UKC

Call me an ageing hippie but wasn't this going too far; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14052153

In reply to Pekkie:

Oh Pekkie you ageing hippie ;0) . Interesting article that . . .

In reply to PekkieF

wasnt it leary who said 'LSD. guaranteed to cause mass paranoia and hysteria in people who havent used it'?

its interested that they report the whole operation as finding enough acid to make 6,000,000 trips.
woo hoo.
considering LSDs potency, that could effectively amount to about a milk bottles worth....its not like they were taking on the russian mafia shifting containers with hundreds of bribed customs officers.

and anyone can still get the stuff anyway. thanks to the narcotic squads they pushed the supply of powerful chemicals away from people they themselves describe as educated good old boys, and into the hands of organized crime. well done.

In reply to ice.solo:

fair points man , concisely put .

In reply to Pekkie: the final death knell for the 1960's counter culture, in 1977?

I do believe the breaking of a butterfly on a wheel was The Times headline relating to the arrest and prosecution of Mick Jagger.

In reply to boogie man:

yeah, ive long thought about this (i did my share of acid at university).

seems to me that the demise of acid coincides with the growth of 'harder' drugs.
now im not saying its a 100% correlation - but as its a demograph with a large overlap i bet its related.

from my own experience and those i know who 'got into' it or just tried it, LSD is an amazingly self-limiting thing: 'yeah, i got into it for about a year, then, kinda got over it'.
i dont think its particulary enlightening stuff - the experience is nothing like the way the media portrays it (flashbacks? thats just lame propaganda).
what it does show you tho is the amount of junk floating around in your head. all that shit you think whilst high isnt buddha-like - its just the mind equivalent of compost.

in fact i wonder if more people have been turned OFF drugs from acid than turned onto them...?

given the choice, id rather a world full of trippers than junkies and meth freaks. people tend not to hold up late night convenience stores or brawl outside night clubs for acid.

no, i aint advocating the stuff. i really dont care who puts what into their bloodstream, i find most of the personal drug use scene very boring and inert.
but i AM sick of hearing how theres a 'war on drugs' thats being won - when its so obviously after all this time not like that. we have more drug related violent crime, more large scale crime associated with drugs, more insidious drugs on the market, more cross-use of drugs.
the accepted methods for managing illegal drug use has systematicly failed, and that shits me.

whining, demonizing or celebrating the past history of drug laws enforcement is getting us nowhere.
time to try something new.

>>rant temporarily suspended<<

In reply to ice.solo:

well thought out views there ice solo . I have similar views & I was spiked with acid once when I was around 19/20 & didn't have a frigging clue what was happening for a few hours but I'm sure I would of enjoyed it if I was aware . I haven't gone near it since but may have a trip out one day .

All this propaganda & drug war jive is too tired , tedious & transparent for me too , exactly who do they think they are convincing any way ?

laters

In reply to Pekkie:

Do you think it was "going too far"? And if so, why?

In reply to boogie man:

Don't even think about it now, too much dangerous stuff around now, leading to more deaths.
Never done LSD, but lots of friends did, and some ended up in mental hospitals. One friends son was given something by his sister, and has spent over 20 years in Rampton or other places ever since, and only gets day release occasionally.

In reply to ice.solo:

I find it interesting that you say flashacks are lame propaganda, a friend of one of my brothers used to take acid, and found that he got flashbacks and would have things happening to him like thinking he was seeing a tiger walking down the street while on the way to watch a game of football. He went to see somebody to talk about it with, and he was told that flashbacks can be caused by deposits of acid which remain in places in the body like at the base of the spine, and every so often these can trigger a flashback, and that he had to rationalise it as just being a flashback, and that he wasn't seeing a tiger walking down the street.

He used to get flashbacks but no longer does, so I guess the deposits were used up in flashbacks or processed by his body somehow.

Cheers
Tim

In reply to ice.solo:

By the way I had a flashback once after taking magic mushrooms, i've just remembered, it briefly looked my speaker was moving across my bedroom carpet a little bit, though it only happened once.

In relation to the article, I think people can probably explore thier conciousness okay without taking drugs or lsd or mushrooms, if they want to.

