Honestly, my slashdot sig is an advertisement. It is exactly for the purposes you describe. Specifically to "encourage an audience (slashdot readers) to take a specific action (buy my book)". I am marketing my book through my sig (amongst other methods of course).

This is what I meant when I said you were either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy. If you define advertising as being something very specific that no one else uses as the definition, then you can make any claims you like about it. However as that's not the commonly understood definition, it's only going to misdirect people hearing/reading your statements to think you mean something else.

I challenge you to find a single lie in the advertisement that constitutes my slashdot sig or even the Amazon web page it links to.

With this argument you're either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy (too early to tell, but could be both). A lot of advertising is manipulative content devoid of any real truth, but that's not the definition of advertising. It's fair enough to say that advertising that falls in to this category is harmful, however - even if that were 99.999% of advertising which exists (which I doubt) - that still does not say that advertising itself is always harmful.

My sig is an ad. It's advertising a book I wrote. Let's look at a couple of hypothetical where I decided not to ever advertise it.

1) Let's say you're interested in the subject of Self-Discovery through psychedelics, but you're unsure what good books there are on the topic. You Google around and find.... a couple of Amazon links to books written a long time ago that other people have finally written reviews for. Do you find my book? Not likely. No one has ever heard of it so no one ever wrote anything about it. It's there on Amazon, but so far down in the list that unless you were searching for it specifically it won't come up.

Why is this a bad thing? Why should my book get advertised and get some priority? Well, because it's new and it might be better than other existing works on the topic. You'll never know if you don't get a chance to ever even know it exists.

2) You're a psychologist but have somehow never come across the idea of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy during your studies. "Recreational drugs" have never really interested you, so you never specifically go searching online for anything to do with them. The chances of you ever hearing about my book are very slim. As it turns out though, psychologists who have never heard of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy are exactly the kind of people who may be very interested in my book, as it gives them a wealth of information that they can then use as a starting point for further investigation in to the subject.

So yes, I have a financial interest in your decision of whether to buy my book or not, and I'm advertising it with the specific hope that people buy it and give me money. However the alternative would be that my book sales remain at near zero forever and I wasted a lot of time writing it. I never wrote it to get rich - I wrote it because I'm passionate and knowledgable about the subject and want to spread that knowledge to others. The money from it is nice to have and I feel it's only fair to compensate me for my work, so I won't give it away for free to everyone (also 'free books' are usually not viewed as well by large subsets of my target audience) but it still is a secondary motivation to the desire for my book to be read.

I think it depends on what is being advertised and the method of targeting.

You (and Mr Marti) make a point, but I think it's only a point against one of the very common forms of targeted advertising that exists today.

In your first example, they don't know you bought the windscreen wipers, so they keep advertising them to you and it's useless to both you and them. In your second example, they're targeting to you for the wrong products based on incomplete information about you. These are problems with the implementation, not the concept.

As per my sig, I recently launched my first book. My sig is an example of nontargeted advertising. Anyone who notices it and is interested may click on one of the links and may end up buying my book (and I thank anyone reading this who has done so or will do so!). However I don't expect it to be a particularly large generator of sales. The intersection of 'slashdot readers' and 'people interested enough in knowing more about psychedelic assisted self-discovery' is probably not very high (although hopefully greater than an empty set).

Facebook's advertising however is different. On facebook, people list their own interests. This therefore allows me to pay some money and specifically target my ads at (for example) people who 'speak English'; 'are interested in psychedelics'; and 'enjoy reading'. This way, I can be sure that my ad only appears in front of people that at least have a reasonable chance of being interested. This not only means that people who might be interested get made aware of my book, but also I don't have to worry that I'm paying for showing it to people who will absolutely never be interested in reading it.

This kind of targeted advertising makes a lot more sense to me and I have yet to see a downside.

I believe there would be, yes... however if you legalise the 'safer' variants of most classes of drugs, the quantity of people persuing illegal highs will be significantly lower. As another poster mentioned, no one* would take "Krokodil" who could get their hands on cheap and easy Heroin.

