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If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one...

A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks.

Stay safe kids.

Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open

Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes

My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24.

I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontrolled settings.

These anecdotes are always sad, but you have no way of confirming whether they took a normal sized dose of actual LSD, or whether they took a shitload of some unknown research chemical. Also, as you wrote, set and setting are important and those are not described.

Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people.

For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.

> negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person

Based on the anecdotes in this thread, I'm getting the impression that when you have a really bad trip, you don't make it back to tell the story in the first person. The only people left to tell are the observers.

That’s preposterous.

Are you a stock shill trying to devalue the rising psychedelic industry or something?

The observers also have not made it to this thread. They would be second party. We are hearing from people who have heard from observers. At least two links of trust necessary.

I've taken acid with three people who I later found out suffered from schizophrenia, and in all three cases they had had psychotic episodes years before I had met them. The first of these three definitely went from normal-seeming to more and more intense over the course of taking acid with them - he even drew his own version of the famous schizophrenic cats in doodles on people's doors at university.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain#/media/File:Louis_w...

"Friends mother" typically has ability to talk and there is no reason to assume she did not talked about flashbacks in person.

It reminds me of something I read here the other week, one third of Americans know someone who died of coronavirus. So telling stories about what happened to a friend works as a sort of "probability amplifier": it only takes one event for a lot of people to have a happened-to-a-friend story.

And that's before we even take into account the risk of mistelling that increases with second-hand information.

I know this isn't your point, but I actually did lean too far back in a chair and crack my head open on the table behind me. I had to go to the ER and get sutures.

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