For Brilliant Color: Packaging the First LSD Blotter
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7b7kv4/mark-mccloud-collects...
Mark McCloud has about 30,000 tabs of LSD. He collects them, frames them, and catalogues them in his San Francisco home, which is why Mark gets periodically arrested by the DEA.
(full disclosure: i work for the MIT Press)
> No, because you have to ask the right question to take it. Do you want a one-on-one with your maker?
Hopefully he won't take all of them like these guys: https://notsoprofound.com/the-unforeseen-lsd-overdose-of-197...
So, you know, there is a vacuum waiting to be filled. Could be filled by a head shop, could be by anything…
A JS framework is probably nabbing it as we speak
You'd think there'd be many more with a great name like that.
"Where are you from?" "We came from London." "Oh, all the way from the UK? You don't seem to have an accent at all!" "No, it's about 30 miles from here."
Bongs and Bagels?
I think I know what my YC pitch is.... A side line delivering weed AND snacks
https://i.imgur.com/pP1TjeI.png
Not sure which I like best, .love, .info, .net, .pro or .me :-)
Finally, it's pretty incredible that something like this survived. Most people follow a "dispose of the evidence" protocol when it comes illicit drug packaging.
Woah there buddy. 100 droplets at 1,000 μg each = 100,000 μg.
I was a little surprised to learn that they didn't just dilute it a bit more and soak the entire sheet.
Seems like one can expect a hit to be a more precise dose than a half-hit, presuming it's still done that way.
It's somewhat unique in that.
Something to keep in mind.
There's nothing in the Wikipedia entry that contradicts the possibility, though. Both could be true, with illicit details elided from the official telling.
Still I'm choosing to believe in innocent origins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_with_Diamonds
you can't help wondering though...
That's true but at least we have a bit more to go on there (if not specifically about Lucy in the Sky) - I can't dig up the original reference but it's a famous enough story to paste from a random google search result:
John told Derek Taylor that when he and Paul dropped acid together they “just stared into each other’s eyes saying ‘I know, man’ and laughing”
Always a bit hurtful to be reminded of stuff like that.
Obviously when you start taking high doses and reality kind of breaks down the distinction becomes moot, but at regular doses it does matter.
I'm 53 now and hope that before I die (which I hope isn't anytime soon) there's a safe and legal way for me to try LSD.
That said, I must highly recommend not using in attempt to “fix” one’s aphantasia.
Edit: I recommend to stick to shrooms if you can.
I'd love to tell you, but I don't know how people without aphantasia experience LSD. What I do know is that my inner experience is only (mostly) blind; it has fully developed senses of hearing, touch, smell and taste. I get visual distortions, apparently within normal parameters. Thus far in the few experiences I've had with synesthesia, it's never involved my sense of sight.
Funny, I usually have the opposite experience :) LSD for deep, not-so-much visual, inwards journeys and mushrooms for very visual, laugh-y and social experiences.
When I'm on LSD, one of my favorite things to do is talk to friends over text. It results in me saying stuff that I could never say otherwise. Here is something Emily (a headmate of mine) once said:
> ....there must always be sadness... because all that is good will always end.... and it will never stop being sad that it is this way~
For me, thinking like that just does not happen without LSD, it was a complete accident but it's so pretty!
And the substance (as long as it is a tryptamine) is less important, save for personal preferences. (I have heard a lot about LSD for fun and shrooms for insights - for me, there is no such distinction; if anything, LSD, even in lower doses, produces more profound associations, ones that words cannot capture. At higher doses, well, as you said, the distinction becomes mood.)
At the same time, the soul (overall personality, mind, motivations, desires, approach, will, and goals) is crucial.
Unless you are trying to treat some other illness it isn’t worth the risk until we better understand the mechanisms behind why psychedelics can trigger mental disorders.
That's what I'm saying, though. There's no way to know how susceptible one is to a particular disorder in general, let alone while on psychedelics.
There is evidence of psychedelic use connecting parts of the brain that aren't normally connected, AFAIK the white matter becomes much more interconnected during a psychedelic trip.
Speak for yourself. Risk tolerance is highly subjective.
It's true that a small percentage of individuals who try psychedelics will develop otherwise unexplained mental illness. It's also true that a small percentage of individuals who try skydiving will break their legs and that a small percentage of individuals who try scuba diving will drown. However, ultimately, it's up to individuals to decide for themselves whether it's worth bearing such risks for the sake of experiencing something new and exciting.
