So this rockstar is gonna lead the world now?

This is the best shit I have ever smoked.

Report from a bad shroom trip

Before you read on, it’s imperative that you know a few important facts about drugs.

So yesterday, I had my second-ever “bad” mushroom trip. I use the word bad with hesitation, because it was definitely very healthy for me, and if anything it convinced me of its therapeutic potential. By bad, I mean it wasn’t the most enjoyable thing while it lasted, and it certainly wasn’t what I had expected.

Dose: 4.5-5 grams of dried Cubensis mushrooms, in tea
Setting: Alone, on empty stomach

This was my second time trying to take it in the form of tea. I broke all the mushrooms into little pieces into a mug, put a teabag in and poured water over it. After I was done drinking, I used a spoon to fish out all the now-soft mushroom pieces.

It took me about 25 minutes to eat the whole dose, I am starting to like the taste less and less. The come-on was quick for being mushrooms, it started about 30 minutes after my first sip and grew in strength rapidly. After going through the typical yawns and lower back muscle stretches, I felt it was time to lie down. As soon as I did, I got the impression of being in a rollercoaster. Whether my eyes were closed or open, it felt like I was in for a ride, and it was speeding up. Little did I know it was building up speed for a jump. The whole experience seemed to grow in intensity at an exponential rate, and then it was like the train left the rails at the highest point, and I was just floating in the air.

A moment later I had landed, and I had no idea what was going on. Not a clue. It was like my brain had been shot out of a cannon, and somehow landed back in my head, but all those comfortable and hopefully confirmable assumptions that I call reality had been lost in the blastoff.

What the fuck is going on? Apparently I’m lying in a bed, and I’ve got a drug in my system.
Whose bed is it? Mine.
What about all this other stuff? Also mine, I guess.
How did I get all this shit? I bought it with money.
Where’d I get money from? This company that I work for.
What’s a company? Uhmm.. it’s like this pretend person, that is also an enterprise.
Why did this pretend person give me money? Well, recently I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff on behalf of the government.
What’s the government? It’s the guys who run this tribe.
How come they get to run shit? Because if I try to run my life the way I’d like to, they send guys in blue suits to my home who force me to go to a really shitty place called jail.
And I’m okay with that? Uhh, no, but that’s just the way it is.
So what am I anyway? I’m a human.
What’s a human? A kind of advanced monkey that walks upright most of the time.
What’s a human made of? Uuhhm.. organs, which are made of cells.
How do cells work? No idea, all I know is they have a cell wall and a kernel, and a bunch of miniature organs. Oh, and I suppose they contain DNA, too.
If I’m made of these things, isn’t it pretty important to know what the hell they are? Yup, I guess so.

You get the point. It was like trying to explain to a caveman or an alien how my whole society functions, and how I fit into it. It was a lot of fucking work before I got my bearings back, and once I did, I was astonished at how much relevant shit there is that I have no real idea about. Because of the ego-displacement, I was seeing the depth of my ignorance from an outsider’s perspective, and that was a humbling experience. Kind of like the first time you hear a recording of your own voice.

So after clawing my way back to something that resembled reality, I just sat on my chair for at least half an hour, feeling like I had just washed ashore from a wreckage. It felt like my life was in danger, it was cold and it was moving way too fast.. but damn, it was exciting. And damn if I’m not gonna do it again.

So to sum up, here’s what I learned from it:
1. There’s a LOT of shit I need to find out more about before I can claim to know what the fuck is going on.
2. People, including me, do a lot of their daily activities simply for the reason that they think they have to.
3. I’m not practising what I preach on the topic of work – I’ve been campaigning a bit to get my girlfriend to focus more on the area that she enjoys over the one that she considers most likely to give her financial stability. Meanwhile, I’m working a job that I don’t really like for the simple reason that I’m scared I wouldn’t be able to make any money doing what I love (fighting and writing). I hate feeling like a hypocrite.
4. My political stance needed a lot of clarification. I think I’ve got the right perspective now, but that’s a subject for another post.
5. There is no moral obligation to be lawful, if the law is absurd.
6. I am more gullible than I thought I was, so I need to do a lot more questioning.
7. I need to worry less about how much money the Gubmint is stealing from me in taxes, and start worrying more about how much I am making. The first amount is really hard to change, the second one is easily doable.

