Psychedelics And The Mind
Essay Preview: Psychedelics And The Mind
Report this essay
Since the dawn of time people have been seeking out psychoactive drugs for various reasons including religious revelation, emotional relief or for recreational use. It is true that man is not the only ones who seek out this intoxicated state. This behavior is shown in animals such as the caribou, most commonly known as the reindeer, which become so attached to hallucinogens that they grind their teeth down to the gum in order to scrape psychedelic lichen from rocks. Memory plays a major role in the psychedelic experience. A deeper look in to the understanding of the powerful mechanisms that memory contributes to the psychedelic experience, and after-effects on the memory, requires a lesson on the inner-workings of the brain during this experience
The term psychedelics applies to a vast majority of drugs that produces a powerful experience on ones mind, body and brain. In the United States almost all of these substances are controlled in one way or another, with the exception of a short list of perhaps even more powerful substances than those which are controlled; for example Salvia Divinorum, a legal psychedelic plant, said to be as powerful as DMT (produced and released in the brain during dreams), two substances which I will go in to further detailed later. The common psychedelic compounds used today, although there are hundreds more, are as follows:
THC (cannabis), LSD, DMT, MDMA (ecstasy), Mescaline (cacti), Psilocybin/Psilocin (fungi), S. Divinorum.
The fascinating thing about the desire many people possess to continuously break apart the human mind by allowing perception to be free from the restraint by which
new ways to harness the power of a psychedelic drug so as to cross the boundary of space and time therefore becoming disassociated with reality. Since the 1960’s, or even as early as the time LSD was discovered (1938), illicit drug chemists have developed a “trick” to make new compounds. They do this by synthesizing an existing psychedelic compound and tweak the structure of the molecule