I guess I need to get rid of my couches then!!! I've been known to sit on couches daily! !

I kid of course, and this is quite serious. To me it seems that even if the information is easily accessible/available and we try to teach people of the dangers, some of them simply do not care about the ins, outs and potential hazards of a psychedelic experience. For some, it is nothing but another way to get off and have their jollies for a while. Most of them survive and go about their lives none the wiser which is sad, IMHO.

Don't get me wrong, education is key but the problem is that we can't forcibly educate anyone. The best we can do is try... Ignorance is anything but bliss in these situations. I wish the careless people would pay more attention to what they are getting themselves into and perhaps we could avoid these disasters.

This a tragic story and my heart goes out to the family involved...

Have to chime in and disagree, wolf. Drugs, ALL drugs, WILL be legal- one day. It has nothing whatsoever to do with casualties, but rather the flow of money. Figure out the tax structure and dispensation guidelines, and world governments will flick to wholesale legalization.

I saw it on my crystal ball, this will happen.

As far as psychedelics being a causal factor in psychosis- whew that's a can of worms! I really don't think that they even mimic the psychotic state- but perhaps extreme use can trigger latent pathologies. But that's even highly debateable. I have experienced a psychotic break, with vivid hallucination as well as psychedelic loops, and have had bad paranoid trips. The two states are dissimilar. IMO.

But this convo is about the issues brought up by the young Cave Jr.s death. What is the communities responsibility in safety and awareness? The wonderful people at MAPS and Zendo project, dance safe, even tripsit and others have taken up this cause in differing ways.

How do you promote safe use?

Have you ever had a "close call" or needed a sitter or been glad you WERE a sitter?

Ha well hope I live to see that day. One day maybe but I think we're going to be waiting a while to see things like LSD legalized!



No I don’t think they do either really dude, but in my case a mixture of cannabis, LSD, and panic combined produced a state of mind that corresponded to almost textbook paranoid schizophrenia.

Delusions of grandeur, messages on television, delusions of persecution (voices), delusions that reality was not real, delusions that I was going to be murdered and tortured to death, delusions I was God and so on and so on (and on)...

I agree that the LSD or psilocybin experience does not in itself cause a psychotic reaction and a psychotic state of mind is much more related to how an individual reacts to the experience.

Panic though on top of psychedelics can I believe produce delusional or psychotic reactions which is why I think cannabis -well known these days for causing anxiety and panic reactions- is such a potentially dangerous combination with psychedelics for those who are prone to paranoia and anxiety with the drug.

That said I am sure that delusions are also possible with all psychedelics when the dose is high enough.

I have had mushroom trips in which I felt on the verge of alien take over as if they were hacking into my mind mentally and almost managing to manipulate my physical behaviour. Never did it get out of control in these instances for me without the addition of cannabis but again I am simply warning people to take care.

Much higher or frankly stupid doses of the kind I see suggested every day on other drug forums would almost certainly be risking a psychotic break with or without cannabis.

Correction: my point was not that sofas and drugs are same in effect.
Point was: yes they are the same concerning a general law, that people die regardless of their last activity.

WOD will continue as long as someone somewhere dies after ingestion?
WOD could as well say to continue as long as gravity exist.

That would be a nice thing if intoxication would be the only act on earth that guarantees that you will not die during so, people would be high anywhere anyplace

But he did LSD and that's why he fell of the cliff?
No.
He died because he was near a cliff, he had lived trough the lsd without the cliff.
Second:
what's the percentage of cliff-fallers with lsd in their blood?


(it's not personal wolf )

Agreed.



Understood.

And what is the relative number of people falling from a cliff while under the influence of equasy?

EDIT: I realize that the link may be a bit of a long read, so I'll quote a short primer to the dangers of equasy by Dr Nutt himself:

Nah didn’t take it as personal dude. I was just trying to clarify my position, as I felt the point I was really making was a touch misrepresented. I was not meaning to come across as if I am in favour of prohibition or am anti-psychedelics but equally I strongly feel that we should not whitewash psychedelics.

Yes I agree his death was an accident and without the cliff he would not have died but is it not equally true that without the LSD he would also probably not have died?

LSD even with high doses should not really under normal circumstances distort a person’s faculties to such an extent that he would end up falling over the edge of a cliff.

Even on a high dose I would know do not go near the edge of a cliff, or do anything dangerous like swimming in the ocean or playing near fire etc. The manner of his tragic death, is perhaps indicative of a psychotic reaction which may have panicked and confused him and his ability to think/see things rationally. So yes I beleive the LSD he ingested played a huge part in this boys death.

The pro drug activists on forums like this can sometimes be as biased and unwilling to listen to the genuinely potentially catastrophic effects that psychedelics can have in the same dogmatic way that anti-drug activists are unwilling to listen to the potentially positive and beneficial aspects.

