Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization

> The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students.

I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.

Given that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?

Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?

I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness. And it’s supported by the fact that psychedelics are also a network like the brain is. And when taking them, your brain experiences plasticity and that’s what allows profound changes.

A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?

Oh yeah bro, drugs created civilization bro

So if you take a lot of psychedelics you end up with a civilization that ritually murders 20,000 people every couple of months.

Just imagine the power you could wield as a shaman with drugs like DMT and psilocybin it would look like a literal magic