Category: Speed

Alt Left: A Look at Partial Drug Legalization Efforts in the US

Rambo: I wonder what percentage of these murders are in some way drug-related? I’ve never seen actual numbers but would have to guess those numbers would be pretty high. It just seems that in so many of these cases drugs were at least the “chain of events” starter that led to alot of these murders; an ever present link in the chai

RL: Most of these Black on Black shootings in our big cities these days are gang warfare. And what sustains the gangs? The drug trade. Legalize the drug trade and for what purpose will the gangs exist? How will they make money? They may just fold up altogether. Those gangs are primarily money-making operations.

So since most of the shootings are gang related and the gangs exist because of the drug trade, I would say that probably the vast majority of these murders are drug-related in that sense. Not so much related to the consumption of drugs as in people getting high and crazy and blowing each other way but more related to the sale of drugs.

Rambo: Which brings up the question once again: should all drugs be legalized? A lot of Libertarian types say it’s the obvious solution to halt murderous gangersterism, but since Libertarians never get elected to anything, aren’t they just banging their heads against the wall? If all drugs were legalized, how would hardcore drug addicts get the money to acquire the narcotics they desire? Would drug-related crimes increase? Since addicts aren’t likely to be long-term job holders, how would this affect the society at large? It’s not an easy issue to address.

Good question.

This has already been tried in a sense in Seattle and in some ways, it is being tried in other places like the city of Fresno very close to where I live.

In Seattle, possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine are legal. However, drug dealing is still illegal.

In Fresno, meth addicts state that police are not prosecuting meth possession crimes of under a certain amount. So users are carrying precisely this amount with them and possibly dealers are delivering packages in this precise amount. It’s not a tiny amount of meth either.

Legalizing possession of hard drugs in Fresno and Seattle has not led to a decline in drug use, of course. And since drug sales are not targeted and remain illegal, the problem of drug trade-fueled gangsterism obviously carries on regardless.

Legalization of cannabis promised to put a stop to all cannabis-related crimes, but now illegal street sales of cannabis are somehow competing with legal cannabis sales in cannabis shops. I’m not sure on what basis the illegal sales are competing. But legal cannabis is very heavily taxed, possibly taxed so highly that the price has become noncompetitive, and street sales can beat the cannabis shops on price. Border Patrol agents are still seizing huge amounts of marijuana at the border and arresting people for trying to smuggle it across, but this strikes me as absurd considering that restricted use and sales of the drug are already legal in much of the US.

In Seattle, police were arresting street people and the homeless, the vast majority of whom had either mental illnesses or drug addiction issues, regularly for all sorts of petty crimes. The local jails were overcrowded and typically they would be jailed for a month or two and then released. Police complained about a revolving door involving these petty offenders, but it’s hard to see what else could be done. This situation is very much ongoing.

Since use is legal, entire sections of downtown Seattle streets have been taken over by mostly homeless addicts using meth, cocaine, and heroin right out in the open. Low level drug dealing is also ubiquitous.

As a result of all of this, Seattle has become a magnet for homeless people all over the country who are flooding there due to the good treatment the homeless receive there. Nevertheless, downtown streets are now full of homeless people sleeping rough on the sidewalks. People going to work have to step over these human eyesores as they negotiate their way to their jobs very morning. Mentally ill homeless people regularly act loudly and frighteningly crazy right on the sidewalks and streets, creating huge embarrassing and scary scenes. Not much seems to be done about these lunatic ravers.

Perhaps most importantly, now that drug use is legal, addicts have swarmed to the city, and petty theft rates in local businesses have skyrocketed as addicts steal goods to pawn to buy their dope.

So, sure, partial legalization solves some problems, but it also creates a whole  lot of new ones.

As usual,  I have no ideas on how to ameliorate this situation. I’m going to throw up my hands on this one like I always do.

Alt Left: What’s Behind California’s High Housing Costs and High Rates of Homelessness, Poverty, and Welfare Use?

Tulio: Hey RL, just a bit off topic, I was recently reading that California when adjusted for cost of living has the highest poverty rate in the country and that it also has the most welfare recipients.

The Right has been going nuts in the Trump era bashing California and called it a failed 3rd World state that looks the way it does because it’s controlled by Democrats. A lot of that is of course hyperbole, but there is a lot of struggle in California.

I’ve always found this argument a bit specious because there are 15 or so other states where Democrats control the governorship and legislature that don’t have the same quality of life problems. The Right will ignore of course that the majority of high-poverty states are red states.

But there is a question I’m wondering. Is the demographic change of California from majority White to now mostly Latino the reason for these economic problems? It stands to reason that if most of your demographic change is coming from immigrants of a poor country, it will make your state a poorer place.

And this has nothing to do with people voting Democratic per se. If tomorrow 10 million Central Americans immigrated to Nebraska I’m sure you’d see similar issues emerge.

Good question.  This is an excellent hypothesis, actually. I just don’t think there is much of anything to it.

High Cost of Housing: The Secret Behind All of the Problems

The adjusted poverty rate is due to the high cost of housing. Everything else flows from that. What are we supposed to do about it? This is a problem of capitalism. Explain what the state is supposed to do about this housing problem.

I mean we are trying to do a lot of things but the money’s not available for a total solution to the problem. Also our solutions are running into a lot of NIMBYism.

The Homeless Cataclysm

We are fairly kind to our homeless here, so other states kindly put their homeless on buses to California, especially cities like San Francisco. We are trying to deal with this homeless problem as best as we can. What are we supposed to do? The homeless problem is also tied into the housing problem.

Problems of Penal System Reform

The problem is also drugs. Face it, a lot of the homeless are mentally ill or alcohol or drug addicted. They can’t work even if they wanted to. We have decriminalized a lot of drug use here and we released a lot of inmates and reduced a lot of crimes from felonies to  misdemeanors. Also our jails and prisons are badly overcrowded. Hence a lot fewer minor offenders are getting locked up and a lot of them are just roaming the streets instead.

Problems of Drug Decriminalization or Legalization

Everyone says we ought to decrim drug use and I have always tended to agree. But this is what you end up with when you do that. In Seattle, they look the other way on minor drug use and possession, hence there is a huge amount of open drug possession, use, and dealing, a lot of it right out in the open and associated with the homeless.

The drug of choice is often methamphetamine, which can make you act pretty crazy. So you have these crazed meth heads roaming around the streets scaring everyone, certain streets no-go zones due to open drug use, homeless everywhere, even sleeping on sidewalks  where you have to step over them, and rampant crime, mostly petty thievery from stores as addicts steal like crazy to get money for their habits.

I am at a loss to do about any of these problems, sorry. I just want to throw up my hands.

What’s Wrong with Social Programs?

So we have a lot of welfare? Big deal. That’s the state trying to deal with the poverty problem. Good for the state! Keep in mind that to these guys, everything is welfare: Section 8, Food Stamps, Disability, Workman’s Comp, reduced utility bills, on and on.

Serious Limits on What a Mere State Can Do about These Things

We are a very liberal state with a very liberal Legislature that cares a lot about these problems, but they are beyond the scope of the state government to deal with, much less fix. But we are trying our best. Ask these Republicans what we ought to be doing instead.

I don’t think changing from a majority White state to a majority Hispanic state has much to do with it. There is a lot of poverty, here but there is also a lot of wealth. Keep in mind that California has the 8th largest economy on Earth, higher than the vast majority of actual countries. And we’re not even a country. We are just a state.

The Myth of Illegal Drugs Frying Your Brain and Permafried People

In response to Jason’s post here about drug use frying your brain, I have written this response. In general, the notion that the use of illegal drugs will fry your brain or make you permafried even after you quit is nonsense. In general, once you quit you go back to the intelligence and sanity level you were at before you started. Few people get permanently lowered intelligence or permanent mental illness from former drug use.

Most illegal drugs do not cause any permanent damage to your brain that would affect you permanently after you quit.

In all of my years using drugs, I have met 10,000’s of drug users and I never met one person who had used so much drugs that they were “fried” in the sense that they were permanently stupid or crazy after they quit using.

Cocaine

There may be some consequences far down the road – say, with Parkinson’s.

Jason’s article discusses an increased risk of Parkinson’s in former cocaine users. But it’s not really due to brain damages so much as changes in a certain receptor that make someone more vulnerable to a toxin. That’s not the same thing as having a fried brain.

I knew a heavy cocaine user who appeared to have neurological problems from the drug. But I am not sure if it persisted after he quit, if he ever did quit. But he’s the only person I’ve ever met like that, and even he wasn’t fried at all. He was still very intelligent and completely sane. However, he did appear to have some sort of brain damage. Whether it was permanent or not is not known.

LSD

I have known people who took LSD up to 700 times, and I know a number who took LSD 300 times. LSD doesn’t damage your brain anyway. It can cause some changes in the visual system due to permanent changes in serotonin receptors, but that just causes some perceptual problems, and this is mostly in people who have taken it 50+ times. It doesn’t change effect you in any way that changes the way you think or feel, in other words, it doesn’t make you stupid or nuts.

There are some very heavy former LSD users who seem to have permanent hallucinations, but those people took a lot of acid over a short period of time – like way, way too much acid. It’s not known what’s going on with them, but I suppose they are permafried in a sense.

LSD is a dangerous drug.

Cannabis

I know many people who have been smoking pot for 10, 20, or even 30 years, and there’s nothing wrong with any of them. You wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with them if you met them. They’re not damaged at all.

The pot lowering IQ discussed in Jason’s piece is only for use before you are 18. If you start using at age 18 or after, there’s no effect on IQ. People under 18 need to be very careful about pot because it can indeed lower their IQ’s a bit.

Pot doesn’t give you schizophrenia, period. The most it can do is trigger it if you are already vulnerable, but even then, most of those people would have gotten it anyway. But it can definitely bring it on sooner than it would have otherwise.

The rate of schizophrenia has been flat for 60 years, all through the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s and 2010’s, and all sorts of drug use rates for different drugs skyrocketed at various times in that period. In other words, neither cannabis nor any other drug is going to give you schizophrenia with one exception discussed below.

MDMA

MDMA is a very dangerous drug and it can definitely cause physical damage to your brain. It permanently lowers scores on a few aspects of intelligence tests such as vocabulary, but you mostly can’t notice any changes and there do not appear to be any changes in mental stability. In general, it doesn’t make you stupid or nuts.