Personally, I'd recommend that healthy people try all three of those activities. Life's short, after all, and you're more likely to get hurt in a car accident on your way there than you are to suffer injury from any of those particular activities in and of themselves. In every endeavor, it's up to you to do your own research and make as rational and informed a decision as you can given the available evidence.
People have taken less than a few doses of NBOMe and died. Meanwhile there are no known deaths by LSD overdose, people have taken thousands of doses of LSD and lived.
For example, most skydiving is done in a guided and controlled way, with participants paying a professional instructor to help them through the process on a flight where everyone involved knows that people will be jumping out of this plane, in areas chosen by said flights for this to be done in. The risk of injury or death would be much higher if you were to, say, bowl over a flight attendant on a commercial plane flying over, say, the Rocky Mountains, steal a backpack from a supply area that you assume is a parachute, shove open the emergency exit, and jump out. However, that risk might be significantly lower if you happened to have prior training as a military paratrooper
Lifetime risk of death in a car accident might come down to frequency. But it could also be affected by such factors as road conditions, weather, your own physical and mental health, the condition of your car, and whether you're being pursued by a military helicopter
Broad statistics tend to be a poor substitute for understanding one's own situation in assessing the risks one is willing to take. They are used in science because science tends to aim to draw broad conclusions over large aggregates. Your own individual risk assessment may take such aggregate measures into account, but it's unlikely that this is adequate to make such assessments wisely, and either way only informs your assessment of risk rather than your tolerance for it
But sure, you're doing something not well researched when you take psychedelics, and various people have very different experiences with them from getting a revelation to having the worst experiences of their lives.
So yeah, there are unknown risks and unknown benefits, thread carefully and take that into account.
I am always fascinated by this conundrum. A lot of people say it's a life-altering experience, yet it generally doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person (unless they have a mental illness ).
I think there's a vague consensus that one must 'integrate' the experiences you have on psychedelics in order to meaningfully impact your life, if that's your goal. Those profound experiences and feelings you can have on psychedelics are certainly incredible and moving in their own right, but in order to make that have an effect on who you are (increased empathy and better framing of life events are often mentioned), you the taker of those drugs has to put some work in to learn from it. It always bothers me when I'll see statements like 'this drug changed my life', especially when talking about psychedelics. The drug didn't do it alone.
This is also seen in the early work using MDMA by psychiatrists - the drug itself was just one part of the treatment.
Yeah, I never liked that phrasing either. It makes psychedelics seem like some magical mental health panacea.
Often people who seek out these drugs are already taking the first steps to change their life (this can mean many things, even if "only"[1] changing their outlook) before ever taking the drug. They changed their life on their own, the drug was just a means to an end.
[1] I put only in quotes, because anyone who's struggled with any mental health issues knows this can be a gargantuan hurdle
Are you always this precise when causality is being assigned though? Take geopolitical matters for example, when you hear a story about what caused some event on the geopolitical stage being attributed to one variable/entity do your spider senses perk up and realize you're being told a tall tale?
The best insight you will get, without taking the trip yourself is going to come from reading Huxley's "Doors of Perception". A large enough dose will give you all sorts of interesting insights into your own thinking.
The closest your going to come to this, is the first time you watch the film "The Game", assuming you pay close enough attention and are tuned into it as a film and the characters in it. However it pales in comparison to the real thing.
There were a couple kids we didn't know well that went schizophrenic/psychotic break.
My closest friend got too much in his early twenties at an early burning man, went schizophrenic/psychotic and after a year or so in and out of jail, committed suicide by cop. There was nothing that could be done for him as he was an adult and didn't want help.
This was a college educated, elementary school teacher.
I haven't touched the stuff since.
You do you, but don't tell people there aren't risks.
I used to share this attitude, but seeing a close friend have a complete break and lose his life over some recreational partying changed my view.
So I'd talk about it enthusistically (like any acid-head!), but I'd never recommend itto anyone.
https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=23788
This doesn’t get mentioned in the current “psychedelics as a cure-all” hype wave.
Also, reading this linked person's comment, they were on DMT and it sounds like they have some strong ideas about how the universe works (they mention having been to "heaven" before and keep mentioning hell and evil and devils as if they are real). Yes, people should be careful, especially when they have issues with mental health.
