Author: vjmp

Trip Report – 405mg Mirtazapine

Mirtazipine

I learned from PsychonautWiki that the antidepressant Mirtazapine could work as a psychedelic-deliriant. Thought it sounded fun. Having some mirtazapine left over from a previous prescription I took took 9 x 45mg tablets at about 6.30pm, for a total of 405mg. I weigh 115kg (255lb) and am very drug resistant, so this dose should not be considered a guideline of any sort.

Little happened for an hour. I had low expectations considering this is a legal pharmaceutical. At about 7.30pm I started feeling lightheaded and a bit euphoric. At this time I started watching a rugby match.

Although I have a passion for rugby, it was hard to concentrate after about 8.00pm. My head was swimming and I started to get a generally good buzz, not unlike being drunk but without the sickliness.

I walked outside. Walking was very difficult and I stumbled like a drunk, almost taking a header down a flight of stairs, but wasn’t concerned about falling over.

At the bottom of the stairs I decided to take a piss on the lawn. My cat ran up to me and I thought to be careful as it was getting close to the stream of piss. I looked again, and it wasn’t a cat at all – just a field of long grass that formed a dark shadow and which appeared to move in the wind.

I looked at the night sky. For some reason my visual acuity had sharpened tremendously. Even without my glasses, I could clearly see many stars in the Southern Cross. Normally I can see four, and five if I stop and look hard. Now I could see about ten. I didn’t even know there were than many, and I found it incredible.

Looking at a wider field, I could see hundreds of stars surrounding the Southern Cross and the Pointers, and then I could clearly see the Milky Way galaxy itself, appearing in a broad band across the sky.

The Milky Way stretched right across the sky, and I had the most bizarre sense of the entire galaxy being alive, and that I actually could comprehend my place in it. Here I was, on a planet facing away from its star, beholding the entire galaxy, which I knew to be utterly full of every kind of life imaginable. Somehow I comprehended that out there was all manner of life that would and will astonish us in all kinds of ways.

Then I was in front of my laptop, doing some reading and eating some chocolate (that tasted orgasmic). I heard music, and realised that it was coming from somewhere non-physical. It sounded some Asian pop, and it seemed like my brain was tuning into its frequency despite that frequency not being the same as my physical one.

That was the psychedelic part of the experience. The delirium came shortly after. I forgot who I was and what I was doing, but there was a deep sense of everything being alright.

I returned upstairs and lay in bed, now feeling sleepy. I could not sleep and had a bit of restless leg syndrome but also had amazing closed eye visuals. I saw what looked like psychedelic drawings of Robert Crumb, only in full colour, and in the psychedelic greens and purples so characteristic of late sixties iconography.

These displayed themselves as posters that were advertisements for a movie or band of some sort. They looked good, and they flashed before my eyes at a rate of four or five per second, always different, as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.

I was conscious enough to be astonished at the range of creativity showed by whatever force thought up the formation of these movie posters. Being an experienced psychedelic user, I remembered then that the brain filters the Great Fractal out from the conscious experience so that consciousness can focus on the consensual reality of this frequency, and that I had temporarily broken that filtering, hence I was seeing the movie posters.

I slept lightly, coming to awakeness only when something loud happened in the cricket that was playing on the television. Soon I felt a deep, relaxing, physical euphoria that made my body very sensitive.

When I woke up the next day I felt relaxed but a bit slow and irritable.

I think a high dose of mirtazapine would be good for making love on, because of the enhanced physical pleasure. It is hard to concentrate on it though, and the deliriant effect was moderately strong, which makes it poor for socialising. Probably the nicest use for it would be out in nature during a summer evening.

– CERVANTES DE LA HOYA

If Cannabis is a Mental Health Medicine, Then We Are Killing People With Prohibition

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High in the news at the moment is the story that six young people have killed themselves in three months in the town of Kaitaia, population 5,000. Kaitaia is in the search for solutions; so far suggested is a youth space and more streetlights in some back streets.

Predictably, no-one in the New Zealand ruling class has the courage to suggest the legalisation of cannabis.

According to a study by Montana State University, suicides among men aged 20 through 39 years fell roughly 10% after medical cannabis was legalised compared to those states that did not legalise.

