Everything I know about drugs, I googled.

I am so sorry for you.

The explanation is that you don't understand that people have different motivations and opinions than you do. Different kinds of smoking devices allow for different rates of consumption, alter the way the smoke tastes and feels, and have cultural appeal sometimes. A bong has the downside of not really allowing small hits and the upside of having really smooth hits, so you're going to be smoking more, faster, than you would out of a bowl or a joint or something. I personally love the whole act of rolling a big blunt and smoking it, but some people hate blunts altogether. In Europe, it's almost unheard of to roll a joint without tobacco in it. Over here, the reverse is true; it's almost unheard of to roll a joint with tobacco in it. Sometimes it's just too annoying to load up the bong and so you just use the bowl, and sometimes it's relaxing to do the whole ritual of getting the bong ready for smoking. Bongs are awkward with more than 3 or 4 people, rolled weed is kind of wasteful. It's really just a matter of preference, same with the taste and smell of weed. Some people like ketchup, I think it's vile. I don't see how this isn't immediately obvious, really.

E: TL;DR



Lesser is a matter of opinion. I have no idea why this wouldn't be immediately obvious to you.

I can tell you without a shade of doubt that marijuana does not kill brain cells. Drugs are not inherently bad. Many of them cure headaches, stomachaches, diarrhea, and cancer. Recreational (aka psychoactive) drugs are not inherently good or bad any more than medical drugs are inherently good or bad. Both categories have effects that are good or bad depending upon the situation. Drugs are not an experience, but they can definitely make an experience, and in my case and many others, they have painted broad strokes across my life.

Being allowed to experience new modes of consciousness via the use of various psychoactive drugs should be a basic human right, in my mind. I realize things are different in the first world than other countries and even that could change soon, but we exist in a time of relative prosperity. Life now is easier than any other time, ever. Sensationalism and the news media fools you into thinking otherwise, but this truly is the best time ever for you to be alive, so far. We are not quite into space yet, and I feel we have conquered much of what we can conquer on this Earth and consequently have managed to build societies wherein man has an unprecedented amount of leisure time. The very fact that children do not work, excepting education and certain farm-related exceptions, can attest to that.

As such, we very much desire to fill that free time with the things we enjoy, because hey, why not? Think about the passion a person can have for the things they enjoy. When you're doing something you enjoy, something that you never get bored of and where each motion feels like you're just moving your muscles along a track set out for them to be a thousand percent perfect, you feel a peace in your heart, which is the real point of the thing after all.

That state of being perfectly content with what you are doing,of not having to not allow yourself to think beyond the work you are doing and living in the single present moment of perception in the river of time, is a major central theme to Eastern philosophies (Differing from Western thought in that Western thought is all about stepping back from your environment and examining critically, not identifying with reality in order to not confuse yourself as to what reality actually IS. I think both approaches have their place in life and both should be studied long and hard.). Buddhists call it Buddha nature (A Buddha [not THE Buddha] is a man who has achieved enlightenment, separate from or even above the gods, unbound by time and space), Taoists call it the Tao, there are many names for it, but trust me when I say they're all different paths to the same thing.

I mention all of those things because if you pay attention you will see a great emphasis on specific modes of consciousness. "Leisure time", "prosperity", "enlightenment" and even having been "educated" are all contributing factors to your mode of consciousness in the big picture. You experience things in your life, the internal processes of your brain chew on them over a period of time, accepting new stimuli as it comes and chewing on that, and changing its internal processes as a reaction. Physics pretty much relies on the idea that the universe operates according to certain rules, and so we know that in reality time is an illusion and is more of a dimension in space, and that everything that ever is and was and in fact everything that ever could be exists, as far as we know.

And yet we are wired to experience only Now. A single frame of existence at a time, we are not these individual frames of time but the man in the lay-z-boy, watching it all roll by. This ties into the free will problem and is basically the place where people assign the soul, I think, but we won't go into that. What we will go into, however, is the answer to your question at long last. I thank you for your patience with my slightly high ramblings.

The reason why people get so upset about drugs is because of all that stuff I was talking about earlier. Since we experience time as we do, we can sometimes have a hard time seeing the gradual changes because of our tendency to normalize things. Thusly, something that can vastly change the internal goings on of our mind, and so alter our experience of reality, very quickly is obviously going to be very interesting and, with some drugs, a very pleasurable experience. The change over time of the intensity of the subjective experience determines the "rush" factor of a consumed substance.

Unfortunately, people can let themselves get very attached to the expectation of this psychoactive experience and so, as do all things when desire, attachment, and reality collide, it turns to ♥♥♥♥. Addiction is wonderful and feeling good all the time really is subjectively ♥♥♥♥ awesome. Reality doesn't work like that, and so we have the collision. The smaller scale is being butthurt because you can't smoke weed at a party or something, when if you had never expected weed you might have had fun. Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen are all basically teaching that while you are not capable of always controlling your environment, you are capable of controlling your reactions to it. Just slightly different perspectives.

Lastly, I would like you to consider this when thinking about my comment about drugs being a right: I wouldn't have thought any of these things or spoken any of these words or very likely not have been a tenth as wise as I am if it were not for drugs. I have used psychedelics to explore new frontiers of human existence, to explore realms of sensation and the inside of my own mind with the infinities it holds, and I have come back from the depths much wiser. I have been torn apart and shown incredible things, maybe products of the leviathan depths of my own subconscious mind, maybe somewhere else. I cannot say, we cannot know. What I do know, though, is that everyone has benefited from psychedelic and other drugs, from the influences of drugs on the people who have influenced our culture, and not just music and movies and stuff either.

