Higher Logic

I'm not sure what the point of this is, but I wrote it while under the influence of cannabis, a friend to all. Take it as you will, and take from it what you must.

What exactly are drugs? Are they purely recreational or medicinal? Perhaps Marston Bates has most correctly defined the term, as “almost all materials taken for other than nutritional reasons.” Every culture, no matter how advanced, has an inventory of drugs and a medical system. Drugs are perceived differently from culture to culture, which results in different effects on the users despite their chemical makeup. A famous German toxicologist, Lewis Lewin, classified drugs according to their effects:

Euphoria
Sedatives, which reduce mental activity and induce mental and physical comfort, such as morphine and cocaine.

Phantastica
Hallucinogens that produce symptoms of altered brain states, such as cannabis and mescal buttons.

Inebriantia
Drugs that produce an initial stage of cerebral excitation, followed by a state of depression, such as alcohol and ether.

Hypnotica
Sleep producers like chloral, sulphonol, and other barbiturates.

Excitania
Mental stimulants known as analeptics, or any plant that contains caffeine or nicotine.

Ataraxics
A more recent addition, which would include tranquilizers.

Drugs are nothing new. Every category of drug was known to the so-called primitive people. In fact, the history of the use of these drugs is so ancient that it would require an academic exercise just to figure out their origins. The switch from natural drugs to synthetics occurred during the Second World War, when natural products were scarce.

The poet Baudelaire described drugs as “artificial paradises.” Using Lewin’s categories, they can be more simply put as dreaming sleep, energetic wakefulness, well-being, drunkenness, and inspired imagination.

In palmistry, there is a small line near the bottom of the edge of the palm called the paradise line; however, some refer to it as the poison line. It’s supposed to indicate a person’s capacity to enjoy pleasure. Drugs have the characteristic of being paradisiacal and poisonous.

Drugs encourage strange forms of narcissism, in that they attempt to regain paradise. This desire is a fundamental ambition of human nature, in which every religion encourages.

Drugs have been used the world over for entertainment, therapy, religious observation, and cures for physical and spiritual illnesses. There are so many drugs in the world; it would be hard to list them all. In South America alone, there are over 80 plants that one could consider a drug; these would include the vine Banisteria Caapi, the pepper Piptadenia, cocaine, and even a caterpillar found in bamboo stems. There’s the peyote cactus, from which we get mescaline, to a species of Ipomea, which contains a relative of lysergic acid, or LSD; there’s the psilocybin mushroom, which was known as “god’s flesh,” and the Datura Starmonium, or thornapple, which contains scopolamine and atropine.

The use of drugs around the world makes it plain that man is a discontented animal beset by psychological and physical troubles, by boredom and spiritual ambitions. Drugs relive pain and illness, and more importantly one’s perception.

Drugs bring one to a state of mind that normally requires hours of intense focus, such as meditation, thus they are often used by shamans as an instant means of reaching certain states. Tobacco, for instance, was used throughout the Americas for pleasure and to aid in concentration. Shamans, or medicine men, used to smoke large amounts at one sitting to reach ecstatic experiences. The combination of tobacco smoke and over breathing, which causes oxygen intoxication, produces a giddiness and nausea which most people experience which their first cigarette. In fact, giddiness is a universal symptom of ecstasy; the word itself comes from the Old English gidig, meaning possessed by a god.

If a man was to take a drug in private, it was considered a fault. Ritual setting serves a huge purpose in one’s perception of the drug they are doing, because it directs energies into specific channels and puts paradise into relation with objects in the outside world by establishing a dogmatic plan within the imagination.

Never let a drug put you in a passive state, for once that happens you are no longer one that dreams, but one that is dreamed.

Jean Cocteau said it best when he said no one becomes an addict unless one make’s a pact with the drug: a pact in which one dedicates one’s will to the power of the drug.

Freud concluded, after ten years of cocaine use, that the central reason for drug use was to overcome depression and to find a father-substitute. He suggested that the effects are not due to direct stimulation, but rather the removal of certain censors in the brain. In terms of cocaine, it removes anxiety, which has to do with the superego. By removing the censor, cocaine removes anxiety. These removals of censors allow one to follow lines of reason into the subconscious without mental censors putting up resistance. Freud escaped addiction of cocaine, while one of his friends did not. For this, Freud suggests that his friend only did so because he found a method by which the effects of the drug became subservient to the force of his intellectual drive; he had created a special form of ritual.

Essentially, what is being said is that unless you have a force to direct the energies of a drug, you are powerless to the will of the drug, and thus become an addict.

Drugs that are hallucinogenic in nature, at least according to Lewin’s categorization of drugs, are said to be the ones used in religions, rather than narcotic or stupefying drugs. Hallucinogens are said to put psychological anxieties into touch with the musculature, and what is dissociated is the ego from the imagination, rather than the imagination from anxiety. This is the main reason why hallucinogens are not physically addictive, in that they do not inhibit anxiety.

