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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  4mo ago (open.substack.com)   1510 thread views

A Depressed Shrink Tries Shrooms

open.substack.com

This is a first-person account from a psychiatry resident (me) enrolling in a clinical trial of psilocybin. Somewhere between a trip report, an overview of the pharmacology of psilocybin, and a review of the clinical evidence suggesting pronounced benefits for depression.

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"Roadside trash grass" is about the equivalent of the Jungle Juice you are talking about -- making any kind of decent alcohol at home takes a lot more effort than growing good weed -- which is basically just gardening with extra steps.

Please elaborate on what you mean by "decent alcohol" and "good weed". I think there are some shenanigans with quality/potency/etc.

"Decent alcohol" == "doesn't taste like rotten fruit"; "good weed" == "female plants that were triggered to produce buds", more or less? Not a really high standard, although if you wanted to up the ante I'd think that something like "good whiskey that you might find in a store" would be much, much harder to make at home than marijuana of reasonable potency.

(given that I know lots of people who I'd consider connoiseurs who do the latter basically for fun; you can have like five plants for personal use here, which is way more than anyone could reasonably smoke by themselves -- and these guys smoke a lot!)

I do actually also know a guy who bought some kind of still kit and made some harsh high potency moonshine (if you are into that sort of thing) and a kind of cherry liqueur that was... OK? He's sort of bored of it now because (get this!) it's too much work -- whereas the dope-growing guys just trade clones amongst themselves and put them in the backyard.

"female plants that were triggered to produce buds"

That barely narrows down the range at all, so I don't think it's a good distinguisher from "roadside trash grass".

Also seconding @ArjinFerman. The classic version of this, in context of "relatively easy to make at home" and "I left some fruit (that I'm legally allowed to buy and have) in the cabinet for too long."... and, uh, the actual history of how things went down during prohibition, is wine.

That barely narrows down the range at all, so I don't think it's a good distinguisher from "roadside trash grass".

I dunno what to tell you man -- that's really all it takes. Start some seeds inside with your tomatoes in ~March, plant them, cull the males then throw a trash bag over the rest for a few hours a day in the fall and you will have pretty decent weed. The trash grass mostly comes from people skipping some of the above steps.

Sort of to repeat my question... where did you legally get those seeds? What potency are you expecting this product to have? Why do you reasonably expect said potency from those seeds?

You will be surprised to learn that people have been growing pot illegally for a long time -- you used to be able to buy seeds mail-order; I imagine you can get them on the internet these days without needing to go particularly dark. Or you get them from your pot growing friends. What I'm trying to say here is that the potency of marijuana doesn't depend as much as you seem to think on the strain.

Ok, so, like, not like buying fruit legally at the supermarket, as if it's just a regular Tuesday grocery day. There appear to be significant differences in the types of enforcement schemes that could conceivably be implemented.

What I'm trying to say here is that the potency of marijuana doesn't depend as much as you seem to think on the strain.

What does it depend on?

Ok, so, like, not like buying fruit legally at the supermarket, as if it's just a regular Tuesday grocery day.

No, more like putting the fruit in some sort of carboy, adding yeast, monitoring fermentation, etc -- do you really think it would not have been possible to charge somebody for doing this during prohibition based on the "I just like to store my fruit that way" defense?

What does it depend on?

Whether there are male plants present and whether flowering is correctly triggered before it gets too rainy (for outdoor growing) causing your weed to become mouldy. The proliferation of different strains these days is at least 80% hipsterism.

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Not a really high standard, although if you wanted to up the ante I'd think that something like "good whiskey that you might find in a store" would be much, much harder to make at home than marijuana of reasonable potency.

Why whiskey and not wine? Homemade tends to be superior to the stuff you get in a store. Why aim for potency? If you just want to get shitfaced you go for moonshine.

You're not banning it unless you're planning to commit a genocide.

Homemade tends to be superior to the stuff you get in a store.

Homemade wine tends to be superior to the stuff you get in the store? That is... not true at all in my experience. And in the cases where it is, a tonne of work goes into it. Anything plausibly resembling "I left some fruit in a cabinet" is likely to be barely drinkable by desperate college students (I should know), nevermind better than what you get in a store.

You're not banning it unless you're planning to commit a genocide.

Ah yes, the great genocide of 1920 -- how could I have forgotten?

Anything plausibly resembling "I left some fruit in a cabinet" is likely to be barely drinkable by desperate college students (I should know), nevermind better than what you get in a store.

It is true that my direct experience with the production of alcohol is with beer, and my experience in the consumption of homemade wine boils down to someone else having made it, but I just looked up some basic recipes and it is, in fact, basically "I left some fruit in a cabinet". Maybe the homemade wine I tasted had a more involved production process, but being familiar with the process of fermenting alcohol, I honestly doubt it.

As for quality, The idea that "better than in a store" is a hard bar to clear strikes me as absurd. Whether it's beer or wine, I swear they're putting something in it that leaves you with an unpleasant aftertaste, which homebrew just does not have.

If you want to insist that good beer is somehow easier to make than good wine (I'm far from an expert, but the proposition sounds extremely counter-intuitive to me), we can settle it relatively easy, I'll just make some, and tell you if I liked it.

Ah yes, the great genocide of 1920 -- how could I have forgotten?

Did in fact cause lots of deaths via crime. It didn't escalate to genocide, because they weren't actually stamping out the ownership and production of any and all alcohol. What am I missing?

What am I missing?

That marijuana is even than this! People are growing it illegally right now!

I agree that banning it is hard, and probably impossible to completely stamp out, given it's current prevalence, but I think it's easier to target a specific plant, than literally all sources of sugar, water, and yeast.

The US government did try pretty hard for like 50 years and failed abjectly, so it must at least be... fairly hard? I'm prepared to accept "both are above the threshold of hardness that the richest most powerful nation in the world can accomplish"?

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