Roar Mikalsen - HUMAN RISING - radiofri..

iding his bike and playing basketball with the kids. ‘You’d never *have known+ anything was
wrong with him,’ she said. ‘Emotionally, physically, he overcame it.’
Shane finally died three years later, in the fall of 1999. He and Sue used MDMA again
a month before his death. ‘We wanted one last night,’ she said. ‘We spent the next six hours
recapping our lives together. We talked about everything (…). We lived our entire life
together that night, plus we lived fifty more years. We kind of took back what the cancer had
robbed. We took time.’ At one point, she recalled, ‘he looked at me and said, ‘You know, it’s
really great not to have cancer tonight.’” (Jacob Sullum, Saying Yes; In Defence of Drug Use
(Tarcher/Penguin Books 2004) s 184-85.)
Som vi ser her, er det liten tvil om at MDMA hjalp Sue og Shane å hente frem det
beste i seg selv og hverandre den siste tiden Shane hadde igjen. Det er da også et fellestrekk
ved de psykoaktive stoffene at de har en evne til å gjøre livet bedre for folk, og spesielt
kronisk syke har hatt mye igjen for slik bruk på sitt siste.
32 De psykoaktive stoffene
”Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”
Timothy Leary.
De psykedeliske stoffene omfatter en rekke rusmidler. De mest kjente og vanlige er LSD,
forskjellige sopp som inneholder Psilocybin, peyotekaktus (inneholder mescalin), Ayahuasca
(inneholder DMT), ibogain, og ecstasy. Legen Andrew Weil sier dette om dem:
“The substances in this class probably have the lowest potential for abuse of
anypsychoactive drugs. In purely medical terms, they may be the safest of all known drugs.
Even in huge overdose, psychedelics do not kill, and some people take them frequently all
their lives without suffering physical damage or dependence. In the right hands, they can
bring about dramatic cures of both physical and mental illnesses. Yet these same drugs can
cause the most frightening experiences imaginable, leaving long lasting psychological scars.
(…) In fact, the mental effects of psychedelics are completely dependent on set and setting
— on who takes them and why, where, and how.” (Andrew Weil & Winifred Rosen, From
Chocolate to Morphine; Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Houghton
Mifflin 2004), s 112-13.)
Ibogain
Ibogain er et psykoaktivt alkaloid som finnes naturlig i rotbarken til en vestafrikansk busk.
Tradisjonelt har stoffet vært brukt i seremonier og helbredelse av stammer som tilhører
Bwiti-religionen i Vest Afrika. Denne planten hjelper i mange tilfeller opiatavhengige å
overvinne sin avhengighet. Det er et mer ustabilt rusmiddel enn for eksempel LSD og
Psilocybin. (Enkelte kilder vurderer stoffet til å ha en dødsrate på 1 av 300, pga 12 registerte
dødsfall av 3611 registrerte behandlingstilfeller utenfor Afrika per mars 2007. Se
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