• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
A tale and a half:

SUBTERRANEAN PSYCHONAUT
by Michael Mason, Chris Sandel and Lee Roy Chapman
07/28/2013

He stood naked by the roadside with a blanket draped around his hips, feebly reaching out for the glimmering cars as they passed in the morning light. He was almost too hideous to look at: Purple and black tracks streaked across his frail limbs, and his hollow eyes peered out from a pale, gray head shaved bald, eyebrows and all. Brandon Andres Green was not from hell, not exactly. He was from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Over the course of the past six days, Green had been tied up in a Tulsa hotel room, where his mind was loaded with powerful psychoactives and his body ravaged. He was then driven 500 miles south and abandoned in a Texas field at night. Green had crawled through the darkness, the occasional moan of a distant car his only guide. Every few feet, he collapsed from exhaustion. By morning, he reached the road. He grasped at fistfuls of air, hoping that someone might notice him.

It was 8:11 a.m. when Patrolman Neal Mora of the Texas City Police Department passed. He wasn’t quite sure what he saw. He turned around, pulled over to the shoulder, then stepped out of his patrol car and approached the man cautiously.

“Help me, please,” Green gasped.

The emergency techs showed up and loaded Green gingerly into the ambulance. They ran a few tests on his vitals. He had about 45 minutes left to live.
Green was no innocent, not back then. He was making a few hundred dollars a week selling weed and Ecstasy in Tulsa when he met the wrong girl, who introduced him to the wrong guy. He couldn’t have known that he opened the gate to an underworld populated with federal agents, clandestine chemistry, and mystical orders. A world in which one man, Gordon Todd Skinner, felt at home.


Continued at Length:
http://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut/
 
The extraordinary story of the Welsh LSD ring that supplied the world
Columnist Carolyn Hitt looks back at the remarkable Operation Julie

BY CAROLYN HITT
13:27, 27 MAR 2017
UPDATED 09:48, 28 MAR 2017

It’s the anniversary of Operation Julie this weekend – one of the biggest drugs investigations the world has ever seen. It involved 800 officers drawn from 11 police forces who went undercover for more than a year to break an LSD ring that spread through 100 countries, provided 60% of global supply and was worth – in today’s money – half a billion pounds.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/news-opinion/extraordinary-story-welsh-lsd-ring-12802907
 
I received the largest dose of psilocybin ever administered in a published FDA study.
Dose #3: 59 mg

By Steve E.

A 3-part series on one participant's experience in the Pharmacokinetics of Psilocybin in Normal Adult Volunteers study at the University of Wisconsin. Read about Dose #1 and Dose #2.


After experiencing the flood of emotions from dose number two and the journey of the dark soul in dose number one, I was thinking, “I have experienced my darkness, my demons, the underworld. I have purged my emotional blockage. I am ready to experience the divine. White light. Unity consciousness. Yes!”

http://www.psymposia.com/magazine/largest-dose-psilocybin-fda-study-3
 
I thought that Sid Barret took the largest single hit of LSD ? .. he never came down from that trip I heard ?
 
Psilocybin is not LSD.
Yeah I know that X .. in my past, we all experimented with loads of both as well as mescalin, jimson weed and fly agaric .. and other stuff. I prefer shrooms, an average 4 hour trip instead of an LSD 12 hour one ..

edit: I don't 'play' with or use drugs anymore .. they're all dangerous when they're abused. Drugs are bad mmmkay :creepy:

 
Last edited:
The mind-altering trip of acid countess Amanda Feilding
A psychedelic revolutionary

Amanda Feilding drilled a hole in her head and fell in love with a pigeon. Now, after five decades of pioneering research into drugs, scientists are finally catching up to her ideas.
Posted Wednesday 26th April, 2017

Evening light is breaking through the leaves of London’s Battersea Park, where three friends – Amanda Feilding, Joe Mellen and Bart Huges – are tripping on acid.

It’s the height of the 1960s and the group are talking animatedly about their shared passions – the ego mechanism, cerebral circulation – as a pigeon named Birdie nestles into Amanda’s shoulder, cooing affectionately and pecking her neck.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/amanda-feilding-acid-psychedelic-research-drugs-pioneer/
 
I'm not endorsing the use of such drugs - but this is quite interesting in what it says about consciousness and the sense of self:

Psychedelic drugs induce 'heightened state of consciousness', brain scans show

Brain scans have revealed the first evidence for what appears to be a heightened state of consciousness in people who took psychedelic drugs in the name of science.

Researchers at the University of Sussex and Imperial College, London, measured the activity of neurons in people’s brains as the drugs took hold. Similar measurements have shown that when people are asleep or under anaesthetic, their neurons tend to fire in a more predictable way than when they are awake.

