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Comment by tranchms | Hacker News Reader

I hear ya. I’ve yet to see it negatively effect anyone other than a bad trip, which, seen in the right light, can be a therapeutic experience.

But I know they need to be respected and understood.

I also realize that some people with a family history of mental disorders like schizophrenia, would be better off staying away.

Like, some people have used psychedelics, and they go crazy. But how many of those people were crazy to begin with? How many would end up like that if they never tried psychedelics to begin with?

I tend to think that the fear is over dramatized.

But I do emphasize respecting its use in a profound way.

It changes you.

The upside is that real LSD is so rare, the chances of people finding it are slim to non. It’s distributed by so few people.

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I watched a good friend freak out in front of me on a bad trip. Almost thirty years later he's still not the same and needs antipsychotic medication to function. This kind of thing isn't common but it can definitely happen.

It's entirely possible that LSD uncovered or accentuated an underlying flaw in your friend's psyche...

It probably did but that flaw wasn't obvious at all beforehand. He was a bit eccentric but also a really bright and funny guy with a lot of friends and a very dedicated student.

This is the common response from proponents of LSD. To them, it's never the LSD, and instead the adverse reaction must be because the person had a mind that was predisposed to some sort of mental illness.

Even if it's true that someone has some kind of latent / dormant condition that is ultimately triggered by the LSD, then the act of taking the LSD itself was the catalyst, and the person would have been far better off not ever having taken the drug.

The drug is illegal, and the argument growing up was that the "government was suppressing free thought" or whatever nonsense was being pushed, but the reality is that such a drug is dangerous and absolutely does hurt people. Whether connected to a predisposition of mental illness or not, it's not a hard connection and people should be extra cautious when considering whether to engage in such behavior.

Care should be taken, like with any substance we ingest. However, I disagree with your premise.

We do not know if LSD was in fact the catalyst. We don’t know if the people who got ruined after taking a single tab of LSD actually took LSD or some research chemical (which are quite commonly sold off as LSD).

Yeah, 2CI is for example very dangerous psychologically, and I’m sure it gets sold as LSD when an unscrupulous dealer has excess inventory.

Some research psychedelics are more dangerous physically, and certainly less researched, but in terms of psychological effects, all psychedelics are generally pretty similar. It's silly to assume LSD is somehow significantly less likely to cause psychological trouble.

I agree, it only should be available to those, who are already in danger by pre-existing conditions like chronic depression or other similar serious mental conditions.

What's your evidence that those people are worse off having taken the psychedelics? You can't know the counterfactual isn't that those people who respond poorly to the drug would have had a similar mental break without it. Until the drug is studied rigorously all we have to go on are conflicting anecdotes. That said in the face of a lack of reliable information caution is warranted.

Even if that person would not have taken LSD and would have had a psychotic episode 5 years later due to the underlying issue, that's still 5 years of good health lost because of LSD.

Or it’s 5 years less of post-treatment life.

We can make random guesses all day about what’s a good outcome but how about we leave it to medical researchers to actually figure out what’s safe and beneficial?

It seems pretty delusional to just say these people would have spontaneously lost their minds even if they didn't do extremely powerful mind altering drugs.

It seems pretty delusional to make conclusions when you don't even know if they really took LSD or something sold as LSD, but actually dangerous, and are missing basically all other important data other than "they took something and then became crazy", while the then in the sentence means "after that", as in time, not "because of that".

It’s literally guaranteed that some of them would have.

So if someone takes any medication and strokes out, has an MI, or stops breathing, we can't blame the drug because maybe that was going to happen anyway?

Usually, yes. That's why we haven't banned Tylenol.

>The drug is illegal,

Only in certain contexts (ie. some instances of interstate commerce).

>The drug is illegal

>but the reality is that such a drug is dangerous and absolutely does hurt people.

With this reasoning, skydiving, base jumping, and even the act of simply driving a car should should also be illegal. We let people do far more dangerous things, yet keep them legal. There is another reason LSD & most psychedelics are illegal. What that is, I don't know.