Trip report

I just came home from an astounding trip. The following trip report is composed at home from my memory and the notes that I wrote while high. Again, remember these important rules if you’re thinking about trying out psychedelic drugs.

Substances:
Fresh Cambodian Psilocybe Cubensis (55-60 grams)
Cannabis sativa (Approx 3 good hits, no tobacco mixed in)

Setting:
Outdoors, social.

Me and three friends started out after lunch yesterday. The plan was to go camping by a remote lake, sleep in a tent and enjoy the forest while high. By the time we got to the designated camping spot, it was 1630. We decided how much we wanted to take after we stopped the car. I ate 45 grams then and 15 grams half an hour later.

The onset was quick, almost like mushroom tea. One friend reported some nausea, but I felt almost none. I also didn’t experience the familiar muscle tension I usually get in my lower back and face during the onset. The same friend who felt a bit nauseous also had the strongest effects, it hit him hard long before it hit me, even though we weigh the same, ate the same amount of mushrooms, and we had eaten lunch together so his stomach was not emptier than mine.

1730: As the effects began to make themselves known for real, we decided to go explore our surroundings before sunset. Our base camp was high on a forested cliff above the lake, and we climbed down the side of the mountain. After climbing down the cliff side, I discovered two of my friends excitedly staring down a tree. They had found a lump on the tree trunk that looked like it was alive. I tried it, and sure enough, after putting my face close enough to the tree I could see all kinds of shapes where the eyes would normally have been struggling to keep focus. My visual acuity was unusually strong, but everything seemed to be moving or crawling in an exciting way in the periphery. As we made our way to the waterfront, I interpreted falling leaves as giant butterflies. I found the environment strikingly beautiful. Colours started to shift and swirl when I relaxed, and I had to stop to take it in fully. One friend accurately described the effect of floating colours in the reflection on the water as similar to a Monet painting. Our moods were good, and we sat down on a log under a large oak to admire the sunset.

After a bit of relaxation, the conversation turned to jokes, and I think we all felt very confident and relaxed, because we all laughed more than ever before. It might have been the mushrooms, but I was impressed by the cleverness and delivery from two of my friends. The visual effects became less intense, and we decided to make our way back to camp for some cannabis. We found a way up the other side of the mountain, and prepared the stuff. It was getting dark now, and the wind was getting stronger. It was difficult to get a good hit because the wind kept killing the lighter, so we made a fire and started to cook. After eating (delicious soup filled with meat from lunch), me and one friend took another trip into the forest. It was very dark now, and all we brought for a light source was a camera. This was on purpose. The idea was to use the camera flash to get an image of the surroundings, and then try to navigate by that memory for the next ten seconds or so. It was pretty fun, but we soon realized the visual experience of the camera flash was way more exciting than the navigation part, so we stopped and just flashed the camera while we chatted for a bit.

By now, optical effects were beginning to become strongly distorted by the mushroom. The light from the camera flash seemed to stay on my retina for at least 30 seconds after each shot. I closed my eyes, and found that my visual imagination had grown far more potent than while sober. On our way back to camp, we stopped on a rock and looked up at the stars. We were both seeing little momentary sparks of light around each one, and I began to see a shimmer of rainbow colours across the whole sky. The moon was up now, and shining very brightly. Several times, the moonlight was so strong in my periphery that I thought someone was pointing a silver flashlight at my head.
As I focused on the shimmer, it started to take shape. Rather than a general fog of colours across the clear sky, it ordered itself into an ornamental tunnel of rainbow light, which seemed to flow from whatever light source I was focusing on directly down to me. It was very beautiful.