“What we find is that under each of these psychedelic compounds, this specific measure of global conscious level goes up, so it moves in the other direction. The neural activity becomes more unpredictable,” said Anil Seth, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex. “Until now, we’ve only ever seen decreases compared to the baseline of the normal waking state.”

Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher at Imperial College who took part in the study, said the sudden increase in randomness in brain activity appeared to reflect a deeper and richer conscious state.

“People tend to associate phrases like ‘a higher state of consciousness’ with hippy speak and mystical nonsense. This is potentially the beginning of the demystification, showing its physiological and biological underpinnings,” he said. “Maybe this is a neural signature of the mind opening.”


Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science...psychedelic-drug-trip-lsd-ketamine-psilocybin
 
I'm not endorsing the use of such drugs - but this is quite interesting in what it says about consciousness and the sense of self:



Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science...psychedelic-drug-trip-lsd-ketamine-psilocybin
Psychedelic drugs increase a state of consciousness in the same way that putting super fuel in a Ford Fiesta does .. it'll drive faster for a while and the it'll burn out then nobody will want that car. We're flesh and blood machines, we are what we eat .. I tried to talk a 16 year old out of dropping his first acid last year, the last time I saw him, he didn't even speak to me and was giving me knowing 'dick head' looks sat in a pub room with older blokes that were clearly drug 'grooming' him .. he'll have to learn the hard way it seems .. I tried .. I'm not getting anymore involved. Drugs are bad.
 
That's one of the smartest things you've ever said on here, Swifty.
 
That's one of the smartest things you've ever said on here, Swifty.
I promise not to let it happen again, sorry ..

(I'm sending you a pm of something extremely stupid to atone)
 
...Is there a scale for drug experiences? How does that work, then? The more f***ed up you are afterwards, the higher the scale, or does it depend upon how diminished your ego is during the experience?...

Well, for the heat in a chilli there is the Scofield Scale. The higher the Scofield the hotter it is.

So may I suggest the Strawberryfield Scale for tripping.

INT21
 
...Is there a scale for drug experiences? How does that work, then? The more f***ed up you are afterwards, the higher the scale, or does it depend upon how diminished your ego is during the experience?...

Yes ... There have been multiple scales developed to try and rate / rank hallucinogenic effects, but they were typically designed to evaluate experiences involving a single particular hallucinogen.

For example ...

A review of 3 scales developed (half a century ago) to gauge LSD effects is included in this online article:

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/rjspap.htm

(see section entitled Measurement of Hallucinogen Effects in Humans )

The more recent Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS) mentioned there has been applied in studies to evaluate whether it can yield reliable rankings across multiple drugs, as described in this abstract:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11295326
 
Last edited:
Psychedelic drugs increase a state of consciousness in the same way that putting super fuel in a Ford Fiesta does .. it'll drive faster for a while and the it'll burn out then nobody will want that car.

Just to be clear, I have never taken any myself. I am just interested in what research people are doing into consciousness. When growing up, there was an unfortunate person walking around my neighborhood who had fried his brain on LSD - a sight that put me off ever taking any.
 
Wombat,

Same goes for me.

I often wondered what it is like to experience the effects of LSD. But knowing what it does and that you can't just switch it off is enough to deter me.

INT21
 
When I was a student, I knew a mature student who told me he'd done pretty much all the hard drugs and loads of LSD.
He had that thousand-yard stare and burnt out personality of someone who'd seen too much. He seemed to be drained of emotion. Very odd. Very talented guitarist, so it hadn't given him too much brain damage.
I found his website a year or two ago. He seems to have straightened out his life. :)
 
Nice to hear that someone made it out the other side.

The acid era produced some good music, but at a high cost.

INT21
 
Cary Grant: how 100 acid trips in Tinseltown 'changed my life'
At the height of his fame, Cary Grant turned to LSD therapy for help. He later claimed the drug saved him, but did it also spell the end of his career?
Xan Brooks
Friday 12 May 2017 09.00 BST

Grant’s adventures in psychedelia – an estimated 100 sessions, spanning the years 1958-1961 – provide the basis for Becoming Cary Grant, a fascinating documentary that plays at next week’s Cannes film festival. It’s a film that takes its lead from Grant himself, undressing and probing the star of North by Northwestto the point where the very title risks feeling like a red herring. “Like all documentary makers, we started out looking at the construction of Cary Grant,” says producer Nick Ware. “But we ended up deconstructing him through the LSD sessions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...in-tinseltown-changed-my-life-lsd-documentary
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Cary's adventures in counter-culture have been well-known for a long time - especially as he went to some lengths to go on the record as an advocate for what was still "therapy." When it became associated with dropping-out, he lost his enthusiasm, as Holmes might have done when Morphine became the beastly Heroin.

