Depends on the game. If it’s a game that revolves around problem solving (Kerbal Space Program, Door Kickers), you can come up with strategies you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of.
Overwatch and other fast-paced repetitive games are probably not a good use of it. Atmospheric games, including horror games, can be much better. Playing the very dark and grungy Doom 64 was an experience. Or Hotline Miami.
I gotta get back into the two most recent Wolfenstein games.
Aliens and Predator were nice to watch as well. I’m not going anywhere near Jacob’s Ladder, though.
Outside is nice; It can be combined quite well with exercise. But information technology gives you access to nearly the entirety of human civilization.
Cocaine or meth don’t produce an actual physical dependency (as opposed to a tolerance) like alcohol or opiates do, (with the shaking, sweating, puking effects of withdrawl we all know about from movies) yet at least in the case of meth, it is apparently considered to be just about the most “addictive” drug around by many addiction medicine professionals.
Of course “Shrooms” don’t have any of these drawbacks, but if you’ve ever really gotten a hearty headful of potent psilocybin, you can attest that it is NOT always a mild, risk-free experience, although quite possibly an extremely enjoyable, perhaps even seemingly enlightening one if the set and setting are muy bueno.
I mean… we’re pretty secure in our understanding of psylocibin toxicity. It’s really hard to take as many magic mushrooms Obviously, if you try to get high off of Amanita Phalloides things will not end well for you. But if what you’re taking is actually magic mushrooms, you’re about as likely to get mushroom poisoning as you are from cooking a Waldpilzpfanne.
Now, granted, there are valid concerns about lookalikes - there are, in fact, mushrooms that like like psylocibins that are poisonous (although we’re not exactly talking about Amanita Virosa here). The best way to assuage those concerns is to regulate, and buy your shrooms from a reliable source.
Alcohol isn’t really the proper basis for comparison. Yes, alcohol is destructive, and that’s why we attempted, nearly a century ago, to ban it. And no, it didn’t work. But the reason that it didn’t work is that it’s the most difficult drug on the planet to enforce, because you can make it from pretty much any sort of plant material, without need for any sort of specialized equipment. It’s one thing to block traffic in one specific species, but another to block it in everything.
I guess growing mushrooms from spores or sending 0.25’’ cardboard squares through the mail must be a lot more difficult than I thought.
I suggest the 2 main reasons we don’t hear anywhere near as much about people using psychedelics as opioids/meth/etc are 1) It tends to cause much less problems which would draw attention 2) A lot of people are understandably scared of trying them. I know I was the first few times.
ETA (sorry, 5 minutes were up): Psychedelics are kinda effectively legal in Canada and yet, you don’t hear much about that, do you?
You see, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, Schedule III, Section 5, forbids LSD and any salt thereof. It does not, however, forbid prodrugs (which the body turns into LSD) or analogs (like ETH-LAD).
What clever cunts have figured out is that, if you sell those under the fig-leaf of “chemical research samples, not for human consumption”, you can sell them openly on the grey market. I won’t mention more details as that might run afoul of board rules but the point is that anyone with a bit of coin can order them and the Queen’s own mail service will deliver them to your door. Yet, do we hear a flood of horror stories coming from Canada? Is anyone freaking out about this?
This! I have grown/eaten psylocibes, but always thought of it as a “rough” high. One of my nephews told me that he prefers micro dosing, which I’d never heard of. Very cool concept.
Specific to the bolded part, they’re freaking out about it in the UK.
Several years ago, it was mephedrone, aka plant food, that was the synthetic of choice. That was certainly dangerous.
I can’t remember what the latest synthetic mind-altering drug is, but in general, synthetics are a big concern to the people that pay attention to them. They’ve started allowing testing at music festivals where users can have samples of their drugs tested so they’re sure of what they’re taking.
That’s ok. Trying so soon after pot legalization was probably a bit too eager. Do you remember the first time you tried to lift weights or jog or meditate or learn a skill? You didn’t quite get there, did you? But that was your stepping stone.
You must know more about this than I: How did the first ballot initiatives go for pot? How long did it take from the first failed initiative to State-wise legalization? It’s going to go ever faster for mushrooms and then onward and upwards, ever higher.
Any time you’re dealing with a plant (as opposed to a tested extract or a synthetic) dosage is going to vary; because plants of the same species will produce different amounts of different compounds due to a whole lot of varying things about their environment – temperature, amount of sun, exact soil components, presence of specific other plants, presence of insects, just to start with; as well as due to not only species but exact variety; as well as age at harvest; as well as storage conditions and length of time between harvest and the time you eat the plant.
Having said that: I think trying to ban plants is silly and ineffective. Sometimes it’s the reverse of effective, as if a psychoactive plant is banned this may create or encourage a market for synthetic substitutes. While it’s a whole lot easier to control the dose of active ingredient(s) in a synthetic, a) if the synthetic’s illegal there’s no way at all to know either what you’re getting or how much you’re taking b) synthetics on the market are likely not to be the same as the plant, even if legal, both because it may well be cheaper to use different compounds and because the effects of taking the plant are unlikely to be due entirely to any one compound within it, and we often don’t understand the interactions of such compounds well enough to reproduce them accurately.
So, very longwindedly, a) yes I think psychoactive mushrooms should be legal and b) I think they should be used with caution, part of the caution being awareness that you don’t know how strong the effects from any specific mushroom are going to be.
My daughter has been microdosing psilocybin with her therapist’s knowledge to treat her depression/bipolar symptoms and is having great success with it. She takes a teensy dose every three days and says it’s working better than the lithium she took for five years without the dampening effects and destruction of creativity and libido.
Now I’ll grant you she’s an experienced psychonaut with quite a few full fledged trips under her belt but she says the effects of the microdose are almost imperceptible aside from a general lightening of her mood and a generally more positive outlook on life. I’m thinking of giving it a try myself, since I’m also pretty experienced with psychedelics and I’m interested in seeing how microdosing does for anxiety/depression and CPTSD.
There’ve also been some interesting studies that correlate psychedelic usage with a resistance to addiction of multiple substances–there’s quite a bit of data to indicate that psychedelics can interrupt addiction and help to prevent future dependencies, so much so that there’s a group of therapists in Oregon trying to get legalization of shrooms for therapy on the ballot. Considering the severity of the opioid addiction crisis I think it’s a good experiment to try.