You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: The Economist 1988's Front Cover Foretelling a World Currency in 2018 - Is This True?

in #bitcoin7 years ago

I hadn't seen your three last paragraphs when I started answering you.

A predictable hyper-suggestibility outcome out of the use of a particular psychotomimetic substance supposedly does exist with the consumption of scopolamine:

The effects of scopolamine were studied for use as a truth serum in interrogations in the early 20th century, but because of the side effects, investigations were dropped. In 2009, it was proven that Czechoslovak communist state security secret police used scopolamine at least three times to obtain confessions from alleged antistate conspirators.

This is how I first heard about it:

World's Scariest Drug (Documentary Exclusive)

VICE's Ryan Duffy went to Colombia to check out a strange and powerful drug called Scopolamine, also known as "The Devil's Breath." It's a substance so intense that it renders a person incapable of exercising free will. The first few days in the country were a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine. After meeting only a few people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined.

I think psychedelics are like ''conspiracy theories'', you can't put them into a single block as all being the same without the risk of creating a straw man argument. So yes, I agree with some conspiracy theories probably being used as a disinformation tool to spread cognitive dissonance, and with some others fitting in the urban legend category, while the rest must be falling in line with the where there's smoke, there's fire idiom.

Sort:  

Scopolamine is not a psychedelic. It's a deliriant if used in high amount doses. Not the same thing.

Fair enough. According to Wikipedia:

Hyoscine is in the antimuscarinic family of medications...

Found on the CIA's website:

Because of a number of undesirable side effects, scopolamine was shortly disqualified as a "truth" drug. Among the most disabling of the side effects are hallucinations, disturbed perception, somnolence, and physiological phenomena such as headache, rapid heart, and blurred vision, which distract the subject from the central purpose of the interview. Furthermore, the physical action is long, far outlasting the psychological effects.

It can give hallucinations. As a psychoactive agent, it's in the same larger nomenclature of hallucinogen.

You're right, it is usually not classified as a psychedelic, nor as a dissociative, but rather as a deliriant:

Naturally occurring deliriants are found in plant species such as Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), various Brugmansia species (Angel's Trumpets), Datura stramonium (Jimson weed), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), and Mandragora officinarum (mandrake) in the form of tropane alkaloids (notably atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine).

Maybe I should have used the word drugs instead of psychedelics in my last paragraph.

Again on Wikipedia, the full scope of the drugs used in Project MKUltra seems rather vague:

MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis,[citation needed] sensory deprivation, isolation and verbal abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture.