CJ Trowbridge

2020-06-11

Drugs and Society

Reading Response – Section 4

• Illegal drugs and how they got that way – hallucinogens
  • All currently illegal drugs were recently legal
  • All cultures have parties, usually including the use of drugs
  • Ecstasy fills an unmet need for connection, empathy, connectedness, and openness between people in a hostile culture, especially for young people
  • Young people throughout history have always used drugs to escape their hostile cultures
  • Drugs unite generations
  • Ecstasy is not chemically addictive
  • The pentagon tried and failed to find a way to ecstasy it as a weapon
  • Shulgin showed psychotherapists how to use ecstasy for therapy
  • Despite current medical use, the DEA overruled the judge who was ruling on the drug’s status and banned any further research into its safety and lack of addiction potential.
  • “One man’s schizophrenia is another man’s enlightenment.”
  • Early on in prohibition, possession of a single dose of LSD could be punished with a twenty-year prison sentence.
  • Leary: Turn on, tune in, drop out.
    • Psychedelics quickly became a threat to the authoritarian establishment
    • Ban leads to a whole series of bans on any drugs that are directly a threat to the authoritarian establishment, or associated with any ethnic or racial group outside of white nationalism and systemic racism in America.
  • The government came to see psychedelics as a causal factor behind the civil rights movement and other activist movements, and therefore took stands against psychedelics in order to prevent future social progress.
  • “Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be alert to opportunities to have them arrested by local authorities on drug charges.” -J Edgar Hoover
  • Nixon runs on widespread prohibition of drugs
  • The Controlled Substances Act gave the president unlimited power to declare drugs illegal for specific people under specific circumstances and mass incarcerate them.
    • Nixon used it to mass incarcerate social dissidents during the Vietnam War.
    • No longer does congress have a role in drug police
  • Michael Pollan on What It’s Like to Trip on Mushrooms
    • Stamets says that like many psilocybin species, “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.”
    • Why in the world would a fungus go to the trouble of producing a chemical compound that has such a radical effect on the minds of the animals that eat it? What, if anything, did this peculiar chemical do for the mushroom?
      • One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this phenomenon, as Stamets and Terence McKenna have done: Both suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying to tell us something important by way of psilocybin. But this strikes me as more of a poetic conceit than a scientific theory.
    • many plant toxins don’t directly kill pests, but often act as psychostimulants as well as poisons, which is why we use many of them as drugs to alter consciousness
      • Think of an inebriated insect behaving in a way that attracts the attention of a hungry bird
    • Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic scientists—and I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of subjects, each acting on the other in the great dance that would come to be called coevolution.
      • “Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” They could see this dance of subjectivities because they cultivated the plant’s-eye view, the animal’s-eye view, the microbe’s-eye view, and the fungus’s-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation.
    • You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with my wife Judith.
      • However, after only about 20 minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,” none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore, she said, but now we were at least a mile from home. She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had flown out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect.
    • I went out and sat on the screened porch for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if the volume had been turned way up.
    • Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a screen.
    • I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normality was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.”
    • I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we’re too self-regarding to appreciate—had taken on the flesh of feeling and reality.
    • “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”
  • researchers turn to popular club drug to treat ptsd
    • Mdma releases dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin in the brain
    • In therapy, it helps patients open up about trauma
    • It was first used this way in therapy before finding adoption in clubs
    • Examples from therapy case studies
      • Use in treating PTSD
    • Studies have shown that mdma was efficacious for 82% of participants in ptsd trials
  • dancesafe
    • This website was broken when I tried to open it, but I am very familiar with dancesafe. They test drugs for people at parties, and in harm reduction more broadly. I work at a nonprofit in SF which throws big parties. This year we built an internal department which mirrors dancesafe and provides many of their services at our events, in partnership with Zendo and several other similar organizations
  • mind altering drug could offer life free of heroin
    • Several clinical trials have shown that low doses of ibogaine taken over the course of a few weeks can greatly reduce cravings for heroin and other drugs.
    • Ibogaine’s mind-altering effects mean that today, the US Drug Enforcement Agency defines it as having a high potential for abuse with no recognised medical use. It is classed as a schedule I drug, the most restrictive legal designation.
    • the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a US non-profit research organisation, decided to investigate whether there was any scientific validity to the reports.
      • Legal restrictions in the US severely limit funding for clinical trials of this kind, so the volunteers recruited – this is where I come in – were those who had sought treatment independently in Mexico, where there are fewer restrictions on ibogaine use.
    • With my withdrawal symptoms completely gone, I am perplexed by the state of clarity I am in while seeing the most profound stream of visual phenomena. I am also filled with a sense of awe at the potential for a life free of heroin. Emotional memories force me to deal with some of the deep subconscious guilt I have repressed for years
    • the results appear to show compelling preliminary evidence of ibogaine’s efficacy at a single dose
    • Of the 29 others who took part in the trial, none are now reported as having problematic drug use. Two years after that one dose of ibogaine, I abstain from all drugs.
  • the heady, thorny journey to decriminalize magic mushrooms
    • In recent years researchers have shown that psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD appear to treat a range of disorders, including depression and PTSD.
    • the FDA has granted MDMA breakthrough status in phase 3 trials, thus fast-tracking the approval process. Psilocybin itself is undergoing two separate clinical trials.
    • Oakland, California, city council voted unanimously to decriminalize a range of psychedelic plants, including mushrooms and cacti
    • Oregon is considering a measure in 2020 to allow access to “guided psilocybin services,” while lowering penalties for possession.
  • ayahuasca, a strong cup of tea
    • After arranging yoga mats and blankets on the floor, they each paid $150, listened to a Colombian shaman and his assistant welcome them in Spanish and English, signed a disclaimer, and accepted large plastic takeout-style containers for vomiting.
    • each got up to receive a cup of thick brownish liquid with a muddy herbal taste. It was ayahuasca (eye-uh-WAH-skuh) tea, a hallucinogenic brew from the Amazon that they hoped would open them to personal insights through optic and auditory hallucinations.
    • In a world increasingly dominated by screen time, not dream time, it is not surprising that many people, having binged on yoga and meditation for years, are turning to a more dramatic catalyst for inner growth. But those who swear by ayahuasca’s usefulness (many say it’s like having 10 years of therapy in a night) also caution that it has to be treated seriously, calling their experiences while under its influence “work” because, in addition to causing them to vomit and sometimes have diarrhea, it can be frightening and challenging to the psyche.
    • although two religious organizations in the United States are sanctioned to use it legally, the N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (or D.M.T.) in ayahuasca is a Schedule I controlled substance — considered to have no medical use and a high potential for abuse. It is in the same category as ecstasy and heroin.
    • a visit for ayahuasca tourists can become a nightmare, “and some don’t go home at all.” Inexpertly mixed brews or the use of another more dangerous plant, Toe, have contributed to bad reactions, as well as poor screening for medical issues. There have been cases of sexual molestation, too.