Paul Phillips

Who needs drugs?

Edited at 2008-04-08 02:16 pm (UTC)

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I'm generally with you on drugs, but there are a couple of questions I have difficulty answering myself.

- Should all drugs be legal?
- When the use of drugs leads to non-victimless crimes (e.g. robbing people to support the habit), should the government offer subsidies to help offset the costs?
- Does the health of the collective ever require infringing on the rights of the individual?

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So I'm actually teaching The Scientific Psychology of Poker (really; PSY 400 at Syracuse University), and my students and I were just talking about your brain doping article of a few months ago. A few questions they've asked me to ask you:

* how prevalent is "poker PED" use on the tournament circuit (or, I suppose, in cash games) at the highest levels?

* what drugs are commonly used by poker players? (students are curious about both prescription drugs and recreational drugs)

* without naming any specific people, do you know anything about some of the side effects (e.g., sleep deprivation) players have experienced?

* could you elaborate on your subjective experience using Provigil? are there specific skills that Provigil and Adderall enhanced? to what extent are these the correction of ADHD symptoms vs. the enhancement of "normal" abilities?

* did the multitasking enhancement seem subjectively "unnatural" to you? (that is, did it feel like normal perception or did you feel like you were getting information without explicitly paying attention to all of the sources of information?)

* are there outward signs that would enable a player to recognize another player who is using pokerPEDs? (so that it could be exploited, not so we can narc on them)

My students and I greatly appreciate any responses (from Paul and others). Thanks!

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I'm a winning cash game player at small stakes online. I also have a real job, and don't make enough to brag about, but I do make enough to have to report it to the IRS (going on my 3rd year reporting poker winnings! ... which is a brag AND a beat, lol)

There are a LOT of 18-28 year old males that play poker online who smoke a LOT of pot, and lead an existence that could be characterized as living like a hermit (See my post below). Some lose, but more than you might think win. It's very common at small stakes online up through mid stakes... I believe it's less common at the highest stakes, but I wouldn't think it UNcommon. The best-known online pros all have blogs on www.cardrunners.com, and some are definitely stoner-types. However, a huge part of maintaining sanity at stakes that high is being able to balance your life, and most consider heavy drug use a personal flaw which can be a huge leak in their game. Drug use has definitely destroyed more than a few amazing poker players (a la Stu Ungar, etc)

As for PED's, I'm assuming you mean Adderall, Ritalin, etc. I would think that's far less prevalent than pot, but not totally unheard of either. I would also think that's more common on the live tournament circuit... what with having to sit in a chair for 12-16 hours a day at your highest level of focus. Online, I wouldn't think so much, because I don't think a lot of people pop those kinds of pills and then sit on their laptop in their room for 12-16 hours a day. Well, at least not without having deeper-rooted underlying drug issues. But I'm not on the tournament circuit, so that's purely speculation on my part.

Also, I've noticed that the LAG (loose/aggressive) style seems to be highly correlated with ADHD personality types... so maybe some younger players might be more comfortable with those kinds of prescription drugs. Something to look into in poker psychology class, that's for sure!

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I can't speak to the first 3, but I can probably offer something on the ADHD/Adderall side.

1st, it is frankly very difficult for someone with ADHD to say what correction vs. enhancement even means. For me, the correction sure does feel like an enhancement, but largely because I am able to concentrate and focus on things in a way that would often be impossible otherwise. And luckily the ol' noggin lucked into some decent horsepower and was nurtured pretty well growing up.

That being said, for me there is also a detriment as my natural ability to do several things at once while my brain hops around quickly can actually be a huge benefit that makes me massively alert about my surroundings. For me, there is no multitasking enhancement but rather the opposite. Adderall gives me the ability to focus in on something (usually something that gets boring...like playing good poker) for very long periods of time. It allows my brain to slow down and think through situations I would never consider carefully or properly.