As for the heaven thing, I do not know if they were particularly susceptible to delusions before ever taking anything, but if they were, then it was probably not the right choice, yeah.
It's hard to be self-aware about delusions if you don't know they're delusions. It's definitely possible though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU8VmJsX6-s
I've wondered if it would be useful to approach psychedelics similar to the way that meditation is taught in vajrayana lineages, where you have to do preliminary mind trainings before you start advancing to other practices. If you encounter "hell" in a bad trip, like the person in the post, but have no way to understand it, it's easy to believe in it literally.
I just watched a few minutes of that video you linked and I'll definitely watch it later, he seems very lucid about his delusions, thanks!
Some might rationalize this, as getting a better grip on one's Jungian shadow. I sometimes view the experience that way, but sometimes I wonder if it slightly loosened some important retaining bolt. I'm pretty sure negative vibes can come out of the Pandora's psychedelic box, too. Also, this variability in effect hinders using it therapeutically. It's hard to "guide" a trip, and no one really trips in the same way twice.
You don't need a heroic dose for ego death (but it probably helps). You could be listening to music in a dark room or with closed eyes, on a medium-high dose and you suddenly start disassociating.
Also, you don't normally hallucinate in the same way media portrays it (there are drugs that make you hallucinate though) AFAIK (none of my friends or I hallucinated on psilocybin/LSD; I wouldn't call DMT hallucinations either). Ego death trips are more conceptual than purely visual, but there's a strong visual aspect to it too.
I'm autistic and have ADHD so it might affect me differently than the typical person. I don't necessarily like it that way (I would love one of the super-intense experiences that people tend to get really excited over) but so far I haven't been able to cause a particularly strong effect. Very curious why I'm either more resistant to it or more tolerant of it to the point of being underwhelmed.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a very nice experience that I like to partake in every couple weeks. The first time I did LSD (100μg) I got HPPD for about a week, sometimes I wish it never went away. Being sober is so boring!
There are plenty of tips online, but two that have stuck with me are:
* remember that it will end
* have something with you that you've had for a long time, because it'll be an anchor.
Neither of those thoughts/things may matter until they do.
* remember that you will be extremely tempted to answer complex questions like What Is Love? and Who Is God?
* when you are actually unable to answer simple questions like What Is Toothpaste? and Where Is My Left Foot?
> have something with you that you've had for a long time, because it'll be an anchor.
* Have some Librium or Valium to hand.
Without more information, that conclusion seems to be going too far.
The package is a parody of a commercial product, and it would be totally unsurprising to me that the parody extended to the attitude of the text. Kodak almost certainly presented its contemporary film as "a scientific product of a modern research lab" in a similar way.
Startup concept: a conversion camp where you take religious peoples' money and host LSD retreats for queer kids
Aside: I'm sure psychedelics helped many people come to terms with their speciality, or the altered headspace helped them come out to friends
I'm curious if you had an 'aha!' moment or maybe your environment at that time had any effects.
The environment was just my own apartment and a friend talking about various topics for ~10 hours when we were about 17 years old or so after a 1.5 dosage LSD (don't remember the exact dosage, but we had three sugar cubes with one dose each, one of them got split in half to share).
I grew up in a country-side place where homophobia and nationalism is basically thought by parents by default to kids. Doing "sieg heil" in a sneaky way during events was considered funny by most. Most of the people hadn't seen a non-white person until we had to start traveling to the nearby city for school, which happens around the 17 year old mark. So basically being exposed to lots of preconceived hate since birth.
A lot of the subjects we talked about were about acceptance as we both had our own experiences rejecting or distancing ourselves from people based on perceived "weaknesses", something we both realized was just introducing harm and isolation.
If someone wants to make this a thing (and it's legally viable), where do I send my CV?!
See previous thread here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38970587
(and the menlo park studies... LSD is intrinsically linked to the development of silicon valley)
Super interesting!
Has there ever been any objective -strong emphasis- of the efficiency of LSD to improve cognition, creativity or consciousness? Because I definitely never see LSD listed in the category of "doping" substances. The main advocates are users themselves who think they had a revelation - but how much of it is self-delusion? I'd hasard it's a lot - if not all there is to it.
