Reddit reviews Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse

Excellent points. This book is a well-written, excellent resource for anyone interested in drugs and society.

I looked over Wiki, and it's not there. It must be in this book
http://www.amazon.com/Illegal-Drugs-Complete-History-Chemistry/dp/0452285054
Awesome read. I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn everything about drugs read it. My school library had it. I don't even like reading and I couldn't put it down.

I went to one AA meeting when I first got clean and never went back. I understand people have found support and success in it but to me, personally, I felt it only increased the stigma of drug addicts as these broken hopeless people barely hanging on by a thread. It's an outdated system that relies on little science or attempting to progress the participants and relies more on holding people in place and focusing on the past. Instead I just worked towards becoming a normal person. Here are some of the resources I used:

r/Fitness - Getting Started: Exercise is probably the #1 thing that will aid you in recovering. It can help your brain learn to produce normal quantities of dopamine again as well as improve your heath, mood, well being and confidence.

Meetup: You can use this site to find people in your area with similar interests. I found a hiking group and a D&D group on here which I still regularly join.

Craigslist: Same as above - look for groups, activities, volunteer work, whatever.

Diet

This will be the other major player in your recovery. Understanding your diet will allow you to improve your health,mood, energy, and help recover whatever damage the drugs may have done to your body.

How Not To Die Cookbook

Life Changing Foods

The Plant Paradox

Power Foods For The Brain

Mental Health

Understand whats going on inside your head and how to deal with it is also an important step to not only recovery but enjoying life as a whole.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

The Emotional Life Of Your Brain

Furiously Happy

The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

Educational

If you are like me you probably felt like a dumbass when you first got clean. I think retraining your brain on learning, relearning things you may have forgot after long term drug use, and just learning new things in general will all help you in recovery. Knowledge is power and the more you learn the more confident in yourself and future learning tasks you become.

Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse

Why Nations Fails

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

Thinking, Fast and Slow

The Financial Peace Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Restoring Your Family's Financial Health

Continued Education / Skills Development

EdX: Take tons of free college courses.

Udemy: Tons of onine courses ranging from writing to marketing to design, all kinds of stuff.

Cybrary: Teach yourself everything from IT to Network Security skills

Khan Academy: Refresh on pretty much anything from highschool/early college.

There are many more resources available these are just ones I myself have used over the past couple years of fixing my life. Remember you don't have to let your past be a monkey on your back throughout the future. There are plenty of resources available now-a-days to take matters into your own hands.

*Disclaimer: I am not here to argue about anyone's personal feelings on AA**

Here's a list of books that will help you.

Drugs and Human Behavior Not for the faint reader. It's technical yet understandable. It's a booked used for a college level class.

Illegal Drugs This is a more comprehensive book that tells you a lot of things.

Depending on the drug you're looking to understand there's various forums, wiki's and so forth you can use.

this is the great source

It doesn't work like you think it works. US federal drug law immediately makes illegal any drug that is an analog or acts in an analogous way to an already illegal drug.

If you come up with some drug that acts like heroin but isn't heroin in your home lab that chemical is de facto illegal as soon as it's made, no legislation required. All of these 'bath salts' are already illegal, but the DEA doesn't have time to track down every fly-by-night website that happens to sell the ingredients to make these drugs or those that actually sell the drug.

For more, read this book.

I like this book a lot: Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse - Paul Gahlinger

Hello there,

I don't use really use reddit and just stumbled into this forum. If I am breaking any standards of etiquette please excuse me or simply disregard what I have to say. General disclaimer: I do not recommend trying anything I mention.

"Basically I've done shrooms 4 times, highest was 7 grams."

Four times isn't really enough to make certain claims like "set and setting mean nothing to me" and "it is impossible to have a bad trip for me at any dose". Let me explain, mushrooms, more so than the vast majority of other psychedelics, are more dependent on the individual's neurochemistry. Meaning you will find a greater range of reactions to varying doses. With that said, there is still a range of "normal" dose-responses and then the outliers. These outliers can have a much stronger response to 2 grams than someone else would will have on 6 or visa versa where they have a comparably "weaker" response to a much higher dose than others. For some more information on this check out: http://www.amazon.com/Illegal-Drugs-Complete-History-Chemistry/dp/0452285054 , it mentions it and provides additional sourcing for this (I am in the middle of a move and my copy is in storage). I am not saying that most of the qualities of a trip are somehow non-applicable to the outliers, rather, that those qualities are achieved at differing doses.

Having said that, one's individual neurochemistry can change a lot over the years or even shortly with dramatic changes in certain conditions. When I was your age I fell into a large scale interstate drug distribution situation and was procuring bibles (lsd) and large quantities of mushies and ketamine. With the ease of access and a leaning towards being a bit of a drug-nerd, I tripped many hundreds of times with huge fluctuations in doses. I have ingested half sheets and babysat others who took a few hits, a friend and I have babysat people taking 2 grams while being on 10 g each (that same friend would pop a tab of family fluff to stay awake so he could drive the 8 hours during our smuggling days) and I have pushed 25 g of primo aborts while meditating. I have observed different phases insofar as how I reacted to various doses while controlling for obvious factors like short-term tolerance.

