A bad acid trip nearly ruined my life
blackshaw.substack.com
blackshaw.substack.com
Do you really need a warning?
It might not have been proper LSD in the first place. There is synthetic LSA on the market, which gives LSD-type effects for 20-hours instead of the 8-hours of LSD, which has dramatically worse effects on both dopamine and dorepinephrine because of the long stimulation. The result is very bad trips with serious anxiety and paranoia.
Small dose in wrong setting: maybe not great but you'll be fine
Large dose in good setting: good
Key things: - 15 minute onset - Massive hallucinations - Only lasted a few hours
LSD takes 45 minutes to start the effects and lasts around 12 hours. As mentioned in the article, you don’t hallucinate big scenes or things that aren’t there.
I once had a similar experience where I took some random tabs from a guy in a bar. I immediately had effects with in 15 minutes, with some big visuals. The trip was pretty intense, but not as bad as the author’s. The trip was over in around 5-6 hours. It was definitely a research chemical and not LSD.
Absolutely false. Set and setting are crucial.
> Suffice to say that I was far from home in an unfamiliar (and public) environment with people I didn’t know very well and had little reason to trust.
Stopped reading after this part -- Taking psychedelics in such circumstances is a horrible idea!
> In other words, it was as unsuitable an environment for psychedelic experimentation as I could have designed [...]
> I’m not here to play victim; no permanent damage was done, and there are worse traumas.
> I’ve taken psychedelics again since that day with positive results and I’ll continue to enjoy them in moderation.
Reading other people's creative writing regarding drug trips is as interesting as hearing someone telling their dreams: amusing sometimes.
I’ve had a trip not dissimilar to what is described herein, and while the experience itself was jarring, to say the least, the upshot was that it allowed me to divest myself of an awful lot of the reified bull that we consider to be our world.
For me, being nothing, being everything, being utterly alone, being a barely existent mote in a vast and incomprehensible universe, resonated - for that is what I am - nothing, dust, a brief flickering of matter in a certain organisation against a dark background. Statistically irrelevant noise, indistinguishable from black body radiation at a distance.
For some, ego death is debilitating, for others, liberating - again, I suppose it’s down to the beholder, how invested you are in the false reality that we collectively agree upon, how deep down the rabbit hole you are consciously willing to go, regardless of the psychic pain it inevitably involves as you reassess yourself from “centre of your personal universe” to “statistically non-existent”.
I guess I was at least somewhat primed and prepared when it happened, already being well schooled in the likes of Baudrillard, Dick, and other psychedelically influenced existentialists, and having some context to give me a grasp (as much as one can have a grasp on the slippery fish of reality) on what just happened.
Perhaps… perhaps the bad trip actually came close to freeing him from his personal black iron prison, but upon seeing the vastness of the outside, he decided he preferred the safety and constancy of captivity.
If someone wrote an article titled "Alcohol nearly ruined my life", most people wouldn't translate it into "No one should ever drink alcohol"
The oddly defensive comments which are much lower quality than I'd expect on this site are still posted.
I find salvia entirely tolerable, even enjoyable, but strong edibles push my shit in somehow.
Sounds like this person's other experiences have just been microdosing.
But you had bad feelings during your trip. Yeah that sucks. It happens.
For anyone curious Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a Fuck [1] which is a pretty entertaining book all things considered. As far as "self help" books go I personally find them all relatively fruitless/pointless, but I also might not be the target audience for them. With that said, I did enjoy his book and his anecdotes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...
I don't want to be too insensitive but I don't understand how that's getting even a little close to life ruining.
I've had a similar experience before. It was scary, but it didn't bother me at all after. I understood I experienced my brain having it's wires crossed for a while and left it at that.
Not many meaningful conclusions you can draw from it except I should take less next time.
Probably because "I had a bad few months" isn't as good of a headline as "nearly ruined my life"
I had a fairly traumatic experience like the author's, it was relentlessly terrifying, and some of the things I saw were like precision bomb attacks on my ego that I couldn't just shake off by saying "well that wasn't real". I got over it fairly quickly, but I can fully imagine not being able to next time, and I will never be as cavalier with these things again.
It's great that you had a bad experience that you were able to cope with so easily. What does this have to do with the author's experience however?
Your "tl;dr" is needlessly mean-spirited and downplays the author's experiences. People can develop DP/DR and PTSD symptoms from bad trips. Some of those can last for a very long time and others really can worsen if no professional help is sought.
I always considered it kind of a fun challenge to use in odd settings but I always had completely certain way to end the trip with me, which can be a source of mental comfort even if not used.
Kinda contradicting himself here, but I sympathize with the author.