(Part 2) Top products from r/eldertrees

I'm not a chemist; I'm currently studying ChemE at university. I'm also the "science mod" over on /r/trees, so I think I can help out a bit with this one.

The science behind cannabis and how it works is extremely interesting, but it won't help you with 99% of Biochemistry.

Everything we know about cannabis can be learned pretty quickly, provided you have the backgrounds in chemistry, biology, and preferably a bit of pharmacology.

What you can is do is study drugs and their functions as a whole to supplement and enhance your studies in biochemistry; I know that it's granted me a new appreciation for the human body and the processes that regulate it. These fields are vast and expanding at an astonishing rate.

The field of pharmacology is huge, but in a nutshell you can break it into pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. They focus on effects and the relations between dosage and response (dose response curves, etc.) as well as the mechanisms through which the drug is processed and how the drug passes through the body, respectively.

In short, pharmacokinetics studies what the body does to a drug, while pharmacodynamics studies what the drug does to your body.

As a Biochemistry major, these topics will likely be right up your alley. You'll still have to do the mundane, but perhaps some background along these lines will provide you with a new perspective on the processes you are studying in class.

If this sounds like your thing, I'd recommend the following text, provided you already have a good grip on molecular biology and a little electrochemistry: Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience

If you like this text or you just want something to supplement it, Caltech, easily one of the top research universities for this field, offers a course taught by Dr. Henry Lester via Coursera, here.

It's a highly informative course that pairs very well with the text I linked above. You'll touch on everything from drug addiction to recreational drugs to the different receptors and how they are activated.

It's not active right now and I'm not sure when the next session will be, but you can go onto Coursera and watch Professor Lester's lectures which are, by far, the most integral part of the course. I went through it last session (January - February) and I was very satisfied with both the material and the way it was presented.

Tl;dr: You can supplement your classroom material with all sorts of interesting studies related to drugs, but if you're not interested in the material you're studying in class at all, it may be time to rethink your field. You can't tie everything to drugs, but you can use the study of drugs to enhance your appreciation for the "macro" systems you're studying.

Milton Erickson was the greatest therapist of the 20th century. Contact his foundation to hook up with a worldclass therapist, dedicated to helping your son, as opposed to a therapist who wants to stretch out the therapy to as many profitable sessions as possible. https://www.erickson-foundation.org/institutes/
''As all passionate endeavors, the Milton H. Erickson Foundation began with a dream.

In 1974, a young, earnest psychologist named Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D. had a noble aspiration. He wanted to hold an educational meeting of mental health professionals. For six years, Dr. Zeig, along with other colleagues, trained and mentored under Milton H. Erickson M. D., the world’s foremost authority on hypnosis. Dr. Erickson never charged his students, so to express his gratitude and to offer Dr. Erickson an opportunity to witness the tremendous impact he had made in the field, Dr. Zeig organized the first Congress. As plans were underway, the need to establish a more formal non-profit educational foundation was recognized. The Milton H. Erickson Foundation was incorporated October 29, 1979. Unfortunately, Dr. Erickson died nine months before the Congress but was able to appreciate that 750 had already registered. The Congress, held in December of 1980, attracted more than 2,000 and was the largest meeting ever held on the topic of hypnosis.

Over the next 30-plus years, the Foundation has grown to offer more Congresses; conferences on brief therapy and couples therapy; an Evolution of Psychotherapy conference; training workshops, including the Intensives and Master Classes; a rich and expansive archive; the Foundation Press which offers information resources and studies of Dr. Erickson’s methods and Ericksonian related topics; an Erickson Center for Hypnosis and Psychotherapy where patients pay on a sliding scale; a newsletter published three times a year; and more recently, a museum, formerly the home where Dr. Erickson lived and worked the last decade of his life.''
https://www.erickson-foundation.org/about-us/
Read this book, and offer a copy to your son. Hypnosis is fascinating,and your son may become interested and start reading about therapy, which is quite therapeutic. https://www.amazon.com/Frogs-into-Princes-Linguistic-Programming/dp/0911226192
The book is not boring, not stiff, but rather, entertaining and funny.
What's it about? http://www.nlp.com/what-is-nlp/

First book I recommend to any programmer, no matter what they're working on, is The Pragmatic Programmer. Excellent stuff.

If you don't get a shot at low-level coding at work, get yourself an Arduino kit and just hack away. Apparently the language is similar to / based on the C programming language. I use C every day.