Just legalise one or two opiates; one or two amphetamines; an entactogen or two; most of the tryptamine psychedelics; a few of the phenethylamine psychedelics... etc.

* "No one" meaning 'almost no one', since there'll always be morons.

Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.

Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.

Depends on the seller's intention... generally not, but maybe.

Drug dealers usually don't want to harm or kill their customers. It tends to reduce repeat business...

So, based on this line of thought, we should immediately outlaw alcohol, tobacco and coffee; all three substances only have very limited positive use and a high potential for harmful addiction.

The risk of addiction - hell, even the DANGER of the substance - has very little if anything to do with its legal status in most countries' legal systems.

Legalising or decriminalising various drugs may or may not reduce the number of addicts; but it WILL decrease the associated dangers that only exist because of the current legal status.

That has nothing to do with the relative dangers of the substances and everything to do with that the 'desired effect' of the drugs are totally different. It's like saying, "the bad effects of McDonalds are widely known, but people still eat there instead of just having a raw carrot.".

I'm a relatively frequent user of psychedelics (as my post history and sig clearly show), however have absolutely no interest in marijuana, opiates, or alcohol despite having tried all of them. On rare occasions (approx. once a year) I enjoy entactogens (almost exclusively MDMA) and on very rare occasions (approx once every two to three years) will also use amphetamines, however that's more for their direct use (in helping to perform a long repetitive task without losing focus or getting tired) than for any kind of enjoyment.

Usually, the synthetic drugs are much more difficult and expensive to make as they're far more chemically complex than the simpler 'traditional' recreational substances.

There are a few cases of some reasonably difficult to make drugs - such as LSD - however make one large batch and you've just created a year's supply for an entire average sized nation, so it does tend to balance out.

I definitely agree it would be very nice to know more about the exact functioning of psychedelics - and about brain function in general. It's true we don't know 'a lot' right now. However it's also true that we know a lot more than most people think. For example, we have a fairly clear idea which brain receptors are targeted (for most tryptamines, that's 5-HT2a, 5-HT2c and 5-HT1a; but for LSD, add in another 5 HT subtypes and then quite a few others on top) and we have a reasonable idea of the 'normal' purpose of these receptors.

There have been fMRI scans performed on people taking psychedelics (sadly only mescaline and psilocybin to date; I'm really looking forward to when someone does an LSD study) and we get a reasonably good picture of which brain areas experience differences in activation. And again, we also have a reasonable idea of what brain areas are responsible for what parts of cognition.

We do still have a lot of guesswork, that's true; but it's not all mystery.

I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people having their lives destroyed by psychedelics, but have yet to find any actual evidence of it. In the medical literature there is a total of one case known of a person that did not previously have a mental illness experiencing a lasting psychosis after LSD use (out of hundreds of thousands of recorded LSD experiments). That person was the twin of a schizophrenic, and so may have had an undiagnosed condition. Out of people with pre-existing mental conditions, the rate of a lasting psychosis following an LSD experience is around 0.2%.

There certainly are cases of psychedelic use that have cause problems in other ways, such as the CIA's internal experiments dosing people with LSD causing one employee (who was given a high dose in his coffee without his knowledge) to commit suicide in a fit of paranoia; however I discount these as being true dangers of psychedelics as being dosed without your knowledge is a very different thing to taking it with (at least some) foreknowledge and expectation of the effects.

My book focuses - as the title states - on the responsible use of LSD. I don't deny that it can be a very traumatic and unhelpful experience when used in the incorrect setting or with an incorrect prior state of mind. I also don't deny that even with the right setting and state of mind it can be traumatic - but in these cases, the traumatic experience can be directed to be useful (I specifically cover this in book in quite some detail) in the same way that people coming through a difficult life experience such as a car accident, death of a loved one, or similar can come out of it stronger and better than they were before.

At no point does my book advocate the use of LSD to 'go out and have fun' or as a 'party drug'. It certainly can be used this way (and often is) but personally I see too much danger there to consider that wise.

