Altered States
From time immemorial man has assumed intoxication with various substances primarily as a form of recreation. These substances which provide escape have been many and varied ranging from various liquors and other alcoholic concoctions to cannabis and even the exotics like datura, salvia divornum, peyote, psilocybin, and a host of other means toward what is claimed to be elevated consciousness and/or the simple copping of a buzz.Of late there has evolved industrialized intoxication utilizing substances like drain cleaners and solvents to produce high powered drugs of dubious quality made by amateur 'chemists' with many disastrous results from their use. These include freebase cocaine, the dreaded 'crack', and methamphetemine, ecstasy, the so-called "bath salts" and other chemical means to escape the surly bonds of reality.
The issue with all of these drugs, designer and engineered alike are those consequences such as the recent 'bath salts' epidemic with persons ingesting things not meant to travel metabolic pathways much less enter into synapse formation and activities of daily living ...
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Now we have two newer modalities for altered consciousness in the form of 'alcohol smoking' with people breathing in fumes of concentrated ethyl alcohol via mechanical means for a mainline approach to pulmonary intoxication and 'vaping' whereby individuals intake a concentrated cigarette chemical laced vapor of nicotine, flavors, and other chemicals instead of lighting up and puffing on cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and so forth.
The issue, as with all the others remain those consequences which go unrealized, unrecognized, unsubstantiated and unintended. The means and the ends are progressively incongruent ...
Expand your consciousness only to have less of it over time. These dangerous approaches to ingesting alcohol and nicotine are fraught with very real morbidity for those who partake — yet proponents continue to do so at alarming rates.
The sad part about it all is the fact that these mechanisms of "getting off" receive participation with a consent which is sometimes totally uninformed. "Thinking something is safe" does not "make it so".
Investigate before ingesting. The hazards are a real and present danger to life as you know it. It's a tough thing to realize too late the folly of those popular notions which are borne of faulty logic and sold at a convenience store or elsewhere regardless of the sophistication of the purchaser. Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware!