People who have a history of mental illness in their family or suspect they may have latent mental illness should be wary of some drugs. Nitrous oxide is dissociative as is kratom. This person's first bad experience with psilocybin should have warned them off LSD, as there are many anecdotal stories of people losing their minds because they were mentally ill to begin with (Syd Barret of Pink Floyd). Millions of people have taken LSD over the last 50 years without serious side effects, Steve Jobs who this person cites, being a good example. I've had good trips and bad, but I'm actually fine. I had a very bad experience with kratom so I don't use it.
I had a very bad experience where I lost myself and came to riding my bike down the road at 2 am in my underwear. It was the Red Maeng Da variety which is more potent.
Makes me wonder if a counterpoint to adopting almost anything will arise with 1 million people having the ability to obtain a drug with ease instead of 10,000 people that are forced to jump through a lot of hoops and navigate a specific kind of closed drug culture to come out changed for the better. When there's a 0.0001% chance of years-long negative effects, that's a lot more people making up the minority. Safety regulations are always written in blood. I think there will only be pushback when, ironically, enough people are convinced that we should finally legalize these drugs for millions of people to use, and that 0.0001% minority grows loud enough.
The person wasn't talking about policy but about how people aggressively pretend like these drugs can do no harm. You can have a completely free policy while also being honest and accurate about what the drugs do and what can happen.
I had a similar thought. I talk about how delicious Japanese, Korean, Indian, etc food is, but don't warn people that .23% of Americans are allergic to Sesame oil which is used often in those cuisines. Same can be said about products that contain say peanuts. Would you say people aggressively pretend like those foods do no harm if they aren't caveating their love of it with facts about allergy rates and impact? Further, there was a very long discussion on this forum about the sesame warning being mandated and whether that was government overreach or not.
I think there are no people who get addicted to psychedelics in the classic sence of addiction.
They could get addicted like when you are addicted to a book or a movie. Because the experience was so impactful. But most psychedelics have a quick saturation cycle, you get really high levels of tolerance in a really short time.
For example, using acid multiple times during a festival will just degrade the experience exponentially until you really dont notice even high doses (not on a physiological level either). So its really hard to structurally abuse it.
Having said that, drugs are a bit like extreme sports: they are definetly dangerous when handled without care and never really become safe.
Doesnt mean you should or shouldnt use them. Its just a choice. Some people want to take that risk, others dont. Some people want to risk their money on entrepreneurship and other dont. Doesnt mean entrepreneurship is something bad.
I had a similar experience, too. I was 18, just before starting college. It took me about 15 months to start to recover with Prozac helping me create breathing space. Daily flashbacks. It took about 4-5 years for the flashbacks to stop. I stopped marjuana/cannibis during that time, tried it again 10+ years after the event, could handle it then.
LSD is dangerous, even once taken in the right environment can screw you up for life. I had a long road back, screwed up my first 3 years in college (went from top of class in high school to average, but recovery in year 4 meant i ended up back top-of-class). Still, terrible drug.
Just based on the headline, I disagree. If you have a genetic propensity for schizophrenia or things like that then yes, avoid it. But for the vast majority of LSD users it’s a transformative experience.
Drinking alcohol is socially accepted but tens of millions of Americans have some sort of diagnosed use disorder with it and almost 100k people died last year to drinking. Do we say “not even once” to alcohol?
It’s all about drug education, we need to make sure people aware of the risks and allow them to do what they do. Otherwise we’ll just keep repeating this war on drugs nonsense.
I feel like this kind of whataboutism misses the mark. To be clear - I'm in no way advocating for alcohol, or against its damages to society.
But one like the article is about doing something safely, once, in your own place. Dangers of alcohol are generally overdose, long term abuse, and accidents.
How many people drink one beer in the safety of their home with trusted people, and have their life turned upside down?
I get where you’re coming from but I’m comparing two drugs here, LSD and Alcohol. One of those communities is underground, mixed use with harder drugs, associated in large part with people who are “less than” in society. There’s no way to get well tested, accurately dosed LSD without performing those tests yourself.
The other community has companies controlling everything, ads playing to all ages permanently, they have full control over their branding and marketing, etc. They also lobby the federal government to keep doing what they do.
If LSD was as legal as alcohol, and as successfully marketed, I think at that point we could draw conclusions as to which drug is more of a detriment to society and peoples’ health.
If the same amount of people had access to LSD by simply going to the gas station or local grocery, that is one very big if lol. I get the vibe you are pro-drugs, which isn't a terrible thing IMO, but this thought experiment is somewhat ridiculous on the sole fact that we have an increasingly sick society. The mental health statistics in this nation should give giant red flags.
In a vacuum your experiment just might work, but probably not in 2023 American society. There is a lot more non-biased scientific study that needs done before unleashing these powerful substances on the population. I would suggest removing bias and looking at it in a neutral way, as I'm sure a happy medium can be established here.
I totally agree about the reality of mental health issues in the US. And I definitely agree we need more studies on LSD and its effects. It's very unfortunate that LSD is schedule 1, meaning that research is exceedingly difficult to do on large scales, which essentially means that debates like this are only really supported by anecdotes and fear on both sides.
I'd like to say I'm not pro-drugs. I'm just pro-science and anti-war on drugs, which I'll assume you are too. If there was a scientific consensus on how often normal doses of LSD caused things like visual snow or, more severely, the onset of schizophrenia or similar disorders I think the world would be a better place. If LSD indeed caused more harm to the world than existing popular drugs like alcohol, then I think anyone who trusts science including myself would say "Okay, let's stop doing them". But until then, it's just hearsay anecdotal evidence that gets us nowhere. If it does get us somewhere, it's been historically in the direction of demonizing those who do drugs which I think has had a negative effect on society as a whole.
Schizophrenia is a genetic disorder, so if you parents or grandparents have a history of it, then that would indicate a genetic propensity for it. I am sure there are also relevant SNPs you could look for if you have your genome decoded.
This is one of two reasons why I decided to not try anything, ever.
1. What if it’s the most amazing thing ever, like ADHD medication, what if you get insanely productive, and you then have to go back to being mediocre?
2. What if it triggers something bad. If I get 10% worse at focusing on a solving a problem?
I’ve done similar. I’ve actually smoked many cigarettes but I’ve never bought nicotine myself. I’ve seen both of my parents piss away thousands of dollars and years of their lives to cigarettes, but damn a hit of a vape can be fun with friends
> 1. What if it’s the most amazing thing ever, like ADHD medication, what if you get insanely productive, and you then have to go back to being mediocre?
Probably a good time to remind everyone that ADHD medication will not actually make you insanely productive forever. Good for treating genuine ADHD, but trying to use it like a limitless pill just leads to tolerance, dependence, and burnout.
The more involved doctors will actually start people on low doses and titrate up so patients don’t get the wrong idea about what the medicine is supposed to be doing for them. It’s usually the people who took too high of a dose they borrowed from a friend in college or something who have an idea that stimulants are a magic limitless pill without consequences.
