When America first dropped acid
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs
It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces for why I wrote the book.
I believe the recording was first brought to public attention by Don Lattin, whose books The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010) and Distilled Spirits (2012) are both great.
In terms of research, I used to keep all my photographs of archival documents, PDFs of sources, etc in DEVONThink, but I switched over to using the standard Photos app on Macs. It has automatic OCR now so I'm able to search text that appears in photographs quite easily. I did a lot of oral history interviews to supplement the archival research. This book wouldn't have been possible up until recently because it's only in the past decade that so many historical archives have been digitizing their collections. I was able to visit the key archives in person, but with others, archivists were nice enough to send me scans of key documents. Super grateful to them.
Did you look into that at all? Especially considering the current stance on psychedelics in Canada (essentially decriminalized), and the state of serious research, do you see Canada being a pioneer going forward like it was in the past?
I heard perhaps urban folklore from an old-timer former journalist that the LSD trade was monopolized by a single criminal syndicate in the 50's. There are still some haunts with local regulars not overrun with suits, squares, or tourists.
After reading the article, I watched the Margaret Mead bit on “The Rejected.”
Hope your book does well. I’ll buy it on Audible :)
Was there any collaboration or correspondence between Mead/Bateson and Hubbard? Documentation on Hubbard can be hard to find, and he seems to have preferred it that way.
Hubbard was important, to an extent, but one of the things I'm trying to do is draw out the larger social and intellectual circle that surrounded the more famous names. So to just to take on example, Betty Eisner was (I would argue) significantly more important than Hubbard both in developing the concept of set and setting and in developing psychedelic therapy in general.
She actually released a memoir online before her death, which is fascinating reading and has a lot of quotes from original letters (some of which I consulted at Stanford, which has her archive): https://erowid.org/culture/characters/eisner_betty/remembran...
All: please let's discuss the specifics of this article—there's a lot there, and it will be much more interesting than the nth generic thread about psychedelics. Specifics beat generics on HN.
Weird to think about how media can amplify a set of ideas, that itself didnt last very long. We keep having this renewed consciousness of ideas, like a microphone blowing it into everyones ears. Even funnier is to think that an ideology that hates mass media (anti corporate 60s culture) may actually just be a product of mass media, much like mickey mouse.
If there's one thing that's clear beyond all else involved in the topic of popular culture, it's that the media chooses what culture to push and what to ignore.
For those not in the know, Mondo films (that's usually the start of the title, like Mondo Freudo) gathered together very disparate samples of different slices of life, with a heavy emphasis on the titillating, the criminal, the bizarre, not to mention almost anything that might be numbered among the counterculture, and presented them in a vaguely documentary-like format. How much was staged, how much wasn't? Still, aside from the almost obligatory nudity, you got a very strong feeling of "look at the strange stuff these people get up to!"
My guess is that they had kind of an outsized impact for what seemed like half "nudie cuties" of the 50s married to a casual National Geographic feel of different cities in Europe, the United States, and associated territories.
This sounds like something you'd read in a pop psychology book, not an actual piece of historical analysis.
Given the visible cultural impact that the "ideology" (to use your word) had, and the sheer number of artifacts we have to attest to that, it's almost impossible to imagine how this claim could be substantiated.
Ironically, the only thing in that that's close to a correct statement is the line about communes and acid, which were actually a very small part of the "ideology" that you're referring to, and relatively rare, but which were amplified in public perception due to media portrayals.
The media does manufacture narratives. Youth in New York and San Francisco had a subculture in the 1950s which was framed as beatnik, and soon sitcoms were mocking beatnik. Small basement performance places would have patrons not clap to avoid noise complaints, so patrons would snap their fingers as applause. This was then presented as something unusual and pretentious, minus its original context. The same thing with San Francisco hippies - they arose organically, the mainstream culture took notice of them and presented them a certain way, and the cycle goes on.
Every social movement that arises is met with an attempt to coopt and to commodity by the corporate media and corporate America, this has happened for a long time.
https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cool-Business-Counterculture...
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.
...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
This culture is still pervasive - probably accounting for the majority of people who actively argue for decriminalization and research - and a bad spokesman. It reminds me a lot of the people who think Cannabis can’t be addictive, cures cancer, and has no negative effects. In some ways, it fetishizes and ascribes magical properties to drugs just as much as the “drugs are bad with zero exceptions” crowd does. Except, in many aspects it’s worse, because it downplays risks and pressures people to partake. Normal people notice it even if they can’t articulate it, and it does a lot to discredit reasonable people.
