[extropy-chat] Wireheading / psychoactives

[John]

Four days a week, I'm quite impressed you haven't been sectioned by now.

Magic mushroom tend to require quite a lot of recovery time afterwards to reach full potential again, most people leave it weeks before they eat anymore. I've not tried LSD, so I'm not sure just how long the recovery time on that is.

One of the first things Hoffmann noted about LSD was that the day after he woke up feeling particularly sensitive to the world.

This, combined with knowing that these molecules are metabolised out of the synapses and that immediately afterwards their potential for effect decreases suggests to me that they trigger an increase in the 'esterase metabolic pathways in the synapses. E.g. you take LSD, your body senses that it's become lodged in the post-synaptic boutons (atropine does this I believe, and is used to treat nerve agent exposure by 'clogging' the synapses to prevent spasmodic firing) and increases the levels of esterase to break it down. Afterwards, those level likely remain elevated for a while, allowing the synapse to carry a higher bandwidth of signals, allowing for a greater level of sensitivity.

This is all pure speculation, but it seems like the most likely way these effects would emerge to me.

I've noticed something similar after trying psilocybin mushrooms. Just out of interest, do you get a headache the morning after with LSD?

I've often wondered about the possibility of mixing psychoactives to achieve greater effects. As you pointed out, sooner or later you reach a peak that's difficult to go beyond due to pathways being saturated / metabolism wiping out the active material etc. However, if multiple actives where used, one might expect the experience to be orders of magnitude more diverse - mescaline, psilocybin and salvinorin say, which all work on different receptor sites (off the top of my head, I think it's mainly... muscarine, serotonin and kappa opoid respectively). And finish it off with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

Never tried Heroin. I tend not to believe too much of the anti-drugs stuff I read but there certainly does seem to be a correlation between Heroin and bin diving.

In light of Bill's note, I live in the UK, where magic mushrooms were legal fodder until recently.

John



BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean.
Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/a74e30b1/attachment.html>