Posted by pinksharkmark (12.128.190.12) on January 13, 2001 at 15:12:59:
In Reply to: Because of Nathan - and others posted by annemarie on January 13, 2001 at 10:14:02:
... at least without some proof.
Call me a cynical and suspicious kind of guy, but many things about Liberty's posts are nagging at me.
Big coincidence -- Nathan was Liberty's husband's best friend. Both are clusterheads. Apart from people who met at the O.U.C.H. convention, how many clusterheads have even MET another clusterhead, much less had one as a best friend? Not saying it never happens... it's just pretty rare.
Timing issues -- Liberty's first post was to DroolDonkey, on January 9 at 2:11 pm. I quoted it on CH.com January 10. "It has been hell trying to get our hands on the shrooms for his treatment. It has been hell to get our hands on the money for the shrooms. But we were blessed to have our own "angel" who helped us out..." She thanks Flash for providing the link, presumably because without the link she would not have found her "angel". The fishy thing is that Flash posted that link to DroolDonkey on January 6 at 5:01 pm. So... presumably she found the link to DroolDonkey at CH.com, immediately checked it out, found someone who sent mushrooms virtually overnight, persuaded her suffering husband to delay taking them until she could invite Nathan's wife over to watch her husband experience instant relief (risking catastrophic embarassment and "see... I told you so!" from said skeptical wife if the treatment failed), observed her husband abort a headache with the mushrooms, then composed a message to DroolDonkey thanking Flash, without even waiting to see whether the headaches would return in a few hours. Doesn't that seem like a pretty compressed time frame? Less than seventy hours from finding a link to a possible source for mushrooms to posting a success story.
And, by the way, posting it at a mushroom forum, not at CH.com, even though she has been "lurking" here for two years, not posting because she felt she had "nothing to contribute". Seems to me letting us know that her husband finally found something that worked was a pretty big thing to contribute. Her first ever post to CH.com was Jan 11 at 3:36 pm, thanking me for quoting her DroolDonkey post. Her second post to CH.com was twenty hours later, describing a cluster-induced suicide.
Hard to swallow issue -- Nathan obviously knows of Liberty's husband's success with mushroom therapy. He has presumably also been told of all the numerous success stories that led said husband to try the mushrooms in the first place. In other words, Nathan now KNOWS FOR SURE that mushrooms work, and also knows that his best friend has some, or can at least obtain a resupply in less than seventy hours. Yet instead of quietly taking mushrooms without the knowledge of his harpy wife, and claiming some kind of natural remission to pacify her, he kills himself. Does this seem reasonable?
Inconsistency issues -- "I was buying the dried shrooms from a very trusted source and mailing them to those that need them. I cannot afford to do that anymore..." Wait a minute, here! I thought she got them from "an angel" she discovered at DroolDonkey! If so, she didn't pay a dime for them. If she had ALREADY been buying them from "a very trusted source", why does she say "it has been hell getting our hands on some shrooms"? Why was she so delighted to find "an angel"?
Back to timing... how long has she been mailing them to people? I thought she just found her "angel" a few days ago! How did she know who to mail them to? She had never posted to either CH.com or DroolDonkey prior to January 9! How would anyone even know how to contact her to give her an address to mail the mushrooms to? Besides, shrooms, even if bought on the black market, are pretty cheap. Maybe twenty bucks or so for a full-on recreational dose. Her husband only needed one dose. How many other doses has she mailed out that she has run out of money?
Odd reticence -- she says in her latest post that Nathan's family are basically a bunch of turds, that the confrontation almost became violent, that she has no respect for the wife whatsoever. Yet she won't mention Nathan's real name to the newspapers without the family's permission. Is this family worthy of such consideration? Besides, deaths are a matter of public record. I, for one, would be more convinced if I had a name and the address of the funeral home where I could send flowers or a donation to O.U.C.H. in memory of Nathan.
Furthering an agenda -- Her reaction to Nathan's suicide is to proclaim to the world that "SHROOMS WORK". The whole message is centered around the concept that "if only he had taken the shrooms" this would never have happened... i.e. people are literally DYING because shrooms are illegal.
Fishy alias -- she posts as "Little Liberty". A very common kind of psilocybin mushroom is called "Liberty Cap", and they are very small. This is the kind that Flash uses, and that August and Q and Graham tried. Many of the posters to the mushroom forums, (The Shroomery and DroolDonkey) use screen names that are puns on mushroom names... i.e. "Azure", "Amanita", "Silly Simon", etc.
I have a very strong suspicion that someone, probably a shroomhead from DroolDonkey, perhaps with the very best of intentions, has concocted this whole thing, from start to finish.
One of the reasons I think this may be so is that in my original post to DroolDonkey (in the Experimentation Forum, the thread titled "Stamets used Aspirin") I used the term "suicide headaches", and explained how they got that nickname. Now, I realize that people DO commit suicide from these headaches, but suicides are certainly rare. How many do you actually know of? I can't remember EVER reading of a suicide on CH.com. Help me out here, you veterans of CH.com. Can anyone point me to a post mentioning another one?
Anyway, if you follow the "Stamets used Aspirin" thread, as well as the "Cluster Headaches... the Cure!" thread, you can see that one guy got pretty impassioned about helping out clusterheads, repeating the suicide angle in nearly every post. For what it's worth I doubt very much that he is Little Liberty, for a number of reasons. But he was not the only Donkey to jump on the bandwagon. His posts got read by a LOT of people, several of which advocated mailing shrooms to clusterheads. Maybe one of those people picked up on the "suicide headache" angle and thought it would be a good idea to invent "Little Liberty".
I admit that maybe all of these discrepancies, coincidences, apparent contradictions, timing issues, etc., when taken seperately, may have innocent explanations. I sure hope that is the case... or maybe not, because that would mean that there really is a Nathan, and he really did commit suicide. But when you consider all these odd things in light of another explanation -- a hoax -- well... you tell me.
I'm feeling sick about this whole thing. It sucks, one way or the other. If someone is jerking us all off, it sucks bigtime. If a clusterhead really did kill himself, it sucks even worse.
If my suspicions can be allayed by a clarifying post from Little Liberty, I will apologize immediately, sincerely, abjectly and profusely.