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A major factor in America during the first three decades of my life was New Recreational Drugs. Something always was being invented from scratch (e.g., LSD), rediscovered (cocaine), or modified (crack cocaine).
L to R: Mickey Kaus, school shrink, band director, Lou Reed
These innovations had much impact on crime statistics, music, attitudes, and so forth. Mickey Kaus, who had the Velvet Underground perform live during a school assembly when he was student body president of Beverly Hills HS in 1968, always says that when people go on and on about the creativity of the 1960s, they’re basically talking about the impact of novel combinations of chemicals on the brain.
In recent years, however, has this rate of innovation fallen off? I can remember somebody telling me about Ecstasy for the first time in late 1985. My reaction was, “Well, of course, they’re always inventing new drugs. This will never stop.”
But, it kind of seems like it stopped. Granted, nobody tells me about new drugs anymore, so perhaps kids these days are taking stuff that Hunter S. Thompson never imagined. Or perhaps not. Perhaps all the major psychoactive niches got filled decades ago so there isn’t much demand for new drugs.
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Pharmaceuticals provide so much variation that there isn’t a need to invent new stuff. Don’t like valium? Get some vicodin, oxytocin, muscle relaxers, xanex, lorazepam, ambien, or whatever
A difference since 1985 might be more of these drugs are Rx. Seems to be a lot of recreational use of Ambien now, for example.
woah Steve, you’re really out of it. You haven’t heard of synthetic marijuana or bath salts? I was recently on a rec league soccer team sponsored by a semi-legitimate synthetic marijuana shop owner.
Okay, so most of the innovation has been carried out by major pharmaceuticals coming up with medicines to replace what people we’re using to self-medicate?
This 1983 video was probably highly influential career advice for the people who now work for pharmaceutical giants:
Have you seen the self-portraits of Bryan Lewis Saunders where he paints/draws himself on different drugs? Those show that there really are a lot of drugs to choose from. Maybe its the “long tail” where the large selection creates it difficult to get a big trend going so old people never hear of them.
http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/
The two big recent innovations IMO are portable vaporizers for nicotine and hash oil.
http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/Replies: @Steve Sailer
Judging by Bryan Lewis Saunders’ pictures, Ralph Steadman must have been on bath salts and morphine.
So a long tail for drugs could be like a long tail for styles of music: most niches have been filled, so little that’s very new sweeps across society because there’s little demand for novelty?
What about synthetic weed? It’s got some cannabinoids (no THC, though), and it has been banned by many states and the feds in the last several years, but is much less friendly to the user than marijuana. Talk about your half-baked ideas…
I saw a documentary on ecstasy, and it seems in moderation it can be very therapeutic, but in excess (as most club kids use it) it is very dangerous. Moderation in all things, something kids don’t appreciate.
I also find it interesting how Freud was so into cocaine as a young man, but then avoided it later in life. He was addicted to nicotine, however. Jazz players in the 50’s showed that opium wasn’t a drug you can use in moderation.
First we made it against the law for guys under the age of twenty-one to buy beer so they’d have something to drink while giving girls a ride in their muscle cars, then we replaced all our hot mini-skirted, airline stewardesses with stewards (“Hi, I’m Carl but my friends call me Patient Zero”), and now we can’t even manage to come up with cool new drugs that might help us forget how much music these days sucks. Something is very wrong with this country.
There’s a new drug called “cheese.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1cvKcGVy6k
“I saw a documentary on ecstasy, and it seems in moderation it can be very therapeutic, but in excess (as most club kids use it) it is very dangerous. ”
When I was in my late teens and MDMA was popular, it seemed people used it fairly responsibly, typically planning a big party or club night or rave many weeks in advance. There was strong social pressure at these events to use it responsibly, including non-profits full of middle aged nurse types that would test a pill for you before you took it.
Like psychedelics, there are various aspects of the substance that lends to moderation and popularity with middle and upper class kids, rather than poor people or sad middle aged addicts. One of them is that raves were typically in either old dance hall type venues or warehouses, and no alcohol was tolerated. So it was basically a substitute for going out drinking.
There’s been a lot of new drugs. ‘Bath salts’ is a catch-all name for dozens of different stimulants and psychedelics, and ‘spice’ is dozens of different synthetic cannabinoids. That’s how they’ve been able to sell this stuff in the grey market, online and in gas stations–the new compounds often aren’t technically on the DEA’s list of banned drugs, and when they do ban them, they can just use a different version.