I can speak to #1. If you take a normal amount, you will not be productive at all in terms what we all feel society demands of us. All ideas of productivity fall away when you trip. Social pressures fall away, you become a kid again in a way. Fascinated by looking at grass breathing in a meadow. You still think familiar thoughts, but in a vastly different way.
Now, if you microdose that’s a different story. I tried microdosing for a month years back at a remote job. I found it made me more able to connect with others. Like I didn’t want to hop off a meeting right away. It gave me some extra creativity when coding, but didn’t increase the output of my code.
I completely respect anyone who doesn’t want to try though, there are even some psychedelics that scare me and I’ve done quite a bit!
That's probably not true. You'll try (and probably already have) all sorts of drugs which are deemed, by some government authority, to be "safe" which have all sorts of nasty side effects. Many "totally safe" drugs have much worse effects than psychedelics.
You will get 10% worse at focusing on solving a problem and then 20% just as a result of aging and there's nothing you can do about it. Your eyes will get old, your vitreous will start to detach and you'll start to see what looks like worms floating around in your eyes. Again, nothing you can do about it. Your hearing too will slowly start to degrade. High frequencies will fade to dust and those below them will become more apparent and, in some cases, become quite annoying.
Without getting into opinions this made me think of a Richard Feynman quote about abstaining from substances, along the lines of "I like how I think and didn't want to do anything to possibly change that."
To each their own and much respect for doing what works best for you.
Both those trip reports are very unusual for psylocibin and LSD. It looks to me that the author might have other health complications that caused the bad trips. As a general advice one should be very careful when taking psychedelics with other prescribed medications or having a history of mental illness.
Or they took something that was presented as LSD but was actually something else. This sounds like the kind of nerve damage people get from taking dangerous doses of MDMA. Not saying it's MDMA specifically but it could have been something neurotoxic.
I have no reason to think it wasn't LSD, but there's also a decent possibility it was something else passed off as LSD, which is a fun consequence of the war on drugs.
Arguing like this is no good. You're demanding that we accept a random blog post over a random comment, and demanding expertise from the random comment that you're not demanding from the random blog post.
The comment you're replying to is speculative. It's all right for people with some personal knowledge to speculate.
I don’t think they’re that unusual. I think there’s a major bias on the internet toward only allowing/supporting positive stories. Negative stories attract a lot of people trying to explain it away as due to underlying mental illness or some other generic explanation (which is inevitably so generic that it could apply to any user)
It seems every negative psychedelic anecdote on HN is met with commenters that are resistant to the idea that the drug could possibly be negative for someone.
> It seems every negative psychedelic anecdote on HN is met with commenters that are resistant to the idea that the drug could possibly be negative for someone.
Similar trend for reports on the negative health effects of cannabis
Obviously this is purely anecdotal but I thought I'd share my experience anyway: I hear a lot more often about bad experiences on the internet than I do in real life, and in my social circles using drugs for recreation is common.
What is anybody supposed to do with this response? Is there a test you can take to rule out long-term negative side effects from psychedelics? If not, aren't you just rolling the dice one way or the other? Mightn't we not just act as if there's a particular mental health complication called "susceptibility to long-term negative side effects of LSD"?
Based on my experience many people aren’t well informed about possible complications when taking LSD. There are certainly negative side effects possible but there is also decades of research on LSD. There is no test to rule out long-term negative side effects from psychedelics but there are safety precautions when starting with psychedelics which weren’t adhered to based on the trip reports from the original author.
I’m going to start my comment off with…if you have any reservations about taking a mind altering substance, don’t do it. Just be content in enjoying your existence substance free. :)
That said, IMHO, there are many things one can do:
1. if one suffers from mental health problems, they should probably avoid any mind altering drugs (OTC, prescription or illicit) without significant guidance from a medical / mental health professional
2. speak to a mental health professional, one that is open to leveraging these types of drugs for mental health purposes
3. Assuming you passed steps 1 & 2 or are confident you don’t need to bother with them…start small and with less intensive options (i.e. if you can’t handle something like marijuana in moderate to high doses, don’t bother [without following steps 1 or 2]). And as condescending as it sounds, if you’re ready for this step, experiment in the best possible environment (and in a good headspace to deal with what is coming) with an individual(s) you trust and do so with a low dose
If you enjoyed your experience after step 3, you could consider slightly increasing the dosage or type of mind altering substances while still adhering to the advice mentioned in the previous steps.
Maybe the problem is people not respecting the complexity of putting such a mind altering substance in their body. One isn’t required to do it and should only do so when they know what they’re getting in to and have a good understanding of the (for lack of a better word) consequences.
Also, maybe individuals who have a very positive experience should be more explicit about providing a disclaimer that what worked for them isn’t guaranteed to work for others.
Edit: and to more directly respond to your comment, IMHO, using something like LSD or any mind altering drug is a bit of rolling the dice.
> Is there a test you can take to rule out long-term negative side effects from psychedelics?
PiHKAL and TiHKAL reports start with "allergy tests" of low doses around 1/10th of a typical dose.
Erowid and other resources (Psychonaut wiki, etc.) list a starting dose of LSD to be around 25mcg, while the author here took 160mcg as a virgin- over 5x the starting dose.
It's also not clear whether they tested the drugs, which likely means they did not. The report sounds more typical of a DO(x) or NBOMe substance than LSD, which also come on blotters and are sold as LSD relatively frequently.
> What is anybody supposed to do with this response?
I think GP’s post has actionable advice in it:
> As a general advice one should be very careful when taking psychedelics with other prescribed medications or having a history of mental illness.
One simple thing a person could do (in the spirit of being careful) is researching the interactions between different drugs. For example, you could Google “psychedelics + SSRIs” if you were on SSRIs, or “psychedelics + social anxiety disorder” if you had social anxiety disorder. It doesn’t seem too difficult if one is already googling “psychedelics + Steve Jobs”
Isn't this exactly the kind of response that the blog author is calling out? I have a friend who had no history of mental illness or prescribed medications and had an absolutely horrific trip that left him very unsettled for a good few months. The issue is that responses like this deflect onto other possible causes rather than accepting that sometimes people who could never have known differently can have truly dreadful experiences. I say this as someone who has had universally positive and very meaningful experiences with psychedelics, including LSD.
I would agree with both you and the author. There is always a possibility of a bad reaction and that should always be taken into account. Weed combined with beer makes me black out, not pass out, walk around not behaving like myself blackout. And yet I can handle large amounts of tequila. Regular weed use makes someone else I know hyper paranoid, mean and agressive. Simply not everybody is going to react well and there is no telling who that somebody is going to be, so those that want to try it should be aware of the risks.
> It looks to me that the author might have other health complications that caused the bad trips.
This doesn't matter and is a very misleading IMHO.
Because people having some per-existing conditions they don't know about and hasn't caused anything but supper middle issues is _extremely high_. EDIT (extremely likely to have some condition, not neccessary a condition which interacts with the drug you are about to take)
And the problem with psychedelics is that the chance of both you getting long term problems if you have conditions from even small doses and you not knowing about this conditions and you and people around you not understanding the risk at all is high (at least if compared to some of the legal drugs, like alcohol).
