Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index
 The RulesThe Rules FAQFAQ
   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   CalendarCalendar   SearchSearch 
Log inLog in RegisterRegister
 
More states legalize Pot 8) when for Oz?

Users browsing this topic:0 Registered, 0 Hidden and 0 Guests
Registered Users: None

Post new topic   Reply to topic    Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index -> Victoria Park Tavern
 
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 13, 14, 15 ... 31, 32, 33  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  

When will it be legal here?
Within 2 years
20%
 20%  [ 3 ]
2-5 years
13%
 13%  [ 2 ]
6-10 years
6%
 6%  [ 1 ]
11-20 years
26%
 26%  [ 4 ]
It'll never happen
33%
 33%  [ 5 ]
Total Votes : 15

Author Message
Skids Cancer

Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.


Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175

PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2018 12:02 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

I tried LSD a couple of times back in the 80's. Not my scene at all!

Hallucinations, panic attacks and the length of time you're under its influence... I found it quite terrifying to be honest.

_________________
Don't count the days, make the days count.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2018 10:15 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

^^^
Aren't hallucinations the whole point? And isn't the dose what determines length of time? (Maybe you took too much.) Panic attacks, admittedly, are no good. (I guess advocates would say you needed a guide or two for that.)
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun May 27, 2018 1:30 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

Mugwump wrote:
...
Mugwump wrote:
...
Many years ago I took dope three times. Once was blissful, one neutral, and the third brought me very close to psychosis, ...
...

... The significant difference on the three occasions was my mood and predisposition. The last, “psychotic” time, I was not in a good mood when I took it. I have heard it said that the predisposition can have a significant effect on the experience.
...


I was reminded of the above (although it refers to a different drug) when I read the following (from the same Pollan article):

"After both conducting and participating in a great many mescaline and LSD sessions — at the time it was routine for scientists to test drugs on themselves — the researchers observed how variable the experience could be, depending on circumstance and mind-set. In those days, no one knew how best to administer these strange new compounds; the need for a guide wasn’t immediately apparent. Some early scientists in white coats bearing clipboards dosed volunteers in a hospital room with white walls and fluorescent lights. Very often, the volunteers would then be left alone. Researchers didn’t yet understand that the psychedelic experience is not foreordained by the chemical but rather is “constructed” in the mind from an unpredictable mix of expectation, memory, the contents of the unconscious and a variety of environmental factors.

... Shamans have known for thousands of years that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a hallucinogenic plant like ayahuasca or peyote can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, cues, special objects or music. They understand intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness can be harnessed as an important resource for healing — for breaking destructive patterns of thought and proposing new perspective in their place."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/15/magazine/health-issue-my-adventures-with-hallucinogenic-drugs-medicine.html
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2018 11:07 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

Some quotes from the earlier article:
[ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment ]


"Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. ... Psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal cancer patients, and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists and scientists (to study creativity) and divinity students (to study spirituality). The results reported were frequently positive. But many of the studies were, by modern standards, poorly designed and seldom well controlled, if at all. When there were controls, it was difficult to blind the researchers—that is, hide from them which volunteers had taken the actual drug. (This remains a problem.)"
...


"The effects of psilocybin resemble those of LSD, but, as one researcher explained, “it carries none of the political and cultural baggage of those three letters.” LSD is also stronger and longer-lasting in its effects, and is considered more likely to produce adverse reactions. Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion."
...


"The questionnaire measures feelings of unity, sacredness, ineffability, peace and joy, as well as the impression of having transcended space and time and the “noetic sense” that the experience has disclosed some objective truth about reality. A “complete” mystical experience is one that exhibits all six characteristics. Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion such a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does.

"A follow-up study by Katherine MacLean, a psychologist in Griffiths’s lab, found that the psilocybin experience also had a positive and lasting effect on the personality of most participants. This is a striking result, since the conventional wisdom in psychology holds that personality is usually fixed by age thirty and thereafter is unlikely to substantially change."
...


"The recreational use of psychedelics is famously associated with instances of psychosis, flashback, and suicide."
...


"Several of the volunteers I interviewed reported feeling intense fear and anxiety before giving themselves up to the experience, as the guides encourage them to do."
...


"This is the “noetic” quality that students of mysticism often describe: the unmistakable sense that whatever has been learned or witnessed has the authority and the durability of objective truth. “You don’t get that on other drugs,” as Roland Griffiths points out; after the fact, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the inauthenticity of the drug experience."
...


" “The brain is a hierarchical system,” Carhart-Harris said. “The highest-level parts”—such as the default-mode network—“have an inhibitory influence on the lower-level parts, like emotion and memory.” He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the default-mode network dropped off precipitously under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may help to explain the loss of the sense of self that volunteers reported."
...