The new film will feature some rather anodyne home-movie footage of the former Mr Leach in his sunset years. It appears to dodge the Randy Scott question, which has been well-aired, I suppose. The review contains the memorable image from one of Cary's trips, in which a giant penis takes off from Planet Earth, like a rocket.

It misses out the weirdest of his visions: he was blowing up boy-babies by their pizzles and knotting them so they could go floating off into the sky! :eek:
 
Last edited:
LSD king Owsley Stanley’s ‘Sonic Journals’ surface after 50 years
Sam Whiting Jun 13, 2017

Way out in the western hills of Sonoma County where no one can hear it, Owsley “Bear” Stanley’s personal speaker system is cranking Doc and Merle Watson’s version of “Tennessee Stud,” recorded by Bear at the Boarding House in 1974.
With father and son Watson trading flat-pick leads, the sound coming out of those speakers is too clean and rich not to be shared with neighbors and everyone else. So that is what father and son Stanley are finally doing.

http://m.sfgate.com/music/article/LSD-king-Owsley-Stanley-s-Sonic-Journals-11209700.php
 
The latest issue of New Scientist has an article about people using micro-doses of hallucinogens, as a general booster at work. I think. I didn't read it.
 
I'm reading Christopher Isherwood's Diaries: The Sixties. During November 1963 Aldous Huxley is dying but doesn't realise/accept it. He was given small doses of LSD.

The day before he died he finished and revised an article on Shakespeare and Religion. Just before he died he asked for LSD, was given it and died without pain.
 
Huxley died on the same day as C.S. Lewis and JFK.
 
Just to be clear, I have never taken any myself. I am just interested in what research people are doing into consciousness. When growing up, there was an unfortunate person walking around my neighborhood who had fried his brain on LSD - a sight that put me off ever taking any.

Did the sight of alcoholics having DT's scare you away from drinking? I've been taking mushrooms and acid for 25 years and I would love to put my brain side by side with heavy drinker and see whose brain is more "fried".
 
Did the sight of alcoholics having DT's scare you away from drinking? I've been taking mushrooms and acid for 25 years and I would love to put my brain side by side with heavy drinker and see whose brain is more "fried".

Well, I never saw an alcoholic having DTs - but I have seen alcoholics up close and that is scary. And I will admit to having had rather too much to drink for a while. And that was scary too.

But I don't want to judge anyone's behavior or choice of drug (if any).
 
I've recently had a renewed interest in DMT, I think that I overlooked how fascinating it is.

A DMT trip 'feels like dying' - and scientists now agree
A new scientific study suggests strong similarities between near death experiences and the psychedelic drug

Ben Bryant
14 September 2018

The chill of the fluid flows through Iona's arm as the DMT - N,N-Dimethyltryptamine - is pumped into her bloodstream.

She is in a treatment room at the Imperial College Clinical Research Facility in London, taking part in a scientific study into the effects of illegal hallucinogen DMT. She's in a chair, eye mask on, cannula poking out of her forearm. The lights are dimmed and a specially commissioned ambient soundtrack plays in the background. Chris Timmermann, a psychologist and neuroscientist who researches psychedelic drugs, stands nearby.

Inside Iona’s brain, enzymes work like cleaners mopping up a monsoon to break down the drug flooding her system. The hallucinations hit her like a hurricane. A sense of dread envelops her.

“My eyes were closed but there was so much going on that it was really hard to focus," Iona says afterwards. "The one image I remember was lots of books opening and rainbows shooting out of them."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/dd52796e-5935-414e-af0c-de9686d02afa
 
Also did anyone else read this article in the papers recently about Paul McCartney's experience on DMT?

Paul McCartney 'saw God' after taking DMT during Beatles heyday
'I was humbled'
Roisin O'Connor Music Correspondent
Sunday 2 September 2018 15:17

“We were immediately nailed to the sofa,” he recalled. “And I saw God, this amazing towering thing, and I was humbled. And what I’m saying is, that moment didn’t turn my life around, but it was a clue."

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-...beatles-new-album-egpyt-station-a8519461.html
 
Interesting that he shared the same hallucination with another person! Or thought he did.


Yes I thought the same thing. Synchronised hallucinations, I don't think much research has been done on this type of phenomenon. Very strange and interesting. I do believe that the tryptamine psychedelics (such as DMT, mushrooms-Psilocin etc.,) are very unusual and can produce strange phenomenon, especially when two (or more) people who are very close to each other take them together and experience the trip within close proximity to each other. Maybe under certain circumstances the drug can bridge a stronger psychical connection between two people who already have a pre-existing psychical link developed over time.
 
Back
Top