Dont forget jenkem
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkem
Hey LMGTFY,
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health does not have any new drugs on it for 2012.
It does show you declines in popularity by looking at the difference between “past year” and “lifetime use” rankings.
Past year rankings are:
1 cannabis
2 illicit prescription opiates
3 illicit prescription tranquilizers
4 hallucinogens
5 cocaine
6 stimulants
7 MDMA
8 inhalants
Everything else has past year usage below 0.5%
Lifetime rankings are
1 cannabis
2 cocaine
3 hallucinogens
4 illicit prescription opiates
5 LSD (a subcategory of 3)
6 illicit prescription tranquilizers
7 Stimulants
8 MDMA
Everything else has lifetime use below 5%.
The trend is away from cocaine and hallucinogens, and toward illicitly purchased prescription drugs and MDMA. PCP use is now below 1/1000 the past year, despite a 1/40 lifetime use rate. Crack likewise has a 1/29 lifetime use rate, but 1/500 past year use rate.
This seems to overall be a positive trend. Cocaine is expensive, harmful to the body, and funds criminal organizations. Prescription drug abuse is dangerous too, but standardized pills makes it hard to overdose, and the profits go to the drug companies most Americans own through their mutual, pension, and index funds.
http://www.samhsa.gov/data/
There are LOTS of new synthetics out there, though they’re often less effective and more dangerous than the existing set.
Here’s a great writeup on the synthetic drug ‘revolution’:
https://medium.com/matter/the-drug-revolution-that-no-one-can-stop-19f753fb15e0
There’s Krokodil, coming from the land that many here regard as the global epicenter of faith, family values, and responsible governance.
Well, the ’90s NorCal techno-shamanic-rave scene came with a bunch of novel stuff, either originally synthesized by Alexander Shulgin (who died Monday, bless) or “rediscovered” from South American shamanism. In college I took some of that stuff, ordered off the internet as “research chemicals” – 2-T-C-7 (it was kind of like a moderate dose of ecstasy plus a low dose of LSD), 5-MeO-DMT (like going from 0 to 8 hits of acid and back again in about 90 seconds), something else I forget.
But yeah, to second everybody, bath salts, synthetic “marijuana”, prescription pharmaceuticals.
Pushing recreational drugs through the official medical channels isn’t a terrible idea, “okay you can use this stuff but not too much at once, and only if you have a doctor check you out every so often” sounds reasonable and worked well enough for laudanum and methamphetamine back in the day. Of course eventually that degenerates into “okay you can use it but only if you make unscrupulous people with Caribbean MDs rich”. I lived in LA and had a medical marijuana card for a while, it started out “okay you can by weed in stores but only if you smile and nod and play along with a true-believing quack for $200” and after a few years was “okay but only if you give $50 to let a shameless self-promoter stand in front of you for 30 seconds and have her nurse take your blood pressure”.
Soren’s right that the real innovation has been in pathways of administration, not chemical composition. Adderall combining 3 amphetamine salts with different half-lives for a more level high, vaporizers to smoke weed and tobacco in public again, time-release Oxycontin, heroin and cocaine now cheap and pure enough for suburban kids to snort (injection was always a big barrier to acceptance, and smoking that stuff’s low class)
Oh, almost forgot, ketamine. That was kind of a thing for a bit.
iPot
Adderall and similar ADD drugs. They’s apparently a lot of spillover to the non-RX world.
I suspect this has knock-on effects with electronic music.
I suspect part of the reason is that new drugs are now born illegal; it used to be you could invent something like LSD and promote it for a while before it was outlawed. Another reason, I think, is that the whole drug-supply-chain is just so much scarier now than it was before, say, 1985. With the brutal gangs and the brutal alphabet agencies there’s a lot of deterrence against folks smart enough to invent new street drugs as opposed to misusing pharmaceuticals or messing with the old (well, old now!) standbys.
I looked at the title and thought this would be an Alexander Shulgin obituary.
As someone intimately involved in millennial drug culture, I’ll second pharmaceuticals as being our defining intoxicants. Primarily Adderall (AKA amphetamine – nothing new there) and opiates, with some Xanax thrown in for good measure.
