LSD: Not Even Once
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1 - blaming of the person who had the experience, for not having the proper “set and setting”, or not respecting the drug.
2 - claiming that there’s no such thing as a “bad trip”, and only a challenging one that takes time to integrate.
There might be some truth to both of those things, but I think it vastly undersells how incredibly destabilizing a “bad trip” can be.
The primary thing I learned from spending an eternity in hell on two of my trips? That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing. A few years later and I can no longer feel much of the trauma of the experience, but there were months were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.
Currently I feel that there’s nothing about life or myself that I can learn on drugs that I can’t learn in other (safer) ways.
I’m glad people have massively positive experiences on drugs, but I worry that we’re underselling the risks when we just say “just check your set and setting, and remember that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad trip’, just a challenging one”.
When I was 8 or 9 I had a night terror that involved some sort of life-sized game of Tetris that was moving terribly fast. My brain wholly adopted the belief that if I were to lose, everyone I loved would die horribly. I was trapped in this night terror for what felt like forever. Afterwards I refused to sleep voluntarily for weeks.
To this date, nothing has come close. I would describe the feeling as “dread.” Just complete, pure dread.
My “bad trips” brought back that same feeling, but magnified by a thousand.
I also experienced these feelings later on psychedelics and in some other circumstances of adult duress.
I really do wonder what to make of the similarities.
Insufficiency. Futility. Infinitesimally unlikely. HAD to. Indifferent, malicious. Having to move things in a way that conflicted with the established physics of the situation.
I got to the point of rationalizing this as actually being some kind of memory of being born / memory of that trauma. The lack of all proportion to the sensation, along with the incredible stakes, feeling of pressure (literal and figurative) etc…
So interesting reading all these reports of the same type of thing!
The TV looked huge to me, and for some reason, it looked as if it would never be able to fit through the door again. Thinking that the TV was stuck in this room forever gave me the deepest sense of dread. Something had gone really wrong with the world. What would my family do when they realized that the TV was stuck? Would they cry desperately? Would they run away and leave me there? I just felt like life would never be the same again.
Rarely, now in my adulthood I start feeling similar but I realize what is happening and I can control how the objects turn big /small.
For me, the feeling of dread did not come from me "having to move spheres but not being able to" however. It came from "knowing that these spheres will be moving no matter what I do", but they would be moving "infinitely slowly", like one of those optical illusions [1] where things seem to move but they're not actually.
[1] https://twitter.com/sebjwallace/status/1384773017717420034
There's something really interesting here about this shared type of experience that many people are reporting. All a bit different, but a very similar feeling.
I feel like others online must have discussed this type of thing before, but I've also come up short when searching it. How do you even describe it or name it in such a way that is searchable? Has anyone come up with a name for it?
Now I kind of want to post this on Reddit or something to find more people with this experience, and maybe see if anyone has a name for it.
I've never done Salvia, but the descriptions I read about it from people remind me of this feeling as well. They often talk about a wheel and spinning movement and dread.
Lucid dreaming is totally learnable but internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend reliable sources to learn if anyone wants.
The second time I experienced it was during a weed "overdose". I will never do edibles again, nor will I ever do any stronger psychedelics. These two times were among the worst of my life.
This is also why I have a strong reaction when people are kind of dismissive of bad drug experiences. It was very much like a kind of torture.
I was around ten years old, and experiencing sleep walking mixed with nightmares once every few weeks.
My bedroom was on the attic floor, as was my brothers room and a play area by the stair case.
There was a gray and white “queen of solar mathematics” who was like a ghost, following me. She would not let me go back to sleep or leave me alone unless I could trace the floor plan of the attic into squares. I had to walk on the perimeters of the squares only, and if I messed up I had to start over from the corner. It felt like forever, I was more and more tired and making mistakes. I could see my body from above at the same time as being in it, like it was a video game.
Eventually I think I collapsed and woke up at a random spot early in the morning. My brother asked me what the hell I was doing.
Not saying you have it, I'm just drawing parallels between the way people's brains seem to suffer.
Is their a way to mitigate the nocebo effect of LSD? Setting helps? If you believe LDSD is bad or can be bad, then don't take it!
Sorry to say it, but that's the same what can happen when you're falling in love with someone. And if your love breaks, yes, most time you will find someone who will say 'You choosed the wrong person', like the wrong set&setting. But this is one of the more or less good endings, what when your partner dies? But would you ever warn someone to falling in love?
And that I say, who thinks LSD is not a drug for everyone.
This isn’t to discount the immense pain people feel from heartbreak or losing a loved one. Just that the human mind seems to have an incredibly large capacity for suffering, moreso than we’re aware even during the most painful moments of our lives.
However, bringing it up online (reddit, HN) I either get others chiming in with their negative experiences or I get blamed as if I have never done drugs before (i have, lots) or am inexperienced with LSD (I've tripped a half dozen times with good results), or didn't read this book or that online guide (I have)..
Anyway.. when I recommend LSD to new friends, it's to stay in the fun domain (50-150micrograms, go have fun at a music festival) and consider the myriad of other forms of therapy first.
This is what I do as well. People are gonna take drugs, I’m not trying to talk anyone out of that, so I recommend staying safe and sticking with low doses. But curiosity often comes calling anyway and people naturally want to delve deeper, and I worry a lot of people justify massive doses without proper preparation because they see so many people saying “oh, there’s no such thing as a bad trip!”.
I don't think we should prevent people from having those experiences of they really want to. But I've frequently noticed the people providing those recommandationa don't have any idea of the care that is required or the risks that are associated with that kind of experience.
Those risks are extremely frequently dismissed but sadly, they're real. The author of that article is one example, but they're many others and the consequences are very long lasting
Culturally, people raised in a 'more is better' consumer mentality are most at risk for this, or if they don't know what kind of dosage they're dealing with. One thing about the original post here is that they state they know the amount of LSD they took in terms of ug, but how would they? Also, how would they know the purity? Is it possible that some unreacted side product of a low-quality LSD synthesis damaged their visual nervous system, perhaps, leading to long-term effects, or was it due to a kind of neuronal rewiring process?
Bottom line: these drugs need attention from full-scale carefully managed scientific investigation, which has mostly been banned since the 1960s.
Hopefully over the next few decades this stuff can be decriminalized and can move towards more therapeutic environments. I believe that in the right circumstances they can improve/save lives.
(To be clear, that's not what I meant about fear mongering stories. I mean fictitious boogy man stories, like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/orange-juice-lsd/ . You can see the same thing with fentanyl today - fentanyl is deadly, but people still feel the need to exaggerate and attribute impossible characteristics to it, leading to panic attacks in cops that so much as touch it. In the same way, psychedelics are dangerous, but there was a time when people felt compelled to invent fictitious ways for them to be dangerous.)
Not only that, but the different "qualities" of pain one can experience. I never believed that grief would feel the way it felt when I first experienced it, and I was completely ignorant of it, until I went through it (I thought I understood grief through empathy, but I was wrong). How many subjective experiences are we ignorant of?
Absolutely. I think the best way to look at the psychedelic experience is as something that shows you a different way of perceiving reality that you should then seek to translate into long term change via spiritual practice.
For those who gets the most out of it, I don't hear them talking about taking it continually, all the time. Usually it shows them something that leads them to other things.
> but I worry that we’re underselling the risks
Anyone with an ounce of sense knows exactly what bans and prohibition lead to.
I don't mean to take away any of the "I had a bad time" stories, my point is prohibiting leads to worse times, mandatory paranoia, decreased likelihood to reach out for help in even medical emergencies, and that's without going into how areas which attempt to maintain a market for prohibited substances are turned into no-go war zones.
I would say the hand wavers are alluding to this reality.
I am a proponent of licensing of therapists and subject for their suitability to the psychedelic experience.
Not only is it not for everyone, it's suitable for a rare few who can take the whole thing seriously and understand the gravity of the experience.