However, there are some people called e-tards out there who took a lot of MDMA very frequently over relatively short of periods of time, and these people appear to be permafried. Mostly they seem a bit stupid.

However, I have heard that even these effects of MDMA go away after ~7-8 years if you stay away from the drug.

 

Speed is another matter but even that tends to clear up after you quit. There are some very heavy methamphetamine users, especially people who shot the drug, who have developed an illness that looks a lot like or possibly is paranoid schizophrenia.

There are some recorded cases out of Japan, and a friend told me about another case here in California. This is not a common outcome and even with all the heavy meth abuse that is going on nowadays, you don’t hear much about people being permafried in the sense that they become permanently mentally ill with paranoid schizophrenia.

Heavy Polydrug and Alcohol Abuse for Decades (30 years)

I have heard of one person who used huge amounts of drugs and drank very heavily over many years, starting as an adolescent. They are now off of everything, and they have a rather poor short-term memory and forget stuff a lot, but other than that, they are still extremely intelligent.

They are also a bit suspicious and paranoid, but not at the level of a paranoid psychosis. I suppose this man is permafried in a sense, but if you met him, you would not appear stupid or crazy.

Conclusion

Bottom line is a lot of that stuff can mess you up pretty bad while you are on it so you seem stupid, crazy, or even brain damaged. But most if not all of that tends to clear up when you quit. Permafried people who are permanently stupid or nuts from heavy drug use must be awfully rare because I haven’t met one in my entire life. The fried brains and permafried nonsense is mostly mythology.

Tumblr Pedo Blogs – CP, Pedo Moms, Loving Families, Meth Smoking, and Satanism

In response to this post here, Jason is worrying his silly little head about nothing. If you will look below, you will see that there are hundreds of thousands of people on the Net leaving obvious trails and doing things that are far worse than we are doing here. Anyway, it’s obvious that we don’t like child molesters or CP here, so why would anyone be suspicious of our conversations? You all don’t realize how out and open these types are.

Don’t be paranoid about these posts, please. I went on Tumblr blogs and found hundreds to thousands of people more or less openly admitting that they distributed CP and downloaded it to their drives.

Not to mention that I found 50-100 out and out pedo blogs. I mean whoever made that blog had to be a pedo because that’s what all the content was. I don’t mean the content was illegal. It was mostly cartoon CP, CGI CP, CP drawings, CP stories, and clothed little girls wearing some pretty skimpy clothing. The first four are absolutely legal. The last is more up in the air, but if they have their clothes on, it’s probably legal.

There were literally hundreds of people more or less openly posting that they distributed and downloaded CP. They were using a Kik-type program. Kik was popular because it was so anonymous. I believe that the Kik servers were not recording people’s IP’s deliberately.

Anyway, this was some new Kik-type program that was even more anonymous than Kik, and all of the pedos were headed over to this new program. They were giving out their handles on this new program and saying, “Lots of great pics to trade. Look me up!” They didn’t say it was CP, but they were posting on pedo threads, so that could be assumed. Most of the people distributing the CP were men.

I probably found ~100 of either pedos looking for a “pedo Mom” or Moms with little kids posting that either they were pedo Moms or they wanted to become pedo Moms. The pedos and the pedo Moms were interacting on the threads. A pedo Mom is a mother, probably single, who will allow a pedo to molest her kid, generally for money. The Moms probably get in on it for the money and maybe for the thrill. The motivation for the pedos is obvious.

All of those looking for pedo Moms were men, and I got the distinct feeling that they were all pedophiles. I don’t think any of the pedo Moms were pedophiles because female pedophiles barely exist, but I think some of them were off into meth smoking and/or Satanism.

They were just sick women with low morals. It’s generally acknowledged that a lot of men are sick fucks, and it’s true, a lot of us are. But what people don’t realize is that quite a few women are sick fucks too – more than you would ever imagine.

There was also a tremendous amount of Satanism and celebration of evil on these pedo blogs. A very large proportion of these pedo, molester, or CP types were open Devil worshipers. They delighted in worshipping evil. I suppose even they realize that this pedo, molesting, and CP stuff is seriously evil, so if they are going to get into it, they are going to embrace evil in order to slake their perverted desires.

There was also an incredible amount of drug use going on and celebration of such. A very large proportion of these pedo types were into smoking meth. Smoking meth is pretty evil too, so I suppose that was part of the Satanism. So they were celebrating and worshipping evil while being way deep into meth smoking and pedo/CP stuff.

With a lot of these people, especially the meth smokers and Satanists, they did not even seem to be pedophiles. Many said that they had never seen CP before and wanted to see it, or they had never had sex with a kid before and wanted to try it. These people were just trysexuals. They’ll do anything sexual.

A lot of them were probably bisexual, into group sex, threeways, gangbangs, making their own porn, BD/SM, watersports – I mean you name it, they were probably into it, and the more sick,  fucked up, and perverted the sex was, the more they liked it.

To them, sex with a kid and CP was just another fucked up, perverted kink that they wanted to try – quite possibly sickest, most fucked up kink of them all, which of course is part of the attraction. These are people who have embraced evil and are into being evil. So they are looking around for evil things to do because that’s what they are into – being evil and doing evil stuff.

I’m not really into talking about the Devil, but Jason is religious and talks about Devil worship and Satanism a lot. It might be interesting to see what a Christian says about all this pedo – meth smoking – Satanism behavior.

Repost: Alt Left: What Percentage of Homosexual People Is Acceptable To You in a Given Population?

Answered on Queera.

Believe it or not, all of the answers said that if a country’s population was 100% gay, that would be absolutely wonderful! I’m sure having all the population of your country gay would be the greatest thing since sliced bread! What the Hell’s the matter with people? It would be catastrophic for any country to be 100% gay, though we’re probably headed that way in the US at the rate we’re going here.

How could having 100% of the population of your country gay possibly be a good thing!? Color me mystified.

A given population as in for a country? 3%. That’s the percentage in the US, and it’s just fine by me. Understand that homosexuality is bad for society in the sense that it causes a lot of costly problems for society. Furthermore, taxes paid by gays do not make up for the costs that society incurs from homosexuals.

  • Homosexuals live 20 years less than heterosexuals. It is horribly sad for gay people that they miss out on so many years of wonderful life, but it seems to me that reduced lifespan is costly to society.
  • Gays have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders. While this causes a lot of suffering to gay people, and this is sad, at the same time, mental illness is costly to society.
  • Gays have much higher rates of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse than straights. The gay male party and play scene revolving heavily around methamphetamine and club drugs is particularly alarming. Lesbians in particular smoke a lot. The costs of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse to gays themselves are no doubt significant in terms of disease, mortality, and the suffering that can come from excessive substance abuse; nevertheless, this incurs a lot of costs to society.
  • Gay men obviously have a very high STD rate. At 20% infection rate, the HIV rate is especially alarming. Most of these diseases remain confined to the gay community and have not broken out significantly to the straight community, with the exception of the Black community with all the down low men. But the great heterosexual HIV epidemic spreading from gays to straights never occurred mostly because HIV goes from men to women and then it stops, as spokesmen from the New York Department of Public Health said as early as the 1980’s. That’s not completely true, but it is very hard to get HIV from a woman. Hepatitis A, B, and C are or were  fairly to very common to in the gay community, vastly more common than among heterosexuals, most of whom only acquire B and C from IV drug use. Parasitical diseases such as shigella, ameobiasis, and giardiasis are also extremely common among gay men; whereas they are quite rare among straights. In recent syphilis epidemics, up to 85% of cases are among gay men. Syphilis is quite uncommon among straights. Gay men have elevated rates of anal cancer, and the rate is rising. The rate is vastly higher than the rate among straights. I would like to point out that it is gay men themselves who suffer most from these diseases, and this suffering, although self-imposed, is often tragic, horrifying, and heartbreaking, particularly in the heart-wrenching case of HIV. Lesbians have very low rates of STD’s but higher rates of breast cancer. I doubt if lesbians impose a disease burden on society. The very high gay male STD rate, in particular the HIV rate, obviously imposes considerable costs to society.
  • Tragically, gay men have a suicide rate 3X higher than straight men, even in San Francisco, the most gay-friendly place in the US. The attempted suicide rate is also very high. Gay male teenagers have a tragically very high attempted suicide rate at 8X the normal rate. Suicidal behavior causes unfathomable and heartbreaking suffering on gay men. However, attempted and completed suicides impose considerable cost on society.
  • Domestic violence rates are very high in gay and lesbian couples, especially the latter. A gay man is much more likely to beat his partner than a straight man is. A woman is much less likely to be beaten by a male partner than by a female partner. This causes immense suffering to the partners of gay and lesbian batterers. In addition, domestic violence is costly to society.
  • In gay areas, gay men typically take over all of the public restrooms and turn them into miniature sex clubs. This renders most public restrooms unusable by the rest of us. Most gay men typically vociferously support the use of public restrooms as sex dens for gays. I don’t have much sympathy here. Gay men are simply being very irresponsible with this depraved mindset. Further, this is a cost to society.

It is first of all most important to point out that gay men themselves suffer worst from most from these largely self-imposed conditions, a suffering so profound that it almost moves you to tears. Compassion is essential. Nevertheless, there is a cost to society.

Some of these issues may be caused by discrimination (see the high teenage gay male attempted suicide rate), but there is a cost to society no matter what causes it. Some of these problems would lessen with increased acceptance of gays, but others would linger or possibly even worsen.

The question comes up whether gays pay for the costs they bring to society. Many gays seem to have above average intelligence for some reason, especially gay men. Gays seem more artistically talented than straights. More gays than straights seem to get college degrees, in particular gay men. Gay men seem to earn higher than average wages and are disproportionately employed in high paying and prestigious professions.

I am always hearing about a homosexual, often a gay man, who is contributing something noteworthy and exemplary to our society such that it mentions a media notice. Obviously, gay men contribute more to the tax base per capita than straights. So gays, especially gay men, offer considerable benefits to society, not flowing from their homosexuality but from other aspects of their lives.

I have not discussed lesbians here because I know little about them, but I doubt that they impose serious costs on society other than reduced lifespan.

However the question rises whether gays pay for themselves. Despite their excellent contributions to society and their higher than normal tax contributions, I still do not think that homosexuals pay for themselves.

The question then arises about whether the rest of us should be willing to carry a small burden for our gay brothers.

Personally I feel that at 3%, I am willing to shoulder the costs of homosexuals to society, as the numbers are so small that it is something we can cope with. I would be willing to tolerate up to 6% gay men in society. I think we could deal at that rate. However, if the rate of male homosexuality went higher than that, all of these problems above would increase in scope with attendant costs.

Honestly, even when you get to 10% gay men in any country, your problems are going to go up a lot. The % of gay men in New York and San Francisco is quite high, and they definitely impose considerable costs on these cities. Once you start heading up to 15–20% of any country’s population being gay, I think it would be unsustainable for many reasons (see above).

Homosexuality in society seems to be one of those things, like many things in life, that is best in small doses.

Meth-induced Voices in Your Head Start with Pareidolia

Interesting article on meth-induced voices in the head deriving from long-term use of methamphetamine.

Eventually, and note that this happened with everyday use of crystal meth for a couple of years, there didn’t have to be any white noise to trigger the voices. Eventually I heard voices all the time, and they took on a different nature. They would sound just like real voices, coming from different directions and distance, so the sensation was enough to trick my brain into believing that I really heard the voices with my ears.
They became voices that mocked me, voices that ridiculed me, voices of imaginary observers to a mind that became increasingly paranoid and deluded. So it became much like a persecution complex, or paranoid schizophrenia.
At one stage I heard people talking about me at work, saying terrible things about me. I heard them through the walls. I heard them even when I was alone.

That sounds almost exactly like paranoid schizophrenia. I have heard that long-term meth use can lead to a permanent paranoid schizophrenia-type illness. Most of this data has come out of Japan where people have been injecting shabu or meth for many years. The cases involved subjects who had been injecting shabu every day for 10+ years. The illness was incurable.

Meth-induced voices in your head take you to a bad place, a real living hell on Earth. And many who go there don’t return. They end up permanently psychotic…
…I find this very interesting, in that it could mean that hearing voices is simply an expected side-effect of prolonged drug use. Further, I noticed many meth addicts who tended to believe in black magic and possession. Even when I was in rehab years ago, some residents there became convinced that a schizophrenic resident (who talked to himself and spoke in gibberish that they thought were “demonic tongues”) was possessed. No amount of attempting to reason with them would convince them otherwise.
So beware, voices in the head and apophenia leading to an irrational belief in the paranormal (as well as possibly in God in recovery) may well just be a side-effect of the high levels of dopamine as a result of frequent prolonged drug use. And it may be permanent.

This is interesting, implying that in some cases, the delusions never really go away. 
It’s interesting how the voices start up faster the longer they have been going on. For instance, if they have been going on a long time and you quit for a while, they will start up again full-blown after only a few days of meth use. This is a kindling effect and it is well known in cocaine use and bipolar disorder, especially manic episodes.
A heavy cocaine user will quit and then smoke cocaine one time. After only using it once, they are running around shutting all the drapes and talking about how the police outside can hear everyone so people need to quiet down.
In Bipolar Disorder, the more episodes you experience, the worse the illness until you get to the point where you are a somewhat manic all the time. Episodes come more often and healthy periods between episodes shorten. The episodes themselves become worse and last longer.

Meth-induced Voices in Your Head Start with Pareidolia

By Jerome

I’ve never written about this topic on this blog, although it was a frequent subject on my old blog. Maybe it’s time…
This subject is fascinating to me now, though it wasn’t always that way. In active addiction it was scary. It was something that I lived with for a few years, but what I find most interesting is how it started.
Firstly, you need to know what pareidoloia is. It’s defined as seeing patterns where none exist, and while that explains it technically, it doesn’t really make it clear what the psychological phenomenon actually is. Visual pareidolia is when we think we see shapes like faces in inanimate objects, like Jesus on a piece of toast, or a face on Mars.
But pareidolia is also when we think we hear voices or recognizable sounds through white noise. An example of the less well known auditory pareidolia is when you’re taking a shower or hear really loud rain falling on your roof, and you think you hear voices or your phone ringing through the noise. That was how my meth voices started. At first it was just ordinary pareidolia, where there was loud rain or wind and I thought I heard voices, but would realize immediately that it was my imagination.
But then something seemed to go wrong in my brain. Fragments of sound that sounded like voices evolved into much more. As months went by, it would happen more frequently, and any background noise, even noises that were not noticeable to most people, would trigger it. So what started out sounding vaguely like voices, after a few months became voices of people that I knew speaking unintelligible words. So it was like hearing a conversation from another room, one just out of earshot and not heard clearly. Then as time went by, it became actual words and sentences that I could make out.
Eventually, and note that this happened with everyday use of crystal meth for a couple of years, there didn’t have to be any white noise to trigger the voices. Eventually I heard voices all the time, and they took on a different nature. They would sound just like real voices, coming from different directions and distance, so the sensation was enough to trick my brain into believing that I really heard the voices with my ears.
They became voices that mocked me, voices that ridiculed me, voices of imaginary observers to a mind that became increasingly paranoid and deluded. So it became much like a persecution complex, or paranoid schizophrenia.
At one stage I heard people talking about me at work, saying terrible things about me. I heard them through the walls. I heard them even when I was alone. Eventually I isolated myself from the outside world and everything in my life was affected as I retreated into my own delusional world of suffering and pain.
Meth-induced voices in your head take you to a bad place, a real living hell on Earth. And many who go there don’t return. They end up permanently psychotic. I’ll probably revisit this topic and write about how it felt to live with those voices and the inevitable delusion, but today’s post is mostly about how they start.
I find it interesting to know that those voices do start with auditory pareidolia, which is something we all experience. Of course, if you’re a meth addict and you start to experience voices, it’s probably a great time to stop using. But you won’t, I know. Yet you need to recognize that when this happens, you can no longer try to convince yourself that you aren’t an addict.
When it reaches this point, you’re a long way past crossing a line from user to addict. You need to recognize that you have a serious problem, one that is affecting not only your life but those of all involved in it. Once the voices progress to the point where you hear them all the time, they don’t stop as long as you continue using. Even if you are clean for a long time and then relapse, the voices return in a few days, and then stick around as long as you use. At least that’s how it was for me.

Update: This article about apophenia (the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena), which is of course closely related to pareidolia, lists high levels of dopamine as a possible cause. Of course drugs like meth, and to a lesser extent cocaine and crack cocaine, cause tremendously high levels of dopamine, considerably higher than the levels that occur naturally. And all of those drugs cause voices in the heads of long-term users. Apparently high levels of dopamine might also cause belief in the paranormal, and EVP, among other things. (I’d considered mentioning EVP here anyway.)
I find this very interesting, in that it could mean that hearing voices is simply an expected side-effect of prolonged drug use. Further, I noticed many meth addicts who tended to believe in black magic and possession. Even when I was in rehab years ago, some residents there became convinced that a schizophrenic resident (who talked to himself and spoke in gibberish that they thought were “demonic tongues”) was possessed. No amount of attempting to reason with them would convince them otherwise.
So beware, voices in the head and apophenia leading to an irrational belief in the paranormal (as well as possibly in God in recovery) may well just be a side-effect of the high levels of dopamine as a result of frequent prolonged drug use. And it may be permanent.
Some of my most annoying Facebook “friends” are people I became acquainted with in rehab, who share Christian nonsense followed by “type Amen” all the time. I can’t bring myself to unfriend them somehow. The most annoying proponent of the sharing Jesus movement is a girl I remember from rehab who believed that she needed to eat sand. There was even a patch of sand set aside especially for her in the garden. (My greatest challenge in rehab was to refrain from pissing in her sand patch.) So ironically, some who hang on so desperately to Jesus in recovery may in my opinion do so simply because their brains are fried from all the drugs. Fortunately I’m not one of them. I guess I’m just lucky.

Alt Left: What Percentage of Homosexual People Is Acceptable To You in a Given Population?

Answered on Queera.

Believe it or not, all of the answers said that if a country’s population was 100% gay, that would be absolutely wonderful! I’m sure having all the population of your country gay would be the greatest thing since sliced bread! What the Hell’s the matter with people? It would be catastrophic for any country to be 100% gay, though we’re probably headed that way in the US at the rate we’re going here.

How could having 100% of the population of your country gay possibly be a good thing!? Color me mystified.

A given population as in for a country? 3%. That’s the percentage in the US, and it’s just fine by me. Understand that homosexuality is bad for society in the sense that it causes a lot of costly problems for society. Furthermore, taxes paid by gays do not make up for the costs that society incurs from homosexuals.

  • Homosexuals live 20 years less than heterosexuals. It is horribly sad for gay people that they miss out on so many years of wonderful life, but it seems to me that reduced lifespan is costly to society.
  • Gays have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders. While this causes a lot of suffering to gay people, and this is sad, at the same time, mental illness is costly to society.
  • Gays have much higher rates of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse than straights. The gay male party and play scene revolving heavily around methamphetamine and club drugs is particularly alarming. Lesbians in particular smoke a lot. The costs of drinking, smoking, and drug abuse to gays themselves are no doubt significant in terms of disease, mortality, and the suffering that can come from excessive substance abuse; nevertheless, this incurs a lot of costs to society.
  • Gay men obviously have a very high STD rate. At 20% infection rate, the HIV rate is especially alarming. Most of these diseases remain confined to the gay community and have not broken out significantly to the straight community, with the exception of the Black community with all the down low men. But the great heterosexual HIV epidemic spreading from gays to straights never occurred mostly because HIV goes from men to women and then it stops, as spokesmen from the New York Department of Public Health said as early as the 1980’s. That’s not completely true, but it is very hard to get HIV from a woman. Hepatitis A, B, and C are or were   fairly to very common to in the gay community, vastly more common than among heterosexuals, most of whom only acquire B and C from IV drug use. Parasitical diseases such as shigella, ameobiasis, and giardiasis are also extremely common among gay men; whereas they are quite rare among straights. In recent syphilis epidemics, up to 85% of cases are among gay men. Syphilis is quite uncommon among straights. Gay men have elevated rates of anal cancer, and the rate is rising. The rate is vastly higher than the rate among straights. I would like to point out that it is gay men themselves who suffer most from these diseases, and this suffering, although self-imposed, is often tragic, horrifying, and heartbreaking in particularly in the heart-wrenching case of HIV. Lesbians have very low rates of STD’s but higher rates of breast cancer. I doubt if lesbians impose a disease burden on society. The very high gay male STD rate, in particular the HIV rate, obviously imposes considerable costs to society.
  • Tragically, gay men have a suicide rate 3X higher than straight men, even in San Francisco, the most gay-friendly place in the US. The attempted suicide rate is also very high. Gay male teenagers have a tragically very high attempted suicide rate at 8X the normal rate. Suicidal behavior causes unfathomable and heartbreaking suffering on gay men. However, attempted and completed suicides impose considerable cost on society.
  • Domestic violence rates are very high in gay and lesbian couples, especially the latter. A gay man is much more likely to beat his partner than a straight man is. A woman is much less likely to be beaten by a male partner than by a female partner. This causes immense suffering to the partners of gay and lesbian batterers. In addition, domestic violence is costly to society.
  • In gay areas, gay men typically take over all of the public restrooms and turn them into miniature sex clubs. This renders most public restrooms unusable by the rest of us. Most gay men typically vociferously support the use of public restrooms as sex dens for gays. I don’t have much sympathy here. Gay men are simply being very irresponsible with this depraved mindset. Further, this is a cost to society.

