Mod+ Psychedelics & other mind altering substances -> Culture, Theology and Therapy [Resources]

Anti-Addiction Drug 18-MC Begins Human Trials

Savant HWP, Inc., a privately-owned pharmaceutical development company in San Carlos, Calif., announced on September 23 that they had begun human safety trials on 18-MC (18-methoxycoronaridine) as a treatment for many forms of addiction and compulsive behavior.

The trials, which were conducted by Savant’s South American partner, focused on single doses of 18-MC that were administered as part of a double blind, placebo-controlled study.
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As always, consult a site like Neurosoup on safe use.

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Aya: Awakenings Austin, TX premiere Feb 2, 2014

An in-depth discussion about DMT and ayahuasca culture with writer-producer of the film Rak Razam, writer director of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Mitch Schultz, and visionary artist-musician Michael Garfield. Are entheogens a ‘silver bullet’ or more like a hyperspatial ‘app’ that defrags your hard drive? Does it help to have others reports and maps of the hyperspatial landscape to draw upon? Is ayahuasca grooming a new generation of healers to help rebalance the world? Can shamanic media help us make sense of the cosmos and our relationship with nature? How do we anchor multi-dimensional experiences? Do we need to evolve a hyperspatial language? Is there an interspecies frequency that all creatures with dimethyltryptamine share? Are ayahuasca and DMT planetary hormones?
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See Neurosoup.com for discussions on safe use.

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An LSD Trip Helped Me Quit Smoking

I realized that smoking now filled me with self-hatred, and that realization came during a weekend binge on LSD.
It's always fun, LSD. It may have become slightly out of fashion since the 1960s, but I have always regarded it as a milder version of taking mushrooms—albeit a longer-lasting trip. The fear and panic surrounding it always seemed excessive to me, but of course everyone who takes it has a different experience.

As I was gazing up at the stars during that trippy night in spring, my best friend and I were talking about life and the three smokers' truths I mentioned above. I realized I had carried them with me for a while now, without ever making a disciplined decision.

I can’t describe it in any other way than feeling as if a switch were flipped inside me. Suddenly, I realized how ridiculous smoking was—why was I doing something that made me feel miserable? Of course I was completely spaced out, but the psychedelics helped me zoom out and break through my own frozen ideas about not being able to quit. I didn’t think, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I really need to quit soon. The only thought I had was: I don’t want to do this anymore.

"Sounds like a familiar story," says clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen. Together with his wife Teri S. Krebs, Johansen has been conducting research into psychedelics and alcohol addiction as part of a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. "We've heard of addictions to alcohol, heroin, and tobacco that were broken with help from psychedelics. The reason seems to be that substances like LSD can provide a moment of clarity that can help you see your existence as a whole and get a long-term perspective into certain personal issues.”
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The Brutal Ongoing Cost of the War on Drugs—and Your Role in It

It’s fairly agreed upon these days that the war on drugs has caused more problems than it’s solved, and that controlled legalization along with treatment over incarceration would make a better solution. Countless lives have been lost and billions in taxpayer revenue has been wasted as a result of both fighting and trafficking illegal drugs. But how complicit is the average user in the violence and economic waste?

In May, the London School of Economics published a report titled “Ending the War on Drugs.” The authors of the report, which included five Nobel prize-winning economists, maintained that the global war on drugs has been a catastrophic failure that requires world leaders to rethink their approach to drug laws. The report cites mass drug-related incarcerations in the U.S., corruption and violence plaguing developing countries and Russia’s HIV epidemic as glaring factors that the UN’s “repressive, one-size-fits-all approach” to combatig drugs has failed in its intended goal, and has instead created a $300 billion black market. The solution? “Rigorously monitored” experiments with legalization and an emphasis on public health that would minimize the impact of the illegal drug trade.

It’s not only economists who question current drug policies: in April, a national survey by the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Americans say that policy should focus on providing treatment rather than incarceration. The same survey found that 54% of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana. And in early October, The Guardian published the results of a survey that found 84% of Britons want to see an end to the war on drugs, with 27% in favor of decriminalization.

However, the ugly truth is that until governments find a workable solution to the drug problem, you can probably bet that your drugs followed a long trail of corruption, bribery and bloodshed to get up your nose. For starters, death toll estimates for the Mexican drug war range from 60,000 to 160,000 since 2006. Most progressives shit bricks to hear those kinds of figures from Big Pharma or Big Tobacco, and would arrange the protests and boycotts to prove it. But how often is a blind eye turned to the realities of drug production and trafficking–the death tolls, the government corruption, the wasted resources–in favor of getting high?

