Looking for little people

I'm sure there are people traveling to the Northern Cordillera of the Philippines right now (Yunnan would involve more surveillance and New Guinea more wicked insects) to find mushrooms, either to try them themselves or to sell to curious Americans. And quite a number who are finding similar-looking mushrooms and lacing them for sale to those curious Americans.

That particular hallucination is so specific... little humans running around, swimming in your drink, climbing the bookcase ...

We tend to see faces in things, so maybe there's something hardwired in the brain to reconstruct people-images, but these are supposed to be always small, and dynamic. If everyday experience weren't so devoid of traces left behind by little people, it would be fun to imagine these as invisible imps, but it's hard to write a story about characters that don't seem to do anything.

Synthetics

I remember reading about krokodil some years ago--the writers were very worried about this synthetic morphine. It was a problem in Russia, but krokodil abuse in the US: urban legend or not? California poison control seems to take it seriously but says reports tapered off a decade ago. The first link cites cheap heroin (and presumably fentanyl) and difficulty getting codeine (to synthesize it) in the US as militating against its adaption here.

I don't hear much about bath salts (synthetic cathinones=khat), but I gather they're still a problem.

And for those watching West Africa, there's kush--a combination of synthetic opioid and synthetic cannabinoid (a combination which, despite media hype last year, doesn't have to use human bones in its synthesis). It's claimed to be particularly addictive, but I haven't found anything remotely like solid numbers on how many guys use it or what the mean expected lifetime is.

Fentanyl's a problem here, and a friend of a friend lost a kid to heroin. I wonder how elastic the demand is for euphoria. If we successfully suppress the current opioids significantly, will some of these others fill in?

There's more than one kind of slavery.

UPDATE: Wrt kush in Liberia: this story claims 100,000 addicts, which sounds like a nice round number from the air, and a UNFPA 2023 report estimating 1 in 5 use narcotics. Careless reporting is common; that may mean narcotics specifically or all drugs generically. Someone counted 866 "drug dens" in Monrovia, which is by far the largest city. If each serviced 20-50 addicts, the 100,000 doesn't sound too far out of line. If 32% of the 5.7 million are youth, that's about 1.8 million, and if UNFPA is right that's about 350,000 drug users.

Modularity

Psilocybin treating depression? Apparently yes--at least short term. A little, although with only 16 patients it's not something I'd bank on. But it's the mechanism and their proposed further applications that I don't quite follow. They seem to imply that depression is locked in somehow by "modularity" in the brain. Some pathways can't change. The psilocybin reduces the "modularity" and allows more generic thinking--or something like that. I'd think "modularity" would help with concentration, but this is way out of my area of expertise.

One of the authors is quoted (here) as predicting that this therapy might also be useful for anorexia or addiction. That seems like a bit of a leap, though maybe addiction problems might benefit from learning to avoid "near occasions."

Is this legit, or a lot of wishful thinking around a chemical variety of percussive maintenance?

Opium wars

I don't sit still for podcasts, but I made an exception for the first part of Scott Adams announcing that his stepson had just died of a fentanyl overdose.

He describes the things that came together to cause this, starting with an accident his son sustained that caused brain damage, California rules that limit parental control of minor children, and the ready availability of powerful drugs and of fake Xanax (which can contain fentanyl too).

He suggests that the agents responsible for killing 30,000 Americans a year should be executed, and that if the Chinese don't do it, we should. He has a lot more faith in our ability to act inside China than I do. And faith that the society with more addicts will prevail--didn't happen last time.

This is a hard time for him. I wouldn't link to it at all, except that this is what he wanted to be public.

Fentanyl is nasty stuff. One policeman died after contact with it--apparently because he tried to wash it off with hand sanitizer, which made it much easier to absorb through skin. I gather that quite a bit of the drug is simply mailed from China, and delivered by the USPS.