It is first of all most important to point out that gay men themselves suffer worst from most from these largely self-imposed conditions, a suffering so profound that it almost moves you to tears. Compassion is essential. Nevertheless, there is a cost to society. Some of these issues may be caused by discrimination (see the high teenage gay male attempted suicide rate), but there is a cost to society no matter what causes it. Some of these problems would lessen with increased acceptance of gays, but others would linger or possibly even worsen.

The question comes up whether gays pay for the costs they bring to society. Many gays seem to have above average intelligence for some reason, especially gay men. Gays seem more artistically talented than straights. More gays than straights seem to get college degrees, in particular gay men.
Gay men seem to earn higher than average wages and are disproportionately employed in high paying and prestigious professions.

I am always hearing about a homosexual, often a gay man, who is contributing something noteworthy and exemplary to our society such that it mentions a media notice. Obviously, gay men contribute more to the tax base per capita than straights. So gays, especially gay men, offer considerable benefits to society, not flowing from their homosexuality but from other aspects of their lives.

I have not discussed lesbians here because I know little about them, but I doubt that they impose serious costs on society other than reduced lifespan.

However the question rises whether gays pay for themselves. Despite their excellent contributions to society and their higher than normal tax contributions, I still do not think that homosexuals pay for themselves.

The question then arises about whether the rest of us should be willing to carry a small burden for our gay brothers.

Personally I feel that at 3%, I am willing to shoulder the costs of homosexuals to society, as the numbers are so small that it is something we can cope with. I would be willing to tolerate up to 6% gay men in society. I think we could deal at that rate. However, if the rate of male homosexuality went higher than that, all of these problems above would increase in scope with attendant costs.

Honestly, even when you get to 10% gay men in any country, your problems are going to go up a lot. The % of gay men in New York and San Francisco is quite high, and they definitely impose considerable costs on these cities. Once you start heading up to 15–20% of any country’s population being gay, I think it would be unsustainable for many reasons (see above).

Homosexuality in society seems to be one of those things, like many things in life, that is best in small doses.

"Counterfeit Cash," by Alpha Unit

In Memphis, Tennessee, two early morning Black Friday shoppers were arrested for passing counterfeit bills. Police confiscated a total of about $1,600 in fake bills, computer equipment to make fake bills, and methamphetamine.
The circumstances are similar to earlier cases, such as the case in Oklahoma City in which two people were arrested after a raid at their home. Police found large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine, along with several sheets of counterfeit 20-dollar bills.
Materials and equipment for making fake currency were found in a home in Santa Rosa, California, during a raid. In addition to counterfeit bills the police found drug paraphernalia and methamphetamine.
Not that long ago counterfeiting was a difficult and expensive operation. The best counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out pretty convincing 20s, 50s, and 100s. Doing so required the ability to cut intricate designs by hand into metal plates. Not anymore. A lot of teenagers in this country can tell you that all you need to make fake money nowadays are a PC, a scanner, and color inkjet printer. (Of course, those teenagers are usually caught in no time, since it’s not easy to produce truly authentic-looking bills.)
In case after case of counterfeiting you will see drug use implicated – particularly methamphetamine. Meth addicts often steal mail and commit other property crimes to get their hands on the money they need for their habit. They can stay awake and focused on repetitive tasks for days, making them good at such crimes as forgery, identity theft, altering checks, and trying to perfect counterfeit currency.
Millions of dollars worth of counterfeit cash is supposed to be in circulation in the United States, and there’s usually an uptick in detection during the holidays. Counterfeiters see this as the ideal time to try to pass fake bills; that’s when they think they’re more likely to get away with it. A business that ends up with counterfeit bills doesn’t get compensated for the loss and usually raises prices to make up for it.
If you end up with a counterfeit bill, the US Secret Service wants you to tell them. They say to notify your local police department or the nearest Secret Service field office. There’s no financial compensation for turning it in, though. Central banks say that to do so would subsidize counterfeiting, providing a financial reward for counterfeiters’ criminal behavior. Turning it in is just another civic duty.

Alcohol/Drugs and Brain Damage

Repost from the old site.
For those who are worried, I would add a few pointers from my own life. I’ve been using drugs and drinking, one or the other or both, recreationally, for almost 40 years, and my health is superb. Of course, as with all things, moderation is the key.
There were some wild binges of drinking and/or drug use where I thought, “Wow, this time I have definitely damaged my brain for sure!”
At that time, I just stopped using whatever it was that had me worried and waited for a bit, and it seemed that at some point, all my brains came back, and then some. In some cases, I a number of cases, I had to wait for 3-10 days (average ~1 week), but in one case, it took a month to get back to where I was.
After almost 40 years, you would think that I would be getting more and more fried by the year, but it’s just not so. To be quite honest, in many ways, it seems like I am smarter than I have ever been.
Furthermore, no one who meets me or knows me ever thinks I am stupid in any way whatsoever. It is quite the opposite. Not trying to brag here but people regularly say things like, “You’re are one of the smartest people I know.” I don’t think they would say that if I was fried.
When you exercise or play sports, they say listen to your body. With drinking and drugs, that too, but also listen to your brain. If things start seeming foggy, slow down for a bit and see if things clear up. Most if not all cases of permanent damage from this stuff have occurred from people who did not heed the warnings and careened right on ahead.
To summarize my writings on the subject:
Methamphetamine and Ecstasy are terrible for the brain, Ecstasy so bad you should not take it even one time. PCP is quite bad for your brain and probably ketamine is too. You can play around with any of those drugs a dozen or so times in a lifetime (and possibly more), and you won’t suffer any permanent damage. Any more than that, and things get a lot dicier.
Heroin is easy on the brain but nasty in any other way. Opium, and all opiates, are also harmless to the brain but can be addicting. Use must be judicious and occasional, if at all. In particular, don’t mix with other downers. Long term alcoholic drinking permanently damages the brain.
With less heavy drinking, the permanence of damage is much less clear. At low levels, drinking causes no damage whatsoever. The widespread notion, proffered even by many doctors, that each drink “kills brain cells” is utter nonsense.
Cannabis, marijuana or hashish is one drug that can be used even very heavily by adults with minimal permanent effects on the brain. Occasional use by adults seems to be completely harmless to your brain. The question of brain damage by very heavy cannabis use has not yet been resolved, but even if it occurs, most of it seems  to clear up on cessation.
Daily use of small amounts by adults can occur for years with apparently minimal damage. Any damage that occurs has not yet been proven, but if it exists, it seems to be quite subtle, and I am uncertain how significant it is.
Unfortunately, for minors, the question of little to no damage is much less firm, such that I recommend that anyone wait at least until they are 18 to begin using cannabis.
Of all of the drugs of abuse, as far as heavy use goes, cannabis is by far the easiest of them all on your brain.

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.

Cannabis Is Good For You

Repost from the old site.
Well, not necessarily in general, but if you are a regular methamphetamine user, there is a suggestion that you get less, not more, brain damage, or cognitive impairment (whichever it was) if you concurrently use cannabis than if you use methamphetamine only. The fact that there is a drug that gets you high that might actually be protective of brain damage in some cases is downright fascinating.
Keep in mind that this study found only a trend, and did not prove that cannabis protected against the damage caused by meth use. However, if you read the study, there was a linear trend that showed that the meth + cannabis users had scores intermediate to the controls (no drugs) and meth only groups.
The meth only group scored worst, the controls scored best, and there was a trend for the meth + cannabis group to score intermediate. The trend was not significant enough at the .05 level to be probative, but there was a suggestive trend towards better scores if meth users used cannabis also.
What was found was only cognitive impairment, or worse scores on a test, but with meth use, at some level, say 1/2 gram a day for 1 1/2 years, there is definitely brain damage, and it does not completely clear up with abstention.
There is anecdotal evidence for permanent damage after only 2-3 weeks of very heavy use, but it’s not proven. We don’t yet know when structural damage to the brain due to meth use begins. Meth can probably be used up to a dozen times or so in a lifetime with no problems, but after that, all bets are off.
If anyone has some good data on meth and brain damage, please comment or email me the links.

Fresno Has a Bad Rap

Fresno, 30 miles away from me to the South, has a bad rap. It’s just another large city in California anymore. There are 440,000 people living here now, and it’s not that different from other California big cities, except that in a lot of ways it’s nicer.

There’s nothing particularly unpleasant about it except the weather. The crime rate is not that high. There are few Blacks. The traffic is excellent, and even at rush hour, it is still pretty much doable. There are nice parts of town and not so nice parts of town, but mostly it isn’t terrifying like parts of LA. The gangs mostly prey on their own kind. One thing though: this region has been one of the top cities in the nation for auto theft for some time now.