"Carhart-Harris has cited Huxley’s metaphor in some of his papers, likening the default-mode network to the reducing valve, but he does not agree that everything that comes through the opened doors of perception is necessarily real. The psychedelic experience, he suggests, can yield a lot of “fool’s gold.” "
...


"The sovereign ego can become a despot. This is perhaps most evident in depression, when the self turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. In “The Entropic Brain,” a paper published last year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Carhart-Harris cites research indicating that this debilitating state, sometimes called “heavy self-consciousness,” may be the result of a “hyperactive” default-mode network. ...

"Carhart-Harris believes that people suffering from other mental disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thinking, such as addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, could benefit from psychedelics, which “disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior.” In his view, all these disorders are, in a sense, ailments of the ego. He also thinks that this disruption could promote more creative thinking. It may be that some brains could benefit from a little less order."
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2018 11:45 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

^ all very good, but it ignores the critical point : mind altering drugs alter the mind. They disorder the human brain, which has evolved to function as it does in order to make society (our default mode as intellectually higher social apes) work. Our intellectual and moral senses are too precious to be fooled about with on any scale (we already do this with alcohol, to our immense and evident cost, but at least its mental effects in mild doses are negligible).

As a limited experiment to better understand the effect on brain chemistry of hallucinogenic drugs, this type of study may be defended. But of course it is clearly more than this : as with most such “experiments”, this appears to be a subterfuge to advance the insane notion that human moral senses and powers are “enhanced” by drugs. That idea, widely popularized by gullible, earnest advocates and pop musicians since the 1960s, is perhaps the most powerful acid (ahem) to have ever eaten away the safety and strength of an advanced society. We see its effects everywhere today.

_________________
Two more flags before I die!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jun 01, 2018 11:21 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

Certainly, potential use seems much more justifiable in a therapeutic context (than for recreational purposes), i.e. when there is a desperate need that may justify certain risks, even large ones.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 6:33 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

Ending America's War on Drugs Would Finally Unleash the Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelics

http://time.com/5295544/war-on-drugs-ptsd-mdma-rick-doblin/

Rick Doblin:

"Like many ex-servicemen and women experiencing mental health issues, Lubecky went to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA). But none of the treatments offered there worked for him. The only two drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for PTSD, Zoloft and Paxil, were more effective in women than in men, and didn’t work for combat-related PTSD. Out of desperation, he volunteered as a subject in an experimental study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD in veterans, firefighters and police officers.

"The study was sponsored by the non-profit research and educational organization I founded, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and funded entirely by private donations. Because of the stigma associated with illegal drugs—MDMA is what the party drug, ecstasy contains, though the pills are often impure—MAPS was unable to get grants from the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration or the National Institute of Mental Health, despite there being over 868,000 veterans with PTSD receiving monthly disability payments from the VA at an estimated cost of $17 billion per year.

"The treatment being tested by the study involved three day-long administrations of MDMA about a month apart, and 12 sessions of psychotherapy within a three-and-a-half-month process.
...

"On May 1, The Lancet Psychiatry published a scientific paper about the study Lubecky volunteered for; it reported that two-thirds of the 26 veterans, firefighters and police officers treated no longer qualified for a diagnosis of PTSD one month after their second MDMA session, with their reduction of PTSD symptoms lasting over time."
...

"The organization is also sponsoring research into the use of four different kinds of smoked cannabis (THC, CBD, THC/CBD combination and a placebo) in 76 veterans with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. ... Unlike MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, marijuana for PTSD is usually self-administered on a daily basis to control symptoms, and is used for months or years, with symptoms often returning after cessation of use. Marijuana is reported by many veterans to be helpful for PTSD, but MAPS’ study is the first double-blind, placebo-controlled study ever conducted.
...

"It’s long past time for the mainstreaming of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana, and for replacing prohibition and criminalization with public health approaches to reducing drug abuse. In a post-prohibition world, we’ll finally recognize that."
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 12:37 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

^ And here is the MAPS press release:

https://www.maps.org/news/media/7158-press-release-mdma-assisted-psychotherapy-shows-promise-for-veterans-with-chronic,-treatment-resistant-ptsd

Key quotes:

"[T]he double-blind, placebo-controlled, Phase 2 pilot study in 26 participants found that one month after their second day-long experimental session, 68% in the full-dose MDMA group did not qualify for a diagnosis of PTSD, compared to 29% in the low-dose MDMA (active placebo) control group. The course of double-blind treatment included 13.5 hours of non-drug psychotherapy and 16 hours (two day-long experimental sessions) of either full-dose or low-dose MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. On average, the positive results were sustained one year later."
...


"Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD will begin in the summer of 2018, and will enroll 200-300 participants across 16 sites in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. If the Phase 3 trials demonstrate significant efficacy and an acceptable safety profile, FDA approval is expected by 2021."
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 7:51 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

Ecstasy as a Remedy for PTSD? You Probably Have Some Questions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/us/ecstasy-molly-ptsd-mdma.html
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto

PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 9:20 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

K, with due respect, so what?

so some illicit drugs can have beneficial effects to specific cases when administered under controlled supervision. That doesn't mean these drugs should be generally available to all or can't do serious have when used in uncontrolled situations

_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Sat Jun 02, 2018 11:14 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
K, with due respect, so what?

so some illicit drugs can have beneficial effects to specific cases when administered under controlled supervision. That doesn't mean these drugs should be generally available to all or can't do serious have when used in uncontrolled situations


Quite. The real agenda here is to normalise these drugs so that they become readily available to any cerebronaut who wants to wander into the doctor’s surgery claiming to have back pain. Since Doctors have no incentive to disappoint their customers, it’ll be a backdrop to widespread use.

If they are to be legalized in this way, then let it be by synthesis of the required chemicals in a pill, taken under close supervision, rather as we do today with various morphines.

There are many days when I reckon our culture is so decadent that we might as well sped the process by making it easy for the whole population to pervert cognition, empathy and productivity, but while there is a flicker of hope and reason, let’s hope, and appeal to reason.

_________________
Two more flags before I die!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2018 4:35 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
K, with due respect, so what?

so some illicit drugs can have beneficial effects to specific cases when administered under controlled supervision. That doesn't mean these drugs should be generally available to all or can't do serious have when used in uncontrolled situations


Stui, that is a weird comment. I post things that I think are interesting and relevant (having basically broadened the discussion from pot to all drugs). I already said on this page that I think the risk-reward balance is a lot different for medical purposes, but I actually never even said I would vote for that in a hypothetical referendum. I don't expect everyone to read every single post in a thread, but anyone who did read past posts may have formed the impression that I am drug-phobic, while you seem to have jumped wildly to the opposite conclusion.


Last edited by K on Sun Jun 03, 2018 4:40 am; edited 1 time in total
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2018 4:36 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

Can you rephrase the question please?
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website  
stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto

PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2018 3:02 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

K wrote:
stui magpie wrote:
K, with due respect, so what?

so some illicit drugs can have beneficial effects to specific cases when administered under controlled supervision. That doesn't mean these drugs should be generally available to all or can't do serious have when used in uncontrolled situations


Stui, that is a weird comment. I post things that I think are interesting and relevant (having basically broadened the discussion from pot to all drugs). I already said on this page that I think the risk-reward balance is a lot different for medical purposes, but I actually never even said I would vote for that in a hypothetical referendum. I don't expect everyone to read every single post in a thread, but anyone who did read past posts may have formed the impression that I am drug-phobic, while you seem to have jumped wildly to the opposite conclusion.


I haven't actually jumped to any conclusion other than your sudden spate of articles were all about the potential medicinal benefits of some illicit drugs. Considering the topic of the thread is about legalising drugs or not, I simply commented. Did you have another point that I missed in posting those or they were just random things vaguely related to the topic and you thought you'd share them?

_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2018 8:20 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:

Did you have another point that I missed in posting those or they were just random things vaguely related to the topic and you thought you'd share them?

My recent posts were on psychedelics, which are illegal. In finer resolution, there are two topics: Michael Pollan's book (released May 15) and the results of a Phase 2 MDMA study in Lancet (published May 1).

On the book:
The NY Times had an excerpt on May 15, which I noted on May 17, with links to a review & an earlier article, which I noted shortly after.
On the study:
Time had an article on May 30, which I noted on June 2, with other articles on the same.

There's a pattern there. Media put out articles, I see them shortly after, and I comment (or not). It's not particularly surprising to me that those two events had wide media coverage. I don't have control over what the study results were, and actually the study authors would claim the same for themselves. Most people would describe those articles as "news", but, since I neither own those media nor write for them, I am perfectly happy for you to call them "random things" if that's what you prefer.

I can ponder whether and under what circumstances these drugs should be legal if you wish. Perhaps that will be influenced by the results of the yet-to-come Stage 3 trial.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index -> Victoria Park Tavern All times are GMT + 11 Hours

Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 13, 14, 15 ... 31, 32, 33  Next
Page 14 of 33   

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum



Privacy Policy

Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group