The Psychedelic Salon podcast did a long reading of Pickard's novel, The Rose of Paraselsus, which included an introduction which went in to Pickard's background.
It's well worth listening to.
The first episode of the series can be heard here: [1],[2]
Thanks for the link. Haven't listen to that podcast in many years, but am excited for this. It's funny that his style of thinking and writing is clearly kind of similar to Nick Sand, if you've listened to the previous episodes with him.
This is delightful news. I really hope in the coming decades the research of organizations like MAPS get more attention and become completely mainstream.
Making psychedelics Schedule 1 set us back decades that could have been spent doing important research on a large number of mental health conditions.
MAPS (multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies) is systematically demonstrating the positive effects of psychedelics.
Their most impressive work is in PTSD. In Phase 2 trials, they took people with established PTSD (for years) and undertook ~3 guided psychotherapy sessions with MDMA. Within 2 months, 53% no longer met criteria for PTSD and at 12 months 68% didn't.
Far more efficacious that anything else we have. Powerful tool for psychologic healing.
For those that want LSD but not have to be a criminal I recommend trying 1-P LSD which has the functional class of LSD without being illegal in most countries, happy tripping. If you're on the wall about trying it micro dose and work your way up to something functional.
In the UK we had an act introduced to combat legal highs by making essentially everything illegal and then legalising products, rather than trying to ban legal highs as they were discovered.
Despite this 1P-LSD is still being sold in the UK in a supposedly legal way. It's sold as micro dosing pills that are low enough dose to not produce any psychedelic effects if you just take one. There's nothing stopping you from taking 10, though.
(I have no idea if this supposed workaround would actually be seen as legal if taken to court, but the company has been active and selling in the UK for over a year now, they are a sister company of the well known lizardlabs)
Is LSD schedule I in the US? If so it might be prosecutable under the federal analogue act, although whether that act matters seems to be somewhat debated.
I know some other countries have blanket bans on RCs and analogues as well.
Yes. Most psychedelics are Schedule I. Though to be fair, that's in large part due to the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, of which only 11 UN member states are not party.
Very close / the same in my experience. I've never had the exact same effect even from two doses of LSD from the same sheet, much less different producers, but 1p-lsd was just fine and felt the same to me.
I bought a bit before it was put on the controlled substances list in my country. A good demonstration that legal LSD doesn't end the world: it was legal, it was LSD, the world didn't end!
I urge you to look into Krystle's story more. She's an absolutely vile person who participated in the torture and attempted murder of her boyfriend, Brandon Green.
People like the DEA and the FBI can just make up statistics to make themselves look good and they're reported as fact. The drugs seized had a street value of N million dollars, the supply of LSD went down 95% after his arrest. Good job DEA
For some reasons the feds in the 90s were unusually interested in prosecuting psychedelics. I'm of the opinion that all drugs should be legal, but even if I wasn't, I think I would still question why LSD manufacturers were getting such long sentences around that time. Never really made sense to me.
When I was arrested and searched the police didn’t even find the 200 tabs I had on me.
They found everything else, but LSD is incredibly easy to hide from regular law enforcement.
They found everything else, but in typical stupid-police fashion, they ballsed that up too and ended up entering a nolle prosequi (do not prosecute) at the district court level.
The police prosecutor was sufficiently annoyed, and I was sufficiently elated and thankful for the woman who went before me (case unrelated) and set a strong precedent.
Any chance I get to gloat.
Edit to add: this happened in Australia in 2012. Not keen to repeat the experience.
To make an example out of them and discourage others, prevent a cottage industry from forming. LSD manufacturing scales immensely. One lone wolf could create enough LSD to serve the whole United States demand, maybe even the global demand. LSD is also harder to manufacture. You generally need at least a MS degree and lab experience. The people who fit that profile tend to think about the future enough to respond to the possibiliy of a life sentence.
A friend of mine once asked his TA about (my memory fails here) either how to activate a leaving group or set up a protecting group at a given hypothetical structure. The TA, without batting an eyelid, responded "I think you'll find all the precursors are scheduled, too." The next lab, the TA, presumably having reflected a bit and in the middle of an unrelated discourse, added "remember, always characterise any synthesis you undertake."
Edit: (ratelimit, sorry)
group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also
scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.)
characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product.
TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience)
The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
In the 1970s, my father worked as a research chemist for CSIRO (Australian government research lab), doing research into new pharmaceutical products. One of his colleagues decided it would be fun to manufacture some LSD after hours for personal use. The colleague made an error in calculating the quantities involved and ended up taking an accidental overdose. It didn’t kill him, but he spent some time in a psychiatric ward as a result. (I’m pretty sure my father was too responsible to try any himself.)
