seniors aging gracefully

They were a thing to do when I was young, mainly LSD and Mescaline. The Beatles experimented with LSD and wrote about it in their songs. There was a debate about whether Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about LSD. George Harrison was particularly fond of the drug and used it often.

The Beatles, especially John and George, began using drugs in a quest for self understanding and to connect with a higher power. This is clearly referenced in Day in the Life, with the line, having read The Book. What they are referring to is The Book by Alan Watts. According to Amazon Books it is A revelatory primer on what it means to be human and a mind-opening manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence, by “perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West” (Los Angeles Times).

At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated beings, unconnected to the rest of the universe, has led us to view the “outside” world with hostility, and has fueled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world. To help us understand that the self is in fact the root and ground of the universe, Alan Watts provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta.

The experience of using LSD inspired writers in the 60s, especially Kerouac who wrote “On the Road”. The government even got involved and being giving LSD as part of research studies but this research was shut down quickly when it was clear that the effects of LSD could not be properly controlled much less examined in a scientific manner. But in recent years, the use of psychedelic drugs as a viable therapy tool has gained acceptance and is widely used to treat PTSD.

Psychedelic drugs have been around for quite some time. Native Americans used peyote which was called mescaline in the streets in the 60s. in their religious rituals.

While clearly psychedelic drugs can be beneficial, they also can be abused. In the 70s, young people began using Ecstasy — also known as Molly, Adam, and XTC, among many other names — is a synthetic drug, meaning it is made from lab-made chemicals. It increases levels of energy, happiness, and empathetic feelings toward others but also causes negative effects, from muscle cramps to depression to heart failure. Even small doses of ecstasy can harm your mental, physical, or emotional well-being. In high doses, it can cause death.  This drug does affect the level of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. While again drugs that affect the neurotransmitters in your brain can be beneficial, street drugs are often synthetic and unregulated. I really don’t think that the vast majority of kids who use ecstasy are on a quest for self knowledge, they just want to get fucked up.

Why do some people get crazy when they use psychedelic drugs, it all relates to dopamine. Schizophrenia involves imbalances in dopamine activity, with excess dopamine in subcortical regions causing positive symptoms and reduced dopamine in the prefrontal cortex contributing to negative and cognitive symptoms.