Tim

In reply to ice.solo:

Btw#2 I've read of a correlation between LSD use in teenage years and mental breakdowns in later life, when people are in thier 40s or there-abouts.

As a drug I think it's probably nearer the harmfull end of the spectrum than the harmless end.

Tim

In reply to boogie man: Probably the same people that complain about how all drugs are evil while binge drinking every weekend.

In reply to Timmd:

fair enough - 'lame propaganda' was going a bit too far. what i intended to push against was the media focus on this aspect of psychedelic drug use, turning it into some kind of esoteric boogey man in that reefer madness kind of way.

its not untrue that reoccurences of the psychedelic state without recent ingestion of the substances occurs - but to say all acid users have or will have that happen is not realistic. its like saying all who drink alcohol will go down with cirrohsis (sp?).

acid users having issues later in life? i believe a percentage could be, but a percentage of all society will lose it mid-life.
i wonder too how many 40-somethings issues are due to other drugs as well - pot, booze, speed, valium etc?
it may be possible some avoid stresses that lead to breakdowns by exposure to acid.
high pressure vocations and bad marriages lead to all sorts of collapses and violence too - but are not banned.

again - im no advocate of the stuff (tho i am of the freedom to do so safely, well informed and under ones own free will), and 40 years of people using it has revealed very little of evolutionary use (tho not none at all).

i like your debate because its based in actual experience, please dont think im arguing.

In reply to Pekkie: looks like doing something to be seen to be doing something. In the overall scheme of things will have next to no effect. Decriminalise is the way foreward.

In reply to stonemaster:

I'm not convinced - we had legal highs here for some time and they've now been criminalised as they were having an effect on society - people we simply spending all their money and time on them and subsequently stealing to fund their habit and dropping out of employment. A significant number of people committed suicide after coming off methedrone (I think) due to depression.

In reply to Toerag: The Criminalisation took place rapidly after those two lads died reportedly on Mieow Mieow if my memory is correct, which it may not be. It later transpired they were not of Mefadrome [SIC] but were on methadone and alcohol and something else.

My personal view is that have a criminal world in charge of drugs etc is daft and dangerous. But then again other than a standardised quality of supply drugs like nicotine and alcohol available by regulated society through private commercial enterprises has not been effective in managing the fall out either.

As for the Mental Health Stuff, Some drugs increase your vulnerability to towards experiencing poor mental health. Arguments that 20 years later someone will be more likely to have a breakdown would be hard to substantiate scientifically. To the best of my knowledge the argument has not been substantiated ( my knowledge is not total but I do work in Mental Health and my degree led to me exploring these issues). It has also bee made about Ecstasy?MDMA.

What my personal view about drugs and mental health is: "if they affect your mental health don't take them, you may be one of the unlucky ones and the one time you take something it messes things up a lot or you may have no issue and enjoy recreational drug use without issue. There is a correlation between some drugs and increased incidence of ill health (mentally), this is also true of alcohol.

Don't put yourselves at risk Kids.

In reply to Pekkie:

Is there much of a market in acid these days? Seemed to be a lot of it about in early 90s but not seen/heard of any of it since, but that might have more to do with my shifting social circles than anything else. Can't tell if its gone out of fashion or I've just got older.

In reply to Pekkie:

I had a book, might still have it, written by/quoting one of the undercover coppers involved in Operation Julie.

He was quite bitter about the whole experience, I remember he was reduced down to traffic duties afterwards, the line "They said bollards to me, so I said bollards to them" rings a bell.

There were certainly a lot of questionable tactics used and some similarities on the implications for undercover work to the environmental protest group infiltrated by the police last year, so perhaps not many lessons learnt.

Having said that, the Met were complaining about the tactics used during some of the G20 protests and how they had been taken by surprise, when the tactics were 40 years old and well documented. So lessons learnt may be hard to come by for an organisation with the type of memory loss usually associated with prolonged drug use.

In reply to Timmd:


Deposits of acid in the spine. Talked to another hippie did he?

