Medical Cannabis and Insomnia
Medical marijuana patients usually find that sleep is a wonderful benefit of cannabis. Many chronic pain patients experience insomnia due to their pain and find excellent relief and sleep when using cannabis.
In my life I have had firsthand experience with a number of psychoactive substances and for better or worse they truly are what you make of them. Every few years the news will cover a story of a teenager who jumps off a building under the influence of a psychoactive drug. For the purposes of this article I am only referring to the more powerful drugs in phenethylamine and tryptamine families and not the more common drugs such as marijuana, nicotine, and caffeine.
Drugs have a certain negative stigma today that did not exist as recently as a few hundred years ago and because of this those who use them are often lumped together and labeled drug addicts. Like automobiles, all drugs are not created equal and it's unfortunate that society today has lumped phenethylamine's and tryptamine's into the same categories as harmful and addicting drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. With the United States government placing LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline in the highest level of the controlled substance act its not possible for even legitimate medical research to be done with these substances on US soil and following suite nearly every country in the world has similar laws in place. Experiment at your peril and at the risk of your freedom for the next 20 years.
So we've established that the general public has little working knowledge of psychedelics and that law enforcement deals with them in the same way as they do those which cause addiction and lead to crime and death. The government's stand on all controlled substances is to punish harshly in the hopes that lengthy prison sentences will dissuade the public from trying them. As history has now proven, this policy has failed and hundreds of thousands of people are right now unable to read this because they are sitting in a jail cell for what our bodies tell us is a biologically satisfying activity.
Now, let's talk about psychedelics. They don't fit the mold that most 'hard drugs' fit into. They are by and large the most powerful of all drugs produced on or by this planet and they are nothing less than profound. Let's examine the one that everyone knows right off the bat, LSD, Lysergic acid diethylamide. In terms of potency its one of the single most potent chemicals on the planet, it's so powerful that if it was table salt, 1 teaspoon would be 60 thousand doses. Its production is difficult and outside the realm of the kitchen chemist, but 50 years ago a lab could produce millions of doses in a single batch. Today the precursor chemicals in its production are watched with the same scrutiny as uranium. Where did this substance go so wrong? I'm going to tell you.
If someone asks you what LSD is like the best answer you could give is magical. The walls jiggle and dance, sound ripples the air, the depth of music is dramatic and engulfing, words jump out of grass, colors change, you become highly empathetic to those around you, and its easy to discover the most fascinating things about the simplest objects such as rocks and trees. If this was all LSD did it might very well be legal today but its got one side effect which doomed its existence. LSD can and would absolutely destroy capitalism as we know it. For about 1-2 weeks after a strong acid trip its typical to see the relative stupidity of our current government, its petty laws, and usually capitalism in general. The empathy after a trip is wonderful but lsd seriously makes you question the United States in general. I'm confident this is the sole reason this substance is at the highest levels of prohibition. I never lived in the 60's but I wished I had a movement to stand behind, it was empowering and I'm sure that LSD fueled most of that movement.
Aside from civil unrest, LSD is otherwise harmless. Its dose vs. lethal dose is one of the highest of any substances on earth where by comparison, aspirin can destroy your liver and kill you at as low as 5 times the normal dose. LSD has a number of other benefits outside of its recreational value. Prior to its prohibition it was demonstrated to treat other drug addiction with great effectiveness and it itself has no risk of addiction. For that matter, no psychedelic tryptamines have addiction potential due to the powerful nature of the experience and the extremely rapid building tolerance after taking them. LSD has been referred to as the reset button for what ails you and I would generally agree. LSD is only a very recent invention of man and as such its nothing but a drug, there can be no recorded history of it as a sacrament or being used therapeutically but let's talk about a close relative that exist in nature.
Psilocybe species of mushrooms are mushrooms which contain psilocybin (and psilocin). The psychoactive compound psilocybin is about 1/4000th as potent as LSD but the experience is no less breathtaking. Psychoactive mushrooms have a history which dates to the earliest records of man. They have been used for thousands of years in Mexico to help shamans heal the sick. The effectiveness of their treatments has never been disputed, especially by those who get treated, but in the United States treatments of this sort in which the doctor and patient take psychedelics and work through their problems receives the same reception as voodoo. They work on most of the same receptors in your brain and the effects are similar.
