Silk Road forums
Market => Rumor mill => Topic started by: Dutch Pride on September 02, 2013, 08:22 pm
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We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are. In other words, the stories we tell about the things we take into our bodies reflect the stories we tell about our more mysterious selves. A whale steak munched nostalgically in Japan would strike many nature-loving Americans as a moral horror, while the continued appeal of homeopathic pills lies as much with the holistic image of the bodymind they suggest as with their measurable efficacy.
This mirroring effect between substance and self is particularly powerful when the things in question are psychoactive drugs — those natural and synthetic materials that directly and sometimes dramatically affect the lived texture of human consciousness. So what do you think: is alcohol a social lubricant, a temptation, a poison, a medium of culture, a tool of self-medication, or the blood of Christ? All of these views are ‘social stories’ that derive their consistency from the shifting locations wherein human beings find themselves. We reimagine what we ingest from where we stand, and where we stand is a moving target — or better said, a dance.
LSD gives perhaps the best example of the kaleidoscopic range of narratives stirred up by a psychoactive molecule. LSD entered the world barely 75 years ago as a meaningless white powder cooked up by a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann. Since then Hofmann’s tabula rasa has developed a panoply of uses: it has been a mind control agent; an aid to psychotherapy; a simulator of psychosis; a mystical engine; an aphrodisiac; a cognitive amplifier; a scrambler of chromosomes; a productivity enhancer; a demonic scourge; a revolutionary force; a good time; a god. It has been classified as ‘psychomimetic’, ‘psychedelic’, and an ‘entheogen’ (a psychoactive substance used to generate ‘the divine within’). It has been marketed under myriad names, including the commercial brand Delysid, and famous underground monikers such as Orange Sunshine, Windowpane and Purple Microdot. It has been distributed in (and as) vials of liquid, crystal powder, sugar cubes, gelatin caps, and blotter paper.
This swirl of costumes, names, stories and packages has not only influenced the meaning of LSD but also, to some degree, its phenomenology. When the legendary acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III was pressing his famously pure LSD into pills for people such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, he dyed the batches different colours. The colours led to various brand names — Purple Haze, Blue Cheer — which in turn were linked, experientially, to different sorts of effects, even though the quality and amount of acid was effectively the same. Something similar is happening to cannabis today, at least in an increasingly deregulated America, where the red-hot market for ‘medical’ marijuana products has led to a complex and overhyped mythology of targeted effects.
The official war on drugs maintains its bankrupt holding pattern and the digitally remastered offspring of the freaks and hippies keep the counterculture alive
Of course, some of the most powerful stories about psychoactives are told by the state, even if those stories are frequently garbled and contradictory. In the US, for example, the pleasant Polynesian root kava-kava is available on the herbal shelves, while the pleasant Yemeni stimulant khat is controlled. In the UK, the reverse is true. Of course, the stories told about psychedelics like LSD were more demonising, and in 1967 the US government classified it as a highly controlled substance, a year after it became illegal in California. This regulatory act — a new story, if you will — thrust the compound even deeper into the underground, where its meanings proliferated along a myriad of spiritual, artistic, musical, sexual and social vectors that continue to morph their way through society and culture to this day. However, by definitively transforming LSD into an ‘illegal drug’, the state’s story also brought to a halt a wide range of legitimate, board-certified psychological and pharmacological studies that, in their time, might have reframed Hofmann’s molecule into narratives not so heavily freighted with the baggage of countercultural values.
Today, the meaning of LSD and other psychedelics is once again up for grabs. And the main storytellers are scientists themselves, who have recently been empowered to carry on the sort of controlled, laboratory research that was chased underground 45 years ago. So even as the official war on drugs maintains its bankrupt holding pattern and the digitally remastered offspring of the freaks and hippies keep the counterculture alive at events such as Burning Man, a growing number of psychiatrists, neuroscientists, research chemists and psychologists (and their often private funders) have instigated an extraordinary resurgence. We now see above-board research into the physiological and psychological effects of substances such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca and others..
For a resoundingly negative answer to this question, we might consider some recently published research — and the small flurry of publicity it sparked — concerning the dissociative substance ketamine, a synthetic compound once widely used as an anaesthetic. On the street, ‘Vitamin K’ or ‘Special K’ is known as a club drug whose insufflation dependably makes things go all goofy-tunes. And some inner-space explorers have, over many decades, developed a taste for the magnificently uncanny and cosmic out-of-body experiences occasioned by larger, frequently injected doses. Even here, though, ketamine underscores the complex interactions of social narratives and ‘pure experience’. Though ketamine is not terribly different in either structure or effects from the notoriously violent street drug phencyclidine, or PCP, the cultural profiles of the two substances are worlds apart — a distance that some observers suggest has more to do with class and social context than with strict psychopharmacology.