For me, and most people I was doing this with, it was just an affordable, long lasting drug. Sure, I had read various books about opening the doors of perception but at some point you realize it's just more "you" that you are finding.
I do think psycadelics can be used therapeutically in the right conditions but I'm not convinced ad hoc trips will get you there unless you are already skilled at introspective techniques.
The one thing I'll say I agree with is it does change your perspective and can give you a break from your ego. Seeing how nice it is to not be a slave to all the negativity, dwelling in the past, and obsessing over the future is very freeing and taught me that pursuit of meditation was worth doing.
Ultimately, I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.
surely "just" more you still offers "deep spiritual truths", and surely finding them makes you more enlightened.
> I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.
I don't see how this in anyway devalues the psychedelics
If you have experienced what people often refer to as enlightenment, you'll know the feeling fades. It's like trying to hold onto water. Knowing it is there can change the way you think about the world, sure, but chasing it is the ultimate ego trip. It's probably better to be open to it than to run around looking for it.
And I have to tell you, listening to Slayer on the second day of an acid binge in some dingy basement apartment while you try to figure out who you know that has some weed is not the same as hanging around in an alpine meadow with the cast of Hair. It's just not.
I never meant to devalue psychedelics, I was agreeing with the removal of that magical cache they seem to enjoy. For a lot of people they are simply affordable party drugs that let you drink your face off and have a good time for 8 hours or whatever. Their clinical use is very different and I love that it is being explored in a rigorous manner.
The psychedelic drugs themselves do not operate in a vacuum. They are neither good nor bad. I don't mean to devalue their therapeutic use but if anything they are a shortcut to give you a taste of what is possible with your existing hardware.
For an adult trying to lead a responsible life, regular meditation (or walking, playing an instrument, etc) is probably better than self-dosing after work on a Friday. For someone struggling with PTSD, I would imagine a dose in the right environment alleviates that burden in a way most other things cannot. Seeing that it is possible to not feel like you have been feeling could give you the motivation to try to hold on to that and find other ways to experience it. That's incredibly valuable.
Or maybe it just makes "you" more crawled up "your" own esoterical butt?
But that's what opening the doors of perception means. Of course you're "only" discovering things about yourself, but that is still valuable and I think that is what a lot of people find 'mystical' about these drugs.
I agree that shamanistic woo-woo doesn't do any good though.
If you follow the long-wave (Kondratiev wave) theory of economics, the 70s was the beginning of the real "drop" while the 60s were still (relatively) boom times.
At the beginning of the downturn, there were large strike waves and dissent ... which were then, yes, broken, leading to the collapse of the socialist left wing in western countries (those parties calling themselves [or being called] socialist or social democratic now generally aren't and haven't been for a long while), and a brutal weakening of the organized labour movement.
One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counterculture to come up with that. It's been an authentic part of history before. Nor can it totally be dismissed as only coming from drug culture, or a brief source for a small moment in time. We've had similar movements and ideas become popular before. I'd go one step further and call it objectively a good thing.
I think of the brain as a "rationalization machine". It observes environmental inputs, and reflexively seeks to ascribe a cause for those inputs. In so doing, a causal model of the world is constructed (whether accurate or not), allowing the agent to make intelligent decisions about what actions to take in order to produce desired outcomes.
What hallucinogenic drugs tend to do is overwhelm the brain with sensory inputs that are sui generis and cannot be folded neatly into a pre-existing causal model of reality, but that are so numerous that they cannot simply be ignored.
So the "protective mechanism" of the brain, rather than abandoning or risking damage to this highly valuable causal model of reality, is to shunt these experiences over into an "other" category of mystical and religious significance. The fact that these experiences are inexplicable, rather than being an indication of any "malfunction" in the brain which might prompt us to doubt our perception in general, is instead proof of their cause: the incomprehensible divine.
This isn't academic, just my 2c.
I don't think whichever one you see is a choice either, more like the yanny vs laurel thing
At one point I made the same argument you make. Now I don't see it that way. And I feel much better honestly
I think you're right that it's a personality thing, maybe connected to how strong the "rationalization drive" is? I don't know.