I don’t doubt or discount the importance of set and setting and its contribution to tragic cases like this one, and nor do I doubt that there are people like myself at 17 who are more predetermined than most to use LSD and come to grief psychologically.

It was my irresponsibility as a child of 17 and a point blank refusal to believe that things such as LSD (and cannabis) could truly be dangerous that very easily could have destroyed me.

Truly I don’t mind if people have differing viewpoints on this than me! Would be a pretty boring discussion otherwise!

I just dont think we should get so caught up in trying to defend team psychedelic that we we lose sight of the potential dangers.

well said...........

We don"t really know for sure that it was LSD that these lads took. This story comes from the online version of the daily mail " a reactionary tabloid rag masquerading as a traditional values middle class newspaper". More often than not the media never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.


Another quote from the David Nutt link that pitubo posted.....

I find some of the responses here puzzling, because I know everyone here respects dmt and other hallucinogens, and part of that respect is accepting that errors of judgement around set, setting and so on can lead to harm.

Seeing the damage that something can do doesn't negate the benefits of that thing. Cars are wonderful machines, but given some bad choices, they can really hurt people. Car producers respond to that risk by adding safety features-- seat belts, airbags etc. If car makers didn't respond to accidents with improvements, we would think of them as out of touch (at the very least).

We are the producers of hallucinogens. It does not mean that every time someone gets hurt tripping that we have an existential dilemma, but we should sit up and take notice. Some of us at least, should break it down and make sure there isn't a better way to do things.

The Nexus and Bunk Police are examples of well considered ways to add safety-- there are lots of others, too. The question for me is, does this case point out the need for some other safety measure?

It's ok to conclude that nothing else needs to be done because it was rare and random, or that it was unpreventable recklessness. But we can do better than blame 'the system' or the force gravity. Both of those answers seem too convenient, and they don't seem to lead to any solutions.

The hardest factor for me has to do with the Arthur being 15. In my mind, that is too young to be tripping -- I could totally be wrong about that, however. I just don't see any other factors as controllable-- unless it turns out the drug was not LSD, which Arthur thought he was taking. One report indicated that no LSD was not found in Arthur's system during the autopsy. That was just another tabloid source, though.

Umm. A cliff? We should really be asking ourselves "How many sober people accidentally fall off of this cliff per year".

Thanks for the conversation.

Sorry if I gave you this impression, I take my due responsibility for that, but no more than due.
There was another purpose than being biased of course:

Another try from another angle:
we have really learned to come to terms with hundreds of deaths each year in the Alps, while there is good Alp education, warnings, schools, licenses, etc etc, and it still happens. Yet there is no more an attitude: "This may not happen ever again (let's start a war over it)."

The coming to terms with injury/death as a natural component and to embrace that, is not easy. It is maybe the people having trouble with that who are first to say: you are biased and unwilling to listen to the dangers and try to whitewash the risks? Sorry for the rebound.

The rabbit that comes out of the hole risks to be grabbed by claws. Accepting that is not easy. We did succeed so with the Alps, cars, but not with drugs. Alps, cars and drugs should NOT be lethal, yet they are, can we finally come to accept for all activities?

Bias is to accept risk for one activity but panic over another (like drugs).

I am all won for minimizing risk in general, and therefore I shoot a bullet at the WOD, not because I want to whitewash or cloak or simplify or minimize or be-unwilling about drugs' risk (that's a darn accusation right there ), but WOD just works so counter productive in risk reduction. WOD is a self sustaining mechanism that creates it's own fuel: casualties.
Total uncontrolled open access to all drugs is perhaps even worse, as worse as sending everyone unprepared into the Alps.

Yeah I agree dude. It's often easier just to say that the story is made up propaganda, or even that the victim himself (latent psychosis, Darwin award etc.) was to blame rather than accept the fact that these things can happen with psychedelics, have happened before, and will happen again. People get too focused in on fighting the drug war and batting for the team. The anti LSD propaganda from the 60's was not simply a lie. People really did drown, and throw themselves out of windows and had they not taken LSD would probably not have done so.

If you take the position that these things are utterly blameless no lessons can be learned whatsoever.

When people have never really had any experience of truly terrifying or bad trips, they often panic in the water, and thus produce a much more dangerous situation. The feeling of being utterly trapped produces an instinctive animalistic attempt to escape and save oneself but it is in this confused state of mind that the fatal accidents are most likely to occur.

My own advice for what it’s worth:

Avoid cannabis, avoid heroic/stupid doses, choose a sensible location, and nice people to be with. Have a good set going into it.