That’s the point - there are other, slower, safer means to effect positive change on your mind that don’t run the risk of fucking up your brain from some random effect you had no way of predicting. The point is that it’s effects are powerful, which is why there is finally a revival into what exactly is happening.

I don’t understand this common response at all.

If I prescribe penicillin to a patient with a pcn allergy, the fact that I “uncovered an underlying flaw” is irrelevant. Pcn is dangerous to them and should not be prescribed to them.

This is true, in one sense or another, of the majority of adverse effects people have from medications given in therapeutic ranges. It’s basically what having an adverse effect -means-.

It doesn’t mean that medication shouldn’t be given when appropriate, but it’s not a rationale for deflecting attention from the risks of the medication.

The difference is that penicillin allergies can only be triggered by penicillin (or maybe penicillin-adjacent analogues). Mental illnesses and psychedelics don't work the same way.

Psychedelics bring these issues to the forefront, but they don't necessarily cause mental health issues, as the same issues could happen without LSD. I understand what you're trying to express with your example of penicillin, but it's not the same thing.

In my opinion, it would be more accurate to compare psychedelic drugs to activities like meditation and fasting, which also have a risk of anxiety, discomfort, and bringing out dormant mental health issues in some people.

A good mindset of psychedelic use is that you’d like things to be brought to the surface so they can be worked with and integrated.

This is precisely what makes them such useful tools for things like PTSD and why it can be a bummer if someone does Molly at a rave and winds up with a memory of being molested and her friends are too busy doing K to talk with her.

In a safe and supportive setting, this is exactly what can help people heal.

It’s when things get uncovered but not fully released and processed they can occupy ones life.

A good psychedelic therapist or sitter should be able to help someone integrat a current or former bad trip.

Psychedelics are not just spiritual/mental. They can literally alter your brain chemistry and, in rare cases, cause severe adverse effects. There need to be more studies done on the brain chemistry so we know how to predict and prevent those adverse effects.

> In my opinion, it would be more accurate to compare psychedelic drugs to activities like meditation and fasting

I've done all 3 of these (meditation as in mindfulness), and I disagree.

Of these 3, meditation is the most harmless. It is relaxing, not discomforting (I'll hook into this again at the end of my post).

Someone can start meditating or fasting without guidance (though I recommend guidance in both cases, especially concerning fasting) and resume normal life whenever they feel like it. With psychedelics, that one doesn't fly and if you do meditation in a group such as a 10 day Vipassana course or are in a religion or cult being forced to fast then you might also feel the same pressure. But that's an outlier; in general, meditation doesn't have such -or any- pressure. It is relaxing.

Finally, I've followed a mindfulness course for people with autism and there is no such thing as that with regards to psychedelics. The psychedelics also affected my autism, and in some situations made it much worse. All of that while I wasn't aware I had autism!

> It is relaxing, not discomforting

Meditation practice is not relaxing at all. The effect after meditating might be in part feeling relaxed, but in general meditation is pretty hard work.

This is probably a very common misconception, you see all the pictures of people meditating at the beach in front of a beautiful sunset and think that meditating is like going to the spa, when in fact meditating is much more like the mental equivalent of going to the gym.

Also, in many occasions (especially during a 10 day retreat like Vipassana), it can be very uncomfortable if not outright physically painful (although usually never dangerous).

For me mindfulness is far more relaxing than studying, watching a TV series, working, programming, etc (all "active" things). Never mind socializing which is the opposite of relaxing to me, ALWAYS (autism-related). Although it differs per technique (some are easier and fit me more than others).

Especially the effect after it makes that work more fruitful, since for various hours I'll be less tense and more focused. For example, it'd make socializing more relaxing.

Those are 2 very valid reasons for me to call it relaxing. Then again, I find running and listening to certain music also relaxing. Because after a while, I get in an automated flow ("trance") akin to meditating.

The 3rd reason is that if I'm rather tired, mindfulness can potentially get me to sleep. I often (almost daily) do it before I go to sleep, and it aids me to get to sleep. I much prefer it over: overthinking, fantasizing, or masturbating/sex.

Its already painful for me to meditate whilst sitting instead of lying but one gets used to that. Its just untrained muscles getting trained. As long as you don't strain yourself, you're fine.