Many of the Whites here are derived from poor Whites – Arkies and Okies, who came here with the Dust Bowl. They have a working class base, are conservative and many practice fundamentalist Protestantism. They are often very friendly in a small town or Southern kind of way. When I lived in Fresno 20 years ago, it still had kind of a small town feel to it. Even people in stores would treat you like you were their neighbors. Not sure if that has changed.

A few areas have been taken over by Underclass Blacks and are best avoided.

Rents are quite reasonable.

All of the California subcultures are here: hippies, punks, goths, bikers, gays, preppies, emos, you name it, we’ve got it. There are art galleries and rock and roll clubs. There is even at artsy fartsy district called the Tower District.

The White politics is rather conservative, sort of like Reagan Democrats. They were originally Southern Democrats, but they’ve been registering Republican for 30 years now. The Hispanics and Blacks all vote Dem. The politics is divided between conservative White politics (some of the most conservative pols in California) and liberal Hispanic and Black politics.

Big Ag rules the day out here and is deeply conservative. They own most of the press and all of the pols. The whole Central Valley is like a company town with Big Ag as the employer.

The Sierra Nevadas are only an hour or so away, and they’re a total blast if you like mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, etc. A world-famous national park, Yosemite National Park, is 2 hours away.

Clovis is a suburb of Fresno the east. This is “White Fresno.” The Whites have moved here, and White culture is still well and alive in Clovis. Many apartments and new homes around here advertise “Clovis schools.” That’s racist code talk for “White schools.” Get the hint? Clovis schools are very hardass and really try to hold the line academically.

Fresno is just another big city school district full of large numbers of the usual Hispanics dropping out, getting pregnant, joining gangs and getting lousy grades. But serious problems on campus are rare.

Seriously hostile anti-White Aztlan Hispanic culture hasn’t really taken root here, since it’s an outgrowth of liberal politics, and we don’t really have that here.

The Hispanics have lived in the Valley forever and often grow up speaking Spanish as a first language. They learn English in school. They’re almost the majority group around here, so there’s nothing to rebel against. The Hispanics are socially conservative, often have deep roots, and are very family-oriented. Idiot liberal MECHA politics never really took hold here too much. These Hispanics are too conservative for that crap.

The Blacks are not very political either. They’re also mostly conservative working class people. There is an area called Southwest Fresno that is a Black ghetto and is best avoided, but as far as ghettos go, it’s not that bad. The Blacks around here have no numbers, so they don’t cause a lot of trouble, and mostly they hang out with Whites, Hispanics, etc. In lower class areas, Whites, Hispanics and Blacks all hang out and have sort of assimilated to some sort of Hispanic gangster culture, except most folks are not gangsters.

There are few Black gangs here, and some of the worst gangs, like the Bulldogs, are actually multiracial (Black and Hispanic).

There are White Supremacist gangs too. One is called the Peckerwoods. However, like the Aryan Nations, their White Supremacism is mostly for show. White culture is so far gone here that even our White Supremacists have gone Multicult. I understand that the local Peckerwoods mostly have Mexican girlfriends. At the local jails, they are good friends with the local Hispanics.

I was told that the White Supremacist stuff is a bunch of crap and that the whole purpose of the Peckerwoods is “all about drugs.” It’s just a way for Whites to form their own gang, sell dope and get by like everyone else.

The big drug around here is methamphetamine. It used to be manufactured in large quantity in the rural areas around here. It’s a drug of working class Whites, but the Hispanics have started to get into it. Hispanics often smoke it in a form called ice, which is one nasty drug.

There’s also a lot of very good pot around here, but it’s very expensive. The stuff around here almost all comes from the Bay Area, where it is grown in indoor gardens. The stuff is incredibly strong for an old stoner like me. I imagine the THC levels might be 15-20%. I can handle it, but then I can handle most any drug. This stuff is almost like a hallucinogen.

There isn’t much racism here either for some reason. I think all the hardcore racists just took off for White California or left the state altogether. This area is turning seriously into the Multicult, the new culture of California and maybe the US.

Dope Sucks

Repost from the old site.

At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn’t a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain. There was a lot of information that said that drugs could be used recreationally in moderation without problems. That was the spirit of the age. It’s dead and gone now, maybe forever.

I keep thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gotten into drugs as much as I did. The drugs all seem so much worse now because our information is greater. My use was really a product of an era as opposed to just some general degenerate tendency of mine.

Cocaine.

Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie Party Drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn’t seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn’t believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.

Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that; they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an “addict”. But if you know anything about coke, you know a little over a gram a year is nothing more than dabbling, and it’s not really serious cocaine use at all. Further, of course you can do coke for 13 years without getting addicted. I did so myself.

But just about everyone I knew who got into coke at least to the extent that I did turned into an addict. Sooner or later, sniffers move on to smoking or shooting, because it’s simply a more economical way to take the drug.

I’m convinced that cocaine is a great big drag. For instance, I’m such a dabbler that I would actually save up coke. I’d get some out for the evening, lay out of a few lines for everyone in attendance, then sit back and drink Heinekens with everyone else. Coke is such a stupid drug that you can’t just give people a little bit of it and then put it away. If you do, you’re risking a riot.

After an hour or two, they start bothering you for more. You tell them that you’re saving it for later. Now they start getting belligerent.

I’ve had people swear right to my face that they were going to come back when I wasn’t home and steal my coke. The very idea of “saving coke” from one night to the next was considered to be the ultimate in stupidity, and they were going to punish me for being a moron.

So, really, coke sucks. It’s no fun. Even if you can somehow stay a dabbler like me, everyone else turns into an addict, and when they do, they’re actually dangerous to be around.

The addict idiots would come over, excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, and then shoot up in there for the next thirty minutes. We’d be out in the room steaming away. When the guy came out, we’d confront him and tell him to quit shooting up in the damned bathroom, but they never would quit. Addicts don’t take no for an answer.

Other coke addicts stole from me, then had the nerve to blame it on the coke, then told me flat out the money was never coming back. No problem, as long as you stay the Hell away. But they wouldn’t. They rip you off, then they keep knocking on your door and coming around.

I kept banning the worst ones, but they would come back, like males who batter their wives, bearing gifts and apologies. Soon they were back into their abusive manipulative addict game again.

One of the reasons I moved to Central California was to get away from some of these morons. I’d banned them over and over, but they kept coming back. I’d known them for many years, and they were still friends with all of our friends. Sometimes to cut yourself off from these idiots, you might just have to pack up and move away from them.

The addict has a personality. The personality is that of a callous, manipulative prick. There are some decent or classy addicts out there, but those are mostly dealers who deal to afford the habit. If they’re not doing that, they’re hungry for cash and all sorts of other stuff all the time, and probably mooching off or using others. The addict is a user. He doesn’t care about you or anyone else. The only thing he cares about is dope.

Speed.

Speed has got to suck even worse than coke. I did meth around three times in my whole life. When I tell this to non-users, they get a snarl of contempt on their face. But I’m comfortable with it. Three times is basically nothing; it’s experimental use. Why should I feel guilty about it because some annoying Puritan shit wants me to be?

The reason I only took it three times is because that’s how long it took me to realize it’s one of the most awful drugs on Earth. The high is excellent. You’re smart, in control, sane, happy and confident. You feel warm and friendly and talk all night with your wonderful friends. You don’t act wild or crazy or insane or anything like that. Your mind is sharp as a pencil, and your emotions are controlled. It lasts a good 18 hours.

The next day you feel like you got hit by a freight train. First it feels like your IQ just dropped 10 points. The stupid feeling gradually goes away after about a week. Your body feels like a sack of bones. It feels like someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked all the energy out of you. That lasts a few days too.

So 18 hours of high is followed by up to one week of crash. Who needs this?

PCP.

PCP is a really strange drug, and I took it about a dozen times, mostly unwittingly. When I tell that to non-users, they get this wild, horrified look in their eyes, but it’s no big deal. A dozen trips is experimental use, and I don’t regret a thing.

Back in the 70’s, scumbag PCP users were common. They were evangelizing, and the way they did it was to pass PCP joints around masquerading as pot joints and not tell you.

You could always figure it out real quick due to the bizarre minty metallic taste, but you were still mad at the dusters for being so dishonest. The first time was out of this world; the rest of the trips were unremarkable. I’ve certainly heard of people doing strange things on the drug, but I’ve never seen it much myself.

I remember once I was at a party in downtown Huntington Beach in 1976. There was a band playing, then people started passing joints. At some point, the dusters sneaked theirs in too. By the time I realized it, I was flying, so I just kept taking hits off the PCP jays.

This was a party of around 20-30 young folks, most around age 18, and everyone was high on PCP. Not one person was acting weird in the slightest. Non-users don’t get it. Even crazy drugs like PCP typically don’t make most folks act nuts.

LSD and psychedelics.

Acid and all the other psychedelics suck because just about everybody on Earth despises them and the people who take them. We were never in the stage of psychedelic acceptance when I was using them from 1974-1988, and I’m not sure if we ever will be.

Nothing strikes terror, rage and disgust into the heart of the non-user like the word LSD.

In truth, psychedelics are probably my favorite drugs of all. I took them about 40 times and never really had a bad trip.

Once on mushrooms on got on a bit of a bad trip – sort of an anxiety – awkwardness – nerd trip where I suddenly felt like the biggest geek on Earth. I was with a tripping partner and he wasn’t cool about me being transformed into Ultra Nerd.

So I turned the trip around. There were bad nerd vibes with strange deep blue colors and energy fields running through my body like waves of electricity. Those were the shitty nerd vibes. The rest of you might refer to them as an emotion. The fascinating thing about psychedelics is the way your feelings actually become extremely electric and even colorful. Joy has one color, sadness another, on and on.

Well, I decided I was going to turn this trip around. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was able to do it. I took the bad nerd electricity, changed it from blue to red and changed its direction. It was going from my skull down all through my body and out my feet in a big fat blue-purple electric drag feeling.

I changed it by reversing it. A new red electricity feeling would start at the toes and go up, fighting the perennial 18 year old vibe in a sort of battle of the feelings. It took me a good 45 minutes to get the good feelings going in an excellent flow that didn’t hang up on the bad stuff on the way up. Then the trip was turned around and a really crappy trip was turned into a fantastic trip.