At best, anxiety and communication between participants in a therapeutic setting can override any positive value. At worst participants can experience long term negative effects, as OP outlines, or end up like Syd Barret. (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/07/the-psychedelic-...)
That said, for those who do experience life-changing positive experiences, they are among the most valuable in their lives, and diminishing them as "fast" or "easy" is dishonorable.
One of the greatest issues with the human race is the idea of "if I think it's bad, then it's bad for you, too." (yes, indeed, switch the polarity, it's the same issue.) We seem to be addicted to saying what is best or worst for everyone.
In this age of ridiculous political polarization, driven primarily by complete imbeciles on both sides of the aisle. Psychedelics _can_ help some people see outside of their bubbles and reduce limitations in thinking.
If only we can treat such substances with respect and stop wrapping them up in cheerleading or doom mongering, we could probably benefit from them more routinely.
Just a counter example, muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries.
reading others online experiences, and the responses, there is often a lot of emphasis put on setting, ignoring set comes first. were you in a good place, internally, when you had your experience? were you depressed? i don't think it is victim blaming per se to expect that a person in a bad head space can enhance that bad into trauma with drug consumption.
there is huge risk for someone who is in a bad set, but also in denial, looking to drugs to "fix" what is wrong. some good people who had bad trips can do, is to describe to others what a bad set was, so others know what to look out for.
I think this is the direct result of just nonsensical criminalization that equated cannabis with drugs like heroin, while the toxicity of cannabis is much lower than alcohol, for example.
Legalization leads to better education, which typically provides both sides of the argument, so that a potential user can make educated decisions as to whether to try the drug or not. I have seen debates on "when not to use cannabis" on some canna podcasts (like Leafly, though I don't remember the episode).
I think that avoiding LSD for people prone to panic attacks is a pretty sound decision.
It also leads to more cases of abuse. Like many things, legalization is both good and bad at the same time.
> It also leads to more cases of abuse.
Citation needed. Here are a few counter reports:
Pointers From Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War[1]: "Opioid overdose deaths fell after Portugal’s policy change. So did new cases of diseases associated with injection drug use, such as hepatitis C and H.I.V."
Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?[2]: "Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime"
How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis[3]: "[T]he number of addicts was halved and overdose deaths had dropped to just 30 a year for the entire country. The number has remained steady ever since."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/upshot/portugal-drug-lega...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/portugal-heroin-decrim...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
“As Magdalena Cerdá, the study’s lead author, and her coauthors wrote in JAMA Psychiatry, “Although occasional marijuana use is not associated with substantial problems, long-term, heavy use is linked to psychological and physical health concerns, lower educational attainment, decline in social class, unemployment, and motor vehicle crashes.”
If you dont like that study, there are plenty of others. I’m not here to LMGTFY.
Cannabis was legalized there over a decade ago, and with that hindsight it's clear that legalization decreased consumption among minors.
That night I was basically paralyzed. It wasn't a bad experience, but I was not ready for it to be that powerful.
Since then I've just being using gummies. You can dose 5mg or 10mg which is plenty for me to just have a good feeling and still fully function. I've also noticed that different strands affect me way different. I may become sleepy, or really happy and giddy, or totally calm and cool, or motivated, or just a nice elated feeling, or combinations of those and more.
There's the whole sativa/indica thing, but I feel like the market just guesses what their strand is because 1) The feelings are still super random within the same type and 2) There are way too many types of "feelings" to just binary classify with.
You can buy weed that has nearly no THC and a whole lot of CBD. But we also have infused pre-rolls that are nearly double the strength of natural weed with no CBD. These are polar opposite experiences.
Everything is labelled both in Percent, and in mg/g so there is no mistaking whether or not the weed is strong, weak, or somewhere in between.
Everything also gets described with terpene measures, as those volatile oils have a huge impact on the experience. It's pretty much the reason why if it smells super dank and thick, you're headed for couch lock, and if it smells lemony fresh and clean, you're in for a super clear head buzz instead.
Likewise, marijuana is nearly always sold with an educational fact sheet. One learns early on that CBD is both medically useful, but also takes "the edge" off of strong weed. Beginners should start slow, and don't smoke weed that has 0% CBD.
Also there's the well known strategy: If you're the personality that tends to have that dread feeling when the buzz comes on, then start with only a small amount until you pass that first stage. Then you can smoke like crazy without that dread feeling, since it is really only triggered in the initial phase. Once you're adjusted into it, you're all good for the night.
Just don't smoke so much that you end up greening out. That's a real thing, but nearly only ever happens if you eat too much THC edibles at one time. It's hard to green out from toking once you get past the initial phase because auto-titration kicks in big time. Most people don't even realize they are doing it, but it has everything to do with why one can toke 10x the amount over the course of an evening at a party than they ever could at home, and never have that dread feeling that one can experience if they use too much from the start.
People usually only learn that through experience, but it should be part of the education. Knowing the phases (initial coming on, the buzz, then fading back to normal) greatly enhances the experience.
when you buy a pack of weed, you get 1 blob of weed that the purchaser has to divvy up themselves, then has to find a container to consume it, prepare that container properly themselves (blunt, joint, bong, etc), then consume all at once due to the nature of the process. then theres sorting out all the indica/sativa blens. the point is, the system is stacked against newcomers.
edibles are the closest, thats correct - but sellers pack edibles with as much thc as possible. cutting edibles into pieces then further removes the users ability to control the experience, but at least its similar to a pitcher of beer.
Anyways, vapes are great for nicotine and DMT but I'm not a fan of how most cannabis vape pens get easily gummed up. So I'd rather stick to dab rigs and bongs.
The problem with edibles is that the digestive system's metabolism produces way more psychedelic cannabinoids. It's a different experience, one that can be more anxiety inducing in lower doses.
there is a multi-billion dollar market just waiting for the first person that creates a strain of weed that is resistent to this effect.
My partner doesn't like getting too buzzed, so I always get gummies that are about 1/3 the strength of normal gummies. And normal gummies aren't that strong. You can buy them super strong, but that's a conscious choice that again is reflected on the package and labelling. You never have to cut your edibles. You just buy the strength you want.
Incidentally, whether it is indica or sativa is in the small print here. The typical effects are listed on the vendor web pages.
The problems you list were certainly true as recently as 2 or 3 years ago, and pretty much limited to the illegal or grey markets. Legalization has taken it a whole lot further ahead.
They are professionally produced and controlled products these days.
PS: You can even buy cannabis products with nearly no THC in them. They are high in CBD, specifically for medical use since they are not psychoactive. Apparently CBD gummies are used by a lot of people for insomnia, because it is indeed relaxing, with no high feelings whatsoever. Much better than most OTC sleeping pills for that reason.
So literally everything you said is based on purchasing from the streets or grey market, and not professional or controlled outlets. The range of what's available is huge, and everything is clearly labelled so you won't be making any more mistake than you would overdrinking that 6 pack example you mentioned.
heh. sounds like youve never been in a weed store. everything is behind the counter - its not like a supermarket beer aisle where you can pick and choose at your leisure before making your way to the checkout aisle. all the clerks are stoned, and if youre the only one in the store, theyre all looking at you. its one of the most surreal experiences you will ever encounter.
The stores do tend to suck, so I lost interest in them a very long time ago. The ones I've been in are just nicer/cleaner than the grey market stores that came before legalization. I occasionally drop by one if I happen to be passing by, and I even found an "upscale" shop. But still not my thing. I don't like shopping in stores anyway, and they tend to be gloomy and miserable for such a fun product. I'm really not into the Bob Marley Rah Rah Rah thing, either. I don't feel that compulsion to have pot leaves on everything I own, wave flags, or have white-guy imitation dreadlocks.
So no, I have absolutely been there, and yup I totally agree with you on the store details. But you keep picking the negative things that are easy to avoid. Stay away from such places, and go for more professional vendors.
