Posts tagged drugs
- The difference between a Christian and a Hippy?
- One abstains from the Tree of Knowledge,
- and the other consumes too much of it.
- A psychonaut tastes before he imbibes.
- Knowledge is never simply given.
Jacob Sullum: In Defense of Drug Use
Religion, culture, politics. This is the software we boot up with every morning. A program of bias, opinion and geography. Scripts and subroutines. A linear recursive map. A feed back loop. Boot up, shut down, boot up, shut down.
The hacker has shown us how to break open software.
The psychonaut will show us how to break open the mind.
The trick isn’t to be less like machines… but more like machines. Constantly evolving, changing and connecting. Networked, open-sourced and interfaced.
The Facts About DMT
There is ALOT of misinformation going around the net regarding psychedelics, specifically DMT.
Lets take a moment and not be so quick to assume that the psychedelic experience is linked to anything external or ‘outside’ of our own cognition. When we try to mix in mystical new agey, religious speculation without any regard for empirical evidence we only serve to transform a powerful medicine into a powerful poison.
The facts from Dr. Rick Strassman -
“We don’t know whether DMT is made in the pineal. I muster a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting a reason to look long and hard at the pineal, but we do not yet know. There are data suggesting urinary DMT rises in psychotic patients when their psychosis is worse. However, we don’t know whether DMT rises during dreams, meditation, near-death, death, birth or any other endogenous altered state. To the extent those states resemble those brought on by giving DMT, it certainly makes one wonder if endogenous DMT might be involved, and if it were, it would explain a lot. But we don’t know yet. Even if the pineal weren’t involved, that would have little overall effect on my theories regarding a role for DMT in endogenous altered states, because we do know that the gene involved in DMT synthesis is present in many organs, particularly lung. If the pineal made DMT, it would tie up a lot of loose ends regarding this enigmatic little organ. But people seem to live pretty normals lives without a pineal gland; for example, when it has had to be removed because of a tumor.
“In both these regards—the pineal-DMT connection, and endogenous DMT dynamics—we ought to know a lot more within the next several years due to the efforts of a research group being led by Steven Barker at Louisiana State University. He, with his grad student Ethan McIlhenny, are developing a new super-assay for DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, and metabolites. This assay will be capable of detecting those compounds much more sensitively than previous generations of assays. They’re looking at endogenous levels in awake sober normals, to assess baseline values of these compounds. We should have some data from those samples within a year. They also will be looking at pineal tissue. Once we have some baseline data in normal humans in normal waking consciousness, comparisons can be made between those levels and levels in endogenous altered states, like dreams, near-death, and so on.”
Sorry, this is not a fact. Dr. Rick Strassman, author of ‘The Spirit Molecule’, only theorizes that this might be what is happening.
Although DMT is found in our bodies (certain fluids), there is no evidence available that the pineal gland creates DMT or causes near-death experiences.
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