The “new” drugs are mainly things that Shulgin thought up and some lab over in China synthesized – 2c-B, 2C-E, AMT, alphabet soup stuff like that. They’ve never broken through to mass popularity because:
*they’re non habit-forming
*they’re heavily intoxicating, to the point where a public veneer as a functioning human isn’t possible
*they have very low active doses, often 10 or 20 milligrams, and thus are hard to effectively standardize
Mephedrone seems popular with kids these days. It’s a khat like synthetic substance, that is similar to MDMA or cocaine in it’s effects.
Ketamine, though not new, seems to be quite popular too.
“Foxy” is new, but it’s very niche. It’s not widely taken, but I think it’s disproportionally talked about because of the dearth of widely taken new drugs that you mention.
The new drug story for our era seems to be the wider acceptance of novel methods of delivery for already-common drugs, not the synthesis of new ones: marijuana is now “vaped” (heated to a temperature that releases it’s THC into the air) or “dabbed” (condensed to higher potencies in a process involving butane) much more frequently than it once was, although smoking and eating are still dominant. Similarly, Club Drugs like Ecstacy are now taken anally much more often than they once were, a process that selects for a certain type of person, and will certainly buy America’s proctologists a few extra boats. Common sense suggests it’s extremely unhealthy.
Marijuana today really is a different drug than it was 20 years ago. That assertion is commonly made, and there’s more to it than empty alarmism. THC levels have skyrocketed, and both of the new delivery methods I mentioned above are significantly more intense than smoking. The same is true of edible marijuana. I’m libertarian enough that I think pot ought to be legal, but I’m realistic enough to know that legalization will mean having to deal with a lot more people acting semi-retarded in public, and a lot of other externalities as well.
I quit smoking pot when I turned thirty (and when my father revealed to me that he knew I smoked, a revelation that filled me with a shame I did not expect). I recommend quitting to any recreational user who’s considering it. I feel much better, perform better at work, and my friends compliment me on increased verbal coherence (and I imagine more of them recognize this than say it, since it’s an awkward thing to intimate; suggesting that someone used to be incoherent is bad manners). Quitting is worth it, and I suppose not ever starting is even moreso!
@Steve
In the UK Ketamine has been rediscovered as an abusable drug to produce a dreamy euphoric dissociated state – it has been used for a long time, eg in third world countries, as an anaesthetic which can safely be administered without an anesthesiologist. The abusers sometimes need to have their bladder removed due to damage – which is no joke.
There are also some remarkable, but credible, reports that Ketamine may have a similar beneficial effect to Electroshock treatment in severe melancholic or psychotic depression – which would be the first breakthrough in this field for about 60 years.
I just hope that what may be a major breakthrough in the treatment of psychosis does not get hijacked by association with abuse – this is actually a likely ‘misinformation’ strategy for Big Pharma who could not make any money off an old drug like Ketamine; whereas the evil and worse-than-useless new antipsychotics (aka ‘mood stabilizers’) are making billions per year – or per quarter – Ablify makes more money than any other drug in the world.
I may have this completely wrong, and somebody correct me if I am, but supposedly in the 1970’s -80’s chemists realized that all of the analogues of MDMA had some kind of property or another, so a variety of these went out on the street with assorted slang names. Then the FDA went ahead and banned whole classes of these chemical series, even if they had not been synthesized yet (by above-ground chemists). True?
There are plenty of new synthetic drugs. If you want to know a lot more Steve, send me an email, and I’ll write up something for you, having been involved in some prosecutions. They just recently (2012) had to pass a new law to add hundreds of compounds to the Controlled Substances Schedules because the Federal Analog Act wasn’t working anymore to get these
One major family is synthetic cannabinoids (‘Spice’) or, as the law calls them ‘cannabimimetic agents’. These are especially prevalent in East Asia, and lots of servicemembers get in trouble with them in Korea, Japan, Guam, etc. But they are challenging to test for. The active ingredient in marijuana is ‘THC’ – Tetrahydro-cannabinol. Well, if you keep the cannabinol, and try all kinds of different small organic chemistry group substitutions of those four hydros, you’ve got hundreds of possibilities, all with their own subtly different psychoactive effects, and also, unfortunately, different metabolites showing up in the urine.
