still disoriented in the way that is typical of Datura, she was hallucinating
persons not present and mistaking one person for another. "Are you my tailor?" she asked
me several times as I led her back to my room. "Are you my tailor?"

>>11507175
OP here, I have eaten mountains of drugs - I just think Mckenna is fag
>>11506795
I found the bit in the book. He doesn't lie to them but I get the impression that he didn't let them know how badly fucked up it would get them. They all smoke DMT and the British dude just disappears in the story and then he fucks her wife while she's on a deliriant

>Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura,
Datura metel, for the LSD.

"She seemed quite delirious,
quite unable to discuss with me what had happened only a few moments before on the
roof. It is an effect typical of Datura that whatever one experiences is very difficult,
indeed usually impossible, to recollect later."

"When I awoke it was with a start and from a deep
slumber. It was still dark. And there was no sign of my friend, I felt a stab of alarm; if she
was delirious then it would be dangerous for her to be wandering alone around the village
at night. I jumped up and threw on my jalaba and began to search. She was not on the
roof, nor near the grain storage bins."

"I found her on the ground floor of my building. She was sitting on the earthen floor
staring at her reflection in the gas tank of a motorcycle, which belonged to the miller's
son-in-law. Still disoriented in the way that is typical of Datura, she was hallucinating
persons not present and mistaking one person for another. "Are you my tailor?" she asked
me several times as I led her back to my room. "Are you my tailor?""

>>11506987
In that case, it should be able to help you come to terms with your own brain damage.

>>11506953
>an objective and correct representation of the universe exists, and what's more, I experience it in my every sober moment

you're not a child anymore, there is no immutable adult world that has always existed and always will - rather the world is the sum of everyone's beliefs, and these, and therefore our perceptions of 'being' change over time. Read more history - logical thought in humans was niche and underdeveloped before Aristotle, for example

(not that I think one's experience tripping is anymore 'real' either, just that they both emanate from a common, perhaps unreachable, source)

>>11506766
>Worse speaker
i'd say his success in drawing and entertaining crowds, leading to his popularity which seems to only be increasing as time goes on, directly contradicts this assertion

i recommend you listen to to his lectures that have been archived on soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/lozo-382782666/011-terence-mckenna-culture-and-ideology-are-not-your-friends . he makes interesting points about culture and perception that can be enjoyed from the most soiboi liberal to the idiot conservative

>>11507407
yeah I actually plan to listen to more of his lectures at some point, but he talks too slow - hence my defamatory post

>>11506953
>brain doesn't work as it should
People are known to perform better at certain tasks while tripping on lsd than sober. Some even perform better at math and problem solving. I’ve even programed on lsd, and found myself doing so effortlessly.

>>11507455
just listen on 2x speed

>>11507455
"too slow" is a bizarre criticism to me. like he rambles a bunch and has this word salad thing that gets annoying after a while, but if anything he talks too fast

>>11506953
lot of spooks here

>>11506776
and redpilled

>>11506987
The major serotinergic psychedelics (LSD, DMT, psilocybin) are not at all neurotoxic, practically speaking. Nor, to our knowledge, are other common hallucinogens like peyote, salvia, LSA, and so on.

>>11507209
wtf is this late 1990s slashdot?

>>11506953
S P O O K E D

>>11506766
>>11507534
Was he just destined to get brain cancer regardless of his use of psychs? How can a man so interested in the workings of the mind and drug use not get regular check ups and studies of his brain? How could he not have noticed something was off before letting the tumor grow the size of a golf ball?

>>11507793
That's what happens

>>11507231
These two lunatics are a disgrace to the pursuit of consciousness expansion.

>>11507793
he wanted to move on to the great cosmos, got tired of constantly coming back to this meat vehicle

>>11507802
How come?

>>11506953

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around
Humans can eat plants and learn about this millenary tools.

> brain doesn't work as it should
> ultimately meaningless

I can see you never tried it.
It's not fair you despising these tools because of your personal egoistic fear.

>>11506953
6.7/10 bait, would respond

>>11506987

>>11506953
Unironically based and redpilled

>>11507910
Your image only proves that alcohol should be banned

>>11506953
>synapses misfiring

>>11507922
THIS GUY KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE HALLUCINATIONS ARE NOT SIMPLY CAUSED BY SYNAPSES MISFIRING THAT’S A CHILDISH OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HOW PSYCHEDELICS WORK ALCOHOL IS MORE NEUROTOXIC THAN LSD

>>11507928
Lets not be stupid here if Heroin was legal and used like alcohol that bar would be much much higher

Ok I am done, I thought /lit/ was smart but fuck no.

Seeing you only speak of this from a congitive plane (brain malfunction?), makes me realize you are fucking brainlets that have never tried it.

>>11507933
Actually it would be lower
check Portugal for example

>>11507910
>No definitions or clear metrics, just numbers attached to someone's idea of harm
So this is the true power of drug war statistics?

>>11507961
and people are just driving down to the store to pick up their favorite heroin...

>>11507910
>>11507910
"Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance."

I'm too lazy to register for an account with the journal to read the entirety of their methods but these findings seem rather contrived.

Obviously alcohol, the most commonly used intoxicant, available almost anywhere and which seriously fucks you up if you drink enough will cause the most harm to others and partly so oneself.

An argument for mushrooms can be made along the same lines and what we "know" about mushrooms from their frequency of use and what users tend to do, how much they do and whatever.

My point being this graph is fucking stupid and you're a fucking stupid bitch for posting it.

Huxley, McKenna, Watts and all the rest of the san francisco boomers are basically diseased people who sought to fill their wicked and empty lives with meaning by chasing the “next world” or “eternity” or whatever you want to call it.
It’s just a continuation of the old literary posing, using lsd and instead of opium and absinthe.

This will leave you cringing at your youth at best. At worst, it will destroy you mentally. Don’t trip, don’t start pretending your search for transcendental reality is genuine in any way. You would never do it if a.) you were not already neglecting yourself in some way and b.) you did not perceive that our modern “culture” prizes le epic spiritual journey

I know several people who suffer from residual hallucination and lead much worse lives because of it. But even without physically destroying your brain, it can harm you. See: Chris McCandless. The way this shit propagates is by flattering clever young people whose intelligence and augmented emotional sensitivity have already set them slightly apart from their parents and peers, telling them they’re very special and deserve to attain knowledge of some great hidden truth.

>>11507972
Unironically a good idea. Make it legal, make proper shit, usable only in a controlled area.

>>11507985
Read William Blake

>>11507519
I poisoned a man to give sexual pleasure to his wife
beta af

>>11508030
Damn never thought of reading one of thr most famous writers to live, I’ll totally go destroy my brain now

Blake was half insane

I really don't know what I hate more, wannabe star children who ate a sixteenth once and "opened their third eye", or puritanical reductionists who dismiss everything as misfiring of synapses based on some Reefer Madness-tier understanding of both psychedelics and neuroscience.

McKenna was an intellectually honest, if sometimes lost, individual. Timothy Leary was a spook. Most posters in this thread are a hot mess.

He compared himself to Melville and Shakespeare in an interview once.

>>11508058
>be retarded
>need potentially dangerous drugs to make basic realizations

>>11508069
>potentially dangerous
I see which camp you fall into. Also, I never made any claims here, and nobody "needs" anything.

DMT substances are obviously not medically harmful, whereas something like alcohol is.

Psychedelics and the culture around them can be incredibly socially harmful to people. Just like a stressful job, toxic family, toxic religion can medically damage someone over a period of time, the society and culture of recreational psychedelics are most certainly dangerous. Especially for people that are fragile, traumatized, and rely on artificial spooks to keep their life bounded.

>>11506766
Wish he talked about his 'meat locker' bad trip that sent him into an existential crises. As such an experienced tripper and psychonaut intellectual it would have been interesting to hear what that was all about. Big disappointment.

>>11508079
>proven side effects puts me into a camp
Stop projecting your cult mentality

>>11508120
What proven side effects? Please enlighten me

>>11508089
DMT substances, I meant psychedelics based on tryptamines and their analogues. Writing quickly while at work on toilet

>>11506766
This nigga was so gay. If he was alive I would kill his ass.

>>11506776
Where can I get more info

>>11506766
>Listening to a CIA shill.

>>11506766
He was more of an intellectual entertainer than a straightforward academic intellectual, for sure. He almost always took the time to say, “And I’m just speculating here...” or “This isn’t what I think is absolute truth but it’s interesting to consider...” In this respect, he was pretty honest. He was a guy faced by some interesting mysteries and who admitted all he could do was theorize about them. As such, I appreciate him. Strict adherence to the scientific process can be useful but it doesn’t mean we should totally get rid of all imagination, creativity, hypothesizing, etc., turning us all into robots. In fact, it’d probably paradoxically set back science if we just shut off our imagination and ridiculed everything we thought bizarre. McKenna may not have proved big things in a lab but who knows if some of his off-hand ideas might not be the leaven that ferments future neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, botanists, mycologists, artists, etc.

His prose is also pretty lit at times.

>>11507985
>Because some idiosyncratic and unprepared psychonauts who were among the first to experiment with consciousness expansion happened to get it wrong, this of course means that no one ever should expand their consciousness.
>Trust me, my pastor said so.

>>11506766
>doesn't talk about bad trips

"This trip that I had in Hawaii, I thanked God that somebody was there, that Kat was there specifically. Because just the sound of her voice completely ameliorated a whole spectrum of hard to describe but very icky things that were threatening to overwhelm me. And I don't have trips like that very much, where I need somebody there..."

"And that's what these psychedelics do, they make you get down and grovel in the dirt. God, I had this trip in Hawaii that was just horrible, you know, where it was saying:
'You think you're such hot stuff? You won't even get off your ass and go shit in the field.' You know 'I wanna see you grovel, man! You sit in front of all these people and pontificate on how it's all put together... Face ME! Now, in the darkness, and tell me how it's all put together!'"

>>11508058

>McKenna was an intellectually honest

You know all those lectures on YouTube of him everyone likes so much were taped after he had his infamous "Meat Locker" trip, right? He was continuing to promote the "5 dried grams in the silent darkness" technique to his listeners, while he himself never did it againt because he was morbidly afraid of tripping.

>>11508623
He also had a firm attitude of "don't take my word for it, I'm as full of shit as anyone, find out for yourself". If you take anything away from his lectures that isn't that, you have missed the point. The only thing he ever advocated for, when all is said and done, was taking responsibility for your own consciousness and making up your own mind.

>he himself never did it againt
He did eventually, just not as frequently. I know that one trip did fuck him up, but it is worth mentioning that most of our information about it comes from Dennis.

>>11507930
Stop posting that image It's mathematically incorrect. Replace "lim -1/x^2" with " -e^x" or something.

>>11506766
Project Lifeguard discusses druggie philosophers.

ProjectLifeguard.net

>>11508130
Dude if you take like 5 hits of acid then you are LEGALLY INSANE.

>>11506953
>synapses misfiring

>>11508553
>'You think you're such hot stuff? You won't even get off your ass and go shit in the field.' You know 'I wanna see you grovel, man! You sit in front of all these people and pontificate on how it's all put together... Face ME! Now, in the darkness, and tell me how it's all put together!'"
Sounds like a very scary, but also humbling experience. Everyone ought to have an experience like this at least once in their life. Would be very beneficial for the people caught in the riptide and momentum of everyday living.

