I heard once that somebody went into psychosis and ended up committing double murder without first taking LSD. Maybe bad things happen sometimes and it doesn't necessarily mean that whatever you are personally afraid of caused it?

Same claim has been made about marijuana https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-man-who-said-mar...

Or even junk food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassina...

Let’s wait for the science, shall we?

It’s important to not write these cases off because it’s a good reason to decriminalize and study illicit drugs in a therapeutic setting so we can learn more about how they impact various groups of people. SSRIs also lead to suicide and can cause psychosis, so can stimulants like adderall. In almost all cases there is an underlying mental illness a medication tends to make worse. The reason it’s uncommon with these medications is because the patient is under the supervision of a doctor. I don’t need to go into how many homicides have resulted due to alchoal

LSD is one of the generally safer and more well tolerated psychedelics. As far as I know it’s not legal, and there is no way for anyone to know if that person took LSD. Other drugs like NBoMe are active in the microgram range and do cause behavior like this can had lead to death.

Look up the Darknet Avengers, this was a group of people that started by drugs of the darknet,texting them, and posting the results to let people know if dealers were selling a dangerous substance in the guise of LSD.

The vast majority of people do NOT test their drugs. Again, a good reason to decriminalize.

Real LSD when done responsibly can be one of the most healing and therapeutic experiences any one can have.

A tab is (nominally) 100micrograms, a standard single dose.

I'm not finding any news reports about such a case, the only one that sounds relevant in the same timeframe is this: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230302000713

Can you provide a link or something more specific than 'I saw it on Reddit'?

A tab is just a square of blotting paper. It can be any amount, but is most often 1-2 doses.

LSD can cause persistent hallucinations, though these tend to be minor, like halos around lights. It can also leave a lasting impression on your mind. This is usually a positive, and is one of the reasons it's interesting for anxiety and PTSD.

Physiologically, it's remarkably safe. People have taken 1000s of times the standard dose and been fine. It's worth being a little alarmist though, as a "bad trip" can occur at any dosage, and can have extremely unpredictable effects. It's usually upsetting but manageable, but the horror stories are real too. Powerful stuff. Do not combine it with alcohol.

Anecdotally, my worst experience (out of about 5 times) was throwing up on myself then sitting in a river for 3 hours trying to feel clean. My friend punched a hole in his wall and took a shit in it.

The "face-eating bath salt man of Florida" was a schizophrenic that had smoked too much cannabis, triggering a manic episode.

He never even ingested alpha-PVP, the "bath salt" / amphetamine synthetic in question.

>You hear stories with psilocybin mushrooms too but I remember reading that LSD was a different beast that it can actually cause lasting symptoms whereas you don't hear that with psilocybin (but not without cases involving psychosis).

LSD is, among the most experienced of psychonauts, associated with a slightly relatively increased risk of HPPD, especially compared to mushrooms.

The dosage, setting, and personal predisposition to manic and schizophrenic episodes is a magnitude more affecting of a factor.

Antedate urban legends such as the above, and "orange juice man", just further dilute the truth, and increase the actual risk to people harming themselves.

A tab is roughly a standard dosage. One problem is that LSD is such an extremely potent chemical (the effective dose is measured in micrograms) that it is difficult to be confident in your dosage when it hasn't been produced in a rigorously controlled pharma environment. So even one tab might be actually several times stronger than you're expecting.

I've seen bad trips, I've even seen one case of psychosis. My personal opinion is that the positives still outweigh the negatives. The negatives are also easily mitigated by providing a safe and positive setting (and would be even more so with standardized production); clinical administration would be quite safe. Benzodiazepines are effective in stopping the anxiety spiral of bad trips.

If someone chugs a bottle of vodka and loses it, you don’t turn around and presume that a bottle of beer will lead to the same result.

You might find Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” a good read to get some background of fear uncertainty and death/dread around some drugs and how it’s tainted a lot of perception over the years.

> Not trying to be an alarmist

Every form of medication has associated risk and there are horrific anecdotes for everything. The key is to get more probable benefit than probable detriment. If the risk for a particular medication is unusually high then the problem it's likely to help with has to be commensurately severe.

psilocybin (or more accurately the active drug it is converted to, psilocin) and LSD are extremely similar as classical psychedelics. psychosis is possible with any sort of psychoactive drug and individuals with a family history of bipolar disease or schizophrenia should avoid consuming any psychoactive substances. with that said, psychosis is extremely uncommon with LSD in healthy individuals at reasonable doses, and LSD use actually has a slight negative correlation with later development of schizophrenia.

i'm not sure about that particular case, but consuming LSD while on lithium (commonly prescribed for bipolar disorder) essentially guarantees an acute episode of psychosis and possibly seizures so I wonder if that particular individual was on lithium at the time.