Quote:

---

Comradez said:
First off, I want to make clear that I don't entirely, or even in large part, blame dealers for being paranoid and disrespectful to strangers.  I blame, almost entirely, this nightmarish drug war for creating entirely understandable reasons for distributors of these particular entheogens to be particularly paranoid.  This, in my mind, is the true evil of the drug war--not that it suppresses a small sliver of potential supply, because it really doesn't do a very good job of that (except, perhaps, in the case of LSD when they make a huge bust like with Pickard).  Far more important is the drug war's role in perverting the psychedelic community with paranoia and fear.  That's what generates bad trips...

---

That's not the only thing that generates bad trips.

Quote:

---

Comradez said:
Anyways, with that out of the way, let me explain my experience this past week and the lessons I have drawn from it all.

I am visiting my sister this summer, so I don't have access to my usual routes of drug acquisition (and my sister is completely ignorant about drugs, although she is curious about psychedelics, which is the main reason why I really wanted to procure some psychedelics here). 

So I decided to visit a location that I will leave unnamed, except to note that it is well known as a hippy hotspot, so at least I would have reason to hope, I felt. 

Now, this was going to be the first time that I had ever tried to obtain any illegal drug from strangers, so I was quite daunted by the prospect of it, but I really wanted to introduce my sister to psychedelics, so I persevered.  Nevertheless, I tried to not get my hopes up too high.  I was prepared to be patient, to allow people in the local scene to get to know me for at least a week.  And, mind you, that it was an hour and a half bike ride each way from my sister's house to this location every time I wanted to go there, so it was a real effort that I put into this. 

So, the first day I find some hippies and chit chat with them a bit.  One girl was working on a painting that was really cool.  After a few moments, I half-jokingly, half-seriously asked if any of them had seen a girl named Lucy around.  They laughed and said they had not, and I laughed and said, "OK, thank you."  I came back a little bit later and saw that one of the guys had "Sacred Mirrors" sticking out of his backpack, where all you could see was the title, and I was like, "Oh, Sacred Mirrors!  Alex Grey!"  I saw that he also had this other Alex Grey book, "Transfigurations," I think, that I hadn't seen before, so I looked at that for a while as everyone else chatted about random shit.  Finally, before I left, I got these HBWR seeds out of my bag that I had been meaning to give away to someone (because I had had such a terrible experience with them the night before and my stomach had basically told me, "Never again for a long time, OK?" so I gave those seeds away to this group and left.  I felt very upbeat about this day, both in terms of meeting cool people, and in terms of potentially getting closer to scoring some acid or shrooms.

The second day also went well.  I smoked a little weed with them (which I don't usually do around people I don't know really well because I tend to get paranoid, but I quite enjoyed this time because there was a very pleasant vibe going on).  I also confessed to one person that I was looking for psychedelics, and he gave some very encouraging words and quasi-concrete indications that they would be coming my way soon.  That day I left feeling even more elated and especially impressed at my ability to make new acquaintances (because I tend to be very shy with low self-confidence around new people), and delighted at my ability to have a good weed experience around strangers (because over the past year I had gotten worried from several bad experiences with it that it was turning on me), and of course delighted that I would probably be getting hooked up with some psychedelics. 

Looking back, it seems like things started to go wrong on maybe the third day.  One of the guys jokingly asked if I was stalking them.  I also received no further word about any hookup (like, a phone number, or when and on what day to be there, anything...which frustrated me and struck me as being really flaky of them, although now looking back maybe it was because they suddenly didn't trust me for some godforsaken reason that I can't imagine).  Maybe it was because I was introducing myself to too many people...being "too friendly"...but I just naturally try to be a nice guy.  I don't have enough confidence to approach random strangers very often, but if I meet someone new through a friend or through a "scene," as was the case here quite often, I'm almost dorkishly polite about shaking hands and telling them my name and whatnot.  Maybe that's not kosher.  I don't know, I must confess that I am very naive about these sorts of things. 