Dang I'm high.

EDIT:


Mindset and setting are very important with drugs. The former statement causes the latter, I'm willing to bet, especially with the other story about enjoying it you told.

It's such a shame that it's hard to convey that opinion to those without any level of the experience without sounding pretentious, you make a convincing argument with conviction.

weed is great w/ moderation

My cat smokes weed.

Oph, I still want some shrooms if you have any.

I don't know if drugs will help my situation.

Never done shrooms, what's it like?

It's a sensory experience totally without precedent in sober consciousness that is totally unrelatable to someone who has not done psychedelic drugs. Your experience of the world and mode of consciousness are so fundamentally and massively altered from a sober state that it's like trying to explain color to a man who has been blind since birth. I envy anyone who hasn't done psychedelics because they get to do psychedelics for the first time.

Just ate truffles I bought in Amsterdam, which proceeded to do jack ♥♥♥♥. That made me sad.

DMT oil extracted from acacia confusa root bark. Will report back post-hyperspace, which will be any time within a week from now.

DMT eh? I've read a lot about it some time ago. I am looking forward to post-experience summary.

Oh, and it's been a while since I've done anything informative here. Let's correct that, shall we?


DMT: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine Elves

"So, ComradePyro, what the ♥♥♥♥ is it?

Glad you asked. DMT is dimethyltryptamine, sometimes N,N-DMT. It is a chemical found commonly in nature across a wide number of plant and animal species. Wikipedia is, as useful, informative here.
"Since 1955 DMT has been found in a host of organisms: in at least fifty plant species belonging to ten families,[3] and in at least four animal species, including one gorgonian[17] and three mammalian species."
So it's ♥♥♥♥ everywhere (including Schedule I, lol, ♥♥♥♥'s illegal as ♥♥♥♥) and luckily not that hard to extract. I won't elaborate further on that particular point, because 1. I don't trust any of you around highly caustic solutions 2. Other people have already written better teks than I can. It's totally easy though.

DMT is commonly found in many vines in the Amazon, a fact which Amazonian shamans have been taking advantage of for thousands of years. Not having access to purified chemicals or the internet, they have instead perfected and passed down a brew called Ayahuasca, wherein a bunch of plants are tossed in a pot, boiled for a long time, and the resulting liquid is drank to imbibe the drug. Ayahuasca is pretty neat because DMT can't survive what is called first-pass metabolism, which basically means your liver kills it before it can get to the brain. To counteract this and make the DMT orally bioavailable, the shamans use a vine containing a naturally-occurring MAOI. MAOI = Monoamine oxidase inhibitor. As you might have guessed, monoamine oxidase is the thing in the liver which is responsible for removing DMT during first pass metabolization. Thusly, with MAO inhibited, the DMT can survive its trip through the liver and head to your brain and ♥♥♥♥ with all sorts of ♥♥♥♥ in there. White kids have, of course, realized you can take any MAOI and eat DMT and get a similar effect (there are actually quite a few plants in ayahuasca itself), and have dubbed it pharmahuasca.

"So how do I get this ♥♥♥♥ into my brain without some gross-ass tea?"

DMT in the West is largely consumed via vaporization (Not smoking! Pyrolization (setting that ♥♥♥♥ on fire) destroys the DMT and makes the harshest ♥♥♥♥ smoke), with a variety of methods employed from crack pipes (you vaporize crack too, if you didn't know, crack pipe isn't anything special really) to complicated induction heating apparatuses. If you wanna find out how to build your own solid DMT vape, google for "the machine", it's the tried and true classic.

"Okay sure but what does it do to you?

DMT is in a class all its own. Those more savvy to the chemistry side of things may have noticed the -tryptamine suffix, but let me assure you this isn't 4-HO-DMT (psilocin). This is the grandaddy of all tryptamines, the high performance F1 car to psilocin's grocery getter. If you vape DMT and do it properly, you will leave this universe entirely. There are reports of encounters with entities from beyond this plane of reality (I make no claims as to whether or not these things are "real" or merely ghosts in a drug-filled mind, the important thing here is that's what you feel like is happening at the time), often described as loving, caring, and desperate to teach you. You won't be you, by the way, because you won't be in your body, you will be in a fractal universe of infinite color and patterns. These descriptions, due to the nature of psychedelics, are about half literal and half metaphorical. I can only say that I highly recommend the experience, and that everyone should try it at least once barring some sort of medical condition.

"But ComradePyro, my mind and will are feeble instruments, you have to tell me what not to do!"

Don't do an extraction if you don't know what you're doing, don't forget to wear gloves and eye protection if you decide you know what you're doing, don't be like me and put your elbow into a drop of highly basic solution, don't abuse this ♥♥♥♥ because it is powerful as ♥♥♥♥ and I would say of all the classic psychedelics this one has the most potential to ♥♥♥♥ you up. Treat this substance with reverence, set and setting are paramount here. If you are lucky enough to get the chance to do it, you won't want to abuse it, and you will revere it, but the warning has to be given anyway.



Final thoughts: DMT has almost no capacity for tolerance, with effects returning after about an hour and baseline coming around T+18-20. Reading DMT trip reports is highly entertaining and very interesting at times. DMT has the strangest smell, like nothing else I've ever smelled. Almost plasticky, kind of spicy, the smell makes my chest tense up a little. Don't buy cheap ♥♥♥♥, get proper equipment. Have fun, be safe, always wear a condom.