(I would be fun to imagine a plant of fungus whose evolutionary niche would be to seduce animals/humans they need it - leading to it being cultivated)
I'd advise learning some history before berating me with bullshit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Psychotropic_Sub...
Edit: the repercussions of these conventions extend to this day even when countries attempt to legalise just cannabis, like Germany's case when moving forward with their legalisation which infringes on EU law against illicit drug trafficking [2], procedure 2001/0114/CNS is a direct side-effect of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances [3] started... By US's policies against drugs in the 60s-70s. It's a direct link creating issues to this day by puritan American values.
Decades of potential research worldwide blocked because a politician in the US needed to get a weapon against minorities, fun, huh?
[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_Agai...
It's easy to become cynical about psychedelics, because there's a ton of bullshit in the space. (And it's probably fair to assess that the push of these substances into the black market helped create an environment where only "hippie-esque" bullshit could thrive). But the results seem pretty clear that there's real potential in these drugs to alleviate human suffering in many ways.
Does that mean that these drugs unlock magical insights or enhance the intelligence of their users? Of course not, and no one serious is suggesting that they do. But there's been plenty of real research over the past two decades that makes dismissing the medical value of psychedelics as "nonsense" a fairly silly take.
And the bullshit stems exactly from it being a potential career death if someone attempted to research them in depth. Without factual and objective analysis the only knowledge left is a hodgepodge of anecdotes, except for the odd Alexander Shulgin or others more scientifically rigorous minded the reports came from users who are not a good cohort of people to objectively analyse their experiences.
MAPS [0] is one of the few groups who against the odds continued to research it, lately they have been advancing research on using MDMA for PTSD, psylocibin, etc. If it wasn't a huge taboo for decades for serious researches to enter the field this type of research would be much more advanced today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidisciplinary_Association_...
(That notion seems suspect on its face, since those other countries have similarly strict drug laws, but that's not really my point - my point is that there's plenty of research in the field as of 2024, and it's not fair or accurate to dismiss it as nonsense).
It's weird how people can make implicit claims of omniscience while on regular consciousness and nobody bats an eye, but far less ambitious claims on LSD are crazy talk.
It seems to me that regular consciousness epistemically privileges regular consciousness.
Also, I don't see any military adding LSD in the toolkit of military leaders. It has been tested as a disabling agent. But never found use as an enabling one, neither in the US nor in one of its enemies.
Where would this come from, other than self-reporting? Plus the claims are typically not about 'efficiency', just that ideas people have had under the influence of LSD have inspired, in some part, their real subsequent work - from all sorts of art to code. There are piles of examples of this.
Don Hopkins a few years ago with a deep dive into Bill Atkinson, Hypercard, LSD and lots of other interesting stuff:
Presumably all the same labs that already test cognition and creativity?
(I don't know which of the bajillion different meanings of "consciousness" is being used here, but my guess is that that it's one of the vaguer ones that nobody is testing).
From competitive pressure in the creative industry? My work isn't good because I think it is. And if LSD did give access to a deeper, higher reality, you'd think LSD users would produce more impactful work.
LSD and other psychedelics give you insights, ways to see things without the noise of your ego always in front of it, and those experiences are valuable to oneself, not necessarily to be more productive, more creative, etc. Many artists used LSD, many other artists are teetotalers, each one has their own experiences to draw from to create their art, it's the sum of the self experience that creates impactful work.
You are looking at this as if life is some sort of competitive sport and people are only trying to gain an edge by taking mind-altering substances, that's not how life works nor a good way to approach those substances. You can't min-max life, as much as you try, that's the illusion of control living in your mind speaking.
There are numerous ongoing studies into the effects of psilocybin on terminally ill patients, the idea being that the psychedelic effects helps people face death calmly. Every time I think about that, I'm always tickled by the idea that perhaps these fungi have evolved a way to farm their own food.
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10106897/
Edit: Michael Pollan's book has a Netflix adaptation that addresses palliative mushroom therapy, among other uses: https://www.netflix.com/title/80229847
Sir Mushroom offered that he's a wizard from a thousand universes away. He travels everywhere, guiding people by the hand, introducing them to the larger world.
Aren't H sapiens just God's way of taking billions of prokaryotes on a trip to the moon?
In Machine Learning, we might think of this idea as "setting your Learning Rate too high"
The brain is the same, but no checkpoints.