Back at base camp, the rest of the guys started talking about more exploration, while I laid down a bit away to enjoy the visual effects. The physical effect was also very comfortable at this time, even though I was lying on a fairly cold rock without any moss on it.

Looking up at the stars, they seemed to shift and move about a little bit, or perhaps I could see the movement in the air between me and the stars. Either way, they appeared very much like three-dimensional objects, hovering at different distances away from me. I normally think of them simply as two-dimensional dots in a flat sky. It was an exciting sensation.

I closed my eyes, and the inside of my eyelids looked just as bright as the moonlit sky. Immediately, the closed-eye visuals began. At first they were just dancing lights, but I willed them into becoming fantastic temples and beautiful vistas with trees and lakes. Details like fog, reflections or billowing air appeared seemingly on their own, without me trying to create them. I called my friends over, and two of them laid down beside me to see if they could get the same effect.
This time when I closed my eyes, I let the experience decide what to show. All I focused on was demanding that it looked real. Whenever a vision looked too pastel or too flat, I willed it into becoming three-dimensional, shaded and textured. I was nearing the peak of the trip, and it could feel it was going to be something spectacular. To my great surprise, I was visited by the little green men.

I had never seen them before, but I recognized them the moment I saw them, from Terence McKenna’s descriptions. At first there was only one, but they rapidly multiplied as if by mitosis until I was looking out across a sea of them. They appeared similar to a drawing of a funky alien I made long before I tried drugs.

They seemed entirely three-dimensional and real to me. The colour of their skin was difficult to determine, as they seemed to be emitting their own light, which shifted and shimmered. They transmitted a feeling of excitement and welcoming, and I got the impression that they were entirely benevolent. They struck me as having a child-like curiosity, but also great wisdom and patience. All of their eyes were looking at me with a sort of expectant expression, and I saw something like a small wall in front of them all. I got the feeling they didn’t want to impose unless I asked them to. Remembering something Terence once said, I mentally repeated the phrase “Come in, little green men”.

Given the green light, they merrily started jumping over the fence and began communicating with me by doing tricks. They transformed themselves into obvious mirages that faded on my retina, they danced about and changed the landscape around them. I can’t remember everything they did, because I was trying hard not to become too excited or impressed. I had the feeling that if I were to gave in to my astonishment, I would miss the point of what they were trying to tell me. I had the feeling that I was very close to a major insight, and my mind was straining to understand the message. My powers of imagination felt so strong that I could change perspectives as easy as reaching into my pocket. I could imagine being a cow, or living on an alien planet with vivid a sensation of realism. I almost became convinced that I could leave this world if I wanted, and live the rest of my life as any kind of creature I felt like being.

At this point one of my friends started laughing at his CEVs, and a discussion started. This broke my ability to focus. The green men disappeared, and we lay there describing our visions to each other for a while. My friends described jumping up and down on a giant broccoli, and similar things. Still reeling from my experience, I attempted to describe the feeling of being able to change into any being in any place I wanted, and at least one of them became convinced it was possible.

The other one, who had been running along the stem of an enormous broccoli a second ago, felt convinced that the world in his head was so real it must be the same as the real world – ergo, he would be able to navigate his way to the tent with his eyes closed. This proved untrue, but he said it was an extremely amusing sensation to be looking at something so realistic and convincing while receiving reports of a very different world from his feet.

My friends started to feel a bit cold laying there on the bare rock, so they got up and started to put fuel on the fire. Their conversation made it impossible for me to relax completely and let the visions come back, so I eventually got up as well.

The open-eye hallucinations continued for most of the night, but after what I had seen with my eyes closed, they didn’t seem very exciting anymore. The excitement had faded a bit, and I became somewhat reserved because I was annoyed with my friends for bickering over how to handle the fire. After some more soup, three of us started to feel tired and decided to retire to the tent. It was only 22, but it was dark and it had been a day of feverish mental activity.