The mushroom experience is similar to the LSD experience with some important differences. Mushrooms cause much the same hallucinations, off color walls, patterns form out of nowhere, your perspective of objects is distorted, sounds are received different, and the true beauty of nature is something only seen behind a trippers eyes. Mushrooms something that LSD doesn't though and that's the fractal. I've been lost in never ending fractals before that were just fascinating beyond believe, LSD doesn't do this, there's some patterning with your eyes shut but the fractals seem to be specific to psilocybin. Mushrooms do have a very important difference when compared to LSD though, mushrooms do not cause empathy, they do not cause you to sit around questioning capitalism and the government, and they don't cause you to spend day's afterword pondering how to implement a trade society and disband the US Government. To put an analogy to the mushroom experience, I would say Keep it Simple Stupid. Mushrooms cause you to enjoy the simpler things and not waste time trying to figure out what's wrong with society. It's as if someone shut off the judgmental part of your brain and replaced it with flower power.
As a medical tool psilocybin has a unique property, it has a nearly perfect track record for the prevention and treatment of cluster headaches. While my research on this subject is limited, what I know is that for the time psilocybin is present in the body the receptors in the brain which get out of sync and cause cluster headaches are either not receptive to the same headache signals, or simply the synaptic chain of events is set askew for weeks at a time after a psilocybin trip. The end result is that there have been some clinical trials of psilocybin therapy for cluster headache treatments. It's one of the oldest psychoactive substances we know about and despite it being completely illegal. It's therapeutic and fun all at the same time and I myself have used it to treat my insomnia and it works fantastic.
There's many left to talk about but this editorial is becoming quite long so I'll cover just 1 more substance which I know will be gaining more and more coverage in the news as more and more young people create YouTube videos using it. I'm talking about the little sage Salvia Divinorum related to the mint plant. This little plant produces salvinorin A, a substance that is nearly as potent as LSD and when smoked can completely dissolve your perception of reality in as few as 15 seconds.
It is my opinion that this plant has a great deal to teach us but not in the smoked form. When smoked it overpowers you and drags you off to a place where gravity has no apparent meaning and the scenarios that play are too weird to be worth describing. In most people this amounts to them sitting in a lump on the couch for 10 minutes and then having little or no memory of the experience. This is what is bombarding YouTube right now. A small percentage of users do not detach from their body during the experience but rather run around hurting themselves and bumping into things. These are the users most likely to lead to salvia's ultimate prohibition as its only a matter of time till someone jumps off a building and is found with salvinorin A in their blood. It's the eventual fate of all psychedelics whether deserved or not.
The story doesn't end there though, Salvia, the divine sage has an extremely long history as a healing tool too, it's been used by Mazatec shamans for visionary healing sessions. The Mazatec shamans would produce a quid of even pairs of leaves which would be rolled and chewed in order to let the juice be absorbed by the glands in the mouth. This produces a very gradual and controllable come up and a real meaningful and controllable experience that lasts for several hours. There's a lot to learn from this little sage but not as a recreational drug and certainly not as the subject of thousands of YouTube videos, that can only end badly.
That covers the scope of my topic today. There are a great number of other equally powerful psychoactive compounds that have thousands of years of history behind them. The peyote cactus contains mescaline, a psychoactive phenethylamine which is characterized with vivid hallucinations including the sky changing colors and seeing people who aren't there. Peyote itself has a history of use with man that predates Christ by over 3500 years and was a very necessary part of the rite of passage of manhood for the Native Americans and for this reason its use by them is protected by law.
DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful psychoactive on earth today. Its use is characterized with a complete detachment from reality and a lengthy visit to a magical land where nearly anything is possible. Not a great deal has been done to study the therapeutic value of DMT but nobody will argue that its effect on the human psyche is anything less than profound. Its described as a trip to your dreams, and in fact when a human does dream its speculated this is caused by the release of natural DMT reserves in our brain. DMT is produced in many plants on earth and has been used by the indigenous people of Peru with the b. caapi vine to produce Ayahuasca, a mix of the MAOI properties of the vine and the DMT in the plant Psychotria Viridis to produce one of the most profound spiritual experiences known to mankind. The shaman provides a bowl of the Ayahuasca brew to the patient and after a short time it upsets the stomach and the subject purges and his trip begins. Western medicine does not acknowledge the therapeutic value of Ayahuasca but its users predate 'the west' and the way things are looking, may outlive us.
I hope this article helps the uninitiated understand psychoactive drugs a little better and change the bad stigma that users receive. There are no psychedelic drug addicts, the nature of psychedelics themselves make sure of that, just people who enjoy a trip from the normal way of thinking for a short period of time. There are a great number of powerful substance I did not cover in this article and if I've sparked your interest I encourage you to pick up the book The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications by Christian Ratsch. It covers nearly every psychoactive planet we know of today and it's a great read.
I am not encouraging drug use, but drug education and as importantly, the proper treatment of users. If a police officer read this and decided just once not to call in the Drug Recognition Expert to prosecute someone tripping in the park that was not hurting anyone I would be satisfied. Your body should be your temple, but it's not, so be smart out there.
Thanks for reading.