>>11507890
animals preceded plants by a considerable amount of time.

>>11509439
That's a fairly tame experience compared to what some grade A lunatics have been through. Dropping 10 tabs in a dark forest, seeing demons and shit. Absolute units. Closest I've ever come was an existential breakdown, at 450ug, culminating in the adherence to the presupposition that all conscious awareness, in contrast to unconsciousness, was a form of pain.

He corrupted Tao Lin

Think what you would like about Mckenna, but there are real benefits in psychedelics. A person's mind is like a unlit cavern, in which the Self has found itself as it wanders around in absolute darkness feeling along the walls with its hands as it constantly searches for something to orientate its bearings before moving on, all while attempting to avoid the sharp edges it has fallen upon in the past.

Psychedelics, such as LSD or mushrooms, act as a sort of torch, temporarily illuminating the cave to reveal its before-unseen vastness and brilliance of the tunnel that seems to go on forever in every direction. If everything goes right, you, the Self, may take your hands off the wall and step out into the openness and take as much of it in as possible while you have the opportunity; relishing in the divinity of vulnerable but free awareness the light has gifted until happily returning to the wall as the light fades.

Other times though, the light may shine too bright and you may cling to the familiar wall with all your will, keeping your eyes shut to simulate the darkness you remember as the vastness of the cave becomes too huge to bear and you can feel its presence pushing against your backside as you are pressed against your wall. Though this may be scary, the built pressure is always relieved before your last breath is squeezed out of you as the light fades to nothingness and it is dark once again as if a light never appeared in the first place.

Psychedelics can be very illuminating, but can corner you if you let it. Be responsible and do research beforehand as Mckenna always suggested. Use a scale, test everything before ingestion, and refrain from doing it around people you do not trust completely.

>>11509458
3/10 bait.

the sad thing is that I really doubt about the seriousness of the question

>>11508149
FBI.

>>11507988
The important part is really how it enables better research and warnings about the effects and consequences, along with making it easier to get into good detox programs.

>dude your mind is just how you perceive the world and there's nothing intrinsically valid about any of your thoughts
>DUDE WHEN I TAKE DRUGS I HAVE THOUGHTS THAT ARE MORE VALID AND WORTHWHILE THAN YOUR NON-DRUG THOUGHTS
Druggies are dumb.

>>11509832
Define "drug"

>>11509869
Any substance defined as a schedule 1 dangerous drug in the Drugs Misuse Regulation 1986 (Qld)

>>11509946
Kek. I wonder if the anon I originally replied to actually thinks this.

>>11509955
That's me.

>>11509964
Kek, alright I'll play along. Why do you think these government officials have the authority to classify what is and isn't harmful? and how do they define what a "drug" is?

>>11510002
Not the point dumb druggie. You exhibit clear brain damage.

@11510085
2/10 bait.

>>11506766
>>Worse speaker
McKenna is a phony spook and a shill, but he is objectively an excellent orator. Shame that nearly everything he says is weaponized nonsense.

>>11506766
You can actually learn more from your bad trips.

>>11510085
nice diagnosis over the internet. Not an argument.

>>11506776
He told them it was datura and they were polyamorous. It was the 60's.

>>11507910
>what categorizes as harm
Bad trips happen and can fuck you up mentally. Don't listen to this loser.

>>11510292
Yeah, sure, you can have a bad time on anything and it can fuck you up mentally. Doesn't mean that individual bad trips have a measurable effect on society though, or even on individuals. I've had some real shitshows, but time passes, you learn, and things don't seem so bad in retrospect. I am absolutely no worse off for the wear, and I suspect that is the case for most people. Don't be such an alarmist. Mushrooms are about the safest drug you can put in your body. The type of bad trip that can fuck you up, I mean REALLY fuck you up long term, is one in a million, and probably tied to underlying mental problems that were waiting to be expressed.

>>11509663
This. They (major ones like LSD, DMT, and psilocybin) literally increase brain connectivity massively while you’re on them, allowing you to make much more connections and perceive more than you do while sober. It’s no surprise people see something almost mystical in this hyperconnectivity. It forces you, after certain doses, to feel and think everything repressed and put in your subconscious/ignored at the same time. Can be illuminating and terrifying at once.

>>11506953
If your this much of a brainlet to not even be able to understand the basic biology and chemistry of the human brain then what are you doing on /lit/? Not to mention all the writers who have taken drugs to inspire/aid their writing, whether they be psychedelics or otherwise. I can tell you're from /pol/

>>11507534
Peyote (mescaline) is also serotonergic as well as LSA but the latter is not nearly as popular as the rest

>>11508133
Some tryptamines are harmful but the most well known psychedelic tryptamines are not>>11508140

>>11509207
lmao what are you talking about. -e^x doesn't evenhave an asymptote on the y axis.

>>11509207
that's the point.....

>that's an unnatural experience that warps your brain
>posting on 4chan

>>11506953
>synapses misfiring
KEK

>>11507100
HPPD is almost certainly the result of some sort of neurological damage

>>11510588
Wrong.

>>11506953
!!!brainlet alert!!!
youre assuming the brain's normal perception is perfect because you have sub 100 iq, it actually isnt perfect.

if you had a perfect pair of glasses then wearing a broken pair might not reveal very much to you at all, but if you only have a broken pair and then view things through a pair that is broken in a different way then you can actually make better observations than if you just view everything through the one broken pair

i hope you now understand why people roll their eyes at you whenever you try and enter deep conversation

>>11510667
>Serotonin neurotransmission has been hypothesized to be involved in the aetiopathogenesys of both acute and persisting LSD- and SC-induced perceptual disturbances (61). The main mechanism supposed to be implicated consists of a vulnerability/ predisposition of psychedelics’ consumers to continue centrally processing visual imagery after the visualization has been totally eradicated from the visual field (23). Persisting visual disorders may be explained by a reversible (or irreversible) “dysfunction” in the cortical serotonergic inhibitory inter-neurons with GABA-ergic outputs (63). The anandamidergic system has been also implicated by involving the areas of visual information processing (64, 65).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00240/full

I'm not totally against people using psychedelics, but it's dishonest to say that they're entirely harmless.

>>11510748
Severe or even just inconvenient HPPD is extremely rare, and even in such cases it typically goes away with time. The average case of "HPPD" isn't properly the disorder at all, is mild at most, requires a discerning eye or a weed habit to even notice, and also fades with time.

Like, the worst part of severe HPPD is that it makes it hard to drive due to massive starbursting of lights, which is actually a very common side effect and complaint of laser eye surgeries. HPPD is really not the end of the world and most people who claim to have it don't qualify.

>>11510825
The prevalence of HPPD has likely been underestimated, since there is not really any specific effective treatment for it. How do you know that typically goes away with time? Most people who have HPPD never really get rid of it, most people have to stop using drugs all together since it worsens their HPPD, most people might get used to it over time, but interference with your vision is still debilitating as fuck.

The worst of HPPD is probably the constant distraction that your brain needs to allocate resources to filtering, reading is difficult as fuck for people with HPPD, even if it's just visual snow.

>>11510887
>Most people who have HPPD never really get rid of it

You haven't done enough reading, you haven't done enough drugs, and you haven't spoken to enough people who do many drugs. I have never once met a person, out of at least a hundred trippers, who attested to having debilitating HPPD, and for those who have noticed increases in visual snow, floaters, etc., I have never heard the claim that these don't fade with time following a break from hallucinogens (including weed). I am aware that there are very serious cases, and I would not be surprised if they were permanent, but my experience is suggestive of the extreme rarity of such circumstances, and the research literature (although scant) corroborates this.

>>11507191
The ringing has nothing to do with muscle contraction - it's 100% in your brain, hallucinated - something related to miss-triggering sleep mechanisms.

>>11510947
How many people did you actually ask about HPPD?
How many of those people were still using psychedelics?
Sure, the visual interference isn't so pronounced once they get used to them, but it's still distracting when they try to read.
There's some weird stigma in drug communities where they try to pretend that HPPD is totally fine and nothing at all to worry about, and that you needn't worry about it because it is SURELY temporary, right? I mean, it's definitely NOT the case that people who stay in those communities are the ones that experience temporary "HPPD", while those with it cease recreational drug use. I'm not surprised that they wouldn't open up about it around their supposedly "open minded" pals.
It's not like they have access to some revolutionary treatment, and they shouldn't worry about it. I mean, it's EXTREMELY RARE, right?

>>11507985
The core of the problem is that our culture no longer prescribes a coming of age/initiation experience for young men.

>>11510983
>Sure, the visual interference isn't so pronounced once they get used to them, but it's still distracting when they try to read.

I've never encountered this. You may as well be telling me that birds commonly don't fly based on the actually very rare circumstance of clipped wings. I am acknowledging that it is in fact something that occurs, but frankly, I think that an extremely bad trip productive of PTSD is far more common and concerning. You're arguing about a piddling topic when there are more serious things, which is the clearest possible indication that you are overconfident and have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about.

>>11508058
agree
>>11508096
yeah that's what i was referring to. Such a shitty person to have all his beliefs crumble in on him and then continue to sell them even though he knew it was false
>>11508148
>https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-lcL1Fj40AGH7cqhY/McKenna%2C%20Terence%20-%20True%20Hallucinations_djvu.txt
>>11508291
obviously he's not to be completely dismissed if your into reading about psychedelics but I just have a problem with the preacher/hippy types, who happen to usually be violent fucked up people in disguise. I liked reading him at times but overall don't like his style
>>11508553
I was talking about eh 'meat locker thing' and I don't think that passage talks about a bad trip at all, not even close - that just sounds like a 20 minute segment of a regular trip. Most people 'need someone there' when they're tripping. I'm the only person I know that liked to regularly take psychedelics by myself.
>>11509410
no.
>>11509466
I have tripped just as hard as Mckenna, dozens of times. You find much better writing on tripping death trips and overdosing on novel psychs on Erowid.
>>11509552
Is he even worth reading? I dismissed him as an idiot
>>11510288
yeah that's the reading that let's that passage slide.
>>11510435
Pretty sure Mckenna also said that mescaline was useless or vastly inferior to mushrooms, which is retarded
>>11510947
I feel like I can back that up. I had HPPD I'm pretty sure, for quite a while but I didn't really care because I was smoking weed all day and it wasn't a big deal. It went away at some point, when I stopped tripping every third day probably

>>11509552
>>11510998
>Is he even worth reading? I dismissed him as an idiot

To anybody who knows anything about hallucinogens, as you appear to, Tao Lin's Trip is low quality kitschy trash. However, it does bring in some pleasant and interesting McKenna factoids that I don't feel the inclinatiom to dig through hours of video lecture and at least one biography for. It is also interesting to read it viewing Tao Lin as a characterization of the depressive millenial zeitgeist. Trip details his stumbling, embarrassing, almost hilarious ascent from this state through his thirties. I am interested in reading Taipei now purely as an account of modern depression, particularly because he stumbled on McKenna, his saint and savior, only hours or days after sending in Taipei's final draft!

