Alt Left: Blacks and Hispanics Get Arrested at Disproportionate Rates, and That’s Not Due to Racism

I used to drive an ice cream truck as I noted in a previous jokes. I sold dope, cannabis, out of my truck to supplement my income. Remember the jokes and memes about ice cream truck drivers selling dope out of their trucks? Weren’t there Dragnet episodes about that? Well, it’s not an urban legend.

A lot of the other drivers sold it too. Buy pot, roll joints out of it, and sell joints for $1 apiece, mostly at parks and particularly on weekends. At the end of the day, standing in line waiting to get paid (that’s how it worked),  the other drivers and I would talk about how the drug dealing went that day.

Some days the pot-sellers would bring in $100/day selling jays. This was good money back in 1978, equivalent to $350/day today. I made $1,000/month, equivalent to $3,500 month or $42,000 year now, which ain’t bad for such a dumb job.

I sold hash in addition to ice cream. Very quietly, mind you, but I did sell it at $10 a gram. I was selling some really good red Afghan hash out of that truck at one point. I was also selling this crappy, tar-like homemade hash that sort of sucked.

I think I bought a 1/4 pound of the Afghan hash and sold ounces, 1/4 ounces, and grams. It came into the port of Long Beach in the hulls of oil tankers. We knew a guy who bought the cannabis right off the ships and that’s how we got it. In all the years we bought from this guy, the ships never got caught.

I even sold that Afghan hash at university in my classes right under the eyes of professors. We had a trick way of doing it. I sold LSD right in the middle of class too via the same method. Lots of giggles all around as we did that.

All the other students knew we were obviously selling drugs in class, but no one cared as this was 1979-1980, and literally no one cared about “soft drugs” (pot and psychedelics). The hard stuff? A different story.

We were onto cocaine as a dirty, nasty, ugly drug real quick and I never actually dealt it because it was too sleazy.  We were already onto that stuff all the way back in 1979 before everyone else does. Coke is ultimately a shitty drug. I used the stuff for 13 years. Don’t take it, it’s junk, and it’s really bad for you.

I lived as a criminal for 14 years as a (mostly) soft drug dealer of pot, hash, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and even mescaline and peyote once in a while. I know about the life of The Street and The Petty or Victimless Crime Underground. Suffice it to say that the Criminal Underworld is very moral in a sense and you don’t burn other criminals. That results in something called “paybacks.” And as the saying goes, “Paybacks are a bitch.” Dylan was right when he sang:

In order to live outside the law, you must be honest.

– Bob Dylan

Before pot legalization, I used to see these Mexicans in my town standing in the parking lots of their apartment complexes selling pot. Geniuses!

Actually I used to buy from them, so I’m sort of an idiot too, right?

Blacks stand right out on the street selling dope too. Brilliant!

Then the SJW’s scream that Blacks and Hispanics take just as many drugs as Whites but they get busted way more. Unfair! Discrimination against non-White criminals! Not fair to crooks! Racist, discriminatory law enforcement! Evil racist cops oh noes!

I laugh every time I read this because I know that Blacks are Hispanics get busted for dope way more than Whites do because non-Whites are so stupid about how they sell and use drugs.

POC Genius 1: “Hey I got a plan to be drug dealers and never got caught!”

POC Rhodes Scholar 2: “Yeah, what is it?”

POC Genius 1: “Let’s stand right out in the open in public selling and using drugs! Cops think most people hide indoors to do that stuff, so this way we’ll never get caught!”

POC Rhodes Scholar 2: Good plan! Why didn’t I think of that?!”

It’s practically a Polack or blond joke.

My dealer friends and I were very, very smart about dealing.

We had all sorts of tricks. I can’t list them all here. I personally maybe 5-10 completely different outfits posing as different members of society to sell quantities of drugs. There was suit and tie businessman dude with the dope in a nice suitcase (natch) doing deals in the office worker part of town, gym dude with gym clothes and a gym bag doing deals in health club parking lot. There were others

I never got caught and neither did my friends. Why? Because we weren’t morons who stand out in public and sell dope in full view of the cops and everyone else and expect to not get caught, that’s why! I mean how smart do you have to be to literally do this stuff out of site

LSD, Flashbacks and HPPD

Man with OCD here. I’m taking medication for it. I will take LSD for the first time in a few weeks. What are the possibilities of having HPPD? You’ve said you got visual disruptions, what does it feels like? Is it the same thing which is called “flashbacks”?

