Kid Tripping Balls infront of UCF Library

How is it important for people to film him when he's strapped down to a stretcher being escorted by several cops? I think the issue we really have here has 2 major components.

  • Drugs (specifically hallucinogens) are heavily stigmatized in our culture. This prevents people from being able to handle someone properly when they are having a bad trip and sifting through some of their baggage. There is a possibility that he was with his friends on campus and lost them and being alone during the onset of a hallucinogen can be a disorienting experience for someone who is unprepared for it. According to the article he seemed to be having a bad trip and was freaking about but was still docile because apparently he was giving hugs. It was when the girl decided it was the best idea to take him to the counseling office that things started to head for the worse. I'm not surprised that he started to view these people as the enemy if they were trying to take him to the school's counseling center and then she had the idea to call the cops. My point is that its because hallucinogens are stigmatized, we have a culture that is ill-equipped to handle situations like these in a constructive manner which ironically ends up exacerbating the circumstances. This could have been avoided not by escorting him and thinking "You need clinical, medical help immediately!" but by walking him 30 feet to the reflection pond and putting chiller music from Shpongle (the DJ on his shirt). So now we have stories like this that make the headlines and reaffirm ignorant people's opinions and get placed on the mental shelf right next to the story of that one friend of a friend of a friend who thought he was an orange and peeled his skin off.

  • The second point is similar to the first one and that's because this is an unregulated substance people are taking an unknown amount of an unknown substance. Potency varies from dealer to dealer and can even vary heavily from batch to batch. You really go into taking LSD partially blind every time because all you see is a piece of paper. Since this is unregulated you can take 2-3 stamps one time and then get a hold of some real LSD where 1 stamp will be even more potent than the 3. Nowadays there's also a lot of research chemicals going around that have effects similar to those of LSD but we have no idea what the potential negative side-effects could be. All of these factors together sets the stage for what could potentially be a disaster. If it was regulated not only would I think we would drastically decrease of even eliminate these "crazed tripping kid" stories that we are all too familiar with. In fact, there is a therapeutic value with hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) that lots of researchers are beginning to discover. Google this for yourself.

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