You know that, you bad trippers? A lot of you can do that. You can change your trips, turn them around, make them go this way and that way. It’s just a drug. You’re still generally steering the ship you call your mind.

I often would buy a hit of LSD and just keep it in my drawer for months or even years until I felt that I was ready to take it. I would wait until a period in my life when I was feeling happier, more together and more mentally healthy and centered than I had in a while. Sometimes I might have to wait a while until I felt my head was ready for it.

That’s really the only way to take LSD. Never take it when you’re out of sorts in any way at all, in a bad mood, or in a bad, down or stressed out phase in your life. That’s how bad trips happen.

I haven’t taken a psychedelic in 20 years. I probably won’t take one ever again.

You really don’t get any credit for being a casual, recreational or responsible doper. It’s hard to do with most drugs anyway, but you can do it with pot and possibly psychedelics.

But you don’t get any credit. If you take a hit off a joint once a year, you’re the same as some guy slamming a gram of coke a day. The non-users hate all dope and all dopers, and that’s one of the sad rules of the game.

With booze, people are pretty sane. If you drink lightly, say no more than 1-2 drinks a day, most non-drinkers are sane enough to recognize that that’s not a problem.

Not so with dope. If you don’t use, you hate it, and you hate people who use it. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a non-user who was tolerant towards any kind of kind of drug use. Ex-users are pretty much the same way. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met an ex-user of even marijuana who was willing to tolerate it in anyone else. Once they put on that ex-doper crown, they get up on that high horse and never get off.

It’s for all of these reasons that I think dope sucks.

Drinking is fun in part because it’s socially acceptable. Things that aren’t socially acceptable are a drag. You’re always paranoid about who to reveal your drug use too, and you’re always running into morons who think that heroin and weed are one and the same.

Not because dope is bad for you or you’re evil or immoral if you use it, but more that the whole scene around it, and the ridiculous non-users, is a great big gigantic drag. If even pot ever gets to the point where non-users can accept it the way they accept social drinking, maybe it might get fun again.

The Pig Farm Murders

Warning: Adverse reactions – vomiting – have occurred from watching the video and even from reading this post. Please read or watch with caution.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnBU7FXUgSg]

I’m not sure I had ever heard of this case before, but it’s really bizarre! Robert Pickton and his equally bizarre brother owned a pig farm in British Colombia. They had a building built next to it for “charity events” hosted by the “Piggy Palace Good Times Society.” These events were actually wild booze-fueled bacchanals with up to 1,800 partiers and “entertainment” by plenty of prostitutes from Vancouver’s raunchy and drug-ridden Downtown Eastside district.

The Downtown Eastside has one of the West’s most concentrated populations of drug addicts, mostly using crack and heroin, but increasingly also meth. Most of the female addicts there support their habits by prostituting themselves. There are an estimated 5-10,000 drug addicts living there at any given time. Despite a vigorous needle exchange program that hands out 2-4 million of free needles a year, the population has one of the West’s highest HIV rates: 1/3 of the population and 80% of the prostitutes are HIV-positive.

Around 1983, three years before the Olympics, prostitutes started disappearing from the area. They continued to disappear until Pickton’s arrest in 2002. In 2007, Pickton was tried and convicted of six homicides, all Downtown Eastside prostitutes. He was charged with 21 more homicides of more Downtown Eastside prostitutes, but he may never be tried for those deaths.

He is also implicated in another five homicides of young British Colombian women. He claims 49 murders. He really wanted to hit 50, but he says he got careless and got caught. He really regrets not hitting the big 5-0.

Some of the testimony coming out of the case is outrageous:

The star witness in the trial of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton testified on Monday that she walked into the barn at his suburban pig farm to find him covered in blood and a woman’s body hanging from a chain.

“There was blood everywhere,” Lynn Ellingsen told the court.

“He told me if I was to say anything, I would be right beside her.”

Good Lord! Ellingsen, a prostitute and crack addict, lived on Pickton’s property for a month. Earlier on the same night when she saw the horrible sight, she and Pickton had gone to Eastside Downtown to pick up crack and a prostitute. They went back to Pickton’s place and smoked crack.

Ellingsen had fallen asleep when she heard a noise. She went into the barn and saw Pickton, covered in blood, with a woman hanging from the same chains he used to hang up his pigs when he slaughtered them. The woman on the chain was the prostitute they had picked up earlier than night. Pickton was skinning the woman when she walked in.

The arrest was not his first brush with the law. Five years earlier, in 1997, a young woman had barely escaped with her life. A drug-addicted prostitute named Wendy Eistetter was handcuffed and stabbed by Pickton. In a wild melee, she somehow got out of her cuffs, disarmed him and stabbed him before escaping. A motorist found her by the side of the road at 1:30 AM, wearing only a coat, with multiple stab wounds and took her to the hospital. Charges were mysteriously dropped.

While the investigation into the charges was going on, an acquaintance came forward and fingered Pickton as a suspect. His description of Pickton was riveting. Pickton spent most of his time downtown picking up whores. His farm was a bizarre and creepy place, patrolled by vicious dogs who roamed the property with a 700 pound boar. The dogs and the boar would all attack you if you came onto the property. Good God. Then there was Pickton’s trailer. What were all those women’s pursues and ID cards doing in there anyway?

Pickton’s brother, David, was also a strange guy. In 1992, he was arrested on sexual assault charges. He had attacked a woman in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. He was given a slap on the wrist. He looks menacing in his photo.

Police found all sorts of horrible things in their investigation. Women’s heads were found in the freezer, sawed in half vertically. Female hands and feet had been stuffed inside the severed heads. The body parts were sharing freezer space with unsold pork.

Female remains were found in a wood chipper. Women had apparently been chopped in the machine and the meat was fed to the pigs on the farm! In 2004, it was revealed that some of the women were ground up and their flesh was mixed with pig meat from the farm. Thankfully, it was not distributed commercially.

A .22 pistol with a dildo on the end was found, apparently a murder a weapon. The dildo was used as a makeshift silencer. Blood-stained clothing was found in the trailer where Pickton lived. A woman’s remains were found in a trash bag at the bottom of a trash can on the property. A woman’s jawbone and teeth were found near the slaughterhouse on the property, where more than pigs were slaughtered. Another jawbone was found in the mud of one of the pigpens.

Night-vision goggles, Spanish fly, fur gloves, .357 ammo, and a syringe with blue windshield wiper fluid inside were also found. Pickton had injected some of the women with windshield washer fluid to kill them. Pickton had told a friend that women were stripped, handcuffed, gagged and taken to a bed where he had sex with them doggy-style. Afterward, he strangled them on bed using a looped wire. Then they were bled and gutted with the main body parts being fed to the pigs and the rest mixed up with pork offal and taken to a rendering plant to be disposed of.

Prostitutes and other guests were invited to the farm. There Pickton cooked for his guests, offered them drugs and hosted wild, never-ending parties. It now appears that some of the food he was cooking for them involved pork mixed with ground up female victims.

He had taken the remains of some of the women, mixed them with pork offal, and taken them in barrels to a rendering plant, where the rendering machines like this one were used to grind up his victims’ remains.

After a huge investigation involving 54 anthropologists and huge earth-moving machines, the DNA of 30 different women (some say the figure is now up to 80), was found at the site. 27 were identified, all prostitutes.

It now appears that Pickton, aged 52 when arrested, had been killing women for at least 11 years before he was caught. His first known victim disappeared in 1991, when he was 41 years old. However, as early as 1988 and 1989, he was already regarded as dangerous to women. In 1988, women were warning other women to watch themselves around him. In 1989, people were warning women not to go home with him, admonishing them with terrifying tales.

He had apparently grown to hate prostitutes, whom he had been using for years, after as he put it, they infected him with Hepatitis C, attacked him with a knife, stole from him and used him. His rage at prostitutes did not develop until relatively late in life, which is why he did not start killing until age 41, which is quite late to begin a serial killer career.

There are other unconfirmed aspects of the case, with Ellingsen accusing Pickton of having sex with a dead woman’s corpse. Ellingsen and other drug addict-prostitute, Dinah Taylor, lived with Pickton for a while and helped him to pick up prostitutes and bring them to the farm. There is also a possibility that Taylor may have been involved in some of the killings, but she has never been charged. Pickton told his brother David that Taylor had killed some of the girls.

Good overview of the case here.

Sexmaniacman On Borderline and Schizotypal PD

Repost from the old site. The following posts will figure a fellow named Sexmaniacman, who is a friend of mine. He either wrote these posts himself and sent them to me via emails or else I am transcribing them based on conversations he had with me.

A commenter notes on the Personality Disorders

Schizotypal was always the odd-man-out personality disorder — both literally and figuratively.

Sexmaniacman thinks he had a gf once who was both a Borderline and a Schizotypal:

Hi Bob, this chick was so nuts, man, oh man oh man. She had a dx of “Borderline Schizophrenia” and was a serious acidhead.

She proudly said, “I’ve always been crazy.” Her Mom was schizophrenic and had tried to stab her in the back and kill her when she was 4 years old. Her life was desolate, and she would move back and forth between all these different personalities that you could not keep track of.

She lived in Hollywood, was a fag hag and was always getting picked up by guys and abused. She let groups of guys gangbang her and all sorts of crazy shit. She was always telling stories about guys or groups of guys picking her up, tying her up, torturing her, having sex with her, and threatening to murder her.

The stories seemed almost too weird to be true, but she was an extreme submissive who obviously was giving off “hurt me” vibes that a lot of sicko dudes might have picked up on and acted on.

She was also a bit bi and had sex with women sometimes. But she liked young girls, like 14 years old! Whoa! She also liked young boys, like 13 years old, and she loved to entertain me with stories about breaking in 8th graders. She was an old pro at this. I thought it was just plain weird.

We were going to go a lesbian bar in Hollywood and try to pick up a girl to take home with us (that was real easy to do in LA, which is full of all kinds of gays, bis and swingers), but she was so weird, I figured we would never be able to pick up any decent women.

Her idea of a good time was going to a gay bar and hanging out there all nite. I said pass.

She literally ate acid by the handful, five or eight hits at a time.

I took her to a Cure concert and for some weird reason, all these Goth chicks were grabbing me and trying to molest me the whole time at the concert, even when I was with her. While we were walking around, while we were sitting at the concert, the women just wouldn’t leave me alone. The whole thing seems like a hallucination now. It was 1983. She was flying on a handful of acid.

