here's an interesting thing

The host of "Fear Factor", explaining our whole existence, here.

I know from first hand experience that psychedelics can make you crazy and that what you experience on a trip is not real.

I have read numerous accounts saying just the opposite, that the experience in the "trip" was more real than "this" reality.

(I haven't listened to the clip, so don't know what it was about -- how long is it?)

due to my LSD usage when I was younger. No one belives me when I say that stuff is bad for you. I guess what it takes for some people is the actual experience. I'm not saying that everyone is going to go crazy from using psychedelics, just that some people do. You are taking a great risk when you use that stuff.

I know a couple of guys who cannot stop using marijuana. At the very least it has ruined their financial lives and they are addicts. One of them confessed to me that getting high was his way of escaping reality.

The clip is about 10 minutes long.

but I have to say that I could make a similar, if not stronger, case against many legal pharmaceuticals currently in wide use.

I believe strongly, VERY strongly, in an individual's right to explore their own consciousness using whatever tools they can, as long as they don't endanger any one else. I take a risk every time I get in my car, so it's not like we need to be protected against risk.

We should have the right and ability to choose for ourselves, without having to worry about ending up in jail.

Legal drugs bad. Illegal drugs good. Pharmeceutical companies evil. I've got a 5000 word essay about how I was robbed of ten years of my life due to mental illness. Let me know if you'd like to read it.

I don't think you can make a blanket statement regarding the "good" or "bad" nature of any substance. These things depend on the circumstances. You're absolutely right, psychedelics are not for everybody. And if the pharmaceutical drugs are helpful for your situation, then they are good for you...they're also not for everybody, obviously. Anyway, if you are better off now thanks to taking the legal drugs (and not taking psychedelics), then great! The way society in general deals with mental illness is a goddamn shame.

But I dispute your characterization of this conversation. I was not making blanket statements about "all" legal or "all" illegal drugs, or even the pharma companies. Just making a point about how individual cases can be used to prove whatever one wants to prove.

Obviously there are unique individual solutions for individuals, the same which would be a disaster for someone else.

can you elaborate on what it's about, and how long the clip is?

at least at the beginning. Here's a partial transcript I found with it, but it's not the part that I found amusing, really:

Everybody in their life, if you live, you know, and you haven’t had a heavy psychedelic experience, and you haven’t gone in an isolation tank, you’ve missed out.

You’ve missed out on a huge chunk of what life really is.

Life is a massive fucking mystery, and there’s only a few different ways to really crack below the surface of that mystery, and the best way is psychedelics, and the heavier the psychedelic the better, and guess what, no one’s dieing from psychedelics.

All our thoughts on psychedelics are all based on bullshit propaganda that we heard about people you know, going crazy, or losing their mind’s eye.

You’re not gonna go crazy, you’re gonna go fuckin’ sane, alright, all that stuff is gonna remove your ego, and it’s gonna explain to you what the world is really all about…

Yeah, I don't know if I believe all that, but he also starts in with some stuff about how the dream-world may be just as valid and "real" than our day-to-day lives. Interesting, I thought.

I probably agree completely with what is being said.

Anyone interested in this topic should read Rick Strassman's book called "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" before making any declaration about what DMT does.

DMT is a compound that is actually produced in the brain, by the pineal gland. There *HAS* to be a reason for that -- nature is mighty stringent about what it uses it's resources on.

It's highly unfortunate that so many people are unaware of the shamanic traditions in so many other cultures, particularly those that know how to use the DMT-containing plants. Daniel Pinchbeck is another author worth reading.

DMT is nothing like LSD in terms of how it affects the brain.

:D

Seriously, like pretty nearly word for word on parts of it. He even mentions Strassman and his book.

Anyway, I thought it was hilarious that a guy who feeds bugs to people for a living should be so interested in such stuff.

and maybe the clip doesn't explain why, but Strassman did controlled clinical studies with DMT, approved by the FDA; he was the first to be allowed such a trial since the problems that came up in the 50s/60s (with, for example, LSD).

One finding was that his subjects had strikingly similar experiences, which seemed to support the existence of an objective reality that is different than the one we are able to perceive with our "normal" sense apparatus.

This type of research is so utterly fascinating and important, and it's beyond despicable that there are so few who are allowed to engage in it.

along with the marginalization of pretty much any serious research on them, just really smacks of the worst kind of totalitarianism, where the government seeks to actually control our consciousness.

Seriously, why are things that affect consciousness itself, but have no particular deleterious physical effect, and are not addictive in any way, why are these things so illegal? And, like, even more taboo than things like cocaine and heroin, which clearly do have serious negative effects.

Of course we see why, if we look back at the days when psychedelics were an unknown quantity, with LSD being sold over the counter and such, and then see the massive increase in social and political awareness that followed their popularization, and figure that our ruling class put two and two together...it's no fucking wonder, really. But it is totalitarianism. Can't have the huddled masses opening up the doors of perception now, can we? Hell, they might start to see through the ruse that allows the oligarchs to rule in the first place.

It's all about control. And fear. And religion. (which is 3 ways of saying the same thing)