Slight optical effects like flashes of light in different colours went on for most of the night, making it difficult to sleep. This was the first time I experienced something I would characterize as negative while coming down from mushrooms. There was a slight headache, but I attribute that to the fact that I have a cold, because I’ve never felt it before on either of these compounds. The comedown was longer than I expected, probably because of the large dose.

I won’t discuss what I learned from my trip in this post, because I feel like I have a lot of thinking to do. It will probably be a while before I digest this experience entirely. I’m looking forward to the challenge, but even if not much useful comes out of it, at least we all had a fantastic weekend. Hope yours was as good as mine.

What’s so great about drugs?

So I guess I lied about that hiatus. Read this warning before you go on reading this post.

Now I’ll tell you what’s got me so passionate about psychedelic drugs. It’s not the physical experience. It’s not even the short-term mental experience, although that is pretty damn attractive. It is the long-term mental benefit.

I have only taken two drugs that are illegal for adults(unless you count the time I used my mother’s prescription pain killers without a prescription), so I won’t speak for any drugs besides cannabis sativa and psilocybin mushrooms.

There is zero doubt in my mind that taking these drugs has helped push up my intellectual development along at a pace that would have been all but impossible without them. The last year has been the happiest in my life, not counting those years between birth and leaving Kindergarten. How did drugs help with this? By teaching me a hundred little things about myself and the world, and by sparking the interest to learn more about bigger things.

Here are some examples of things I learned as a direct result of taking psychedelics:
*Why I was afraid to grow up when I was a kid
*To balance instant gratification fun with long-term preparation to have more fun
*How to activate my imagination in a new way
*How positivity breeds positivity
*How fascinating science is when approached the right way
*Just how much control I have over my enjoyment of life
*The negative effects alcohol had on my life
*The nature of immortality
*The importance of changing perspective.

And I’m just scratching the surface. There is so much more to say, and so much left to learn, and not just about the self. There seems to be an infinite amount of knowledge to be gained from these altered states of mind, because they displace the consciousness to different frequencies of thought than those normally inhabitable. They are agents for examining mental habits, among other things.

How? I don’t know. It is a massive mystery how these natural compounds can create such  reality-altering and intense experiences. Saying “they alter brain chemistry” is no kind of explanation. Of course they do. But that is only the surface of it. Our scientific understanding of the brain is quite rudimentary compared to most of our anatomical research. Even if we can see which receptors are affected by which chemical compounds, and which nerve endings start firing, we cannot explain how eating a little bit of something that grows in the dirt can lead to the experience of communicating with an entirely otherworldly and incredibly wise intelligence. There are still so many questions to answer.

Are the “entities” one can contact while tripping on various drugs real, or simply reflections of the self? If they are reflections, how can they seem to teach so many foreign things?
Is the human consciousness infinitely variable? If not – what are its limits?
How many altered states are beneficial, and in what situations?
How deep into the unconscious is it possible to probe?
Why do the teachings of the plant and the mushroom seem so much more relevant to me than any other inquiry?
What could I achieve if I was able to always operate in the highest state of consciousness?
What could we achieve, as a race, if we were all operating on the highest level of consciousness possible?
How much of reality comes down to interpretation, and how much is universally true data?

The problem is that research on these plants, which by all credible accounts seem to have been used by humans for as long as art and religion have existed, is now restricted or taboo in most of the western world. So where can you get answers? The only ones with real knowledge are the few surviving shamans, the masters of religious ceremonies among certain indigenous peoples from Latin America and Africa. But the shamans speak in riddles. They have many things to teach, but their perspective of the plants is coloured by their culture. The shamans can teach you how to use the plants safely and productively, and how to return with your sanity. But if you ask about the nature of the experience, they start to tell stories about spirits, ancestors and gods. I have no patience for magic. I love to explore magic, however.

