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NEWS: AdelaideNow - 25/10/07 'New drug scourge to hit'

lil angel15

lil angel15

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New drug scourge to hit
TORY SHEPHERD, HEALTH REPORTER
October 25, 2007 02:15am

DRUG users will move from ecstasy towards psychedelic drugs in search of "spiritual enlightenment", Adelaide drug researcher David Caldicott says.

Dr Caldicott said people use drugs for specific "self-medicating" reasons and those reasons are changing.

He said while more research into shifting drug trends needed to be done, Australian users tended to follow European trends.

In Europe, they are turning off "pills" and tuning into more "mystical" highs, he said.

People use such "hug drugs" as ecstasy – known as entactogenic drugs – to get a feeling of love and intimacy with others, he said.

Now, more people are looking for a spiritual or religious experience and are turning to such hallucinogenic drugs as LSD or others derived from plants –cacti and mushrooms – which are known as entheogenic drugs.

Many are legal and available in the wild, in gardens and online.

"Young people are looking for reason, for insight," Dr Caldicott said. "One of the things that defines generations X and Y is a lack of belief in organised or formal religion and there is a large section of the drug community looking for spiritual enlightenment.

"Entheogenic drugs are compounds, frequently biological, that create or mimic the spiritual experience."

He said many of these drugs are plants, which will create an "interesting problem" for law enforcement. Entactogenic drugs include ecstasy MDA, MDE and 2CB.

Entheogenic drugs include datura, "magic" mushrooms (psilocybin), salvia divinorum, some cacti and many other plants that various cultures have put to religious or shamanic uses.

While seizures of LSD have been up slightly, Detective Inspector Craig Patterson said police had not noticed a trend towards entheogenic drugs in SA.

"Not that we've picked up," he said. "It may be more on a national scale but we have actually noticed ecstasy seizures are up slightly".

He said it could be that current investigations focused more on ecstasy and amphetamines than on psychedelic drugs.
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Adelaide Now
 
^And on e more then psychs :)
 
on one hand you have the good Dr talking about "searching for spiritual experiences" on the other the writer is trying to imply that that searching is evil and should be stopped.


its both sad and funny that we have freedom of religion, only if that religion does not use a drug in its rituals. Who has the right to deny the relevance of an experience simply because it comes from eating a mushroom, and furthermore, can anyone say, with 100% certainty, that the religions of today were not made as a way to deal with ethnogenic experiences?

There's plenty of possible ethnogenic connections in most religions.
 
^^ What he said... It makes my brain hurt trying to reconcile the headline with the actual comments from the dr 8o 8(
 
Completely agree, Chronik Fatigue.
Tori Shepherd is not a bad reporter, but the people who write the headlines are the sub-editors, faceless entities pushing the political message of the paper. I'm torn when they ring and ask me for opinions on this and that. If I don't express myself, we get the unopposed views of the Jesus-freaks. If I do, it gets blown out of context. In the past I've put embargo's on The Advertiser (like after they monstered Sandra Kanck for her comments on medical MDMA, refusing to publish my comments in support of them). I did an interview with Carole Whitelock on the ABC this afternoon, and that was much more productive... If anyone has any suggestions about how to treat the Advertiser, let me know. I'll let you know what the reporter has to say for herself.
 
Living in Adelaide, I was surprised to get offered 2cb the other day. Had no idea such obscure substances would be so readily available in this little corner of the world.
 
the psychedelic search can be evil and fuck your life though .., speaking from experience.
 
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I must say, apart from the headline that was one of the most neutral drug articles I've read.
 
It's obscure in the sense that, if you go up and ask anyone who isn't either a drug user themselves, or somehow involved with drugs, they'll have no idea what it is. Whereas most people have a vague idea of, or have at least heard of, pot/acid/shrooms/speed/meth/e/etc.
 
Spoke to reporter today. Mortified by headline. Wrote piece and doesn't even know who wrote headline. Has passed on my concerns to editors- fully expect editorial staff to reverse policy and report evidence based stories 8)
 
good to see Caldicott back in the press tho ;)

in Canberra the drug market shifted towards " research chemicals" for about a year and a half back to acid or LSD like hallucinogenics.

now with xtc almost normalised like alcohol and people wanting more from their experience (rather than a sutble change of consciousness) older or more experienced users, especially long term or dealers are making the switch and the follow on effect of making it popular again within social circles.

we are already seeing this occur at the detox i work in here in canberra with more and more people having Halucinogenics on their "recently have done" list.
 
HAH the last drug counsiler I spoke to didnt even know what LSD was

I suggest that she wasnt very well trained to deal with people like me (court enforced trip to discuss drugs with some sort of rehab counseler)
She agreed
She said normally she dealt with teens smoking pot or slightly older folk on meth (more a result of where I live than anything else)

And that she wasnt at all trained to deal with someone interested in discssing the finer points of psychedelic use and the effects on my mind

Was quite funny actually she was quite keen on hearing what I had to tell her about it because they where never taught anything about psychedelics (like i said her experience was mostly dealing with young (19-21ish) people abusing meth.

In the end she told aside from smoking more pot than was healthy she saw no major flaws with my reasoning to use the drugs I do.
 
Nwalmaer said:
HAH the last drug counsiler I spoke to didnt even know what LSD was.
In the end she told aside from smoking more pot than was healthy she saw no major flaws with my reasoning to use the drugs I do.
Click to expand...


well the standardisation of training in the field is pretty poor and is slowly being addressed, and most counselors are not necessarily up to date on drugs in a harm reduction point of view, usually from a moralistic way that they have been taught to see substances- not all counselors tho.

mind you i had a quiet chuckle as i have seen alot of mandated people justify the reason to continue a problematic relationship with a substance to themselves.
 