This isn't a useful distinction unless you can reliably identify the flaw before the negative impact of LSD. Without a detection mechanism, this is as actionable as "LSD does bad things to some people"

I've seen this too but not from just one trip. I've seen heavy users kind of never come back.

I suspect your friend had latent psychotic tendencies. Would be interesting to look at family history.

These are powerful drugs that seem capable of both helping and doing harm. They should definitely be used with care, studied, and not abused.

Of course what the war on drugs did was to ban the scientific study of these things and push them exclusively onto the street where they did get abused.

The existence of undiagnosed disorders and the potential presence of effective coping skills/supportive stable home environment/unstressed personality/late-onset symptoms would preclude reliance on prior indicators of determining fitness for a given psychedelic.

Family histories are not always clearly diagnosed. That hypothetical uncle you've never met and no one talks about? Unknown mental health flag.

Self-diagnosis of a mental/emotional state that calls for drug-taking is itself a clue that not all is so normal in the individual's mind--or is it something wrong in the world the person wants to relate to better? Who can know but the one supposedly experiencing an unnaccepted state? Observing/deciding/dosing by the selfsame suffering/diagnosing/tripping individual sounds risky, because if the downside is a long future of some degree of insanity, it is only a variety of Russian Roulette.

To allow scientific studies, fund them, possibly create therapies is to also conquer the stigmas involved in substantial ways and that process is tectonically, multi-generationally slow (or impossible).

What was the set and setting for your friend?

What was going on in his life at the time?

Who was with him and how did they work with his “freak out”?

It sounds like he lacked the set, setting and support to integrate that experience in a healthy way.

It can happen with various meditation and yogic practices as well, and the effects can be just as severe and long lasting. I suspect that some people’s minds are in an unstable equilibrium that, when perturbed, sends them way off balance, and it is a state that no one would have been privy to before some traumatic experience acted as a trigger.

The rate of psychosis in clinical studies appears to be very low, and they carefully select research subjects.

I would suggest that psychedelics cannot take a person with zero risk of developing psychosis, and make them psychotic. There are many apparent triggers for mental illness eg a failed relationship, a drug binge, losing your job, giving birth etc, and we don’t treat these as causal events. Psychedelics are most likely no different. People at risk of developing psychosis may have a greater willingness to try psychedelics as well, creating a biased sample.

If we ever do get regulated access to psychedelics, it will need some process to exclude ‘at risk’ persons. This will be crude and highly exclusionary at the start. Over time, genomics and brain imaging may allow more careful selection of those who can take psychedelics safely.

> People at risk of developing psychosis

Psychosis is an episodic condition caused by metabolic failure. Contributing factors include malnourishment, alcohol withdrawal, chronic stress, certain prescription and OTC drugs, street drugs, etc. People would recover from psychosis if given supportive treatment - good nutrition, B-vitamins (liver, yeast, etc), appropriate pro-metabolic prescriptions, naltrexone to keep them off alcohol, etc.

My observations of the standard treatments forced on "psychotic" patients is that they are only useful for preventing the patient's recovery. My aunt's friend was always sort of 'off', now she's dying of liver failure. Didn't know until now that she's been on maintenance antipsychotics for decades, even though the trigger for her episode concluded decades ago.

Someone does not need to have a "family history of mental disorders" to become an acid casualty. Some people simply have a bad reaction to the chemical and there isn't a reliable way of knowing in advance how a person might react to it.

How do they know if what they’ve taken is actually LSD-25, and not some research chemical?

Research chemicals pawned off as LSD is more common than ever. They are dangerous psychotic inducing deugs.

How do they know if what they’ve taken is actually LSD-25, and not some research chemical?

Anyone who has become an ‘acid casualty’ was dosed with these dangerous research chemicals, and everyone who was just fine had legitimate LSD?

Are you suggesting that’s impossible or improbable given the prevalence of fake LSD as well as research chemicals being sold as LSD-25?

My implicit suggestion was that the viewpoint expressed in my comment (as a question) is a ridiculous logical fallacy.

