Well, you can certainly bake it into brownies or make pot butter. However, I’ve always felt like smoking it was better for me than eating it, b/c it affects you so much more when you eat it.
As we’re on the THC deposit subject:
A Russian trained MD recently mentioned to me that THC is deposited in the brain stem, staying there 20 years(!!). She’s a tad new-agey and mentioned it in the context of a brown rice-banana diet to detox, not as a scare tactic.
Now, I’m not ready to buy this as I’ve read my fair share on marijuana and this is completely new to me. I can’t find any good sites that promote or discredit this idea. Wild goose chase? Anyone ever hear of this?
No cite or even proof, but a couple of things make this logically unlikely.
- With all the autopsies that are done every year and research concerning degenerative brain disorders this should be pretty easy to uncover.
- If 1 turned up evidence of this, the Partnership of a Drug Free America would probably make sure it was on the front page of every paper in America.
- 2 would probably happen even if all the available evidence indicated that these deposits were completely harmless.
So re-inform him. Why do people have to be so inhospitable?
Psilocybin appears to have a extremely low risk of overdose. I am unaware of any long term health risks from its use.
The principal risk of any substance this powerful is emotional distress.
Emotional trauma can result from the use of any psychedelic. The chance of this is can be greatly influenced by the amount of care or carelessness the user has in intelligently choosing when and where to partake.
Being aware of the risks and planning accordingly can reduce them greatly, but appearently not eliminate them. Occasional bad experiences crop up occasionally even in well control circumstances.
As with any bad experience, the psychological make up of the individual will determine if this winds up being just one bad night or a life crisis.
I started a thread a couple months ago about the safety of magic mushrooms, but it was lost… I believe the bottom line was that you have to take many times the regular amount in order to overdose, and the only significant physical effect was nausea. Just make sure you know exactly what you’re picking if you pick them yourself.
the trouble with mushroom deaths is that it is sometimes hard to be sure exactly what species has been taken, and therefore what toxins and substances. When I last did a search, I found only 4 deaths that looked like they had been caused by psylocibin, and even they were not 100% sure. As long as you are positive of the mushroom species, they appear to be safe.
so then wouldn’t shrooms be the safest drug? They are also “non-addictive” for the most part.
So what about Syd Barrett ?
most people don’t really want to hallucinate, they are looking to drugs to make them feel good. If you are an acid-head, then LSD and mushrooms are pretty safe physically, but might screw a minority mentally. Just whatever you do, don’t think you can fly off a tall building or look at the sun.
This didn’t answer the question about “safest” at all.
One of the reasons LSD is considered as safe as it is, is the huge ratio between typical dose and lethal dose (at least 5000 to 1). Mushrooms don’t have this high of a ratio.
On to the mistakes in this one. The most serious is the looking at the sun line. No one has ever sat and stared at the sun til blind (or vision damaged) while on these substances. The protective reflexes stay nicely intact.
Thinking one can fly is unlikely but possible.
What to say about the hallucination part… hmmm… These substances are indeed capable of inducing true hallucinations (experiencing objects or events that are completely not real), usage patterns today generally avoid dosages high enough to cause this. Going to this high a dose greatly increases the risk of a bad experience. It is much more typical to take just enough to alter perceptions of things that are in fact there. The result might be best describe as turning the whole world into an “art gallery”.
A buddy of mine was entrusted to watch a sheet of acid. Payment? One blodder. You can guess the rest. The police were called a couple hours after he consumed the whole sheet (due to the party, not him)
The only ill effects he has suffered is that we still give him a hard time, 15 years later, for trying to kiss the lady cop.
sorry scotth, I knew these were urban legends and I assumed that everyone did. (note to self: put more smiley faces in posts)
Dr. Drew would disagree.
On tonight’s “Love Line”, there were two callers of interest to this thread. The first was a girl that had taken a few grams of mushrooms for the first, and only, time about six months ago. She now has permanent streamers following moving objects and falls in and out of “that mushroomy feeling”. The second was a man who called in to confirm what the girl said, only he had been taking LSD for a long period of time and was now in a permanent hallucinatory state. He was advised to go to a specific doctor at the Haight-Ashburry Free Clinic, who had extensive experience with this, and to be prepared for growing depression and memory loss. Dr. Drew has said many times that LSD and other hallucinogens are the most damaging drugs you can possibly take. It is not from chemical damage to your body, but the physical altering of the brain. Taking a hallucinogen is like tossing a hand grenade into your mind and the looking at all the pretty colors that result. It may take 5000 doses to be physically toxic, but it only takes a few to be mentally, and permanently, so.