Regards

D

In reply to Blue Straggler:

I just think that giving educated, idealistic people 13 year jail sentences was rather counter-productive. As I recall (with what remains of my drug-addled brain), when acid first arrived it was taken from idealistic, even creative and artistic, motives; you read The Doors of Perception by Huxley first. Of course, many took it for fun and no doubt the dealers made a lot of money, and there was the mental health side (I stopped after a bad trip which really was nightmarish) but, still; 13 years?

In reply to Pekkie:

Interesting Operation Julie is a thread on a climbing forum.....

In reply to John Rushby: wasn't one of the 'gang' later a well known himalayan climber ?

In reply to Dauphin:

It seems like he might have done, having googled and found acid doesn't get deposited in the base of the spine. It's not totally clear it seems, why some people can have flashbacks.

Cheers
Tim

In reply to Doug: 7 years later.

In reply to Pekkie:


OK, aside from the sentencing, do you think the Operation itself (the raids) was too heavy-handed and that the well-intentioned acid-heads should have been left to get on with it? Or do you think the Operation was necessary and just that the sentences were too harsh?

In reply to Pekkie:

I was thinking about them being idealistic, and wonder if the law stops being impartial if the kind of person somebody seems to be affects the number of years they get?

If you deal and distribute a class whatever drug, I guess you have to be given the relevent sentence for doing that whatever kind of person you are, or the law can become less fair.

Cheers
Tim

In reply to Owen W-G:


many believe Pickards arrest is the single biggest blow to black market lsd.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard

This is a fascinating story.

In reply to Timmd:

I mean make and distribute, not deal and distribute.

In reply to Timmd:

flashback is just a stupid media term.

the crux of the issue is that the human mind is capable of vivid recollection of any state of conciousness from the past!

In reply to sutty:

Rhetorical, but how many would have ended up in mental hospitals anyway?

Its often wrong to attribue (or try to) an undesirable outcome to one influencing factor when in reality such things are multifactorial.

In reply to Timmd:

Correlation does not imply causation > http://xkcd.com/552/

Prof Nutt and his colleagues (see article in The Lancet at http://is.gd/aeCgy0), thought otherwise and unfortunately because it wasn't towing the political line he lost his position on the governments drug advisory board.

LSD had an overall harm score of 7 (lowest was mushrooms at 6). Alcohol scored 72, heroin 55 and crack cocaine 54 (see figure 2 in the fulltext of the article, and crucially read the criteria for scoring that they use).


But then when has evidence and expert opinion ever had any bearing on politics and policy?

In reply to Doug:

I seem to remember something about an expedition organiser being sued over someone's death - possibly due to the supply of dodgy oxygen equipment. Rather than pure O2 it was cut with helium....

In reply to Doug: Henry Todd, who subsequently ran commercial expeditions to Everest and had the contract to supply oxygen cylinders for all expeditions. He was at one time married to an ex Miss Scotland.

In reply to slacky:

Fair enough...

In reply to jazzyjackson:

I guess it's not implausable that the chemical changes which happen while tripping, might have something to do with flashbacks, though. From brief googling it seems only certain people might be prone to flashbacks.

Thankfully, I didn't take mushrooms on many occasions, and only had one flashback 15 years ago quite soon after taking them, it was kind of interesting as a teenager, but it's quite nice to haved closed that chapter.

Tim

In reply to Timmd:

hi tim, fair point but its entirely plausable that the "flashback" has no neurochemical trigger at all.
It could simply be a memory triggered by almost anything,a colour, a smell, music.
I find the term an annoying distraction from the more important discussions on psychedelics and conciousness.
I heard the term mostly when I was a teenager from friends who didn't know the difference between nutmeg and nuttela and then again in the sensationalist press. Never had one myself but its possible my whole life has been a giant flash forward ; )
just my two bobs worth.

In reply to sutty:



The thing is that kind of thinking could lead to restrictions on anything dangerous - climbing for instance. I imagine back in the 60s the dangers weren't fully appreciated by many people. These days I think people are more aware of the dangers and the strength of acid sold is something like a fifth of what it used to be.

I met someone once who had taken acid with a friend every day for a whole year! I was pretty surprised that even that amount hadn't been harmful for him.