Interestingly, in drtj's comment about live vs. online I would agree about very long tournaments, but I would add that for me it is much easier to maintain focus in a live environment (cash or small tourney) than online. Another interesting phenomena for me is that tournaments in general are also so much more naturally stimulating (and they have a finish line) that without medication I play much better in a tournament setting (and I am a complete loser in cash games). With medication this difference disappears.

In terms of detecting Adderall specifically, I don't know how it would manifest in someone who isn't ADHD. In an ADHD person it can be quite obvious (less chatter, more deliberate, less nervous type motion like tapping or something). Mike Matusow is probably the best example that most of us know - - there are a couple of times on TV that I would feel pretty comfortable saying he was taking his meds that day.

Hope this helps, sounds like a dynamite class (better than my "Politics in Film" experiment back in 2000... :) ).

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Is there any drug that you would not want to legalize? E.g., meth.

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Do you feel that your experiences with consciousness-expanding drugs have a basis in objective reality or not? Do you feel that you're really having a revelation about the nature of the universe?

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Love your blog... I came as a poker fan-boy a long time ago and never left.

I remember one blog of yours years ago where you mentioned that in your past, if you'd been arrested and given the average sentence for the number of times you'd broken the law (I'm assuming referring to pot or other drugs) you wouldn't get out until the year 3000.

I infer from that (and that picture on your old website with the BAD ASS Marley dreads... was that real?!?) that you were probably no stranger to the ganj yourself back in the day. I also gather you probably outgrew that and moved on at some point between now and then.

I smoked pretty close to daily from 19-21. There was no "moment of clarity" or anything like that for me but I've since cut it back a lot. I'm definitely not happy with myself when I smoke too much, and I seem to enjoy it more in moderation. I'm 23 now and probably smoke less than 5 times a month most months... even though that might seem excessive to non-smokers.

I'm sure I could quit and never smoke again if I wanted to, [much more easily than I could quit drinking, if I wanted to] but I honestly just don't want to right now. Or am I really just lying to myself about thinking I could quit?

My question is did you just wake up one day and say you had enough? Or was it more of a gradual, outgrowing it kind of thing because of life circumstances and increased responsibilities? Or, is the true measure of a stoner simply how much personal responsibility that person seeks or avoids in his life, and the balance there is the answer.

I know for SURE that I'll never become an "old stoner"... I've met a couple and nothing is more lame than a 40-something with long scraggly hair, a goatee, and drives a van, haha

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If I could take a regiment of pills that would turn me into my ideal version of myself, and the pills had no side effects, what are the reasons (if any) not to go forward with that?

Please exclude the following reasons:

- the cost of the pills, including the aggravation of taking time out of the day to swallow them
- one would miss out on the immense satsifaction of becoming the person they would want to be through years of hard work
- avoiding the stigma of being some sort of pill popping drug addict

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The ideal version of yourself may be an asshole.

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Perhaps you know, that's an old bill cosby joke, which I saw in "Bill Cosby: Himself." He describes a conversation with someone espousing the virtues of getting high...

Guy: It enhances your personality!
Bill: Well, what if you're an asshole?

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Interesting! That routine has to be in my subconscious, because I replied without thinking and was post facto regretting using "a-hole" as maybe too harsh for an intended joke, and wondered why that word bubbled up.

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(Note: The following exceeds the comment character limit, so I'm posting it in two separate comments. I apologize if you disapprove.)

Hi paul, I've been reading your blog since your poker days, but I decided to create an account only now to share with you an experience that I had with psychedelics recently. Like Jill Taylor, I had an absolutely enlightening experience that only mind-altering substances/events can produce. However, unlike her experience, mine was not euphoric, but instead it was the most frightening experience of my life.

I'm 22 years old, but I only tried marijuana for the first time two weeks ago. I was at my friend's house one night, and after my anti-drug pre-med girlfriend left, he asked me if I wanted to smoke up. Having always wanted to see what all the fuss was about, I said "Absolutely" and soon took three hits from a pipe outside on his patio.

I don't know how only three hits gave me what Wikipedia calls a Level Two psychedelic experience, but it did. At first, I just started laughing hysterically. At first at nothing, and then at the thought that I was laughing at nothing, and then at the thought that I was behaving exactly how a stereotypical high person behaves, until finally it just became recursive laughter.