Reading the other comments I see that others have expressed the same thought.

It’s a hypothesis.

I heard LSD is rarely synthesized now and instead people end up with research chemicals (now scheduled) like 2C-B instead. Do you know if this is true?

It's not. There are reliable LSD vendors on the dark markets.

True. In fact chances you're buying LSD nowadays is almost zero. And I suspect this is the reason of many bad experiences described in this topic

Where do you get that information from? What are people taking when we see articles on HN talk about the benefits of micro dosing?

Test kits, test kits, test kits, TEST KITS. This whole thread needs test kits.

Do you have any research to suggest people can become an “acid casualty”?

This seems to be more lore than fact.

And recent meta analysis shows that psychedelic use has no negative impacts on mental health (and in many cases, is beneficial).

Can you cite research that backs that up? I have a friend who it brought out/caused his schizophrenia. I understand it may have occurred naturally eventually because he has a family history but having it occur when he was 20 is much worse than later in life.

It’s incredibly irresponsible to say it has no negative impacts without more research being done in the area.

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-studies-fail-find-associ...

This study seems to suggest classical psychedelics do not cause mental illness which I will not argue against. However, as someone diagnosed as schizophrenic in 2012 and now considered bipolar with pyschotic features my last use of LSD caused a pyschotic break. I had a great trip, but I took the drug at 9pm before a festival and by the time I made it to 6am I could not slow down the frentic pace of thoughts in my brain and calm down enough to sleep and my pyschosis manifested itself despite my experience with hallucinogens and previous pyschotic episodes. I was in a stable state and it was the night of lsd that destabilized me. I haven't experimented with psychedelics since even though I have had some of the most powerful and positive experiences on lsd and mushrooms. It is not worth the risk of ending up in handcuffs again. I do not wish the mental ward on anyone. So my advice is respect these substances and your body because altering your mind opens you to possibilities beyond considerations of sober thought. People like me should not use these substances, and you may not realise you are like me until you do. I knew I probably shouldn't but my experience led me to believe I could handle any trip, that an lsd trip is a drop in a bucket compared my psychosis, but I learned that drop was all my body needed to propel me into another episode.

I’m sorry you had such an intense experience!

I was diagnosed with schizophrneia and Biploar. I found that mdma in a theraputic setting helped me heal the underlying condition and resulted in an elimination of symptoms.

I’ve also had psychosis induced by psychedelics, however I also saw how the psychosis was a result of deeper held beliefs that weren’t serving. The psychosis ended up resolving with a much deeper sense of self and compassion.

That said, with a clear understanding of psychosis, how to work with and integrate it, and a theraputic setting for psychedelic use, folks might want to avoid it.

Psychedelics helped me heal without medication.

You could say the same thing about anything that anyone has ever had an allergic reaction to.

I’ve seen a friend become semi dependent and kinda disassociated from reality after multiple times a week use of various research chemical psychedelics. It seemed to bring out some underlying bipolar like condition.

Anyway; also a strong proponent, but I’ve seen the potential harm as well. On the balance it seems worthwhile for many people, and good for many people to try a little LSD at least once.

Research chemicals are dangerous.

They’re mostly all synthetics derived from amphetamine class of drugs like MDMA.

2CE. 2CB. 2CI. Etc. and countless others. No one taking them know what it truly is.

They are dangerous. And more ubiquitous than LSD-25.

You can never be sure what you’re getting. You can OD and have a psychotic episode.

I do not classify them as therapeutic psychedelics, and always advise against.

If you ever take a tab of LSD and it’s bitter or metallic, or anything but absolutely flavorless or just paper, do not take. Spit it out.

This is an idiosyncratic opinion to say the least.

2C-E, 2C-B, and 2C-I are what they are, single compounds, just as LSD-25 is. They are phenethylamines, related to mescaline, the substance for which the term "psychedelic" was coined.

They are synthetic, as is LSD, and have a wide therapeutic index. Being less potent by weight, it is easier to measure a specific dose than with LSD, which is commonly put on paper or taken in liquid form.

Getting "puddled" from a bottle of LSD is a more likely route to a psychotic episode than anything 2C-I or 2C-B have to offer; 2C-E is a different beast.