To do well with embedded systems, real-time, device driver, or kernel type stuff, you have to really, really, really, understand what the hardware is doing. I was able to learn gradually because I started programming when there was one CPU and no cache memory. Each hardware operation was straightforward. Now with multi-core CPUs, multi-level cache memory, multiple software threads, it becomes a bit more complex. But something like the Arduino will teach you the basics, and you can build on that.

Every day I have to think asynchronously - any operation can happen any time, and if they share memory or other resources, they can't step on each other. It can get hairy - but it's really fun to reason about and I have a blast.

There's a lot more I'm sure, but get started with some low-level hacking and you can build from there.

If you want to get meta, many of the best programmers I know love Godel, Escher, Bach because it widens your mental horizons. It's not about programming per se, but I found that it helps my programming at a meta level. (and it'll give you a lot to meditate on when you're baked!)

Wow, everyone is saying that the trick is not to get too high, but I have read a ton of non-fiction books while really wasted and absolutely loved them.

Such as "Man and His Symbols", Carl Jung.

As an aside, me and my husband had a couple over for the evening recently, while I was reading "Hamlet's Mill". Contraversial, I know, but still fascinating reading... Especially when stoned.

Anyway, I knew the husband, but not the wife. And she sat next to me on the sofa, took one look at the book and actually said "What are you reading for?"

She really thought that I was holding a book that I couldn't read, just to impress people. And there was only my husband and me there when they turned up.

> I often feel like this in these type of group smoking situations and I'm tired of it. its like as soon as I notice I haven't said anything in a while it gets worse. Like I keep thinking of things to say or do, but nothing is ever good enough.

It sounds like you are feeling a little bit of social anxiety when you consume too much THC. If high amounts of THC make you a little anxious, it might be a good idea to not get that high in social situations.

You could also try taking some CBD, which helps treat anxiety, and it can also modulate the effects of THC, to make it less anxiety-inducing.

If you are interested in self-improvement, you could also learn some techniques on how to deal with anxiety by reading a book like When Panic Attacks.

The Magicians is a little heavier than some of the other suggestions but is also a good mind expanding read.

It starts off as a fairly typical Harry Potter type story (loser kid finds out he has special powers, must learn to control them, etc...) but with a very deep story.

I have this case. And I love it.

https://www.amazon.com/Apothecarry-Case-Handmade-Storage-Connoisseur/dp/B07R652GN1

Has a lock. Has plenty of room for all kinds of wares. And looks really really cool.

Edit: whoops. Not refrigerated. Still love it though.

I'd also suggest Last Chance to See.

It's really interesting to see Adams blend his humor into such a different subject as endangered species.

Such a smart comic strip, I used to read it every day!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Calvin-Hobbes-v/dp/0740748475

Yes, Sandra Ingerman wrote a book about it. Most shamans deal with it, there's quite a bit online too.

It may be worthwhile looking into the work of Dr. John Sarno.

I'm currently reading Marihuana Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon. It's old (but surprisingly up to date), about trees, and written by an expert in psychiatry. Sounds right up your alley.

http://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Reconsidered-Grinspoon/dp/0932551130

I used to own that book. That was back when there were only a handful of books available about growing cannabis. I'm not sure, but I think Ed Rosenthal was the author.

EDIT: Nope, it was Jim Richardson.

Interestingly, if you look into it, opium is and was a much safer substance than the prescription opiates that doctors prescribe and patients overdose on today. A great book on the history of opium is Opium Reality's Dark Dream

Abusing drugs is bad, prohibition is worse.

Did they go over the origins and history of AA at the beginning of every meeting too?

https://www.amazon.com/The-Sober-Truth-Debunking-Programs/dp/0807033154

Be Here Now is my go-to book when wanting to combine cannabis and meditation/spirituality/etc. The author doesn't dwell on weed specifically, but he was heavily influenced by psychedelics and discusses this early on in the book. As /u/its_my_growaway mentions, psychedelics of any sort are simply (but enjoyable) tools.

I can't decide if I like that cover or the one Amazon shows

edit: I guess the UK version has the sparkly gradient. DAMMIT

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0380004232/ref=tmm_mmp_used_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=&qid=

yeah, the cost of a dna read is $1000 but the retail price is still higher, but not for much longer.
i go to jalr.org to line up the studies i do. they pay $2k to $5k and last a couple weeks or a month. i want to recruit a cadre of lab rats willing to have their dna readin exchange for getting a smaller payment for that study , then we would be available for more studies. so far big pharma doesn't know what to do with a subjects full dna; they are at most only testing one or two genes
but they more than anybody else have the budgets and economy of scale to start doing it sooner than most anybody else will.

i think the irb's will be very uncomfortable with the idea at first.