- Imagine a family of drugs that could treat addiction, depression and post-traumatic stress: sicknesses of the soul for which modern medicine, in all its surgical wizardry, has few cures. Substances that were a fillip to creativity and could provide those who took them with an experience comparable to seeing God or witnessing the birth of a child. Say these wonder chemicals were found: why would a society make them illegal?
I feel like something strange happened some time before I was born that goes beyond drugs/psychedelia. I look at pictures of Iran from the 60's and 70's, an iconic video taken at like 2am in a 7/11 in Orlando in 1987 of just people going about their random inebriated business, and how relaxed everyone seemed, how casually friendly they were. I look at all of this and I can't help but feel like as a species we missed something. Like we accidentally retarded our development at a key moment, and the past few decades have been playing catch up to where we were supposed to be. It might just be that I don't yet have kb levels of relevant geopolitical history, but I feel like the world stage that we inhabit now is somehow lesser than it was, lesser than it 'should be.' Maybe that's nonsense, but it's a fairly keen feeling I get from time to time.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
The moment I got to this paragraph, I was a little worried about the overall message: But then the lady also mentioned in the end that she is not a scientist and that she would rather stay in the background. Which I totally respect! Then there were the talks about the benefits of recreational use. A discussion I keep having with a friend is about this halo effect. He says that taking the drugs makes you feel as if they helped you in something but all of this might be just placebo or even harming in the long term. Now I have talked LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin and smoke Cannabis. The things I experienced were mind blowing, amazing, hard to describe. After that, I was fascinated by the substances and I am actively working on building up an NGO for the support of psychedelic studies in Germany. I don't have the feeling that it was placebo. What about you Hubski? Do you think it could be all "fake"?“The video is frustrating in terms of public perception,” she says. “But trepanation has had subtle but definite benefits for me, and to the other people I know who have had it done. Jamie had chronic headaches until he was trepanned, but not since. I think it has a lot of potential advantages. My theory is that trepanation improves the level of blood circulation round the brain to that of childhood. You get more blood into the brain with each heartbeat, and also an increase in washout of toxins. I’d suggest that cannabis and psychedelics do the same thing, but at a higher level. There are other techniques that can achieve this, like yogic breathing or cranial osteopathy, but trepanation is permanent.”
Anyone can see my history with mind-altering substances here . As to what the impacts were: well, I would say my sense of humor has changed a bit. The....absurdity of the everyday? Bleeds through more now. As an example, I occasionally think about how strange it is we keep animals in our houses. It's kind of a weird thing, which we just take for granted. I trip whenever I get a break from both work and school (obviously I have to be in the mood as well). Trips seem to put everything in context for me, and bring to the forefront what I am worrying about. Sometimes, for example, I will just have a basal stress level, and not really notice it, but while tripping, I generally realize exactly what I am worrying about, and that's helpful to resolve it. I certainly don't think it's a placebo, but I also don't observe many STRONG changes to myself or my ways of thinking between trips. I do think that people tend to over-value every thought they have while tripping, because it feels extremely meaningful. Writing your thoughts down and going back the day after a trip, then the week after a trip tends to put those thoughts in a more reasonable context. Some things just don't translate to sober life, some are complete nonsense, and some are valuable insight. I certainly think that psychedelics should be examined for medical uses. It's ridiculous to say that they cannot have a strong impact on the conscious mind, I suppose the question is how predictablely positive can we make the experience? If, in proper controlled settings, we could achieve, say, a 1/50 negative experience, with 49/50 feeling positively afterwards, I would say it has very good medical utility.