The study says that the lower rate of suicide in states that have legalised medicinal cannabis “is consistent with the hypothesis that marijuana can be used to cope with stressful life events.”

This is something that almost every young person in New Zealand knows! Almost 100% of New Zealand youth know that cannabis should not be illegal. They’ve seen most of their parents smoke it and they know it’s less dangerous than alcohol. I personally can credit the use of cannabis with saving me from a desperately dark psychological situation.

But the ruling class puts young people in prison for this medicinal plant that saves lives, and then says the problem is a lack of streetlights! The fact that the ruling class is so appallingly out of touch is another reason why it’s so difficult to be a young person in New Zealand.

How stupid are they? Why don’t they ask the young people with mental illness what they want, instead of assuming that because they are mentally ill they can’t possibly know?

85% of Kaitaia live on some kind of benefit. If you are on the benefit in New Zealand and don’t have cannabis, then insanity is never far away. Being a young person in New Zealand is difficult, due to the almost total absence of stimulation.

Being a young person on a benefit in economically depressed small-town New Zealand is an extremely difficult psychological challenge.

If a person doesn’t understand that, then they don’t have the empathy necessary to be involved in the process about how to solve our mental health problems.

Mike King has it right when he said “If we’re going to put a dent in these appalling numbers we have around suicide then we’re going to have to start listening to communities,” he says.

Well, at least 90% of these young people want the right to relax, to calm down, and to stimulate their artistic and creative endeavours by smoking cannabis. Are you going to listen to that?

This is what the community is saying: smoking cannabis takes our suffering away. Cannabis prohibition takes away a mental health medicine that we could be using to make our lives better. It’s even backed up by the statistics.

Young people are dying because you’re not listening.

How Media Bias in New Zealand Contributes to a Prohibitionist Attitude

cannabismurder

The bias against cannabis in the New Zealand media expresses itself in a number of ways. Some excerpts from a recent Southland Times article called “Invercargill Teen Jailed for One Punch Kill” show how biased this sort of reporting is.

Thanks to a phenomenon called the serial position effect, psychologists know that, when presented with a list of items, a person reading them is more likely to remember the one that was first in the list. Keep this simple fact in mind when analysing this piece.

The article told the pathetic story of Tyrone Palmer, who killed a man named Matthew Coley with a single punch to the side of the head in Invercargill earlier this year.

Near the beginning of the article is the sentence “On Friday, April 8, Palmer had… used the class A drug LSD, cannabis, and alcohol.”

Understanding the serial position effect, we know that anyone reading that passage is likely to take away from it the message that “the class A drug” LSD and cannabis were at least as responsible for the sucker punch as the alcohol was.

Anyone with a clue, of course, will know that the LSD and cannabis had nothing to do with the violence for the simple reason that psychedelics do not make people violent. Moreover, there are hundreds of cases of unprovoked violence every year in New Zealand that involve alcohol and no cannabis, and there is never a case of unprovoked violence in New Zealand that involves cannabis and not alcohol.

“The judge was particularly concerned about the effect drug and alcohol use can have on young people. ‘I am intensely troubled by the reference in the narrative to the use of [LSD], cannabis and alcohol.'”

Apart from again manipulating the reaction of the reader by leading them to associate LSD and cannabis with the violence, this sentence also uses the common prohibitionist rhetorical device of distinguishing ‘drugs’ from ‘alcohol’.

The reason why this is done is because much of the impetus behind cannabis prohibition comes from the liquor industry, as the first thing any industry does in a capitalist system is to try and destroy their competitors, and the alcohol industry knows that a large proportion of people would rather smoke cannabis than drink alcohol.

The article waits until the very last sentence to mention that Coley’s mother “planned to keep warning New Zealanders of the dangers around youth drinking.” So the quote of the one person in the whole story who places the blame on the alcohol is shunted down to the very bottom of the story.

Incredibly, the final sentence for punching another human being to death was 22 months – the same as the sentence initially handed out to Kelly van Gaalen last year for cannabis cultivation.

The ultimate effect of the kind of dishonest rhetoric shown by the author of the Southland Times article is that growing a medicinal plant comes to carry the same penalty as killing another person.