My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
You also need precursors (like ET) which is difficult to get. Though China is a pretty good source if you can pull it off (and for other things like safrole, etc.).
My friend who is a pharmaceutical chemist said LSD is actually quite difficult to make, compared to other illicit drugs:
- Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases.
- It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs
Do criminals actually respond to deterrents though? Sam Harris argues otherwise in a couple of podcasts and I tend to agree...people break the law constantly without thought of the penalties. People text while driving when that could kill someone else.
I agree, just to add in my own words -- it gives you a fresh perspective, as if your staring at the world from the eyes of a tree. But is it really that important for those in power to maintain a certain narrative/perception? These sentences sound too rough..
There was definitely unreasonable fear around LSD. I remember my parents not allowing us to use temporary tattoos because they were concerned they might be laced with LSD.
One reason was that the government didn't like the people using the the psychedelics in the first place, and drugs were a convenient justification for going after those people. Marijuana prohibition in the US is the same story.
I came here to make a comment about CIA's Project MKUltra so I'll just add a quote about the use of LSD from the Wikipedia article:
> [...] experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers—"people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.
In the 90s the feds tried to go hard on gun crime and that just got them a bunch of pictures of crispy children on the news, not exactly the look they were going for.
In the world of use it or lose it budgets cracking down on psychedelics seems like a pretty safe way for the DOJ to keep burning money without incurring too much negative publicity.
The Government is very familiar with LSD, having used it for a wide variety of research over an extended period of time. LSD has proven exceedingly effective at behavior modification, and has already been put to use by the wrong hands. So, they know better than anyone as to how dangerous it is: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-ONeill-ebook/dp/B07K6J273Q
Readit News
It's well worth listening to.
The first episode of the series can be heard here: [1],[2]
[1] - https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-609-the-rose-garden-int...
[2] - Direct link to the mp3: https://media.blubrry.com/psychedelic_salon/archive.org/down...
Making psychedelics Schedule 1 set us back decades that could have been spent doing important research on a large number of mental health conditions.
Their most impressive work is in PTSD. In Phase 2 trials, they took people with established PTSD (for years) and undertook ~3 guided psychotherapy sessions with MDMA. Within 2 months, 53% no longer met criteria for PTSD and at 12 months 68% didn't.
Far more efficacious that anything else we have. Powerful tool for psychologic healing.
Hard to tell how effective the treatment is with nothing to compare to.
https://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/05/27/the-government-j...
(I have no idea if this supposed workaround would actually be seen as legal if taken to court, but the company has been active and selling in the UK for over a year now, they are a sister company of the well known lizardlabs)
https://micro1p.com/
I know some other countries have blanket bans on RCs and analogues as well.
Yes. Most psychedelics are Schedule I. Though to be fair, that's in large part due to the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, of which only 11 UN member states are not party.
I bought a bit before it was put on the controlled substances list in my country. A good demonstration that legal LSD doesn't end the world: it was legal, it was LSD, the world didn't end!
AL-LAD has also been spotted in recent years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=r7qliVpGEk0&...
https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut...
In the words of Ali G: You're probably getting ripped off if you have to pay that much.
[0]: https://youtu.be/B6Sg8D2Ci0Q?t=15
yes
My recollection was the weight of the blotter paper was considered as the drug itself and that easily increased the federal sentencing guidelines.
That is incredible. For a crime that harms noone.
They found everything else, but LSD is incredibly easy to hide from regular law enforcement.
They found everything else, but in typical stupid-police fashion, they ballsed that up too and ended up entering a nolle prosequi (do not prosecute) at the district court level.
The police prosecutor was sufficiently annoyed, and I was sufficiently elated and thankful for the woman who went before me (case unrelated) and set a strong precedent.
Any chance I get to gloat.
Edit to add: this happened in Australia in 2012. Not keen to repeat the experience.
Which is of course the entire reason for switching away from using sugar cubes and to blotter paper as delivery media.
Edit: (ratelimit, sorry)
group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.)
characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product.
TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience)
The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
- Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases.
- It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs
- Purification is challenging as well.
ergotamine doesn't grow on trees lol
Psychedelics = hippies = anti-war left.
A well-known and somewhat similar "unusual interest" was in prosecuting crack versus coke.
When you look for racism everywhere, you find it everywhere. Let's be more objective, eh?
So does meditation... just that it typically takes way longer :)
> [...] experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers—"people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
In the world of use it or lose it budgets cracking down on psychedelics seems like a pretty safe way for the DOJ to keep burning money without incurring too much negative publicity.
This is why the sentencing was so harsh.
Please provide evidence for this claim.