There is also an entire family called synthetic cathinones (‘bath salts’). There was a ‘control act’ by that name proposed last year. These are all somewhat related to methamphetamine and derive from the same precursor. The ‘Cath’ is from ‘Qat’, and all those Red-Sea area people constantly chewing those leaves are doing do in order to get a milder form of that buzz.
Ecstasy itself is a modification of meth, and there are ways to modify the structure of ecstasy to change the nature of the experience, and sometimes this family is called ‘Candy’.
There was the ecstacy in the 90s. There are a lot of variations on that molecule. Bath salts too, seeking both mild hallucigens and speed.
May I say a word for my drug of choice, craft beer? It is mostly higher alcohol by volume than america lager so you get drunk faster but delicious.
Oh, I forgot MXE – Methoxetamine (unforgivable, I’m ashamed, I just heard of a case with it!). It’s a ketamine derivative. Mephedrone is a synthetic cathinone, and MDPV is popular and is sometimes called a ‘bath salt’.
2-DPMP is another one, and it’s truly on its own structure-wise. Novartis discovered it in the 1950’s, but gave up on it.
But in general, the name of the game is to take existing psychoactive compounds and play around with some of the peripheral alkyl groups, usually relying on some typical ways known to increase potency depending on that drugs suspected mechanism of psychoactivitiy. It doesn’t take that much sophistication to do this, unfortunately.
A way to visualize this is that it’s kind of like changing the toppings on a pizza. The bread and sauce and cheese stay the same. The brain is always going to react ok to any kind of pizza, but some toppings make it moderately good, while others make it truly awesome. “Let’s see what happens when we replace half the mushrooms with pepperoni. Oooh, delicious!”
Safe to say Huey Lewis was not juicing in 1984.
I’m pretty surprised at the street drug knowledge of iSteve commenters.
The only thing I’d add, as a counterexample to the rise of pharmeceuticals, is the shift of amphetamines from shady-prescription drugs to street drugs. Generations ago, Ayn Rand, Philip K Dick, probably a bunch of authors I don’t like as much, and half of Major League Baseball were heavy amphetamine users, and they didn’t end up looking like today’s meth addicts.
You’re just not hip enough. See Pihkal and Tihkal of the recently late A. Shulgin. And that’s far from all of them, with many little-known things showing up on the scene.
There’s plenty of demand: as Jonathan Ott said “the real drug- problem is that we need more and better drugs”.
Dave Pinsen is spot on with this, “A difference since 1985 might be more of these drugs are Rx.” However, in some places the trend is beginning to reverse itself due to government intervention coupled with the iron law of supply & demand. For instance, heroin has made a huge resurgence in Ohio over the past year due to the state legislature cracking down hard on prescription painkillers (such as oxycodone and the like), anyone caught illegally selling prescription painkillers, AND the doctors who prescribed them. The unintended consequence of this vigilant persecution is that now it’s easier and much, much cheaper to buy heroin than OxyContin on the black market. Well played, state legislature! As necessity is the mother of invention, look for all sorts of new and exciting recreational pharmaceuticals to emerge from the Buckeye State toward the end of 2015. I just hope they give them really cool sounding and Ohio-centric names like “Flyover”, “DEVO Dust” or “Woody Haze”.
Ketamin? William Gibson was writing about a dealer moving ketamine in Neuromancer, published in 1984.
I’d suggest DMAA is a drug that was rediscovered and re-purposed recently. In the 2000’s people started using it for workouts. Until it was recently banned, supplement makers were putting it in their pre-workout concoctions. I used it and it was a great drug to take before a lift. When you get older, motivation is the biggest challenge. DMAA had me wanting to bench press my truck.
The downside is you have the shakes for an hour afterward. That and kids would load up on it as a party drug and drop over with a heart attack.
The 60’s was when multi-track recording, amplification, synthesizers and other technologies started to blossom. For my money these had a much larger impact on the creativity of the decade than drugs. Which is a better record, “Pet Sounds” or “The Madcap Laughs”?
From what I can tell, there’s been a Galtonian explosion in new, more potent strains of pot thanks to the so-called “medicinal” marijuana movement.
Unfortunately, this has been accompanied not by a new culture of moderation, but by a culture that encourages even more intense consumption.
This is the unfortunate but inevitable result of combining cultural permissiveness with legal restrictiveness.
