> The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students.<p>I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.
The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.<p>The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. We can't tell "in your case you should take this dose, the risks are quantified and acceptable, and this is what we should do if things go wrong". And it is not for the lack of trying.<p>People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent.<p>The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
We have pretty strong indications of when and why things go wrong. Openness vs rigid thinking are an axis that are very strong correlative factors. A lot more nuance but there is a lot we do know about risk factors so it isn’t a complete question mark.
> The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.<p>There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.<p>There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.<p>> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.<p>The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.<p>This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.<p>There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.<p>I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.<p>i can think of a way to find out :)<p>we'll have to take it in stages <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial</a>
The War on Drugs only serves to give law enforcement unlimited extra constitutional powers.<p>Even the bizarre murder of Central American fishermen is justified by someone somewhere having a dime bag or something.<p>Who needs trials , or evidence. Drugs are bad.<p>Government good.<p>Drugs bad.
i don't dispute that the "War on Drugs" was (is?) pretty much just a glorified jobs program for law enforcement but nevertheless some drugs <i>are</i> very bad. ironically enough alcohol, despite being the most readily available drug after caffeine, is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction.
It's thought that a lot of the geometric designs in Indigenous pottery and architecture are directly influenced by hallucinogenic plants like datura.<p>There's a <i>really</i> great YouTube channel called Desert Lore and he covers this topic in depth in this episode. It was really fascinating:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=j8gH0WnHRpeo1BJu" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=j8gH0WnHRpeo1BJu</a>
The top comment when I clicked it does not agree with the narrative:<p>@rkozakand 10 months ago<p>The so called "southwestern motif" is found wherever people weave. Our native rugs in the mountains of Ukraine use the exact same motif, only in different colors. It is a natural outgrowth of weaving techniques, which encourage triangles. We also have ancient pottery from what is called the Trypillian culture, which includes spirals and what you call 'zen tangle' motifs, which we call 'bezkonechnyk'. This pottery looks very similar to Southwest American pottery, even being executed in the same colors. I therefore doubt that they are as tied to specific plants as you think, although patterns repeat in nature, and maybe we have similar plants.
Given that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?
All you can really say is that negligence is corrosive to civilization, and maybe that drugs act as an amplifier of sorts for society's illnesses and qualities.
Yeah, like this zombie civilisation:
<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i2k7KQ5L5Jg" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i2k7KQ5L5Jg</a>
I am not sure if you can say it’s raising or falling by their posture
You can 100% say that European civilization was heavily, heavily influenced by the consumption of alcohol.
Yeah, it's really gross that coffee cups are left all over the place. But yeah, rise in caffeine consumption in place of ethanol is thought to have enabled and fueled the enlightenment, and been a major factor in the industrial revolution.
I love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire).<p>It’s amazingly coherent.
Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of <i>any</i> civilization?
Alcohol and fermentation have a much different role with food safety and preservation though; the inebriation is just a pleasant side effect for some (and a curse for others)
Beer may have lead to the domestication of cereal grains. This is not my theory, here's an article about it: <a href="https://nautil.us/beer-domesticated-man-234697" rel="nofollow">https://nautil.us/beer-domesticated-man-234697</a><p>Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.<p>Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.<p>There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
It's proposed in a Niven-Pournelle novel that grain domesticated humans: we gave it the largest premium territories, we carefully propogated the finest varieties, and we elevated it to a holy sacrament and a symbol of sacrifice, divinity, and unity.<p>An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.<p>Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
yes coffee is reason behind our current civilization
I can't quit it. When I do, after about 2 weeks I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee and sit in my open plan office,and hide my contempt for the absolute rank ineptitude of almost everyone else there. Load me up with the happy brown juice and I can pretty much make it through. I'm not convinced this is sustainable tbh.
> ... I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee ...<p>Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward - <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806</a><p>> Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.<p>PBS Eons Why Does Caffeine Exist? (5:13 for the bit on bees) - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI</a><p>> In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
Chesterton called it, quite fittingly, "The Puritan's opium".