Through I believe they do have high potential in health care (assuming personal being well educated about this topic()), because one one hand this setting allows reducing the number of unknown risk factors, (should be) well educated, and directly know what to do if something goes wrong.
() Except that the handling of pain killers in the US can make you question if that is reliable possible.
You mitigate that risk by going into psychotherapy and finding a therapist who is a good fit for you before trying mind-altering substances.
It's fairly obvious if you think of drugs as an extremely potent medicine for issues you weren't even conscious of. Any protocol for treatment of mental disorders starts with a disclaimer that psychotherapy should be the first step unless your situation is quite unusual. Then, if it so happens that your therapist thinks that there is nothing really wrong with you and that you won't get any real benefits from continuing to attend therapeutic sessions, and if you do not have any family history of inheritable mental disorders, you can try hallucinogens.
It might be that most of the stuff written about psychedelics on the Internet doesn't treat them with this amount of respect, but the responsibility for your mental health is ultimately on you, and the information about the benefits of psychotherapy and the dangers of going into a trip with an improper set is out there.
That's why I said it has potential in health care, where it could be prescribed by a therapist who knows well about this topic and involved risks.
I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care.
While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed.
So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat.
One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment.
I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.
Sounds like a CNS injury with symptoms that are pretty much mirror benzodiazepine and alcohol withdrawals.
No matter how unusual or rare it is to experience this, it's really worth surfacing cases like these. I'd rather not take the risk at all, even if the risk is really low.
Hmm. Not sure about "risk is really low" part. How low? Is it greater than the risk of dying in a car accident? Are you going to rather not drive a car at all, even of the risk is really low?
Although I don't agree with the author's conclusion, it is true that drugs can have long-term side effects on sensitive parts of the brain.
Tinnitus in particular is fairly common and is listed as a side-effect on many prescription meds. I've experienced it after taking DMT and it also lasted about a year. I've also had small visual changes that are harder to pinpoint and certain smells being amplified.
The risk is small for the average person and it usually goes away, so it's really a personal choice if it's worth it.
Isn't it true for even over the counter drugs and even foods that they can fuck you up if you are predisposed to have an issue with the substance? Why would LSD be any different. It's like getting mad at people promoting peanuts because some people die if they eat them.
I gave an example. Peanuts. They can literally choke you out.
Ciprofloxacin can ruin your life. Acetaminophen can ruin your life. Aspertame can ruin your life.
The point is that for every substance there will be someone out there predisposed to have a reaction to it. That's not a problem with the substance, and people shouldn't stop recommending it, as the author suggests.
Had a similar experience, but with the much more tame marijuana. It was a 6-hour long panic attack for me. Similar to the author of this, I read for years of how "the only way it could ever harm you is if you were crushed by 100 lbs of it" on sites like Reddit. It wasn't until after getting high that I heard about marijuana amplifying stress tendencies in a minority of people. I've always been high strung, and maybe my experience reveals something that needs fixing inside of me, but given how marijuana turned my anxiety up to a measure that has only ever been matched by an actual panic attack, I'll avoid LSD (and anything similar like shrooms) like it's a loaded gun pointed right at me.
As someone who has been consuming lots of marijuana in the past 25 years, my recommendation is to not consume marijuana when in a bad mood or in stressful situations. I see drugs (including alcohol) as mood amplifiers.
> Similar to the author of this, I read for years of how "the only way it could ever harm you is if you were crushed by 100 lbs of it" on sites like Reddit
I think this is the direct result of just nonsensical criminalization that equated cannabis with drugs like heroin, while the toxicity of cannabis is much lower than alcohol, for example.
Legalization leads to better education, which typically provides both sides of the argument, so that a potential user can make educated decisions as to whether to try the drug or not. I have seen debates on "when not to use cannabis" on some canna podcasts (like Leafly, though I don't remember the episode).
I think that avoiding LSD for people prone to panic attacks is a pretty sound decision.
Pointers From Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War[1]: "Opioid overdose deaths fell after Portugal’s policy change. So did new cases of diseases associated with injection drug use, such as hepatitis C and H.I.V."
Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?[2]: "Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime"
How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis[3]: "[T]he number of addicts was halved and overdose deaths had dropped to just 30 a year for the entire country. The number has remained steady ever since."
“As Magdalena Cerdá, the study’s lead author, and her coauthors wrote in JAMA Psychiatry, “Although occasional marijuana use is not associated with substantial problems, long-term, heavy use is linked to psychological and physical health concerns, lower educational attainment, decline in social class, unemployment, and motor vehicle crashes.”
If you dont like that study, there are plenty of others. I’m not here to LMGTFY.
First time I tried it, I didn't know what I was doing, and smoked half a joint. I figured it was like cigarettes - you're supposed to smoke the whole thing, but I had some presence of mind to just try half.
That night I was basically paralyzed. It wasn't a bad experience, but I was not ready for it to be that powerful.
Since then I've just being using gummies. You can dose 5mg or 10mg which is plenty for me to just have a good feeling and still fully function. I've also noticed that different strands affect me way different. I may become sleepy, or really happy and giddy, or totally calm and cool, or motivated, or just a nice elated feeling, or combinations of those and more.
There's the whole sativa/indica thing, but I feel like the market just guesses what their strand is because 1) The feelings are still super random within the same type and 2) There are way too many types of "feelings" to just binary classify with.
When folks say that marijuana's a safe drug, it's purely in reference to the fact that it wont kill you. 100 shots of tequila in an hour will cause death; 100 tokes of marijuana will not. The problem this results in is an interesting one: marijuana growers are constantly increasing the per gram density of THC/cannabinoids in their plants. The consequence of this is that today's marijuana, compared to that of the '70s, is like drinking Everclear vs. drinking a bud light. I've avoided using marijauna for a long long time now because of this; there's just no way to have a controlled slow buzz with marijuana.
The thc/gram is higher, but you can easily control intake with edibles. It is easy to still get low quality shake weed, like the stuff our parents smoked in the 70s, you just have to go to the weed shops in the poorer parts of town and tell them you are making brownies. I can get an ounce of crap weed in Seattle for 30-40. Perfect for cookies or brownies.
This is one area where I think legalization has helped. In my state, I can now get an inhaler using the same basic tech as asthma inhalers, and it can fairly precisely dose 2.5mg of THC per activation. Added benefit, completely smokeless. Even vape pens cause me to cough pretty bad (let alone actual smoking), so it's a huge upgrade to the experience.
I guess because I live in a country where marijuana is fully legalized, I have never seen this as an issue. Our pot is labelled in the same way alcohol is, so you know pretty close to exactly what you are in for.
You can buy weed that has nearly no THC and a whole lot of CBD. But we also have infused pre-rolls that are nearly double the strength of natural weed with no CBD. These are polar opposite experiences.
Everything is labelled both in Percent, and in mg/g so there is no mistaking whether or not the weed is strong, weak, or somewhere in between.
Everything also gets described with terpene measures, as those volatile oils have a huge impact on the experience. It's pretty much the reason why if it smells super dank and thick, you're headed for couch lock, and if it smells lemony fresh and clean, you're in for a super clear head buzz instead.