I took her to see Pink Flamingos, we watched Divine eat dog shit off sidewalk, and she thought that was hilarious. We went to see The Story of O, which I thought was weird, but she insisted was the story of her life.

She kept wanting me to inflict pain on her in all these different ways (A LOT of women are into pain! Is that weird or what?) but I wasn’t really into being a sadist too much. I did inflict some pain on her, but I didn’t really enjoy it. She sure did! Damn right! But it was the weirdest joy, a joy in a bottomless sadness. I couldn’t relate.

We went at forever, and she was a real screamer. One night she turned me in the middle and said, “You know what, Sexman?”

“What?”

“You’re a good fuck.” She repeated that a few times.

I’d just been turned into a complete sex object by a woman, and I didn’t even care.

I’d leave her place at the end of the weekend. Her Hollywood apartment complex was full of all these Guatemalan and Mexican illegal aliens. It was 1984 and the invasion was well under way. I guess the guys had been listening to her sexual opera performance all weekend because as I walked out, the Hispanic guys would all stand up and start clapping for me and raising their beers.

Cheers to the Master Fucker! She would drink, take acid, smoke pot, do speed, and then grab a bottle of antidepressants and start taking pills and downing them with a glass of booze.

“Whoa!” I said. “What do you think you’re doing!”

“You don’t know the pain I’m in Sexguy,” she whimpered and started crying. “You have no idea what it’s like. I need this, Sexdude.”

I shrugged and hoped she didn’t die on my watch. Who wants to deal with a dead chick and cops?

She was schizotypal in that she used language in really weird ways, and even though she insisted she had all these friends, she seemed really isolated. Plus she was just flat-out fucking weird in a way that Borderlines simply are not. Like she was on another planet, an alien. Invariably, she accused me of being a fag too for some reason like all of her faggot friends, and that pissed me off.

I will say she had more insight into my personality at the time than most other women have ever had.

She used to regale me with stories about her gay friends. Her gay friends were all these seriously weird masochist dudes into the leather scene.

Her eyes got really wide.

“My friend Jim, he’s not satisfied until the welts are this big.”

That’s one of her sicko masochist gay friends. Every time she talked about them, I told her to shut up as she was grossing me out.

She stretched her fingers to make about a one inch measurement. In her eyes, she was trying to shock me and I know it turns her on. She wanted one-inch welts too. Obviously. Like Hell you’re getting ’em from me, you sick bitch, I thought.

She called me one time but I wasn’t home. A woman I knew was over at my place in my absence and answered the phone. “Tell Sexman it’s just me,” she sighed wearily into the phone. “It’s just me. Just V.” Her self-esteem was 80,000 leagues under the sea under an anchor. The woman hung up the phone.

Later the woman said: “That’s the woman you’re dating, Sexguy?”

“Yeah,” I sigh.

“Wow, she seems like she thinks she’s the biggest zero on the face of the Earth. How sad.” The woman shook her head, and an incredible sadness came over her face too, a hundred years’ worth.

“I know.”

I broke up with her.

“Can…you…at least…give me a reason, Sexcat?” V. whimpered into the phone.

“You’re just too nuts for me. I mean, I’m nuts, but I’m neurotic. You’re way more crazy than I am, and I just can’t deal with you. It’s like dealing with someone from another planet. I can’t handle you. Good luck in the rest of your life.”

She called me a few days later, crying.

“After you broke up with me, Sexbro, I put my fist through a wall, I was so mad. Now I have a hole in my wall.”

“Over me? You did this over me? Why? Don’t bother, V. Don’t smash walls over me. I’m not worth it. Smash walls over someone else…Look, I can’t handle this, this is way too nuts.”

I got a new girlfriend, K., pretty soon, and V. had given me VD like most sluts do, something called Trichomonas with no symptoms in the male. I immediately gave it to the new girl, and it causes four days of misery in the female. The new woman was pissed.

I said the only thing you can say when you give your girlfriend VD.

“Hey, don’t ever say I never gave you anything.”

I thought that was pretty funny.

She sure didn’t. Icy eyes shone at my across the room.

“That’s not funny, Sexman.”

“Yeah it is.”

“No it isn’t.”

I saw V. again two years later. She came down to visit me, an hour’s drive. I saw her on my porch like a lost poppy, the most forlorn thing you ever saw. We went inside and had some wild sex for a couple of hours. She got pissed at the way it ended and left in a huff.

I never saw her again.

I assume she’s dead, probably long ago. The way she was, she couldn’t have lasted long.

Cannabis Is Neuroprotective

A fascinating new study shows that cannabis offers some neuroprotection to young people who engaged in binge drinking episodes. The binge drinkers were young – aged 16-19. This is an age at which the effects of drugs on the brain may be particularly bad, since the brain is continuing to develop.

What was shocking was that binge drinking in adolescents caused the type and degree of damage that it did. Binge drinking caused actual losses of white matter in the brain, similar to the damage seen with drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.

Briefly, white matter is the axons that connect brain cells to each other. Grey matter consists of the connections and also the cells themselves. So heavy drinking in adolescence causes actual damage to the connections between brain cells. That’s pretty serious stuff. It’s not known if the damage repairs later, or at all. However, connections between cells can grow back.

If the damage does not repair, then a Hell of a lot of adults are walking around with significant brain damage from binge drinking in adolescence. If this is the case, then clearly the brain can handle this sort of damage, since most such folks, assuming they are damaged in this way, are able to function well both cognitively and psychologically.

The study was fascinating because if the adolescents used cannabis in addition to binge drinking, the damage was notably less than if they binge drank alone. Therefore, cannabis use was somewhat neuroprotective to the brain in terms of the damage caused by binge drinking.

This does not mean that cannabis use is good for your brain, or that it does not damage the brain. But no study of cannabis use has ever found anything as dramatic as extensive white matter losses in the brain (that’s a pretty serious type of damage). So, if anything, binge drinking in adolescence (which many adolescents do) is remarkably worse for your brain than using cannabis in adolescence, which is an amazing thing to say right there.

But that’s not exactly what the anti-drug moralfags and fuckwits tell us, is it? In their view, binge drinking is a necessary evil, while cannabis use, especially in adolescence, is a moral and public health catastrophe. God, what a load of shit that is.

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 15% of the neurons of the hippocampus with heavy use.
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.

Middle Age: Get Healthy or Die

Repost from the old site.
Mentally healthy, physically healthy and happy.
Once you get around my age, God doesn’t give you many more breaks about this stuff.
If you can’t be all three by middle age (mentally healthy – relatively speaking, physically healthy – no excuses, and happy – who needs misery?) at least give it a good shot! When you’re young you can blow off one or more of these things things and get away with it for a while, but as you get older, omissions like that really start to bite!
Mentally healthy?
Seems you can get away with being kind of nuts when you’re young, but I wouldn’t want to try it at my age. In males anyway, suicide becomes much more of a risk as we age.
If I’m going to get depressed, I need to think about that. As a young man, I regularly felt horribly sad, but now I’ll hardly touch it. Depression in middle-aged males is often deadly. How odd. You would think it would be the young guy to buy it with his own hand, but it’s not. It’s the older, wiser, more mature guy.
Anxiety? Young men are expected to be anxious. In an older guy, you just seem like an idiot. You’re already an old fart anyway who practically needs to buy friends, and you just gave people one less reason to talk to you.
Psychosis? Never tried that one, but some of my friends did. Once again, that’s probably easier as a young man. Most people think young guys are insane anyway, so young psychotic males are generally not behaving dramatically different. With an older guy, it’s like, “Whoa!! Nam vet! He’s gooot a guuuun!”
They just know you’re going to go postal. They have a point. It’s usually a middle aged guy going postal, and he’s usually not even nuts.
He’s just depressed, plus he just got fired from his job, plus it was a shitty job in the first place, plus he needs Viagra now and he can’t afford it, plus his woman left him, plus he looks around at the women his age, half of whom looked like they swallowed Right Whales, and he thinks, “I’m getting tired of being a mammal.”
Add it all up and the guy wants to just write “I’M A LOSER” in block letters on his shirt and walk around town for a few weeks. Pride prevents this of course, so the only logical alternative is to shoot up the former workplace or mall or wherever.
Honestly! After every one of these shootings, we get all these people on TV and the press running around saying, “Why? Why? Why?” Oprah holds one her “Oprah Asks Why Shows”. Why, why, why, everyone is running around saying. They’re nearly at the end of the alphabet, they’re running out of letters, and they’re genuinely puzzled.
They’re not asking the right question!
The right question is not why do people go postal in the US and go shoot up random humans, the question is, Why the Hell does this shit not happen every day, or more than once a day? That’s the damn miracle.
Like when teenagers get shot up at a school. People act like that’s the most horrible thing of them all. It’s totally incomprehensible. Huh? Why is that? Teenagers are the most uniformly unpleasant members of our bedeviled species. We shouldn’t be shocked if their perfectly reasonable fellow humans reacted to teenagers’ general assholitude by blowing away multiple numbers of them at once on a regular basis.
What’s incomprehensible is how controlled and repressed we are, but that’s the reason for all the postal dudes anyway, right?
You’re supposed to nod your head.
If you can’t be mentally healthy, at least be as mentally healthy as you can possibly be. It’s important, dammit!
Physically healthy?
I blew off brushing my teeth for a while recently (I still flossed daily or more than daily) and at the last check-up, I had eight cavities. I’ve got two metal crowns in my mouth now from root canals, and if I don’t watch it, I’ll have a mouth full of metal or even worse, teeth I can pull out and show folks for a gag.
In middle age, your sex drive goes from a continuous annoyance that gives you a great big embarrassing hardon (Often with no where to put it either!) every time the wind blows, to a closely guarded treasure capable of being snatched away forever at any time. Use it or lose it! You crave the beautiful young women you couldn’t stop screwing as a young man, and now they look at you like you’re a creepy old pervert.
You look in the mirror and you seem to be actually aging, physically and observably, with about every new day. You want sex, but then you look at your wife or girlfriend or the women you’re dating. If she weigh 300 pounds or so like so many, she’ll probably almost kill you every time you do it with her.
If she’s not 300 pounds and she’s around your age, you look at her and think, “Well, at least it’s female.” What are your alternatives? You could be in prison, getting fucked in the ass by other guys against your will. Ok, that’s a kind of sex. You could be having sex with your hand, but that gets old.
I swear to God for every year men age, women age two. Correct me if I’m wrong!
Like to eat lousy food? No problem, but by middle age, you’re going to start paying. If you’re not a fat pig yet, you soon will be. Fat tastes good, sugar tastes good, salt tastes good, so we Americans eat crap and commit suicide by fork. Hey, it’s the red, white and blue, man. Life, liberty and the pursuit of fattiness. Comes with a price.
I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol by age 35 and was on health food the next year. I’m still on it, and I’m still on the statins and BP pills too. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you’ve got diabetes. That’s one shitty disease.
You can smoke cigarettes until about mid to late 40’s. Then they are going to start fucking you hard. You’ll only get a really crappy sounding hoarse voice that sounds like you got shot in the vocal cords if you’re lucky. If not, lung cancer or throat cancer and a weirdo voice box. All by 50. I’m not kidding; I’ve seen this.
Like to drink? Have fun! Sure you can drink as a young man. That’s what being a young man is all about! Think you can keep it up til 45 or 50? Think again.
Assuming you can even stay alive and do this, you will start to look like serious shit. Your face will look like it got run over by a tractor. Your teeth will all fall out. You will look 20 years older than you are, and you’re already old to start with. Your eyes will contain bottomless wells of sadness.
And you will become bitter, angry and nasty. You’re old anyway, you look like crap, and now you have the personality of a wolverine. And why should anyone so much as give you the time of day now?
By 45 or 50, you and your cohorts will start dropping dead. No one will be surprised, and saddest of all, hardly anyone will give a fuck. The autopsy will be unremarkable. “Natural causes” is not uncommon for this sort of thing.
You want to take drugs for 30 years? Who are you fooling? You can’t do it. If you’re male, you will look like Keith Richards. Keith looks like a cadaver with a motor inside that gets injected with motor oil every day to keep the rusty parts moving.
I honestly think Keith is a zombie. I think he died a while back, climbed out of the grave and back to life, and here he is with us again for a bit somehow. Ron Woods has that same “I got shot and lived” look about him. Many of the Stones do. You think that’s attractive? To look like human petrified wood? Get real.
If you’re female, you end up like Marianne Faithful. People will look at you and think, “Wow, why doesn’t someone just shoot her and get it over with?”
So, drugs for 30-35 years? Forget it. You can maybe smoke some pot, but that’s not really drugs.
Hate exercising? Great. I hope you like canes, walkers or wheelchairs, because you will be using them soon enough. Seriously, get moving or get dead. In middle age, it’s not just a saying.
Like your cock and how it works? Better get off that couch. The longer you sit on that couch, the sooner that thing goes into permanent suspended animation.
Happy?
Goes along with the mentally healthy part, but also the physically healthy part. Why do people engage in this unhealthy stuff above? In part because they are miserable.
Why do emo morons cut themselves, burn themselves and sit around talking gleefully of suicide? Simple reason. Because these shitheads are not happy. How do we know this? Because happy people simply do not do these stupid things.
You think happiness is something you can just blow off and be a callous cynic, a stoic hardhead or a cold fish, but look what happens when you do. Happiness is not something to be trifled with – lack of it has some hardcore consequences.
If you can’t be really happy, then at least be kind of happy. If you can’t be happy at all, then lie and fake it and pretend to be happy. Laugh and tell jokes and act like you don’t care. I’m convinced even pretending is better than misery.
Middle age. It’s no time to fuck around!

