Veteran's Hospital LSD Testing (1956) [video]
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This is a succinct summary of my own experiences. LSD basically makes you realize just how much of a slave you are to your own biology, and the kind of unrestrained thoughts it elicits cannot readily be translated to everyday frameworks. Nobody who's never tripped can comprehend what it's like to trip.
Still, it can help you learn lessons if you make a point to do so. I recall LSD trips whenever I feel stressed or depressed, and it works really well to make me realize how little my problems matter in the grand scheme of things.
Pixelation, fractals and weird japanese voices included… =)
I don’t think I will ever repeat it, and I don’t think I need it. I was very fortunate to try it before my 20s. That level of introspection and decoupling from reality changes your point of view for the rest of your life, so I think I got all the benefits quite early. I became more creative, in fact I excelled in creativity in the Uni. I would easily come up with engineering and design solutions that my professors couldn’t even imagine. I really think LSD made be a better problem solver.
Steve Jobs (and many prominent artists like The Beatles) liked it for a reason… Here's one of Jobs quotes:
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” ― Steve Jobs
Think about what that means…
Visually, a trip is very similar to this gif http://i.imgur.com/w9ygNoP.gif
Mentally, it's like a series of breakthroughs you'd get after years of therapy wrapped up into a couple hours.
You have to give people some explanation, otherwise we'll never progress past "I heard Lucy makes people go crazy and they think they can fly so they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge".
It's not something I'd recommend doing for a very long period of time, but I think a lot of people would get a benefit from doing it a few times and going to a nature environment, having philosophical discussions, etc. with friends.
It's possible that the silent majority simply feel that spending a bunch of time in an altered LSD state is a crazy thing to do. People claim they are profoundly different after tripping, but if you look at what they do, not what they say, they don't seem much different. They seem like pretty much the same person, if you look at their accomplishments before and after.
That's not to discount the therapeutic properties. If LSD can help someone in pain, whether physical or emotional, then it's a great tool. But that's a very different situation from what most LSD proponents seem to imply: that everyone should do it for no particular reason except curiosity. And curiosity is nice, but we should at least be willing to admit what it is: an interesting experience, the same way taking a vacation to a remote tropical island is an interesting experience. But you'll still be pretty much the same person before and after your vacation, though more relaxed afterwards.
I think you'll find as many examples of people who are transformed by it as you want to. Put your blinders on, and it's just a drug to "turn on, tune in, and drop out". First-hand experiences of the drug, like psilocybin (chemically basically the same drug), show that people truly do have positive life-altering changes in their lives after the experience.
Without some objective data, there's no way to attribute the abilities and accomplishments to the absence or presence of LSD.
Just like all the things that have been discovered while not on LSD, for example.
In either case, the additional edit stating "that everyone should do it for no particular reason except curiosity" was not in the original post, and is something that nobody here, as far as I can tell, is promoting. LSD, like psilocybin, is a powerful drug, and should be respected as such.
In terms of physical sensation, someone once likened it to the shiver you sometimes experience while urinating, except lasting several hours instead of a fraction of a second. I always liked that analogy.
while moderately drunk analogies are created uninhibited, now Hofstaedter says that analogies are the core of cognitions, so much for that.
And now i am wishing everybody here a happy new year ;-)
It saddens me that there is no safe and legal way for me to try it.
Anecdotally, I've heard from friends in the jamband scene about friends who did LSD who came back "completely changed , and not in a good way."
Anecdotally i've heard people say marijuana will get you addicted to harder drugs, will turn you into a melted couch blob, etc.
I'm not saying your friends weren't changed for the worse, but I do know I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user. As such I have to conclude that people choose to speak poorly about LSD, which in turn means we all hear more horror stories than feel good endings.
I am proud to be an LSD user. For a few of my friends who struggle with depression, they take LSD once every few months. They report that it acts as an emotional 'reset.'
I don't know you or where you're from, but that's unheard of inside the circle of people I know.