What follows herein is an overview of the socioeconomic costs of some of the most popular and widely used recreational drugs.
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Sciborg_S_Patel said:
The Brutal Ongoing Cost of the War on Drugs—and Your Role in It
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Long have I believed that addictive drugs were made illegal to provide criminals with an income, which distributed the impact of crime across society particularly the poor, and the middle class, rather than criminals concentrating their activities on the rich and powerful. In return for being protected from low level acquisitive crime, the middle class would vote to curtail their own liberties, and the poor and low level criminals would feed off themselves.

The rich and powerful in one stroke had found a way to direct criminal activity away from themselves, control the criminal element, drug the poor, and get the middle classes to pay for and accept the controls on their civil liberties.

So although I'm all for drugs being provided for free to those who are addicted, where do the criminal element get their income from? Is society even prepared for the cost and fall out of lancing this boil? It has become so big and infected that if the system is burst, the effects will be dramatic.
 
From brain diseases to pets, start-ups develop new cannabis cures

KannaLife Sciences, based in West Hills, New York, is hoping to tackle traumatic brain injuries with CBD-focused applications.

The company signed a license with the National Institutes of Health in August to develop treatments, which in turn will seek Food and Drug Administration approval in the next three to five years.

KannaLife hopes its products will help treat degenerative brain diseases for patients—including professional athletes.
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Colorado Legalization Report Card: No Impact on Crime or Teen Use; $84 Million in Taxes.

'Before Colorado voted in 2012 to become the first state in history to legalize cannabis, law enforcement officials and politicians promised the worst:
  • Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said the number of children using drugs would increase.
  • Former attorney general Edwin Meese and Charles Stimson argued violent crime would surge.
  • Kevin Sabet, a former senior White House drug policy adviser, warned of high addiction rates, spikes in traffic accidents, and reductions in IQ.
  • Former DEA director John Walters claimed “what we [see] in Colorado has the markings of a drug use epidemic.”
  • And Jack Healy and Josh Voorhees’ said marijuana is the drug most often linked to crime.
They were wrong.


Miron reviewed fifteen years worth of public health and safety data spanning the rise and explosion of medical cannabis in Colorado by 2010, followed by its 2012 legalization. He found that “the most important outcome of marijuana policy is marijuana use.”

Among high school students, ‘the overall trend is downward and not materially affected by the changes in marijuana policy. … These results provide little indication that marijuana or other substance use changed in Colorado after commercialization of medical marijuana in 2009.'
 
Magic Mushrooms Create a Hyperconnected Brain

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is best known for triggering vivid hallucinations. It can make colors seem oversaturated and dissolve the boundaries between objects.

But the drug also seems to have more long-lasting effects. Many people report intensely spiritual experiences while taking the drug, and some studies even suggest that one transcendent trip can alter people's personalities on a long-term basis, making those individuals more open to new experiences and more appreciative of art, curiosity and emotion.

People who experiment with psilocybin "report it as one of the most profound experiences they've had in their lives, even comparing it to the birth of their children," Expert told Live Science.
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Horizons 2014: Graham Hancock "Psychedelics and Civilisation, Light and Darkness"

"Graham Hancock investigates the possibility that by demonising and criminalising the use of psychedelics, rather than seeking out ways to harness their power for altering consciousness in safe and nurturing spaces, our society may have set itself on a profoundly negative path — a path that might even deny us the next step in our own evolution as a species."
 
Voters Across USA Accelerate Unprecedented Momentum to Legalize Marijuana, End Drug War

“This Election Day was an extraordinary one for the marijuana and criminal justice reform movements,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Alaska and Oregon proved that Colorado and Washington were no flukes. Washington, D.C. voters sent a powerful message to Congress that federal marijuana prohibition has no place in the nation’s capital. Voters in Florida and Guam demonstrated that medical marijuana could win big even in fairly conservative jurisdictions. And California and New Jersey revealed an electorate eager to reduce prison populations and the power of the prison industrial complex.”

“These victories are even more notable for having happened in a year when Democrats were trounced at the polls,” added Nadelmann. “Reform of marijuana and criminal justice policies is no longer just a liberal cause but a conservative and bipartisan one as well. On these issues at least, the nation is at last coming to its senses.”

This November’s successes will boost efforts already underway in states such as California, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada and Arizona to end marijuana prohibition in 2016.