If you want modern weed with full factual information backing it, you have to buy in a modern way. Preferably from a vendor that also fills medicinal prescriptions, since they are the ones that know what they are talking about, and aren't stuck in the decades old Cheech and Chong era.
Some people enjoy that. Not me.
I actually like acid but I wouldn’t call it safe. The visual effects can be quite intense and if you’re not used to the idea that reality is influenced by perception you’re in for a really bad time.
I'm the same way, perhaps to a lesser degree. My sister more so.
Part of me thinks I need to get really high more often and explore myself, but there's a chance I'm just chasing shadows and another approach is needed.
Lots of people have an "always sober" policy and they do fine. Or are they square?
I've smoked weed, I've had edibles (both homemade and from fully legal dispensaries), and at most got kind of spaced out and overly talkative. Whatever this stuff really was, it presented as a wholly different experience; strong hallucinations, time felt like it was slowing, inability to focus, loss of motor control (like unable to get down a flight of stairs), even unable to operate my phone enough to send a text message. Ultimately it led to panic and fear; I was completely unprepared and basically incapacitated until the next day. It ranks as one of the worst experiences in my life, and it felt as if it would never end.
There's a wide range of experience possible from this stuff, even things that (should you believe the internet) are as harmless as weed.
After this, I feel like I'm done for good. Whatever nebulous and unproven benefits that might possibly exist don't seem to be worth the very real risks (that I now am aware of first hand).
> On top of that, the loudest tinnitus you could imagine.
This sounds more like a DO(C/M/B/I) trip than LSD.
> I had dabbled a bit before with psilocybin, and don’t think it changed my life in any real manner other than showing me what mental illness is.
The author had a negative experience with psilocybin, expected that that would be the case with other psychedelic drugs, and was angry that they proved themselves right?
> Fuck you, Jobs.
It is super easy to create a scapegoat to absolve yourself of any responsibility in your decision making process. You pretty much have to actively ignore a large amount of advice when doing cursory reading about psychedelics to arrive at “LSD Bad!” without a single thought or mention of set and setting.
If you don’t anticipate all of those things, I’d imagine it would be a very hellish experience.
I had no idea what you were talking about here, so looked it up. Link for anyone similarly ignorant :
Serious? You went with a strong dose on your first try and you blame Steve Jobs? I mean, don't get me wrong, he was a dick what with driving a un-plated Porsche just so he could park in handicap spots and all, but this is 100% your fault. According to erowid, a starter dose is around 25ug.
My first time getting drunk was somewhat unexpected. I was with friends and drinking screwdrivers, because I didn’t particularly like the taste of vodka and that’s all we had.
I had no idea screwdrivers should be about around 20% vodka by volume - I made mine half and half. I also wasn’t familiar with enough alcohol to know about how long it takes to take effect, or to judge where I was in the process. Between those two things, I drank six ~16oz glasses full before I got to the point that I felt a strong buzz. I stopped… but my metabolism didn’t.
I vaguely remember sitting in the bathroom floor that night, looking at my own vomit in the toilet, and thinking “Huh. That looks like blood. That’s not good.” The funny part (in retrospect!) is that is the only thing I remember for a six hour period or so, and that the thought was in a purely flat, narrative tone. I wasn’t at all worried about throwing up blood. It was at most a mildly interesting thing to have noticed.
FWIW, the next day I realized that it wasn’t blood. I’d eaten a spaghetti a couple of hours prior, and it was partially digested marinara.
That's the problem with drugs. They're just not safe in the same way. No matter how hard the addicts cope.
They're not safe because they're illegal and, as such, society can't impose quality/dosage controls.
That said, not everyone should use various drugs. And that generally varies by individual.
Humans have been documented (through archaeological finds) to have been using mind altering substances for 10,000 years. And likely, much, much longer.
And we're (that's a general 'we') not going to stop. The solutions of course, are quality controls, ingredient disclosure/purity and quality information about such substances being broadly available.
But that's never going to happen as long as we encourage a black market for those substances. We've been going about all this (which is nothing new) ass-backwards, IMHO
Also I’ve never heard of someone addicted to psychedelics. I’m starting to think you may not know what you are talking about and are just being judgmental.
>Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. This might involve seeing or hearing things that other people cannot see or hear (hallucinations) and believing things that are not actually true (delusions).
Much more of that with LSD than beer
> Psychosis associated with alcohol can occur with acute intoxication, alcohol withdrawal, as well as in patients with chronic alcohol use disorder. The specific diagnosis of alcohol-related psychosis is also known as alcohol hallucinosis. It is a relatively rare consequence of alcohol use. However, it may be more prevalent than classically thought depending on the inclusion criteria used for diagnosis. In alcohol-related psychosis, symptoms of psychosis present during or shortly after heavy alcohol intake. Clinically, alcohol-related psychosis is similar to schizophrenia but has been found to be a unique and independent condition. It is characterized by hallucinations, paranoia, and fear.
...
> A 2015 Dutch literature review on alcohol-related psychotic disorder found that there is a 0.4% lifetime prevalence in the general population and a 4% prevalence in patients with alcohol dependence.
You need to read the actual text and not just the title.
I can't believe that peanuts have a good name and are promoted a lot in some circles!
I'm sorry that this person had a very bad experience, but someone with a peanut allergy wouldn't be so full of themselves as to warn everyone off of peanuts, despite the fact that the vast majority of people can consume peanuts with no problem, and enjoy it. Most things in life have some risk.
This person had a hard time on psilocybin and though they should try LSD? Jfc
I think it's well known that things can go south really quickly on basically anything that alters your brain chemistry. Yes, these drugs alter your brain chemistry. And also, yes some people are way more sensitive than others.
It's unfortunate this happened but to completely write off the potential psychedelics show for treating trauma and PTSD is naive at best.
Some people have a negative reaction to LSD. Some people don't. Some people have a positive reaction to LSD. Some don't. What's missing, crucially, is the only useful information- how many of each there are. There is nothing else that is relevant! If "some guy had a bad time" was a robust argument for "never ever do this thing", it would be a bad idea to do anything ever.
> Reading reddit anecdata about how LSD has changed people’s lives for the better - and the army of comments that dogpile on, agreeing - makes me upset at their naiveity and harmful promotion
It is indeed naive to think that some random guy on the internet talking about their experience is useful. Now how did we decide it was "harmful promotion" again?
That's why we have things like alcohol and don't have things like heroin. It's all about risk vs reward. Heroin makes you feel much nicer than alcohol but it's almost certain to fuck your life up so we don't do it.
The head slam may be cooler than interpretive dance, but we don't do it because it gives you brain damage.
Counterpoint: there's a whole sport based on that and it does cause brain damage: American Football[0].
[0] https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/population-health...
No, by your logic, alcohol would have been banned long before any other mind-altering substance. A multitude of longterm studies[1] have borne out the fact that most illegal drugs are safer than alcohol on multiple metrics[2]. Contemporary drug policy is based on culture and superstition, not science and medicine.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210 [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6
Then I read on HN that was BS. Flashbacks don’t happen, trips can be made safe, etc.
I’m actually glad to finally see this LSD etc promotion challenged. Seems like what I heard growing up was more true than what I’ve read on HN up until today.
Similarly, the thinking that LSD or other recreational pharmaceutical must be either entirely bad or entirely safe, the "bad outcome does not actually happen" or "it only takes one time" is binary, black or white, absolutist thinking. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
And I think that most participants know that it's an "extreme sport" a "daredevil thrill" like skydiving or a roller-coaster. A roller-coaster that never gains velocity or height would be pointless and boring.
The author definitely did not think those were minor side-effects.
> What's missing, crucially, is the only useful information- how many of each there are. There is nothing else that is relevant!
the evidence that a bad trip can potentially cause permanent damage is useful and relevant.
> If "some guy had a bad time" was a robust argument for "never ever do this thing", it would be a bad idea to do anything ever.