Also, thank you for the support on the HPPD point. It is really a non-issue in the vast majority of cases; PTSD and schizophrenia and doing harm to yourself or others while under the influences are the possibilities of actual concern.

>>11510994
>I've never encountered this.
you clearly don't have HPPD, why would you encounter visual interference? kek
>i think a bad trip is worse than literal brain damage that persists for the rest of your life
ahh yes, very impressive
>piddling topic
how is persistent visual interference without treatment a minor concern?

>>11510990
Even if we had an initiation ceremony, our core cultural values are garbage.

>>11511021
You clearly don't have HPPD either and all of your knowledge is derived from reading about the extremest possible cases. If you understood the slightest thing about neuroscience you would know that "brain damage" is an essentially meaningless phrase when applied to anything other than blunt force trauma a la Phineas Gage, insofar as there are countless environmental influences which have positive and negative impacts on the constant neuroplastic changedness of the brain, including the long term toxic effects of stress derived from PTSD. You are an ignorant alarmist and are, again, I repeat, overreaching your own understanding from not only an experiential and social perspective but also a psychological and neuroscientific perspective. I am done speaking with you. Hopefully you learned something.

>>11511038
>"brain damage" is an essentially meaningless phrase
how would you explain persistent visual interference that stays with you for the rest of your life? it's certainly not a positive change, and it impairs the value, usefulness, or normal function of your brain.
try seeking anecdotes from people who actually have HPPD, instead of your pals who are still using psychedelic drugs, scumbag.
i haven't exaggerated anything, and have accurately described the brain malfunctions that psychedelics can cause.
be thankful you were lucky enough to avoid HPPD, bastard child.

>>11511049
Wow, he's pretty lucky that he closed his eyes before he saw this post. I'm not quite sure how his ego could of possibly recovered from losing this argument. Thank you for correcting the misinformation he insists on spreading. I'm glad that we can have at least one intelligent person on /lit/.

>>11511049
Not that anon but
>brain malfunctions
there is no such thing.

>>11507191
>tripfag
>has the poorest trips
As it should be.

>>11511174
It's just a term I used to describe dysfunction caused by deviation from a norm of a functioning brain.
Care to explain why I'm wrong in doing so?

>>11511198
can you define a normally functioning brain in a satisfactory manner?

>>11509277
um, friar; why are there huge anime milkers at the top of your sermon?

>>11511244
In this context, that would mean a brain that doesn't experience persistent visual disturbances following the consumption of an exogenous substance.
This was implied when i stated "the brain malfunctions that psychedelics can cause".

>>11511286
would a brain that experiences persistent visual disturbances that didnt ingest a psychedelic / hallucinogenic substance be a normally functioning brain?

>>11506766
if you cant handle a bad trip, you deserve to be cucked, also, you didnt hear about the guy until your dumbass chink yuppie idol told you about him anyway

>>11511288
No, are rules determined by outliers? Of course not. There must be a neurological explanation as for why they process visual information that isn't there.

>>11506770
Machine elves are a fucking lie, just one of many example of mckenna duplicitously birthing a meme amongst his initiates.

>>11511300
i think youre assuming that there is a normal range of qualia that doesnt actually exist in reality

>>11511305
sure there is, a normal and healthy brain of a person who is sober should only see what is there (with the exception of when you look at the sky, you might see some squiggly things) -- there is no evolutionary benefit to having your perception of reality constantly distorted.

>>11506766
Yeah he was cook and possibly on some people's payroll to help ensure that Western kids keep on passively gazing inward. A gifted speaker though, English isn't my first language and his talks taught me many new words and idioms.

Imagine believing that some perspectives are objectively better than others.

>>11506953
Absolutely bluepilled post.

>>11506766
the dude managed to reason his way out of schizoaffective / schizotypal disorder which is pretty neat.

>>11511303
>No, are rules determined by outliers?
People getting HPPD at all is an outlier, having HPPD be debilitating is extremely rare - certainly an outlier

>>11511294
you missed the mark there buddy. I had read his books before Tao Lin had even heard of him, and I'm younger than Lin. I had also never heard of Lin until quiet a while afterwards. Also, I have had many bad/messy trips, deliberately sometimes. You're a faggot.
>>11511304
I've seen what he's talking about, but I hate that name. That shit's real.
>>11511333
He's extremely smart and seems to be a master of English, I just find him pretentious and long-winded

>>11511422
probably depends on the psychedelic, dose, time between trips, other drug use, etc.
i would imagine that the risk increases depending on these variables, hard to calculate the true risk... but for an adult who doesn't use other drugs, and only uses psychedelics sparingly, assuming that it's a psychedelic with a relatively decent safety profile like psilocybin or lsd, the risk is probably low.

I live near a meme city on the west coast where psychedelic usage is considered fairly normal. People around here are self-absorbed pseud assholes walking around with their heads unscrewed

so no I don't think psychedelic drugs make you wiser, or a better person

>>11511433
Not the anon you were addressing but I agree, he's definitely long-winded, but I don't think pretentious is a label you can assign to him. If you watch interviews or talks where you actually see his facial expressions, none of it suggests pretence. Its like he's in a weird sort of coy perpetual amazement with everything.

>>11511445
It would depend on all that. But as a whole, all the people taking psychedelics since 1960 until now? If being slightly reckless with psychedelics put you in danger of lifelong HPPD - we would definitely know about, there would be literature and sufferers and it would be tied into drug folklore, it's just not there. Even in the age of research chemicals and wild experimentation, it still hasn't reared it's head. There are other problems with idolizing psychedelics for sure, and I don't think they make you wise. I just don't think HPPD exists as you think it does.

>>11511286
DMT is a product of our brain as well.

>>11511554
not proven

>>11511570
>
http://beckleyfoundation.org/2017/07/05/do-our-brains-produce-dmt-and-if-so-why/
It's already in us, even if it were produced by another organ.

>>11511485
Do you have a source on that?

Source?

A source. I need a source.

Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion.

No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered.

You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence.

Do you have a degree in that field?

A college degree? In that field?

Then your arguments are invalid.

No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation.

Correlation does not equal causation.

CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION.

You still haven't provided me a valid source yet.

Nope, still haven't.

I just looked through all 308 pages of your user history, figures I'm debating a galumphrgf supporter. A moron.

>>11511679
Nice formatting reddit
Edit: /s

>>11511465
That much is obvious. But, that's no fault of, say, LSD. All psychedelics do, in my estimation, at active doses, is enhance a persons personality characteristics.

The average person is of course going to come away from an experience of consciousness expansion as interpreting it as proving their presuppositions about themselves.

>>11506766
>>11506766
the shpongle tracks are ace tho t b h

>>11511286
>visual disturbances
I only speak for myself of course, but there's nothing disturbing about the residual effects of psychedelics on your perception. You have to be taking large quantities often to actually run the risk of getting a serious case of HPPD, but taking healthy doses ocassionally hardly poses a risk of HPPD. You would know this if you've taken psychedelics.

>>11511829
not much evidence to support this claim is there? not much at all

>>11511838
Clinical evidence? Of course not, you functional retard.

They're schedule 1, you absolute fucking retard.

What little clinical research has been done on psychedelics has concluded, rather demonstrably, that they have a resoundingly and overwhelmingly, and obvious, immediate positive effect on the mental health, in otherwise neurologically normative people, of the individual who incurs a described "mystical" experience, you complete and total retard.

>>11510002
>Why do you think these government officials have the authority to classify what is and isn't harmful?
Queensland Parliament has the authority to make law in the state of Queensland. The limits to the laws they can make are set out in the Constitution. No such provision exists which would prevent Parliament from making laws prohibiting dangerous drugs.

>"HURR BUT WHY"
If you go down this route you are no longer arguing that drugs should be legal but rather that Parliament is prohibited above and beyond what is in the Constitution from making law. So let me ask you a question - should we make drugs legal if the price of doing so is the defanging of government into an impotent bystander and the loss of the rule of law and an orderly society? Do you think society can persist in a desirable state without laws? If the answer to these questions is no then my reasoning stands: drugs are illegal because Parliament has said so and they are defined as defined. If the answer is yes then your argument is no longer about drugs at all, so further discussion about how they are defined and why that definition is correct is pointless and you should instead confine your remarks to alternative forms of government and why they are superior.

>and how do they define what a "drug" is?
Through schedules 1 and 2 of the Drugs Misuse Regulation 1986 (Qld), which is subordinate legislation empowered by provision in the Drugs Misuse Act 1986 (Qld)

>>11511877
>Drugs Misuse Regulation 1986
1987*

>>11511343
Imagine being so afraid of what other people think of you that you use drugs as an integral part of your identity. All so you can take comfort in the notion that you are a unique individual and not like all the cargo pants wearing normies. The sad reality being that the inner workings that made those normies all dress like each other is the same as the reason why you started using drugs. You can use all the drugs you want, but you are just the same as the rest of us and there's no spiritual enlightenment or drug enduced epiphany that can take you away from that reality.

>>11511343
>that picture
>implying those people are freethinkers choosing to conform and not people all being themselves, who just so happen to be the same as everyone else

>>11511877
I think the poster you're responding to is trying to hit at a specific point but isn't. The quandary he is directing your attention towards, I think, is whether or not a government should have the ability to classify as X, drugs which aren't X.

So, say, placing marijuana in the category of schedule 1. Meaning no medical applications.

Which is an outright lie.

>>11511877
>should we make drugs legal if the price of doing so is the defanging of government into an impotent bystander and the loss of the rule of law and an orderly society?

lol wut

>>11511896
Whether they CAN is a question for the High Court.

Whether they SHOULD be able to is a question for the voters.

That's what democracy and accountability is about.

>Which is an outright lie.
Your opinions are not more important than the opinions of others.

>>11511899
If his argument is that Parliament is constrained above and beyond its actual legal constraints, where does it end? If he can't provide clear limits to his argument and explain why they make sense then I believe it's a valid point to ask him to consider the potential impact of spiralling pseudo-legal constraints on Parliamentary power, especially considering that Parliament is the body which constitutes the democratic power of the electorate. Any constraint on Parliament is a constraint on democracy.

>>11511913
It's not his fault Parliament is bad at controlling psychoactive substances lol

I think legalization of most drugs is a good idea. Who would smoke some weird THC analogue cooked in China with no regulation if they access to good weed? Same goes for opiates, make morphine legal and cheap, flood the market - no more fentanyl addicts. Also no more underground 'cool' allure to drugs that is always coupled with misinformation from both sides.

>>11511924
It is fault if, being forewarned of the law, he gets caught with them and sent to gaol.

So long as government is legitimate, we are duty-bound to follow the law. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is also the one thing that separates us from the shithole countries of the world. We must all make an active choice, every day, to comport ourselves in a way compatible with civilised society. This means obeying the law, where laws are civilised.

>>11511888
You're so far removed from reality that you don't realize those "normies" buy and use more drugs than the other 70% of campus.

You don't know anything about me, my identity, my habits, my beliefs, or my experiences.

You're just an ideologue pushing an agenda.

>>11511906
>Your opinions are not more important than the opinions of others.
Then how is it possible to have an expertise?

