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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  5mo ago (open.substack.com)   1534 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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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"?

Yeah, but I thought you were arguing that controlling weed is harder relative to controlling alcohol, and I'm not seeing it.

Also, if potency is just about the female flower thing, how come it increased around the time of it's normalization / legalization? Doesn't that imply that attempts to ban it are actually keeping the potency down?

Yeah, but I thought you were arguing that controlling weed is harder relative to controlling alcohol, and I'm not seeing it.

IDK why you thought that -- I said ' "I dropped some seeds in the bush someplace" isn't bad... '

Doesn't that imply that attempts to ban it are actually keeping the potency down?

IDK, maybe? Careful illegal growers were certainly making very potent weed back in the 90's; probably earlier. How potent does it need to be?

IDK why you thought that:

Quotes like this:

Cannabis is even easier tho...

or this:

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

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