Drugs, recreational

2017-08-07 – 2021-05-24
Maybe related 🤷:

My mentioning and citing material to do with recreational or medical use of controlled substances should obviously not be taken as an endorsement of recreational use of controlled substances. I am not qualified to make such endorsements, even if I were inclined to. Indeed, if you are turning to a mathematician for intelligence on legal or pharmacological questions, you should probably inspect your life decisions to see if any other ones you have made recently are similarly suspect.1

So, here are some links about recreational drugs which I find interesting.

Eventually I’d like to speculate about medicalisation, and how drugs for diseases are socially accepted, drugs for things that aren’t diseases are denounced, and what a disease is, is negotiated based on… what? These all interact with the patent system in amusing ways.

Legality and political economy of taking recreational drugs

TODO: Dr Karen Hitchcock had a nice turn of phrase, which I would like to transcribe from the podcast when I have time.

(Self 2020):

There are two key problems with books that attempt to be objective about illegal drugs. The first is that for the most part their authors won’t admit to having used such substances for fear their own objectivity may be compromised. The second follows fairly logically from the first: who, precisely, are such books aimed at? If they are targeted at readers who already have a consuming interest in drugs (pun intended), then they are very likely — by definition — to know rather more about the subject than the author; and if they are for people who only have a tangential interest in the subject, why should they want to read about it at all?

Here is one answer: kids preparing for high school debates on drug legalization. That is why I started reading about this topic.

Robin Hanson naturally has a model of the role of status in drug bans: Quality Regs Say ‘High Is Good’.

Addiction

See addiction.

Psychedelics to treat mental illness

What if it was not only fun, it was also good for you? Notwithstanding there is some motivated reasoning here, there is also some research. Here are some options. Psychedelics may free us from our Pavlovian Prisons. I am curious about the credentials of enthea an advocacy… group(?) for legalisation of psychedelics. They have a some feedback on Vinay Gupta’s Cutting Through Spiritual Colonialism. Adultification. Jacob Falkovich, The Great Annealing. Personality change on LSD or magic mushrooms Universal love, said the cactus person.

Practicalities

Roll safe documents the practicalities of taking MDMA.

References

Becker, Gary S., and Kevin M. Murphy. 1988. “A Theory of Rational Addiction.” The Journal of Political Economy, 675–700. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830469.
Bressloff, Paul C., Jack D. Cowan, Martin Golubitsky, Peter J. Thomas, and Matthew C. Wiener. 2001. “Geometric Visual Hallucinations, Euclidean Symmetry and the Functional Architecture of Striate Cortex.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 356 (1407): 299–330. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2000.0769.
Carhart-Harris, R. L., and K. J. Friston. 2019. “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics.” Pharmacological Reviews 71 (3): 316–44. https://doi.org/10.1124/pr.118.017160.
Carhart-Harris, Rl, and Dj Nutt. 2017. “Serotonin and Brain Function: A Tale of Two Receptors.” Journal of Psychopharmacology 31 (9): 1091–1120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881117725915.
Dezfouli, Amir, Kristi Griffiths, Fabio Ramos, Peter Dayan, and Bernard W. Balleine. 2019. “Models That Learn How Humans Learn: The Case of Decision-Making and Its Disorders.” PLOS Computational Biology 15 (6): e1006903. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006903.
Dezfouli, Amir, Richard Nock, and Peter Dayan. 2020. “Adversarial Vulnerabilities of Human Decision-Making.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (46): 29221–28. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016921117.
Dregan, Alex, and Martin C. Gulliford. 2012. “Is Illicit Drug Use Harmful to Cognitive Functioning in the Midadult Years? A Cohort-Based Investigation.” American Journal of Epidemiology 175 (3): 218–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwr315.
Lang, Misha Glenny and Callum. 2019. “How to Buy Drugs.” London Review of Books, November 7, 2019. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n21/misha-glenny/how-to-buy-drugs.
McKenna, Dennis J. 2004. “Clinical Investigations of the Therapeutic Potential of Ayahuasca: Rationale and Regulatory Challenges.” Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Psychoactive Plants, 102 (2): 111–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pharmthera.2004.03.002.
Nutt, D. J. 2009. “Equasy — An Overlooked Addiction with Implications for the Current Debate on Drug Harms.” Journal of Psychopharmacology 23 (1): 3–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881108099672.
Olekalns, Nilss, and Peter Bardsley. 1996. “Rational Addiction to Caffeine: An Analysis of Coffee Consumption.” The Journal of Political Economy 104 (5): 1100–1104. https://doi.org/10.1086/262054.
Santos, R. G., J. Landeira-Fernandez, R. J. Strassman, V. Motta, and A. P. M. Cruz. 2007. “Effects of Ayahuasca on Psychometric Measures of Anxiety, Panic-Like and Hopelessness in Santo Daime Members.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 112 (3): 507–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2007.04.012.
Schartner, Michael M., Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Adam B. Barrett, Anil K. Seth, and Suresh D. Muthukumaraswamy. 2017. “Increased Spontaneous MEG Signal Diversity for Psychoactive Doses of Ketamine, LSD and Psilocybin.” Scientific Reports 7 (April): 46421. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep46421.
Self, Will. 2020. “Pills, Powder and Smoke by Antony Loewenstein; Say Why to Drugs by Dr Suzi Gage – Review.” The Guardian: Books, January 20, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/20/pills-powder-and-smoke-antony-loewenstein-say-why-to-drugs-suzi-gage-review-will-self.
Strassman, Rick J. 1995. “Human Psychopharmacology of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.” Behavioural Brain Research, Serotonin, 73 (1–2): 121–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-4328(96)00081-2.
White, James W., Catharine R. Gale, and G. David Batty. 2012. “Intelligence Quotient in Childhood and the Risk of Illegal Drug Use in Middle-Age: The 1958 National Child Development Survey.” Annals of Epidemiology 22 (9): 654–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2012.06.001.
White, James, and G. David Batty. 2011. “Intelligence Across Childhood in Relation to Illegal Drug Use in Adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, November, jech-2011-200252. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2011-200252.

  1. In fact, I should probably have this disclaimer on many notebooks here, because I have made notes on some really suspect things. Bessel function D-algebra? What was I thinking?↩︎

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