Likewise, marijuana is nearly always sold with an educational fact sheet. One learns early on that CBD is both medically useful, but also takes "the edge" off of strong weed. Beginners should start slow, and don't smoke weed that has 0% CBD.
Also there's the well known strategy: If you're the personality that tends to have that dread feeling when the buzz comes on, then start with only a small amount until you pass that first stage. Then you can smoke like crazy without that dread feeling, since it is really only triggered in the initial phase. Once you're adjusted into it, you're all good for the night.
Just don't smoke so much that you end up greening out. That's a real thing, but nearly only ever happens if you eat too much THC edibles at one time. It's hard to green out from toking once you get past the initial phase because auto-titration kicks in big time. Most people don't even realize they are doing it, but it has everything to do with why one can toke 10x the amount over the course of an evening at a party than they ever could at home, and never have that dread feeling that one can experience if they use too much from the start.
People usually only learn that through experience, but it should be part of the education. Knowing the phases (initial coming on, the buzz, then fading back to normal) greatly enhances the experience.
when you buy a pack of beer, you get 12 cans each with 12 ounces of liquid containing ~5% alcohol. you open a beer, you drink it.
when you buy a pack of weed, you get 1 blob of weed that the purchaser has to divvy up themselves, then has to find a container to consume it, prepare that container properly themselves (blunt, joint, bong, etc), then consume all at once due to the nature of the process. then theres sorting out all the indica/sativa blens. the point is, the system is stacked against newcomers.
edibles are the closest, thats correct - but sellers pack edibles with as much thc as possible. cutting edibles into pieces then further removes the users ability to control the experience, but at least its similar to a pitcher of beer.
Vape pens are fairly predictable, you can have a known potency dose in the cartridge and each puff will be a predictable potency.
Anyways, vapes are great for nicotine and DMT but I'm not a fan of how most cannabis vape pens get easily gummed up. So I'd rather stick to dab rigs and bongs.
The problem with edibles is that the digestive system's metabolism produces way more psychedelic cannabinoids. It's a different experience, one that can be more anxiety inducing in lower doses.
No, you can buy it that way. But you can also buy them pre-rolled just like cigarettes. There are also so many other forms - pills, lozenges, breath strips, etc. The THC infused beverages are gauged in the same way beer is - a light beverage will have about the same impact as a light beer, a standard beverage will have about the same impact as a standard beer, and strong... you get the idea. We actually don't have strong THC beverages, but if we did, you know exactly what it would be comparable to in terms of strength.
My partner doesn't like getting too buzzed, so I always get gummies that are about 1/3 the strength of normal gummies. And normal gummies aren't that strong. You can buy them super strong, but that's a conscious choice that again is reflected on the package and labelling. You never have to cut your edibles. You just buy the strength you want.
Incidentally, whether it is indica or sativa is in the small print here. The typical effects are listed on the vendor web pages.
The problems you list were certainly true as recently as 2 or 3 years ago, and pretty much limited to the illegal or grey markets. Legalization has taken it a whole lot further ahead.
They are professionally produced and controlled products these days.
PS: You can even buy cannabis products with nearly no THC in them. They are high in CBD, specifically for medical use since they are not psychoactive. Apparently CBD gummies are used by a lot of people for insomnia, because it is indeed relaxing, with no high feelings whatsoever. Much better than most OTC sleeping pills for that reason.
So literally everything you said is based on purchasing from the streets or grey market, and not professional or controlled outlets. The range of what's available is huge, and everything is clearly labelled so you won't be making any more mistake than you would overdrinking that 6 pack example you mentioned.
heh. sounds like youve never been in a weed store. everything is behind the counter - its not like a supermarket beer aisle where you can pick and choose at your leisure before making your way to the checkout aisle. all the clerks are stoned, and if youre the only one in the store, theyre all looking at you. its one of the most surreal experiences you will ever encounter.
I only order online. We even have same-day shipping for most places. But I'm always fully stocked up, so I am more patient about it. My source of choice is a few provinces away, so I just use regular mail.
The stores do tend to suck, so I lost interest in them a very long time ago. The ones I've been in are just nicer/cleaner than the grey market stores that came before legalization. I occasionally drop by one if I happen to be passing by, and I even found an "upscale" shop. But still not my thing. I don't like shopping in stores anyway, and they tend to be gloomy and miserable for such a fun product. I'm really not into the Bob Marley Rah Rah Rah thing, either. I don't feel that compulsion to have pot leaves on everything I own, wave flags, or have white-guy imitation dreadlocks.
So no, I have absolutely been there, and yup I totally agree with you on the store details. But you keep picking the negative things that are easy to avoid. Stay away from such places, and go for more professional vendors.
If you want modern weed with full factual information backing it, you have to buy in a modern way. Preferably from a vendor that also fills medicinal prescriptions, since they are the ones that know what they are talking about, and aren't stuck in the decades old Cheech and Chong era.
I think your fear is stopping you from experimenting with MJ. Just like how you can dose with alcohol or any other substance regardless of how concentrated, you can take a smaller, more measured dose of MJ instead of finishing an entire joint by yourself. Edibles and cartridges are great ways to dose.
I had a really bad experience with marijuana. I'd tried it a few times before, but it always had literally zero effect on me (as in I smoked as much as everyone else, they got baked and I felt nothing). And then one day I took a single hit in a shop in Vancouver and was almost instantly hit with brain zaps. It got so bad that I couldn't walk without throwing up, had trouble seeing, and this lasted for hours (from 10:30 am until a little past midnight when it finally subsided enough to sleep). Never again.
It's colloquially called a "whitey". Likely you had a very high THC strain and it hit your body like a truck of bricks because you weren't accustomed to it.
By any chance was this "one hit" done on a hot knife at the Pain Management Society on commercial drive pre-legalization? Because I've heard a similar story from quite a few people, several of them heavy users. No warning, and sent on their merry way without checking if they had a safe way to get home. Which I mention because getting lost trying to find home is a common theme in their stories. The people who knew what they were looking at report the dose as a generous dollop on the order of .5g.
Not on Commercial... it was downtown somewhere I think (this was 8 years ago and the day is a blur). There was a kinda grungy store downstairs that also sold grey-area mushrooms, and a "bar" upstairs. I remember the proprietor saying that they operated it as a "protest" against cannabis laws. They had these machines that instantly vaporize the stuff.
Different location, same delivery. It was a bit of a wild west before legalization. You had in one hit what most heavy users would consider plenty for a binge weekend. I'm glad to see those old shops go.
As someone for whom Marijuana also induces panic and anxiety I second this. At least when I dropped acid I could somewhat control the dosage and was careful not to start with a full dose.
I actually like acid but I wouldn’t call it safe. The visual effects can be quite intense and if you’re not used to the idea that reality is influenced by perception you’re in for a really bad time.
> I've always been high strung, and maybe my experience reveals something that needs fixing inside of me, but given how marijuana turned my anxiety up to a measure that has only ever been matched by an actual panic attack, I'll avoid LSD (and anything similar like shrooms) like it's a loaded gun pointed right at me.
