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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Is this the substance that comes from frogs?

Exactly the one, though nowadays most people use the synthetic form. If you're in Canada here is where to buy cartridges that fit a vape pen.

It seems to me that almost all psychedelics are illegal in Canada, despite the law being weakly enforced.

But how does a clearweb website just sell illegal drugs? Is the law that weakly enforced or I am missing some kind of loophole that makes this totally legal?

I think 5-meo-dmt is so weird and specific that it's technically legal (if not, there are other chemically distinct drugs that are legal but have pretty much the same effects). But that website also sells shrooms pretty easily. Psychedelics are just not a priority for law enforcement, and I never had any problems ordering from them.

I'm hardly an expert, but I think this is the same deal as stuff like Salvia, and the explanation I've heard is that they just aren't "fun". They give very intense altered states of consciousness, but the extremity of the experience and the lack of a pleasurable rush mean that they aren't chemically or psychologically addictive, so they don't get banned. "Ego death in a can" is apparently not the experience most drug abusers are chasing.

Salvia was incredibly fun as a kid. Spending hours afterwards confused if you were a man dreaming that he was a floor tile or a floor tile dreaming that he was a man is character-building.

Disagree to some extent, my highschool friends would get some salvia from time to time, as it was completely legal and sold in gas stations. The first time i tried it was on a balmy friday night before i was to attend the archetypal highschool party. The experience was so intensely unpleasant and extreme that i was left bewildered. I decided i'd rather go home and think about what the fuck just happened rather than go talk to people who didn't know that there is an entire universe of recursive car seats you can get trapped in on the passenger side of my friends camry.

DMT on the other hand is similar but somehow not so uncomfortable or jarring. Salvia is like being shown the truth of some alien universe but any joy or laughter has been edited out, DMT is like seeing beyond the veil in its terrifying and hilarious entirety.

So yeah, salvia was fun as a kid in that its a bonafide hallucinogen with low risk of chemically bad stuff happening, but its also widely regarded as kindof an unfun experience unless the idea of hallucinating is novel enough that you would want to just for the sake of it.

I don’t know anyone that liked salvia, but normal DMT gets high marks. (No pun intended)

I’m not really clear on the difference in the various analogs.