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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> socially harmless. Nobody gets addicted to them, there are no known negative health effects.

Not true.

My friend woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed after a bad trip on mushrooms. He saw his dead body in the street and was convinced he was dead and a ghost. He then went running around Manhattan traffic jumping on cars.

An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.

I am not saying psychedelics should remain banned. But to casually call them harmless is incredibly irresponsible. They need to be taken under supervision by people with experience. This is called trip sitting. Not all trips are good as emotions and state of mind can effect the outcome. Things can go wrong fast. Be safe.

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if you are worried about the harmful behavioral effects of psychedelics, consider that a significant fraction of all violent crimes involve alcohol:

* 15% of robberies

* 37% of sexual assaults

* 27% of aggravated assaults

* 60% of domestic violence (victim reported)

* 40% of child abusers (self reported)

* 40% of convicted murderers (self reported)

* 30% of traffic violence fatalities

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/crimes/

psychedelics are essentially insignificant and are almost never involved in violence.

Sounds like both should be illegal then?

No, it means both should be legal and the behavior is what should be prosecuted, not the substance taken.

> An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.

What behavior could be prosecuted here except for giving someone LSD without supervision?

Who do we prosecute when a motorcyclist crashes into a tree at 120 mph?

We should prosecute the US institute of traffic engineers since it’s literally in their model policy that streets must be designed so you can go fast enough to kill yourself, and the correct number of pedestrian deaths before considering any mitigations is significantly more than none.

So if you go faster than kill-yourself speed a missile gets fired and evaporates you? Or how are you supposed to make a street that doesn't allow you to go fast enough to kill yourself?

Make 'em wiggly and add stop signs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/

The trope of people jumping out of windows on LSD is entirely Art Linkletter's fault for not being able to accept his daughter's suicide, but instead blaming in on the fact that she had mentioned that she had done LSD before.

Since, if you're on LSD (or pretending to be) and acting out, the first thing you're expected to do is talk about how you can fly and threatening to jump out of the window. It's silly. No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic, and the trope has proved longer lasting than the memory of Art or Diane Linkletter.

edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-scarlet-linkletter/

> Diane’s death helped spread a widespread urban legend that lives on to this day, although it was around well before her fatal plunge. According to a popular story that warns young people about the dangers of drug use, “some girl” jumps from a window while on an acid trip because the drug fools her into thinking she can fly. The claims immediately made after Diane’s death that she had been on LSD, coupled with her method of suicide, seemed to some to fit this existing cautionary tale, and afterwards her demise was pointed to as an example of this legend’s coming true.

> No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic

Salvinorin-a on the other hand has (slightly?) more potential for this scenario. Users can experience what they call “salvia gravity,” a sensation of being pulled in some particular direction, which they follow with their body. I saw someone curl into and begin to lean against a 2nd-floor window screen. His friends kept him safe for the ~7 minutes the trip lasted. If he had been alone though, he could have fallen out.

I don’t know how common that effect is, and it’s quite different from the folklore of people thinking they can fly on acid. This is just a PSA for the few people who are interested in trying that particular drug.

That seems like an odd argument for a substance that disconnects you from your actions.

Yes. And.

I often hear stories about people tripping on mushrooms getting upto mischief. When I did I always find that, along with the mushrooms, there was a bottle of whiskey, or equivalent.

My culture is awash with alcohol. It is hard to disentangle the dreadful effects of the alcohol overdose experience form the psychedelic experience after consuming a bottle of whiskey.

I am worried about self harm.

in that case, consider that around a third of all suicides are actively drunk at the time, and people addicted to alcohol suffer as much as a 120x greater suicide risk

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/resources/dual-diagnosis/a...

and then consider the mortality and harm caused directly by consumption of alcohol, which is significant, and one of the statistically largest causes of death at 140,000 people killed per year

https://nccd.cdc.gov/DPH_ARDI/

and once again, the involvement of psychedelics with with suicide is extremely limited and rare. psychedelics are often self-reported as a source of long-term relief from suicidal feelings, after even a single experience.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8033757/

Are you worried about self-harm that psychedelics are able to prevent?

From my read of the scientific literature, most situations like the ones you describe are at least partially caused by underlying disorders that pre-existed (and manifested). And the second one you describe is a pretty common story to be told (same rumor at my college).

> From my read of the scientific literature, most situations like the ones you describe are at least partially caused by underlying disorders that pre-existed (and manifested).

Do you have a qualifying medical certificate and professionally diagnosed my friend? The answer is no. So don't try to down play a serious incident you have ZERO knowledge of.

> And the second one you describe is a pretty common story to be told (same rumor at my college).

When my teacher told us the story she was quite emotional and serious. It could be a well intentioned lie to discourage "drug use" but again, you have no way of knowing the truth so knock it off.

> Do you have a qualifying medical certificate and professionally diagnosed my friend?

It's weird that you yourself don't require these kinds of qualifications to participate in this discussion. I guess you don't need them in order to disqualify people from disagreeing with you.

Note that my text was written to not specifically say that you lied, or misinterpreted the situation. my point was "the average observation is not entirely consistent with your anecdote", and "if a person does a crazy thing on drugs, it may not have been the drugs that made them crazy"

(as for credentials- no, no actual medical credentials, but I do have a phd in biophysics [emphasis on drug discovery], and have worked in the field of medical biology for decades). More importantly, my goal is here to avoid the "reefer madness" effect by countering establishment propaganda and college rumors with my read of the scientific literature, and also to raise awareness that mental illness is common and that psychedelic drugs can be a precipitating condition that turns a maintained disease into an emergency.

Trip responsibly,

Is that any less reason to think this isn’t a good idea? How many latent, otherwise-benign disorders might become manifest if people experiment with these drugs?

Or with alcohol, or with religion, or with watching movies about time travel.

Is there a Biff Tannen copycat crime spree I wasn’t aware of?

China has been concerned that time-travel movies cause people to lose their grip on reality.

How are these two scenarios different in practice?

1. Someone has had a latent mental disorder since birth, which then manifested itself permanently upon taking psychedelics, and would have never manifested itself without them

2. Someone who originally had no mental disorders developed a permanent one from taking psychedelics

Just replace "psychedelics" with "*" because the general question is interesting, not psychedelics. People have just sort of gone along with the idea that psychedelics precipitate mental illness more than other drugs, or other life activities. There isn't really strong data for that with LSD.

An English teacher you say... you have a reference for that - or is that just an iteration/mutation of the original story? (Frank Olson)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

Basically a chemist gets secretly drugged with a massive dose of LSD, then nine whole days later allegedly jumps out the window of a hotel... this was after he was declared a possible security risk...

So more than likely he was helped out that window.

If not that - it was probably the guilt: for being a part of MKUltra and the clandestine drugging of American citizens - he had a moral crisis, that much is certain.

I'm not saying your story isn't true... but I've been on the internet long enough to see how stories morph over time.

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