In reply to sutty:
One friends son was given something by his sister, and has spent over 20 years in Rampton or other places ever since, and only gets day release occasionally.

Im sorry but do you sincerly believe 1 tablet was responsible for his whole personality dissolving and the ensuing 20 years?

In reply to Timmd:

Britain was a more authoritarian country back in the 1970's. I guess that psychedelic drugs might have had something to with releasing the straight jacket.

Regards

D

In reply to jazzyjackson:

It certainly is! I note that Pickard got two life sentences. Yet Curtis Warren got only 12 years after being caught with huge amounts of cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, guns, ammunition and hand grenades. I know the Pickard case was in the US and the Warren case was in the Netherlands but there does seem to be a discrepancy somewhere. Don't want to start a paranoid conspiracy theory but the US authorities do seem to have a huge downer on LSD.

In reply to Pekkie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#Legal_troubles

an example of how twisted the legal response to LSD celebrities could be (mind you the silly fcuker did escape from jail!)

LSD has always had a strange 'market' presence.
on one hand its idealised in the media and a huge source of inspiration for stereotypes, marketing and sanitized youth culture - in a way no other drug could be. maybe this is an association with 60s nostalgia, but even still.

then on the other hand is given the highest drug classification possible, even out-bidding heroin. acids deemed to have no value to society at all (heroin was for a long time a prescribed medicine for bronchitis...?!), so users and purveyors are subject to the same penalties as crack and meth defendants.
the penalty is seemingly regardless of the chemical - its based on the amount and intent of the chedules sheduling.

thing is: go out and get 100 methamphetamine users, 100 crack users, 100 crank users etc and compare them to 100 acid users.
i guarantee theres a difference.

whilst the authorities were busy playing spook n dressups to nab a bunch of oxford types, neo-nazis and coke dealers are out there involved in much more unsavoury businesses. for departments underfunded and the subject of public scrutiny, surely theres something wrong with that.

as for flashbacks, its worth looking into the molecular composition of LSD. its part of the indole-ring group that includes all sorts of endogenous chemicals within the human system (melatonin, seratonin, tryptophan etc).
its not impossible that previous use of acid or other indoles creates a pathway for future catabolism of endogenous chemicals to the same receptors acid triggers, with a similar effect.

indeed, the most powerful hallucinogen around - DMT - is endogenous. makes acid look like a water pistol, but is very short lived (10mins or so).
its released when a specific pathway for seratonin is not broken down, allowing the molecule to act on other receptors.
it does this most nights as part of the dreaming process.

whos not to say that acid use (or mushrooms or mescaline which both share the indole-ring family) doesnt mess with the serotonin-DMT catabolism process?

In reply to ice.solo:


All those indole ring groups that you mention are psychoactive - its's possible that a state of extreme arousal where these neurotransmitters are in abundance may start firing the pathways that the LSD kicked into your nervous system.

I never felt the back doors of perception being smashed in when taking acid, just realized that my head of filled with utter rubbish. Don't like the robo-cop come down either. Have had a few experiences on Shulgins synthetic empathogens which you could describe as meeting god.

Regards

D

In reply to Dauphin:

completely concurr with you there. maybe acid was all dandy in the 60s, but theres more appropriate and less damaging stuff about since.

Have had a few experiences on Shulgins synthetic empathogens which you could describe as meeting god.

shulgin. say no more ; )

In reply to Dauphin:


I've not taken acid, so I can't really comment on the difference, but I have the most fantastical, weird, archaic dreams pretty much every night.

I suppose they aren't available on demand, of course, like a LSD is, but having a stilton sandwich pretty much just before going to bed almost guarantees extra vivid weirdness, though...

Blessed are the cheesemakers, that's what I say!

In reply to Dominion:

quiet man, theyll ban stilton next.

then imagine the drop in quality once the mafia starts making and distributing it.

In reply to ice.solo:

shulgin, theres a genius and he's not well at the moment. There are frantic efforts to have his hand written scribbles documentated befor

In reply to jazzyjackson:

whoops

before they are lost forever : (

In reply to Dominion:


lol, cheese dreams! be careful

In reply to jazzyjackson:
>lol, cheese dreams! be careful

It starts out with a bit of innocent mozzarella, just now and again, at weekends. Then next thing you know it's full on Stilton/ Gorgonzola mixes. Then they branch out into the synthetic variants: triangles, processed cheese and cheese strings.

