I would go as far as to say most people should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their life. There's nothing like it. It's one of the great pleasures of being alive.
This isn't to discount your experience but rather a general warning: all drugs aren't for everyone. It's easy to take away from these threads that psychedelics are universally positive and that negative trips are generally the result of misuse.
Which isn't true. Before going into this doing some deep introspection about yourself and your abilities is really important. Use these drugs with extreme caution.
I think many pro-psychedelic and pro-drug people in general underestimate how much these drugs vary with people. I have a friend who will make a gram of weed into cannabutter and eat the whole thing in 1 sitting, getting about 200mg of THC at once, and not have any major problems. He was a big proponent of "there's no such thing as too much" until he saw another friend of ours have an incredibly intense panic attack on 10mg of THC. My wife has intense anxiety on as little as 2.5mg of THC, regardless of CBD and CBG levels (whether via gummies or straight plant matter); no dose can be thereputic for her.
Based on the number of people I know who have experimented with these drugs, I think there's a smokescreen effect where people who have bad experiences don't talk about it nearly as much as people who have good experiences, so it seems significantly less risky than it is. Of the 10 or so people I know personally who had a psychedelic experience, about a third of them have had bad ones. They just don't really talk about it and never want to try it again. I wouldn't say that most people should try psychedelics at least once unless I knew what the actual numbers were, otherwise I'm pushing many people into having a horrible nightmare for hours on end.
Maybe I'll go back to normal eventually, or maybe I had a latent anxiety disorder that was triggered by the mushrooms and I'll just never be able to enjoy weed again. I don't know. My friends didn't have experiences as bad as mine, but they did have a bad time. Most of my friends love psychadelics, and I'd never take them away from them, but before we all tried them, they were talking the same way, and it's what made me excited to try them. I wasn't expecting it to do to me what it did.
Had one once. It was not a pleasure at all. Best I can say is that it was interesting and that I did 'experience' interesting stuff. But that has no profound effect on me, since I consider it, like a dream, to have no basis in reality.
Generic statements like this are dangerous since different people may respond VERY differently to the same substance. This can depend on long term traits like personality or short term like the current state of mind. People reading such statements might think there's no way it can go wrong. If it isn't a profound experience, they might also think there's something wrong with them, which isn't the case.
Would it make a difference if it was a 70 year old who is still open minded and curious about life, the universe, and everything? (given that I'd guess that any 70+ year old willing to do LSD is likely to be as per this description).
Legitimately interested in your answer / reasoning (mainly because my plan was to experience a number of different drugs once the rest of my life, that could have been put at risk by drugs, is kinda setup and done well enough).
Some drugs increase heart rate dramatically - the older you are the more susceptible to atherosclerosis or other circulatory diseases. There’s more medical risk the older you are for sure. However, you may find you only need a little bit. Some drugs are funny. Some work on first try, other takes a couple tries before your brain understands the chemical.
If you're a US male, average life expectancy ~76 years, then hurting/killing yourself in your 20s you lose ~50 years of life. Hurting/killing yourself in your 70s, you lose an order of magnitude less.
I hope to remember this in my 70s! Seeing most people don't, so not having particularly high hopes...
Having a mini stroke at 26 like I did, I was able to bounce back. Having a mini stroke at 81 like my father did, resulted in his death.
A better delivery would have been: “Don’t settle down with one woman until you find the woman you can’t live without. Until then, keep searching. While you’re out there, remember to enjoy yourself and life as you’ll never be as young as you are today.”
I know some folks in the HN audience will not like this example, but Elon Musk is one.
An older cannonical example is Timothy Leary.
No names are coming to mind, but I feel like there have been plenty of psychedelic informed cults, with cult leader narcissists who continue to abuse people despite experiencing psychedelics.
It may open some doors and cause you to consider more angles, and for many people it helps them with empathy and connectedness, but in another sense it's amplifying what you've already got. A "bad" input can get amplified too.
Manson would dose himself and his followers to, IMO, lower inhibitions and make them more receptive to his ideas.
Isn't he also a ketamine junkie? Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, although some call it psychedelic, it's not exactly the same thing.
In addition to other, unrelated drugs.