I'm the same way, perhaps to a lesser degree. My sister more so.
Part of me thinks I need to get really high more often and explore myself, but there's a chance I'm just chasing shadows and another approach is needed.
Lots of people have an "always sober" policy and they do fine. Or are they square?
I had this buying some weed derivative edibles (marketed as delta 8) in a state with full on prohibition.
I've smoked weed, I've had edibles (both homemade and from fully legal dispensaries), and at most got kind of spaced out and overly talkative. Whatever this stuff really was, it presented as a wholly different experience; strong hallucinations, time felt like it was slowing, inability to focus, loss of motor control (like unable to get down a flight of stairs), even unable to operate my phone enough to send a text message. Ultimately it led to panic and fear; I was completely unprepared and basically incapacitated until the next day. It ranks as one of the worst experiences in my life, and it felt as if it would never end.
There's a wide range of experience possible from this stuff, even things that (should you believe the internet) are as harmless as weed.
After this, I feel like I'm done for good. Whatever nebulous and unproven benefits that might possibly exist don't seem to be worth the very real risks (that I now am aware of first hand).
I think it's useful to consider this blog post as an anecdotal experience of someone who had a significant, traumatic experience with LSD for which they were entirely socially unprepared for even when those those experiences seemed to be known among those who take LSD (no one expressed surprise or confusion at their condition in their group). There is plenty of questions to ask here: why didn't this person's friends refuse to give them LSD, given their previous experience with shrooms? Why was this person so blindsided by HPPD? What is going on in the cultural millieu of hallucinogenic drugs where someone can have a bad experience with one hallucinogen and then, knowing this, willingly take even more without seriously being warned against by friends or online resources?
Seriously, if I had a friend who couldn't handle alcohol, I would stop drinking with them and I would certainly refuse to take harder stuff with them. When I first had anxiety from smoking weed, my friends promptly told me weed is probably just not a drug for me to take and to take lower doses or to abstain from it entirely in the future-- and anxiety was a well-known (to me) possible consequence from weed.
I've noticed this pattern where "anecdote" is deployed when someone disagrees with some point another person is making. But would you be chiming in here about "anecdotes" if this was a post by someone claiming acid helped them?
Anecdotes are rarely definite proof of anything. But bayesian evidence is bayesian evidence.
And if someone tried to argue that LSD can never cause visual snow, a single anecdote is enough to refute that. Anecdotes are not always wrong in debate.
The thing is, anecdotes can be easily made up. I’m not saying that’s happening in the case of visual snow, but we need studies to talk about things like this, not anecdotes.
Except of course we can't know for sure the anecdote was an example of LSD causing visual snow, the drug might have been spiked or it could've just been a coincidence...
Anecdotes are at best a clue that there's more research needed. Unfortunately for many people they're also often far more memorable and even convincing than cold hard statistics.
Why not? I think it was Jeff Bezos who said “When data and anecdotes disagree, it’s usually the anecdote that’s right. Something is wrong with the way you’re measuring your data.”
If there’s a debate at all then the data are probably ambiguous or inconclusive, so let’s talk real human experience. Data says LSD is the best thing ever, and here’s one guy who has a terrible experience - is he wrong?
Jeff Bezos in that quote is talking about customer complaints and how they relate to SLOs.
When a customer is complaining about e.g. "your site being broken", there's usually some real problem they're complaining about (though whether it's your problem to solve, or their ISP, or their computer, or their lack of knowledge of how web browsers work, etc. is another question entirely.) But the point being, if your data says the customer can't possibly be experiencing an issue — i.e. if your data disagrees with the customer's own lived experience of having a problem at all, with the data saying that e.g. the customer made a successful purchase, when the customer says they couldn't even load the site — then that should suggest that your tools for measuring your data are broken, or that there's something else equally-fishy going on (like a Man-in-the-Middle.)
None of this applies to medicine/psychology, because medicine never has the sort of data that could even theoretically be used to make a claim like "this is 100% working, and anyone who says they have a problem is lying" — the sort of claim where even a single counterexample would be enough to refute that statement, and therefore where a single counterexample would be valuable.
Rather, the sort of claims made in medicine are Bayesian confidence claims. The sort of (evidenced) claim that gets a treatment approved by the FDA, goes something like: "treatment X tends to be well-tolerated in population Y, while producing a positive outcome of power Z with benefits outweighing the measured side-effects."
No single anecdote (= clinical data) refutes that kind of statement. Instead, you need to compile and quantify a bunch of them (= clinical data meta-analysis) to actually make an argument for or against that claim.
Knowing this, any attempt someone might make to wield a single anecdotal claim to influence the credence you give a statistically-derived Bayesian-confidence statement of the safety and efficacy of a medical treatment — especially where you don't have an intuitive sense for how much data went into the statistics that led to the original statistical claim — should be regarded as an attempt to manipulate you with rhetoric, rather than honest debate praxis.
Which is not to say that the anecdote is false! You can totally believe that the person's lived experience is real, and empathize with them, and try to come up with solutions for their problem; while also taking as hokum any attempt by them to convince you that their anecdote generalizes.
No and the reason is I have seen far more anecdotes about good trips than bad, which pushes me to believe that is the norm. And by far more I mean in my life I have seen maybe a 10:1 ratio. There would have to be a flood of negative reports over a period of years to tilt me in the opposite direction to counteract that.
Yes; I think someone claiming a drug helped them is also a useful anecdote. I do think HN as a community tends to weigh positive anecdotes more than negative ones [when it comes to hallucinogens], and wanted to point out that this particular negative anecdote suggests there exists at least some amount of greater or more systemic concerns about how such an experience came about to begin with.
The post concludes that promoting LSD through anecdotal evidence is "harmful" and "naive" while condemning LSD through anecdotal evidence. I've had good experiences with hallucinogenics and think they're a societal net-positive, but if this post was promoting LSD based on a good trip with good results, it'd be equally bad. Maybe even more so.
Sorry, I don't mean to blame the author of the blog post. If anything I'd like to know why their friends didn't step in for them, nor that they never came across the potential long-term consequences in even a casual research step prior to taking LSD. I'm wondering if the hallucinogen community isn't upfront enough about not taking hallucinogens under certain circumstances and that's something we can glean from this anecdote.
> What is going on in the cultural millieu of hallucinogenic drugs where someone can have a bad experience with one hallucinogen and then, knowing this, willingly take even more without seriously being warned against by friends or online resources?
In attempts to (rightly) justify legalization, we now first have to appeal to the puritan-descendant US society and persuade it that it has great medicinal potential (because recreational potential is not enough). Consequently, you see overly exaggerated headlines that tout these substances as a miracle cure. Which, honestly, it might be for some people with certain conditions in a specific settings.
But, a person then reads "a new LSD study" and might conclude that their psilocybin trip was not a success, but maybe the LSD is going to change their world for the better.
If we just legalize these non-toxic substances, the conversation around them changes. The same happened to cannabis (where still nowadays, many people use the "medicinal" angle to justify their recreational habits so that they are not judged by the society, despite cannabis being legal in a number of US states).
