About Addictions

Hallucinogens

Certain drugs can affect the subjective qualities of perception, thought or emotion, resulting in altered interpretations of sensory input, alternate states of consciousness, or hallucinations. This general group of pharmacological agents can be divided into three broad categories: psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants. All of these agents act as neurotransmitter mimics, often as agonists or antagonists at neurotransmitter receptors. Their primary effects are markedly different from those of other psychoactives such as cocaine, amphetamines, heroin or alcohol.

The term hallucinogen is often broadly applied, especially in current scientific literature, to some or all of these substances. The term, though, has long attracted criticism.
In all but a tiny minority of psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants, hallucinations of various kinds are only one of many effects produced. The nature of the hallucinations produced is dependent on the specific compound. Broadly speaking, psychedelics reduce the filters in the brain causing sensory overload which is often manifested in visual and audial distortion, dissociatives cause a separation between cognition and sensory awareness (possibly including hallucination or dreamlike experiences), and deliriants are a class of drug that produce a fragmented dissociated state of quasi-consciousness akin to sleepwalking where dreams and reality intertwine to produce potentially dangerous hallucinations indistinguishable from reality.

Forgotten?

After the fading from public sight as one of the many elements of the 1960s counterculture, hallucinogen use took a less visible but nevertheless persistent role in Western society in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s something of a revival of interest in the drugs has occurred. There are probably several important contributing factors to the resurgence. One is the rise of dance-based rave and trance culture, in which participants frequently employ drugs such as the entactogen MDMA, and to a lesser extent, other hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms and ketamine, as an aid to inducing ecstatic or trance states of consciousness.

A second major contributing factor to the revival of interest in hallucinogenic drugs has been the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web. This has made information pertaining to drugs much more accessible to the general public, provided a platform for advocacy that was not previously available, and has enabled otherwise isolated interested parties to communicate and exchange information and experiences. Some well-known contemporary authors of topics relating to hallucinogens include Terence McKenna, Stanislav Grof, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Alexander Shulgin, Jonathan Ott and Rick Strassman.