[crazychester]

Originally Posted by curiousuburb Some good things to always remember: 1) Cars can hurt you. 2) You cannot fly. 3) It's never a good time to die. 4) Taking your clothes off will draw attention. 5) Keep your mouth shut at all times while in public. 6) Although you may see things that are not there, you won't NOT see things that aren't there. 7) Don't forget how to burp. 8) Only carry: a house-key, some loose change, and your address in your shoe. 9) Nobody can tell that you are tripping till you tell them "I'm tripping". 10) No matter how fucked-up you think you are, you'll eventually come down. geniuses.

Actually, in my experience, this advice is pretty much spot on. I've done the car one ('shrooms, thought we were in an empty car park, the sudden appearance of cars hurtling past at 100 k's revealed we were, in fact, wandering up the middle of a major highway).

But The Mason has a doozey of a story dating back to the surfin' sixties that amply demnstrates 2 and 3. He and a friend had gone to the coast for a weekend's surfing. After setting up camp some distance inland, they dropped a couple of trips and went to check the surf, arriving at a suicidally high cliff edge.

So The Mason's mate says to him, "Can I jump off this cliff?"

Now what he really meant was "I'm convinced I can launch myself off this precipice and not die by defying gravity but I know I'm tripping and my judgement could be a bit screwy, so I just thougt I'd get a second opinion before trying it out."

The Mason interpreted it as a rhetorical question: "Can I, in theory, jump off this cliff?" So he says, "Sure." At which point the other guy hurls himself over the edge.

In a Looney Tunes™ meets Real Life™ moment, a piece of the dude's clothing gets snagged on a stunted tree growing out the side of the cliff, arresting his fall and leaving him dangling a few feet below the edge. After the obligatory Comedy Gold Trip Freak Out,
("You bastard! You said I could jump."
"I didn't mean it literally, you idiot. You're tripping. You should know to be suspicious of any bright ideas based on possession of super human powers."
"That's why I was checking with you!")
he was hauled to safety.

Proof of point 4. An old boyfriend of mine decided to give datura a try after reading Carlos Castenada (now widely recognized as not exactly the most factually authoritative work on the use of psychedelics and hallucinogens). He was down on the south coast of NSW when he put the plan into effect but, after ingesting various plant parts, remembers nothing until many hours later when he was picked up by a Good Samaritan (acting above and beyond the call of duty IMO) on the highway, half way back to Canberra, wearing nothing but his underpants.

When I was at uni in the early eighties, somebody broke into the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) and stole some vials of pharmaceutical grade LSD they had stashed away for "research purposes". I didn't get to have any although The Mason did. Suffice to say, the experiences of numerous individuals who looped out on that stuff while it was floating around, provide plenty of evidence as to the veracity of the remaining points.

Somebody stole a chimpanzee from the JCSMR once too. They thought the chimp would fetch a good price from the right buyer. Which may well have been true but the market for hot chimps is rather more specialized and considerably smaller than the market for, say, hot VCRs. Chimpy proved to be quite a handful. Oddly enough, this was done while the person concerned was not under the influence of pharmaceutical grade LSD.