And now there is a new competing narrative. Studies recently carried out at Yale, and published last month in the journal Science, have confirmed earlier reports that ketamine offers remarkable, nearly instantaneous relief for people who suffer from forms of major depression impervious to other treatment methods. Interpreting depression as a hardware problem largely caused by the loss of synaptic connections, the researchers argue that ketamine works by encouraging sprightly neural growth in brain regions correlated with memory and mood. Journalistic reports also linked this research with the development of a new vein of antidepressants, including Naurex’s GLYX-13, that have the neurone-fertilising power of ketamine without, as one report describes them, the ‘schizophrenia-like effects’.
By sweeping sublimities under the rug of toxic ‘side effects’, the researchers sidestep the remarkable paradox that psychedelic substances present
Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes ecstatic, and certainly mind-bending modes of transpersonal consciousness whose subjective power might itself boot the mind out of its most mirthless ruts.
By sweeping such sublimities under the rug of toxic ‘side effects’, the researchers and their partners in industry want to sidestep the remarkable paradox that psychedelic substances present to brain-based reductionists: psychedelics are material molecules that frequently occasion experiences that look and feel, for all the world, like the sort of mystical or religious raptures whose unfolding cognitive content calls into question strict materialism. In other words, reductionist researchers of powerful psychedelic effects must still squirm before God — or at least before the experiential states that recall the ecstatic reports of traditional religious mystics, or of shamans making pacts with non-human entities, or of meditators seeing into the knitted web of self and world.
This ‘return of the religious repressed’ is now part of the scientific literature as well. In a widely reported 2006 study at Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths showed that when psilocybin (found in ‘magic mushrooms’) was given to spiritually minded volunteers in a supportive institutional environment, it reliably ‘occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.’ Griffiths had designed a rigorous double-blind study, and his results not only influenced the future course of psychedelic research but also helped to establish the terms that have marked public discussions about the drug.
Even so, for psychedelic insiders, Griffiths’s results were still No Shit, Sherlock. In essence, Griffiths and his team had simply restaged one of the most famous psychedelic studies of the 1960s: the Good Friday (or Marsh Chapel) experiment. Led by a Harvard graduate student of theology named Walter Pahnke, with support from Timothy Leary, the Good Friday experiment showed that, over and against a placebo, psilocybin gave the bulk of divinity postgraduates something like a powerful religious opening.
But how far does this ‘something like’ get us? Although the follow-ups that Griffiths performed seemed to support the spiritually efficacious power of psychedelics over time, does his study really tell us anything about the sacred? After all, while his volunteers were unfamiliar with tripping, all of them already possessed a religious or spiritual world-view. It was Leary’s old message of set and setting: drugs might simply reflect and amplify beliefs and patterns of meaning already woven into the user’s intentional ‘set’ and environmental ‘setting’. The drug itself, in such a view, has no privileged access to sacred reality. Rather, like a feedback loop, it merely catalyses stories and perceptions already ‘programmed’ in the human mind or its surrounding cultural environment.
And even if psychedelic rapture and mystical experience ‘on the natch’ are somehow the same (which seems unlikely), that still does not sidestep the reductive arguments offered by some neuroscientists. A rising tide of ‘neuro-theologians’ are offering up ever more technically robust — if sometimes philosophically and culturally naive — accounts of religious experiences. For them, anomalous experiences such as waking visions, timelessness and a sense of divine presence might be nothing more than the mislabelling of meaningless brain events. Even if these accounts prove far too simplistic in the end, they do remind us that, once the brain is in question, all experiences are mediated.
Perhaps there is another way of thinking about all this, and perhaps this other way embraces a widened sense of mediation rather than a privileged sense of mystical insight. Perhaps what we see in extraordinary psychedelic experience is the temporary establishment of a circuit in which a variety of worlds link up and begin to resonate, so that neurons, cultural narratives, the lords of the forest, the serpent twists of DNA and the make-believe of ‘something like’ are inextricably woven together in a multidimensional matrix that reverberates in a rainbow display as sacred as it is profane.
part2
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=208777.0;topicseen
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:D
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Very interesting read.
+1 8)
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just so you know DP; Khat has recently been classified a Class C drug in the UK
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Serious??
Mr Brown must be on pcp!! :o
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Serious??
Mr Brown must be on pcp!! :o
also Mr brown (if it is indeed Gordon your referring too) is no longer PM, he was ransacked in the elections a few years ago in a historically significant coalition where the conservatives and liberals joined forced to run the government together.
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excuse me... i meant that noob Cameron obviously.....must have been a little on the high side last time ;)