Furthermore, if crossing the BBB was a prerequisite for psychoactivity, a whole shitload of of things we find to alter our state would not exist. Don't forget that steroids are psychoactive to some degree. And at least resist the urge to *classify* something you don't know anything about. All I'm saying is,'look, there are these plants with novel, interesting effects to be explored." It'd be great to not have that met with such swift pigeonholing and invalidation.
Yeah, I gotta pop in here and take issue with this. If something doesn't cross the BBB then it can't have any effects on the CNS, only the sympathomimetic systems. If you're not stimulating receptors in the brain in some way, regardless of what those receptors may be, you're not going to get any effect on consciousness, let alone psychedelia. I will thus insist you post some sort of evidence to back up your extraordinary claim that effects on consciousness can be realized without having activity occurring within the brain. Otherwise I will throw your own needlessly antagonistic and hostile words back in your face: "Stop trying to talk about something you have no idea about and do some research..."
Again, we're not being sticklers here about the definition of "psychedelic."
No, you're wrong. YOU may 'not be being a stickler about the definition' of psychedelics, but contrary to what I suspect you may believe, you are not everybody, and everybody else here is accepting the traditional definition of what psychedelia is and how it happens. If we're just going to throw random shit into a pile under the heading of 'psychedelic' then the term loses any objective meaning.
We have words to describe things specifically for a reason. If I tried to tell you that something like amphetamine was psychedelic you would likely tell me I'm talking bullshit, yet it's well established than hallucinations can be a major component of stimulant psychosis. We use specific terms to clarify what is an inherently fuzzy thing: language and how it encodes meaning. How is it useful to destroy the boundaries of what is and isn't X or Y so as to satisfy your need for somebody to be wrong so you can then be correct?
I'm not being a dick to be a dick, and this isn't just an academic distinction, a splitting of hairs. This web forum is predicated upon the concept of accurate information, and exists to try and spread that accurate information as far and wide as possible, to try and hold back the tide of nonsense and mythology, to say nothing of outright lies spread by advocates of prohibition. Classifying things sloppily is a great way to misinform, and thus goes against everything that Bluelight stands for.
So let's use our nearly infinite variety of words and their permutations in a conventional way when dealing with other people. Conversation has to take place within a sort of philological middle ground, where the participants ackgnowledge that there may be variation based on geographical or cultural separation in the connotations and denotations of various terms, and meet eachother halfway. This sort of compromise is necessary for any sort of meaningful dialogue, and while it may seem to you that it looks cool to be a maverick and go against the grain by using terms in unconventional or sloppy ways, I see that as taking a stand against something useful – the objective meaning encoded in our words – for no other reason than to be provocative or to wriggle out of a compromising statement that somebody took issue with
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Back to the issue of changes of consciousness without a compound passing through the BBB, I would be interested to hear more about these steroids that you mention. I am not aware of a single steroid that possesses some form of psychoactivity. It is true that these compounds can definitely alter
behavior, but they do so by altering the levels of certain regulatory hormones and signaling factors. This leads to a chain of alterations in the concentrations and locations of chemical signals in the body that eventually does reach into the brain, through the blood-brain barrier.
And then within the brain these abnormal quantities of whatever signaling compounds are in question creates changes in neurotransmitter levels and in the expression and pattern of electrical signals. This, ultimately, is what then drives the behavioral changes, such as unexpected, improper levels of aggression. But the steroid is not actually going into the brain and working upon the receptors there in some fashion that creates alterations in consciousness that are commonly referred to under the heading of 'psychoactive effects' as we know them. Rather, the steroids are at one end of a long, complicated chain of hormones, regulatory and signaling factors, and so forth, that ultimately leads into regions of the brain responsible for regulating our emotions and levels of aggression, such as the amygdala, via alterations in the complicated, not fully understood feedback and feedforward loops that govern many aspects of our physiology.
