I personally have never taken DMT though from everything I've read and heard on podcasts it's not something to be taken lightly. I think having a sort of "DMT Clinic" that you can go to would be the best middle ground of allowing the public access to these substances while also ensuring that there is a trained professional there to guide you through the process.
Saying "trained professional" in this context feels wired because this stuff has been underground for so long but I think it's starting to bubble up into the mainstream enough that we need to start bringing all that "into the light". Lets have training programs that teach people how to administer this stuff properly, how to deal with the negative side effects, etc.
One of the things that while I find understandable is ridiculous is the fact that Bill had to use a pseudonym in the community. I feel like if were at the point where you have C-suite types at Apple taking this stuff, it's time to think about making it available to the broader public.
The resistance is real, systematic, and rational (from the perspective of maintaining current power arrangements). Not a joke.
Well, Ayahuasca (with DMT as the active ingredient) retreats seem more and more common and are for some reasons tolerated more and more in europe. Technically it is illegal, but I can still book them online.
But I won't, as I don't trust the competence of the average new age "shaman".
For example, someone might have insights about the interconnectedness of all life and wants to transition to regenerative agriculture or communal land use, but face zoning laws that enforce individual property ownership. Or someone might experience ego dissolution and wants to create more egalitarian workplace structures, but runs into rigid corporate hierarchies.
https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/preventionwellness/pages/psilo...
"A client may only access psilocybin at a licensed service center during an administration session in the presence of a trained, licensed facilitator."
The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.
"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.
Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.
1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.
So... this clinic was not entirely unlike what you're proposing w/ DMT.
FWIW, the results were incredible. I was effectively "cured." But unfortunately my insurance changed, and it became no longer covered, and I couldn't afford the $2000 every six weeks for the treatment anymore. And it's not super convenient to take two hours off from work to go to the trip-sitter's to get the treatments.
I hope that they figure out what it is in psychadelics that make them effective at treating stuff like depression and PTSD and make it more accessible because it seems like there's so much potential there.
(Also: fuck Elon Musk for making Ketamine a punchline)
"why, there's no magazine called 'Weird' is there?" [0]
> substantially longer duration of the former
Individual insight doesn't map to institutional action. Systems can't integrate experiences they can't measure or systematize.
I do think that there are some truths to government desire for narrative management, too. It is unwise to be a hugger in a knife fight, and you don't want the populace to get high, see God, and deteriorate national security.
All in all though, it all boils down to life being complicated. The resistance isn't adversarial - it's structural. Which makes it both less intentionally evil and harder to overcome.
Ayahuasca trips seem to be like edging with poison. But maybe the documentary I saw was biased.
But that doesn't make replacing every instance of ketamine with "horse tranquilizer" any less funny.
In the SF bay area – & plenty of other regions around the world – the criminal enforcement against hallucinogens is, de facto, a very low priority as long as you're not flagrantly endangering or inconveniencing others.
Put differently, while an idea being established and self-justifying doesn't necessarily mean it's exclusive in these traits and should be bolted in, sure, an idea being fringe also doesn't necessarily mean it's unjustly fringe at all, or that it's being unfairly discriminated against. To claim so without evidence is little more than conspiratorial thinking and self-victimization.
It further sounds really quite self-serving to paint e.g. me as some misguided sheep part of some malicious cabal for this. It's a little more than just a variation on the all too common ill faith ways of argumentation; mixing in the semantic specifics of psychedelic experiences, name dropping people, movements, and quotes, and deferring to a "specific" culture's particularities serves at most as a distraction from this.
Seems like it.
I did it one time and there was no vomitting and feeling great the day after.
But that maybe was, because the plant that was used was apparently not so strong. So yes, it is from natural plants, that can have very different concentrations. I suppose this is what the documentary means with life threatening poisening? Getting a plant that had a unusual high concentration?
But I never heard of those horror stories from people who do it regulary. (Vomitting is quite normal, though) Otherwise I have limited knowledge in that area, but I do know with mushrooms for example, you can use different ones of the same species to mix them to average out concentration differences. I assume the same can be done with Ayuahasca. But like I said, I would not recommend the commercial retreats anyway.