And nicotine, don't forget that. Smokers built the modern world (and then developed lung cancer for their troubles).
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Alcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so.<p>I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
As the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
> Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.<p>Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.<p>That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
> That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.<p>I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
So for mold, low enough doses aren't poison? Can't you just say this about anything. If you have <i>poison</i> in a low enough dose it's not poison. So it means jsut about nothing to say alcohol isn't poisonous because you can have a small dose of it.
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.
Poison is a function of dosage. Water is a poison in a high enough dose.<p>What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?
Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs, and I'd say the indiscriminate action and lack of any particular affinity is what makes it a poison as opposed to a drug. It is also generally assumed that alcohol is not exactly in the same category as drugs. ("drugs or alcohol" etc.)
That's purely because it's usage is accepted nearly as a default, and drug in common usage is most often a pejorative term if it doesn't refer to a medicinal context.<p>Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
> Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs<p>That's primarily because it's most commonly diluted 90%. Spirits (or everclear) have much lower intake required.
But the "Active dose" to "lethal dose" ratio, aka "therapeutic index" of alcohol is pretty bad.
It’s much more of a poison to some of our primate relatives. iirc the genes that facilitate alcohol metabolism evolved in great apes millions of years before homo sapiens, and we inherited them; we’ve been boozing long before we were even human.
if alcohol can damage your short term memory,<p>Imagine what effect alcohol has
I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness. And it’s supported by the fact that psychedelics are also a network like the brain is. And when taking them, your brain experiences plasticity and that’s what allows profound changes.<p>A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?
There is no evidence of that. What you say is not supporting, but rather "conveniently makes sense".<p>I don't dispute the utility of psychedelics. But I have observed (and this is anecdotal) that the fanatic devotees of the drugs tend to engage in magical thinking around the power/history/whatever of psychedelic substances, no matter their intelligence or accomplishment, or rigorous critical thinking in other areas.
Reconciling the profound interiority of the experience with a mere external catalyst can be quite challenging.<p>Consider the question yourself next time you are in the throes of an exoerience and see how hard it is to maintain objectivity...
It’s a controversial theory, but it does exist[0]. As far as I know, there is no prevailing theory about where consciousness came from so speculating based on existing theories isn’t claiming it’s the truth.<p>Is it such a leap that fungi are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity so maybe our early ancestors took it to get the evolutionary process started.<p>0. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory</a>
One of the reasons this is such a long bow to draw is that, as you have absurdly reiterated and an earlier commenter posited, this is Lamarckism.
If it is true, where are all the sapient reindeer and other animals that have consumed these substances as a species for as long or longer than we have existed?
I'm aware of the theory. I'm not aware of any explanation offered by the theory as to how those who first experienced consciousness via psychedelics managed to pass consciousness on to their descendants. It doesn't make any sense. If you cut the tail off a rat, it doesn't have tailless children.
How are psychedelic chemical compounds “a network”? Are you referring specifically to fungal mycelium? Of course there a tons of non psychedelic mushrooms and tons of non-mushroom psychedelics
There are a number of problems with these statements, but a major one is that psychedelics are associated with <i>reduced</i> activity within the DMN (but increased activity between the DMN and other networks). It is not clear the direction in which this causality runs.
> psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness<p>This reads like recycled lamarckism.
Just for clarification. The default mode network is what activates when we are at rest or ”not focused on the outside world”. Ie daydreaming and mind wandering, even if it also can be active during detailed thinking.<p>It has also been shown to have negative correlation to networks in the brain associated with attention.
> I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness<p>I have never taken psychedelics but I believe myself to be conscious.
> psychedelics are also a network like the brain is<p>Sorry to be rude, but what the hell does that mean?
Fungi grow as a vast interconnected network and can communicate to other fungi. Similarly to how the neurons in the brain communicate.<p>In fact, when you take fungi, it tones down common neural pathways and allows new ones to form between new places.
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So if you take a lot of psychedelics you end up with a civilization that ritually murders 20,000 people every couple of months.<p>Just imagine the power you could wield as a shaman with drugs like DMT and psilocybin it would look like a literal magic