There were a wider spectrum of drug policy reforms on the ballot this November than ever before in American history, on everything from sentencing and bail reform to marijuana legalization, far-reaching decriminalization and medical marijuana.
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As always, check out sites like Neurosoup and How to Use Psychedelics for safe use.

A (Psychedelic) Trip With Dad

“Dad: I’m on mushrooms,” I said.

“Oh!” He sounded delighted. I heard him shoo away his colleagues. When he came back on the line his first question was, “How do you feel?”

Amazing, I said. “Good! What do you see?” I told him we were in a park. “Vondelpark!” he exclaimed. “Very beautiful.”

“And the trees….” The trees had faces. Trees didn’t normally have faces. “They’re people.” I felt like I’d untapped a secret.

“Yes! Nature is alive, isn’t it?”

This essentially blew my mind to breadcrumbs. I remember muttering, “Whoa,” and hearing my dad’s idiosyncratic “Ha-ho!” laugh. He was 5,550 miles away, but he felt close enough that I could’ve hugged him. “Listen to the universe, Steph,” he said. “Pay attention.” The line went dead. The minutes were gone.
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As always, check out sites like Neurosoup and How to Use Psychedelics for safe use.

Three Pillars of a Successful Psychedelic Experience (That Just Might Save Your Life)

Over the last few years as research and public opinion championing the benefits of plant medicines has proliferated, an equally disturbing trend has been developing. Not only in the news, but quietly within the community in stories that never reach the public. This disturbing trend is increasing as the supply of good practitioners is being overwhelmed by sheer demand. As thrilled as I am hearing the reports of positive transformation from the sacred plants, I am far more devastated when harm occurs that easily could have been prevented.

Below are true accounts of adherence and violation of three standards that should act as living, breathing mandates to be molded by the continued expansion of consciousness. With good practice, plant medicines can play a key role in the healing of collective suffering on the planet. With malpractice, fuel will be added to the Draconian fire that keeps them from serving their purpose to humanity.
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Marijuana Drastically Shrinks Aggressive Form Of Brain Cancer: Study

Over the past few years, research has revealed that marijuana can both destroy certain cancer cells and reduce the growth of others. Now, a new study in mice has found that when combined with radiation treatment, cannabis can effectively shrink one of the most aggressive types of brain tumors.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George's University of London outlined the "dramatic reductions" they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group.
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DMT and the Bible: An Interview with Rick Strassman

Jeff: Rick, can you tell us a bit about why you wrote this book? Your work, of course, is well known and celebrated through your first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. But this book seems like a ‘return to roots,’ as it were. Can you speak in particular to that?

Rick: I was left with a handful of difficult questions at the end of my DMT research in 1995. And I felt I had only partially worked them through in the process of writing DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2000. It seemed to me that all of these questions would resolve themselves if I could only find the proper model or models that could help me understand the DMT effect. By the expression “the DMT effect,” I mean both the fact of DMT’s existence as well as its effects. What is the nature of the world that DMT reveals? How does it do it? Why does DMT exist in our bodies? What is the value of entering into the DMT state; that is, are we or the world any better off for having visited it?
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As always, check out sites like Neurosoup and How to Use Psychedelics for safe use.

How Underground Therapists And Scientists Keep Psychedelic Medicine Alive Despite Gov’t Ban

In 1960, a psychiatrist named Sydney Cohen surveyed the results of 44 physicians who had administered 25,000 doses of LSD or mescaline to 5,000 subjects under widely varying conditions. Cohen found “no instance of serious or prolonged physical side effects” in either those 25,000 sessions or in the wider literature on psychedelic drug studies. Adverse psychological reactions, he found, were rare, and mostly related to pre-existing mental illnesses.

But the powerful drug that was proving surprisingly safe to use in the clinic was creating a panic when used on the streets. The mushrooming popular abuse of psychedelics in the late ’60s, particularly by unscreened young people taking it in uncontrolled environments, struck such a sensitive cultural and political nerve that it left the drugs, and the scientists who worked with them, severely stigmatized for more than a generation.

“It was if psychedelic drugs had become undiscovered,” one researcher recalled.

Ironically, the criminalization of the possession of psychedelic drugs in 1970 and the attendant passion of the authorities’ anti-drug crusade did little to slow the spread of recreational abuse, but effectively shut all research into possible beneficial uses down cold.

In the three decades that followed, an underground network of therapists continued to use the now illegal compounds in treatment of psychological maladies.
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