"some guy got permanently fucked up doing something" is a strong argument for me to very carefully consider the potential benefits of "doing something" and whether they are worth it; in the case of LSD, for me personally, the benefits don't outweigh the potential downsides, and anecdata is more than enough for me to make this decision.
I would argue that this is not true in isolation! I guess it's not technically wrong, in that a new article is not 0 information, but without an attached probability there isn't much to learn. Frankly, some of the symptoms the author experienced are typical of HPPD, and some are not. Correlation isn't causation, and one datapoint absolutely does not show so much as correlation.
You almost certainly partake in activities with a chance to go far more wrong every day! In fact, if the mere possibility of something going wrong is enough to dissuade you, then you shouldn't have needed the article in the first place- there's always a chance things could go horribly wrong!
To be clear, I'm not saying LSD has no risks. The author got very unlucky, but not as unlucky as others who have been documented in the literature. My pitch is not even that those risks are mostly worth it- for many they probably aren't. What I'm saying is that the author's experience is every bit as useless as the people who constantly hype LSD up. The conclusion is "Fuck you, Jobs"- can you say with a straight face that the author wouldn't have concluded the same way even if no one else in the world had ever had a bad experience on LSD?
But there is an attached probability implicitly. I can make some common sense assumptions about the number of people that have ever done LSD and get a lower bound on the risk (with a huge confidence interval, but still). Of course a chance of say 1 in ten millions is really small, but if the perceived benefits of doing LSD are also small, then that might be enough for me to make up my mind.
> Frankly, some of the symptoms the author experienced are typical of HPPD, and some are not. Correlation isn't causation, and one datapoint absolutely does not show so much as correlation.
This is a good point, I have to decide for myself whether that person is trustworthy or not, and whether their experience is relevant to my case. But if I decide that I can trust their evidence, then I'm going to factor it into my decision, even if it's only one datapoint. If in the future a controlled study on the risks of doing LSD gets published, I can reevaluate my position then.
> You almost certainly partake in activities with a chance to go far more wrong every day! In fact, if the mere possibility of something going wrong is enough to dissuade you, then you shouldn't have needed the article in the first place- there's always a chance things could go horribly wrong!
Yes, I partake in many activities that have a nonzero chance of harming me temporarily or permanently. But with each of those activities, I've decided that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. And mind you, I did not need to read extensive studies with attached probabilities do decide that crossing the road or swimming in the sea is worth the risks.
This touches on another disagreement I have with your original response. We don't live our lives constantly evaluating the risks based on peer reviewed studies with attached probabilities. We rely on common sense and our lived experiences as well as other people's experience that we learn about. The plural of anecdote is not data, but together with a healthy dose of common sense, it can provide acceptable heuristics for evaluating risks and making decisions.
First my intuition here is that in most situations, we should expect any specific example brought to our attention to be actively misleading. Out of thousands of stories about LSD, this one happens to be on the HN frontpage- should we not expect it to be unusual in some way?
Second, I think I assume that for any given activity, there exists at least one story about it that is very bad. So finding such a story shouldn't swing your judgement too much. It isn't new information!
To put it another way, we can't possibly be using the pair (average case gain, example very bad outcome) to judge if things are worth it. When we decide to cross the road, we are drawing on our extensive record of safely crossing roads, as well as our highly accurate model of the road (I would feel much less safe crossing a highway at rush hour than a suburban road at 1am) to judge the situation. If we just drew on benefit (get to the other side of the road) and potential cost (get hit by car), there would be no difference between crossing at an intersection and jaywalking. Clearly there's a probability component which is not drawn from the ether, but instead from our internal model of how the world works. I think that in your argument, this would be the "healthy dose of common sense".
In the case of drug effects, or in medical interventions overall, we don't have that benefit. Here anecdotes and common sense commonly steer us wrong- that is the undeniable conclusion of decades of disappointing research.
My specific disagreement with the way the author framed their point, which prompted my response, was how they felt that people who have had good experiences and talked about them were "naive", because the author themselves had a bad experience. I take the perspective that those people are no more wrong than the author- both are generalizing entirely from their own experiences. But your perspective would seem to argue that those people talking about how LSD is great are correct! After all, many psychonauts have tried LSD many times and come out fine, and have seen others do the same. They are reasoning from anecdotes and a healthy dose of common sense.
It may well be the case that for most peoples' risk budgets, LSD isn't worth it. The author obviously things so. But at no point do they make that argument! The sum total of the post is "Some people anecdotally say they get great benefit from LSD", "I had extremely negative effects from LSD (as do some other people)", followed by "therefore LSD is definitely not worth it for anyone". Huh? It's totally understandable why someone who went through what the author did would feel this way. It would be entirely unreasonable to expect someone bitten by a shark to couch their very real and very bad lived experience with the statistics on shark attacks. Hell, there's a legitimate point to be made about how the spiritualism and hype around psychedelics mean that positive anecdotes are treated as data while negative anecdotes are brushed under the rug. But the author, however understandably, did not make that point.
I learned what it means to be grounded. I'm fucking unshakable now. "Everyone's different" is the real lesson here.
That being said, the way Silicon Valley uses this shit makes me want to rage. Treat it like it's sacred, and it'll treat you like you are.
1. What kind of situation where you in in terms of lodging, social isolation, and access to nature?
2. How often were you taking mushrooms and how much did your dose vary?
3. We're you consuming any other drugs at the time?
4. What time of day did you typically take mushrooms and what did you do during?
5.Did you get sick of rice and beans and how much did you supplement your diet with other foods?
Interested in your experience.
When I was tired of rice and beans, I hiked down to a little restaurant that had really, really good fried fish.
One time I built a hot tub.
A park ranger was kind enough to jump start my car when I was ready to leave for good. I feel like that was the least they could do after writing me six parking tickets, all of which I paid.
The rest of the answers, I leave to you.
Required reading for 5th graders, imo.
At the end of the day, it's not much different than the thousands of people who hike the PCT every year. I just... didn't walk anywhere.
It was so long ago that I could no more get a book out of it than I could get a book out of "what I did last year." I just... don't remember the details. I remember admitting to myself that I could see ghosts and the moment I figured out why I saw them. I remember the day the air changed and I knew I could either stay another winter or leave. But most days were just, "fill the water, boil the water, make the food, mend the clothes, gather the firewood, tend the fire, sleep."
I have no reason to think it wasn't LSD, but there's also a decent possibility it was something else passed off as LSD, which is a fun consequence of the war on drugs.
It seems every negative psychedelic anecdote on HN is met with commenters that are resistant to the idea that the drug could possibly be negative for someone.
Similar trend for reports on the negative health effects of cannabis
That said, IMHO, there are many things one can do:
1. if one suffers from mental health problems, they should probably avoid any mind altering drugs (OTC, prescription or illicit) without significant guidance from a medical / mental health professional
2. speak to a mental health professional, one that is open to leveraging these types of drugs for mental health purposes
3. Assuming you passed steps 1 & 2 or are confident you don’t need to bother with them…start small and with less intensive options (i.e. if you can’t handle something like marijuana in moderate to high doses, don’t bother [without following steps 1 or 2]). And as condescending as it sounds, if you’re ready for this step, experiment in the best possible environment (and in a good headspace to deal with what is coming) with an individual(s) you trust and do so with a low dose
If you enjoyed your experience after step 3, you could consider slightly increasing the dosage or type of mind altering substances while still adhering to the advice mentioned in the previous steps.
Maybe the problem is people not respecting the complexity of putting such a mind altering substance in their body. One isn’t required to do it and should only do so when they know what they’re getting in to and have a good understanding of the (for lack of a better word) consequences.
Also, maybe individuals who have a very positive experience should be more explicit about providing a disclaimer that what worked for them isn’t guaranteed to work for others.
Edit: and to more directly respond to your comment, IMHO, using something like LSD or any mind altering drug is a bit of rolling the dice.
