Drugs + political epistemology
•High and Mighty: How People in Power Use Drugs, 2024
•Drugism, 2022
•we're here, we're high: essays on drugs, 2018
🍄💊🌷💉📝📚
Here it is folks. This has actually been going on for years on the DL. now it's out in the open. the primary purpose is to extend troops' operability on the field (i.e. more war!) and to reduce costs associated with healthcare for PTSD and other mental health issues.
imagine if psychedelic heads dropped their judgmental bullshit and embraced people who use other drugs with open arms. this movement could make so much progress so fast.
drug activists, we ALL need to study up on our political theory. read some fucking marx. read bakunin. read alfred mccoy's politics of heroin. learn about the history of social movements. we have so much work to do ppl
Thrilled to announce I’ll be joining the graduate school at Kansas State University to pursue an MA in sociology!📝📚✨ I’ll study under Travis Linnemann, author of Meth Wars and The Horror of Police, who does incredible work at the juncture of sociology and critical criminology.
The Doors of Perception is like the ultimate noob book. Huxley literally tripped ONCE before writing it. Acts like somehow he now understand the secrets of the mind and suggests mescaline will totally change things, for the better.
here's my prob w/ all the stuff about using "psychedelics" to treat "addiction": both concepts are pseudoscience. the trope is a really elaborate marketing scheme to sell drugs, not solid science.
@ManishaKrishnan
combining k + opioids + getting in a hot tub is practically asking for an accident. not the 1st time someone has drowned w/ k in their system.
@hilaryagro
there's a word for this (the biased judgment of drugs and/or the people who use them) which i invite you to use. it may help get the idea across the people. (btw i didn't coin it so i'm not claiming credit here, just sharing):
soon shrooms will be so potent that u can trip on one bite. it will be like what happened to weed in the '90s/early 2000s where potency increased by like 5-10x.
calling someone an "addict" or referring to their drug use as "addiction" is verbal abuse; it depersonalizes the person on the receiving end of the language, turns them into an object to be relegated to the gutters of the collective mind
@vijaygajera
Great research! 👏👏👏 Thank you for sharing. If anyone is interested, here's a thread about the US side of the Indian-Chinese opium business and the numerous prominent political families from the US that made their fortunes from the trade. Very related:
this is so dope! a video of what it might look like if coffee were (still) illegal. I love the facts at the end about the various examples of coffee prohibition in history. a great illustration of the absurdity--and inhumanity--of modern drug laws☕️☕️☕️🖤✨
Coffee made me understand why drug criminalisation harms people. So, my team helped me capture that in a short video. If you believe drug use must be a crime, please give coffee a chance. I don't drink coffee but my loved ones do 1/
the very notion that the psychedelic experience is based on ineffable mystical truths is precisely the same mechanism which allows it to be abused and manipulated by people in positions of authority
This project is presented as a potential solution to war, but in reality it will have the opposite function. It will be used apologetically, as an excuse that people are "doing something" about the conflict. It provides the spectacle of action, without any real action.
Excited that our group will be publishing the first scoping review of psychedelics for chronic pain. I'll post the full article link when it drops next week!
“The War on Drugs is a Tragedy”
An interview with
@NuriaCalzadaA
From DIY harm reduction to the United Nations, Núria Calzada is a soldier in the War on Drugs…and she’s fighting for the people.
most so-called "psychedelic" advocates have their sense of identity + self-worth so intimately tied up w/ the movement that it is deeply uncomfortable--painful, even--for them to come to terms with the fact that the movement was and is a domestic military/intelligence operation.
Was just talking w/ someone yesterday, we speculated that MAPS PBC would soon change their name as they shift into commercial pharmaceutical production. Figured it would happen sometime in the next year. Didn't think it would happen literally a few hours later. Wow.
MAPS Public Benefit Corporation has begun accepting investors and changed it's name to Lykos Therapeutics.
Here are a number of references from the Autumn 2020 MAPS Bulletin which seem quite at-odds with this decision. 🧵
1/8
Honored + excited to share that I have interviewed Martin A. Lee for my new book.
