The Therapeutic Value of Psychedelics and other drugs

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sciborg2

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« Reply #135 on: April 21, 2014, 10:53:32 pm »
Paying a high price for the war on drugs:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/03/war-drugs.aspx

"In a new memoir, neuroscientist Carl Hart discusses how his research on drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine has led him to decide that all drugs should be decriminalized."

"As a child growing up in one of Miami's roughest neighborhoods during the 1970s, Carl Hart saw first-hand the toll that poverty, drugs, guns and domestic violence took on his close family and friends. When he was 6, his mother separated from his abusive father. At age 12, he saw his sister injured in a drive-by shooting. Many of his childhood friends ended up dead or in prison. As a teen he used drugs, shoplifted and occasionally carried a gun himself. But eventually — through hard work, mentors, the military and education — he launched himself to the highest rungs of academia.

Hart, who earned his PhD in 1996 from the University of Wyoming, is now Columbia University's first tenured African-American professor in the sciences, where he studies the neuroscience of drug use. Some of his work undercuts widespread assumptions about drug users, such as the idea that most will become addicted. In laboratory studies with cocaine and methamphetamine users, he's found that rather than being held hostage to their drug use, most people can make a rational decision to give up a dose in exchange for a reasonable reward — even as little as $5.

Recently, Hart has become involved in drug policy advocacy as well. In his book "High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society," he interweaves personal memoir and scientific research to conclude that drug abuse is a symptom rather than a cause of societal ills — and that America's drug laws, not drugs themselves, have wreaked the greatest havoc on the country's poorest and most vulnerable citizens."

Madness

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« Reply #136 on: April 23, 2014, 01:39:47 pm »
Looks interesting, sci.

I am going to try to read this book at some point.

http://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Information-Theory-Shamanism-Reason/dp/1453760172/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397327052&sr=8-1&keyword

It will be refreshing (for me at least) to get a scientific view on this matter.

You might want to check out The Subtle Body - Cyndi Dale, Royce. It's an interesting read to say the least.

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Royce

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« Reply #137 on: April 28, 2014, 05:32:51 pm »
Thanks for that Madness. I will check that out instead, since it seems more broad in content

sciborg2

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« Reply #138 on: April 28, 2014, 10:32:44 pm »
‘Angels and Demons’: the Politics of Psychoactive Drugs

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We are now paying people to take drugs they don’t like and don’t want, while we continue to invest vast sums of public money in efforts to curb the use of drugs that people do like and do want. Prescription drugs like antidepressants, antipsychotics and so-called ‘mood stabilisers’ are widely promoted as good for your health. But the history of prescription and recreational drug use is more intimately intertwined than most people recognise. Attempts to disentangle the two have created a false dichotomy – with prescription drugs, at least some of them, set up as the ‘angels’ that can do no wrong, and recreational drugs cast as the ‘demons’(3).

Distinguishing drugs in this way makes no sense pharmacologically, and does not help us to understand what effects they actually have. The regulation of drugs is driven by political imperatives to produce a population that remains productive, diverted and obedient. The masses must have their opium, but must not be allowed to be so free with their drug use that they infringe public order or undermine the efficient operation of the economy.

Royce

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« Reply #139 on: May 08, 2014, 10:32:46 am »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkF9NZjrSIE

Bill Hicks on the value of psychedelics:)

sciborg2

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« Reply #140 on: May 11, 2014, 07:18:30 am »
Politically Incorrect on LSD with guest Robert Anton Wilson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYzfSzYbmAE



Royce

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« Reply #141 on: May 11, 2014, 02:56:22 pm »
RAW is such an interesting dude. I have "quantum psychology" and "prometheus rising" on my shelf.