Another issue that I later found out was a problem was that I was "dressed too clean" for some people.  I'm sorry, but I must confess that clothing style strikes me as an absurdly stupid criterion for judging whether someone is trustworthy or not.  Clothing style would be one of the simplest things for a police informant to fake.  Far harder for a police informant to fake would be things like giving accounts of having used various psychedelics (which I discussed with some of them), knowledgeably discussing psychedelic music (which I did), and overall giving off a certain type of gentle, conscious vibe (which I feel like I naturally do, not to brag or anything). 

So, some things had been happening before today to make me feel a little off-put by "the scene" that I was dealing with, but stuff that happened today tipped the scales for me.  For example, I was walking along with two guys and talking with them about some girls we had met or something, and suddenly one of the guys stops the other and motions him over to like have a private chat about me to which I was obviously not invited.  So I'm standing off in the distance like a doofus while they quite obviously talk about me.  Then one of the guys leaves with the unstated but obvious intention for me to not follow him.  Then the other guy walks off and I go to walk with him, and he turns around to me and is like, "Why are you following us around all over the place?  What's wrong with you?"  I was dumbstruck.  I vainly tried to put together a coherent rebuttal that would address all of the assumptions and affronts to my dignity in that statement, but I failed and just walked off. 

I later found a guy that I trusted a little more, and who I thought trusted me a little more, and I told him that I felt that I was unwanted in this milieu and that I had become disillusioned with the prospect of hanging out in it, and especially with the prospect of trying to find drugs from it.  He apologized that some of the people were acting like that and said that "we're still cool" and whatnot, and I am inclined to believe that he was being sincere, since he is one of the guys who I feel has really "got" me and detected my fellow entheogenic vibes while I've been there.  And so I explained that I didn't necessarily blame the guys for acting like that, as I would probably be just as paranoid in their shoes.  The problem is really the whole situation with the drug war's draconian penalties looming over it all. 

In any case, I was still quite unsettled by the whole affair, and I doubt that I will be going back to that scene (nor do I think that I would be accepted if I tried to). 

The problem is that there's nothing I can do to prove to them that I'm not a cop.  Trying to prove to a drug dealer that you're not an informant is like trying to prove to a psychiatrist that you're not a psychopath.  Everything you do can be interpreted, if the other side is pre-disposed in such a way, so as to reinforce their convictions.  "Perhaps you are just a former psychedelic enthusiast who got busted and who is now a police informant."  And what can I do to prove otherwise? 

In fact, I expected the people in the scene to ask me more about myself.  But I think they knew that none of that would have mattered anyways.  There's no question that they could ask about me that would inform their decision as to whether to trust me or not because I could simply lie to any question that they posed.  Thus, I understand why they really weren't curious to know anything about me at all. 

What this makes one confront is the brutal realization that there are no objective criteria by which one can judge whether someone else is trustworthy or not.  All you have is an intuition:  trust them or not.  And based on my experience, people make up their minds about this by about the 3rd or 4th day with you.  After that, if they've concluded against your trustworthiness, anything you do just gets filed under the schema of "Something really clever that informant is doing to try to get us to trust him." 

The practical lesson of this for drug buying is, if you don't get a solid hookup by the 3rd day of hanging out with a scene, don't even try any longer.  You're not going to get the hookup, and the longer you hang around, the MORE suspicious you'll seem, not less.  So just stop wasting the time of both parties and call it quits if it doesn't happen by then. 

The more unsettling lesson of all of this is that there are really no objective reasons to PROVE that there is anyone whom you can trust, and there's no way to PROVE that anyone really trusts you.  For all you know, everyone could be an extremely clever manipulative psychopath, extremely good at imitating emotions.  Everyone could be a police informant.  Everyone could be a very cleverly disguised alien, or whatever. 

