Psilocybin is psilocybin (he said, predictably).
Well the cubes are supposed to be all more or less the same, but the Hawaiian is generally regarded to be considerably stronger than the rest.
perhaps because I'd like a sort of silver bullet for my brain
Timothy Leary said:Acid is not for every brain .... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.
there's certainly a macho element to it in the same way as insisting on the literalism of actually climbing to the top of a very tall mountain is macho, or crossing a desert or polar waste.
It still takes a certain bravery (or perhaps foolhardiness, in some cases) to be prepared to do that.
I think William Burroughs considered psychedelics more dangerous than opiates, and if anyone had plenty of experience with both, it was him.
6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies, dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his “content.” He programs the sensory order.
On the plus side, despite the damage they can cause, numerous studies have shown users of psychedelics to be more emphatic and more caring, with better social cognition.
I can believe that, but is the implication here that taking psychs 'makes you a better person', or that some personality types are predisposed both towards empathy, altruism and so on, and towards seeking psychedelic experiences?