PiHKAL and TiHKAL reports start with "allergy tests" of low doses around 1/10th of a typical dose.
Erowid and other resources (Psychonaut wiki, etc.) list a starting dose of LSD to be around 25mcg, while the author here took 160mcg as a virgin- over 5x the starting dose.
It's also not clear whether they tested the drugs, which likely means they did not. The report sounds more typical of a DO(x) or NBOMe substance than LSD, which also come on blotters and are sold as LSD relatively frequently.
I think GP’s post has actionable advice in it:
> As a general advice one should be very careful when taking psychedelics with other prescribed medications or having a history of mental illness.
One simple thing a person could do (in the spirit of being careful) is researching the interactions between different drugs. For example, you could Google “psychedelics + SSRIs” if you were on SSRIs, or “psychedelics + social anxiety disorder” if you had social anxiety disorder. It doesn’t seem too difficult if one is already googling “psychedelics + Steve Jobs”
This doesn't matter and is a very misleading IMHO.
Because people having some per-existing conditions they don't know about and hasn't caused anything but supper middle issues is _extremely high_. EDIT (extremely likely to have some condition, not neccessary a condition which interacts with the drug you are about to take)
And the problem with psychedelics is that the chance of both you getting long term problems if you have conditions from even small doses and you not knowing about this conditions and you and people around you not understanding the risk at all is high (at least if compared to some of the legal drugs, like alcohol).
Through I believe they do have high potential in health care (assuming personal being well educated about this topic()), because one one hand this setting allows reducing the number of unknown risk factors, (should be) well educated, and directly know what to do if something goes wrong.
() Except that the handling of pain killers in the US can make you question if that is reliable possible.
I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care.
While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed.
So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat.
One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment.
I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.
They never really understood what I was talking about.. I talked to others, and most people report no such experience.. I was convinced (and still is) that everyone has this, and it's more about.. how well attuned they are to it, how aware they are of it.. Like with the floaters.. As I'm writing this, I sit in a dark room with my monitor, and around the white text box is a hundred little "cells" jotting around in the snow.. I don't believe for a second this is uncommon, I think the less part is becoming aware of it.
It's hard to "unsee", when you've recognized the face on the crab, it will always be there to some degree. When you've become aware of a sound, you can't unlearn it.
Back to childhood, as a kid, I was at the ear doc a few times, trying to find out what the thing was I heard.. It was not tinnitus (that came later) but, in the end they concluded it was the flow of blood in my ear.. Something everyone hears, but many people don't notice.
When I was a kid, I would blink my eyes when looking at high contrast scenes, and as my eyes were closed, play with the afterimages, eventually learning to refresh them by slightly changing the force with which my eyes were held shut.. Eventually I noticed how the light became momentarily brighter when going outside from inside a dark house.. I found that thing in my head, that thing that made it become brighter and darker, and played around with it, eventually showing my friends at school that one can change the size of their pupils by thinking about it, just like one can wiggle their ear or move their scalp.
I'm not discounting the experience, but rather, I question if this is really damage to the brain, or rather, a stimulation that caused them to notice what is already there.
I have a vivid memory of asking my father if he could see atoms too when I was between 5 and 8.
I told him that when I stared at an object long enough, I saw little dots (snow). I must have just recently heard about atoms and mapped them to my experience.
Fortunately he understood what I was talking about and said told me it’s just my eyes or my mind presenting me with bad data. I’m sure it was a strange question for him, “can you see atoms too?”
This is actually not floaters and instead is explained as the blood vessels in your eyes moving blood. Believable, but it sure does look like you're seeing random "information" rather than just pipes at certain stages of pump.
I can also see things move if I stare long enough. I can see the atoms, I can see the coloured blocks and such. I can also see the eyes "ISO" when in a dark room, I find that awesome as a photographer.
You see a similar sort of popular collective delusion with people who claim Cannabis cures cancer or other disease. Sorry but hard no. There is no such thing as "Medical Marijuana." It's simply marketing and propaganda to get the public into associating virtue with Cannabis use, with the end goal of eventually changing policy.
Yes, there’s a lot of exaggeration if you’re listening to some person who knows nothing about science, but there are true benefits with it as well. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water as they say.
Imagine if medical heroin was a new discovery. "I had depression so I took medical heroin and now I'm cured, we should be giving this to kids instead of pills". Because it makes you feel good and that reduces pain, people would believe it's a magical cure for everything rather than just being a painkiller. Ironically, medical heroin would actually be a safer and more effective cure for all of the things cannabis is being suggested for. The only real downside to heroin is the cost and that's what causes the societal problems.
Here are the two main areas of research:
- For two forms of treatment-resistant epileptic seizures, Lennox–Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, it is the closest you can get to a "miracle" treatment -- significantly reduces seizures with no clear downside other than feeling the effects. You can extract just the specific cannabinoid (cannabidiol) needed to treat it, so that there are no unwanted psychological effects from it.
- It is nearly irreplaceable for treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. The alternatives (prochlorperazine, promethazine) just don't have a cost-benefit analysis that adds up the way cannabis does.
And two important areas with a lower quality evidence are anorexia and migraines.
Which can probably be an impetus to solve some forms of depression, or have a change in life etc.
So I think you're partially right but also partially wrong at writing it all off as useless or some fad.
Irritating how harmless and positive psychedelics and cannabis are made out to be in popular culture in spite of the issues like these that can cause.
LSD is dangerous, even once taken in the right environment can screw you up for life. I had a long road back, screwed up my first 3 years in college (went from top of class in high school to average, but recovery in year 4 meant i ended up back top-of-class). Still, terrible drug.
I could fill pages with the anecdotes, specific examples, and my personal speculation on why this is but i can just gloss over the details and skip to the takeaway: LSD has made my life net better.
Another point I am trying to drive home is that this is what I would consider an “incomplete” or “immature” take. For example the authors anxiety is likely stemming from some organic experiences either traumatic, economic, physiological, or psychological — getting to the bottom of those and surfacing the patterns themselves is one of the great benefits of this chemical. I’d love to see this author examine their experience and ask where the anxiety is coming from.
You have to face your fears and anxiety before you can understand them — before you can conquer them.
I’m just glad this forum is finally talking about this topic. More psychedelics here please.
You can do all this without the use of drugs.
Dabbled in psychedelics pretty heavily in college. Think it was one bad trip that ended it for me. Dealt with some major anxiety for a couple years afterwards but eventually I went back to ‘normal’.
Visual snow never got worse, I did get “seeing stars” though which I never had prior to doing psychedelics.
Overall the conclusion I came to is that psychedelics are an absolute luxury in the US. If you can afford to break your brain and you think the risk is worth it go for it I guess?
Fortunately I was in college, had a job that was easy, and programming was an in depth enough experience that it made my anxiety go away while doing it.
Seeing stars can have other causes like the blood vessels in your eyes being messed up. You can get them from, for example, being too hungover or tired. Not saying it's that, but it could be totally unrelated.
Also a similar experience with psychedelics in college, although it was actually smoking marijuana a week after a very intense trip that gave me the most terrifying night of my life. I had to have sedatives and suffered major anxiety for a couple of years afterwards.
I still don't regret taking them. I learned a lot about myself and had some amazingly beautiful experiences. But I wouldn't wish the final one on anyone.
I know little about drugs, and have never tried LSD. I have watched paramedics on television trying hard to put a patient in a positive frame of mind before administering ketamin. Could this be similar?
Many psychodelic drugs are not giving you "nice trips", which is also part of the reason _some_ have a very very low chance to make mentally addicted (and happen to also not trigger physical addiction).
But they do "shake up" you mind in a way which can have long term positive effects in various ways, which could be as simple as helping with self reflection or as live changing as curing depression (not from a LSD tip, but there are psychedelic based treatments for depression which not only had cases of healing some people where "classical" methods did not work at all, but yielded long term results in a way no anti-depressant I'm aware of can archive).