Drug prohibition, a 100 year-old globalist project of the Progressive Left (later adopted by Neocons eager for a perennial interventionist cause), has thusly borne its fruit.
So glad you brought up Bryan Lewis Saunders, I’ve met the guy, he’s very interesting.
A friend here in DC sustained a fairly stable oxy habit for several years, with the help of suboxone, but then when money started getting short he switched to heroin. He’s weaned himself off now. I’m definitely not speaking from personal experience when I say the more expensive, non-street drug is a lot clearer and more energetic high. It seems like there’s a class dimension here, but on the other hand, West Virginia does oxy and more wealthy Virginia does heroin, so who knows: http://www.roanoke.com/news/virginia/virginia-lawmakers-express-concern-about-prevalence-of-heroin-in-state/article_239ce3ce-ed24-11e3-9018-001a4bcf6878.html
Psychedelia is a much bigger and more diverse market than it was even 5 years ago in a place like New York, research chemicals are all the rage and there are ‘shamans’ in Brooklyn who will walk you through an ayahuasca trip. I have a hard time believing any of those research chemicals are better than good ol’ acid though.
As for marijuana, I think the strength argument is a canard. The preferred mode of smoking in Europe is with hash, which is why they roll spliffs instead of (generally) joints like in this country. In fact, the only other country people prefer joints is New Zealand, which Vice speculated recently is because both countries have a relatively good supply of cheap weed, that doesn’t need to be refined or condensed. In general people just smoke less of the stronger stuff; it’s prudent to warn them, so as to avoid a Maureen Dowd-type situation, but I think we should generally be happy that stoners are inhaling less plant matter to get high.
I bet Hunter Thompson never suspected kids would stop reading altogether.
It’s hard to synthesize new drugs without being a Ph.D. organic chemist in an excellent facility. There’s not so much opportunity for that any more.
The original 60’s psychedelics were synthesized as part of the effort to make anti-psychotics. All of these drugs are similar to but not identical to neurotransmitters.
The late Alex Shulgin continued that work, but how he managed to get approval from the DEA to do it is beyond me. (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL) And who was there to do it after?
On the other hand a quick look around erowid gives me this chemical:
https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/4_methylethcathinone/4_methylethcathinone.shtml
Maybe if you look through their archive you may find other drugs of such recent vintage. They might have a hard time getting traction. Shulgin was a public figure and so he had disciples to spread his work. There’s nobody equivalent anymore.
For context, Shulgin invented MDMA. (Ectasy is MDMA + speed.)
As for marijuana, I think the strength argument is a canard. The preferred mode of smoking in Europe is with hash, which is why they roll spliffs instead of (generally) joints like in this country. In fact, the only other country people prefer joints is New Zealand, which Vice speculated recently is because both countries have a relatively good supply of cheap weed, that doesn’t need to be refined or condensed. In general people just smoke less of the stronger stuff; it’s prudent to warn them, so as to avoid a Maureen Dowd-type situation, but I think we should generally be happy that stoners are inhaling less plant matter to get high.
Joints have been passé in America for quite some time. They dominate b-roll footage for news stories about marijuana, but I haven’t seen a serious potsmoker use one in the past five years. Far more common are small pipes, water bongs, “one-hitters” (cigarette-looking metal pipes with a sharp tip that one twists and grinds into tightly-compressed bud, squeezing a pinky-nail sized amount into it’s tip, which is consumed in one or two lighter-tipped exhalations, knocked out, and the process repeated), and the alternate methods I talked about in post 26. Spliffs and blunts get a little bit more attention, but joints, as far as I can tell, get exactly none.
Another health externality you miss is that while all the most common methods (pipes, bongs and one-hitters) lead users to inhale less of better stuff, they’re all about inhaling intensely when a flame is touched to the other end: compare to joints, which burn passively on their own between hits. This means that while less plant matter is being inhaled, more butane is. I’m no doctor, but I can’t see that being healthy.
The only thing I’ve heard about is krokodile (sp?) mentioned upthread. Agnostic once did a good post on drug use in the different eras.
When we first bought our house, my elderly neighbor was upset about an angel trumpet that the former owners put in the yard and I removed it for her sake. She was afraid of teens hurting themselves with it. Ten years have passed and Angels Trumpets have become hugely popular garden ornamentals and I now have one giant one and just planted three smaller ones last week.