(I did it when I was invited into a ceremony in a remote place by people who were not frauds)
the normal dose is 5-10mg, but LD50 in sheep is about 100mg, it might be as low as 30mg in humans.
It absolutely should not be legal, at least to anyone. Perhaps require training in dealing with drugs with a low therapeutic index
Also the vast majority of people are done purging within a few hours...not "days"
(Source: work at retreat center and have drank hundreds of times)
It's actually quite the opposite. True-believers overwhelmingly disseminate cultural myths. It's the police officer who believes they can positively affect the enforcement of order, educators who base values in the rational order of the mind. It's journalists and pundits who frame news as a tension between order (good, stable) and chaos (bad, dangerous). Where deviance is newsworthy primarily as a threat to order. See news cycles on crime, protests, economic instability, all in terms of order must be "restored."
Look at the modern workplace, for instance, obsessed with order, predictability, and process (think: KPIs, best practices, Six Sigma). And corporate culture manuals and onboarding training reinforcing norms of punctuality, control, and rational planning.
It's present in engineers, scientists, architects, IT managers - professions often celebrated as the apex of rational, orderly progress and as solutions to messy[chaotic] problems. Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value because it more closely aligns with necessary order.
None of these roles form a secret cabal. Still, they enforce and perpetuate the cultural value system whose results are judged on the basis of order.
No one is saying that chaos is good or order is bad. It’s that the binary itself is a function of our cultural mythmaking. When psychedelics make that myth visible, the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Ask anyone who lived in Libya under Gaddafi and then in the years since, or who lived under any other despotic regime and compare it to the chaos that ensued when the despot is removed.
Civilization’s association with order is not random (or a function of “cultural myth making”); chaos _sucks_.
That seems quite unlikely given that there are many 30mg dose trip reports, going as far back as TiHKAL.
How does it work? Is the half-life of it shorter when administered IV?
1–5 mg/kg IV
1–2 mg/kg SC
85 mg/kg O
In mice:
75–115 mg/kg IP
48 mg/kg IV
113 mg/kg SC
278 mg/kg O
They were administering over 30mg to humans in trials. (Metzner (2013); Shulgin and Shulgin (1997); Ott (2001); Davis et al. (2018); Uthaug et al. (2020a))
Sheep are susceptible to toxicity from certain tryptamine alkaloids because of their physiology.
These alkaloids, especially those that are N,N-dimethylated, can trigger neurological symptoms in sheep, such as convulsions, spasticity, and gait issues. The alkaloids are suspected to affect the brain and spinal cord by interacting with serotonin receptors.
5-MeO-DMT is an N,N-dimethylated compound. Its full chemical name is 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. That indicates the presence of two methyl groups attached to the nitrogen atom of the tryptamine backbone.
Stay safe, everyone!
Just go buy $100 in street ketamine (still marked up 100x, fwiw, also because laws) from someone reputable, test it for fentanyl, and blow lines of it. Same deal, $1900 less cost. Breaking some dumb rules is far preferable to living with untreated depression.
You didn't literally write that of course. Instead, you said these:
- "the proponents of "Big Reality" really really really fight against its disruption"
- "the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood"
- "Western civilization has a deep myth"
- "[list of values] must either be accepted (...) or face rejection"
- "western civilization values (...) [list of values] in a self-justifying way"
- etc.
All of them painting "Big Reality" as a group that:
- exists
- is just following myths
- unjustly represses the exploration of alternatives
- is western for some reason?
I hope we can agree that this is not a positive or even a neutral characterization, and that it suggests coordination. Hence, malicious cabal.
> It's present in engineers
I mean yeah, hi. Every time I'm able to work with something tangible, something measurable, it's always an intrinsically better experience, both on a personal level as well as socially. And every time I run into the opposite, the end result is confusion and misery. To paint this as just cultural doesn't feel even remotely right. Especially since I really don't see culture having come first, or since there are neurodivergent people who have a particular fascination with exactly these concepts (counting, hard logic, etc), suggesting the existence of biological biases and drivers towards these.
> Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value
Art is incredibly technical, actually, especially the better stuff. And when you engage that technical side, you get incredible richness in return, much more levers you can push on with much more intentionality. These wouldn't be recognized things if people didn't try to see a "method to the madness" and instead just kept on going by vibes.
I cannot know what threads you've been visiting that gave you this impression, and I'm sure that there are people here who do what you describe. But as far as my anecdotal experience goes, I cannot confirm having experienced this (people taking cheapshots at liberal arts here) by the way.
> When psychedelics make that myth visible
But you don't need psychedelics to appreciate that the vast majority of the things we experience and reason about have an excessive serving of manmade components. Even something trivial as chairs or names are just artificial constructs. What this requires is a philosophically intrigued mind, not necessarily a drug-addled one. If your idea is more that "okay, but these are more tangible and readily apparent while on drugs", sure, maybe that's true. That's really not the position you've been portraying though - but that this is some exclusive perspective, that only arises when you let your mind magically throw everything else away temporarily via chemical means.
> the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
Doesn't help if you set up the rhetorical framework that way... Mind you, every belief is like this. It's not just those inherited from culture.
Realistically an entire new agency (DEA) was chartered to enforce the new regulations, and the greatest threats were those thought to disrupt an "ordained" vision of reality that was not to include the kind of experimentation which made clinical evaluation possible.
Rapidly, before the most thorough experiments could be conducted which would have more accurately informed the established pharma regulation process.
Rather it was superstition that was included in the new regulations, and the enforcement agency was mustered to fight to preserve more superstition than should ever be allowed.
This really really stands the test of time, and if kelsey did not personally observe this phenomenon, it's even more amazing than it appears on the surface.
It was $600 (discounted) for the first infusion.
You go through a pre-evaluation with the doctor, where they determine a dosage for you based on prior experience and bodyweight.
My clinic also offered to co-administer IV benzos to prevent panic attacks or negative experiences, which was a HUGE plus for me.
During the experience you're given a button, which you can press to call them and have the drip turned off or turned down.
If it wasn't so expensive or covered by my insurance, I would've certainly repeated it.
Highly recommend.
You get to decide whether you want racemic or S-Ketamine, and your money is held in escrow until you've got the product and release the funds to the vendor.
You can't use animal models for dose, you have to convert to hED (Human-Equivalent Dosage). You can estimate this generally with allometric scaling:
https://drughunter.com/practical-pk-calculators
Also, animal physiology varies.
Beta-adrenergic agonists like clenbuterol make mice wildly muscular, which unfortunately is not the case in humans, for example.
This is, of course, way more risky and pretty much illegal I guess, but it should probably be cheaper?
Not necessarily "condoning" the behavior, so much as sharing harm-minimization info here:
For safe/sterile injection, you need three things, all cheaply + easily available on the internet.
1) Bacteriostatic water - https://www.amazon.com/bacteriostatic-water/s?k=bacteriostat...
2) Sealed, sterile vials for preparation of the solution - https://www.amazon.com/Sterile-Vial/s?k=Sterile+Vial
3) Insulin syringes. 29g 0.5" work well. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=29g+1cc+1%2F2+inch+insulin+syring...
See my comment in this thread about IM administration of 4-AcO-DMT for more info:
No, not much. But plenty of new age shamans, who are spiritual, because they flew into the Amazonas once.
"My perspective is that the substance you drink is only one part of it"
Definitely. When I did it with brasilian Santo Deime folks, I was part of the whole ceremony, including cooking it traditionally for a long, long time and preparing mentally for it. Something like this I would like to do again at some point.
It's not a hypocrisy. Both are true. If that doesn't make sense, then remember curiosity is the cure to confusion.
It's not difficult to draw a line between social reproduction and drug policy; what's difficult is to convince people that it exists.
1. Specifically social ontology, various constructivist texts, and frame analysis.