I am not even sure what flashbacks even are, and I am not sure if I have experienced them. After I first took LSD at age 16, my marijuana trips changed dramatically. It was like the LSD had altered my brain and changed the pot trips. The pot trips became way weirder, more colorful and rather frightening, but I sort of enjoyed them anyway in the way that you enjoy the very scary rides at the amusement park. They scare the crap out of you, but you love it. Plus it was like journeying to another planet every time I smoked pot. About six months after I had taken LSD, I went to look in the mirror. To my shock and horror, my entire face was deep, dark blue almost like someone who has had a heart attack. I flipped out and ran upstairs to my parents room and looked in their mirror. Now my face had changed and it had a slight reddish tinge to it. I ran down to the downstairs bathroom again and looked in the mirror again and all that was left was a faint greenish tinge over my face. I think I ran back to my parents’ bathroom instead and looked in the mirror again. I have no idea why I was running from mirror to mirror, but my instinct just old me that there must be something wrong with the mirror. Thinking about it now, it seems so idiotic, but that is what I felt at the time. This time all of the colors were gone. The whole thing could not have taken more than a minute or two. I happened one more time a few months later in the same mirror. This time it was a very deep dark red, as deep and dark as the blue-purple had been. I did the same thing of running from bathroom to bathroom and mirror to mirror, and after a minute or two, it went away. I always thought for some reason that thee were LSD flashbacks, though I never had those colored faces on LSD. I do not know why I thought it was an acid flashback. I suppose I could not think of any other reason. It never happened again, and to this day, I have no idea what caused it. I never worried about it although it was a hallucination. I never worried that those hallucinations meant that I was mentally ill or brain damaged somehow. I simply shrugged them off. Non-mentally ill people can hallucinate and even hear voices at times. The occasional hallucination is not big deal and nothing to fret over. You guys can call me insane all you want to because I had couple of hallucinations. See if I care. I doubt if many people get HPPD from one use of LSD, but perhaps it is possible. I have dated some women lately who are or were LSD users. One ~50 year old woman had taken LSD 350 times. Another much younger woman had taken it maybe 30 times and was definitely a current user. These are only two heavy users that I have met in recent years. Neither woman had any HPPD symptoms at all. I know many people who have taken LSD, including folks who have taken it many times, and I never met anyone who had HPPD. I think it is not common. However, a recent survey of university students found that of those who had taken LSD 50 times or more, 4 I took LSD nine times and other psychedelics (mescaline, peyote, LSA, Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, psilocybin) about another 20-30 times, so maybe ~30-40 trips total. I have not taken psychedelics since an acid trip in 1987, 29 years ago. I am a bit worried about doing psychedelics now. I figure I am nuts enough as it is, so why take psychedelics and risk making myself even crazier than I already am? I am not sure when the HPPD hit, but it is not very bad. On some occasions, I get very bright colors. I rarely get them anymore, but sometimes if I have taken a lot of caffeine or the drug Benadryl, I get the colors again. Actually the world looks much better all lit up Technicolor like that. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It only bothers me if I start freaking on it and thinking, “Why is the world all lit up this? Is there something wrong with my brain?” If I just relax and accept it, it’s not a problem and actually is rather fun. I called up an eye doctor once and complained about my symptoms, and he busted out laughing over the phone. “Oh! The colors are getting better, huh? Well that’s great! Hope you enjoy it! We only care when the colors are getting worse. What you have is not a problem.” Apparently he was referring to loss of color vision.