Do you believe that a democracy of the uneducated people is, in all cases, a betterment over something like a Technocracy? You're simply trading the possibility of corruption with the certainty of propagandized public opinion projected onto the masses.

You're also taking the position, ironically, of valuing the opinions of others (government) as being more trustworthy than even your own.

Nothing about your worldview makes any sense.

>>11511933
Okay, but nobody's gonna care if you're not an idiot about it.

>>11511937
>Then how is it possible to have an expertise?
Parliament is accountable to the electorate, not the expert class.

>Do you believe that a democracy of the uneducated people is, in all cases, a betterment over something like a Technocracy?
Yes.

Death to tyrants.

>You're also taking the position, ironically, of valuing the opinions of others (government) as being more trustworthy than even your own.
No, see >>11511933

>>11511938
True, thus proving that the current system has scope enough to capture high range offending without being unduly severe on low range offenders.

>>11511943
yes and no

>>11511946
yeah
nah
she'll be right m8

>>11511940
>Parliament is accountable ...
You've missed my point.

Your opinion is that nobodies opinion is above anyone else's.

That's a nonsensical presupposition. It's a non-starter for the purposes of political orientation. To be an expert, to have an expertise, is to have an opinion worth more than that of someone without compatible expertise.

>>11511949
>To be an expert, to have an expertise, is to have an opinion worth more than that of someone without compatible expertise.
How many votes should an "expert" get?

If your answer is anything other but an instinctual, immediate, reflexive screech of "one man one vote" you belong up against a wall.

>That's a nonsensical presupposition.
One man one vote.

>>11511933
>This means obeying the law, where laws are civilised
Stopping me from growing and smoking weed is uncivilized. Same goes for any other drug I can grow and use myself.

>>11511980
>Stopping me from growing and smoking weed is uncivilized. Same goes for any other drug I can grow and use myself.
You can form that view, but it's not one I share, and I advise you that your prospects of advancing it as a defence are limited being that the elements of the crime "possession of dangerous drugs" do not include any like provisions.

>>11511934
Nah, I think I've got you pegged. You use drugs, because you think they are eye opening and broaden your mind, but if you were to actually write any of those big existential moments down, they would be really banal.
And you get defensive, because deep down you're kinda scared that these drugs really are as bad for you as people say.
You would never admit to this though.

>>11511995
>you're kinda scared that these drugs really are as bad for you as people say.
This.

As a lawyer, take it from kiddos. Everything they tell you about drugs ruining lives is true.

Stop now before it's too late.

>>11512004
>take it from kiddos
take it from me, kiddos

>>11511994
Yeah but weed and shrooms are less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco

>>11511954
It's charming that you adhere to such a simple worldview, but the reality is that only a small percentage of people in any given civilization make the legislative decisions. And in order to position yourself inside that elite group requires competence, and expertise, to a degree exceeding what could be expected of the average citizen.

This is why government exists.

The average citizen gets to vote who will make their decisions for them, based on their expertise. Obviously this is the optimal outcome. Reality is that the average person is so cognitively inept in comparison to those with academic expertise that they can be misled and misled by mere charisma and exposure propaganda.

Meaning that the shitty system you perceive as being corrupt is extant precisely because everyone gets to vote.

>>11512019
Sounds like something you should bring up with your local MP.

>>11512026
>the reality is that only a small percentage of people in any given civilization make the legislative decisions
Yes, and they are exactly as accountable for those decisions as the electorate is concerned with them. In democracies, people get the government that they deserve.

>The average citizen gets to vote who will make their decisions for them, based on their expertise
It's charming that you adhere to such a simple worldview, but the reality is that only a small percentage of people vote based on their estimation of their local member's expert knowledge. In fact, most politicians are former lawyers and economists, not professionals at all, and most Ministers are completely knowledgeable about their departments. You could argue that politicians are "expert politicians," but even this usually isn't true.

Sure, there is an estimation of /competence/, but that's just part of the equation - and perceptions of competence are tied up with how well the politician's vision lines up with the voter's desires. So people perceive someone as more competent when that person promises to give them what they want, so competence and expertise might as well be bywords for "how well do their promises line up with my desires? Well? Then they must be an expert!"

>Meaning that the shitty system you perceive as being corrupt is extant precisely because everyone gets to vote.
Death to tyrants.

>>11512046
>completely knowledgeable
completely ignorant
Fuck I need to switch on.

>>11512046
>Sounds like something you should bring up with your local MP
Yeah but you can see how illogical it is lol.

>>11512058
>Yeah but you can see how illogical it is lol.
Yeah but it's democratic.

>>11511838
>when literally everybody in the thread, including not only people who have drug experience and have known many people with drug experience, but also people who have sifted through the gems and the trash of psychedelic literature, and people who have certainly read more primary literature than you, and even people who at least pretend to have formal knowledge in related academic disciplines, disagrees with you and you keep going

You are retarded friendo. Even if HPPD were a regular occurrence, its negative impacts are:

1: Undoubtedly less damaging than traumatizing experiences, temporary psychoses, schizophrenia onset, and harming oneself or others while under the influence

2: Probably worth the risk in a medical, therapeutic context, given that in risk/benefit analysis, therapists are willing to give the actually neurotoxic MDMA, and doctors casually use ketamine on emergency patients with alcohol in their system

Your obsessive attachment to this discussion is like if I came up to scholars of Chinese history (a subject I know nearly nothing about) and started shouting gibberish about Genghis Khan and Confucius and tried to convince them that I knew more than them.

>>11511994
I get what you're saying, legalism and all. I've been in trouble with the law because of weed and I didn't use that as my defense. I also have no interest in getting political about it other than in informal discourse, that still doesn't stop me having an opinion on it.

>>11506953
The acid headspace seems far more STRUCTURED than regular consciousness. So structured in fact, that it's not hard for nerds to test hypotheses and come to scientific conclusions about psychedelics over a few trips.

>>11512065
You might be surprised to read this, but you're no different than ideologues who propose that communism is preferable to any other conceivable alternative simply because X.

You're an ideologue, not a free thinking person.

>>11512077
>psychedelic users pretend that their drugs are harmless
holy fuck you've convinced me
>1: Undoubtedly less damaging than traumatizing experiences, temporary psychoses, schizophrenia onset, and harming oneself or others while under the influence
all of these risk factors can be controlled, you're rolling the dice with HPPD - especially with certain psychedelics
>2: Probably worth the risk in a medical, therapeutic context, given that in risk/benefit analysis, therapists are willing to give the actually neurotoxic MDMA, and doctors casually use ketamine on emergency patients with alcohol in their system
never claimed that psychedelic use is inherently bad, and it's probably worth rolling the dice, for some... hard to say with such little evidence.

Imagine destroying your brain with drugs just for a few hours of pleasure.

>>11512079
>that still doesn't stop me having an opinion on it.
Yes and that's fine, and I understand your opinion. Anon asked me how I'm defining drugs and I answered - the Drugs Misuse Regulation 1987 (Qld) sets out a comprehensive list of dangerous drugs. The rest of this is just a tangent, not really relevant to my original shitpost but probably far more interesting.

The point is, for this new discussion at least, that whether or not you personally want to take drugs we as a society have decided that certain drugs should be prohibited for the good of society. Maybe you could use them responsibly, but laws aren't written for you. They are written for my clients, with twenty pages of violent offending and drug abuse, whose lives have been destroyed by drugs and by the people who sell them and enable the business of drugs to be carried on. Drugs are not the great Satan, but we are better off without them.

>>11512087
>You're an ideologue, not a free thinking person.
If you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.

I'm not particularly interested in the self-serving justifications of a would-by tyrant, though I will humour them. I can already tell what they are: "I make better decisions than everyone therefore I should be in charge." Even if it's true, and it's probably not, such a system interminably leads to human misery regardless of the quality of the man in charge. Democracy is not perfect, but a full understanding of history reveals the truth: the cause of human progress requires democracy.

And it requires the death of every tyrant.

>>11512114
>if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.
In your case, that's probably true.

>>11512133
I accept your concession.

>>11512114
>with twenty pages of violent offending and drug abuse, whose lives have been destroyed by drugs and by the people who sell them and enable the business of drugs to be carried on
I've been around people like that. and drugs can be a scourge, meth, opiates and so on. I'm in a Victorian meth town and things get pretty rough. I resent being lumped in with people like that when I get caught by chance growing a few plants. I got a harsher sentence than a drunk who bashed their pregnant wife the same week. Violent assaults regularly receive lighter sentences than I got for having a few plants. Drug laws are a joke. I respect you've seen a lot first hand on your side of the law, and I respect you for upholding the law and civilization - but it all breaks down on the other side and some people shouldn't be put there.

>>11511994

Why do you freedom and oppose the principle of self-ownership? Are you a literal fascist? I'm not being facetious. There is no way to reconcile belief in self-ownership with belief in drug prohibition.

>>11512108
Oxidation's a bitch

>>11512114
>If you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
Hey look I can play cool wise highschool quotes too!
>You're brain is like a parachute, it works best when open.
Thank you for derailing a Terrence McKenna hate thread. Psychedelics are very strong drugs, nobody here knows wether they should be legal and easily accessible or not. The biggest danger is probably drug induced psychosis, not HPPD. Some people are prone to magical thinking, like the idiot this thread was supposed to be about. Psychedelics can easily lead you down that path if you're not careful. That said, people who do psychedelics can have fun and/or gain insights about their lives that are life changing and positive. It can give you some perspective but your brain is still on drugs so you have to take this perspective with a grain of salt.

>>11512181
The fact they're a lightning rod for the creation of cults of personality is pretty damning.

I certainly don't believe that western civilization has a mature enough relationship with drugs to partake in psychedelics safely. The solution I think is pretty obvious; keep them illegal, and let those who wish to use them attain them of their own accord.

>>11512181
>nobody here knows wether they should be legal
They should be illegal because that is the democratic will of the people.

>>11512171
>There is no way to reconcile belief in self-ownership with belief in drug prohibition.
There is no way to reconcile civilised society with your dangerous disregard for democracy.

>>11512157
>Violent assaults regularly receive lighter sentences than I got for having a few plants
Did they get you for trafficking? I find it hard to believe that you got a harsher sentence than full-blown domestic violence for possession, even if you have a lengthy criminal history. But maybe you just got a shitty Magistrate, that does happen. Some of them are absolute cunts.

Drug laws aren't perfect, sure, but I respect their necessity more than I respect your autonomy when you use that autonomy to take drugs. And I don't mean to say that in a disrespectful way, but it's the clearest way to put my position. You can nevertheless continue to produce and use drugs if you want, but the consequences have been explained to you.

>>11512181
The thanks was sarcastic. Fuck Terrence mkenna with his pseud word salad. That's what happens when you mix megalomania, magical thinking, and a lot of psychedelics.

>>11512193
different anon, but bullshit. Western civilization has plenty enough a relationship, it invented acid. Pastey drug nerds should get butfucked in prison for years because they didn't go get some Amazonian spic charlatan to give them ayahuasca? Smoking changa (invented in the west, in my home state actually), is bad because I'm a white boy?

