This crisis laminate thing was made as a shorthand addendum to a longer training offered to festival first responders. formatted to fit into little laminates you can wear around your neck and is meant to jog someone's memory in a crisis without missing critical indicators of safety or being so dense as to be illegible at night.

We've mentioned it here because it's the best free thing we have right now for crisis response, but it's certainly imperfect for anyone who hasn't taken that training. When we're able to get around to making one in long form that's better suited for folks without first responder training, your feedback will be super helpful, so thanks for that.

Right now the only place we offer comprehensive crisis response triage and training to people who aren't first responders is our psychedelic safety masterclass.

This guy edits

It literally was the most observed, most audited, and most litigated election, ever.

Biden won. That's it.

You're welcome! Well wishes for you on your journey.

As far as information about "tapering on" specifically, we're not aware of much in the way of dedicated research or anecdotal data on how to do it. One strategy informed by Alexander Shulgin's approach could be to raise your dose at small, consistent increments (indexed to the dosage range of the particular substance in question) over successive sessions.

For instance, many drug databases like Erowid or PsychonautWiki list a range of dosages from "threshold" to "heavy." You could start at the low end of a "threshold" dose, then do something on the higher end of a threshold dose. Then something on the low end of a "light" dose, then something on the high end of a light dose, and so on.

I’ve recently started using shrooms. What is a good frequency and dose to use them for and for what purposes?

This is a good example of bad science followed by bad science journalism creating a speculative nonissue out of nowhere. While it hasn't been demonstrably proven that microdosing doesn't cause cardiac issues, the original article with that assertion also doesn't do a great job of proving that it does. Here's a great write up of some of the methodological issues with the original article from Third Wave. To summarize: Dr Ketan has no real-world data to back up his theory; they rely on an assumption of frequency of microdosing that does not match the most commonly used protocols; and finally, he actually extrapolates his hypothesis using some data from MDMA, which has a completely different structure and dosing protocol. That's not to say that there aren't issues and we can definitely say that this is absolutely safe, since the research out there is scant and there is tons we don't know... but this particular assertion is a theoretical stretch and needs some data before it can be given serious attention.

tl;dr, reading beyond the headline and into the methodological details of what smart-sounding people are saying is important.

Word. We're familiar with McKenna and don't think it was meant to be macho in a traditional sense either, which is why it's a bummer that it's sometimes taken that way out of context.

A few elections ago I saw a post about a professor who every election would go around his section of the country to polling locations before election day to see if he could gain access to voting machines. He never broke into any rooms or snuck through security. Instead he would just walk into these locations through unlocked doors where no one was around to stop him. The machines were usually sitting in a dark room just waiting to be plugged in on election day. He never actually did anything but would just take a picture to show how easy it was.

Is this kind of early unfettered access to a voting machine a security issue?

Thanks for the reply.

I think Terrence McKenna coined the term heroic because of old tales about journeys that people would take which you likely will mentally with that size dose. I don’t think it was meant to be macho in a traditional sense

Totally. We've also heard the term "risk reduction" or "risk management" used, which are probably a little better and would likely still be tolerated by major social media platforms. This has given us some good stuff to think on in regards to how we present what we do online, so thanks for jogging our brains on this.

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me with such a message. I actually was watching a pbs Nova special on this topic when I seen your AMA. Thank you for the work you do for people like myself, and I wish you well.

some people order with cream and sugar, so i was explaining what went where at the point of preparation in the drinks

While I'm generally in favor of well-understood and battle tested open-source hw/sw, it's not really a panacea. How do you know the build of the open-source software hasn't been tampered with? How do you know that the physical machines actually in use conform to the open-source specs and haven't been tampered with?

Of course, you can mitigate some of those risks by allowing stakeholders to inspect, verify hashes of builds, etc. But that's a lot of human-factor stuff on top that you're absolutely relying on.

So even in an open-source hw/sw world, RLAs are still critical.

Ah, I understand that approach. Thanks for the AMA. Godspeed!

So, the legal framework in Oregon for psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy is actually still in development (and is experiencing some significant issues) - unfortunately, you can't count on having safe, legal access to professional resources there quite yet. Ketamine clinics have been cropping up in Oregon, however, which may be a useful treatment to consider in discussion with your mental health providers - many folks have found some relief from the symptoms of trauma, freeing up the capacity to work on the underlying issues in the long term.
We're very sorry to hear that you've been labeled as "drug seeking" by folks you've worked with in the past. That type of stigmatizing treatment by mental health professionals gives the rest of us a bad name, and we know you are not the only one who has not sought out treatment because of fear of the people who are supposed to be there to help them. Plenty of psychiatrists and others working in the behavioral healthcare field have not been exposed to all the excellent research that has been happening in this field in recent years, let alone received training that would enable them to have an even-handed, nonjudgmental conversation about their use. We would advise coming in prepared with your research before speaking with your doctor. If they are not prepared to treat your interest in exploring these other treatment modalities in a nonjudgmental, professional manner, that may mean identifying someone who has received more education and training on these subjects in your area.

If we're gonna get technical (and we will, we're nerds), the term "tolerance" refers to your body's lowered response to a drug after taking it, so we're going to address what it seems you're getting at here, which is building a base of experience in working up to higher doses.

We don't like the term "heroic" for high doses because that term has some Epic Badass Connotations to it, which we feel is misplaced given that higher doses are more likely to lead to difficult trips, not being able to navigate you environment safely, unearthing major trauma you weren't prepared to deal with, and seems to anecdotally increase the risk of lingering negative consequences like psychotic episodes and HPPD.

That said, working your way up to higher doses over many sessions can give you a better idea as to what's par for the course and what's not. This can help you determine what kind of help/support you need in a given moment (a trusted friend on the phone vs. a hospital, for instance). Also, if you happen to be one of those rare people who reacts poorly to a given drug due to some genetic factor, health condition, or mental health condition, it's often less bad to learn that at a lower dose.

It's always better to be cautious than totally fucked.

I heard some talk that microdosing can be bad for the heart in the mid to long term. Can you speak to that?

Paper ballots seem to be the key first step to making any progress on this topic. How best can citizens influence the policy-makers to ensure that this minimum step on the road to transparency and auditability is implemented?

Which MODCOD is your favorite part of the standard?

"Harm reduction" is a good term if you're trying to get often-fickle public funding to help people who suffer from acute, negative impacts from taking drugs. People who suffer from overdose due to adulterated drugs or disease spread by dirty needles are definitely experiencing harm and need those harms to be reduced.

But Dr. Hart is right: drug use is a lot more complex than just harm reduction. One of the things that the professional drug people in our network sometimes talk about is the the positive counterpart to many "harm reduction" practices is that they maximize the benefits people get from using drugs.

A lot of social media platforms will kick you off if you say anything about benefit optimization being the result of many of the things we study and teach (a Facebook Ads expert recommended we use the word Safety in the name of our org for this reason), so in the name of not getting our accounts deleted, we've opted to be verrrrry careful about the language we use and made peace with this sub-optimal compromise.

What they did was faff around and mess with numbers they didn't understand.

Do you recommend that someone with experience with various psychedelics, including psilocybin, still build a tolerance to the same before taking a “heroic dose”? Where can we find information about this kind of “tapering on”?

It's not a good match for national elections. It may work for participants within an organization which understand the tech and issues at hand, but there's too many problems for national voting.

No mention of Colorado here? I'm surprised. Our state does voting right.