I guess I'd rather tickle the rationalizing side of my brain with a rationalizination of the tendency to stop rationalizing rather than just stop rationalizing :)
It's important to not become too confident in this either. Our perception of that is as you say useful but also subjective and flawed, and I think if you get down to pure materialism, it's harder to pin down than you may think.
Even something basic which seemingly we all agree on at a basic level and require to function, trying to answer questions like "what is time?", you quickly can end up with mind bendy examples from physics where the intuitive understanding falls apart.
There is no religion, outside of what we imagine. We made it up. It isn’t like the water cycle, it’s not something just waited to be discovered by humans who know how to look for it. Religion is fantasy.
You're making a metaphysical claim here, good luck proving it
Someone mentions religion and you come along and decide to attack it with the same cliche. Why?
Really in all cases, religious and secular, we make the best guesses available to us. I think we need to be humble about all of this.
A shaman brewing a mystical drink that gives you visions of supernatural forces is pretty convincing evidence of a god(s) to your any 2000 B.C. person. How else could you explain such a trip while having no concept of chemicals much less neurochemistry.
It is totally believable that a true religious zealot would be able to achieve much, much more with decades of practice.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-da...
Probably BS, but matches with what you say.
My point is you don't necessarily need chemical inducement to start or sustain the idea. Centuries of religious people believed in transcendent consciousness at times in history where they demonstrably had no access to drugs. You don't need to partake to be moved by John Lennon's all you need is love either; a lot of the people listening did not. And part of our cultural norms have these ideas baked in, with or without drugs.
And in the three main monotheist religions formation stories there is a good amount of time spent/lost in the desert.
My opinion is also that it is more amplified then justified part of the 60s. The more important part was the social revolution and not the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was more the pill. People did fuck before.
While anybody who has been paying attention to reality for very long will recall that the preference for peace & love over war & hate was so overwhelming that it was the war that was over within just a year or two after critical mass was reached among young people. Yes it was only a small portion who took the LSD, but the entire generation was influenced in some way or another too numerous to mention. For one thing it was just too stupid to continue being drafted into the army to go and fight for somebody else's country. There were not major anti-corporate attitudes, that was the least of considerations and really just a little bit of collateral fallout against military contractors. Nothing compared to the number of people today who are truly anti-corporate.
The entire nation grew to a point where a US President known to be dishonest by millions of citizens, was embarassingly ushered out by the combined attitude of the rest of the country (including those who had voted to re-elect him), way more respectably than deserved.
Think how much more widespread a collective attitude among young people against dishonesty would have to be before it could spread further enough for anything comparable like that to be accomplished today. Someone born in the 21st century would be the easiest to be taken advantage of by current disinformation since they simply have no frame of reference, there's nothing modern that compares. When someone born as early as 1968 can come up without a clue.
What's really hilarious is whoever is swallowing this propaganda is spending so much time so misinformed it's like (not even) trying to grasp reality while never venturing outside of Disneyland, and having nothing but imaginary characters as a source of guidance. This wouldn't be the first century where some people's perceptions can become far more distorted without any drugs compared to others who are under the influence.
I guess you can't trust everybody's description, especially when it comes to ideology.
Plus I would think it makes sense to do whatever one can do to discourage the spreading of propaganda.
I feel like something similar happens with various woke/cultural issues
Reading the article, I am reminded of my humanness.
[1] Check out Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about plants (THC included) controlling humans. IMHO it's the author's best title.
Both have been very good for my sobriety. They aren't for everyone though.
Great to see this becoming mainstream. Sad to see the number of charlatans and the industry has popped up around it.
I hope that we're able to safely get these substances to those that need them.
It's human nature to think that more is better. If a little works, why not use more. There's a definite bit of experimenting that should be done to see when more become less effective. As a user, that's just part of the journey. Then we have the marketing/sales view point where they just want those numbers higher, but it actually makes to product less but not in a way the marketing cannot overcome it. I feel this way about the microbrewery movement with high alcohol and hops=>IPA usage.
Alcohol in higher doses isn’t therapeutic. More than 4 beers and any therapeutic effect alchohol could’ve had is now also gone. :)
It was quite fun at a low dose and gave a similar feeling to being drunk without the downsides. After that experience if I had to choose to go out and drink or go out and take a low dose of mushrooms I'm definitely doing the latter.