With that said, I don't think anyone really has control over this. I'm a DID system and I have some sort of limited control but my time skips are usually on the order of days or weeks, not years.
Another artist I am extremely fond of, Mœbius (Jean Giraud), also had a very bad time after a failed psychedelic initiation (but my memory may be wrong, as I can't find it in writing on the web - was it in a biographical documentary or am I mixing him with someone else?).
Like Jodorowsky, I never felt I needed drugs - even to enjoy his work, PKD's work or other usually associated with psychedelic use or culture (Aldiss, Lem, Herbert,Zelazny, Bester). When I listen to weird electrical like Aphex Twin or Bicep and people in the comments talk how they seem to need drugs to feel the music kick, I seriously wonder why - I felt there was little to gain for a great risk to take (either from impurities in the substance, or the substance itself - the risk of a bad trip).
In short: I'm abnormal enough? I am clearly more creative than baseline (but less disciplined to really exploit it - and there isn't a drug with the right profile to make one more disciplined yet critical enough to stay on course).
As a sci-fi reader, of course I am very interested in other dimensions, breakthroughs, alien thinking and superpowers. And LSD and others have that mystique - but seem very disappointing in reality, compared to those expectations.
They’re novel experiences but I never found myself able to really care about it, nor do I think they left a lasting impression. Always made me wonder if I was missing something that everyone else gets.
(The war on drugs is dumb as hell and I think they should be legal in so far as individual freedom is concerned)
That revelation is real.
But I knew about different effects of the brain before just that I thought I'm 'different'.
LSD showed me very fast and very clear that this is not the case
Of course, through engineering, generative AI will surely save us from this burden of terribly ambiguous and inconvenient humanity by amalgamating existing humanity and extrapolating/interpolating based on a handful of plain text, so that's... great?
Yet I don't see it: most LSD usage works the same way as absinthe or opium used to be used: as a crutch for creatives suffering a dry spell, with the user feeling improvement - but the public, critics, "consumers" of the creative product not really seeing it.
(Usually the crutch becomes an addiction, or the toxicity/impurities in the product take their toll, and you end up with a coda like at the end of PK Dick's _A Scanner Darkly_)
What I find most specific to LSD though is that it seems to have produced a long list of LSD advocates, whose work consists only of waxing poetics about how "LSD gives you mental superpowers", and... Not much else. No actual "general" poetry, no Great Text, no theoretical breakthrough in philosophy nor science...)
Firstly, showing up to work on acid is very different than showing up to work on Adderall. The impact on someone's ability to function normally is incomparable. Secondly, working faster to solve problems is not even close to doing things like honing someone's artistic perception in their medium, and having the mental material to manifest abstract concepts. Many of the benefits people reap from hallucinogens are experiential and could influence someone decades later, like travel or something they read.
> Yet I don't see it: most LSD usage works the same way as absinthe or opium used to be used: as a crutch for creatives suffering a dry spell, with the user feeling improvement - but the public, critics, "consumers" of the creative product not really seeing it.
I am a professional art-school trained artist who almost certainly knows many more successful artists than you do: you're either making things up to justify your existing opinion, or you don't know enough about the topic to realize you're making things up. The preponderance of dedicated professional artists and designers I know (on the artier end of the spectrum) have at least dabbled in hallucinogens. Personally, I have not. If you include marijuana, even though that's far more like Adderall in its usage patterns, that number is nearly 100%. Almost none of that drug usage, from what I've seen, is used in direct response to needing inspiration. Of course, none of this is universal, but to say it's not common or influential because you are not aware of many people that are working while tripping is utterly ridiculous.
> (Usually the crutch becomes an addiction, or the toxicity/impurities in the product take their toll, and you end up with a coda like at the end of PK Dick's _A Scanner Darkly_)
Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.
> What I find most specific to LSD though is that it seems to have produced a long list of LSD advocates, whose work consists only of waxing poetics about how "LSD gives you mental superpowers", and... Not much else. No actual "general" poetry, no Great Text, no theoretical breakthrough in philosophy nor science...)
You can find bullshit artists peddling damned near anything for their own benefit, and hallucinogens are one of the worst offenders. That's not an argument against the efficacy of anything. And to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything. Neither for hallucinogen usage, nor abstinence.
