Most of us aren't willing to risk a criminal record.
I wouldn't know where I could obtain such items even if I wanted to buy them. If I can't buy something off the shelf at a retail store I'm simply not going to bother.
Sketchy/unknown supply chain.
Tons of us have jobs (or whole careers!) that we could lose for using illegal drugs, many of those jobs include random drug tests. I'm not risking my entire fucking livelihood without a damn good reason.
During the UK conservative party leadership contest earlier this year I thought it was pretty telling that all or most of the main candidates admitted to using illegal drugs at some point.
But sometimes I forget that there are people out there who are significantly more risk-averse or perhaps more generally obedient and who see the world very differently.
I guess my point is that I didn't think it was a ridiculous question.
I'd also point out that your use of "most" here might be unwarranted. There are surveys which demonstrate more than half of respondents admitting to the use of illicit drugs [1].
[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/national-survey-drug-use-health
The criminal justice system treats people very differently, depending on who you are.
In my lived experience, for middle class white kids, using cocaine, heroin, LSD, etc. was just a right of passage, that for the most part, didn’t effect their future prospects for college or a career.
Meanwhile, black and brown kids caught with a dime bag ended up going to jail.
In the US, white and black people use drugs at about the same rate, but black people are convicted at much higher rates and with longer sentences: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614457/
(Of course there's also the odd case of a racist judge, but my impression is that it's by far the exception.)
Edit: The paper you linked does raise some very interesting questions about the motivations behind various government policies, however.
Yes, income is a factor, but that still doesn't explain why blacks are 13% of the population but the prison population is nearly 40% black.
Nobody seriously disputes the clear racial bias in the criminal justice system.
IRL, I don't know a single drug user or way how to get them. I looked it up online several times in different countries. Result always the same, a good likelihood of your delivery getting intercepted and you getting fucked as a result. Everyting about this annoys me.
No one is going to go to jail because you purchased a small amount of drugs. If you are the seller it's a different story.
Even if you start with the premise nobody is going to jail (which is blatantly untrue - I personally know people with possession charges), getting caught with small amounts of drugs can ruin the careers of some people, including my own career. Think people who must hold a professional licence, people who are subject to background checks (including coders who work at medium to large companies), people who work with children, people who work in certain safety critical industries, people who hold security clearances, etc. There was an FBI agent who was fired recently for testing positive for thc from using CBD oil, the federal government's position is there's no legitimate reason to test positive for thc.
Michael Pollen wrote a best selling book about his experience with psychedelics earlier this year. Tim Ferris funded a research institute at John Hopkins and talks about it on his podcast all the time.
Unless you work for the federal gov't you're catastrophizing the risk.
Most recently, three years ago, I was tested for a contracting gig at a Wisconsin power company for a web dev job.
I've ALWAYS been drug tested before starting a software job. I've been drug tested working for the most benign of industries. I actually had a friend who quit weed so she could get a better paying job.
What world are you living in? Drug possession is one of the most common reasons for being arrested.
Michael Pollen literally wrote a best selling book about taking LSD, eating shrooms, etc. earlier this year.
But with unbeatable Major Depression you are dealing with a significant suicide risk, and the risk to your legal status may be worth the benefit to your overall happiness.
People who want to replace a little Prozac with Psilocybin can afford to wait 10-15 years for treatments to become standardized, legal and affordable.
I spent 15 years assuming that I would kill myself someday, and basically all of life was a delaying action to put suicide off as long as possible. So for me taking the plunge into illegal self treatment was worth it. A yearly Ayahusca session for me does more to combat depression that years of therapy and legal medications.
Be very careful making that transition, you can get serotonin shock.
Naturally grown drugs like marijuana, mushrooms, even peyote and it's cousins are easy to identify, easy to dose safely and there is almost no risk of supply chain tampering.
On the other hand, if you buy 250mg of powdered psilocin or psilocybin from a reputable vendor, you know exactly how much you are getting.
Hell no. There are sadly a million ways to increase the weight of hash with neutral to very harmful chemicals.
Also just the buds of marijuhana can be poisened. Low quality ganja mixed with artifical thc(or something else for example happened quite a lot in recent times)
Fortunately, you do can grow your own ...
It is ridiculous how "square" things have gotten in 2019 when you read things like this on a forum called "Hacker News." Have you ever heard of Mondo 2000? Or that time The San Francisco Examiner sent a reporter to SIGGRAPH because they could not believe the claims that so many people in computer graphics were doing LSD? Things were different in the Valley in the early 1990s.
Most of the people I know wouldn't think twice about dropping some l or shrooms on a weekend with some ketamine and a hit of DMT, and we all have respectable jobs and families. It's just not that big of a deal.