Not really a fair question, given the taboo still surrounding the drug. Imagine asking a homosexual in the 1950's "Are you proud to be gay in the context of everyday society?" Of course the answer is going to be "No." But in certain circles - namely those that don't give in to the notion that such experiences are unspeakable - the answer is surely "Yes."
That said, I agree with zafka that being "proud" to have taken LSD is effectively a category error.
Two points:
First, the concept of LSD user is misguided. In soviet Russia LSD uses you. Second, the world is larger.
LSD hallucinations can involve fairly severe distortions of time and space which are not helpful in that context. A trip can also last 8-12 hours which is quite a long time, so if you start feeling 'oh, I think this is too much for me..' then you're stuck with it for a long period, possibly your foreseeable future during the trip due to the extra cognitive burden of the hallucination. A dose of vitamin b12 can help (by inducing a distracting and rather pleasant hot flush), but after a few different negative experiences I realized the easiest thing to do if feeling bad was to find a quiet spot and just sit down - not too many bad things can happen to you while you're sitting still and adopting a more relaxed posture generally helps the bad mood evaporate of its own accord. Partly because of this insight, I developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and Taoism.
Excess consumption (or comsumption with other drugs like pot) can have unexpected or unhelpful effects. I've experience mild aphasia (difficulty in forming speech) one for a few minutes, and the one really bad trip I had (due to a combination or prior bad mood, excess consumption and inexperience) got unmanageable in two ways. One, I developed temporary amnesia for about an hour, and was unable to remember where I was until someone said 'you know...America?!', which was a place I could remember having heard of - that was pretty confusing, since I didn't know where I lived. Also, I had forgotten everything about my own identity except my first name, which was scary for obvious reasons. Identity is something you take for granted to such an extent that we're not really equipped to deal with not having one. Two, all this happened on a landing halfway down a long staircase, and both the up and down directions looked like the inside of a concertina that was vibrating with the loud music which was going on in the background (but which I was incapable of processing as music right then, it was just a bunch of scary noises). In short I had no idea who I was or how I had arrived in the world, and the world itself seemed chaotic and dimensionless. Eventually I got tired of feeling freaked out and the stairs settled down for a bit, so I wandered around the party in order to try figuring out my new and unfamiliar environment. Probably because I had let go of my anxiety, all my memories suddenly popped back into place - much like when you find your keys after you had lost them, sp you don't need to check every individual key on the keyring. And once that happened, I felt great for the rest of the trip. Not just better, with the satisfaction of having overcome an incredibly difficult situation.
Sounds awful, right? But what's hard to explain is that a bad (or good) trip isn't just something that happens to you; it's about how you react to your distorted perception of yourself, like the psychological equivalent of a hall of distorted mirrors. If you're prone to panic or other sorts of mental discomfort then that would obviously be pretty bad, but if you have a high tolerance of weirdness or ambiguity then it can be very rewarding, despite the existence of some dangerous or scary situations (which you could also encounter in sports or many other contexts). It's not illusory, bad or good; it's just the experience of the interaction between your brain and this particular chemical which modulates the threshold of synaptic firing. Your mind will work differently, but it's still your mind - and is the scary aspect for many people who have negative experiences, they regocnize the troubling experiences as manifestations of the subconscious.
I've tripped maybe 80 or 90 times. I stopped eventually (>10 years ago) because it felt familiar enough that I wondered if I was just exploiting it for entertainment rather than self-exploration or expansion. I would like to take some again now that time has gone by but would be more inclined to do so in quiet solitude rather than in a social context, maybe I've just come to value tranquility and calm rather than excitement as I got older. I have absolutely no regrets, even of the frightening bits - I would say that psychedelics have been among the great positive and valuable experiences in my life, not as something to be consumed and enjoyed, but as an experience to be pondered and ocntinuously re-integrated. I feel they brought a significant improvement to my mental health - I have suffered from chronic major depression since youth but was able to develop a much stronger sense of agency and larn to manage my condition thanks to my psychedelic experience.