So where can I turn for some verifiable knowledge? The intellectual hippie scholars who grew out of the 60’s – notably Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary – have a lot to offer, but even their understanding is limited, and they all seem to have had a propensity for going too far out on an intellectual limb in many cases. Additionally, their language is often geared towards an audience which has shared their experiences.

So where can you go for simple, verifiable facts and explanations? The only remaining authority is the experience itself. To me, it seems like whatever it is that I have the impression of communicating with while in the altered state, it is certainly a being of immense wisdom. Its body of knowledge appears deep and wide beyond my ability to grasp, but its language is that of an adult talking to a child. It is bringing me along at a pace that I can handle. When I ask it to be frank, it begins to explain something so incomprehensible, so large and all-encompassing that my mind strains to take it in, and I say “stop, I’m not ready for this”. Every day, I try to understand more, to widen my consciousness and connect the dots so that one day, I may understand all of what the mushroom has to tell me. I make missteps and incorrect assumptions from time to time, and it requires a lot of heavy mental lifting, but I am making progress.

That is the essence of my exploratory journey. I have become addicted to learning more about my human condition and my mind, and the psychedelic trip happens to be the teacher with the best curriculum and the most credentials.

Now, I turn the mic over to Graham Hancock:

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Written partially while sober and partially while slightly high on cannabis.

Marijuana: Gateway drug

The more I research and try drugs, the more I find out that I’ve been lied to. The only accusation that’s true is the above. It was a gateway drug for me. If I had hated cannabis when I first tried it, my interest in altered mindstates would probably have died. Intead, as a consequence of trying cannabis, I have ended up doing mushrooms and will be trying DMT and probably mescaline.

But people misunderstand the idea of gateway drugs. It’s not as if I didn’t do my research before trying the psilocybe cubensis. I’m not gonna put anything inside my brain unless I have a pretty good idea of what’s likely to happen.

The real reason cannabis is a gateway drug is that the first time you get high off some good stuff, you go “Hey, wtf? This isn’t anything like what they told me in school!”. It makes you wonder what else they lied to you about.

Comic shamelessly stolen from the brilliant SMBC.

Nick Herbert on Psychedelics

“I got my degree in nuclear physics, and if they trusted me with plutonium; why not LSD?”

The best parts are at the end.

Rules of engagement

To the part of the populace that abstains from psychedelic drugs, users of psychedelics often appear to be confused and gullible. It is common for users of psychedelics to say things like “we are all one”, or “everything is connected” without being able to explain what they mean by that. That is because a large amount of the population consists of gullible dullards who rely too much on their feelings, and that goes for drug users as well.

Gullible drug users often reach some insight and then lose grip of it, failing to trace their way back to logical reality. The way to avoid this is to be intellectually deliberate. If you intend to take strong doses of psychedelic drugs, follow these rules of engagement:

Do not give in to astonishment. When the trip takes you to an exciting insight, stop, relax and trace your way back before continuing onward.

When you are uncertain of whether you know your way back, try to put your thoughts into words. If necessary, write them down to see if they make any sense. When choosing your words, be as honest as possible, even about the sensations and insights that you are unable to explain or trace back logically. For example, instead of saying “we are all one”, say “I have a very convincing sensation of being one with everything”.

Whenever you feel like you are losing control, ask why.

The real reason many intelligent people are scared of getting high is that they think they are going to lose control. That isn’t what happens, unless it you want it to happen. What does happen, in my experience, is that whether you want to or not, you are going to realize exactly how much control you actually have. This will reveal to you a lot of dumb assumptions you’ve been making, and you’re going to stop assuming those things.

I mean assumptions like thinking the government knows better than you do what’s best for you. Only you know that, because only you know who you are. If there is a warning bell going off in your head right now going “Uh oh, revolutionary thoughts!”, that means you’ve been tricked and you’ve bought into the big illusion that other people are constantly trying to push on you: the idea that other people can decide what is true, what is beautiful, what is best for you, what is acceptable to say and what is acceptable to feel.