Damn Right We Are

And screw you if you don’t like it.
Baby Boomers Still Getting High, Agency Says.
I’m not sure when I last smoked pot.
I think it was less than a year ago though for sure. I started smoking it again, and it was one of the best things I’ve done lately. I have an anxiety disorder called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
I don’t talk about it much on here because no one wants to hear about it, and this isn’t a “Crazy Blog.” Stigma is still an insanely (Joke!) huge issue, and I have enough problems as it is. Crazy Blogs are the ballooning number of sites where folks with mental dx’s (usually way worse than mine, like Manic-Depression, Major Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, Asperger’s, Schizophrenia, etc.) mostly write about their mental stuff.
I take meds for OCD – an SSRI called Lexapro. I’ve gone off many times, but I relapse slowly but surely every time. Thing is, I started smoking pot again a few years back on a whim, and it worked great for OCD!
Unfortunately, folks like us have to deal with fools called “psychiatrists” and “psychologists” sometimes. Psychiatrists sometimes to get the meds. Psychologists for therapy, which I’ve had years of anyway and don’t really need anymore, as it doesn’t do that much for OCD, and I’ve already learned enough about myself and my life as I need to know.
This whole field, including all of the psychiatrists and psychologists, is insanely (Joke!) dead set against this thing called “drugs,” despite the fact that they shovel them out all the time as a way of getting their fat paychecks. Plus the dope that the psychs dish out is way worse in terms of side effects than any kind of cannabis.
One particularly annoying thing that these idiots do is the minute you meet some new psych-fool, and they learn you have both a dx and a drug history (even if deep in the past), they immediately make the extremely helpful suggestion that your dx was caused by getting high! Wow, thanks a lot! A dx that developed like 27 years ago, and I’m supposed to feel guilty for the rest of my life about causing it! I feel so much better now! I see why they call it the “helping professions!”
Even though in my case there seems to be zero evidence that this is the case. As an obsessive, I’ve thought this issue to death 50,000 times in multi-hour mental vicious circle sessions.
And drugs never really made it worse or better anyway in the past. Though sometimes coke would make OCD better, usually with plenty of booze too (I also did great creative writing on coke and lots of booze – great combo!) and one time when I was on LSD, I had 1-2 hours free of a particularly horrific obsessive thought that had locked into my brain 24-7, 365 for about a year or so. That was the only couple hours of peace I had had in that whole year. That’s why acid is evil, you know. Because it helps mental illnesses sometimes.
Anyway, if you admit to drinking at all (I drink two glasses of red wine a night) or taking any drugs other than the evil junk the p-docs write scripts for, you get shoveled out of all the programs immediately towards some bull called “Drug Treatment.” Yeah, that’s right, if you admit you take one hit off a jay once a year, you go to local equivalent of Betty Ford. Lame or what?
This is because recently the mental health idiots (not the people with the illnesses, they’re the smart ones), meaning the morons who “treat” us, decided to split “mental health” and “drug treatment.” Nowadays most of the former are dopers too, so this doesn’t make sense, but the whole motto nowadays is never the twain shall meet! So if you have any dx at all, even fulminant schizophrenia I guess, you get shunted to the Synanon clowns, and the mental guys won’t even talk to you until you get “drug treatmented.”
Only then you go into mental health, but only if you get “clean.” What if you never go clean and keep using? I guess mental health says go away until you come clean. This is based on the somewhat lame idea that you can’t treat anyone with a psych dx as long as they are “using.” There’s no evidence that this is true as a general statement, and in a lot of cases, it’s just stupid.
The local medical treatment folks are much the same. I use a public facility, so this may be the problem, but I bet privates are just as insane (Joke!). If you tell them you are smoking weed, even for good reason (like it’s medicine, duh) they freak out and remand you to “therapy.” Then you go to the Therapist Lady who knows little about dope and less about medicine, and she tries to force you to quit smoking dope.
Mind you, this is in California, where cannabis is legal to use medically as long as you have a card! I can imagine what things are like in South Carolina.
Unfortunately, this anti-drug societal meme, which is profound even here in the middle of a California barrio, has taken a hold of me lately, and I even haven’t been stoned in a while.
I take exception to the standard crap line about drugs. I’m extremely happy that we Boomers are continuing to get high. The typical line is that drugs are evil life destroyers, and everyone who takes them is an evil scum to be avoided and shunned.
In terms of my life experience, my position is that drugs are fun. Drugs are a blast. Drugs are oodles and oodles of kicks and endless good times. That’s been my experience. I never got addicted or totally messed up on dope like it seems every other user did. I’ve been using off and on for 35 years now, and I’m not any the worse for it.
That’s because I was always just a recreational user. Everyone I tell this to is like, “No way! What’s that? No such thing as a recreational user!” This is because, you see, all users are either very casual experimenters or addicts and screwups with a life-wrecking problem.
But really. The only drug I ever used regularly was pot, and even if you use it daily, it usually doesn’t screw you up that much.
I used coke for 13 years and never got addicted. I did probably less than an ounce of coke in 13 years, maybe a gram or so a year. I’d just tickle my nose now and then.
I only did speed 3 times, and I never got into heroin, although I admit to very much a liking for codeine these days, which is killer good for OCD too for some weird reason.
I did hallucinogens for 14 years (40 times overall). These drugs actually act against addiction in that they are so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to take them regularly. I took psychedelics maybe 3-4 times a year, never had a serious bad trip, and I don’t think I have any serious consequences from it other than really bright lit up colors sometimes, which I think is HPPD.
I’ve known many folks who took LSD anywhere from 1-700 times, and I can’t say I’ve ever met one person who was messed up from taking the stuff. I’ve known folks who have been using pot daily for 20-30 years, and they are psychologically normal in every way, shape and form. Those that were not, I saw them quit pot, and in general, they didn’t get any healthier psychologically. Sometimes they even started back up again, and still not much changed. I concluded that pot in general doesn’t seem to have much to do with psychological issues one way or the other.
The notion of the permafried pothead or former acid user is largely a myth as far as I can tell, or at least it’s uncommon. Most of the really psychologically messed up folks I’ve met weren’t using anything. I always thought maybe they could have used some weed to mellow them out a bit.
Oh yeah, one more really evil thing pot does to me. Sometimes it makes me laugh. For hours and hours, off and on. And, even after the high wears off, it still makes me laugh, even for days afterwards, even out in public (where I do try to suppress my giggles). I don’t care if people think I’m nuts for laughing in public. The sane people will just figure I’m thinking of something funny, which is exactly why I’m laughing.
So you see, that’s one more reason cannabis is so evil. It makes people laugh, sometimes on and off for hours and days on end. We can’t have any of that now, can we?

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