Visual noise and tinnitus are both basically perception noise.
So the author had their "noise filters" reset basically, and their brain had to relearn this. This is interesting and somewhat supports the notion that LSD can "reset" your mind in some ways.
I've never tried LSD, but a single dose of magic mushrooms screwed my mind up for years. It took me a very long time to get over the anxiety attacks. I wish I'd never tried it, the experience was terrifying.
Are you sure it didnt have LSD in it? I've done mushrooms many times (in the 90s) and in retrospect, based on differences between trips, I think sometimes I may have had some with acid in them. I don't know how common this practice is / was amongst dealers.
Psychedelic trips with mushrooms and with LSD are very similar, often you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
When there are visuals I find them to be more "organic" on mushrooms and more "sharp/electric" on LSD, but that’s very subjective/suggestible.
But there are "social" trips where there are no visuals, usually when in a group and experiencing the substance together, there I wouldn’t be able to tell LSD and Psylocybin apart.
The feeling of shared being part of a shared consciousness, the cosmic laughter and the fractal thoughts can be the same with both substances.
I'd say there is a psychedelic state of consciousness and many different substances (Psychedelics) will get you there, the experience will differ in nuances, but the general idea is the same.
Keep in mind that in this state you are highly suggestible, so the environment will often do a lot more to shape the experience than the exact substance.
> Psychedelic trips with mushrooms and with LSD are very similar, often you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
Having done both about a dozen times, this is not my experience or the experience that others have shared. Even a large dose of mushrooms only has subtle visual effects, while LSD makes the world look like a van Gogh painting.
I only had strong visuals with high doses of LSD, with a normal tab it’s usually more subtle for me, in a similar way as mushrooms.
But visuals as strong as you describe I had only when I tried 25C-NBOMe. But there the mind trip was only barely present and the body feel was rather uncomfortable.
Having done both far more than that, that's not my experience. I have had wildly visual mushroom trips (at higher dosages) and subtly visual LSD trips (at lower dosages). At comparable dosages and settings the main difference to me is just the duration.
Mushrooms in particular are hard to standardize a dosage of. Eat enough of some strong ones and things get plenty visual.
Had a friend who got DPDR after a bad trip, never really was the same as far as I know. Sometimes just reading about DPDR too much is enough to make you feel the effects a bit, so I can only imagine having it induced by an actual drug. The Reddit threads of DPDR sufferers seem like a special kind of hell.
I have had really, really bad trips on weed and alcohol. No way in hell I am trying anything else. It makes me really uneasy to hear normies going on about trying this and that. They all have some vague yet beneficial reasoning for why they did or might try shrooms or LSD. I always ask them, tell me of somebody that significantly and measurably improved their life after getting involved with psychedelics. Nobody ever can tell me of anyone. Same person, same job, same family, same everything. With a good story if they are lucky. And a bad story if they are like the guy that wrote this.
“since no one can provide an example to me in person, on command, it must not be possible for anyone”
take me as your first anecdotal example of someone whose life has been significantly and measurably improved since taking psychedelics. there goes your entire argument.
I would love to hear more about your experience and how it measurably improved your life. My point though is not that it is impossible for people to see real benefits. My point is that the vast majority of people that have tried it don’t seem any better off than before.
I'm in my 30s and have eaten many pounds of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. Over the course of numerous years and not every weekend or all that frequently and it's been many years since I've eaten them by this point. I've also infrequently and over years had pure LSD direct from the chemist. I've never experienced any problems, I've never been unemployed, married 14 years with children in my only marriage, and maintain a 6 figure salary. I won't go on about spiritual life changes and other nonsense but there are plenty of highly functioning folks out there who can responsibly use psychedelics from time to time and continually improve their lives.
Peanuts: Not even once. Says person with peanut allergy.
I can't believe that peanuts have a good name and are promoted a lot in some circles!
I'm sorry that this person had a very bad experience, but someone with a peanut allergy wouldn't be so full of themselves as to warn everyone off of peanuts, despite the fact that the vast majority of people can consume peanuts with no problem, and enjoy it. Most things in life have some risk.
I've done psychedelics upwards of 50 times over the last 5 years and while I think they are dangerous, and that their real purpose and origin may be different than what we are taught, I still think they are valuable drugs. Invaluable even. I just can't conceive of a place in our culture where we could do them like for instance we do adderall or prozac. I know they do studies but to me it seems like an experience that comes to you and then goes away when you don't need it. Very difficult thing to explain unless you've "been there." I don't think you necessarily need drugs to get there but it vastly vastly makes it easier. Just like I don't think you need a train, car, or plane to travel across Eurasia but walking there sure takes a whole lot of something else.
I was by myself, in a tent. When I felt lonely, I moved the tent closer to hiking trails. When I wanted to be alone, I moved it further away. The easiest way to meet people on a mountain is just walking to the summit and sitting there.
When I was tired of rice and beans, I hiked down to a little restaurant that had really, really good fried fish.
One time I built a hot tub.
A park ranger was kind enough to jump start my car when I was ready to leave for good. I feel like that was the least they could do after writing me six parking tickets, all of which I paid.
At the end of the day, it's not much different than the thousands of people who hike the PCT every year. I just... didn't walk anywhere.
It was so long ago that I could no more get a book out of it than I could get a book out of "what I did last year." I just... don't remember the details. I remember admitting to myself that I could see ghosts and the moment I figured out why I saw them. I remember the day the air changed and I knew I could either stay another winter or leave. But most days were just, "fill the water, boil the water, make the food, mend the clothes, gather the firewood, tend the fire, sleep."
My Side of The Mountain was a good book from what I can remember - read it in 2/3 grade and often think about the spatial constraints of living in a tree trunk when I'm out, in reference to this. Intentionally came to HN this morning to look if you had posted any follow ups; cheers
351 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadYou took a dose down,
You write a blog post just to turn it around
https://www.newsdirect.com/kratom/red-maeng-da-kratom
Irritating how harmless and positive psychedelics and cannabis are made out to be in popular culture in spite of the issues like these that can cause.
LSD is dangerous, even once taken in the right environment can screw you up for life. I had a long road back, screwed up my first 3 years in college (went from top of class in high school to average, but recovery in year 4 meant i ended up back top-of-class). Still, terrible drug.
Just based on the headline, I disagree. If you have a genetic propensity for schizophrenia or things like that then yes, avoid it. But for the vast majority of LSD users it’s a transformative experience.
Drinking alcohol is socially accepted but tens of millions of Americans have some sort of diagnosed use disorder with it and almost 100k people died last year to drinking. Do we say “not even once” to alcohol?
It’s all about drug education, we need to make sure people aware of the risks and allow them to do what they do. Otherwise we’ll just keep repeating this war on drugs nonsense.
But one like the article is about doing something safely, once, in your own place. Dangers of alcohol are generally overdose, long term abuse, and accidents.
How many people drink one beer in the safety of their home with trusted people, and have their life turned upside down?
The other community has companies controlling everything, ads playing to all ages permanently, they have full control over their branding and marketing, etc. They also lobby the federal government to keep doing what they do.
