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self_made_human  C'est la vie  10d ago (open.substack.com)   1151 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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"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.

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"?

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?

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