Everyone has had a bad trip at least once in their life. These trips are caused by the anxiety which the approach of such a psychological dismemberment evokes, and which generates an increasing feeling of loss and horror when it cannot be properly discharged. A really bad trip has certain similarities to a schizophrenic attack, which makes sense when you consider what really happens during a bad trip.

The psilocybin mushroom is said to have a depersonalization effect on one man, but a dematerialization effect on another. Is that, at the end of the day, why drugs are secretly prohibited? Rather, why certain drugs are prohibited, in that they remove the need for material objects. Surely, after smoking cannabis, you have noticed a change in the way you perceive things. For the better it may be for some, to others perhaps not. It penetrates material obstacles; it frees the consciousness from its bodily entanglements.

Drugs have always been used to search for power, a power that can be used to enlarge the capacity of the imagination and to bring about change in society. When society changes, drugs give a certain life to the imagination, which is being stripped, and a confidence in its ability to live in. Cannabis has certainly been used this way. In Jamaica, for instance, the Rastafarians smoke it for religious and political reasons. Half a century ago, cannabis was also the motive cause for a new religion being set up by the Baluba of the Congo. They destroyed their houses and proclaimed the drug to be a power under which they could live in perpetual friendship and protected from calamity. While alcohol is legal and cannabis is illegal in the America, the Balubas prohibited alcohol and those that were caught drinking were condemned to smoke a number of pipes of cannabis in order to reform their misconceptions. Has the greater American population fallen to the misconceptions that alcohol provides? What drive does alcohol provide, what power does it emit and how should it be channeled? Should it even be channeled at all?

A drug is nothing unless it kindles the spirit in a man. A man’s spirit is not his own, but a gift made to him, and as a gift it has a nature and a morality of its own. I often question the spirit of alcohol, and if the power it has is the reason why our society has reached the point we are seeing now. Power, the love of money, greed, are these the things that alcohol provides?

William James, the spiritual forefather of the “Flower Children” movement in the 1960s, regarded consciousness as having different levels. There is the normal waking consciousness, or the rational consciousness as we call it, but there are other types of consciousness that are blurred, in that there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different than the rational one we choose to live and think with. This statement concludes that an explanation of the universe cannot be final if it disregards other forms of consciousness.

Drugs are a tool that brings other space-time dimensions into focus. People must be trained to use the tool, so that when a situation arrives they can examine it from other dimensions of reality.

What is the distinction between science and religion? Some theorize that magic lead to religion, and religion lead to science. Science concerns itself with the measurement of energy processes and sequences of energy transformations. It answers questions based on objective, observed, public data. Religion, however, involves a systematic attempt to answer the same questions subjectively, in terms of direct personal experience. Science is concerned with knowing, while religion is concerned with being. Religions serve to raise the level of being, to expand the consciousness.

Psychedelics have no common feature that unites them. For instance, cannabinol, a major component of cannabis, appears to produce no effect on the human psyche. However, the closely related delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol is highly active.

At the end of the day, only personal experience with a drug can bring truth home to their votaries. One cannot tell you a drug is bad or that it is addictive or will make you mad. It is ultimately up to the user to decide what is and is not.

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lijnbaansgracht

Excellent thread and all done under the influence. I will read it again after I get tested next week and can light-up again for my first bowl in 8 weeks. Don't really need to light-up to get into this because it speaks to a lot of the real problems we are expierencing today. People are trying to place all of their importance on financial success in their lives and then passing it down, generation to generation. We are people dying every day, not from malnutrtion or starvation, we can fix that, and will, but not if we keep dying in spirit. We will not fix anything with alcohol or cocaine or stupifying drugs but maybe with drugs that revitalize our spirits creatively, open our minds past their training of conformity or line standing. We all know this, however surpressed it has become, and must return to it or die. I will continue later, maybe, if all goes well.

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The secret of life is in enjoying the passage of time.

NeoArcadian

Nicely done Higher Logic.

Truely it is up the the people with experience.

One person that has never tried but only studied marijuana can not tell you what it will do to him or what it will feel like. He barely has an idea even.

Even the most experienced stoner can only have a general idea of exactly what weed is going to do to him he next time he smokes it.

That is kind of what makes it so fun though. Things change and 99% of the time they change for the better. Either way though, nicely done.

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"Hammered like a blacksmith, Stoned like a mountain." ME.

Richi

and

Exactly how drugs should be used, and then none of them would cause any problems.

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Richi

Bumping an old favorite to the top...

sterbo

Sometimes drug use causes enormous problems.
It's not the fault of the drugs of course, and I don't believe drug use should be illegal, but humans and drugs?
Heaven and Hell on a daily basis,
that's why we're so attracted; constant conflict to define our soul...

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Thought2012

Hmm, i just think if the person is unhappy, he will smoke and feel lost until he comes down

If the person is happy, he will have a fun high