If LSD was as legal as alcohol, and as successfully marketed, I think at that point we could draw conclusions as to which drug is more of a detriment to society and peoples’ health.
In a vacuum your experiment just might work, but probably not in 2023 American society. There is a lot more non-biased scientific study that needs done before unleashing these powerful substances on the population. I would suggest removing bias and looking at it in a neutral way, as I'm sure a happy medium can be established here.
I'd like to say I'm not pro-drugs. I'm just pro-science and anti-war on drugs, which I'll assume you are too. If there was a scientific consensus on how often normal doses of LSD caused things like visual snow or, more severely, the onset of schizophrenia or similar disorders I think the world would be a better place. If LSD indeed caused more harm to the world than existing popular drugs like alcohol, then I think anyone who trusts science including myself would say "Okay, let's stop doing them". But until then, it's just hearsay anecdotal evidence that gets us nowhere. If it does get us somewhere, it's been historically in the direction of demonizing those who do drugs which I think has had a negative effect on society as a whole.
How would you know until something triggers it? Getting permanently mindfucked from LSD is an awful way to discover this.
1. What if it’s the most amazing thing ever, like ADHD medication, what if you get insanely productive, and you then have to go back to being mediocre?
2. What if it triggers something bad. If I get 10% worse at focusing on a solving a problem?
Nope
Tradeoff is clear for me.
Aldous Huxley would like a word…
Probably a good time to remind everyone that ADHD medication will not actually make you insanely productive forever. Good for treating genuine ADHD, but trying to use it like a limitless pill just leads to tolerance, dependence, and burnout.
The more involved doctors will actually start people on low doses and titrate up so patients don’t get the wrong idea about what the medicine is supposed to be doing for them. It’s usually the people who took too high of a dose they borrowed from a friend in college or something who have an idea that stimulants are a magic limitless pill without consequences.
Now, if you microdose that’s a different story. I tried microdosing for a month years back at a remote job. I found it made me more able to connect with others. Like I didn’t want to hop off a meeting right away. It gave me some extra creativity when coding, but didn’t increase the output of my code.
I completely respect anyone who doesn’t want to try though, there are even some psychedelics that scare me and I’ve done quite a bit!
Counter anecdote: I tend to compulsively clean my apartment on mushrooms.
You will get 10% worse at focusing on solving a problem and then 20% just as a result of aging and there's nothing you can do about it. Your eyes will get old, your vitreous will start to detach and you'll start to see what looks like worms floating around in your eyes. Again, nothing you can do about it. Your hearing too will slowly start to degrade. High frequencies will fade to dust and those below them will become more apparent and, in some cases, become quite annoying.
The more you focus on it, the less likely it is to go away, as you're training yourself to pay attention to it.
I have no reason to think it wasn't LSD, but there's also a decent possibility it was something else passed off as LSD, which is a fun consequence of the war on drugs.
The comment you're replying to is speculative. It's all right for people with some personal knowledge to speculate.
It seems every negative psychedelic anecdote on HN is met with commenters that are resistant to the idea that the drug could possibly be negative for someone.
Similar trend for reports on the negative health effects of cannabis
That said, IMHO, there are many things one can do:
1. if one suffers from mental health problems, they should probably avoid any mind altering drugs (OTC, prescription or illicit) without significant guidance from a medical / mental health professional
2. speak to a mental health professional, one that is open to leveraging these types of drugs for mental health purposes
3. Assuming you passed steps 1 & 2 or are confident you don’t need to bother with them…start small and with less intensive options (i.e. if you can’t handle something like marijuana in moderate to high doses, don’t bother [without following steps 1 or 2]). And as condescending as it sounds, if you’re ready for this step, experiment in the best possible environment (and in a good headspace to deal with what is coming) with an individual(s) you trust and do so with a low dose
If you enjoyed your experience after step 3, you could consider slightly increasing the dosage or type of mind altering substances while still adhering to the advice mentioned in the previous steps.
Maybe the problem is people not respecting the complexity of putting such a mind altering substance in their body. One isn’t required to do it and should only do so when they know what they’re getting in to and have a good understanding of the (for lack of a better word) consequences.
Also, maybe individuals who have a very positive experience should be more explicit about providing a disclaimer that what worked for them isn’t guaranteed to work for others.
Edit: and to more directly respond to your comment, IMHO, using something like LSD or any mind altering drug is a bit of rolling the dice.
PiHKAL and TiHKAL reports start with "allergy tests" of low doses around 1/10th of a typical dose.
Erowid and other resources (Psychonaut wiki, etc.) list a starting dose of LSD to be around 25mcg, while the author here took 160mcg as a virgin- over 5x the starting dose.
It's also not clear whether they tested the drugs, which likely means they did not. The report sounds more typical of a DO(x) or NBOMe substance than LSD, which also come on blotters and are sold as LSD relatively frequently.
I think GP’s post has actionable advice in it:
> As a general advice one should be very careful when taking psychedelics with other prescribed medications or having a history of mental illness.
One simple thing a person could do (in the spirit of being careful) is researching the interactions between different drugs. For example, you could Google “psychedelics + SSRIs” if you were on SSRIs, or “psychedelics + social anxiety disorder” if you had social anxiety disorder. It doesn’t seem too difficult if one is already googling “psychedelics + Steve Jobs”
This doesn't matter and is a very misleading IMHO.
Because people having some per-existing conditions they don't know about and hasn't caused anything but supper middle issues is _extremely high_. EDIT (extremely likely to have some condition, not neccessary a condition which interacts with the drug you are about to take)
And the problem with psychedelics is that the chance of both you getting long term problems if you have conditions from even small doses and you not knowing about this conditions and you and people around you not understanding the risk at all is high (at least if compared to some of the legal drugs, like alcohol).
Through I believe they do have high potential in health care (assuming personal being well educated about this topic()), because one one hand this setting allows reducing the number of unknown risk factors, (should be) well educated, and directly know what to do if something goes wrong.
() Except that the handling of pain killers in the US can make you question if that is reliable possible.
I.e. I did not mean self-medicated health care.
While there had been limitations for research on this topics because of questionable laws they now are often somewhat relaxed.
So by now there are some experimental treatment studies which use psychedelics to treat depression patients which the normal health care system failed to treat.
One important factor is that therapy is always the foundation/basis of such treatments while the well controlled psychedelic trip is often the _last_ step in the treatment.
I forgot about the details but I think it was something along the line of being depressed long term conditioning you brain to be depressed (even if the original source is gone) and psychedelics helping you overcoming this after you already started working on de-conditioning yourself.
No matter how unusual or rare it is to experience this, it's really worth surfacing cases like these. I'd rather not take the risk at all, even if the risk is really low.
What are the pros and cons?
Tinnitus in particular is fairly common and is listed as a side-effect on many prescription meds. I've experienced it after taking DMT and it also lasted about a year. I've also had small visual changes that are harder to pinpoint and certain smells being amplified.
The risk is small for the average person and it usually goes away, so it's really a personal choice if it's worth it.
Please name one single food that can bring down all your psychological defence mechanisms in one go.