So in other words having a "not so nice trip" can be a "good live experience" for some.
But then pretty much anything which messes with your mind can have bad long term effects if rareish complications appear, and a (oversimplified) rule of thump is the more it messes with your brain the more server can the rarish unexpected side-effects be for your live (e.g. worsening or triggering latent schizophrenia, but might also help treating it if done appropriately).
So the author had their "noise filters" reset basically, and their brain had to relearn this. This is interesting and somewhat supports the notion that LSD can "reset" your mind in some ways.
See the section about controversy of country of origin under Entheogen
No matter how unusual or rare it is to experience this, it's really worth surfacing cases like these. I'd rather not take the risk at all, even if the risk is really low.
What are the pros and cons?
If this is the case, due to the long comeup I'd suspect the author took a drug in the DOx family. But there's no definitive telltale sign of it, a long comeup can theoretically happen on LSD as well. ^1
LSD analogues (1P-LSD, AL-LAD, ALD-52, etc.) are generally very similar to LSD, to the point where most unknowing users might not know the difference. They are also more expensive to obtain, so they are rarely ever sold as fake LSD. Some of them may even be prodrugs and therefore identical aside from slightly different potency.
Most fake LSD will instead be a different class of psychedelics entirely, usually a phenethylamine, such as the DOx class of substituted amphetamine psychedelics, or 25x-NBOMe. 25i-NBOMe is a pretty bad one.
Bromo-DragonFLY is said to be utterly horrible. Thank god it's rare.
Not all phenethylamines are bad, though, such as 2C-B and mescaline, but the ones sold as fake acid are usually terrible.
---
^1: Something I find extremely fascinating -- different psychedelics are notorious for feeling wildly different to psychonauts, yet when you actually compare two psychedelics, LSD and mushrooms, a lysergamide and a tryptamine, in a double-blind controlled trial you get a list of reported subjective effects that is nearly identical. Can human language not describe the differences, or is it more based on expectation of what you think you are taking more than anything? What if you did the same study but had them write an essay instead of a list of effects? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01297-2
For me, the few hours of fun weren't worth the amount of stress that followed. I got nothing out of it except some temporary entertainment.
I strongly believe that using LSD in therapy is malpractice. It is not right to give such a potent and mind-altering drug to people who are already dealing with mental health issues. I worry that in the future, we will see a rise in similar cases to mine, as LSD becomes more commonly used in therapy. And although I turned out OK and I can deal with the condition I am scared about how people who might already be suicidal deal with such a life altering event.
When there are visuals I find them to be more "organic" on mushrooms and more "sharp/electric" on LSD, but that’s very subjective/suggestible.
But there are "social" trips where there are no visuals, usually when in a group and experiencing the substance together, there I wouldn’t be able to tell LSD and Psylocybin apart.
The feeling of shared being part of a shared consciousness, the cosmic laughter and the fractal thoughts can be the same with both substances.
I'd say there is a psychedelic state of consciousness and many different substances (Psychedelics) will get you there, the experience will differ in nuances, but the general idea is the same. Keep in mind that in this state you are highly suggestible, so the environment will often do a lot more to shape the experience than the exact substance.
Having done both about a dozen times, this is not my experience or the experience that others have shared. Even a large dose of mushrooms only has subtle visual effects, while LSD makes the world look like a van Gogh painting.
But visuals as strong as you describe I had only when I tried 25C-NBOMe. But there the mind trip was only barely present and the body feel was rather uncomfortable.
Mushrooms in particular are hard to standardize a dosage of. Eat enough of some strong ones and things get plenty visual.
> Some recreational drugs, such as LSD and cocaine, and dietary supplements, including St. John's wort and ginseng, can also cause serotonin syndrome when you take them with these antidepressants.
https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/serotonin-syndrome-ca...
That being said, the author's report of how they tried psilocybin sounds like a warning sign to me: 3 grams, seemingly at home alone. That is a big dose for a first time, and I've never heard anyone recommend taking it alone at home.
I am the sort of person who likes to do these drugs alone, put on a record, and chill (although I do also immensely enjoy being in nature).
Tinnitus in particular is fairly common and is listed as a side-effect on many prescription meds. I've experienced it after taking DMT and it also lasted about a year. I've also had small visual changes that are harder to pinpoint and certain smells being amplified.
The risk is small for the average person and it usually goes away, so it's really a personal choice if it's worth it.
Psilocybin is generally more anxiety inducing, nausea inducing, & introspective then LSD (on the comeup), yet I still recommend that people new to psychedelics should start with psilocybin because it is much easier to control dosage, and the trips are generally much shorter. The intrinsic danger of LSD is that it is impossible to be sure of the dosage of a blotter, even from the same sheet as another blotter.
I understand if the author never wants to take these drugs again. I'd recommend that if you ever are curious again, you skip LSD, find a safe environment with friends and start with a small, manageable dosage of psilocybin (~1-2 grams).
But as a description of a reasonable approach to trying LSD? Come on. He should've started with 1/10th that dose, especially considering his bad experiences with shrooms. This is asinine. It's like throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool, not knowing how to swim, and then accusing everyone else in the pool of being assholes for making you drown. Come on dude.
I've tried Codeine recreationally, a couple of times, and it gives me the spins - the nausea just isn't worth the trip. Knowing this, do I try an epic dose of Morphine? No, of course I don't. Do I make angry blog posts whining that everyone has lied to me about how good narcotics feel? No, I also do not do that.
My brother took magic mushrooms once as he read a lot of things about it that it would cure social anxiety or anxiety in general. This is a problem that lies in our family and I am affected myself so I can understand why he did it.
However, his experience was terrible and he had a bad trip that had the effect that he couldn't sleep for three days. Afterwards he took some medication (sleeping pills and beta blockers) and seemed quite ok for a few weeks but then terrible panic attacks and extreme anxiety happened. He is still recovering but I can see that he is suffering.
All the good reports are probably true and also partly survivorship bias. For my brother it was a terrible experience and I am not sure if he can fully recover from this. People should also report about potential negative effects.
The more you focus on it, the less likely it is to go away, as you're training yourself to pay attention to it.
I experienced some effects of my first dose for 4 days after that everything was back to normal, except that I had gained an outside view onto my life that remained truly valuable up to this day.
as psychedelic drugs grow in popularity, more and more people in more and more social milieus will run into this kind of condescension. some will be pressured into taking risks they don't want to, and some will be harmed by it.
i expect a backlash to psychedelic drugs fairly soon (based on hacker news comments on this article vs. what it would have been a few years ago, maybe already starting). i hope that this backlash doesn't derail the promising medical research into psychedelics that's gotten off the ground in the last few years.
It states its dangers: Purely psychological hazards, not harmful to body. May release latent psychosis or exacerbate depression, leading to irrational behavior. There is also a danger of foolish or incautious behavior, e.g, misjudging distances or thinking one can fly. Physical overdose is not a hazard, though one may easily ingest more than one may be able to handle psychologically.
Start with near zero amounts and ramp, taking notes and vitals (bpm, blood pressure). Understand yourself, the drug and have a friend nearby.
I have a low tolerance for THC, many folks consume way more than I ever could. But at the same time I have managed enjoy 200-400 mg doses (RSO). If I had taken this much at the beginning, I can see how I would have felt like I was losing my mind. I no longer have any form of paranoia, because I know what to expect. Everything in life comes down to practice and familiarity. Approach everything with a gradual slope and know what you are doing.
Yes, it was great fun, but it's just too unpredictable. Regardless of whether or not it actually happened, it was incredibly clear to me that I could have just decided to jump out of a window thinking that it was my bedroom door, or cut myself with a kitchen knife thinking that it was a brush, or think my partner was some sort of attacker and become violent towards him/her, or whatever else. Plus the emotional effects.
