Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, Blind Materialism, and Delicious Cake

If you consider the ingredient aspect of making good food, as individual parts making up a whole, you can understand that adding too much or too little of one ingredient can completely mess up the food's taste and does nothing that benefits the food's purpose of being scrumptious and/or nutritious (Ideally "and", not "or"). You can overcook or undercook it and that messes up the cake, as well. Do you prefer crappy cake that tastes like angel's food butt or do you want a delicious cake? Do you want a tasty cake that makes you feel like you ate some poison because it's way too rich or do you want a tasty cake that's actually free of stuff that's bad for you? (Try making brownies with equivalent amounts of olive oil and honey instead of butter and sugar, it's way too good!)



If you consider humans as a certain balance of ingredients made from a recipe, then you can see the analogy here that I'm getting at. Too much refined sugar demanded by the recipe, for example, and the hapless, hungry human becomes lethargic and fat. If the human is underexercised or overstressed then it probably becomes a loser just like the badly cooked cake. An imbalance of ingredients and process of preparation will end up causing the human problems, and like the shitty cake nobody wants to eat, the fat lethargic human becomes rotten and forgotten. This, of course, does nothing that benefits the humans' purpose of living a happy life that lets all other life be happy too.



With cake, there's all sorts of great stuff you can put on it that don't really taste like anything yet improve its value in a way that they're catalysts to making things tastier as a sort of placebo effect, or perhaps they add to the structure which effects the overall taste of the product. Baking soda, vital to a nice cake, isn't very yummy at all but typical cake isn't that great with too much in it. Photo transfered images, that glazed icing you use to write "happy birthday", candles, sparklers, and all that stuff are all completely bland but definitely are an asset to making the cake more delicious. Of course, if the cake itself tastes like ass, then nobody really gives two shits about the food anymore. As an extreme example, there's Pièce montée, which may look pretty cool but ultimately is part of the kind of sketchy deal surrounding food in our world that I'm going to illustrate with these two contrasting images; one being a decorative, inedible cactus made of nougat and the other pretty much self-explanatory.



So, what the hell does this all have to do with pharma-whatever? Well, defining them very simply here by copying and pasting from wikipedia: pharmacodynamics is often summarized as the study of what a drug does to the body, whereas pharmacokinetics is the study of what the body does to a drug. Drugs are those catalytic ingredients in humans that when used properly can either benefit or when used improperly can detriment. Virtually everyone does drugs, but for the purposes of this article I'm going to focus on psychoactive ones. British people used to drink tea to a point where they decided that in order to get it cheaper they'd get everyone they could in china opium addictions. Binge drinking of alcohol is a cultural and regional problem that's existed in epidemic form for a substantial part of human history. People regularly smoke way too much of today's really quite strong weed and then become burnt-out, sleepy, and ineffective. People drink 4 coffees a day and wonder why they have sleep and anxiety problems. Pharmaceutical companies will pass drugs while trying to stifle their own internal memos indicating that the drug does more damage than healing. Last summer I saw too many kids smoking ecstasy tablets without realizing that they weren't smoking E in the caps but most likely methamphetamine - MDMA, MDA, and MDEA which constitute ecstasy in the purest sense of the drug aren't psychoactive after being combusted, and they were smoking specific caps that they knew would work without knowing why they did and what was in them, and of course some deny that they were smoking up jib because it came in a cute little pill, however most don't buy the truth and willingly believe that there's heroin and cocaine in them instead of what's really there; Adding adulterants like coke and dope is a complete economic fuckup that drug manufacturers are keen enough to not pull. As anyone with a clue would know, you would get zero if any profit doing that and therefore it's extremely rare to find caps with those expensive substances in them because someone thought they might get people addicted and therefore more profit out of it. In any case, every single one of these problems with drugs are not due to the drugs themselves but due to the manner in which the drugs are considered and treated. People in western culture apply their materialistic ideals to powerful psychotropics and treat them like a kid at their halloween candy - Large, thoughtlessly consumed volumes of these things is not the way to go, and if you want to prove this, go bake a cake with 4 times the amount of vanilla extract or something like that and see how good it is.

Just because there is so much crappy cake going around these days definitely is not a reason to stop dealing with cake altogether. It's all a matter of making sure the recipes are done right. When it comes to human beings, whom are vastly more valuable than cake yet essentially related, it's a pretty vital thing for us to get our recipes of self together. A happy life through a positive look on the world, a healthy diet, in addition to releasing your body's endegenous neurochemicals with regular exercise, can be improved (although not replaced) with alien chemical supplementation. There's plenty of examples of this happening that most people don't get to hear about. We would not be in the same place in terms of scientific knowledge if it wasn't for the existence of psychedelics. While a lot of people go a bit wayside on drugs and end up blowing a lot of mistruths out of their asses, it's not the drug's fault, and a lot of these falsifications are just the product of nothing good coming out of not thinking critically and taking drug-induced free-associated thought at face value. It's really a matter of uncommon sense, but this uncommon sense is something that should become common someday if we hope to survive as a species. As such, I don't currently advocate the outright legalization of all drugs because that will lead directly to the outright consumption of these drugs in today's broken consumption methods. Drug legalization would only work if the entire system was reworked to fix the problems of rampant destructive materialistic actions, however, this touches pretty heavily on a heavy idea: The majority of the human race has become an emergent system from life which is rampantly destroying everything including itself through its materialistically driven actions, yet scientific action and thought is another emergent system from life which is possibly the only hope to counteract this. To conclude this post, here's a somewhat incomplete list of links showing doctors, researchers, famous and well-regarded thinkers in favour of the usage of substances deemed by society and law as something explicitly wrong and punishable by either law or mental illness:

(painting by shardcore)


Co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick, who was a co-founder of the cannabis legalization group SOMA and credited LSD to catalyzing the thoughts leading to the discovery of DNA.

Dr.Kary Banks Mullis, who credits his use of LSD towards the discovery of polymerase chain reaction, the revolutionary nobel prize winning technique of analyzing DNA.

Carl Sagan, regular marijuana smoker, who advocated its use and legalization under an alias.

Paul Erdős, who helped develop many mathematical theories from combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory, credited caffeine, amphetamine, and methylphenidate to accelerating his discoveries.

Aldous Huxley, writer of the classic novel Brave New World, and also the writer of the must-read essay "The Doors of Perception". (Check out "Heaven and Hell" too if you can find it)

Robert Louis Stevenson, writer of The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, pumped that book out on a binge of Pope, Edison, and Queen Victoria-endorsed vin mariani cocaine wine (Not nasty nose candy or crack, Vin Mariani, there's a pretty hardcore difference, these drugs are examples of western materialistic dumbfuckery - Watch this documentary for more on this subject)

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is an organization dedicated to scientifically proving beneficial uses for demonized drugs.

Wed, Mar 19, 2008  Permanent link