Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life. With no long term health effects from one dose.
You severely underestimate how much most people want to escape their lives, even if the experience is negative. It's silly to act like people don't self-harm.
I'm not denying that people will self-harm. But the argument that people will self-harm with LSD needs to ignore that there's plenty of better drugs legalised already
Go to a couple of AA meetings and say that again.
Hey, lets optimize society for human happiness and enjoyment without escapism then...
Moloch: "Now just hold the fuck up, I have some corporations to run"
I don’t thin legalisation would hugely increase use.
This might be anecdotal, but even though they can be fun, but they're also very exhausting and make you introspective and also kinda encourage you to think about improving different aspec of your life. Sure, there's some bad trips that make people psychotic, but I think that legalisation and regulations would help protect those peope, rather than harm them, because there's usually an underlying condition that triggers such an episode. On the flip side, I've had bad trips a few times and they usually taught me a lot about myself, the people around me, and how I lived life at the, which in turn pushed me to change for the better, and improve some aspects of my life.
these arguments never seem to have a separate addictive from non-addictive drugs component.
LSD is not so dangerous per se if you are in good hands. It does leave you discombobulated for 12 hours or so and put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble. Mushrooms are a little better because the duration is shorter but they still didn't find the problems acceptable. They tried the stimulating and hallucinatory 2C-T2 which is somehow entirely non-cosmic but I think even that failed market testing.
After all these years a pastor I know is providing psilocybin therapy for the terminally ill which they are doing in a tightly controlled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
environment and of course accompanying people for the whole tip.
The problem is we have such a high bar for pyschedelics that isn't applied to other recreational drugs.
Funny you say that because I couldn't have wished for a better trip than roaming Amsterdam with my friends when I tried mushrooms all those years ago. The canals, the architecture.. it was a fairy tale, I remember it dearly.
Yes, and a variety of other psychedelics in my early 20s. I remember spending time on erowid and then seeking out substances. Mescaline, peyote, ketamine, psylicobin, acid, GHB, DXM, others I'm forgetting.
I wish I had never done any of it.
LSD bonds with something in the brain, such that it causes persistent flashbacks more than any other hallucinogen, sometimes years later. Taking it just once to try it might not have any effect, or might cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. Depends on your personal neurochemistry, the dosage, form of dosing, and your mental state. A friend who had taken LSD described it to me once something like this: LSD sometimes takes any cracks (neurosis or psychosis) in your mind and expands them wide open, forcing you to look into them. If you're aware of them already and they're minor, it can be helpful, sometimes expanding your mind to new capabilities. If you've been unaware or worse, in denial, or they're major, then you get a bad trip that may come back to haunt you over and over again over the years.
Flashbacks that continue to occur after the original drug effects have worn off are a medically recognized phenomenon, which is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Flashbacks typically happen in the days or weeks following ingestion of the drug but can happen months or even years after the drug use has been discontinued.
However the risk from one dose is minimal. If your risk threshold is so close to 0 then we should be banning way more things today.
Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.
A more convincing theory for flashbacks is that they are similar to PTSD. LSD can give really intense and memorable experiences, and in the case of a bad trip, they can be considered traumatic. Symptoms show similarities too. Essentially, flashbacks are just memories, good or bad, and in the worst cases, so bad as to haunt you for years.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is not like flashbacks. As the name suggests, it affects perception, i.e. senses, commonly in the form of visual noise, distinct from what is experienced during a trip. Think something like tinnitus. We know it exists, but the details are unclear.