Do I detect a bit of hostility there in your response? Chill, man
Its not a big deal to me. I feet that I countered skepticism with an appropriate amount of rebuttal that I would use in any college style debate. Its certainly not a 'personal' issue. Your position on the herb board is not going to make or break my opinion you.
I tend to have a very direct way of speaking, so I may come off as being intense or worked up, but thats just how I type all the time regardless of my mood.
I know you have said psychedelic herbs could just stay here, but that raises even more problems.
Does it? I think it solves a problem. The problem is that there is a class of topics that do not really fit anywhere. They do not fit in PD because they are not psychedelic. They do not fit in in Healthy living because these are psychotropic rather than nutritional supplements for health. They *could* could in OD but its a poor place for them since it doesnt really fit the vibe of that board and the topics get buried and neglected under the sheer volume of opiate and amphetamine related posts.
Is it really that hard to separate psychedelic from non-psychedelic herbs? I think that as long as you group psychedelics and hallucinogens together without trying to split that hair the rest is pretty easy to separate...
I DID offer an alternate proposal....That we expand PD to ALSO talk about non-psychedelic ethnobotanicals like Khat and Kratom and Mulungu. That way everything would remain the same except the Kratom and Mulungu posts would go in PD instead of OD.
If we did create a new board, which the majority is in favor of, I think the difficulties are being blown way out of proportion and it would actually go a lot more smoothly than is being suggested.
The reasons for keeping psychedelic herbs here are clear in terms of PD being a vibrant discussion community that already services those topics well, but how does it make sense in the context of this new forum to exclude discussion of those herbs? A clearer way of stating this may be: what specific properties do all the various herbs you want discussed here share that we could use to define the purpose of this forum? Clearly it's not just any herb with psychoactive elements.
There have been 3 approaches suggested....And lets not pretend like its so complicated that we cant tackle it. All this requires is the initial vote to either make a change or not make a change and a second vote to hammer out the particulars. No big deal.
1. We add a non-psychedelic psychotropic herb board. The only disadvantage to that is that some people migh wonder why psychedelic herbs are excluded....This isnt a huge problem in my opinion. Other forums have both and the site didnt explode. If a moderator thought a plant belonged in PT it would get moved. It isnt THAT much of a problem. (It would cover pretty much every psychotropic herb that doesnt belong in PD, so no need to list every property or action we want to discuss).
2. Splitting up explicitly natural plant based psychedelics from non explicitly plant based psychedelics....This approach is more invasive because it splits up a forum that already exists. Its the most consistent by definition, and it really wouldnt be that confusing since even if a chemical is found in plants it wouldnt go in the botanical forum unless it was *explicitly* plant based. I am not going to push for this option though because I dont want to step on any toes or have to go through a tedious process of splitting up an existing and well functioning forum.
3. We simply expand PD to also allow discussion of botanical drugs like Kratom and Mulungu, since the psychedelic croud tends to be more into them than the opiate/meth crowd and the topics will get the respect and attention they deserve. I rather like this approach because its non-invasive, doesnt step on anyones toes, and is ideologically consistent if we label is as Psychedelics and Ethnobotanicals.
This isnt that confusing though. All we have to do is vote on whether we should add a spcae (doing that now and its looking like a pass) and then doing a second vote for the how.
Do I detect a bit of hostility there in your response? Chill, man
Its not a big deal to me. I feet that I countered skepticism with an appropriate amount of rebuttal that I would use in any college style debate. Its certainly not a 'personal' issue. Your position on the herb board is not going to make or break my opinion you.
I tend to have a very direct way of speaking, so I may come off as being intense or worked up, but thats just how I type all the time regardless of my mood.
I know you have said psychedelic herbs could just stay here, but that raises even more problems.
Does it? I think it solves a problem. The problem is that there is a class of topics that do not really fit anywhere. They do not fit in PD because they are not psychedelic. They do not fit in in Healthy living because these are psychotropic rather than nutritional supplements for health. They *could* could in OD but its a poor place for them since it doesnt really fit the vibe of that board and the topics get buried and neglected under the sheer volume of opiate and amphetamine related posts.
Is it really that hard to separate psychedelic from non-psychedelic herbs? I think that as long as you group psychedelics and hallucinogens together without trying to split that hair the rest is pretty easy to separate...
I DID offer an alternate proposal....That we expand PD to ALSO talk about non-psychedelic ethnobotanicals like Khat and Kratom and Mulungu. That way everything would remain the same except the Kratom and Mulungu posts would go in PD instead of OD.
If we did create a new board, which the majority is in favor of, I think the difficulties are being blown way out of proportion and it would actually go a lot more smoothly than is being suggested.
In addition to excluding psychedelics, I assume discussion of poppies and naturally derived opioids would stay in OD - it clearly makes more sense to keep those discussions in the same forum as the synthetic and semi-synthetic opioids, right? Cannabis is clearly right out, as it has its own dedicated forum and for good reason, but it's the single most popular psychoactive herb by far. It makes more sense to me conceptually to take the 'leftover' less popular psychoactive herbs and put them in the catch-all forum, other drugs.
Correct. Because those plants have specific forums already devoted to them.
As for OD being the wrong forum... Why? There's not a lot of discussion of these herbs there because not a lot of people on BL seem to want to post about kratom etc., not because people try all the time and those mean OD junkies chase 'em away. It's not like those topics are disallowed. If you want to spur discussion of these topics, why not create a new megathread for them there, perhaps with subthreads for the better known herbs like kratom, khat, etc.?
I disagree. I see a lot of posts where people ask questions about these plants and dont get suitable answers. I disagree with your explaination that the reason behind this is lack of interest by bluelighters in general. I think a more likely explanation is that the questions are being directed to the wrong crowd within BL. Its the marijuana and psychedelic enthusiasts who will take the plant drugs more seriously and show more interest.
That is the reason why OD is the wrong place. While it is in fact technically an "Other drug", OD is really focuses on narcotics and amphetamines and benzos and coke and really not too into the natural thing like the PD crowd is. Its not the wrong place for categorical reasons, its the wrong place for sociological reasons. The topics wont get the respect they deserve there and the people most likely to answer those questions wont be as likely to read them.
Maybe if you gave some examples of the types of discussions you see emerging due to having a dedicated forum for "non-psychedelic [non-opioid non-cannabis] plant drugs" and why they would be better facilitated by a new forum than a new thread in OD, it would help some of us skeptics out.
Several have already been proposed. Mulungu. Blue Lotus/Lilly. Ma Huang. There are tons. You might be surprised how many.