People Are Getting High on Bath Salts

Here. Actually it is some kind of designer drug being sold over the counter as a bath salts or plant food. Apparently you can use them for those purposes and they work just fine and don’t get you high. You sniff it inject it or smoke it. The drugs in question are mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV. Apparently these are stimulants something like methamphetamine, but I don’t know much about them. Looks like a pretty crappy and evil drug, I would say. It’s mostly in Louisiana right now for some reason, and the state has banned the sale of the drugs. But the Feds have not banned them yet since they are not marketed for human consumption. Banning them will take some time. Most users are apparently meth users looking for a new high. I increasingly agree with the Neurosoup girl on Youtube. She hates meth, cocaine, PCP and heroin. She comes right out and says that they are crappy and evil drugs.She doesn’t like alcohol either. She’s up on marijuana and what she calls entheogens, which is something like hallucinogens. If a lot of the people using coke, meth, alcohol and heroin started using pot and entheogens instead, our society would look a lot different. I would say that the damage from drugs would go way down. The hallucinogens are somewhat self-limiting in use. They are so strong, and people are so afraid and paranoid of them that people tend to only use them for a short period of time. People want a drug they can get high on regularly. My generation promoted the use of coke and to some extent speed. I would say we screwed up bad on that one. Those drugs are just crap. One thing I always hated about drugs were the anti-drug morons. They’re still everywhere; in fact, they’re the majority. Instead of being sensible like the Neurosoup Girl and dividing recreational drugs into different classes, the anti-drug morons just lump them all into one great big mess. They’re all the same. They’re all dope, and they’re all evil. Weed is meth is heroin is coke is LSD is mushrooms. It’s nuts. I had to deal with this all the time while growing up as a pothead. As a pothead, I was said to be “into drugs” and was lumped in with PCP users, cokeheads, meth freaks and heroin addicts. It was all the same. To some extent, this was true of drug users too. They weren’t so stupid as to think all drugs are the same – no user is that stupid – but since pot was illegal, and you had to deal with illegal drug users to get it, a lot of pot users were also using and promoting the use of other stuff, often along the lines that the other drug was as easy and safe as pot. Pure pot users were quite rare. Legalizing pot would put it in the class as alcohol. How many people have you met who drink, often a lot, but won’t touch any “drugs” (LOL)? Lots. Making weed legal would increase the number of pure pot users who don’t mess with other stuff. One thing I noticed that is people, often the older generation, will talk about someone who ruined their life on drugs, often the son or daughter of a friend. Often I will ask, “What kind of drugs?” A legitimate question, right? After all, I’m an old drug fiend, so I’m very interested in details like that! I always get this frustrated response, “I don’t know!” as if it doesn’t matter. Ok, so they got into weed, is that right? Is that how they ruined their lives? This is more of the, “All drugs are the same,” BS. Very frustrating dealing with this moronitude.

Psilocybin Doesn't Cause Brain Damage

Repost from the old site. Told you so. Hell, I’ve only taken it, what, 30 times or so? It never fried me, or at least I don’t think so. I never noticed any long-lasting harm after taking this drug. One time, I had bright colors for about six months after I took it. Another time, I got depressed and sat around alone on Saturday night feeling sorry for myself. Next morning, I woke up and was not depressed anymore. One time, I took some, got in my car, and drove from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley, then turned around and drove home again. I think the whole trip took me about 12-14 hours. You can drive great on the stuff if you have a nice, clear, open road in front of you, and the towering Sierra Nevada sure looks great when you are frying. Plus, the stuff keeps you awake for many hours somehow. I used to sell these mushrooms, and boy was it fun. I was a student, a schoolteacher, a paralegal and a drug dealer. I would sell quarter pounds and pounds and make insane profits like $300 for an hour’s work or so. Plus you get to feel like a spy and feel some real terror when you carry the dope around and do the deal itself. You get to drive past lots of cops with a car full of dope that could send you to jail for a long time. You look at the cops and just drive right on by like nothing is happening. You carry the dope in a briefcase and dress up like an office worker, or you carry it in an athletic bag and dress up like you’re going to gym. There’s nothing like the rush you get being out in public with a car full of felonious dope or a wallet full of tainted drug money. My friends and I dealt dope in the smart way, and most of us never got caught. We were not all totally White, but most of us were raised in a mostly-White beach town. We dressed up like college kids, office workers, gym enthusiasts, and conformed to White middle class society in every way. Yet we sold dope right in front of the cops and society’s noses for years for years and never got caught. There’s a luscious feeling in that. A friend of mine made so much money selling coke that he bought two homes in San Fransisco, one to store the coke and another to live in. He was so hot I didn’t dare even look him up. You don’t even want to hang around some super-dealer like that. I just checked him out and he’s resurfaced in Southern California, fit, healthy and fifty, selling real estate. A survivor. I guess he never got caught either. Even my Mom shakes her head in admiration of him. White society always respects someone who can outsmart the cops in a not-too-evil way. Why? It places a premium on not being stupid, and not being caught. I often wonder if other ethnics share this value. Sometimes I think that these young Blacks and Hispanics nowadays place a premium on getting caught, and therefore being a moron. This I will never understand. These Hispanic kids around here are the biggest idiots on Earth. They do dope deals, albeit for small amounts of pot, right out in the open in front of everyone. They seem to take special delight in doing an obvious drug deal right out where anyone can see it happen. I guess it’s a macho thing. White middle class me says it’s not a macho thing, it’s a stupid thing. No wonder they are always getting hauled in on dope-selling charges. They dress up like gangsters and criminals and then wonder why they get stopped by the cops. Duh. There really is an art to being a criminal. All in all, psilocybin is a fun drug. You keep hearing horror stories about this stuff, about people who took too much of it and are mentally ill, or people who took too much and are fried in some way or another. Problem is that there is not the tiniest evidence that this stuff damages your brain, unlike almost other drugs of abuse. Yes, the drugs that make you feel the most insane of all do not do the slightest harm to your brain in any way. All those stories floating around about people taking too much hallucinogens need to be taken with a grain of salt. If it’s harmless to the brain, how is it supposed to create fried-out acidheads? Answer: it’s can’t. I’m not saying take them every weekend. I haven’t taken the stuff in about 23 years, and I’m not sure if I will ever take it again. Taking these kinds of drugs is one of the most bizarre experiences that one can have on this Earth, though, and you can have some really terrifying bad trips. Psychological harm can occur from traumatic experiences. By the way, it’s not harmful to any other organ in your body either. Plus there are long-lasting positive effects, apparently. On the other hand, this drug can cause HPPD , so I’d advise against taking it. I have HPPD, but I only have bright colors, and it’s really not so bad. You’re living in a Technicolor world, and if you just accept it, the world looks a lot better this way.

