Porn - A 21st Century Drug Addiction

I've been thinking about my drug use and possible addictions lately, and i came to a shocking conclusion, Porn is the worst of them! Even smoking comes second to porn in the "how addicted am I?" scale!

So how the hell can porn be worse than a "real drug" in this respect? Well, because porn is some strange-species-of-new-age-cyber-drug-injected-trough-eyeballs-straight-to-your-brain-shenanigan!

Here’s a crash course in how the brain works.

- Inside your brain there’s something called a “reward pathway.”
- The reward pathway’s job is to help keep you alive by rewarding you when you do something that promotes life, such as sex, eating food or achieving something you’ve worked hard for.
- the way it rewards you is by releasing chemicals in your brain
      - mainly one called dopamine, it motivates you to do stuff and is the main neurotransmitter responsible for the cocaine high
      - but also others like oxytocin, also know as the cuddle hormone, released during orgasm and childbirth

Normally, these chemicals are really handy. They help us feel pleasure and to bond with other people, and they motivate us to come back to important activities that make us happy. The awesome part is, the reward pathway can be hijacked!

The way substances make users feel high is by triggering the reward pathway to release high levels of dopamine without making the user do any of the work to earn it.
Want to guess what else does that? Our sweet beloved porn.

So there you go, porn is like a drug, gets you high and even has potential for addiction!

Fun Fact: Like porn, Cutting also releases endorphins and can be addictive by the same mechanism

Witches and Broomsticks - Shove that magic up your vagina!

Since its halloween (was...) i tought id share a small post about witches.


TLDR -; the broom legend comes fom witches using them to stick psychoactive concotions up their vaginas

Those who practiced “magic” were often using herbs to treat various conditions, though various side effects made them appear like sorcery. Some concoctions were used recreationally—not medicinally—which is where the legend of the broomstick comes in.

Petition to Legalise Psilocybin ('Magic') Mushrooms

I have lots of visitors from the UK, so the following petition probably interests you

Are you one of the 2 million people in the UK who has taken magic mushrooms? Add your name to call for their legalisation!

You can find the petition here

Paul Stamets - The Future is Fungi

If you are like me and love shrooms you will love Paul Stamets, he is a groundbreaking mycologist convinced that fungi can help save the planet, and for good reason.

There are medicines to be derived from fungi, probably more than we can yet imagine. Fungi for insect pest control.  Fungi can absorb and often digest toxics from their environments---toxics as diverse as heavy metals, PCB's, oil spills, and radioactivity. Fungal partnerships can revolutionize our farming methods. And we can heal the ecosystems of damaged forest lands by introducing selected fungal species into those environments. 

Paul Stamets is one of the visionaries of our time. He is revolutionizing the ways we look at fungi.

In this inspirational presentation he will wax eloquent on way more than simply psychedelic fungi. Prepare to have your mind blown; you might never look at fungi or even nature the same after this.

Also worth checking his book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and his DVD Mushrooms as Planetary Healers: From Toxic Waste Sites to Old Growth Forests

Trip Book - Fun and Usefull

This is an idea id like to stick around, a very useful tool for every psychonaut!

What is a trip book? It's a handbook you take everywhere, you take notes before, during and after your trips

Later you can analyze them, its like a live interactive trip report and trip toy! But more importantly, it's a great tool for self-discovery

Most psychedelics impair your memory one way or another, so its good to write your insights so you can "study" them later and see if they stand up for scrutiny or if they are just psychedelic fueled nonsense

There's no right or wrong way to use your trip book, some entries will be extremely detailed while others will have just a few notes or nothing at all, whatever floats your boat

My trip book is a simple black cover notepad, i have a fancy drawing in the first page and i call it "A day in the life of the crazy Psychonaut", i also have a small text in the 2nd page in case of medical emergency explaining where in the book to find what i took, linking to erowid, and suggesting treatment for a number of stuff. Perhaps i can publish a book later with this, who knows!

The pages usually follow this template, i made up the contents to give you an idea of its intended use

Substance(s): LSD, Weed and Beer
Dosage: 4 tabs claimed to be 130micrograms each
Route of Administration: Under the tongue
Mood: Happy
Set: Outdoor 5 day party
Tolerance: Probably Very High, dosed 3 times this week
Trip Objective: Have Fun
Other Notes: Didn't eat for 24 hours, didn't reagent test, Trusted Source

One Brain, Many Selves: Demons, Tulpas, and Neurons Gone Wild

I'm continuing last time's copy pasta from Kevin Simler. If you missed his previous piece, Accepting Deviant Minds, don’t worry — this essay stands on its own. Prepare to rethink your whole concept of “self” — just how many selves can take root in one brain?

To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science.

But to accept them, or at least our experiences of them, and yet give them a scientific explanation: there’s a task worthy of our art. It demands that we look them in the eye and take them seriously, while standing absolutely firm in our materialist convictions.

I don’t know how much of what I’m about to say is true. All I know is that it’s damn interesting.

Today we court madness from the bedrock of science. Today we will face addictions and compulsions, alter-egos and imaginary friends, angelic voices and demonic possessions, even exorcisms. And we will attempt to ground these madnesses, one and all, in a unified, sane, materialist framework.