It's fine that you have these opinions, I guess. It's just that most of them are wrong and I wouldn't want others to be mislead.

Anecdotally I’ve consumed 50-75 100mcg doses of 1P-LSD over the last year and found it almost indistinguishable from LSD. Not to mention easier and safer to obtain (directly from a research lab).

Obviously there is no research on long term effects at this point, and there may never be, but for my personal therapeutic rituals it’s affectiveness is the same.

It’s also worth noting that I’m not microdosing, which you may have assumed from my doses over time. I’m taking it once a week at an average dose of 300-600mcg with a 1-2 week break every 4 weeks (obviously I didn’t start at this dose when I first tried it). Along with other health supplements and exercise just so were clear.

I am an experienced psychonaut, but I’m not a doctor, and I’m not here to champion 1P-LSD nor my personal rituals. But this is my experience.

Cool! Glad to see mention of 1P here. I'm a fan of it myself.

Isn't 1P-LSD the ones that metabolizes into LSD-25?

AFAIK it has not been proven if it breaks down into lsd-25 of if 1p itself fits into the 5-ht receptor as it’s own in vivo.

>It has been theorized that 1P-LSD may act as a prodrug for LSD. While 1P-LSD shows only 38% the potency of LSD in mice, LSD is detected via LC-MS when 1P-LSD is incubated in human serum. Follow-up studies are currently being conducted to compare the affinity and selectivity of LSD and 1P-LSD at 5-HT receptors, and to determine whether 1P-LSD is hydrolyzed to LSD in vivo.[1] Otherwise, it is possible that 1P-LSD may be capable of exerting its own psychedelic effect.

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/1P-LSD

The really dangerous stuff is the NBOMEs which were being sold as LSD maybe 7 years ago. This is why we need legalization, so people can be sure what they're getting.

This is a bit reductions. There is a lot of research chemicals that are very safe analogues, e.g. 4-ACO-DMT or 1P-LSD. Often times more safe because when you purchase these its from a lab that does testing and you know exactly what you're getting.

The real danger of Research Chemicals is the large amount of cheap drugs of other classes produced that have similar effects and are labeled and sold as LSD. Very few people are buying those type of drugs and taking them on purpose. And they are incredibly dangerous.

This seems to me to be a very dogmatic approach.

One can be sure of what one is getting with proper testing. Some are dangerous, others less so.

Personally I enjoyed my experiences with some of them.

Although far from non-existent, none of the chemicals you list are more ubiquitous than acid nor usually sold as acid. Actually, their effective dose range is about 100x that of acid and it would be hard to impossible to fit them on a tab.

NBOMEs are something you did see sold as acid especially a few years back, so I'm not saying you shouldn't be careful. The difference in effect is fairly easy to tell, though, and I have no doubt most stuff sold is the real thing. There are some closely related and nearly indistinguishable compounds, but as far as I know, they are about as hard to synthesize and should have a similar risk profile as LSD.

>And more ubiquitous than LSD-25.

that is CERTAINLY false.

It's worth noting that people can know what they are taking (within a statistical certainly) by sending their substances off to somewhere like Energy Control, or another analytical lab for testing. Most people don't do it, but it is possible to know what you've got.

https://energycontrol-international.org/

> But I do emphasize respecting its use in a profound way.

You did not emphasize in any profound way.

You did imply though that it invariably changes everyone, and never was anyone you know changed for the worse. So it changes everyone for the better. But you ask, surely because you are not sure, whether those who were crazy afterwards had to be crazy to begin with. So, the only thing you really emphasized was your ignorance. What does that mean to you? Everyone is a little crazy to begin with. Thus estimates about sanity are rather distorted and a small sample group not enough, especially if you are biased by preoccupation.

Real LSD is not that rare. You know, people can and many do have their stuff tested. There was a bit of a dry season in the early 2000s but not anymore. This is variation of the stupid old "clean" vs "dirty" acid myth.

Anyway, you're probably right in the sense that there are only a handful of original sources for it. But once you get the production going, you quickly end up with a crapload of doses.

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