The fact that almost none of the drugs in the artistic milieu are used to get inspiration is interesting - you'd think those, especially LSD, would have been prime candidates, given their "legendary" reputation in Leary's advocacy work.
And just for the record: >Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.
"A Scanner Darkly"'s coda is not fiction. Here it is:
"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it…. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying.” But the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape-recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any ‘sin’, it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene deceased
To Ray deceased
To Francy permanent psychosis
To Kathy permanent brain damage
To Jim deceased
To Val massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy permanent psychosis
To Joanne permanent brain damage
To Maren deceased
To Nick deceased
To Terry deceased
To Dennis deceased
To Phil permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue permanent vascular damage
To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage
…and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The ‘enemy’ was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy."
It's not that they don't contribute to inspiration for some, or that some don't deliberately take them, at some point at least, to expand their artistic perspective: they just aren't useful as a work aid to mitigate a lack of inspiration like drinking coffee to mitigate tiredness. Hallucinogens are a leisure drug, not a work aid, and like many other kinds of intense leisure experiences, they can have significant impact on someone's work. Surely people make art while taking acid but it's just not used like you imagine it is.
>And just for the record:
>> Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.
> "A Scanner Darkly"'s coda is not fiction. Here it is:
It was a novel and he was trying to sell books. If you want to know what drug addiction is really like, start with some reputable, published, entirely non-fiction literature written to educate people, not entertain them.
I have not struggled with drug addiction, though being involved in several subcultures in my younger years, many people in my life have, and my list probably rivals his. In my adult life, maybe ten people ranging from fairly close friends, to family, and even an ex long-term live-in girlfriend have died from their heroin (which mostly started with something they were prescribed for pain,) alcohol, and in one case of meth usage. Many more permanently damaged. Their actual stories don't make snappy book codas: they're emotionally exhausting because the sadness of their existence is mundane, boring, and oppressive. Even my best friend in elementary school who after not seeing him for quite some time, I found out was shot by police soon after getting out of jail for robbing a pharmacy to get Oxycontin, seemingly, had an incredibly boring life. He lived with his mother in his late 30s, worked as a grocery store bagger, and didn't really go anywhere besides work, the liquor store, and home, (which is where he was killed.) Also, having worked in nightclubs for many years, I knew many people addicted to cocaine, but I don't know anyone that's died from it or gone to rehab for it (though some for their more severe alcohol abuse... they're very commonly used together.)
Those people that died of alcohol and heroin usage had some similarities in usage patterns. You know what that has to do with artists use of hallucinogens? Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing. Not one single thing. LSD not chemically addictive and it's nearly impossible to fatally overdose on. You will never find it listed in an article about "diseases of despair." People interface with it completely differently than heroin users, drinkers, marijuana users, and coke heads interface with their substances of choice. Consistently drinking coffee in the morning has closer usage patterns to the opioid people than hallucinogen users. Even with all of the artists I've known, only two of those dead people were artists: one was a drummer in a metal band I was briefly in, and another friend picked up painting in an art therapy program in rehab before that one last fateful relapse.
I get it, we all want to feel confident in our understanding of important topics. Being well-read is a good thing, but I think someone you trust needs to give you some version of the Good Will Hunting "You're just a kid" speech. You need to understand the limits of your knowledge. You are trying to pontificate about things you've read about in novels that were written decades ago about drugs that couldn't possibly be less relevant to the ones discussed here. Trying to reason about artists that sometimes use hallucinogens based on the experience of an artist who-- like millions of non-artists-- was addicted to heroin, betrays foundational gaps in your understanding of this topic. If you're honestly interested in this topic, you should read some good, entirely non-fiction, published literature on it.
Does the same logic apply to eating healthy and exercising?
My gut feeling is that any revelations or breakthroughs people have from psychedelics could also eventually occur through other means (therapy, meditation, etc.), but not as quick. It's like a shortcut to the sort of deep introspection needed to unwind the stories we have ingrained into ourselves.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/07/health/lsd-anxiety-fda-breakt...
I think the admiration for it is because it's only recently starting to be re-explored by scientists and researchers, and psychedelics are generally very interesting substances (at least in my opinion). On top of that, the culture and history behind them is also quite interesting. The fact that they're currently illegal in the US is quite unfortunate.
If you read Oliver Sacks' _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales_, you'd see that self-perception can be completely off the mark.