One reason people don't talk about it much is that if someone is arrested and has LSD, the amount in their possession for evidence purposes is based on the weight of the delivery medium, usually blotter paper. So what you might think, that's only a few milligrams per square. Unfortunately the standard dose, which is soaked into the paper, is about 50-100 micrograms. Thanks to the 1986 anti-drug legislation and the 1991 Chapman decision, the weight of the blotter paper was included as part of the 'mixture containing LSD' without regard to the very low dose:carrier weight ratio, so even a modest amount owner for personal use could easily pass the threshold for a presumtive attempt to distribute, attracting a long sentence.
This has been fixed to some extent in the most recent edition of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, but that was only last year, after 20+ years of really jacked-up sentences. Now the sentencing commission assumes a carrier weight of 0.4 milligrams (vs. a base dose of 0.05ug for the chemical itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=TbJlhRCG4NYC&pg=PA164&lpg=...
Here's the current drug quantity table, which sorts people into different groups depending on the amount they possess: http://www.fd.org/docs/select-topics/sentencing-resources/cl...
This still seems an order of magnitude too low to me; a quantity suitable for personal use could put someone away for a couple of years. So it's not the sort of thing that people flaunt openly the way many marijuana devotees do.
I am not proud that I was lucky enough to be born with the talents that I have.
I am generally not very proud of things that I do that take little effort on my part.
I think that a lot of the people who were positively affected by LSD do not feel the need to talk about it.
They know how difficult it is to describe what it is like, and it sounds a little arrogant to talk about how much better it has made one's life.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Pote...
Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study. PLOS ONE 2013. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
LSD is quite safe relatively to others psychoactive but this is not to be confused with the effects from the psychedelic experience. When you get to perceive things differently, be exposed to different views of the world and yourself, get a different outlook on things. Well yes, change can occur and last, sometimes for a lifetime.
And frequent abusers of LSD are known to develop a sort of holier than you personality as they develop the illusion of having superior knowledge and understanding.
It is really a shame that there is no legal avenue to experience this, unless you are very good at meditating or happen to have a near death experience.
Safety is not much of a concern...
There are chemical tests you can use to determine if something is LSD or not. They are available on amazon for a few dollars. Beyond that, all you need is a sober person who knows what you're going through, that you trust to keep up with you for 6 hours.
Of the people I have met who have "acid-head", they have uniformly tripped many dozens of times, sometimes for 48+ hour periods on 10+ doses, and all of them had also used hard drugs.
It is beautiful at the time, to see the world without your own bias. but after the fact it can be a bit depressing when you later find yourself caring about things which you've already realized don't actually matter... running the same rat race whose mere existence earlier made you erupt in a hysterical fit of laughter.
I know i rambled. It's hard to speak in technicolor.
If you're getting pure LSD, safety is not much of a concern. I would love to do acid again (did it by mistake once), but my concern is that because it's illegal, there's no way to know what you're getting is pure LSD. Sketchy dealers or bad chemists can result in a product that gives you a bad trip.
What you might get though is NBOMe (and less common DOB) instead of LSD. They don't feel as profound and have more risks associated with them, but that can be alleviated by buying from a trusted dark net vendor/buying a test kit.
NOTE: Some blotter and liquid LSD being sold in 2013 in the Americas and Europe actually contained NBOMe compounds such as 25I-NBOMe. These chemicals are active under one milligram, but can cause strong effects even on a single 1/4" (6mm) square. The blotter or liquid with NBOMe compounds is usually identifiably bitter, where LSD-containing liquid or blotter has a very mild metallic flavor or no flavor at all.
ADULTERANTS:
[Erowid Note 2014: Note that the following section is no longer accurate as of 2010. Please see Spotlight on NBOMes: Potent Psychedelic Issues for a little discussion of other substances now commonly sold on blotter. The Erowid Crew now estimates that there are over a dozen different chemicals sold on blotter the same size and styles as "acid-style blotters" of the past. These include NBOMes, NBOHs, etizolam, phenazepam, AL-LAD, LSZ, Bromo-Dragonfly, DOM, DOC, DOI, and others.]