You're an ignorant jerk. Anyone who hasn't been caught won't think it's a big deal. Anyone sitting in jail because of it would disagree. Seriously, fuck off with your holier-than-though "adolescent virgins" schtick because some people don't want to just have a bender with illicit substances that aren't standardized.
This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with people who want to do shrooms or acid on a weekend, it's about people looking for therapeutic relief! I can't fathom the ignorance that leads to someone like you conflating medical treatment with nonchalant recreational drug use. They aren't the same, and I'm not looking to get high and have a fun weekend. I'm looking to relieve mental illness you ignorant ass.
The health risks aren't bad either. Psilocybin mushrooms have distinct properties which can be tested for with a white sheet of paper in a super simple test.
In other words, fortune favors the bold.
Testing is difficult because the common tests only test for the presence of LSD-25, not the purity, and not for the presence of substitutes. Someone who mixed the pure substance with some more dangerous derivative would be impossible to detect without lab grade tools.
This has stopped me from trying LSD for my whole life. I assume there are many others that don't want to take mind altering substances with unknown purity.
25i-NBOMe is a drug similar in effect to LSD, but with a somewhat worse track record for safety. It's not likely to harm you, and unless you're fairly familiar with LSD, you might not notice the difference, but it has caused deaths due to severe vasoconstriction, which hasn't happened with LSD, even though many more people have used the latter. It's requires larger doses than LSD does, but it's still active at doses well under a milligram, and is usually sold on blotter paper just like LSD is.
Strychnine is also active in the LSD dose range. There was definitely some propaganda about strychnine-tainted LSD in the 70s, so it's hard to know if this has ever happened, or if it's just urban legend. But it's chemically plausible.
Fortunately, you don't have to just pray that your blotter doesn't have fentanyl in it. You can buy chemical test kits on the clear market and rule out all the culprits that should be cause for concern, and test that your blotter contains LSD (or at least a compound containing an indole group...). See https://www.reddit.com/r/ReagentTesting/ for links to vendors and more information.
Not orally, the BA of actual fentanyl is abysmal orally (although some fentanyl analogs are definitely comparable). LSD is never contaminated with fentanyl to begin with. Some fentnayl analogs have been distributed in paper tab form by research chemical vendors, but LSD is never 'contaminated' with fentanyl. A test kit, or even just ingesting the tab slowly in pieces, eliminates this (non)risk entirely.
>25i-NBOMe is a drug similar in effect to LSD, but with a somewhat worse track record for safety
Thankfully this risk has decreased over the past few years, as real LSD is cheaper, and easier to find, than phenthylamine-based RCs being sold as LSD. You might encounter ALD-52, 1P-lSD, ETH-LAD, etc being sold as LSD, but these are just LSD analogs and have pretty much identical safety/effect profiles.
Also, swallowing the tabs make some of the more common RC LSD imitators completely inactive, whereas LSD will still be absorbed perfectly. At the end of the day, if you're concerned about this, you can buy a $10 test kit.
>Strychnine is also active in the LSD dose range. There was definitely some propaganda about strychnine-tainted LSD in the 70s, so it's hard to know if this has ever happened, or if it's just urban legend. But it's chemically plausible.
This doesn't happen. Also, no it is not chemically possible. The amount of strychine required to seriously hurt somebody would be extremely obvious on LSD tabs. Like it actually isn't even possible to fit enough strychine to seriously hurt somebody on a lsd tab in a discreet manner . The choice of strychine here as a poison shows that whoever originally spread this nonsense has zero understanding of chemistry.
>Fortunately, you don't have to just pray that your blotter doesn't have fentanyl in it.
Once again, this isn't a serious risk. It's extremely rare to find fentanyl in this form now anyway, as most research chemical vendors no longer stock fentanyl analogs. And, again, just consuming the tab slowly or testing it makes this a non-risk.
Also generally there is a very little overlap in dealers who sell both fentnanyl and lsd, these drugs attract very different crowds.
There are places that sell home testing kits which are very useful since you don’t know what you’re getting by looking at it. People used to test for each other at raves until the police said it was a form of condoning drug use and shut it down. So now people still buy but it’s more dangerous.
if you are really struggling, cost is prohibitive, and you think this might be an option then trying it once or twice at home is reasonable risk reward tradeoff, speaking from personal experience.
The psilocybin treatment is also reported as way more effective when administered as part of therapy. You are supposed to trip under the guidance of a professional.
I don’t think that this statement is technically accurate - fortunately. Studies have shown that following a certain protocol or setting will increase the effectiveness. That framework is published science.
I think the bigger moral issue with buying street drugs is that you are essentially funding organized crime.
Ketamine, LSD, shrooms are all accessible, and recreational varieties are not expensive.