Then, suddenly I found myself sitting inside on my friend's living room couch, wondering how the hell I got there. I had tunnel vision and the voice inside my head was absolutely booming. I could only focus on either my thoughts or my surroundings, but since I can't control my thoughts, they were all I could pay attention to. When my friends asked me if I was OK, I tried to tell them what was happening to me, but every time I said part of a sentence, my thoughts on what to say next were so loud that I would forget what I had already said. I realized this, and I thought about how to fix this problem, but after a while I realized that I'd been standing there, staring blankly, without saying a word -- just thinking about how to communicate. I imagined my friends looking at me like I had gone insane and I couldn't do anything about it to make them change their minds.

Then I thought, "Holy shit, what if I DID go insane? I only took three hits -- there's no way I could be tripping out after only three hits! What if I'm allergic to weed and something got damaged in my brain?" This idea scared the shit out of me. I started panicking. Then I thought I was just being paranoid, but then I entered another recursive loop of thinking I was just being paranoid about being paranoid, which made me believe again that I had gone insane.

By this point, I was desperately trying to grab hold of reality. I had lost track of time, my memories, and my senses. I told my friends to tell me how much time had passed since I smoked up and they just looked at me confusedly. I yelled at them to tell me how much time had passed and to tell me EXACTLY what the FUCK just happened. When their you're-batshit-crazy responses of "Uhhh... we smoked up, you're in the living room, and now you're here" didn't answer my question, it frustrated and infuriated me to no end. I decided I wasn't able to communicate and tried to sleep, hoping it would all end when I woke up.

But I wasn't able to. My fear that this psychotic experience would be permanent made my heart pound furiously and my entire body quake in a cold sweat. I decided that my brain needed a cold boot -- an electric jolt to the head to get me out of this endless thought-loop -- and I yelled at my friends to take me to the hospital. This, in turn, scared the shit out of them. They didn't have criminal records and they wanted to keep it that way. Hoping that I'd snap out of it on my own, they led me to the car and just drove around the neighborhood aimlessly instead of taking me to the hospital.

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Unbeknownst to them, this made me think I was stuck in a Groundhog's Dayesque time loop. The repetitive scenery outside the windows of the car, my friends' intermittent glances at me, the quiet turns of the steering wheel and gravel crunching underneath the car wheels... all of it in conjunction with the booming voice of my thoughts made me think I had died. I thought that my consciousness had separated from my physical body because my physical body no longer existed. I thought I was experiencing the last few moments of my life over and over again in oblivion. I thought that this would last for all of eternity.

But then I realized that if I'm experiencing the last few moments of my life, then I must witness my own death. Death, I felt, would have been much better than this psychosis that I was experiencing. I desperately wanted it all to end. I told my friends to kill me. I think you can imagine their response. There I was, 3.9 GPA university student with a future and a beautiful, loving, and intelligent girlfriend of 5 years, begging my two best friends to kill me.

When I was assured that they were not going to kill me, but also that I was not going to the hospital, I truly believed I was stuck in a thought loop forever. I thought that I had thought the ultimate recursive thought. The "death thought", so to speak, that all sentient beings eventually come to; and when they do, they will be stuck in that recursive thought for eternity. I tried telling my friends to never think of "this" thought, but I knew they had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. I didn't care. I was in oblivion, and nothing mattered.

Or maybe, I thought, I was in purgatory. And since I was in purgatory, maybe I could enter Heaven by begging for forgiveness from God and praising the almighty Jesus! Note that I'm very against established religion and, although I'm not a self-proclaimed atheist, I make fun of Christians all the time with my friends in jest. So my friends were pretty shocked when I started saying "Praise Jesus!" But I didn't even notice them. I was trying to get hell out of purgatory.

Or maybe this IS Hell, I thought. This is my own personal Hell. Being stuck in my mind, being completely incapable of expressing my thoughts and feelings in a coherent manner. Being stuck in a straight-jacket for the rest of my existence as people roll their eyes when I tell them to never think a certain thought or it will kill them. All this because I smoked a little weed. I may have laughed a little at this point, but I had probably already lost my sense of humor by then.