Crankinit said:
Living in Adelaide, I was surprised to get offered 2cb the other day. Had no idea such obscure substances would be so readily available in this little corner of the world.
Click to expand...
Are you serious? That's odd... I'm in Adelaide too and I've tried all the 2c's, then again I know where to find them so I guess that's the difference.
 
I've come across 2C-I once or twice, but it's pretty rare (I'm in Adelaide too)... it's a shame, cause I loved it!!

I don't know if it's just my friendship group, but I'd say use of LSD has increased a lot here over the past year or so... although it's still a lot harder to find than ecstasy and meth for me anyway
 
Weird local news story: 'mystical drug' scourge!

Weird local news story: 'mystical drug' scourge!​

According to a very weird local news article published in News.com.au, the fine people of Adelaide need to be on the lookout for a new "drug scourge," as kids turn their attention away from "hug drugs" and toward - brace yourselves - entheogenic drugs.

There are actually so many weird things about this article, it's hard to know where to start. Let's just go from the beginning, shall we?

DRUG users will move from ecstasy towards hallucinogenic drugs in search of "spiritual enlightenment", Adelaide drug researcher David Caldicott says.
Click to expand...

I wasn't sure what qualifies David Caldicott as an expert on this topic, and this article doesn't bother to clarify. Fortunately, Wikipedia seems to have an answer:
Dr. David Caldicott is a research fellow of the Emergency & Trauma Department of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Adelaide, South Australia. He is the convenor of the OzTox Collaboration, an independent multidisciplinary, hospital-based research group committed to a harm minimisation approach to illicit drug use. He has been an outspoken critic of politicians supporting 'zero-tolerance' and prohibitionist drugs policy, questioning the evidence of their efficacy in preventing morbidity and mortality from illicit substances. He believes that drugs policy should not be guided by moral values, but by interventions known to have an effect on users behaviour. He has advocated a pill testing program in South Australia, as recommended by the 2002 Drugs Summit, but has yet to be granted a license by State Government.
Click to expand...

Whew! Okay, sounds reasonable. But let's start digging into the rest of the article:


Dr Caldicott said people use drugs for specific "self-medicating" reasons and those reasons are changing.

He said while more research into shifting drug trends needed to be done, Australian users tended to follow European trends.

In Europe, they are turning off "pills" and tuning in to more "mystical" highs, he said.

People use such "hug drugs" as ecstasy – known as entactogenic drugs – to get a feeling of love and intimacy with others, he said.

Now, more people are looking for a spiritual or religious experience and are turning to such hallucinogenic drugs as LSD or others derived from plants – cacti and mushrooms – which are known as entheogenic drugs.
Click to expand...

I would love to believe this is true, but the article doesn't bother to quote a single piece of actual research that backs this up. I certainly haven't come across any clear research that suggests the entirety of Europe is getting tired of Ecstasy; indeed, judging by the sheer volume of Ecstasy busts worldwide on a regular basis, I would say demand is as high as ever. Of course, it's always nice to see a local news article going to the trouble of educating the populace about the terms "entactogenic" and "entheogenic," but this seems like wishful thinking, especially in light of a different local news story I also just ran across which indicates, uh, Australians still like Ecstasy:

A Queensland researcher says ecstasy has become the second most popular illicit drug after cannabis over the past decade.
Greg Fowler from the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre has outlined new research at a national conference on the Gold Coast in south-east Queensland.

Mr Fowler says more than 500,000 Australians use ecstasy each year.
Click to expand...

However, let's not let facts get in the way of David Caldicott's treatise, which continues:

"Young people are looking for reason, for insight," Dr Caldicott said. "One of the things that defines generations X and Y is a lack of belief in organised or formal religion and there is a large section of the drug community looking for spiritual enlightenment.
"Entheogenic drugs are compounds, frequently biological, that create or mimic the spiritual experience."

He said many of these drugs are plants, which will create an "interesting problem" for law enforcement. Entactogenic drugs include ecstasy MDA, MDE and 2CB.

Entheogenic drugs include datura, "magic" mushrooms (psilocybin), salvia divinorum, some cacti and many other plants that various cultures have put to religious or shamanic uses.
Click to expand...

So what "interesting problem" for law enforcement do plants actually pose? Or is David Caldicott, drugs researcher, forgetting how law enforcement deals with the "interesting problem" of marijuana (hint: by locking people up)? Secondly, what does "frequently biological" mean in reference to entheogenic compounds? Thirdly, entheogenic drugs "include datura" since fucking when? Fourthly, if people in Australia can still reliably get MDE, can someone buy me a plane ticket there?

Leave it to local law enforcement to be the voice of reason in this article:


While seizures of LSD have been up slightly, Detective Inspector Craig Patterson said police had not noticed a trend towards entheogenic drugs in SA.
"Not that we've picked up," he said. "It may be more on a national scale but we have actually noticed ecstasy seizures are up slightly".
Click to expand...

One last weird thing about this article: it was originally published with the headline "New drug scourge to hit," and the opening line referred to "psychedelic drugs." However, several hours later the headline was amended to read "Mystical drugs to hit Adelaide" and then the opening line was amended to refer to "hallucinogenic drugs." I'm so confused! Doesn't the term "psychedelic" more closely correlate to "mystical"? Who edits this stuff? Who thought this was a reasonable story anyway without a single shred of actual data to back up David Caldicott's benign musings about drug trends? And most importantly, is it really true that they've got MDE down under? (I'm sorry, do I seem fixated?)
Click to expand...

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?id=3516
 
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