We will begin, naturally, with the neuron.

Accepting Deviant Minds: Why ‘Hallucinations’ Are as Real as the Self

This time's copy pasta is from Kevin Simler. Kevin is a philosopher and blogger who believes in (pan)critical rationalism, keeping his identity small, and writing as an aid to thinking. This post was first published on his website, Melting Asphalt — one of my favorite sources for fresh critical perspectives on the mind, society, and everything in between.

It's a long read, but it' totally worth it!  Here it goes

At a sleepover when I was 12, a friend told me that he could control his dreams. It didn’t happen every night, he said, but every so often he’d become aware of being in the middle of a dream. Usually at that point he’d wake up, but sometimes, with a delicate act of will, he could remain in the dream long enough to fly around for a bit — or whatever else 12-year-old boys are wont to do in the privacy of their minds.

I called bullshit. In all my experiences, whenever I became conscious of my dreams I would wake up instantly. To be aware of one’s dreaming struck me as physiologically if not logically impossible. But years later I would come to experience these lucid dreams myself. My friend, it turns out, had been right all along.

Looking back on it, what’s interesting is how strong my prejudices were. Even as a 12-year-old I had deep-seated ideas about what constituted a valid conscious experience. Anything outside my own narrow range struck me as illegitimate — as either a lie or confabulation, or else somehow aberrant, like the product of mental illness.

I think we all have these prejudices. But they are a crippling impediment to understanding human consciousness.

So today’s exercise will be to shatter our prejudices about what constitutes a legitimate conscious experience. Incidentally, it will also expand our notion of what it means to be human.

The Motion Aftereffect (MAE) - Inducing morphing, flowing and other mindfucks

The motion aftereffect (MAE) is a visual illusion experienced after viewing a moving visual stimulus for a time (tens of milliseconds to minutes) with stationary eyes, and then fixating a stationary stimulus. The stationary stimulus appears to move in the opposite direction to the original (physically moving) stimulus.

For example, if one looks at a waterfall for about a minute and then looks at the stationary rocks at the side of the waterfall, these rocks appear to be moving upwards slightly. The illusory upwards movement is the motion aftereffect.

This video illustrates that effect nicely, i usually point to it when i'm trying to explain the "morphing" experienced in psychedelic trips, it's not quite the same thing, but its the closest i can show to a non-user.

It's also a good reminder that psychonautics isn't about taking drugs, it's about exploring the mind with several tools, besides, inducing this effect is fun!



This video is best viewed in full screen and HD, you can ignore the letters, its suggested that you read them out loud only to help you focus on the right part of the screen

But how does it work?

Cops Like Me Say Legalize All Drugs. Here’s Why.

Who exactly is prohibition supposed to be helping? After many years of enforcing drug laws as a police officer, my experience with an addicted family member changed my attitude for good.

I was a police officer for 20 years, enforcing drug laws in California and thinking I was doing my part for society. But what made me think properly about drug use for the first time was my experience with my older brother, Billy. I had watched him struggle with a lifelong problem with drugs. But I still did not understand what it meant to be Billy until my husband convinced me to open up my heart and our home to save him in 2002.


It was in this intimacy of watching Billy try, during the year he lived with us, to live up to the expectations of society and those he loved that I realized that our society’s portrayal of people with chronic drug problems was both damaging and morally flawed.

RIP Shulgin

Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin died yesterday, at the age of 88.

A Tweet from the Erowid Center stated that “Yes, Sasha died peacefully this afternoon (June 2), surrounded by friends and family.”

Shulgin is famous for publishing the books Pihkal and Tihkal and for synthesizing over 230 psychedelic compounds that he dutifully tested with his wife as well as for introducing MDMA to the therapeutical world, before it was made illegal.

I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of a respected elder of the psychedelic community, he shall not be forgotten

The Copyright for Part 1 of PiHKAL and TiHKAL has been reserved in all forms and it may not be distributed. Part 2 may be distributed for non-commercial reproduction. You can read both the second part of Tikhal and Pikhal online at erowid, his legacy shall inspire many, like it greatly inspired me.

Rest in Peace Mr. Shulgin

Tales from a former Narcotics Officer

I just found this interview while surfing the web, figured it was worth sharing! 

Sometimes he was Steven Francis Neill, and sometimes he was Neill Franklin. One was an unemployed junky looking to score on the streets of Baltimore. The other was an undercover narcotics agent.

“Eventually, it became somewhat problematic,” the now retired Neill Franklin (which is his real name) explained. “I felt myself getting lost at times between the two worlds. This is one of the reasons for establishing rigid limitations on how long someone remains undercover. We've left some investigators ‘under’ way too long.”

I met Neill for a tour of his Baltimore, the city he grew up in, policed for 34 years, and left upon retirement. As we cruised through a wasteland of abandoned and burned-out houses, it was easy to see why the 55-year-old had moved to the suburbs. Corner boys glared out from under street signs with names suggesting far more idyllic surroundings—Eden, Crystal, and Spring.