This is just common sense but it’s a little more complex than that…

Personally a very beneficial thing for me in really learning how to surrender, and let go, to horrific experiences was my use of Anahuasca. Anahuasca and the challenging brutality of its teaching methods, tells one to pretty much expect, or be ready for, a bad time going in.

You’re then a lot more prepared for the experience with much better and clearer intentions and soon learn to apply this attitude to other psychedelics as well. You don’t panic when things get scary because you fully expected and accepted the possibility of distress going in.

Inexperienced voyagers with only the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ trips immediately think ‘Oh please God I’m having a bad one’ and can end up going into a tail spin. Such people have no idea whatsoever on how to actually handle bad trips, and it isn’t really something you can just tell them. Anahuasca is truly a great teacher in this regard and teaches one how to stop fighting and just stare into it.



Again, respectfully, I think this is avoiding the issue somewhat.

I understand better where you are coming from now dude. Yeah just because something may be lethal or even dangerous does not automatically mean it should be illegal.

My argument though was never that I think LSD or psychedelics should be illegal just that people need to realize they are indeed dealing with substances that can be deadly and dangerous.

Would you legalize all drugs if you had the power dude?

Not unconditionally, please find my thoughts in post #13 of this thread.
I think a very bad scenario is to suddenly bombard society with all "drugs" while being completely unprepared for it. Issue of sustainability of many plants included.

* * *

I admit to have shot in own foot a tad here, it did not add well the rest of my plea:
and call here now for 3 causes working together with a balanced weight:
1) the "drugs";
2) the limited information , education, knowledge,..., about a too young mind, about himself, about drugs;
3) proximity of the cliff.

Having that, still a minority of 1/3 is assignable to the "drugs".
Sounds cold and scientific, not much emotional empathy, pls forgive me.

* * *

I can see a relation though:
In 0.0001% (wild guess) of drug related cliff-fallers, the immediate and sole reaction is: this darn drugs did it;
In 99.999% of non drug cliff-falls, the general reaction is: well that's really sad isn't it, but hey that's life.

* * *

Overall I felt more urge to debunk thinking patterns than to narrowly "defend drugs" or to blanked blame the WOD. Thanks again for the dialogues here, and their nature, loving nexus for it.

I actually knew someone who fell off a cliff and died NOT being high at all, not even a beer. There were at least a hundred of us out in the desert tripping balls stumbling over sharp rocks and cliffs in the dark. Accidents are random. Doesn't mean you should't be careful..

Maybe I'm unclear about what "the issue" actually is... I don't see an issue at all. Potentially the drugs are to blame, but show me a study finding that the percentage of visitors-on-drugs who fall of the cliff is greater than the percentage of visitors-not-on-drugs who fall of the cliff. If those percentages are the same then there's no correlation between drug use and falling of the cliff. Even if there is a correlation, it doesn't matter: People do dangerous things, especially young people. Look at how many rock/mountain climbers die each year; There is a correlation between extreme sports and increased death rate, but that's a freedom that we already grant people. How is using drugs (and subsequently rock/mountain climbing) any different? Again, maybe that was never the issue here.

God this story made me cry and cry reading it. I am the father of teenagers and I have debated strategies of education with their mother over and over. We are no longer together and we both have plenty of experience with psychedelics and are proponents of their use as medicine and spiritual exploration.

However she has never admitted her experience to them and tends to have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to drug use because they are young and developing etc etc. When she caught both of them on separate occasions experimenting with cannabis she came down pretty hard on them without really allowing them to open up. Grounding them etc etc... I feel like it pushed them further underground with her. I had to give her some grace because all of her life she has been surrounded by family members struggling with addiction. She is afraid.

They know full well about my struggles with addictions and my recovery journey and something about my opinion of psychedelics as medicine. I basically sat them down and told them I know they are at the age of curiosity and while I cannot condone drug use in my house I prefer them to be honest and that if they are i will not punish them for telling the truth. If they have a bad trip or need for help to call me and I will show up with no judgement. I also showed the erowid and dancesafe (while they protested the need because the talk embarrassed them) and let them know the consequences of their choices are their responsibility. The big thing is I do not want them to fear being honest.

It is tough because the other problem is that drugs are illegal so while I have vast experience it isn't safe for me to fully open up to my kids lest the wrong information fall into the wrong ears and the authorities show up and arrest me or cause me to have many legal issues for something that is very personal, private to me. Imagine what DHS would say to a parent who was found to trip sit their teenagers! Sad because THIS is a big problem considering psychedelics are part of many of our spiritual paths. Instead we have a wall of secrecy between parent and child.

Even those of us with vast experience are not immune to the dangers.This post from Heath and safety speaks volumes. I wish this would be a required reading before accessing extraction info etc... https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=34293