High and Mighty will continue where Acid Dreams left off, connecting the dots between the military/intelligence establishment and today's drug culture.
🔥🔥🔥
Reading Acid Dreams on the rec of
@vincent_rado
and assumed it was from ~2015 for its sophisticated historical materialist analysis of sociopolitical set & setting, right wing psychedelia, etc. Was SHOCKED when I found out it was published in 1985. Stunningly ahead of its time
ppl will realize that a) these drugs don't solve all their problems, and b) these drugs can actually lead to more problems, even when proper care is taken with them
pharmaceutical psychedelic firms like microdosing because it reduces the inherent risk in the act of taking tryps/phens and is therefore more difficult to causally link to adverse effects. from an insurance perspective, this is more desirable than large doses which may incur risk
Alfred McCoy: smeared/harassed for publishing evidence of govt involvement in
#heroin
trade
Gary Webb: lost his life for publishing evidence of govt involvement in
#cocaine
trade
John Thaler: survived multiple attempts at his life for finding govt involvement in
#fentanyl
trade
it's wild how many different medical terms exist to say "i don't approve of your drug use"
addiction, dependency, substance use disorder, the list goes on....
they will also realize that the entire push for these drugs has been backed by war-hungry billionaires who don't actually give an ounce of a s**t about your mental health.
overdoses are near-death experiences, which are psychedelic, therefore everyone who has survived an overdose has had an ego-shattering psychedelic experience, and it's way past time for y'all to fuckin realize this
soooo this VC firm run by former State Dept, CIA, and Wall St people funds *most* of the psychedelic startups that are even remotely successful. interesting, huh?
What is your favorite
#harmreduction
technique or principal? Drop yours below. All
#drugs
and approaches welcome. I'll share mine tomorrow :) Let's learn together. We all have knowledge to share. Share that knowledge! 👇👇👇✊🖤🔥
Starting to think med students should be required to take classes in sociology, economics, and political science so they understand wtf actually happens when patients leave their office
This is *such* an important point and i think about it alllllll the time. historical amnesia. by my recollection, the fent started getting big in the US ~2015. so we're coming up on a decade.... ❤️🩹🔥
Thinking about how much i learned from older heads, many of whom are now gone😭
@vincent_rado
Those of us that are still alive have a lot of wisdom to share with the younger/newer generations of drug users but if drug war policies continue to kill us in record numbers, today’s youth have no chance at all. This is year what of the “OD crisis”?
So many incredibly powerful substances that just happened to escape the WASP prohibitionist paradigm in the early 1900s are therefore never included in political discussions of drug use. Selective bias to the max.
It's worth noting that many of the biggest folks in the field have direct connections to actual Nazis, students of Nazis, CIA affiliates, etc. Most of the formative research on psychedelics was initially inspired by Nazi drug experiments in WW2.
It's 2070. Net-zero trauma has finally been achieved.
But a new [traumatic experience] has nonetheless manifested in your consciousness so you open the MAPS APP™ to get back on the right track.
The virtual e-therapist chatbot, named Rick, springs to life as a hologram being
hold up--Rick Strassman just shared my piece about him on Facebook calling it "unexpected" and "accurate"!
my mind is bloooowwwwwnnn right now haha
🤯🤯🤯
How To Organize A Psychedelic Conference, 2022 edition:
Step 1. Ban a bunch of journalists.
Step 2. Trash banned journalists on stage w/ fancy powerpoint.
Hamilton Morris of COMPASS defends industry patents and mocks "moralising, hand-wringing" articles about the "psychedelic-industrial complex". Criticises
@shayla__love
, describes
@NeseLSD
&
@brian_pace
's article on 'Right-Wing Psychedelia' as "insane, so absurd".
