[ExI] LSD- the geek's wonder drug?

[Darren Greer]

John Clarke wrote:

> No one had any comments? lol

I read Hoffman's description of his first trip when I was a teenager. I
remember one line very clearly: that he heard Ella Fitzgerald singing a
rendition of "my Ship" that he would give his soul to hear again. He didn't
ingest it, as the article says. He absorbed it through his fingertips, if I
remember correctly.

Stephen King claims that early uses of  LSD gave him an imaginative boost
that carried over into his writing career.  And the project that the CIA
used the drug in was Project Paperclip. There is a list of objectives they
were looking for in a new drug. Ultimately mind control, exhibited through
truth telling, psychosis, neurosis, paralysis, intelligence enhancement,
minimal hangover, a host of others.

LSD was a poor choice for most of these. Interesting enough though, Crystal
Meth hits almost all of the criteria. And since there were Nazis working on
this project, brought out of Germany and to the U.S. after the war for
intelligence purposes, I sometimes wonder if the CIA didn't experiment in
Project Paperclip with this drug too. The Nazis invented it ( though the
Japanese discovered ephedrine in the late nineteenth century.) Hitler took
injections of the drug every few days and they gave it to enlisted men and
pilots to increase alertness and fight fatigue.

One other thing about this: there is a subculture in North America (I've had
experience with them) that believe that Crystal Meth-amphetamine is an
intelligence-enhancing and consciousness expanding drug. Some of them are
also familiar with the generalized tenets of posthumanism and transhumanism.
At least two of them I know believe that the use of the drug makes them more
than human.

Technology is not divorced from their beliefs. Many Crystal Meth addicts are
extremely adept at using it. Mechanization and technology becomes a kind of
obsession while on the drug. Police officers once found a meth house by
noticing a washing machine that was being re-assembled being into another
machine (the article didn't say what) on a front lawn.

In Toronto the subculture of meth addicts call this kind of sketching "the
washing machine syndrome."

There. I commented.

Darren

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 7:19 PM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>wrote:

> No one had any comments? lol
>
> John  : )
>
> On 9/20/10, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wired discusses the drug that some scientists have used for "mind
> > expansion."  I find it interesting that LDS is making a comeback among
> > the intelligentsia and also the medical establishment.
> >
> > http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
> >
> > John
> >
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100920/16d4437d/attachment.html>