>>11512199
>They should be illegal because that is the democratic will of the people.
That's an excessively simple view of things

>>11512199
>democratic
>thinking you make your own opinions
>thinking the people actually voted at some point to make (basically) all drugs equally illegal and very punishable
>thinking people are informed on drugs and how they work to make an informed vote
hahaha quaint.
just take anything you don't like about the "opposing team" of politics (republican vs democrat). It's either fox news (if you're a lib) or the mainstream media (if you're not a lib) that made them think that retarded idea. They didn't construct it on their own. The same thing happens with your ideas, you were spoon-fed. This should be obvious, amerifat.

>>11512199
They tried to say I was trafficking because I had a trafficable amount, but I definitely wasn't. I was growing it to get away from traffickers.
> respect their necessity more than I respect your autonomy when you use that autonomy to take drugs
I respect that position, I don't think we disagree on law and order. And it's not about me, I think a few changes to make the law more consistent would improve society. The drug problem in Victoria at least seems to be worsening, at least not getting any better. We need different approaches.

>>11512234
two at leasts, fuckit

Yeah, let’s put all the CIA drugs into our bodies, what could go wrong?

*dabs*

>>11512244
weed, harmless?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v26zC-1eCo

>>11512199
>because that is the democratic will of the people
A fairly terrible reason for anything

>>11512199

>There is no way to reconcile civilised society with your dangerous disregard for democracy.

Democracy without essential and inviolable rights, such as self-ownership, is tyranny by majority. Self-ownership is fundamental. Prohibiting drug users from using drugs because the majority do not believe they should be allowed to oversee the use of their own bodies is a tyranny. Group X decides group Y cannot do Z. Replace X with any historical majority, Y with any historically persecuted group, and Z with any activity that follows from self-ownership and harms no one but the one performing it.

Which of these notions do you want to challenge?

>>11512114
Schedule 1 drugs aren't inherently harmful. When used irresponsibly and without any oversight, they can lead to addiction and fatality. The most dangerous neurotoxins in the world aren't illegal and they're not schedule 1 substances, meanwhile cannabis is on that list. Society doesn't make these decisions anymore, government agencies do.

>>11512256
>Salvia

>>11511304
yea it sound like Timothy Leary. I was too dump and tried to read one of his book. Had to stop after a few pages, due to too much made up bullshit.

>>11506953
Oh so i guess LITERALLY ALL OF MEDICINE is useless then, after all, its all disruprion of normal bodily functions.

>>11512372
that's right

>>11511304
Yeah I did DMT and didnt encounter any mechanical lord of the rings characters. It was too abstract for "entities" to even exist. Maybe he wanted there to be something.

>>11512234
>They tried to say I was trafficking because I had a trafficable amount, but I definitely wasn't.
>And it's not about me, I think a few changes to make the law more consistent would improve society.
I think the problem here isn't that the punishment for trafficking is too harsh, because trafficking is a serious crime and does need a harsh punishment, but rather that you were charged with trafficking (and potentially convicted) where the charges couldn't be substantiated.

In a perfect world every case would go to trial, and it aggravates me that one of the reasons that they don't is because Court is so fucking inefficient.

I have to be at court at 9AM but may not get on until 11AM for a 30 second mention where I say "we seek an adjournment" and police says "we don't object" and the Magistrates says "okay four weeks."

TWO HOURS of wasted time for something that could be done fucking online. We make an electronic submission, police makes an electronic response, and a fucking registrar could make the decision.

Meanwhile people like you are copping trafficking charges that you instruct could not be substantiated.

Courts are retarded and the legal system has a lot of problems.

>We need different approaches.
I agree totally, but often "different approaches" is code for legalisation. "Prohibiting drugs isn't working so let's not try" is an infuriating proposition - though I understand it's not what you're proposing.

Anyway, the world is shitty and we just have to live in it.

>>11512383
based

>>11512226
Right and wrong are not complex.

>>11512233
I am all for further regulation of the media and public discourse to allow people to formulate more considered and less influenced opinions.

Nevertheless I respect the dignity and intelligence of the voter.

>>11512259
Death to tyrants.

>>11512271
>Democracy without essential and inviolable rights, such as self-ownership, is tyranny by majority.
Your solution is simply tyranny by minority.

>>11512291
>Schedule 1 drugs aren't inherently harmful.
Nevertheless they are illegal.

>>11512384
It's a real effect that can happen in high doses. Not saying the entities are real, but it is a very common effect of DMT.
Not defending Terrence, fuck that guy.

>>11512410

>Your solution is simply tyranny by minority.

You have to be trolling. It's not. Same rights are extended to all members of society. There is no tyranny - note that I specifically mentioned actions that harm no one but the one performing it, i.e. almost all drug use.

Given these rights, Jews are allowed to eat kosher because it doesn't violate the rights of any other member of society, Muslims are allowed to eat halal because it doesn't violate the rights of any other member of society, fatties are allowed to eat french fries because it doesn't violate the rights of any other member of society, and drug users are allowed to eat drugs for the very same reason.

How anyone can construe inalienable rights to be tyranny is beyond me. How am I exerting tyranny on people who choose not to do drugs by doing drugs?

Explain to me how this is tyranny by the minority. Because some pearl-clutcher disagrees with my lifestyle choices, it is an exertion of tyranny? Honestly man, what the fuck.

>>11512442
>Same rights are extended to all members of society.
Even where these rights do not have the support of all members of society, or even most of them.

Tyranny by minority. At best, tyranny by a piece of paper.

A "right" is not a politically neutral thing. It has consequences. These consequences affect real people. Some of these people would prefer that the consequences stop. Sometimes the majority of people would prefer that.

And there you are, with guns and propaganda, telling them to shut the fuck up and take their beating because you're right and fuck what they want, God save the dictator and who cares the price.

>note that I specifically mentioned actions that harm no one but the one performing it, i.e. almost all drug use.
Immaterial.

>How am I exerting tyranny on people who choose not to do drugs by doing drugs?
You are denying them the ability to fully participate in their government by holding them hostage to some fucking piece of paper.

>>11512453
>You are denying them the ability to fully participate in their government by holding them hostage to some fucking piece of paper.

lol wut

Stop consciousness-policing, if you think psychedelics are too dangerous then you have to say the same about philosophy. Should we outlaw reading Schopenhauer because someone might turn borderline schizotypal from reading him? Grow some balls.

>>11512465
I explained it thoroughly and if you have further questions I will need specific reference to what of my material you have failed to understand.

>>11512410
They're illegal because the government's claim is that they're harmful and dangerous, but almost every drug is dangerous when used irresponsibly and without any kind of regulation. You can OD on aspirin. Cigarettes are still killing people. The US government is not interested in protecting its citizens through its drug laws, only in limiting what one can do with one's consciousness.

>>11512471
The paper lobby is interested in protecting its interests through drug laws, not to mention Big Beer.

>>11512471
>They're illegal because the government's claim is
They're illegal because of an Act of Parliament. Parliament is accountable to the electorate. I would suggest you ask the electors, not the Parliament, why they support drug prohibition. Perhaps talk to people in the community who have been impacted by drug use - drug users, their families, social workers, etc.

Or I can shortcut all that for you and tell you that drugs fucking destroy people and are a scourge on civilised society.
>"All drugs are dangerous when misused!"
Some are misused more than others, and are more dangerous when misused.

>>11512480
>I would suggest you ask the electors, not the Parliament, why they support drug prohibition.

Yeah and you'll find out it's largely bullshit and hardly representative of the will of the people at all :)

>>11512489
>Yeah and you'll find out it's largely bullshit and hardly representative of the will of the people at all :)
People get the government that they deserve.

>>11512466
This. Low openness to experience cucks. Incredible that they made their way to a literature board saddled with that much anxiety and social programming.

>>11512453
What? You know that the people didn’t one by one go through every drug and decide to make it legal or illegal, right? You know federal agencies without that much public oversight or accountability did it? You know vast numbers of people were interested in and tried various psychedelics in the US from the 50s-70s before the CIA decided to shut it down because they were afraid of subversive hippie and leftist and anti-war movements, and since many of these people were linked with psychedelics, it was a good and justifiable way to disperse the movement?

You know Prohibition once existed, and we now realize how stupid it is? You know weed has been illegal for a while in the US and now the average person in the US has tried weed, regularly does weed, and/or knows people who do? You know weed’s gonna become federally legal in the US, and a new movement to legalize psychedelics will probably gradually follow?

You know the point of a representative democracy is people can reasonably overturn laws they don’t like? You know we’re not made for the laws, the laws are made for us, because we’re not in backwards Saudi Arabia or some authoritarian country? You know I sound like a faggot by continually asking you if you know?

>>11512495
sez who?

>>11512453

I am literally advocating for the right to self-ownership. This right is fundamental to avoid tyranny. It's what keeps anyone with more voting power or muscle power from turning you into a slave. You honestly believe that self-ownership is not a right endorsed by the vast majority of people? What would you put instead of it? Nothing? How would you feel about a law that made it mandatory that people with blue eyes donate their kidneys to people with green eyes who needed it? I guess if green-eyed people are the majority and vote for it, it's a-ok in your book. You don't seem to grasp how important the notion of self-ownership is. It is literally the foundation of western democracies. You're a lawyer, or did I misread the thread? I have no clue how you can be so clueless.

>And there you are, with guns and propaganda, telling them to shut the fuck up and take their beating because you're right and fuck what they want

That's not how self-ownership works. That is exactly what self-ownership prevents.

>You are denying them the ability to fully participate in their government by holding them hostage to some fucking piece of paper.

No I am not. I am denying them the ability to lord over the lives of others because they happen to be the majority and disagree with their lifestyle choices. There is no holding hostage - that is what happens when there is no self-ownership. I am denying fascists who hate freedom from taking away freedom from those they hate. This is what self-ownership entails, among other things - among these other things, that drug use is permissible.

>>11512480

>Some are misused more than others, and are more dangerous when misused.

True. Alcohol and nicotine kill more people every hour of any day than cannabis and LSD ever has in human history.

>>11512501
>You know the point of a representative democracy is people can reasonably overturn laws they don’t like?
Sure, so what do you think the longstanding existence of these laws indicates?

>>11512505
Me.

>>11512506
>I am literally advocating for the right to self-ownership.
You are advocating the right to self-ownership whether people want it or not.

That's not freedom.

That's you imposing your conception of the world on others, and if given the chance you will do it with guns and force and gulags and death camps because the one thing that tyrants believe above everything else is that their shitty worldview and the greater good is always worth the cost.

>You honestly believe that self-ownership is not a right endorsed by the vast majority of people?
You sincerely believe that you know what people want better than they do, and have the right to give them what they deserve, and that's the worldview of a thousand would-be tinpot dictators and several actual ones.

>That's not how self-ownership works
That is how you would implement it.

>No I am not.
And Stalin denies his gulags.

>>11512515
Laws are not required to be logical, only enforceable.

>>11512521
well that's a pretty silly opinion

>>11512521
>Sure, so what do you think the longstanding existence of these laws indicates?
That it's time for a change and lobbys are too powerful

>>11512525
This is actually physically sickening to me.

>>11512530
You can certainly form that opinion, but it certainly does not indicate that your opinion is widespread.