A note is that psilocybin is only a partial agonist, and the dosages taken for micro-dosing may not be comparable to something like fenfluramine (a drug which does cause heart valve dysfunction for certain). There was a drug nerds thread lying around on Reddit where the theoretical receptor activations were compared. IIRC, psilocybin is not a major risk, as long as you're not tripping every day for months on end.
Microdoses also don't inspire hippocampal neurogenesis whereas larger doses do
Microdosing is not only not beneficial but it may be actively harmful
"...it is possible that chronic microdosing may carry a risk of fibrosis and VHD, which should be assessed in future studies. There is converging evidence that simulation of the 5-HT2BR over several months may lead to the development of fibrosis. Duration of intake plays a major role in drug-induced VHD, even if the substance is not taken daily (Connolly et al., 1997; Schade et al., 2007)."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02698811231225...
But at the end of the day, everyone reacts different. I don't know if there is a point to characterizing what should be 'normal' dosage. They are basically completely different drugs with different uses at different doses.
This is (should have been) expected for any trending topic, but especially something currently seen as taboo. We've seen CBD and the 10000MG 1oz bottles. There will always be fraudsters and scammers. It's just too easy for money to be made by people that have no idea about the actual products, but it's not just drug related. Just look at Amazon to see how prevalent it is, and how accepted it has become
I'm still incredibly new to it all and would love to grow my own at one point. I'd also love to know where ahem folks are sourcing their stuff.
You can also grow legal mushrooms like this, King Oysters in my case. It's a wonderful project teaching you a lot. Start to finish it's about 20 hours of work spanning 2 months.
PS: awesome tip!
So are growkits, but spores are easier to transport (in a syringe suspended in water, or on aluminium foil). Problem with growkits is that it takes a while to see whether you’ve got a good (or contaminated) one, and yield isn’t that high.
Main options:
- (Learning, qulity) Start from spores (syringe or dry): do this to learn a lot, and also to have something to eat afterwards. It was one of my most valuable projects ever. Spores go into petri dish, then search for Uncle Ben’s. Two months starting from zero.
- (Learning, quality, faster) Clone a living part: get your hands on mycelium or a fresh fruiting body (possibly also a sclerotium AKA truffle), which consists of mycelium as well (the »fruit« is the same material as the »tree« for fungi, I digress but this is so interesting). Put into agar petri dish, let it grow, and search for Uncle Ben’s. (I did this with store-bought King Oysters.) Roughly 2 weeks faster than the spore process because you’re skipping the selection-and-transfer phase, and thus also contamination risk.
- (No learning, genome+contamination gambling, fastest) Growkit: don’t have experience with this, but I’ve heard that they often don’t work because they’re contaminated. I have no practical experience here.
The yield is "not as big", right, but it's still more than you can reasonably consume. I don't quite remember, but I think three flushes yielded ~50g (dry) or so out of one small Growkit. Two big glass jars full.
I want to do it again out of enjoyment for the grow process alone. It's really fun watching these things grow!
There are more than one of these stores in my city - wouldn’t be surprised if it was happening in many other cities on the west coast as well.
I used to do "too much" doses and go running the hills with the hounds, back when. They're a great thing; but like all good things they can be overindulged.
probably got an ounce or two under alcohol in the freezer still; haven't felt the need to dip into that for a decade.
Sounds like it very much is about time. If I were you I would also just splurge and seek out a solid ayajuaska experience somewhere in that other America down there. Good luck
>heroic dose. imho they arent worth it, im making assumption regarding the cancer but you might benefit more from an actual `ceremony`. Not to get spiritual but they are more guided, a guided ayahuasca ceremony might be less intense but I personally think would be a better fit.
Hope you'll be fine.
I’ve always considered myself someone who can “maintain their shit” pretty well on drugs (granted, I rarely do drugs recreationally, my mushroom schedule is maybe once or twice a year these days). The few times I’ve hit a bit of turbulence has always been on the come-up or come-down. For mushrooms the comedown has always been smooth for me, but going up I’ve noticed a vague sense of anxiety until the full wave hits.