It felt like I played Russian Roulette with my brain and won, I just got lucky and I'm OK. I think. Maybe my emotions are a bit different now. How would I even know?
1. What if it’s the most amazing thing ever, like ADHD medication, what if you get insanely productive, and you then have to go back to being mediocre?
2. What if it triggers something bad. If I get 10% worse at focusing on a solving a problem?
Nope
Tradeoff is clear for me.
Aldous Huxley would like a word…
Probably a good time to remind everyone that ADHD medication will not actually make you insanely productive forever. Good for treating genuine ADHD, but trying to use it like a limitless pill just leads to tolerance, dependence, and burnout.
The more involved doctors will actually start people on low doses and titrate up so patients don’t get the wrong idea about what the medicine is supposed to be doing for them. It’s usually the people who took too high of a dose they borrowed from a friend in college or something who have an idea that stimulants are a magic limitless pill without consequences.
Now, if you microdose that’s a different story. I tried microdosing for a month years back at a remote job. I found it made me more able to connect with others. Like I didn’t want to hop off a meeting right away. It gave me some extra creativity when coding, but didn’t increase the output of my code.
I completely respect anyone who doesn’t want to try though, there are even some psychedelics that scare me and I’ve done quite a bit!
Counter anecdote: I tend to compulsively clean my apartment on mushrooms.
You will get 10% worse at focusing on solving a problem and then 20% just as a result of aging and there's nothing you can do about it. Your eyes will get old, your vitreous will start to detach and you'll start to see what looks like worms floating around in your eyes. Again, nothing you can do about it. Your hearing too will slowly start to degrade. High frequencies will fade to dust and those below them will become more apparent and, in some cases, become quite annoying.
Just to say it clearly, LSD enriches my life, and I know a much people that feel the same way. But it's definetly nothing for everyone and when you think about taking it, don't do it alone in your room. Find people with experience, not every week experience(!) and talk to them if it's a good idea and if yes, go to the woods and have a nice trip.
After a couple of days of being in that state, I got really fearful thinking I might be stuck with it forever, that I had damaged my brain permanently, but thankfully I got off of it after a week. I promised myself I would basically be a good boy from now. I got a newfound respect for this normal state of consciousness and I became super grateful for just getting out of that nightmare. I would not wish what happened on my worst enemy.
Even though I've heard MDMA can do wonders for some of the mental issues I have, I am basically never gonna touch it.
My migraines (which is a condition closely related to seizures) are partly why I've always said "no" to any form of psychedelic substance; just seems needlessly dangerous.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-once-coyly-defende...
I only tried pot a few times and it makes me feel miserable. It's funny for about 5 minutes, after that I feel like shit. Sometimes even nauseated, I never had the munchies, I don't know what they feel like.
A few years ago I was in a bad bike crash, and it was the first time I had opioids (they tried fentanyl and tramadol).
I asked the doctors to just take them away, the pain of a hip and ankle fracture was way better than the feeling of the opioids.
There's definitely something different about how my brain deals with some of these drugs which makes me think that for me, it would be a really bad idea to try anything else, even in a controlled environment.
> [..]
> “Do you all see this too ?!”
> “Oh yeah, I have that. Don’t worry, you learn to live with it.”
> “LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT?! No way! WTF!”
Hehehe, I had this after an MDMA trip. The sky turned into a giant Brownian motion/visual snow playfield, to the point it was hard to see some clouds. Imagine my surprise next morning when I woke up and it still looked like that. It did go away after a couple years.
The bigger surprise was when night came and my friend realized he was still terrified of _the moon_.
But I agree with his friend, it's weird at the beginning but not actually a big deal. It turns out the sky could look different and it doesn't really matter.
I did try mushrooms when I had just turned 16 and it really brought a storm of existential questions to the forefront of my mind that were very difficult to sift through with everything I had going on as a teenager. I developed a somewhat unfounded fear of tripping randomly and losing control of my ability to distinguish reality that greatly frightened me. At times I would be susceptible to this thinking, having read about HPPD, and any visual disturbance might lead me to feel tremendous anxiety again that I might be tripping or worse going crazy. One notable occasion I was driving at night and noticed halos around every light. I thought I must be going mad, but nope, it turned out I just needed glasses. Not to minimize the anxiety I felt at the time, but reading too much into some of these things can really make it worse. I never randomly started tripping at any time and my grasp on reality was only made worse by the anxiety at the thought of it potentially happening.
Many years since then and feeling I have a much firmer grasp on reality, I just think “my eyes must be playing tricks on me” and bring it up with my optometrist if I see anything weird.
However, I do feel for the author having recently gone through a lot of health anxiety after the sudden death of my cat. I did get to the point where I couldn’t drive across town and a sip of caffeine would send me spinning. I guess a lot of things in life can affect you this way if you’re not ready for them is all I’m trying to say, especially if you’re already anxiety prone.
Be careful with psychedelics if you have anxiety!
Maybe point is not to have radical change but something else.
But anyway what I find more surprising are people taking Datura stramonium. They usually know that it will be mostly bad trip. But they still do it.
take me as your first anecdotal example of someone whose life has been significantly and measurably improved since taking psychedelics. there goes your entire argument.
Personally my experience with shrooms was similar to the article but it felt during and afterwards like a weight has been lifted from my shoulder and I could finally deal with a lot of trauma that resulted in a severe depression. And I found it had long term positive effects on it.
But unless you are naturally inclined to it and in a good position to take it, I think most people would not like doing a mushroom trip.
Just based on the headline, I disagree. If you have a genetic propensity for schizophrenia or things like that then yes, avoid it. But for the vast majority of LSD users it’s a transformative experience.
Drinking alcohol is socially accepted but tens of millions of Americans have some sort of diagnosed use disorder with it and almost 100k people died last year to drinking. Do we say “not even once” to alcohol?
It’s all about drug education, we need to make sure people aware of the risks and allow them to do what they do. Otherwise we’ll just keep repeating this war on drugs nonsense.
But one like the article is about doing something safely, once, in your own place. Dangers of alcohol are generally overdose, long term abuse, and accidents.
How many people drink one beer in the safety of their home with trusted people, and have their life turned upside down?
The other community has companies controlling everything, ads playing to all ages permanently, they have full control over their branding and marketing, etc. They also lobby the federal government to keep doing what they do.
If LSD was as legal as alcohol, and as successfully marketed, I think at that point we could draw conclusions as to which drug is more of a detriment to society and peoples’ health.
In a vacuum your experiment just might work, but probably not in 2023 American society. There is a lot more non-biased scientific study that needs done before unleashing these powerful substances on the population. I would suggest removing bias and looking at it in a neutral way, as I'm sure a happy medium can be established here.
I'd like to say I'm not pro-drugs. I'm just pro-science and anti-war on drugs, which I'll assume you are too. If there was a scientific consensus on how often normal doses of LSD caused things like visual snow or, more severely, the onset of schizophrenia or similar disorders I think the world would be a better place. If LSD indeed caused more harm to the world than existing popular drugs like alcohol, then I think anyone who trusts science including myself would say "Okay, let's stop doing them". But until then, it's just hearsay anecdotal evidence that gets us nowhere. If it does get us somewhere, it's been historically in the direction of demonizing those who do drugs which I think has had a negative effect on society as a whole.
How would you know until something triggers it? Getting permanently mindfucked from LSD is an awful way to discover this.
Sounds like you learned plenty. Also given how little time since, there's probably plenty of reflection and learnings yet to come too.
Then I married a woman who didn't drink much (some members of her family never drank-- ever, not even a drop) and I thought about how we should raise our kids. (We had 3.)
I haven't had a drink in a long time, and I don't miss it a bit. I'd feel even more so about drugs. I encourage everyone to think carefully about what you put in your body.
Those last six words are troubling.
At least in my experience, it's that drugs tend follow the creatives around. Often to the detriment of their creativity.