#WonderlandMiami
if ur looking for dope political lit to get into, i *highly* recommend checking out the (huge) catalog at
@PMPressOrg
. i just finished Occult Features of Anarchism by
@ELagalisse
and it was electrifying⚡️ though-provoking🤯refreshing✨
O yea, everything is 50% off today! 😮👀📚✊
drug activists, we ALL need to study up on our political theory. read some fucking marx. read bakunin. read alfred mccoy's politics of heroin. learn about the history of social movements. we have so much work to do ppl
Rick Doblin used to brag about this at events but acted like it was a secret that he wasn't supposed to know. Yet he mentioned it repeatedly during public talks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“There’s a lot of stigma associated with pain and how it’s treated. If we could change that, that would affect how we view a very important part of our lives."
Inside Vertex’s decades-long quest to develop a new class of non-opioid painkillers:
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing the White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose.
Organizations and businesses—big and small, public and private—all have a role to play in beating the overdose crisis.
Join us:
notice it tends to be a lot of professionals in medicine and drug policy who do this. the most powerful ppl in the field tend to also be the least knowledgeable. but they're the ones who get interviewed for the New York Times and whose opinions shape policy, etc.
Super trippy seeing Drugism on a list next to books by Huxley, the McKennas, Strassman, and Shulgin 😮 But I gladly accept 😎
Big thanks to the team at
@Tripsittermag
for checking out my work + sharing it with others! Much love 🙏💜✨
Psychedelics open the mind, improve the way we think and see the world, and help us unlock a greater level of insight and capacity for critical thinking
Here are 15 of the most impactful & interesting reads for the psychedelic-inspired 📚🍄
Question...does the MDMA still work after you find out it was your own government that killed your family, just in case they *might* have been Palestinians? How much ayahuasca would you need to "process" and "heal" from that?
[Asking for MAPS...]
The evidence Israel killed its own citizens on 7 October — My latest investigative piece.
Full article:
Highlights
🔴An Israeli army veteran has admitted Israel probably killed some of the 1,200 Israelis that the government claims were murdered by Hamas
US study finds that medication assisted treatment has reduced risk of death by drug poisoning. Abstinence-based treatment has higher risk than no treatment.
the fact that someone in a position of authority would tell me to "lay off the DMT" is itself a marvelously compelling example of the ways that power relations affect our conception of drug use.
Heads tend to mostly talk about The Doors of Perception, not his later work like Brave New World Revisited. Maybe the really nerdy ones mention Island sometimes.
People ralso arely discuss Huxley's family, which was chock-full of elite eugenicists who wanted to control humanity.
"don't worry bro, we have the drones do all the dirty work. u get to sit back and play with this joystick. just pretend it's a video game. if it gets too heavy for ya we got some molly in the back." *winks, pats on back.* *Small screen shows civilians dying en masse in real time*
the irony of it all is that if Newsom had approved safe consumption sites and immediately legalized psychedelics his presidential prospects would actually improve *immensely* but whatever...he DGAF about voters, he's after funders. they're who decide elections, after all...
Some people will die as a result of misuse of these drugs. Others will find zero benefit. Some will be helped, and the media narrative will focus exclusively on them for the next few years.
Lykos is just the new name for MAPS PBC, but nonetheless this is...very interesting, to say the least. apparently the removal of the records can be gleaned from the history of changes. many of us have expressed concern about the suppression of data, and here it is, in action:
Why is Lykos Therapeutics, the new owner of MAPS, actively removing records from , particularly in the wake of
@US_FDA
priority review of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD? Is it to prevent public scrutiny before approval?
#Myanmar
is 1 of the world's top producers of illicit
#ketamine
, which is produced + distributed by militias that are affiliated w/ Myanmar's military junta which violently took over the country a couple yrs ago. The junta is supported by drug trafficking
#fentanyl
#heroin
#meth
their entire profession is based on mindfuckery, rooted in the (false) idea that drug use is not a human right. but it is. no matter how many old yt dudes in lab coats try to tell u otherwise. remember that.
i mean, potatoes technically have nicotine in them which is rated by many to be the most "addictive" substance in the world; also dairy products agonize opioid receptors so yea