You do know that casein contains opiates?

In reply to Dominion:


They're caused by the aforementioned DMT. It's in your brain, and almost everywhere else. Animals, plants etc.

In reply to ice.solo:
>the most powerful hallucinogen around - DMT -

Possibly the "most powerful" is now regarded as Salvinorin A?

And on a pedantic note, drugs such as LSD aren't "hallucinogens", they're pyschedelics.

In reply to aln:
i tried salvia, but not the isolate which i gather is sharper.
salvia i found to be as profound as DMT but not as total - it still occurred in this world, DMT is 'other'.
it was less invasive than DMT, which confronts you with ideas and a presence thats pretty full on. salvia felt inviting and safe, the experience being somehow mystical.
DMT is like being kidnapped as a sex slave for an ipad.

i gotta dispute DMT not being a hallucinogen tho - acid, mescaline etc fair enough as it more distorts and reinterprets and is mostly patterns and textures and play on optics - the DMT experience is truely of things that are not 'there'.

In reply to ice.solo:

That's still a psychedelic, or visionary experience. My understanding is that a hallucinogen is a substance that gives an effect where you are in your normal reality but it's intruded by other realities. I.e. you experience people or objects as real, which aren't actually present. Talking to people who aren't there, attempting to smoke cigarettes which don't exist etc. There's interesting accounts of experiences with Jimson weed etc on the Erowid website. Mostly written it seems by American teenagers, taking the the stuff at wildly inappropriate times and places. They're often both scary and funny, and enough to put me off ever trying it.

In reply to aln:

I see what your saying but I wouldn't class Jimson weed as a psychedelic at all. Its more of a delerient with horrific side effects and can be fatal. there were a lot of cases of ingestion and poisoning after Carlos Castenedas books came out as Don Juan uses belladonna. Very few people who tried it would care to repeat the experience.

You can talk with people who arent there with a bad fever but a fever isnt generally called psychedelic. Its hard to pigeon hole what is and what isnt psychedelic but its an interesting discussion.

In reply to aln:
Would agree with ice here, maybe wrong but SWIM experience of DMT is very hallucinogenic, as you say, complete invention of people, places, items that aren't there, compared to LSD, or shrooms which is merely a mixing or reinterpretation of what already exists.

In reply to dread-i:

lol. mozzarella is a gateway cheese leading ultimately to the horror of Cheesebasing (ie) smoking processed cheeses in glass pipes.

The most terrible things can happen to a man in the grip of a Cheesebasing frenzy

In reply to joey82:

I think its heavily dose related.
At full on psychedelic doses of DMT, LSD and Shrooms its possible to have contact with the other IMO

In reply to joey82:

SWIM is pointless. Even if it wasn't you, as soon as you write that it immediately makes anyone reading it think it was you.

In reply to aln:

yes SWIM is most bizarre. Ive read a few forums with experiential reports which used the word SWIM almost twice a sentence.

At the end of the text the only thing it had achieved was to make the whole report unintelligible. Shame really.

In reply to aln:

fair enough. i was interpreting the meanings of 'psychedelic' and 'hallucinogenic' in reverse it seems.
(if we want to really get pedantic, and have psychedelic defined as manifesting the psyche - considering that the DMT experience is so utterly other, maybe we need a new definition there as well.just sayin. very subjective).

yeah that jimson weed, datura, belladonna scene sounds truely terrible.

in fact, its often how the tryptamines (acid, DMT etc) are portrayed.
made more nuts considering that 99% of psychedelic would probably reject the idea of trying it straight out....

by the way, i like this cheese satire thing going on. funny shit. wish i could contribute but seems i have more experience of drugs than of cheese. which may not be a great thing.

In reply to ice.solo:

and what the hell is SWIM?

In reply to ice.solo:

forum abbreviation for "someone who isnt me"

(ie) SWIM ate 5 datura seeds