The Kush

Hi! Welcome to the 24^th edition of The Kush. If you’re reading this for the first time, then welcome. Time and tide wait for none, in the sense because time and tide are independent of human interference. And interference and distractions are all the rage today. From time to time we’ve faced a massive problem of focusing on one single thing (like a book), so much so that we felt our lives being taken away as we sought to put away the smartphone for a couple of hours in another room to avoid its notification distraction. In the end, we ended up muting all notifications. Now the screen looks clean. 

Let’s start blazing. 

Harvesting Magic Mushrooms

We keep repeating this in almost every newsletter: psychedelic plants are going to disrupt the global pharmaceutical market within this decade. Science has been late in reaching medicinal plants in terms of studying them the same way that we do with other materials like silicon (which started the communications revolution), copper or refining crude oil. But scientists are finally up in arms with regards to studying medicinal plants, purely because of the potential they have for global healthcare.

Quoting from Newswire: 

“Numinus Wellness Inc. (“Numinus” or the “Company”) (TSXV: NUMI), a company creating an ecosystem of health solutions centred on developing and supporting the safe, evidence-based, accessible use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies, has harvested the first legal flush of Psilocybe mushrooms in Canada by a public company under its Health Canada-issued Controlled Drugs and Substances Dealer’s Licence. This news coincides with other recent developments by Numinus Bioscience, the Company’s 7,000 square foot analytics and research laboratory, which is focused on handling various psychedelic substances and developing analytical methods and formulations for the evolving psychedelics space.” 

The company intends to use the mushrooms’ active compound, Psilocybin with the help of clinical practitioners and doctors for patients’ mental health issues. Many companies tend to replicate the chemical structure of natural substances in a lab setting so that dependence on natural plants can be reduced, however we disagree with this approach. The pharma industry’s model of creating molecules in the labs may have worked for acute illnesses, however they have not shown the same impact on chronic issues and in many cases side-effects that are more worse than the original issue. 

Therefore, let us not be afraid of nature’s intellectual property and instead, embrace it rather than running away from it.  

Let’s keep blazing. 

The Blindness of Drug Regulators and Enforcers With Regards to Cannabis

The Drug Enforcement Agency in the United States of America, the equivalent of India’s Narcotics Control Bureau, is looking for a ‘contractor’ who will be responsible for getting rid of seized cannabis plants via burning. The Contractor has to burn ‘at least’ 1000 pounds of cannabis per hour for eight hours everyday. The agreement would obviously be confidential. 

The world’s drug enforcers are wasting their time and on top of it, wasting valuable natural resources. 

In a day and age when synthetic drugs are running rampant, do drug enforcers really think cannabis is the same? If we look at their actions, it indeed feels so. Not only are they completely out of touch with scientific reality, but they’re also out of touch with economic reality. But we refuse to believe that they actually don’t know. 

The powers that be, the interests that be, let’s let them be. 

For instance, just today the Narcotics Control Bureau raided the residence of Karisma Prakash, Indian actress Deepika Padukone’s manager, to find 1.7 grams of hash and 2 bottles of CBD oil. With the All India institute of Medical Sciences ruling out foul play in actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death, one can only wonder as to how NCB officials manage to do their duty with a straight face at least in this case.  

Let’s keep blazing.  

The Scene with ‘Mindfulness’

Emotions and feelings form the crux of how human beings understand and make sense of their worlds. What’re humans supposed to do now? Everyone knows and believes in some things, like their Gods, their heroes and heroines, their thoughts about the origin of life etc. A majority of the world though is simply struggling to live from day to day, from meal to meal, and from paycheck to paycheck, all in a bid to make something of their lives and improve the condition of their loved ones if not themselves. 

For individuals harbouring the middle classes, with the basics of survival – food, cloth and shelter taken care of, what’re they supposed to do with their surplus? It’s time to be more productive! And isn’t productivity the be all and end all of modern civilization? The good feelings, the pleasure chemicals coursing through our minds and what not. How do we chase these ‘good’ chemicals and experience a state of ‘flow’ during which we’re buzzing with ideas and thoughts? We read an article. 

“Endorphins should come first, Kotler emphasizes: Ideally, you should exercise for a good 20 minutes or more to trigger the flow state. We don’t enter flow until we’re doing something that taxes us, something that stretches the limits of our comfort zone. “Wait until it gets quiet upstairs,” he says, tapping his forehead. That’s a thing: It’s called exercised-induced transient hypofrontality, and scientists have proved that it literally alters your thought process. “Once you’re there, if you add in caffeine and then a sativa, you’re as close as we can get to a pharmacological version of flow.”

Exercise is a no brainer. The duration is the key. Everyone has their own. 

“We do have plenty of information on how these three elements work in isolation. Exercise is as close to a silver bullet against ailments as we have found; it’s even linked to lower cancer risk. If it came in pill form, every doctor in the world would prescribe it. The psychoactive chemical caffeine is so effective at sharpening the mind that a famous mathematician once uttered the immortal phrase “a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. Given that the 18th century’s great leap forward, The Enlightenment, occurred around the same time that coffee houses sprung up everywhere and we stopped drinking beer for breakfast, you could also say that humans are devices for turning coffee into modern civilization.”

So exercise, coffee and cannabis? 

The moot question on hand is this: is there a best way to live? What is the best way to live? 

Or are we just overcomplicating things because we’re blazed out of our minds? We’ll do something about it though. 

Have a great day 🙂