For example, after I participated in my first 2 year Dzogchen meditation retreat, half of which was spent learning thogal meditation, and once I returned I found I could trip much much harder on smaller doses, while also gaining considerably control over the experience. When doing thogal, one learns to bring about intense visions as is, so I am able to induce and retract the emergence of visions on psychedelics too. Additionally, as I had extremely high dose experiences, afterwards I noticed more sensitivity to lessor doses while retaining a greater degree of control, meaning I can modulate to what degree the same dose induces certain "intoxications" depending on how I oriented the mind. All in all, T. Leary was right in that high doses and experience changes one's neurochemistry and how one interacts with certain chemicals in the future. I can "choose" to trip harder on a few grams now compared to my younger self on 15 g.


Though I can't advise you to take more, you will actually trip on higher doses, as it seems you are indeed an outlier. I have met others like this, they won't trip hard off of a quarter (and require higher and more concentrated doses). However, there are certain things to increase the intensity of the experience (aside from the standard smoking n-n-dmt while peaking on another psychedelic). One example for beginners to increase their visual experiences would be to keep your eyes open and try to focus on everything at once but nothing in particular. One is simply letting the visual field rest in itself while trying to initiate this pattern recognition process (certain patterns can help this, including on the carpet or walls, outside is particularly great for this). Basically you are going beyond the dichotomy between center-periphery in regards to attentional distribution, one is allowing one's visual field to become panoramic-like and trying to basically allow the pattern recognition process to pick out patterns that are easily noticed, or in other cases, not actually there. The visual change is dramatic and one sort of starts "trancing" out with massive distortion. It may take a little practice the first couple of times, but once one gets it can take only a few seconds to initiate. If one initiates this at the very beginning of the trip, then the visions will naturally be more pronounced for the remainder of the experience. The real trick here is to allow the pattern recognition process to re-sync based on the prior pattern, rather than resetting by like blinking one's eyes. If you guys remember the magic eye books, it is as if the next round of patterns is based on the hidden image now exposed, opposed to blinking one's eyes and going back to normal. The goal here is to allow several rounds of this re-syncing to occur, as the patterns will become increasingly sophisticated and removed from the starting point ("objective reality"), this will consume all of one's experience and if allowed to continue will cease being mere extreme distortion and become full on hallucinations, initially still perpetually blooming but still static in a sense, but eventually turning to fully animated hallucinations. In the study of Buddhist trances, this stage is critical in exposing subtle non-jungian archetypes and beyond. Only 1% of LSD users for example experience full-on hallucinations, and this is one of the ways to be 1% =P.



"Only me. Very similar to enlightenment."

Ego-death is such a convoluted and nearly meaningless term in the psychedelic community, so is "enlightenment", which is often based on a bastardization of the contemplative traditions that such terms are loosely based on. "Ego-death" in the senses used by the psychedelic community means anything from a full blown jhanic samadhis, to nirodha-samapatti, to a base-of-all states, etc (in each case, none of which would be "ego-death" in the Buddhist sense). Your brief description for example clearly doesn't fit into the Buddhist sense of ego-death or enlightenment; my reference point is Buddhism because I majored in Buddhology and have formal Buddhist training, as well as vastly preferring Leary's and Capriles' respective models of psychedelic experience, which are framed in terms of Buddhist models.




"Set and setting mean nothing to me. It is impossible to have a bad trip for me at any dose. All that happens is the same thing at higher intensity for a little longer. "

After all I have said, I will simply iterate my objection to these claims as being not rationally justified. If you trip enough and on sufficient doses, more than what you described will happen. If you want visuals, you can have them, as yogis can bring about visions without any chemical support at all, and the chemical support provide an excellent catalyst for such methods. Though minor visuals are really just a distraction, the full-on hallucinations are considered a critical aspect of soteriology by the advanced traditions of Buddhism, for example the third series of thogal visions are so compelling that they bring out the faults in states that appear to be freedom, but are merely imitations (the base-of-all states, which present the largest obstacles to experienced yogis in the pursuit of true and definitive freedom and sanity qua the end of existential lack, a.k.a. Rigpa qua fruit a.k.a. Nirvana/Nibbana).

Anyways, take care everyone. I doubt I will be back, but you guys have quite a nice forum here and I wish you all the best. Have a smashingly great life!

Not sure if this is what your looking for but ...

Buzzed

Illegal Drugs

From Chocolate to Morphine

I lifted most of it from Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse. Maybe give it a buy if you are looking for a good information source.