Hallucinogen use linked to 2.6-fold increase in risk of death for people needing emergency care

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-hallucinogen-linked-death-people-emergency.html

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

I once took nature’s most powerful hallucinogens on-camera for a TV show.

With Salvia Divinorum, ‘I’ dissolved entirely. The very idea of a continuous ‘self’ became absurd. Time looped. Nothing meant ANYTHING.

This timeline of Trump Does & Also Doesn’t Put Tariffs On Things is a bit like that.

Today in Labor History Today in Labor History April 15, 1943: Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, tested his first dose and went for a bike ride. This day is now celebrated as Bicycle Day. “... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...” And from that date forward, working class people could finally afford to go on a trip.

Sandoz originally marketed the drug as Delysid and sold it in 100 microgram doses. From the late 1940s, through the early 1960s, the drug was legal and numerous psychologists and researchers began experimenting with it as a form of therapy. Many were willing participants in the CIA’s UKUltra mind control experiments, in which LSD was given to people without their consent or knowledge. Cary Grant was a frequent and enthusiastic user. As early as the late 1940s, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson became enthusiastic about its potential to unleash a new era of peace and expanded consciousness. The founder of Alcoholic Anonymous was also an early user and said that it was far more effective at treating alcoholism than any other treatment he knew of. Research John Lily, along with Gregory Bateson, began dosing dolphins in the early 1960s, in experiments connected with the U.S. military, in an attempt to learn to communicate with the animals and deploy them as weapons in the cold war.

Hoffman later went on to isolate psilicyben, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in mushrooms, which he also enjoyed experimenting with.

Another informative piece by Joshua J. Mark (one of my sources for "Women in the Ancient World"). Also, ever wonder where #Christianity got some of their ideas about the #afterlife? Pretty much, they took what they wanted (or what was popular), then banned the Rites.

The #EleusinianMysteries: The Rites of #Demeter

by Joshua J. Mark
published on 18 January 2012

"The #RitesOfEleusis, or the Eleusinian Mysteries, were the secret rituals of the mystery school of #Eleusis and were observed regularly from c. 1600 BCE - 392 CE. Exactly what this mystic ritual was no one knows; but why the ancient Greeks participated in it can be understood by the testimonials of the initiated.

"The Eleusinian Mysteries, held each year at Eleusis, Greece, fourteen miles northwest of Athens, were so important to the Greeks that, until the arrival of the Romans, The Sacred Way (the road from Athens to Eleusis) was the only road, not a goat path, in all of central Greece. The mysteries celebrated the story of Demeter and #Persephone but, as the initiated were sworn to secrecy on pain of death as to the details of the ritual, we do not know what form these rituals took. We do know, though, that those who participated in the mysteries were forever changed for the better and that they no longer feared death.

"The rituals were based on a symbolic reading of the story of Demeter and Persephone and provided initiates with a vision of the afterlife so powerful that it changed the way they saw the world and their place in it. Participants were freed from a fear of death through the recognition that they were immortal souls temporarily in mortal bodies. In the same way that Persephone went down to the land of the dead and returned to that of the living each year, so would every human being die only to live again on another plane of existence or in another body."

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/32/the-eleusinian-mysteries-the-rites-of-demeter/

In a few days in Labor History April 19, 1943: Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, tested his first dose and went for a bike ride. This day is now celebrated as Bicycle Day. “... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...”