If you grew up around cattle country in Texas they are literally growing out of cow shit everywhere
It’s effectively decriminalized in the US at this point
Now that people realize that it’s better medicine than what pharmaceutical companies are producing they are adjusting their consumption
It dramatically reduces the difficulty and risk of what used to be the main failure point in the process. Now for $200 of gear and the complexity of a weekend baking project you can just do the whole thing yourself.
Anecdotally I've also seen a lot of people pick up this skill/"hobby" the last few years. I really think the accessibility of this technique is what's driving the increased availability.
It's a fun hobby. It motivated me to go back to school and pursue a biology degree. I think there's a lot we can learn from fungus, and not even in some kind of spiritual mumbo jumbo way, they're just better than we are at a lot of tasks (e.g. if you want to talk about 9's of availability, mycorrhizal networks are way ahead of us: they don't tend towards single points of control/failure like we do).
So yeah, fungus. Funny enough I pretty much only grow koji and some other food molds. I like to talk shop with mushroom growers though. The techniques are really different but we share a lot of experiences and... mindset. People end up with an almost spiritual admiration for the mold. Which is self-evident for psilocybes of course, but koji growers seem to develop it too.
This.
- You get sterilized substrate, which requires special equipment to produce on your own (large enough pressure cooker, mainly).
- Sterilizing rye is a bit of an art. Not too mushy, not too hard, properly sterilized, get the moisture right. Might take a couple of attempts.
- Financial investment is negligible either way.
- You’re hedging your contamination bets with 200g packs, because creating lab conditions at home isn’t that easy. (Plenty of tutorials claim it is, and then show you their special mushroom tent, which you won’t recognize as a beginner, and then you wonder why you’ve got orange fluff a month later.)
There are mushroom based gummies available in local smokeshops due to some loophole in the that this particular strain of shrooms is not explicitly illegal.
My gf just got into shrooms. She started getting them from her weed dealer. His shrooms were overpriced, and hit or miss quality. Then we ran into a girl with a shroom hat at a festival, and it turns out she's a great source. Selling shrooms is her primary source of income. She makes little vegan shroom "cookies" (which are more like fudge), and also sells raw shrooms. She's a licensed massage therapist, and seems to launder the income by charging you for a massage.
Psiloc(yb)in content varies a lot among fruiting bodies of the same batch, genome, flush, hell even within the same cluster (example papers [1][2]). So even for known/good sources I would suggest mixing at least a couple of fruiting bodies to have something known and repeatable. Since powder degenerates faster, honey is a good water/air/light free preservative.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17401967/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037887...
Psylocybin and psylocin are Schedule I wherever they occur.
The only practical loophole is spores, which can be sold for research purposes, though not in all states, and are illegal to germinate anywhere. Still, many online outfits sell and ship liquid culture (mycelium suspended in liquid), which is illegal but it appears nobody cares too much.
https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2019/09/17/from-the-dese...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
'to channel youth dissent and rebellion into more being and non-threatening directions' - FBI internal memo
Without MKULTRA, LSD still hits the US and still causes some cultural tremors.
Subproject 6 of MK-ULTRA involved funding Eli Lilly to develop its own synthesis of LSD. The CIA embarked on this to ensure an adequate supply after finding that Sandoz had produced only 40 grams total of LSD. After Lilly succeeded, the CIA became the main customer, and via various other subprojects funded and supplied researchers that experimented with LSD.
In particular, many counterculture figures first encountered LSD as subjects of CIA-backed experiments, including Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and Grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
Timothy Leary himself was one step removed, being introduced to psychedelics by a fellow Harvard researcher whose research into magic mushrooms was CIA-funded.
[this is all discussed in Kinzer's "Poisoner in Chief"]
Without the CIA it might have taken decades longer.
Isn't that quite a lot of LSD?
It turned out to be an transformative experience for me. And it wasn't from the LSD itself, the dose was too low to impact my brain in a lasting way. But it's helped me connect with others better in a more 'intimate' setting and build more meaningful relationships. It's been over a year and I've done it a few times since and each time it's been a great experience with others. That's the TLDR of my experience.
After that experience, I believe that for most people the benefits do not outweigh the risks until the drug is better studied clinically. The exceptions would be those who stand to experience exceptional quality of life improvements from a treatment-resistant depression breakthrough or cluster headache treatments (which AIUI are already pretty clinically established).
That said, I am probably too curious about life and novel experiences to have ever heeded this kind of advice if it meant not satisfying my curiosity at least once. So if you’re dying of curiosity I get how it might be worth it anyway.