In the end, all ideas have to be measured against all other ideas.
But I suppose what you're aiming at here are objective, measurable results in a scientific context? Well, we have a huge hole in the research body of about 45 years, thanks to criminalization (it is very tedious to get a study approved on a schedule 1 drug). However, in recent years, it seems to be opening up. They call it the psychedelic renaissance. Numerous studies have explored both the subjective effects and the applications in mental health. One that strikes out to me involves testing on individuals attempting to quit smoking. After a year, 80% (!) of the participants successfully maintained their cessation from smoking. [1] This is after a single dose!
Long rant, the point is, there are measurable, real-world impacts that these substances can have.
What microdosing schedule do you use?
You see another type/style of work (... usually "psychedelic"). You dont see groundbreaking stuff in the general, universal term, despite all the stuff about "a higher plane of existence", "opening the mind", "being one with the universe".
That said, in general, I would agree that the long-term effects of LSD on one's abilities are not all that profound. What it does, mostly, is making you more aware of things (or rather connections between things), centered on yourself. Whether this actually leads to any improvement depends on what one does with this information, but, well... how many people drastically change their lifestyle after being told by a doctor that they should do so? Same applies here.
As far as doing things during a trip, this can go either way. LSD takes one's "pattern matcher" up to 11, basically. This means that you can easily spot actual patterns that are there that would take you a lot of time in a normal state of mind, but it also means that you start seeing clear patterns in random noise. Since either manifest as intuition, the only reliable way to distinguish them is by rigorous methodical testing, which can be done, but during the trip it's basically swimming against the current, so generally, people don't. The quality of the output then depends on the input (i.e. on whether there was an actual pattern to find or not, and on how much random noise there was in the environment). It's no wonder, then, that this averages out to mediocre.
But I do think that actual quantifiable improvements could be achieved with strict adherence to a "trip protocol" scientifically developed to optimize for that. Those wouldn't be fun trips, though! And, of course, you'd need to develop such a protocol first through study, which is difficult when it's such a tightly controlled substance.
Let's be honest: if people have been talking so much about LSD for so long, it is not as an aid to get back to mediocre.
The "gates of reality" stuff is more complicated. Quite a few people interpret it in a very... religious sense. Like your mind literally "connects" to some other place or entities that actually physically exists and can grant one powers. I can totally see how people who are religious, or already into various esoteric spiritual practices, or even just raised in a culture where such themes are common, can have that takeaway from a trip - what they see is their own consciousness reflected, but if they are already primed to believe in such stuff literally, it can be very convincing. But, conversely, there are many people that are perfectly capable of understanding that the ultimate source of all experiences on a trip is one's own mind; "opening the gates" then can metaphorically mean better awareness of oneself and one's interactions with the world at large, but I can't think of any way you'd be able to quantify that externally.
I know that people can become out-right messianic after an LSD trip, but people can be similarly evangelical about travel or books or, obviously, religious experiences.
later edit: I actually do think it's more to it than that, for two reasons -- one is that while you're on acid, your brain tends to make wild connections between things that you wouldn't ordinarily do, but I don't think that's good or bad, necessarily -- it's like running an LLM on a very high temperature, it can be funny and interesting, but it's very hit and miss. The second is that I think it triggers a lot of self-reflection (to say the least) and can help you recognize and break out of negative personal patterns -- but that also tends to be what people think of as "bad trips".
As far as "messianic" stuff, I think it comes mostly from heightened empathy, which appears to be a fairly universal thing during a trip (even if it doesn't necessarily stick after).
I can second this, specifically. For me, LSD often triggers thoughts that can't be put into words - upon trying, out come sentences like this:
"can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters. can have a what's very much like. can have an um somethings or others .... mmm much of somethings or others.... can havings a taken umpteenth very good time ...."
Those are real sentences I typed up while on LSD, knowing that they were complete gibberish, but it's what came out of my brain when I tried to put the thoughts into words. The thoughts had some sort of meaning, but not in words, just indescribable concepts. Whatever part of my brain translates thoughts and concepts into words had never been trained on those types of thoughts before, so it came out as gibberish.
Are illegal substances usually listed there? I'd assume they'd only list otherwise legal substances.
In the other sections, you'll find morphin, heroin, Cannabis derivatives, etc.