To be completely honest (and I hope as an AC you come back to read this), I think that you may benefit quite a lot from a supervised psychedelic experience - whether it be with an MD or simply a very experienced individual.

I do agree however that uncontrolled use may be quite detrimental in your case.

I don't want to appear to be 'pushing' my book, but you'd probably find it a very interesting read. You can use the 'look inside the book' feature on Amazon to get an idea of the book's content without having to buy it.

This is EXACTLY what I was talking about...

I most certainly have experienced an out-of-body experience while on psychedelics. I have also experienced complete ego-death whereby the words "I" and "me" would have been meaningless had I encountered them. I have also watched the inner workings of my mind from the perspective of an outside observer. I have felt 'the universe embracing me'. I have experienced a feeling that I can only describe as 'the bliss of existence as a part of a universal consciousness'.

In short, yes, I have experienced some seriously 'insane shit'.

But I know that there is a rational and logical explanation without needing to resort to mysticism. I know that there is no 'universal consciousness'; I know that the universe is a not capable of emotion or 'embracing'; and I know that there is no way to physically see myself from outside (other than mirrors and so forth of course).

Therefore I can use these experiences to better understand reality and examine myself. I can use them to learn about myself and teach myself how to best live my life to achieve in it what I want to achieve. I can use them to further my understanding of the world around me. I can use them to enhance the creative aspects of my life. However at no point does 'mysticism' come in to it.

I don't deny or devalue these experiences on psychedelics - they are in fact why I take them. I just think it's both intellectually weak and devaluing to the experience itself to say that there are 'great spirits' or 'second bodies' or any other mumbo-jumbo bullshit.

As my current book is targeted at beginners, I don't go in to this at great length - only enough to make the point - but in a future book, I intend on exploring this particular theme more fully.

Essentially this is what I do every time I use psychedelics in the higher dose range. My preferred substance is LSD, because I find it to be more introspective than the others, however I have taken many other substances (including all the ones you listed) in varying quantities. I submit that 'thinking critically' about the experience is what has allowed me to understand it and the benefits that it gives me without resorting to the mysticism. Deriving a belief in mysticism from the experience, from my point of view, shows that the person did not think critically about their experience.

I - as you can probably tell from my sig - am very interested in psychedelic substances and the effects they have on the mind. Generally speaking, I'm a proponent of their responsible use.

However, I find that in the realm of psychedelic research, there is a great deal of pseudoscience and mysticism. Just because someone has a 'mystical experience' on LSD or other psychedelics, they then start going off and believing a whole lot of rubbish that just makes no sense. I myself have had plenty of such experiences, and they can be very profound, deep and wonderful learning exercises - I wouldn't be the man I am today without having had these experiences. What they are not however is evidence of something 'beyond our world'.

Essentially, this is just another facet of people's failure to use critical thinking and logic, but it tends to be even more pronounced when it comes to experiences and feelings from within rather than when examining external matters.

Where this causes the most problems is when people start promoting psychedelic use as a snake-oil to help someone 'get closer to the spiritual world' or 'attune yourself to nature' or so on. It's a problem because it works. If you go in to the experience believing this rubbish, there's a good chance that what you experience will reinforce it quite strongly. If however you go in to the experience without believing this rubbish, you can learn an amazing amount about yourself without the need for attributing things to mysticism and superstition.

(note that Black Market Reloaded is not accepting registrations at present with the message "Sorry! Registrations are closed at the moment, due to needed upgrades."... I assume this is to upgrade for the potential new demand)

Similar uses? Well, there's still other black market sites along the same lines as Silk Road, such as Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded.
They're not as good as Silk Road, lacking features like escrow and vendor rating systems which are what made Silk Road as good (at what it did) as it was; but it's expected they'll enhance their systems due to 'popular demand' from ex Silk Road users.
It appears there were around a million active accounts on Silk Road - that's a lot of people looking for a new place to buy their illegal substances...

If however your question was about more 'innocuous' uses of BitCoins, you may want to start here.