>>11512536
okay

>>11512535
This is because you are a tyrant, who believes that he can order the world better than the people who actually have to live in it - who believes he can be the supreme judge of good and evil, right and wrong, proper laws and improper laws, to the exclusion of all other opinions.

>>11512521
>Sure, so what do you think the longstanding existence of these laws indicates?
That you're historically illiterate?
Hashish was used normally for thousands of years, cocaine was in soda and something you could buy at walgreens until about 70 years ago, and opium was as socially pervasive and acceptable as coffee just a few hundred years ago.

Furthermore, the legality and acceptability of entheogens and even recreational drugs had such a longer and richer history than prohibition that it's hard to even read your position as anything but satire. Are you really this brainwashed by the demonic Reagan-Thatcher-John Birch southern strategy propaganda? You unironically believe, as a conservative, that it's the place of government to police the bodily autonomy of individuals?

>>11512521
>Sure, so what do you think the longstanding existence of these laws indicates?
What does the longstanding existence of the prohibition of marijuana indicate? Well, it sure indicates something. But that doesn’t matter, it’s a dodge to the question. The point in a representative democracy is to rationally discuss the pros and cons of various laws. If we find that something is arbitrary and unjust, we try to peacefully convince others to use their power as citizens to change it. Your whole point is basically “Well, the will of the majority has to mean something!” It’s fallacious.

You’re dodging the question of the actual pros and cons of psychedelics. You’re saying you’re against it because it seems like the majority are against it because it’s illegal. But that’s not even how it worked. As I explained it, federal agencies without much public oversight or accountability, including the CIA and FBI, decided to start the War on Drugs to target subversive leftist activists linked to the psychedelic movement. Just because the people have not bothered to talk much about psychedelic legalization in mainstream politics or to consider it doesn’t meant it shouldn’t be or it won’t be. Not to mention that if people have been deliberately misinformed about psychedelics, it’s fallacious to privilege their “having made it illegal” (which they really didn’t).

Sorry to say, but the movement for the legalization of psychedelics has been slowly growing for a long time. It’s due to pop out of underground, mark my words.

>>11512546
>That you're historically illiterate?
History does not make policy. People do.

To give you an example, for 70 years cocaine has not been something you could buy at Walgreens. This indicates that for 70 years people have believed that cocaine should not be something that you can buy at Walgreens.

>Furthermore, the legality and acceptability of entheogens and even recreational drugs had such a longer and richer history than prohibition that it's hard to even read your position as anything but satire
Then it should be easy for you to attain a democratic sanction for your viewpoints.

>>11512552
>You’re dodging the question of the actual pros and cons of psychedelics.
It's an immaterial question. They're not relevant. This may seem unthinkable to you, but go ahead and try and explain how they are. The question is "why are these drugs illegal." The answer is straightforward - and Act of Parliament. The reasons behind that Act you seem well acquainted with, so I don't understand your current confusion.

You even recognise the solution to your perceived problem.
>The point in a representative democracy is to rationally discuss the pros and cons of various laws.
So do this instead of indulging in this random soapboxing. Go find someone who cares and talk to them.

>if people have been deliberately misinformed about psychedelics, it’s fallacious to privilege their “having made it illegal”
People get the government that they deserve.

>Sorry to say, but the movement for the legalization of psychedelics has been slowly growing for a long time. It’s due to pop out of underground, mark my words.
Yes, and people will get the government that they deserve when and if the question arises.

>>11512573
Now this is autism

>>11512573
>Then it should be easy for you to attain a democratic sanction for your viewpoints.
We are. Try looking at how policy is changing in the Juggernaut and pioneer of drug war legislation. Looking at the American position on drugs is a fairly accurate barometer of how your drug policy will look in 10 years if you live in the "free world."

Strange how that would be if the truth is determined by popular opinion, huh?

>>11512581
If heroin is legal and available in ten years I will chop my dick off.

>Do DMT
>Hallucinate making out with my mom
T-thanks psychonauts

>>11512521

>You are advocating the right to self-ownership whether people want it or not.

Yes. This is how constitutional democracies work. There are ground rules. Were the founding fathers of the USA being dictators when they granted the right of freedom of speech to their citizens, whether they wanted it or not? If you believe that imposing rights on people whether they want them or not is undemocratic, then by your contention, no democracy exists. Every democracy has ground rules.

You answer almost none of the questions I pose to you. If the majority of Germans vote to kill the Jews, is that just? If the majority of Egyptians vote to enslave the Christians, is that just? Is that democracy? It's what the majority wants. In your infantile and bona fide retarded conception of democracy and freedom, that seems to be the only thing that matters.

>That's you imposing your conception of the world on others, and if given the chance you will do it with guns and force and gulags and death camps because the one thing that tyrants believe above everything else is that their shitty worldview and the greater good is always worth the cost.

Guns, force, gulags and death camps are all outlawed by the principle of self-ownership, so no, that is simply not the case.

>That is how you would implement it.

I'd like to point out the irony of this combined with this

>You sincerely believe that you know what people want better than they do

And point out that there is no need to implement it, as it is already ensured in most constitutional democracies, albeit poorly implemented. Your total lack of understanding of statecraft and political history is showing, and you're a poor conversational partner that seems to have been nourished more by Jordan Peterson youtube videos than scholarly work, but I digress.

So what you've basically done is accuse me of being a stalinist and answered almost none of my hypothetical questions. Great debating m8, you fucking retard.

>>11512480
Agreed. You can't trust these drunks to not just bootleg their own grog and form powerful crime syndicates around that however, and even though it is addictive and implicated massively in accidents and violence, chronic and acute health issues including as a major carcinogen, general criminality, family and community breakdown, copious lost work hours, and on and on... unfortunately we can't ban alcohol and prosecute its vendors, but we can trust these same pissheads to vote intelligently despite the significant frontal lobe damage they've accrued, but we can't trust them to take psychedelics responsibly because breaking the law constitutes tyranny, and the media should be regulated by experts even though rule by expertise is antidemocratic and also tyrannical, and despite having all the world's knowledge and unlimited fora for lively debate at their fingertips they still overwhelmingly passively consume and regurgitate ridiculous propaganda, and you accuse others of having aberrant, inconsistent viewpoints.

>>11512410
>Death to tyrants.
Yawn. You haven't rejected tyrants, just embraced the tyranny of the mob.

>>11512610
>Were the founding fathers of the USA being dictators when they granted the right of freedom of speech to their citizens, whether they wanted it or not?
Yes, and history rightly viewed that as a mistake, which is why more recent Constitutions shy away from including such a pointless and troublesome piece of legislation.

>If you believe that imposing rights on people whether they want them or not is undemocratic, then by your contention, no democracy exists
Certainly no perfect democracy exists.

>If the majority of Germans vote to kill the Jews, is that just?
What if the majority vote not to kill them, but the Constitution was written in 1941 and the High Court rules that they must? What if the Constitution provides a right to life but the High Court rules that it does not apply to Jews? What if what if what if?

>You answer almost none of the questions I pose to you.
Most of them, like the above, are immaterial.

>Guns, force, gulags and death camps are all outlawed by the principle of self-ownership, so no, that is simply not the case.
Every day people in power face their moment to make a stand on their principles, and every day they fail to do so. Spare me your appeals to the righteous man.

>And point out that there is no need to implement it, as it is already ensured in most constitutional democracies, albeit poorly implemented.
Evidently not, or else you wouldn't be chucking a teary about drug laws. But feel free to bring a High Court challenge so that I can run the opposing case pro bono and laugh you out of the courtroom, big man, if you're so fucking confident.

>answered almost none of my hypothetical questions.
Put $330 in trust and I'll make some submissions for you.

>>11512620
The alternative is tyranny of the minority.

>>11512619
You mistake my support for the rule of law as support for all laws passed by Parliament.

I suggest you pay closer attention, at the least to prevent yourself from becoming a worked example of the intellectual side effects of drug use.

>>11512573
>It's an immaterial question. They're not relevant. This may seem unthinkable to you, but go ahead and try and explain how they are. The question is "why are these drugs illegal." The answer is straightforward - and Act of Parliament. The reasons behind that Act you seem well acquainted with, so I don't understand your current confusion.

You probably feel very rational and disaffected right now, but little do you know that I feel the same way. You’re right, we’re arguing about different things. You’re saying “don’t do drugs because they’re illegal and illegal things are bad because the majority says so.” I’m showing you how your argument is flawed on various levels, down to its premises, and you insist, “Well it’s illegal so I don’t care,” repeating the same thing over and over. Since we’re not arguing about the same thing, this conversation is useless.

>>11512589
It won't be unless for the express purpose of halting use and addiction

>>11512638

>Yes, and history rightly viewed that as a mistake, which is why more recent Constitutions shy away from including such a pointless and troublesome piece of legislation.

Right, so how exactly would democracy be implemented? Not everyone would agree with it, yet you're advocating democracy. Guess you're a stalinist.

>Certainly no perfect democracy exists.

Lame cop-out and "immaterial", lmao.

>What if the majority vote not to kill them, but the Constitution was written in 1941 and the High Court rules that they must? What if the Constitution provides a right to life but the High Court rules that it does not apply to Jews? What if what if what if?

None of these analogies applies to the principle of self-ownership. Lame cop-out.

>Most of them, like the above, are immaterial.

Lame cop-out.

>Evidently not, or else you wouldn't be chucking a teary about drug laws. But feel free to bring a High Court challenge so that I can run the opposing case pro bono and laugh you out of the courtroom, big man, if you're so fucking confident.

1: are you capable of reading?
2: I care about fundamental rights. I am not ashamed of this.
3: I don't believe you're a lawyer, you're too dumb, and even if you are, you sure as shit aren't allowed to appear before anything but the most inferior courts, on account of your aforementioned monumental and massive stupidity. Crying Stalinist at people who disagree with you is the lowest of the low.

>>11512638
>Yes, and history rightly viewed that as a mistake, which is why more recent Constitutions shy away from including such a pointless and troublesome piece of legislation.
Are you seriously asserting that free speech is bad for democracy? How can any democracy operate without it? The will of the people can not be elected without being voiced. Suppressing the voice of the people is suppressing their ability to participate in the democracy.

Further, do you believe that any current, self-proclaimed "democratic" state truly represents the people? Most if not all represent the will of money and power, and are motivated by the tyrants you so despise to maintain that money and power. The powers thaat be don't give a shit what the people truly want, as long as nobody is actively rioting and as long as the cash keeps flowing and their grip doesn't slip.

You're arguing that self-determination is tyrannical. You're the tyrant.

>>11512573

>This may seem unthinkable to you, but go ahead and try and explain how they are. The question is "why are these drugs illegal." The answer is straightforward - and Act of Parliament. The reasons behind that Act you seem well acquainted with, so I don't understand your current confusion.

Is it one of the hallmarks of autism to be incapable of discerning between descriptive issues and normative issues?

>>11512668
If yours is the logical position, it shouldn't be hard to convince people that you're right. Until then the majority of people don't want drugs to be legal

>>11512694
This is exactly what I mean. You’re not making any argument. You’re just saying, “what’s legal is legal, what’s illegal is illegal. If something should be illegal it will be illegal and if something should be legal it will be legal.” You’ve taken a lot of words and posts to just say that.

