"...and if anyone else is going to use it, do so wisely."

Is this anything like "drinking responsibly"?

I don't know if Neal Pollack is a good father or not - but my definition of a good father doesn't include using your son as fodder for 99% of your (boring, repetitive) writing and doing drugs while the kid's home. Honestly, he sounds like kind of a douchebag.

And to whoever said that people who disagreed must be jealous - I have to laugh. I'm a thirty-year-old professional living in a major metropolitan area, married, no kids, and I'm not remotely jealous of Pollack's life (it sounds utterly miserable to me.)

I have a feeling that the poor kid is going to have a lot of issues when he fully realizes that his dad has turned his life into The Truman Show.

I am really enjoying people's accounts with salvia and other psychedelics.

I stopped tripping at 21-- which seems so young in retrospect-- but I had been a regular day-tripper since I was 17.

many vivid memories ("those bubbles have jazz in them")

and learning about myself and the world we inhabit (the web of stars, understanding gravity and the wonders of size/focus/consciousness)

I could no longer commit to 8 to 10 hours of hallucinations, paranoia or dis-empersoned self. But salvia seems like a dream of the goddess and gentleness.

These 17 years later-- maybe...

you said:

"There you have it, the original concept behind the PC thought police. If one person is offended by something, it is officially offensive and must be stopped."

You make a giant leap of logic...incorrectly, I might add.

Where did I say that it must be stopped????

I think the term was inappropriate for the article. That's all I ever said.

The article sucked anyway, and it seemed like he threw the term in there for shock value.

I don't appreciate it. I didn't like it. I'm not trying to censor Salon.

If I can't speak out against it, then somebody is trying to censor ME.

Wow. It's amazing to me that seemingly intelligent human beings keep making the same mistakes over and over. I should not wonder when people lose their lives or livelihoods because of drugs when this culture of permissiveness exists. Is the passing thrill worth the risk, what do you gain from it?

I am thankful I've never had the desire to try drugs, I think my imagination is wild enough on its own!

Vaya con dios indeed!

Some dealers of live plants include detailed instructions on how to grow them.

http://www.entheology.org/links/Default.asp?CategoryID=29

If there were people fucking around with their minds who also happened to be making enormous contributions to society, would you be inclined to condemn those people's drug use?

In other words--what are your thoughts on the notion of the "long shot"?

If 1 out of 5 people who do X get hurt, and 1 out of those same 5 go and accomplish something no else ever did, is that a loss for us as a species? Could it ever possibly be a gain?

Stop hating. How would you know how good a father Neal Pollack is? I've never observed him as a father, but after hanging out with him, I gotta say he is a pretty good human being.

How enlightening. You must all be such winners for only engaging in clean, upstanding, G-rated activities.

Once you "break open your head" you may find, one day, that you can't put it back together again.

I can't tell you how many victims of this sort of experimentation I have known. Not with salvia, but other junk.

It's not cool, it's not smart, it's not trippin', and you shouldn't do it, because it is the rare person that walks away from it intact.

If only a user lost his marbles the first time he used his LSD, or shrooms, or whatever - then maybe more of us would see the cause and effect more dramatically and wise up. But because it often takes a few experiences, or a few years, or the one straw that unhinges you completely, we can more easily shrug it off. Ten years later your former classmate is sleeping in doorways or can't string together a coherent sentence - but during college, he was bright and happy and loved his drugs! So most of us seem to think it's no harm.

You only get one mind.

Several people have made very critcal judgemental posts. They would like very much for you to believe that their motivation is offense at the irresponsibility and immaturity of a grown man compromising the safety and security of his family.

Hmmmm..... Do we really believe this?

When pro-life activists condemn abortion and claim that it is on behalf of unborn children do we believe them?

When anti-gay marriage activists condemn gay-marriage and claim that it is on behalf of the children that they may adopt do we believe them?

Lets think a little bit more about this. I would be indignant if I saw a parent getting drunk at a bar with child in tow. This is the sort of sentiment that the 'scolds' claim they are having.

Is Neal Pollack, in his basement having a 10 minute trip on Salvia Divinorum, analogous to this? No, of course not. His wife and child are safe and sound in their beds. He is not actively supervising his child. The trip lasts 10 minutes, the after-effects maybe another half hour. He's not really needed by his family for this time. It seems concern for the well-being of his family can't really be the motive for this condemnation.

Well then what is it? Could it be, oh I don't know,.... Jealousy? Could it be that these folks have not only become responsible and grown up but also have stopped having fun? Could they envy Pollack because he hasn't let family and fatherhood condemn him to a boring life of work, home, tv, work, home tv?

I think yes.

Sorry if this sounds like a nyah-nyah-nyah, but I feel sorry for anyone who has to spend money to get this effect. I have incredibly vivid dreams --I fly, I swim through the streets, I have deep orgasms, I was chased by a plunger, my elevators go side to side and diagonally. I've spirited a newborn in a plastic shopping bag through the flames of the Holocaust and on multiple occasions have saved my sister from the mile-high approaching wave of a tsunami... The list goes on and on. I've never been tempted to take hallucinogens. I think I'm just naturally trippy.

I do take anti-depressants and they've had the effect of making me feel less refreshed upon waking, but the dreams haven't changed. And I also had a wild Ambien trip recently when I didn't go to bed immediately upon taking the pill (I go through periods of insomnia that can last a couple weeks; a day or two of Ambien breaks the cycle). I had continued writing on my computer when the Ambien hit and suddenly the keys grew and split and basically became a mountainscape. I kept writing.

What was interesting to me was to see how I reacted to such weirdness when, nominally at least, I was still awake. I have always imagined I wouldn't be a good recreational drug taker-- that my cautious mind would protest too loudly and make me panic. But there I was, just accepting the morphing keyboard the way I had in a dream accepted that Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas were holding me hostage.