Slashdot Mirror
Sound As the New Illegal Narcotic?
ehrichweiss writes "The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is warning parents and teachers of a new threat to our children: sounds. Apparently kids are now discovering binaural beats and using them to get 'physiological effects.' The report goes on with everyone suggesting that such aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage and even has one student claiming there are 'demons' involved. Anyone who has used one of those light/sound machines knows all about the effects that these sounds will give and to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best. It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."
Up until high school, I spent my entire life locked into an ideal Norman Rockwell painting. No cares, no worries and just high on life. Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear.
... COMPLETE EAR DESTRUCTION!
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I
My work here is dung.
This kind of insanity is just plain stupid. Binaural beats have a documented psycho-dynamic effect ... programs like Hemi-Sync are intriguing. I don't think people are going to get "high" off of them though. But what if they do? If binaural beats are made illegal and deemed "narcotic", then the "drug war" is more about denying people access to their own minds.
Anyone else ever mess with the "Brainwave Syncronizer" In Cool Edit?
I suffer from occasional severe insomnia, and burning a full CD that gradually slowed the binaural beats down into the deep sleep stage was the ONLY non-narcotic solution to ever work.
Sad to realize all these years later, the only reason it worked is because it was my gateway to ambien...~
I made this video a while back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weOpxELqn-c - I've done a lot of research on binaural beats. They are used to calm the mind and promote a lower brain operating frequency that is akin to relaxation or meditation. Some people say it's a placebo effect, others use it to promote a state of calm in their minds as they try to rid themselves of the daily thought process (many, many thoughts coming in and out of your head very quickly, which is associated with high brain frequencies). Trying to demonize BBs would be like trying to demonize meditation...which I'm sure isn't too far off.
I guess the fear surrounding what people don't understand will never go away. I suggest a split in civilization - let the smarties burrow deep into the soil and the dummies can fry up at the surface.
Sorry for the strange comment, I'm high on binaural beats. :p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Agreed.
Listen, parents. Don't worry about drug use with your kids...altering consciousness is something that humans have taken part in for literally thousands of years.
Drug use is no cause for concern, and in the case of some kids, it can open their minds and expand their horizons. No, what you need to be worried about is drug abuse.
There is a very distinct difference.
Living With a Nerd
NO! I had been warned!
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
altering consciousness is something that humans have taken part in for literally thousands of years.
If Oklahoma is going to regulate activities which entrain brainwaves, they need to target the pushers purveying prayer and even training young kids and defenseless elders in its practice.
That's right, Oklahoma, go after the churches.
Say it right: "Nuc-le-ah Powah".
Source? I could name 14 people off the top of my head who I know personally that are currently drug users...and every single one of them have a full time job, a family, and would be considered to be financially and maternally/paternally successful.
Living With a Nerd
Except it's not the same at all. A beat from two similar frequencies is an actual acoustic effect caused by cyclic constructive and destructive interference between the two waves.
A binaural beat is a phenomenon that you only get when you listen: it's two frequencies played back via headphone so that they don't interfere. The beat is purely an artifact of your perceptions.
Not posting AC, because (having, y'know, actually familiarized myself with the topic of the story) I actually know what's going on.
I'll tell you, as a non-drug user (besides caffeine and rare alcohol), that the War on Drugs itself is at fault for such misconceptions. You see, I've known people who habitually and recreationally use various banned substances. As a result, I knew that most of the government messages regarding drugs were complete fabrications. Not familiar or interested in the specifics, I treated all of this information as suspect. Only after talking to an experienced drug user did I discover that "yeah, meth is really bad, dangerous, addictive, and horrible." When the government message and the War on Drugs treats things like marijuana as something significantly scary, evil, dangerous, etc... compared to tobacco and alcohol, they do a disservice to everyone. When someone obtaining a recreational substance less dangerous than alcohol also has the opportunity to buy much more dangerous things, and has the same "information" about them, that's where the whole "gateway drug" problem comes in.
My take: put all of it on store shelves and provide real actual data about the stuff being sold. Those who want to kill themselves on meth are people who will cause problems anyway... at least under that situation they won't burn down an apartment complex manufacturing it, or rob houses to pay for a habit no more costly than Night Train.
Make them legally equal, but informationally distinguished, as opposed to the current, more dangerous reversed situation. And this just applies to one benefit...eliminating a ton of violent crime, property crime, and wasted tax dollars would be mere side effects.
It used to be believed that drug use led to music. There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. Harry J. Anslinger (1892-1975) Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition.
Now we know better, it's the other way around - aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage.
Funny, I went to erowid and searched "Freon". Here was the very first story that came up:
"[Erowid Warning: Our understanding of the literature is that there is no such thing as safe use of volatile solvents, aerosols and other street inhalants : their psychoactive effects are inseparable from nerve and organ damage. We have chosen to include these reports to help document the real world use of inhalants, but their inclusion is not intended to imply that they are anything but dangerous.]
I guess ill start off with some backround info... My grandpa owns an air conditioning repair place. Its basically a family business. Ive worked there, and my cousin used to work there. I worked on a/c units for a few years (illegally though, I was only 18 and didnt even have a license).
While I worked there a few friends of mine kept trying to get me to try huffing freon since I had access to mass quantities of it. They also tried to get me to hook them up with it. I always harshly turned them down, because I know how dangerous this shit is. It says right on the box in big letters that inhaling it can and will make your heart stop, among other bad things. But you guys are probably aware of this, so ill go on with my story...
One morning in 1998 I woke up to a phone ringing. It was my grandpa, and he was sobbing. He told me to wake up my parents and come to 'the shop' quick. I hauled ass over there to find an ambulance in the parking lot, along with a bunch of cops. My cousin (who was working there) had been huffing freon (r-22, if that matters) from a trash bag and had passed out into the bag. There was a small amount of liquid freon in the bottom of the bag. Needless to say, his lungs were practically destroyed and he had been dead for a while.
I guess what im trying to say is do not do this shit!!!! Ive messed with inhalants before and I know how cool they can be, but damn, dont huff freon. When you get it out of someone's a/c, think about it. Youre not even getting quality freon. It has probably been in the unit for at least 5 years; during that time it absorbs oil from the compressor, chemicals from the welds in the freon lines, and other shit like that. Freon is a tasteless, odorless chemical. The 'honey' taste ive heard described is the impurities in it from the machine its been in. And if the compressor is going out or electrically shorting from age, you might be getting burnt freon. Once when changing out an old unit that had some in it, I had on a mask (of course) and let a blast of this stuff out on a nearby anthill. The ants immediately stopped moving, dead. This is nasty shit.
Anyway, if you wanna get high, inhalants are a dumb way to do it. Just smoke some weed or sniff some coke or something. If you like inhalants that much, stick to the tamer ones like whippits or something. Freon is just about the most dangerous one you can do, especially if you are getting it out of an a/c unit. Theyre trying to get rid of freon altogether because of what it does to the atmosphere; just think about what it does to your lungs and brain. Peace.
I miss my cousin"
Maybe your nephew doesn't know how to read, or thinks that stern warnings are not real.
In any case you can hardly blame erowid for not warning him. This took me literally 5 seconds to find and was the first entry in the search results.
"But this one goes to 11!"