Tag: Psychedelics

Our journey now is ending.  This is the final installment on the Drugs of Abuse subseries of Pique the Geek.  This one will be a bit different, and will likely take a long time to read, if you listen to the music that I have chosen for it.

LSD is a uniquely 1960s substance, even though it was known before then.  Dr. Albert Hofmann first synthesized it in 1938 or so, but sort of forgot about it until 1943.  By the way, Dr. Hofmann died this year at the age of 100 years, so that material certainly did not kill him.

This is such a complex topic that it has taken several weeks for me to decide how to divide it into understandable chunks, and then how to present them.  The manner in which I finally decided may not be the best, but hopefully it will make some sense.  With a topic this complex, it will take two or more installments to complete.  We shall begin with the science and history this evening.

Well, only one installment in this subseries after this one, but it will be special.  Tonight we will explore this class of drugs, what they do, and how they work.

This class of drugs also includes LSD, but that material is so culturally important that it will have a post of its own.  Thinking about it, it may deserve two posts, so there may be two installment after this one.  We will have to see.

Sorry that I did not post last night.  I have been tending to more important family things.  I promise that I will post the next installment this coming Sunday.  I am getting a very intrusive signal from PC Tools Antivirus.  It will not let me go.  I suggest that you not go to that site.

Warmest regards,

Doc

The psychedelic amphetamines (and I include mescaline here, although it is a methyl group away from being a true amphetamine) are many and widely encountered in what are almost always now illicit settings.  They (except for mescaline) are synthetic drugs, not found in nature.

These drugs are “true” psychedelics as opposed to the oddballs described here last week.  Many of the oddballs are dissociatives, and the true psychedelics work by a completely different mechanism.