So if you buy from a trusted source (a product with lots of reviews on a dark net market) you can be rather sure that you are getting what you ordered.
There is also the option to use a test kit.
Is there "little downside"? Not necessarily. Compared to other drugs, sure. You're not going to become addicted and it's not going to make your teeth fall out. But let's be real. This is the most potent psychoactive substance ever made by many orders of magnitude. It can connect you to parts of yourself that are deeply buried in your subconscious. This is what brings about the blissful feelings of transcendence, wholeness, oneness, etc. It can also be absolutely terrifying to confront your subconscious, especially if 1) you're not in a good place psychologically and 2) you're not in the presence of someone you trust. What happens is you start to experience fear as the scary things come up or as you start to experience ego death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death). You don't realize that the fear is all in your head and you start to project it out onto the external world with paranoid thoughts. Kind of like you're having a nightmare, except that it's happening while you're conscious. This is known as a bad trip. It can leave lasting psychological damage if you don't know how to process the experience.
Another potential downside is that an LSD trip could trigger a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. You might come back from the transcendental experience and realize that your life is meaningless, that all of your friends are assholes who don't really know you, etc. You might be inspired to make some big changes. From the perspective of your asshole friends, you will have changed "and not in a good way" ;) But this short-term downside is an upside if you take the long view. If you get your midlife crisis out of the way in your twenties, you can spend the rest of your life doing something meaningful.
There's no way to experience the transcendental upside without the potential downside. But if you're willing to face your own demons, and you take precautions by having a trusted + sober guide, you'll be fine.
Having said that, it's not always a grand magical experience.
I had one semi-bad trip, which in retrospect I unconsciously but intentionally set myself up for. You've got to watch that carefully, and be aware of it, what your mindset is going in. I saw others do much the same thing on a number of occasions, so it's something that happens.
If I'm completely honest about the experiences, most of the time whatever I was doing was incredibly fascinating at the time, but utterly banal in retrospect. Becoming really fascinated with small variations of light and shadow on a wall, for example. Which is pretty cool while you're doing, but not exactly a mystical experience.
The way I always talked about tripping was that it removed the filters from your perception. There's a lot of information coming in that your brain just filters out. That's desirable on a lot of levels, but it's worth reminding yourself that it's happening. Once you've had that experience a few times, it becomes possible to turn it on and off if you work at it. You still won't, most of the time, but it's nice to have the ability when you want it.
The way the setting made a difference for me were perceived risks. In the same way my cognitive filter was disabled for visual patterns, it must have been disabled for danger too; seeing a candle on the coffee table made me panic about a fire so I put it out, and seeing a friend go out on the balcony of our second floor apartment made me terrified that he would try to "fly" or hurt himself, so I made him come in and locked the balcony door. I can definitely see how a more adverse setting could lead to a really scary trip.
You're missing an experience for sure, but you shouldn't approach it thinking it's just a fun drug. Do your research first, understand how to fight off bad trips, be in the correct set and setting, and don't take more than 100 micrograms the first time you do it. LSD will open up doors you didn't even know existed, and then you'll walk through those doors and find out even more. Until you actually do that, you'll never understand what it's like.
Oh yeah, stay away from mirrors too.
"Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child." - Albert Hofmann
To me, it seems that she is trying to say that the difference between watching a movie in B/W and then in Technicolor, would be similar as being sober and then taking LSD.
Seems like it must have been radically jarring to her 1950s housewife societal role.
Being a 1950s housewife, those questions and realizations might not be coherent with her expected role.
For the impatient, forward the video to around 3:45.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...
There is nothing transcendental or mind opening in the "special effects" she is experiencing, caused by short circuiting in her mental device.
Even people who get high by inhaling fumes of toxic chemicals (varnishes, paints, solvents, ether, gasoline, etc) report similar or even more "amazing" things.