I sincerely hope this kind of cargo-culting of LSD is limited to college-age tech circles.
The fact that OPs is "controversial" isn't actually set in any science, it's set in extra-scientific mushrooms-as-religion mentality that is currently proliferating as the "current thing".
A drug-based solution to depression, anxiety, etc would be incredible, but unfortunately outside of humanity's reach today.
If you're not interested in science and instead seeking religion, skip the drugs and reach for your closest religious text and start reading. As a Catholic I recommend the Gospel of Mark as a starting point. It's far easier to believe that multitudes of people 2000 years back witnessed some dope stuff and started following some rules that make everyone feel great today, rather than the universe transpired from nothing in some scientifically unprovable theory and potentially HPPD-causing substances are the only way to feel whole.
then it tries to sneak in little untruths in between the truths that were already yours and already inside you, such as "you should encourage other people to do psychedelics, because they reveal all this wisdom and insight to you"
you stand to gain nothing you don't already posses, and you risk prelest. best case scenario is nothing happens, worst case scenario is you go insane and lose everything and become a literal demon“
Glad you recovered, that would have been quite a horrible year.
People complaining about LSD, to me, sound like people complaining about being shot out of a cannon. You knew what was going to happen once you lit the fuse. You chose to shoot yourself out of the cannon. Not liking it is to be expected for a significant portion of the population; but stop pretending like it's some horrifyingly dangerous activity. This is the mental equivalent of pissing yourself while bungee jumping and warning other people that if they try it, they are 100% going to piss their own pants.
Seriously, if I had a friend who couldn't handle alcohol, I would stop drinking with them and I would certainly refuse to take harder stuff with them. When I first had anxiety from smoking weed, my friends promptly told me weed is probably just not a drug for me to take and to take lower doses or to abstain from it entirely in the future-- and anxiety was a well-known (to me) possible consequence from weed.
And if someone tried to argue that LSD can never cause visual snow, a single anecdote is enough to refute that. Anecdotes are not always wrong in debate.
If there’s a debate at all then the data are probably ambiguous or inconclusive, so let’s talk real human experience. Data says LSD is the best thing ever, and here’s one guy who has a terrible experience - is he wrong?
When a customer is complaining about e.g. "your site being broken", there's usually some real problem they're complaining about (though whether it's your problem to solve, or their ISP, or their computer, or their lack of knowledge of how web browsers work, etc. is another question entirely.) But the point being, if your data says the customer can't possibly be experiencing an issue — i.e. if your data disagrees with the customer's own lived experience of having a problem at all, with the data saying that e.g. the customer made a successful purchase, when the customer says they couldn't even load the site — then that should suggest that your tools for measuring your data are broken, or that there's something else equally-fishy going on (like a Man-in-the-Middle.)
None of this applies to medicine/psychology, because medicine never has the sort of data that could even theoretically be used to make a claim like "this is 100% working, and anyone who says they have a problem is lying" — the sort of claim where even a single counterexample would be enough to refute that statement, and therefore where a single counterexample would be valuable.
Rather, the sort of claims made in medicine are Bayesian confidence claims. The sort of (evidenced) claim that gets a treatment approved by the FDA, goes something like: "treatment X tends to be well-tolerated in population Y, while producing a positive outcome of power Z with benefits outweighing the measured side-effects."
No single anecdote (= clinical data) refutes that kind of statement. Instead, you need to compile and quantify a bunch of them (= clinical data meta-analysis) to actually make an argument for or against that claim.
Knowing this, any attempt someone might make to wield a single anecdotal claim to influence the credence you give a statistically-derived Bayesian-confidence statement of the safety and efficacy of a medical treatment — especially where you don't have an intuitive sense for how much data went into the statistics that led to the original statistical claim — should be regarded as an attempt to manipulate you with rhetoric, rather than honest debate praxis.
Which is not to say that the anecdote is false! You can totally believe that the person's lived experience is real, and empathize with them, and try to come up with solutions for their problem; while also taking as hokum any attempt by them to convince you that their anecdote generalizes.
In attempts to (rightly) justify legalization, we now first have to appeal to the puritan-descendant US society and persuade it that it has great medicinal potential (because recreational potential is not enough). Consequently, you see overly exaggerated headlines that tout these substances as a miracle cure. Which, honestly, it might be for some people with certain conditions in a specific settings.
But, a person then reads "a new LSD study" and might conclude that their psilocybin trip was not a success, but maybe the LSD is going to change their world for the better.
If we just legalize these non-toxic substances, the conversation around them changes. The same happened to cannabis (where still nowadays, many people use the "medicinal" angle to justify their recreational habits so that they are not judged by the society, despite cannabis being legal in a number of US states).
> Continuous anxiety about literally nothing. I felt like a student who didn’t do their homework, and was dreading their teacher calling on them - for 24 hours a day.
this one is most fun :)
kind of like the end of the world is coming and you are supposed to do something but you dont know what, but you know its the most important thing that has to be done
Please name one single food that can bring down all your psychological defence mechanisms in one go.
Ciprofloxacin can ruin your life. Acetaminophen can ruin your life. Aspertame can ruin your life.
The point is that for every substance there will be someone out there predisposed to have a reaction to it. That's not a problem with the substance, and people shouldn't stop recommending it, as the author suggests.
These side effects can be scary to someone that doesn't anticipate them (or just doesn't want them), but the "benefits" of LSD often point to the loosening of your sense of self, seeing unfiltered reality, etc.
TLDR: these side effects can be seen as good in the right context.
> "In terms of visual perception, the 5-HT2A receptor has been found to play a role in modulating the processing of visual information. Specifically, activation of this receptor has been shown to enhance certain aspects of visual perception, such as the perception of brightness, contrast, and spatial frequency. This effect is thought to be mediated in part by the 5-HT2A receptor's ability to increase the activity of neurons in the visual cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes visual information."
> "Interestingly, the 5-HT2A receptor has also been implicated in altered states of consciousness, such as those induced by psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. These substances are known to activate the 5-HT2A receptor, which is thought to underlie their profound effects on perception, thought, and emotion. However, the precise mechanisms by which 5-HT2A receptor activation leads to these effects are still not fully understood and are an active area of research in the field of neuropsychopharmacology."
So, let's consider the question raised in this post, which is: "how a could a temporary substrate-receptor interaction result in a long-term effect that persists well past the biochemical elimination of the drug from the user's system?"
I don't think this is uniquely applicable to LSD vs. any other drug, by the way. Some people might try an opiate-class drug once and develop an immediate craving for that experience. However, this really cannot be attributable to the basic drug-receptor binding - so it's probably something to do with neuronal rewiring of some sort. If neurons respond to the immediate drug experience by forming new neuronal connections to other cells, then this could explain how a long-term effect (visual snow, opiate craving, etc.) could be created by neurons seeking new connections in response to the short-term effect of one-time drug use.
Profoundly, it seems our brains are always rewiring themselves in relation to various stimuli and experiences, but LSD and similar drugs are affecting this process at fairly low levels in the neuronal hierarchy.
Note that this is precisely why many people have said that the psychedelic drug cohort, under controlled conditions, has unique potentials for curing various mental illeness-related conditions. The use of the potent hallucinogen ibogaine to effect long-term cures for opiate addiction is one such case:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28402682/
> "Conclusion: A single ibogaine treatment reduced opioid withdrawal symptoms and achieved opioid cessation or sustained reduced use in dependent individuals as measured over 12 months."
Do you have links to those studies? I'm curious. I've tried Ashwagandha and stopped as it seemed to make me more anxious but YMMV.
My point was that we are commonly using medication that can have devastating effects - and the precise dosages do not account for the imprecise body weight and sensitivity to the substance of the person taking it.
You took a dose down,
You write a blog post just to turn it around
If this "consciousness" thing is so hard to get, then why do we try our best to get rid of it through alcohol, recreational drugs etc ?