If you are buying into ideas like these, getting high will awaken you to the reality that you’ve been conned. Psychedelic drugs are like an intelligence test with a list of recommended reading on the back of the paper. If you can take them and come out on the other side without babbling incoherently, that means you’ve grasped a couple of basic concepts about reality, and you are able to distinguish what’s true from what is false. If you lack this ability, then taking psychedelic drugs in strong doses and sticking to these intellectual rules of engagement will expand your mind and let you take more control of your life, in addition to being a hell of a good time.

The mushroom is often referred to as “the great teacher”, and what it teaches is how to take control of what are experiencing, and make it more like what you really want to experience.

Drugs!

As promised, though a bit delayed.

Drugs are an interesting topic, because where I come from most people use two harmful drugs as unquestioningly as if it were breathing, but will gasp in shock when you tell them that you take harmless ones.

They use caffeine to get through their workday, because they spent the previous evening trying to get away from their workday. Then they use alcohol at regular intervals in order to forget about their workweek so they can start afresh on a new one. These drugs have serious side effects, and doses must be kept very low in order to not be harmful. They both create a physical dependancy, and they both have very serious side effects when overused.

Personally, I stopped doing alcohol a while ago, and I use caffeine carefully. I limit myself to one or two cups of green tea every day, except in rare situations of great sleepiness combined with important and imminent  deadlines.

I plan to keep both of those habits at this level for as long as I’m serious about being an athlete. I’ll probably take alcohol in small doses once I am done with getting punched and kicked in the head, but for now, I don’t need another way to lose brain cells.

That’s why I stick to THC and psilocybin, more commonly known as cannabis and magic mushrooms. I do also plan to try mescaline, which comes from a cactus, and DMT which can be found in all kinds of grasses and roots. These are natural things that grow in the earth, and they have been around for longer than humans have been writing.

It was a real eye opener for me when I heard psychedelic drugs are generally not physically addictive. I was always scared of addictive drugs, because I have exhibited addictive behavior in the past. That was the moment I began seriously considering trying cannabis. In my research about the drug, I came upon a number of interesting, funny and sometimes enlightening videos and soundbytes from a comedian named Joe Rogan. He led in turn led me on to a now dead man named Terence McKenna, who seemed to have gone somewhat crazy by the end of his years, but who had a ton of interesting information to share.

Mostly, it was the novelty of it that enticed me. Just the fact that I had been lied to so much fascinated me, and I started to really open up my eyes to how big drug culture really is. It is all around in our music, art and stories, but you don’t see the references unless you are “in on it”.

In my research, I became convinced that it was possible to use drugs in a productive way, and I have since proven it to be true. There are situations and tasks for which it is more productive to be high than to be sober, and I use it for those situations exclusively.

The main one is introspective thinking; taking stock of my situation and setting new goals. It is amazing what you can find out about yourself while high, there are so many things that come to light when the ego is not there to block your vision. Drugs are also useful for creative endeavours and for recharging when you are feeling spent.

Taking drugs has helped me along in many ways, and made me see things from the right perspective. It has advanced my knowledge of everything from jiu-jitsu to money to social relationships.

However, taking drugs productively requires mental discipline. It requires the ability to not give in to astonishment when the experience presents you with something beautiful, and it requires you to take control when the experience presents you with something scary or uncomfortable. The psychedelic drugs are not feelgood drugs unless you are feeling good, they are agents of truth. If you are trying to hide things from yourself, that stuff will be pushed to the front, forcing you to deal with it or suffer a bad trip. It is only when your conscience is clean that you can have the full experience.

I typically take drugs the way Terence McKenna recommended: In a solitary setting, without lights, entertainment or music, and in heavy doses. In order to really let the mind go, you must decrease sensory input. You must forget about the stuff you have to do tomorrow, and you must focus on letting the experience take you where it will.