In recent studies at Johns Hopkins, most volunteers described psilocybin (magic mushrooms, similar to LSD) as one of the most personally and spiritually meaningful experiences of their lives, comparable to the birth of their first child.
Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EpFWLrMhn0
LSD, like other psychedelic drugs (Psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, ...), floods the brain with (mimics of) neurotransmitters, enabling it to make (almost arbitrary) connections. Hence the synesthesia. It's "therapeutic" effect stems from the fact that the brain/mind/consciousness is leaving the treaded paths it usually takes "automatically" and forms (forces) new trains of thoughts.
Hence the fascination: People are used to their brains working in a particular way, sorting your experiences into "proper" categories, and are stunned when they realize that they can actually process information in completely different ways as well. This is what people mean talking about "filters" being "removed". Aldous Huxley popularized this idea in "The doors of Perception".
Different medications like SSRIs have this effect as well, but by magnitudes less strong.
It's a torrent of thought(fragments) that your brain switches through on this drug. There might be some in there that actually help you cope with a problem you had in your life, but there are lot of "useless" bits as well.
So what taking LSD does is giving you a perspective you haven't had before. This might be of therapeutic value, but so can be other experiences you haven't had before. Like living in a monastery in Tibet. Getting a baby. Seeing a fellow soldier getting killed in the field. Not sleeping for 70 hours.
I'm sceptical of the praises because:
* LSD doesn't make your prior brain-structure go away. It softens it and forms new paths, but chances are high that you go back feeling the same and thinking the same as before. True therapeutic progress is always slow and iterative, because that way it is stable and lasting. Slamming the psychedelic hammer onto your mind knocks you out of your path, but the experience can't be integrated that well because it usually is too random. Also the iterative approach (meditating, behavioural therapy) makes your brain actually start to produce the neurotransmitters needed to form the desired thoughts.
* People usually feel really well for some time after taking this. This is logical, because they realized that their mind isn't as immutable and frozen as they were afraid it is. Also on strong serotonergic agents like LSD you also experience bodily effects like low to moderate fever (which you don't feel cause you're somewhere else). This can culminate in a serotonin-syndrome [1] [2]. When coming down from this condition it's naturally that you feel well, like you would "coming down" from food-poisoning.
What I find really interesting are two common emotions/feelings that people on psychedelic drugs experience:
* Spontaneous insight: that all the things they are experiencing are "true", "right", "eternal". Also "sacred" or "holy".
* All the things around are alive, vibrant, conscious.
I would like to know what in the mind actually produces the feeling of "truth" and what in the mind discerns between "conscious" and "unconscious" things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_syndrome
[2] This is actually the main reason for people dying while partying on MDMA/ecstasy: their organs overheat.
What do you mean by "slow"? Hours, days, weeks, months, or years?
> Also on strong serotonergic drugs like LSD you always get serotonin-syndrome [1]
Your Wikipedia link says
> Singular use of LSD or other 5ht agonists is unlikely to cause serotonin syndrome in lieu of other metabotropic properties which affect the serotonin system.
Depends on the issue, but yes. Weeks to years.
> Singular use of LSD or other 5ht agonists is unlikely to cause serotonin syndrome in lieu of other metabotropic properties which affect the serotonin system.
Technically correct. Diagnostic criteria include temperature > 38 °C for example, so it's only called serotonine-syndrome when symptoms get into the dangerous zone. What LSD does anyway is steering your body into that direction, so you might not have 38°C on LSD, but e.g. 37.4°C. Simply because it affects serotonergic systems and those regulate body-temperature. I'll update my post.
I knew it! Everything really was black and white back then. Except when you took LSD.
To be fair to her, she does say several times that she cannot explain it. It reminds me of this passage from Lord of Light: http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~pulliam/lord_of_light.html
For what it's worth everything she described made me think "yup, I know exactly what you mean".
If you haven't read Flatland, I highly recommend you do so. While on acid, of course.