No problems.
Agree with beltway bandit. Some spirits have a very high % alcohol – so one does not drink a pint of neat vodka.
So, if your weed is stronger than before, you don’t consume as much. Not a particularly pressing issue, is it? It’s more bang for your buck, which is good news, not bad.
Americans are more likely to smoke a whole thing of pure weed, which is not common over here in Europe.
Self-medication… My MIL is extremely bipolar along with other family members, naturally, and has self-medicated with the usual. The best thing I ever did for my little girl who suffers similarly was to start having her drink Gerolsteiner mineral water (high levels of magnesium and lithium) I’ve tried everything short of medication for the past three plus years and it’s been a miracle; takes her 24-48 hours to become normal if there has been a lapse. Switched to mineral sea salt as well. Hopefully, she’ll get better as she gets older, but I’ll be anxious about puberty and adulthood.
Obamide
Homolugen
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2014/06/columnists-get-very-very-high.html
As others have noted, delivery and potency on the marijuana front are big. Dabs and vaporizers are changing the landscape even for old school potheads. With Shulgin’s decline and demise, and no obvious replacement ready to step into his shoes, psychoactives may slow for a while. Opiates are on the rise as noted with the shift from OxyContin to heroin per our political masters bumping up production of the poppy in Afghanistan and jailing pill mill docs here at home. It was only alluded to above, but if you want the bleeding edge here it’s found in the gay party scene and in the bodybuilding community. I suppose both make sense as risk takers in health and a culture of chemical attempts at performance improvement.
Other commenters have assumed that because weed is stronger, usage must be more moderate. But is this in fact true?
My experience says it is not, but my amount of time being conscious of such things only goes back a couple decades at most.
MDMA aka ecstasy was around in the 70s. In Nicholas Saunders’ 1975 “Alternative England and Wales”, a sort of Baedeker Guide to the then-hippy scene, it’s described IIRC like LSD that doesn’t last as long.
Nephew, yes, the 70s, but not 1975. Saunders himself, writing in 1993, attributes the drug to Shulgin, who started promoting it in 1977.
On the other hand, erowid says that some MDMA was seized in 1970 in Chicago.
I am quite disappointed by the crackdown on oxycodone. It seemed like the perfect way to legalize opiate like drugs — without legalizing them, which would be impossible. Sure, people could kill themselves. But almost anything bought from a pharmacy is safer than anything bought on the street.
I think in the next five years, ADD or ADHD will be found to be rare — like 1% or less of school age children. Anyone that has seen a seriously hyperactive child knows the difference — it is both rare and unmistakable. And there will be a huge backlash when the press finally figures out that we are giving our kids speed. School is boring as hell, and nothing makes boring stuff seem interesting like speed. Perhaps I am too jaded, but since education has resisted reform for 100 years, and it is almost certain that school will remain boring — so maybe a little speed isn’t a bad idea.
The anti ADHD movement is slowly getting traction. I suppose it is fighting the new notion that adult ADHD is just as common as juvenal ADHD. Virtually anyone can pass the 20 question test diagnostic test.
I find it hard to believe that stimulants constantly reemerge in different forms without the general public figuring out that it is all basically the same stuff.
I would like to see both an opioid of some form and a stimulant like substance become easily available prescription drugs.
Vast, vast quantities of new drugs. Preposterous numbers of new drugs -most of them legal and orderable on the internets. There have probably been a half dozen new varieties each of amphetamines and hallucinogenic amphetamines released in the last year. Dissociants, hallucinogens, sedatives, stimulants, opiates, cannabiloids, cocaine mimetics: the list is practically endless, and as soon as they’re scheduled, the underground chemists come up with a half dozen more. Same thing happened with anabolic steroids for a while. I look at the whole thing as China’s revenge for the opium wars, though some of them are from Israel.
If you want to know about such things, spend a few hours on bluelight.org and erowid.org
Lots more drugs, but less cultural effect. When John Campbell believed in psionic powers, and John d Macdonald thought LSD was a big deal, taking drugs to alter your mind made you an astral astronaut. Catholics were drinking the Blood of God. Still are, but so many amateurs finger painting with the blood of gods they don’t believe in has watered cultural effects down.