drugs on the internet

Before the big breaktrough of the internet there wasn't many public information bout drugs,so how did the older Bluelighters get their information?

And how did they knew it was true what they heared?

alt.drugs.

And before that, there's some surprisingly good textfiles that went around BBSes, and some not so good ones where they told you how to get high by chugging too much Gatoraide.

www.textfiles.com - there's a big drug section in there... keep in mind most of the stuff in that site was written in the 80's, and I'm not going to vouch for it's accuracy.

Way back in the days before laptops and the internet there was something called literature, meaning printed things you could buy and read and get information from. There were little ads in the back pages of music magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone, for pamphlets with names like Herbal Highs, with tips on how to trip on legally obtained substances you could buy mail-order. Some of these things actually worked. Things like Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds, which I think actually worked in a mild mushroomy kind of way. And dried poppies you could make opium tea from. Lots of these ideas were ridiculous, like eating a teaspoon full of nutmeg was supposed to be how prisoners got high in jail, that one makes me want to puke just thinking about it. I ordered peyote by mail once when I was 16, from an address I found in one of those pamphlets. That couldn't possibly have been legal even in the 70's but there it was.

But you know the internet didn't invent the concept of dialogue and information-sharing, it just made it faster and bigger. When I was a little kid I heard someplace that you could get high drinking coca-cola and taking aspirin. I was to young to know what "high" was but I tried it anyway (didn't work). And older kids always had ideas and information and access. For instance hanging around the parking lot at any Dead concert since like 1969 practically, if you asked the right questions you would get answers, without feeling like a total dork for asking. You would get a lot of wrong answers for every right one but you ask and you listen and you learn, just like here on Bluelight. You figure out who do you trust and you believe what they tell you.

I grew up in a time when pot was getting stronger and stronger all the time, like dramatic changes in potency every year, and the explanation for this was it was being laced with heroin/acid/speed or whatever. Total bullshit but that's what everyone believed. Nowadays just about everybody believes their X has heroin in it, which I think has been diagnostically proven as completely ridiculous and not very fucking likely. Waste of good H.

You maybe had to look harder for information before the internet, but you could find it if you wanted it.

books?

yeah - books - I think they were kinda a collection of printed screenshots bound together. so I'm told. 8)

yeah theres also this little thing called experience. Maybe another called an education.

Jeez, he was just wandering guys, you don't have to be a smart @ss. My guess would just be word of mouth. I probably wasn't as efficent as the internet though.

I think about the all the time and to be honest I really don't know how we survived without the internet!

I used to read as many drug leaflets as I could and talk to people with experience but compared to the internet I really dont think that is much at all.

What would we do without it for information

THE WOOD said:

yeah theres also this little thing called experience. Maybe another called an education.

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sarcasm duly noted and frowned upon.

the internet is something most of us probably take for granted. i think it was a useful post - made me think about how life would be different without it...

alasdair

c'mon - chill. Sarcasm = form of humour. Yes, the original point was valid - what did we used to do? (myself, I remember about as far back as a 2600 baud modem and a local bbs).... but it prompted thoughts of humour in a few people for the same reason "what did we do?".

Jimmy
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www.Guitar-Warriors.com

Well, my primary sources were Dragnet (the tv show, not the movie some 20 years later) and Adam 12, where I learned about "hopheads" , "bindles" , "lids" , and "hipsters" who could have "good trips" , or, like Art Linkletter's daughter, have a fatal "bad trip", (also in her case called "defenestration" by Sgts. Friday and Gannon). Also movies, mostly about heroin: Frank Sinatra in Man With The Golden Arm , and somebody or other in A Hatful Of Rain , Al Pacino in Panic In Needle Park about 1969, and then about 1980 or so Nick Nolte in a movie version of Richard Stone's novel, Dog Soldiers called, I am so sorry to say, Who'll Stop The Rain" , but this was was more about Zen, death, Vietnam, CIA, #1 "Chinese White" heroin, cynicism, co-dependance, corruption and terminal commitment to prinicple than actual drug culture as such.

Yeah, so that's how the real cool dudes and dudettes learned way back when.

High Times magazine. 8)

Urbanhog %)

JimmyDeeTune said:

c'mon - chill. Sarcasm = form of humour.

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i really don't mean to sound like a killjoy but, well, for some people racism is a form of humour. that doesn't mean it should be tolerated because somebody's just trying to have a laugh, does it?

this can be a clinical medium and one person's sardonic comment aimed at raising a smile, is another's veteran poster self-aggrandizing at the expense of a newbie asking a prefectly understandable question.

two sides of the coin and all that. given the clinical nature of the medium and the fact that, generally speaking, we don' t know each other that well beyond our online personas, sarcasm is going to fall flat on its face more often than not. if in doubt, leave it out?

anyway, i don't want to drag this out but i did want you to understand the thinking behind my reasoning. if you have any other questions, you know the email address.

all the best and thanks for your post.

alasdair