Thus, what we are left with is intuition.  We have to trust our ability to know whom to trust.  Schizophrenia is, I think, partly the breakdown of one's trust in one's ability to know whom to trust, and what to trust as being real (because we cannot really verify anything being real...we could be in a video game...so we just have to trust to our common sense that says that we are not in a video game, and that all of the reasons scientists could come up with for why we are not in a video game are legitimate reasons, and not just mechanisms designed to disguise the truth that we are in a video game, etc.) 

You could say, "Just trust your instincts," but if you are paranoid schizophrenic, your instincts are telling you that everyone is out to get you.  So just blindly trusting in your ability to trust cannot be the way.  One must have evidence that one's ability to trust is accurate.  One must trust someone, and then obtain various intuitive proof, such as having intimate sex with that person, that one's instincts were correct in trusting that person.  One must have a history of trusting trustworthy people.  Whereas, in contrast, to have one's trust betrayed is a recipe for doubting one's ability to know whom to trust--a recipe for paranoid schizophrenia. 

This is why, I think, good family life during early childhood is essential.  Because a child is going to trust his/her parents out of instinct no matter what, and if that trust is abused, then the child will not have any confidence in its ability to know whom to trust in the future.

Also, to take this one step further, there is the question of, "How can I trust my ability to trust that others trust me?"  For example, I think that that one dude in the scene trusts me, but how do I really know?  I think that my sister trusts me, but can I trust my ability to know that?  You can go many layers deep into "theory of mind" with this sort of question.   

Fortunately, this whole experienced reaffirmed my trust in my ability to detect who does and doesn't trust me, because I started to suspect that some of the hippies didn't trust me, and then I got verification with the "Why are you following us everywhere?  What is wrong with you?" that my suspicions were correct, so my accurate trust module appears to be working correctly, hahaha. 

But still, it can be unsettling to be in a situation where there is nothing you can do to prove that you are the person you are (in my case, an honest psychedelic enthusiast).  Today I felt a bit like a patient in a psych ward trying to prove that he wasn't crazy.  But at least my ability to prove who I was only affected my ability to maintain that group of friendly acquaintances and acquire drugs, rather than my ability to be released from some imprisoning institution.

---

Quote:

---

Comradez said:
It was disturbing and made me reflect on the question of how anyone can ever trust anyone.

---

Yeah, trust is a hard thing to come by, especially with strangers..when you find someone you can trust, though, it's great.

Quote:

---

Poid said:

Quote:

---

Comradez said:
It was disturbing and made me reflect on the question of how anyone can ever trust anyone.

---

Yeah, trust is a hard thing to come by, especially with strangers..when you find someone you can trust, though, it's great.

---

Quote:

---

Rewindicus said:
honestly man the whole scenario sounded sketchy but more so on your part....i mean you talk about police being able to blend in with clothing style, well guess what they also know who alex grey is they will know about the drugs they are trying to buy they will know somewhat about the scene and they will try to be friendly because thats their job.

You laid out a pretty detailed account of everything that happened and i can honestly say i would be paranoid if some out of towner jsut showed up and tried to get buddy buddy with everyone. THEY KNEW YOU WERE LOOKING FOR DRUGS. and that incites paranoia blame it on the drug war but guess what i would NEVER give psychadelics to a stranger you never know what their reaction is going to be and thats something I dont want to deal with. That on top of that fact of i dont want to go to jail if its a cop you get it?

I dont feel they were out of line and I would have done the same thing fact of the matter is you were there to get drugs they knew it and wouldnt give them to you it doesnt matter how nice and cool you seemed you are a stranger plain and simple. thats enough of a reason. you want to introduce your sister to psychadelics then have her visit you or bring some with next time but dont hunt people down every day riding an hour and a half each way and then be mad that they wont let you in the circle after 3 days.

silly goose! honk honk!

---

Quote:

---

teamkiller said:
wait so you hung around these people for 3 days to try and find acid, or because you felt like hanging out?

---

Quote:

---

last thing you need to be doing is hanging out alone with a bunch of strangers 1 1/2 hours away from your sisters who think you might be a cop. <---thats how people end up missing or worse.

---