Muad’Dib, I can assure you that none of my friends, or I, have ever had issues because of the LSD or mushrooms (or mescaline) that we have taken (and I am probably near the three hundred hit mark over the years). I have, in fact, noticed that most people can enter a state not entirely dissimilar to LSD ingestion without having to take LSD (minus the visual hallucinations, though who doesn’t have eyes that have “played tricks” on them?). States of wonder, giggles, and awe are not exactly rare (unless you would rather not admit you ever giggle). As taking LSD is a rather intense experience it is easy to associate behaviors that occur in the trip to their sober counterparts. And everyone “hears” things from time to time. Our senses play games with us quite a bit. The past user of a hallucinogen is probably infinitely more likely to be able to distinguish false information. Attributing sensory glitches to past drug use is, AFAIK, not ever borne out by data. Admittedly such a study sort of borders on a philosophical thought experiment, but testing the senses of people in all sorts of manners shouldn’t be exceedingly difficult. Most acid users have had similar trips in similar situations with more or less similar music (for example), so I can imagine that if flashbacks are real and are triggerable (instead of random, which would be a good place for the propaganga machine to hide) it should be easily duplicated in a lab setting. I would always be willing to educate myself, however, so if you have some medical doctors that have written studies on the matter I would appreciate it if you shared them. I’d like to know when I am being duped.
It is a hallucinogen. It will cause the world to look different. It will cause your mind to feel like it is thinking faster and stranger (when I am pretty sure that isn’t the case ;)). But—and maybe I am the one being naive when I say this—the general public knows that pictures and walls don’t really warble and warp, that music doesn’t really resonate with the world around you, that trails don’t exist, and so on. It is not stunningly hard to notice a mild hallucination, and if I may be so bold, looking for hallucinations is much of the fun of an LSD trip (gee, the carpet doesn’t usually ripple! Look at that!). Think of tripping as a live act of suspension of disbelief. (and trippers wonder why it feels like they are in a movie! ;)) And since it seems to (in my opinion) simply let normally absurd propositions (like God is a frisbee) run wild for a time previous users of LSD might simply have found some really interesting things in their head and actually be more willing to listen to themselves for the fun thoughts that we all have but normally ignore.
Honestly, since the drug is so illegal and so hated it is a shame we probably won’t ever know the real truth about LSD effects. I suspect it could never be legal simply because of the duration of its effects (if nothing else, and I will be the first to say hallucination isn’t for everyone).
Now, some posters on this board have mentioned that they have experienced genuine “flashbacks”, and who am I to tell them what is and isn’t in their head? But most thinking generally takes the lines of associating otherwise common experiences with an altered state because of the intensity of an LSD experience. And, when you come down to it, whether this happens because of mental association (a decidedly natural and beneficial function) or because of actual physical changes to the brain (and I cannot express a higher level of skepticism here) is, I suppose, somewhat irrelelvant. As ever, being aware of issues is what is most important, and telling people that if they take too much they’ll never see right again (going blind from masturbating, anyone?) or thinking they are an orange is simply a disingenius disinformation campaign.
Please don’t feed the propaganda machine. It is running well enough on its own hot air.
Hot tip!!!–Simulating an LSD trail: wave your hand in front of the TV. Ooh!
I don’t think that this is a fair comment. Prozac, and the other drugs of that ilk, also cause dramatic phyical changes in the brain. Not to mention that often times the people who are on those drugs claim that they don’t feel like themselves. Where is the call to ban Prozac and Paxil?
there is a bit of a difference. No one said that any medicine is completely safe. There are always cost-benefits in any drug, including asprin. Prozac etc when properly used can make incredible differences to a depressed person. It also has side-effects. LSD on the other hand has no current therapeutic value (there were some interesting studies in the sixties but…).
The studies, last time I checked, were still going on, scm1001. Read up about some of it here:
http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v04n1/04103lsd.html
interesting. There are still a few hippies around. I am a bit worried about their patients though- quote: "Each group receives a different dose of LSD, either 100 g, 200 g, or 400 g for up to 5 sessions. " . Now if they mean grammes…my brain doesn’t even want to think about it.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. if they just put a little µ in there the sentence would be far more coherent. 