also is that they all seem to involve purging. Just about everyone wants to vomit before the hallucinations begin. Afaik, that's not common for LSD.
Again, it's a western view, but some people think part of the value of the natural psychedelics is their ability to rid the body of parasites - that's one claim about ayahuasca.
Another Nat'l Geo show featured an American woman who went to the Amazon and she swears she puked out demons. Me, I don't generally believe in that sort of thing, but it had meaning for her and what she hoped to accomplish by the ceremony (for her, it was dealing with long-standing depression and other things.)
What's also interesting is the way the Nat'l Geo section about the guy who treats his cluster headaches with mushrooms is the way it's framed. The guy is so very concerned that he's not identified as part of the "counterculture" surrounding mushrooms and he doesn't enjoy the experience - but I wonder if he would have a different experience if he didn't think he was breaking the law just to keep his sanity, so to speak, by dealing with his headaches. Nat'l Geo even provides "ominous" music when he talks about his anxiety before taking them.
What all of these seem to do, neurologically, is something sort of like MDMA (something else made illegal b/c of its recreational uses) - and that's to flood the brain with seratonin - from at least one receptor, and likely many more.
That's what I think serves as a "detox" function or a "reset" function for people. Over time, that person's standard production of seratonin lead to a return to the previous state, unless the substance also helped to create new receptors so that someone's seratonin function was enhanced over a longer term.
Anyway, that's my guess as to what's going on after the fact.
When you think about it - Nixon was like the oozing boil on the ass of humanity in the U.S. He gave us Karl Rove and all the southern strategy politics and the use of war as a dirty trick to win presidential elections.
It's like the U.S. needs to purge those demons from its consciousness - and the voting booth is too compromised to accomplish this, so we remain in a cycle of negative political behaviors.
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