Making a ritual out of the drug taking is an important part of keeping it productive. Personally, I have a fairly simple ritual. I put on music that sets me in the right mood, I clear my schedule and I turn off my cell phone and chat programs. I make sure I have achieved everything I needed to get done that day, and I take a moment to think through all the tiny things on my conscience, to make sure nothing is gonna jump out at me during the trip. Then I write down my plans for the trip: what I intend to take and what I intend to think about.

After that, I light up.

I am still a novice in the world of psychedelics, and I have much to learn. But what I have learned, I have learned through experience. The exciting thing about what I have learned on psychedelics is that each lesson seems to reinforce and confirm the previous ones, as if I am exploring a coherent structure of knowledge. I am excited to see where it leads.

Drugs preface

Before you read any of my writing on drugs, read this.

Drugs are serious things. They must be respected. If you disrespect them, they can bury you. Anytime you put anything in your body, it is a good idea to know what it is. This is especially the case with drugs, because you are putting something in your brain that doesn’t normally belong there. Better be sure it is the kind of thing that won’t harm you more than you’re willing to take, or your quality of life can be dramatically reduced.

Drugs are not for everyone. Many people are not equipped to take them in a productive way, and that is not a matter of mental weakness, it is a matter of personality type. Drugs are never necessary to meet all of your goals, but they may be necessary to enjoy the road there.

If you intend to take drugs, always do the following things:

1) Know your drug.

Several drugs have very serious and very dangerous side effects that must be avoided. Read up before you try anything. Check out wikipedia, offline sources, and look at the medical aspect. Do not take a drug because your friend just happened to have it in his pocket , take it because you want to experience it and see if it can be used for something useful. Make that decision while sober and alone, never under the influence of peer pressure.

2) Know your source.

Ask questions. What is the stuff? Where did it come from, geographically? How many times has your supplier tried the product from this particular source? If the answer you get to any of these questions is a shrug or contains the words “pussy”, “paranoid”, or “just trust me”, do not use drugs from that supplier.

3) Know your mind.

Ensure that you are not depressed, angry or frustrated. Drugs must be approached with a calm mind. If you have a history of mental illness or addictive behavior, or if anyone in your family does, be extremely careful.  Even if you do not, you must be very particular about not testing the boundaries of madness more than you are able to withstand. Always be in control of the drug. Use it as a tool, not as a goal in itself.

Additionally, always observe the NORML Principles for Responsible Cannabis use, which are:

1. Cannabis consumption is for adults only. Many things and activities are suitable for young people, but others absolutely are not. Children do not drive cars, enter into contracts or marry, and they must not use drugs.
2. The responsible cannabis user does not operate a motor vehicle or other dangerous machinery impaired by cannabis. Although cannabis is said by most experts to be safer than alcohol and many prescription drugs with motorists, public safety demands that impaired drivers be taken off the road and that objective measures of impairment be developed and used, rather than chemical testing.
3. The responsible cannabis user will carefully consider his/her setting and regulate use accordingly. The responsible cannabis consumer will be vigilant as to conditions — time, place, mood, etc. — and does not hesitate to say “no” when those conditions are not conducive to a safe, pleasant and/or productive experience.
4. Use of cannabis, to the extent that it impairs health, personal development or achievement, is abuse and should be resisted by responsible cannabis users. Abuse means harm. Some cannabis use is harmful; most is not. That which is harmful should be discouraged; that which is not need not be.
5. The responsible cannabis user does not violate the rights of others, observes accepted standards of courtesy and public propriety, and respects the preferences of those who wish to avoid cannabis entirely. Regardless of the legal status of cannabis, responsible users will adhere to emerging tobacco smoking protocols in public and private places.

Oh, and one more thing. For the sake of honesty, I must admit to you that this post was written while high on some fine Blueberry weed.