Cannabis and Brain Damage: Cannabis Compared to Other Drugs

The original post in its native form was far too long, so I broke it up into seven different posts, in addition to this post. The separate sections are listed below. The original post, what is left of it, is here. For an examination of the evidence of whether or not cannabis causes actual structural damage to brain cells, axons or dendrites, see here. For an analysis of neuropsychological batteries of cannabis users to determine whether or not they suffer brain damage, see here. For an analysis of EEG testing of cannabis users to discover evidence of brain damage, see here. For an analysis of studies looking at cerebral blood flow in cannabis users, see here. For an admittedly impressionistic analysis of whether or not cannabis causes schizotypal symptoms in users, see here. For a summary of the findings of cannabis and brain damage, see here. LSD and psilocybin, while not causing permanent brain damage (that we know of so far), can cause HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder), a long-term perceptual disturbance of unknown etiology. I have HPPD myself from using hallucinogens about 40 times, but “suffering” from HPPD once again is an interesting concept, at least in my case. All I get are brighter colors, mostly in neon signs and store displays, and only at certain times. Maybe lots of people would love to have this effect, as the world looks so much better this way. I called up an ophthalmologist about it and he laughed me off the phone, saying he doesn’t treat people whose colors improve. It is only my continuing neurosis that causes me to view these changes as frightening instead of integrating them. LSD does have a deleterious effect on the visual system of the brain – it is hypotoxic to that area in lab animals, for instance, birds – but it doesn’t cause any generalized brain damage at all that we know of, and we have been studying LSD’s effects on the brain for about 50 years or so now. LSD does cause reductions in 5-HT2 receptors on serotonin neurons. But this is a case of these receptors retreating back into the cell due to LSD’s assault on those receptors. After about a week, the receptors to poke back out of the cell again. The most recent evidence also indicates that psilocybin (mushrooms) and mescaline (peyote) also do not cause any generalized brain damage, although psilocybin can cause HPPD. Due to the risks of HPPD, this blog unfortunately does not recommend that anyone use LSD or psilocybin even one time, unless maybe if you are dying. Ecstasy (MDMA) produces comparatively dramatic harm to the brain after only a handful of doses (2-10 doses), with the effects increasing with continued use. The drug causes degeneration of serotonergic axonal terminals, which afterwards do not grow back correctly, if at all. There are suggestions that there may be hippocampal damage. On intelligence tests there are deficits in working memory, declining vocabulary, impairments in verbal learning, associative learning and attention and increased distraction. There also seem to be some mood changes. Perfusion deficits and increased delta waves on EEG have also been found, but the same study did not find these in cannabis users. Impairments were also found in the ability to drive a car in Ecstasy users, even after they were abstinent. However, a recent study found no persistent effects from one dose of Ecstasy. Therefore, it appears that using Ecstasy one time is possibly safe. However, taking Ecstasy as few as an average of 3.2 times causes noticeable damage in verbal memory. Ecstasy should be taken no more than once in a lifetime, if at all. Evidence strongly suggests that the heavy use of PCP, ketamine and DXM may cause permanent brain damage and can often cause schizophrenia-like symptoms which may be related to that damage. The theorized damage involves the vacuolization of neurons (basically a hollowing out and death of the neuron) in various parts of the brain. The evidence comes from rat studies and the dosages have been criticized, but humans are far more sensitive to the effects of dissociatives than rats are, so the differential doses are probably about right. The rat evidence has now been challenged by monkey studies, so the matter is far from settled. But until it is, extreme caution, if not outright avoidance, seems to be the best policy for these drugs. PCP can probably be used up to a dozen or so times in life with no permanent damage. Beyond that, things get a lot