Hard mode: you’re irrelevant to this thread. This may seem unthinkable to you, but go ahead and try to explain how you are.

>>11512544
I do not believe that. I do not at all hold any arrogant supposition that I know the whole of the truth and the good. But policy effects health, and the purpose of society (or the purpose I would prefer it to fulfill) is to facilitate the public health, and blindly illogical yet enforceable prohibitions on hallucinogens with well established psychiatric uses (I'm talking just Schedule 2 here, like ketamine) and fundamentally opposed to and indifferent to the public health, as is free access to tobacco and alcohol.

But it's fine because we vote for these conditions that are terrible for all of us, and let's just turn a blind eye to widespread propagandic influence and voter ignorance. None of us are arguing for tyranny -- all of us are doing our duty of informing the populace so that the populace can assist in the adjustment of policy as is occurring in the case of cannabis in the US.

LSD has too much historical and political baggage, but MDMA will hit Schedule 2 in the relative future, and psilocybin mushrooms will not take long to follow.

>>11512668
>I’m showing you how your argument is flawed on various levels
I do not agree with your critiques.

They seem to centre mainly on the thrust that the laws are not a legitimate exercise of Parliament's power because
>they were instituted through the executive (a change in policy) rather than the legislature (a change in law)
>they are not consistent or logical or based in apparent fact
>they are an abrogation of fundamental rights

I believe I understand all of these criticisms fully and I will respond to them now as holistically as I can.

Because the executive is empowered and accountable to the legislature I am not overly concerned about the former. People get the government that they deserve, and if they permit executive overreach then they deserve it. Laws are not required to be consistent or logical or based in fact, merely enforceable. Again, people get the government they deserve. If they want good laws that make sense they will need to ask for them.

I disagree with fundamental rights on two fronts. The first is philosophical wank and not appropriate for this discussion, and is a position I hold only weakly - logic leads me to that conclusion but I reject it nonetheless because I want to believe in universal values and the cause of human progress and so therefore I will. The second is a legal reason - the creation of fundamental human rights in legislature (e.g. the Bill of Rights) takes power away from the legislature and hands it to the judiciary, specifically an unelected, appointed, political body called the High Court. You hold a different view on what freedom of speech means? Well, too bad. Your view is not just in the minority, it is an illegal view. Not illegal to hold, but illegal to implement. And what if a majority view is illegal? It will either be blocked unjustifiably by the Constitution, or more likely the Constitution will be ignored and "reinterpreted" to permit the illegal view - again, see America.

I don't agree with every law. But I agree with the need for laws, and I agree with the need for a process by which they are made, and I agree that our process is generally effective. As a consequence I should obey the laws. Even the ones I disagree with.

Generally speaking, I would have repeat drug offenders shot. However, it's not my place to decide that.

I defer to the will of the people, and I particularly despise people who don't.

>>11512709
I'm not the guy you were talking to and without him this thread would have already been gone

>>11512683
Don't expect further reply.

>>11512685
>Are you seriously asserting that free speech is bad for democracy?
No, I am asserting that the Bill of Rights is bad for democracy.

>Further, do you believe that any current, self-proclaimed "democratic" state truly represents the people?
Yes. It just so happens that the people are represented as willing to be subordinate to the interests of lobbyists and capitalists. Every mechanism necessary for unfettered democracy exists in Western countries, but the people do not seize them. And so they get the government that they deserve.

>You're arguing that self-determination is tyrannical.
No.

>>11512689
I have been very clear about my argument. It is everyone else who is trying to make this an argument about norms.

>Maybe if we keep responding to the lunatic, somehow the world will become a better place as a result.

>>11512730

Lame cop-out, stalinist scum.

>>11512716
>As a consequence I should obey the laws. Even the ones I disagree with.
Slavery and segregation have been legal. I don’t want to bring up SJW talking points but rest assured I understand your points but disagree.

>I defer to the will of the people, and I particularly despise people who don’t.

This is emotIona reasoning.

>>11512717
>I do not believe that
Then defer to the will of the people.

I understand your position, but it is incompatible with my own.

>>11512716
>As a consequence I should obey the laws. Even the ones I disagree with.
Slavery and segregation have been legal. I don’t want to bring up SJW talking points but rest assured I understand your points but disagree.

>I defer to the will of the people, and I particularly despise people who don’t.

This reveals more about your personality than it does make a rational argument.

>>11512722
My apologies then.

>>11512755
>Slavery and segregation have been legal
And they were scourges, not enacted by "legitimate" democracies. If a person is governed, they must be able to participate in the government. Slaves couldn't, and segregation made the prospect dubious.

But let's assume they were - let's go further and assume that 51 electors want to kill the other 49. Let's even assume it's for no reason at all, they're just angry about eye colour or whatever. This is tragedy. But the situation can be reversed - 51 electors want not to kill the other 49, but the Constitution says they must - or is interpreted to mean they must, by whoever controls the High Court.

>"but usually it's the angry mob making stupid decisions, not the Constitution"
Yes, but the angry mob's decisions are only middlingly stupid. It is dictatorships, not democracies, that commit genocides.

I am not overly concerned about democracies making mind-numbingly obscene decisions, and I am concerned about the kind of mind-numbingly obscene politics you see in the US Supreme Court.

>This reveals more about your personality than it does make a rational argument.
It was intended to do so.

>>11512738
One could consider it honing our points and skills to persuade more reasonable peoples.

>/lit/ loves psychedelics

Wtf happened? Read too much Tao?

>>11506953

>>11512716

>Generally speaking, I would have repeat drug offenders shot. I defer to the will of the people, and I particularly despise people who don't.

Imma light up a spliff of freedom in your honor my man.

>>11512785
That's fine.

>>11512767
Engaging with schizophrenics or ideologies wearing the skins of individuals is a waste of time for any thinking person. Like this shit ... >>11512716

>Generally speaking, I would have repeat drug offenders shot. I defer to the will of the people, and I particularly despise people who don't.
Engaging with these ideas is a non-starter. You learn nothing, because they're patently absurd. You're engaging with surrealist parody.

>>11512765
You’re a Legalist straight out of ancient Chinese philosophy. I’m really not, so this discussion is useless. It’s not just our arguments but personalities which are fundamentally different. I generally respect the law as well and hate idiotic hoodlums conked on drugs but by licking my finger and holding it up, I can see which way the wind is blowing. This wind tells me that the prohibition of various drugs is causing more harm and takes more effort to uphold than just legalizing certain drugs, that the War on (Some) Drugs is withering away and will eventually be cast off like the corpse it is. I’m aligning myself with this current because I also happen to agree with it.

Again, you’re arguing something I find irrelevant. I’m discussing drugs, you’re discussing niceties of law and politics.

>>11512791
>You learn nothing, because they're patently absurd
On the contrary, I think I have delivered a valuable alternate legalist perception of Bills of Rights as being antidemocratic.

You can ignore the rest of my posts if you'd like but too many people take for grants that a Bill of Rights protects freedom when, in reality, it is a constraint of the lawmaking power of Parliament - who is most accountable to the community.

Just look at the recent Supreme Court nominations in the USA.

>>11512798
Fair enough, and I think it's appropriate to draw a line here.

My views are informed by my experiences with drug-abusing clients.

>>11512799
Or, you've convinced yourself that being a surrealist parody of yourself is a worthwhile use of your time because you harbor repressed, sub-conscious resentment towards the people arguing against your positions. It's not exactly difficult to see.

>>11512799
The US doesn’t have “Parliament”. Are you talking about Congress? Are you from the US?

>>11512814
>The US doesn’t have “Parliament”
Congress is a Parliament.

And nah, I'm Australian.

>>11512808
I believe that you’re a lawyer. Some other guy in this thread tried to insult you and say you’re too stupid to be one but you definitely talk like a lawyer. I’ll drop acid soon in your honor. Keep up the good work.

>>11512820
Dear Anon,

RE: YOUR LEGAL MATTERS - Conference today

WITHOUT PREJUDICE SAVE AS TO COSTS

Thank you for your time on 4chan.org today. As discussed, I confirm that we reviewed our perspectives on whether or not I was a lawyer. This discussion occurred outside any costs agreement and will not be billed. This letter will also not be billed.

For your files, the details of the discussion were as follows: you indicated to me that you had formed the view that I was a lawyer based on your perception of my style of communication as being lawyer-like. You further indicated that you were preparing to "drop acid," which is a word that is used to refer to lysergic acid diethylamide, in my honour and which I took to mean that you were preparing to administer either alone or with others some quantity of the substance to yourself.

I take this opportunity to remind you that lysergic acid diethylamide is a dangerous drug within the meaning of section 9 of the Drugs Misuse Act 1986 (Qld) and advise you that my understanding of your indicated planned course of action may constitute an offence under same. I advise you if reside in the state of Queensland to dispose of the drug responsibly in a manner which does not constitute a further offence - i.e. the drug should be destroyed or handed in to a police station, and not thrown away or left anywhere.

I confirm that this conversation is within legal privilege and I will not contact the police about this matter.

Yours faithfully,
Anon

>this is not actual legal advice

>>11512770
Tao is an idiot, if anything he's a counterargument to interest in psychedelics. Only one other poster in this thread (other than me) alluded to reading Tao Lin's Trip, and that was to say McKenna ruined him; my own comments indicate Tao's terribly incomplete understanding.

The posters defending psychedelics here are people with their own interest in the subject, independently arrived at. Which is unsurprising given that intelligence is associated with curiosity, i.e. interest in both ideas (and therefore /lit/ involvement) and interest in new experiences (and therefore psychedelic involvement, the safest and most interesting subgenre of drugs). You could also consider it an outcropping of all of /lit/'s religion talk; religion is fundamentally incomplete without mysticism and ecstatic experiences.

>>11511775
then it's better that people don't do them at all.

it makes the average privileged American human wrong in the brain, and that is not something to take lightly

>>11513092
It's certainly best that most people don't do them. As they've nothing to gain, and a lot to lose. However, psychedelics are immeasurably valuable to the human species. Anyone who's taken them knows just how important consciousness expansion is to the betterment of the human experience.

>>11512868
What does Tao get wrong about psychedelics and what do you get right?

>>11512765

In this post we see how much of a moron this person is
>I am not overly concerned about democracies making mind-numbingly obscene decisions
So the idea of tyranny of the majority doesn’t strike him as fearsome.
> I am concerned about the kind of mind-numbingly obscene politics you see in the US Supreme Court
Yet the weakest of the three branches of the government does strike fear into this individual.

>>11512864
Thanks for the advice lawyer-bro, I’ll consider it while I’m tripping

>>11513176
>So the idea of tyranny of the majority doesn’t strike him as fearsome.
It strikes me as rarely as egregious as the tyranny of dictators.

>>11507178
I like you.

>>11513184
Absolutely idiotic. What is the difference between a despot unleashing wrath on a minority and a majority of a collective interest doing that in an absolute democracy?

This is the reason why no government adopts a completely democratic system

>>11513133
it makes art better, sometimes. but what of it. I've come around to feeling extremely suspicious of the supposed betterment to the human race that psychoactive drugs offer. If anything, it mostly just makes people more arrogant, more adept at self-deception

>>11513222
>What is the difference between a despot unleashing wrath on a minority and a majority of a collective interest doing that in an absolute democracy?
The magnitude of the wrath, typically.