But ultimately it just made me kind of sad. Why do I still have to be depressed even after having these drug experiences that permanently cured depression for others? Instead for me it just made it worse, and that really made me feel hopeless for a long time. The only reason it doesn't now is because I've finally secured some intense psychoanalysis which seems to actually be helping me.
For what it's worth I've had bad trips. i.e. a sense of impending doom, demons etc... For some reason I found the experience interesting and positive. I can see why you did not.
Let me know if you'd like to connect and discuss your experience. I would enjoy listening.
Net-net, what's best in your (whosoever is reading this) opinion?
1. To never drop acid.
2. To try it out a couple times and never do it again?
3. To add it as part of one's regimen as and when one needs it?
when something feels really good or really bad, that memory stands out in your brain, and it’s hard to shake, for better or worse, it colours future experiences, shapes the way you interpret and react to them.. One huge negative experience can cast a long shadow - and so can one huge positive experience. A negative and a position don’t cancel one another out, but they each reduce the sum impact of the other - and if your goal is to use one intense emotional experience to change the weight of another, then psychedelics are absolutely a route to making that change.
If you’re trying to cope with trauma, a powerful positive experience on psychedelics can help attenuate your memory of that pain - and if you’re trying to break a habit e.g. a psychological addiction, a negative experience on psychedelics can offset the effects of past positive reinforcement from indulging that addiction. Very similar to forcing yourself to drink until you’re sick, to make you averse to drinking.
Carefully and purposefully seeking out experiences that shape your mind is an important part of being sentient, imo. You don’t have to use drugs to do it, but you’re really missing out if you don’t pursue the practice at all.
Some background/trip-reporting-ish: For the last 6 months or so I've been dosing around 25-50 micrograms at a frequency of ~1 per 2 weeks as my "going out" drug, rather than consuming alcohol. Results have been mixed, definitely enjoyed some nights very much but others the effects were similar to pot paranoia. Lately I've decided that this is probably an imprudent frequency and am dropping down to maybe once per quarter, but will likely consume closer to 100ug per a session. The things I like about it are:
* the rush of energy that persists for the first few hours
* the duration of the trip (4-6 hours of effects, which from a bang/buck perspective is a plus in my book)
* the general silly vibe it creates in me.
Things I don't like about it are:
* the high body load (it creates a lot of muscle tension in my body, and I often feel physically worn out the next day like I was working out)
* the occasional paranoia/in-my-headness
* the higher level of emotional vulnerability I feel while at peak trip (good for some social situations, but in the wrong environment kind of sucks).
tl;dr: on the best trips I turn into a silly fae with a lot of curiosity and humor, on the worst trips I turn into an analytical gargoyle perched at the fringes of the function. In all cases I'm kind of run down the next day.
I've done acid about 15 times. Was fun, I guess.
Acid makes you think outside the box and really zoom out on life. It feels like you're able to think 100x more in the time you're tripping than sober. I would definitely try it. It can open your mind a bit.
But I think magic mushrooms are overall better as an emotional aid.
LSD is a pretty safe choice of psychedelic, since very few things are dangerous at the dosages that you take LSD at, so the most likely "I didn't get what I paid for" scenario is you getting some formerly damp paper. If you have a family history of schizophrenia, it might adjust your risk calculus, but otherwise safety isn't a big concern.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as the first mind-altering chemical someone uses, since the 6+ hour trip time can be brutal if midway through you freak out, which is typically caused by being uncomfortable with the idea that your brain can be under the influence. But if you've drank and smoked cannabis, you're probably relatively comfortable with the idea that your mind can be temporarily altered by chemicals.
But on the whole, I think the fundamental novelty of the experience, in that there is absolutely nothing else like it, makes it worthwhile to try out. If you enjoy it, then it can find its spot in a broad collection of recreational activities, and if you don't, then at least you've experienced it, and it'll be done and dusted in a day or so.
Taking LSD is a skill. If you're paying attention and have a modicum of self-awareness you'll get better at it. What does it mean to get better at taking LSD? It's the ability to have your entire being torn inside out but still able to remind yourself that it will end and that you'll be fine. It's analogous to be being caught under water by a big wave: thrash and let fear take over and you're in trouble. If you can relax and let the wave pass you'll be fine.
