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Comment by 19793378 | Hacker News Reader

19793378

Not the poster, but I had to stop smoking weed because of anxiety and paranoia. I have also taken magic mushrooms in a variety of doses, up to 7g dried, and have not experienced any anxiety or paranoia like I did with weed. I had one magic mushroom experience that started out as a really bad trip, but I was able to manage the anxiety and ride it out until halfway through, when it became a wonderful, uplifting, euphoric experience. Contrast that to that one time I did a dab and had a panic attack and couldn't do anything about it.

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I have to disagree. While weed certainly can and does induce anxiety on occasion it is no where near as intense as magic mushroom trips. It’s not on the same level.

A mushroom trip can leave you feeling refreshed regardless but if you have a bad trip it may expose you to your deepest and darkest fears and become a terrifying nightmarish experience that weed couldnt induce if you tried.

The horror of a bad a trip didn’t necessarily teach me anything other than to respect mushrooms much more than weed.

I have had friends say the same. There is no comparison of the paranoia from weed vs the absolute horror of a bad trip.

I feel that people who say there is havent really done a lot of either to know the difference.

It's very dose dependent.

"At a dosage of 1.6 grams in a therapeutic clinical environment, we might expect 0% of people to experience some extreme fear, for an average of around 1 minute of strong anxiety, and we might expect around ~45% to report a persisting positive increase in mood from this dosage assuming they had first tried 0.8 grams, and then 1.6 grams5"

Via https://tripsafe.org/how-to-take-shrooms/#start-small

Based on studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27578767 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308357/table/T... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308357/

>> The horror of a bad a trip didn’t necessarily teach me anything other than to respect mushrooms much more than weed.

Give it time. It can take a decade of reflection to untangle/parse.

> I feel that people who say there is havent really done a lot of either to know the difference.

I don't know why you are dismissing my experience like that, or why you think that I do not have a lot of experience. Have you ever had a panic attack? Anxiety and paranoia are something I would get consistently from weed. I never felt the same anxiety, and never felt paranoia, on mushrooms. I never had a panic attack from mushrooms. Almost every psychedelic trip I take (between 50-60 so far) has a range of negative aspects, but I am able to better control myself, something that is not the case with marijuana. I have experienced terror on both mushrooms and LSD, and I was able to keep it together and turn it around every time. FWIW, I also prefer to do relatively large doses (3-5 grams mushrooms, 2-7 hits of LSD).

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