touchier. Heavy users show an extremely high rate of schizophrenic and psychotic symptoms, along with symptoms of brain damage. There seems to be some recovery with abstinence, but full recovery is by no means assured. Evidence indicates that ketamine can be used at least once with no permanent consequences at all to the brain. Beyond that, it is up in the air. Ketamine can surely be used at least a dozen times with no risks to the brain. Beyond that, things get hazier. Heavy DXM users have reported a very high rate of psychosis and schizophrenia-like symptoms, along with symptoms of organic brain damage. Users should approach DXM use with caution, and heavy use should be ruled out. Heavy methamphetamine use has been proven to cause permanent damage to dopaminergic systems, especially in the striatum, caudate and putamen (at ½ gram a day, 5 days a week, and 2 years of use). Studies have also shown degeneration of axons on serotonergic neurons and loss (cell death) of up to 1 In the study above, there was some recovery of the dopaminergic system with abstinence, but it was only partial. Meth can probably be used a dozen or so times without any permanent damage. Beyond that, no guarantees. There is some suggestive evidence of chronic psychosis, depression and anxiety directly related to heavy methamphetamine use (over 10 years of heavy use). Impairments in learning, processing speed, and working memory, along with delayed recall, are found in meth users. Brain dysfunction is often readily apparent in heavy meth users. This is one category of drug user, in contrast to most other drug users, that does sometimes appear “fried.” Much of this “fried” appearance seems to clear up with abstinence. Methamphetamine can probably be used up to a dozen times or so in moderation without any permanent consequences to the brain. Nevertheless, some users have reported permanent effects from only 2-3 weeks of very heavy use. Meth is nasty stuff, and it’s best to keep away from it. Heavy drinking can depress neurons for up to two years. With continued heavy drinking, at some point, there is organic damage, which in many cases is permanent, although there is often significant recovery with abstinence. The case of the “wethead” and “dry drunk,” the former alcoholic who is still damaged, psychologically or cognitively, is well known. Heavy use of barbiturates over many years causes a damage syndrome that looks like chronic alcoholism and that does not completely recover with abstinence. Even chronic Valium use causes long-term EEG changes of unknown significance. Sniffing glue has been proven to be possibly the worst thing you can do to your brain short of putting a bullet in it, and the effects do not recover completely with abstinence. Cocaine, unfortunately, seems to be capable of causing brain damage with as few as 11 doses (constriction of vessels in the brain). At three years of using several times a week, there is slowing on the P300 event related potentials test, that may not recover fully with abstinence. Recent studies have also shown that chronic heavy cocaine use causes reductions in gray matter in various parts of the brain. This means that heavy cocaine use causes an actual loss of brain cells in parts of the brain. It may also cause white matter reductions, which means a loss of connections in the brain. There are also impairments in attention, learning, memory, reaction time and cognitive flexibility in cocaine users. It is not known whether these clear up with abstinence. This blog recommends that lifetime use of cocaine be limited to 10 times or less. Even there, there is a slight risk of sudden death due to perturbations in the heart’s electrical rhythms. These perturbations can cause a sudden heart attack or even possibly a stroke. Vasoconstriction is probably involved. In many of the above cases, there is some recovery with abstinence, but often not to the previous level. Experimental use of PCP, ketamine, cocaine and methamphetamine (use up to a dozen or so times for each one) probably does not cause significant permanent damage. Beyond that, you play with matches. Compared to other drugs of abuse, such as Ecstasy, PCP, Ketamine, DXM, cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol, the effects of cannabis on the brain are dramatically less deleterious. In terms of its effects on the brain for heavy users, cannabis is surely by far least damaging intoxicant of them all, for what that is worth.

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