Other than those with PTSD I don't think anyone needs it. I do it to help with my sobriety and to keep a fresh outlook on the world and myself, but psychedelics are just some of the tools in my toolkit.
It can be fun, it can be terrifying, it can be enlightening, it can be disappointing.
If you try it, good luck! If you don't try it, good luck!
Most of what people consider to be “profound” during tripping is just the drug making you think things are profound - in the same way alcohol makes you think it’s reasonable to get angry about an argument about a TV show or cocaine makes you think Uber for cats is the next trillion dollar company. It unquestionably does put you in a state where you may have ideas or thought patterns you won’t have otherwise so there’s a chance that those ideas are actually profound, just like your cocaine-fueled startup idea actually may be a good one. But people ascribe too much meaning and magic to this IMO, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Some people, like myself, have had panic attacks (“bad trips”) on psychedelics. Without going into detail these can be very disconcerting and leave lingering effects like PTSD/anxiety. If you are prone to anxiety I would not partake, and personally I think the benefits don’t outweigh the risk of this at all for most people. At the very least I caution against mixing LSD with cannabis, recommend you have someone with you that isn’t tripping, and ideally have something on hand to treat a panic attack (even if just strong beer/wine/liquor).
A lot of people will say that 1. This only happens if you get something else passed off as acid, or have a bad set and setting 2. You can avoid that if you are smart about where you get it. I think that’s BS because it’s a well documented phenomenon and testing can only easily rule out certain particular things anyway (you can only ever be certain about it if you made it yourself or got it from a regulated research source). Similarly, LSD has the potential to induce psychosis and schizophrenia, which many say is only possible if you were going to develop those conditions anyway (it was already latent) - which is nondisprovable and has no way of being identified. Personally I think these arguments are made from a place of wishful thinking that it can’t happen to them.
On the other hand single trips have been shown/known to help pull people out of depressive states in a moderately durable manner. You may not only process feelings or concepts you haven’t before, but the drug itself may induce a good mood lasting a few days called an “afterglow” which could bring you out of some kind of local optimum. If depression has been negatively impacting your quality of life for a long time I would consider the potential benefits to outweigh the risks enough to try it once.
Also, cluster headaches I believe are uniquely treatable by psychedelics. Those are the only thing that I think justifies adding it to a “regimen” because IIUC those headaches are so uniquely extreme and debilitating.
I like the metaphor of the mountain ski slope, where our minds have our regular thought patterns/trails that we are used to using and LSD is like a fresh load of snow that let's your mind explore and create new pathways in the slopes! This doesn't mean you will come out in 10 hours as a different person, but you will have had a new perspective and that's always enlightening in some way, however simple it may be.
Taking one tab of 100ug for me is never a full 'tripping' experience where I feel out of control and I think most people can try this and enjoy it without much to worry about. There's minimal mental and visual effects and at the peak for 1-2 hours or so you'll get a taste of what LSD is about. If you have a pleasurable experience then up the dose by 25ug every 4 months until 150 or so to get a better trip where things aren't out of control at the peaks but you have a good time. Then when you're comfortable you can do a yearly trip/meditation session out in nature, the shore, or a nice view. The mental state is really unlike anything else for me and being nonaddictive is so nice as I can just go a whole year without using it with no mental effort. Unlike where with weed where my brain equates it with a dopamine response and I'll get thoughts to go smoke even though I'm no regular user.
That's my 6 cents, hope it was useful to someone.
Only real negative for me was it lasts quite a while.
The last time I ever did a psychedelic, I dropped acid and was reading this book called "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. There's a part of the book that talks about drug induced psychosis. There's some illustration of lightning hitting a tower. I remember turning the page, seeing it, then hearing this super loud thunder outside that shook the house
I stopped doing them after that point because it was some kind of sign. When I started doing them I wasn't able to believe in God, after that experience I could
meanwhile, the experience of general anesthesia basically took away my ability to believe in God
one in one out, I guess. It seems like I'd be happier if I'd gone the other way but one can't control what one believes
$70 of goods + $30 in taxes and fees.
Is this what libertarians mean by "taxation is theft?"
It bit Mozilla users harder because Mozilla uses "DNS over HTTPS" to cloudflare itself, ignoring your system DNS. There's a setting to change that but you have to enter "DNS" in the "setting search" to get it.