After a few hours of this, I ended up gaining a workable control of my senses, but I still didn't have a full grasp on time and my thoughts were still booming. I ended up sleeping over my friend's house, shaking like Michael J. Fox and feeling absolutely freezing despite being covered in his thick fluffy blanket.

And now, two weeks later, here I am. Looking back at it, yes, I found that psychedelics gave me the most enlightening experience I have ever had. I experienced things that I would have never experienced had I tried drugs. They have given me an entirely different perspective of my own mind. It has shown me just how linked my consciousness is to my physical brain.

However, by doing so, it has shown me just how dangerous mind-altering substances can be -- not just physically, but mentally as well. I'm very well aware that my frightening experience was in part the product of my (and my friends') own ignorance of the effects of drugs plus the weed-induced paranoia that I felt. But during my experience, I had felt what it was like to truly disconnect from reality in a negative way. I had temporarily gone insane. The psychosis was so scary that I have decided that it's something I never want to risk again, lest the next time be permanent. It may be an extremely rare occurrence, like a back-up parachute failing, but its prospects are far scarier than death.

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Let me just say for now that I look forward to offering my thoughts on this experience, next week - thank you for recounting in such detail.

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What a great story. Horrifying for you of course but a very entertaining read.

I have sort of a similiar story with regards to an old friend of mine. On a side note, I took massive amounts of psychedilics back in my college days and those experiences still rank as some of the most profound, thought provoking, and entertaining experiences of my life. My wife, a complete non drug user, gets very irritated when I tell people that 8 of my 10 most life changing experiences were due to psychedelic experiences. To calm her down I tell her that our wedding was number one.

One of my friends decided one day to take a large quantity of LSD and sit in his room and trip out. By the end of the trip he had convinced himself that he was some sort of god and that one of our other friends was the antichrist and he must kill him. Thankfully he divulged this to others around him and no violence ever ensued. But his parents put him, rightfully so, in a mental institution for about 5 weeks. During the first 3 weeks of his stay, long after the drugs had worn off, he was still convinced of his beliefs. He eventually got out and came back to reality but it was pretty scary to witness his convictions those first couple of weeks.

Now this guy was already pretty strange to begin with. With regards to psychedelics I have always believed that they take who you are and how you are feeling and magnify that a thousand times. So if you happy, you will be euphoric. But if you are feeling down, LSD can make you feel suicidal. You have to be careful of your mindset before you decide to jump in and explore the drugs.

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If this is what happened to you when you smoked weed, do yourself a favor and stay away from shrooms. ;)

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Great job describing your experience. I had what amounts to the same experience the second time I smoked weed. Be confident that it's normal and that you're absolutely healthy and fine. I promise.

In the week following that experience, I noticed that sometimes my eyes would fail to focus as they normally do and I would revert back to the trip a little bit. For some reason I loved looking at my dog when this happened - probably because I felt like she was the only one that wouldn't think I'm a fucking weirdo for tripping so hard off of some weed. I even ended up going to the doctor, thinking I'd contracted meningitis and was experiencing some of its symptoms. When he immediately asked me whether I'd tried weed for the first time recently, I felt pretty dumb, but a wave of relief rushed over me.

Back then I also thought I'd NEVER EVER EVER smoke again, or do any other drugs for that matter, but eventually I got over that. Give yourself a while, but realize how much even this SCARY experience has taught you about yourself, all without any real harm to you. It's like your plane got hijacked by terrorists and you had to fight with yourself to maintain composure - and you made it out okay! Let this experience show you how powerful mind-altering substances can be, and how fragile your psyche actually is. Imagine yourself as an individual strong enough to go through the same experience again, but this time to take note of it as a scientist would - imagine how strong you would have to be! Isn't that person someone you'd admire or like to be?