>>11513262
Do you have any personal experience with psychedelics?

>>11513284
um

yeah

What's a good, serious book about historical religious drug use?
More interested in Old World than New.

>>11506953
t. never done psychedelics

>>11513288
Well, all I can do in that case is respectfully disagree with your position on the issue.

>>11513092
>>11513262
>>11513288
Stop replying to tripfags. Everything they say is wrong and ought to be ignored.

>>11506953
tell me how being a cynical virgin shut in works out for you

>>11511775
>All psychedelics do, in my estimation, at active doses, is enhance a persons personality characteristics.
This is a common and misleading misconception. The outcome of a psychedelic experience is completely dependent on the psychic framework a person has placed around the experience in their mind. If a person approaches psychedelics with, using your example, the expectation that this experience will enhance their previous personality traits, then that occurrence is much more likely to happen.

This is the nature of the experience. You get in return what you are able to put in. Naive college kids experimenting with hallucinogens obviously will get much less benefit out of such an experience when compared to e.g. a young amazonian tribesman drinking a psychedelic brew as an initiation into adulthood as his father and forefathers did before him. The cultural framework to help the user assimilate the experience into their everyday life and derive benefit from it simply is not there for the westerner (as Mckenna constantly preached), so it is obvious why (most) westerners fail to assimilate the knowledge gained in a psychedelic state. They do not fail because it is the nature of the drug to "enhance a persons personality characteristics", that is a wrong and limited analysis. They fail because the mental framework set up to consciously and unconsciously assimilate the experience is not conducive to actual, effective assimilation.

Also most of these users I've seen use these chemicals and plants pretty irresponsibly; effectively throwing set and setting out the window--but that is another issue.

>>11507178
>>11507930
>>11509428
>>11510582

the "trip" effect of mushrooms and lsd is inversely proportional to blood flow in the brain, i.e. the more starved your brain is of blood the "harder" you trip.

>>11510825

I had HPPD for years, and the effects were not just limited to hallucinations. It would always be paired with all of the other nasty effects of a bad trip. people don't realize what a bad trip really means though. They dont realize what it means to "see things you don't want to see." Imagine you have convinced yourself everyone around you is a psychopath. Do you know how difficult it is to reason your way out of that? It's not like its easy to disprove. especially when you aren't god. You could literally write volumes of books debating the issue let alone solve it to the point where you are satisfied and can move on with you life. That's just the first order effects. Then you have the second order effects, as in, why am i always debating whether everyone around me is a psychopath? and you can continue thinking that in reference to the previous thought ad infinitum until someone asks, "are you okay?" and those words echo and sound hollow and you want to puke and run at the same time but you also dont want to sound or look insane so you laugh and put on a fake smile and slap them on the shoulder and say, "Everything's okay I was just blanking." What's worse is that no one fucking believes you because everyone ultimately can see there is something wrong with you so say goodbye to all intimate social relations. People begin avoiding you now and you don't know how to fix it so you begin adopting even faker behaviors to trick people into thinking there is nothing wrong with you only to realize that you are becoming a psychopath by calculating all of your behaviors to convince people you are normal and there is no way out of this vicious cycle of behavior because therapists are parasites and you cant afford them anyway and its your own damn fault you took the mushrooms to begin with and you can't actually prove that what you're thinking is wrong because ultimately people really are selfish and capable of murder and will always put themselves before you.

>>11513557
>the "trip" effect of mushrooms and lsd is inversely proportional to blood flow in the brain, i.e. the more starved your brain is of blood the "harder" you trip.
Absolute nonsense.

>>11513575
This is right up there with "mushrooms are just food poisoning" in terms of DARE bullshit

>>11513474
I'm not sure how mind-altering substances would benefit the life of a hunter-gatherer living a simple life.

If anything, psychedelics were made for people living in an over-stimulated world. For ancient people, reality was enough of a trip, but for people living in modernity psychedelics finally seem to have a purpose, as they can half-assedly resurrect that lost sense of wonder

>>11513589
>I'm not sure how mind-altering substances would benefit the life of a hunter-gatherer living a simple life.
If you are interested in this then I recommend you actually read or listen to Mckenna. He wrote and spoke extensively on this topic exploring many different cultures and the mind-altering substances they (nearly all) used.

>>11513575
>>11513581

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/2138

>Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects.

>>11513589
>>11513474

The only metric we seem to be able to use in terms of quantifying "the long-term benefit of humanity" is the scientific and philosophical progress that led up to now. So then when someone tries to imagine what tangible good psychedelics could have done for ancient people, they're inevitably like "Well, maybe they finally saw reality and yadda yadda" and this is a judgment framed in terms of values from the Enlightenment. But then oddly enough here we are some time after that, doing psychedelics and reading Terence Mckenna as if we want to go back to being that hunter-gatherer as though there was something we missed that we would complete or heal our worldview

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

>>11513557
You are evidence that highly neurotic people should be very cautious with psychedelics.

>>11513620
*that we could use

sorry. Wrote too fast

>>11513266
You’re right. It’s much worse and absolute antipathy devoid of sympathy under a democracy

>>11513630
This. The more people there are in a society the less effective and more malevolent democracy becomes.

>>11513636
This guy gets it. Democracy is best for small, fledging societies, like the colonies of Rome, or Athens, or the thirteen original British colonies in North America

>>11513620
>So then when someone tries to imagine what tangible good psychedelics could have done for ancient people, they're inevitably like "Well, maybe they finally saw reality and yadda yadda"
>reading Terence Mckenna as if we want to go back to being that hunter-gatherer as though there was something we missed that we would complete or heal our worldview
I don't know who advocates for these ideas but Mckenna definitely does not.

>>11513628

its too late for that. i should also add that after trying to figure out what went wrong, and trying shitloads of different medications, i figured out that increasing my serotonin with both ssris and 5HTP directly lead to an increase in "intrusive thoughts" which would trigger a neurotic downward spiral of thought and behavior as well as killing my erections, whereas masturbating which directly decreases serotonin had the opposite effect. the only downside to jerking off is that it kills your dopamine for a few days so you feel like a slug and hate everything.

I will also say to anyone else struggling with HPPD and neurotic side-effects of substances that alter serotonin levels that lifting heavy weights and running, something I can't overstate the benefits of, especially weight lifting. I was prescribed methylphenidate (ritalin) for a year or so, and the effect on my mind I get from a good pump is comparable to ritalin in addition to increasing my strength which ritalin does not do directly.

>>11513676
Sounds like you need to rethink what you and your thoughts are. You are not your brain. Your mental state does not have to reflect some arbitrary and often inaccurate estimated serotonin level. Intrusive thoughts are common in everybody and more common in neurotic people (your neuroses began far before any of your psychedelic use), but that does not mean we have to assign behavioral responses to any particular thoughts which happen to project into your mind. CBT can help you do this but if you are reluctant then just look up how to meditate and be mindful of your own thoughts. These materialistic diagnoses are extremely unhelpful and definitely ineffective, as you seem to realize, so it is probably worth trying a different method.

>>11513474
You're ignoring the context of the response.

>>11513971
Okay but what I quoted from you is remarkably misleading.

>>11514166
If you ignore the context, I would imagine it is.

>>11514333
Explain the context then my tripfaggot friend, because I don't see how your statement isn't extremely inaccurate and misleading.

>>11513726

You are correct that the intrusive thoughts began well before my psychedelic use. I thought they would be the solution. But you are are wrong to reject the evidence that I have accumulated that higher serotonin levels increase, not decrease their rate and likewise lower serotonin levels decrease their rate and intensity. Our relationship with serotonin is complicated and to dismiss my reference to it as materialistic does a disservice to the utility I have derived from the findings of my experiments and research into the scientific literature as well as to the complexity of the relationship our bodies have with the molecule. Also, I do not think "I am my brain", but I do believe I am my body, which is extremely complex and worthy of investigation. It's worth noting that something like 90% (might be more) of your body's serotonin is produced in your intestines, not your brain anyways. So like I said, the scope of my understanding is not limited to "you are your brain," which we can all agree is dumb.

Also, I have been doing CBT for the last 10 years. It wasn't until I started doing research into biochemistry and biology more generally did I begin to get a grasp of what might be the causes of my "intrusive" thoughts. Do you really not wonder why elevated serotonin levels might lead to an increase in intrusive thoughts? Does that really not make you curious as to the role it plays in our lives and our social interaction? For example, I didn't mention this, but lower serotonin levels isn't all benefits. While intrusive thoughts decrease, I become frustrated more quickly and am more likely to lash out at people violently. I also think about killing myself more often. However, if you increase my testosterone levels at the same time as having decreased serotonin levels I'm still as aggressive, but less suicidal.

I'll say this on psychedelics. Take them at your own peril. If you are going to experiment with them, I suggest starting with the smallest doses possible and building your way up while taking notes of the effects. Don't be macho, don't eat a whole bag of shrooms and pretend you'll be able to handle it. You will get your ass handed to you and you will risk ruining your life like I have. I personally recommend Salvinorin A as in my experience it has been safer than acid or shrooms even at high doses and usually doesn't leave people caught in thought loops that psychedelics which have an affinity for serotonin receptors tend to.

>>11514342
In my estimation ... (in relation to the measurable personality changes concordant with persistent usage in otherwise neurologically normative individuals) ... all LSD seems to do is exaggerate intrinsic personality characteristics.

>>11514370
Sociological analysis is always useless. Seems this is not the exception.

>>11514368
No matter the magnitude or quantity of intrusive thoughts, a mind ought to be able to ignore them all.

Do you think salvinorin A may be different because of its subjective dissociative effects at all active doses? contrasting with LSD and mushrooms where the dissociative effects are very hit or miss even at higher doses, or do you think it's all serotonin related?

>>11514412
>No matter the magnitude or quantity of intrusive thoughts, a mind ought to be able to ignore them all

It takes time and effort to "just ignore it" which takes time and effort away from the rest of my life. I would rather not have them at all, and so far from my experimentation lowering my serotonin levels along with keeping a journal seems to be the only thing that works and it doesn't kill my erections.

salvinorin A is different because it binds to opioid receptors, specifically kappa opioid receptors, which is why the effect is different than lsd and psilocybin which bind to serotonin receptors. Here's a fairly comprehensive article on it you might be interested in reading.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC129372/

as for the subjective dissociative effects, i can't comment on that from personal experience. my experience with salvia and salvinorin A was visual and kinesthetic. I mainly felt a characteristic heaviness in my jaw, the ground began to "breath" and perspective seemed to invert itself, things that were far away became near, things that were near appeared far. There was no introspection, no uncontrollable self-pitying or shame or guilt. The only thing that happened was the shape of my perception changed. Highly preferable to every experience I've had with mushrooms with the benefit of no HPPD. Once the trip was over, it was over and I only had to think about it if I wanted to.

>>11514870
>I would rather not have them at all
Everybody has thoughts. To stop the stream of thoughts would be to die. Learn to ignore them instead of acknowledging them. You don't step into traffic to try and stop the flow of cars do you?

>>11506776
le based kike