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I don't think mental strength is the issue here. If that night taught me anything at all, it's that I am my brain. Fighting a bad trip would be like running a system scan to fix your computer being on fire. Any intangible fixes that I might try while tripping out isn't going to get rid of the chemicals that are screwing with my brain.

Trust me, I would love to try drugs again IF I was guaranteed that I'd be perfectly fine afterward. I think everything I experienced was absolutely fascinating. But I saw what it was like to be psychotic, and it was my personal hell. The maximum potential benefits -- a temporary euphoric, enlightening experience -- is not even close to being worth risking permanent insanity, especially when it's already been shown that I'm more at risk than others.

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He wasn't suggesting trying to "fix" anything. Merely monitoring it. What this should have told you is how out of control you are with your mind. As for saying "you are your mind," this statement can be called into question quite easily.

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My guess, you do this type of stuff when you're sober. The paranoia. You can talk yourself into anything. Probably not nearly as much as when you're high, but it's there. Waiting...for something to come along and trigger it, the negative thought pattern loop. Chill brother! Free your mind and your ass will follow.

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For purposes of this question, I assume two things, and hope that both are correct. If not, please feel free to correct the assumptions and then answer accordingly:

1) it is the case that when your two children are old enough to understand this subject, you are the kind of parent that is not going to withhold retelling some (or most) of your experiences with recreational drugs to the both of them.

2) you have had experiences with drugs that you would classify as very positive, and even if it hasn't happened to you personally you are aware of the possibility of very negative things occurring as a result of the exact acts (type, usage, dosage, frequency) that gave you those very positive results.


So, if your kids approach you with an interest in trying a drug, or a variety of them, what will you say? How will you say it? Can you state with confidence that your approach and rationale with your own children will mirror that which you have when discussing this with people that are, for lack of a better term, 'less important' to you? I'm not a parent yet, so I'm rather curious how others would approach this.

As for myself, I have smoked marijuana in my past, but never tried anything else, ever. So while I am not as 'experienced' as what I presume to be the average recreational drug user, I'm also not posing this question to you from the perspective of a squeaky clean debutante-dater.

Thanks for taking the time.

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I am also very interested in Paul's answer to your parenting question, I hope he answers it.

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Have you heard about this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1111833/

"Determined to find out the true effects of marijuana on the human body, stand-up comedian and former Stoner of the Year Doug Benson documents his experience avoiding pot for 30 days and then consuming massive amounts of the drug for 30 days. More than just an amusing story of one man's quest to get superhigh, this documentary also examines the hotly contested debate over medical marijuana use."

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Because I get a depressed and lethargic after a night of heavy drinking, have suffered from depression in the past, I've always been hesitant to mess around with MDMA. Drugs that mess with seratonin freak me out. The last thing I would want to do would be have a "down period" that would last more than a day or two.

Then again....http://thedea.org/docs/2006_de_Win22871_1.pdf

Thoughts on the down period?

Having tried psilocybin and having a very positive experiences (granted the doses I took were small), the prospect of trying others was interesting but I've been hesitant because of the desire to NOT have a horribly intense anxiety reaction to it, or liking it so much I wanted to do it a LOT. That idea with drugs is a little jarring.

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What are your views on beta blockers, Ritalin, and Provigil? If they can push the intellect in a positive direction do you envision a day when taking these are the norm?

http://www.slate.com/id/2188747/

Like a lot of other people here I have been lurking since the poker days and always find your blog (and the associated commentary) enlightening. And you introduced me to the TED talks so a big thanks for that.

On a completely unrelated topic, I know you're dead set against conspiracy theorists, but what are you thoughts around Zeitgeist?

http://zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm

I'm guessing you won't comment on this as it's off topic, but thought I'd put it out there.

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A shot in the arm for pro-drug campaigners? Chocolate-prohibition more like it.

further down.

'The bigger susrpise, notes Serge Ahmed, who designed the preference experiment, is that rats that were already expereinced cocaine users (they had learned to self administer cocaine) still opted for sweetened water over the drug.'

though '... his team might have discovered rats cannot become addicted to drugs'

And Googling it.

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