Ciprofloxacin can ruin your life. Acetaminophen can ruin your life. Aspertame can ruin your life.
The point is that for every substance there will be someone out there predisposed to have a reaction to it. That's not a problem with the substance, and people shouldn't stop recommending it, as the author suggests.
I think this is the direct result of just nonsensical criminalization that equated cannabis with drugs like heroin, while the toxicity of cannabis is much lower than alcohol, for example.
Legalization leads to better education, which typically provides both sides of the argument, so that a potential user can make educated decisions as to whether to try the drug or not. I have seen debates on "when not to use cannabis" on some canna podcasts (like Leafly, though I don't remember the episode).
I think that avoiding LSD for people prone to panic attacks is a pretty sound decision.
It also leads to more cases of abuse. Like many things, legalization is both good and bad at the same time.
> It also leads to more cases of abuse.
Citation needed. Here are a few counter reports:
Pointers From Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War[1]: "Opioid overdose deaths fell after Portugal’s policy change. So did new cases of diseases associated with injection drug use, such as hepatitis C and H.I.V."
Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?[2]: "Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime"
How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis[3]: "[T]he number of addicts was halved and overdose deaths had dropped to just 30 a year for the entire country. The number has remained steady ever since."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/upshot/portugal-drug-lega...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/portugal-heroin-decrim...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
“As Magdalena Cerdá, the study’s lead author, and her coauthors wrote in JAMA Psychiatry, “Although occasional marijuana use is not associated with substantial problems, long-term, heavy use is linked to psychological and physical health concerns, lower educational attainment, decline in social class, unemployment, and motor vehicle crashes.”
If you dont like that study, there are plenty of others. I’m not here to LMGTFY.
Cannabis was legalized there over a decade ago, and with that hindsight it's clear that legalization decreased consumption among minors.
That night I was basically paralyzed. It wasn't a bad experience, but I was not ready for it to be that powerful.
Since then I've just being using gummies. You can dose 5mg or 10mg which is plenty for me to just have a good feeling and still fully function. I've also noticed that different strands affect me way different. I may become sleepy, or really happy and giddy, or totally calm and cool, or motivated, or just a nice elated feeling, or combinations of those and more.
There's the whole sativa/indica thing, but I feel like the market just guesses what their strand is because 1) The feelings are still super random within the same type and 2) There are way too many types of "feelings" to just binary classify with.
You can buy weed that has nearly no THC and a whole lot of CBD. But we also have infused pre-rolls that are nearly double the strength of natural weed with no CBD. These are polar opposite experiences.
Everything is labelled both in Percent, and in mg/g so there is no mistaking whether or not the weed is strong, weak, or somewhere in between.
Everything also gets described with terpene measures, as those volatile oils have a huge impact on the experience. It's pretty much the reason why if it smells super dank and thick, you're headed for couch lock, and if it smells lemony fresh and clean, you're in for a super clear head buzz instead.
Likewise, marijuana is nearly always sold with an educational fact sheet. One learns early on that CBD is both medically useful, but also takes "the edge" off of strong weed. Beginners should start slow, and don't smoke weed that has 0% CBD.
Also there's the well known strategy: If you're the personality that tends to have that dread feeling when the buzz comes on, then start with only a small amount until you pass that first stage. Then you can smoke like crazy without that dread feeling, since it is really only triggered in the initial phase. Once you're adjusted into it, you're all good for the night.
Just don't smoke so much that you end up greening out. That's a real thing, but nearly only ever happens if you eat too much THC edibles at one time. It's hard to green out from toking once you get past the initial phase because auto-titration kicks in big time. Most people don't even realize they are doing it, but it has everything to do with why one can toke 10x the amount over the course of an evening at a party than they ever could at home, and never have that dread feeling that one can experience if they use too much from the start.
People usually only learn that through experience, but it should be part of the education. Knowing the phases (initial coming on, the buzz, then fading back to normal) greatly enhances the experience.
when you buy a pack of weed, you get 1 blob of weed that the purchaser has to divvy up themselves, then has to find a container to consume it, prepare that container properly themselves (blunt, joint, bong, etc), then consume all at once due to the nature of the process. then theres sorting out all the indica/sativa blens. the point is, the system is stacked against newcomers.
edibles are the closest, thats correct - but sellers pack edibles with as much thc as possible. cutting edibles into pieces then further removes the users ability to control the experience, but at least its similar to a pitcher of beer.
Anyways, vapes are great for nicotine and DMT but I'm not a fan of how most cannabis vape pens get easily gummed up. So I'd rather stick to dab rigs and bongs.
The problem with edibles is that the digestive system's metabolism produces way more psychedelic cannabinoids. It's a different experience, one that can be more anxiety inducing in lower doses.
there is a multi-billion dollar market just waiting for the first person that creates a strain of weed that is resistent to this effect.
My partner doesn't like getting too buzzed, so I always get gummies that are about 1/3 the strength of normal gummies. And normal gummies aren't that strong. You can buy them super strong, but that's a conscious choice that again is reflected on the package and labelling. You never have to cut your edibles. You just buy the strength you want.
Incidentally, whether it is indica or sativa is in the small print here. The typical effects are listed on the vendor web pages.
The problems you list were certainly true as recently as 2 or 3 years ago, and pretty much limited to the illegal or grey markets. Legalization has taken it a whole lot further ahead.
They are professionally produced and controlled products these days.
PS: You can even buy cannabis products with nearly no THC in them. They are high in CBD, specifically for medical use since they are not psychoactive. Apparently CBD gummies are used by a lot of people for insomnia, because it is indeed relaxing, with no high feelings whatsoever. Much better than most OTC sleeping pills for that reason.
So literally everything you said is based on purchasing from the streets or grey market, and not professional or controlled outlets. The range of what's available is huge, and everything is clearly labelled so you won't be making any more mistake than you would overdrinking that 6 pack example you mentioned.
heh. sounds like youve never been in a weed store. everything is behind the counter - its not like a supermarket beer aisle where you can pick and choose at your leisure before making your way to the checkout aisle. all the clerks are stoned, and if youre the only one in the store, theyre all looking at you. its one of the most surreal experiences you will ever encounter.
The stores do tend to suck, so I lost interest in them a very long time ago. The ones I've been in are just nicer/cleaner than the grey market stores that came before legalization. I occasionally drop by one if I happen to be passing by, and I even found an "upscale" shop. But still not my thing. I don't like shopping in stores anyway, and they tend to be gloomy and miserable for such a fun product. I'm really not into the Bob Marley Rah Rah Rah thing, either. I don't feel that compulsion to have pot leaves on everything I own, wave flags, or have white-guy imitation dreadlocks.
So no, I have absolutely been there, and yup I totally agree with you on the store details. But you keep picking the negative things that are easy to avoid. Stay away from such places, and go for more professional vendors.
If you want modern weed with full factual information backing it, you have to buy in a modern way. Preferably from a vendor that also fills medicinal prescriptions, since they are the ones that know what they are talking about, and aren't stuck in the decades old Cheech and Chong era.
Some people enjoy that. Not me.
I actually like acid but I wouldn’t call it safe. The visual effects can be quite intense and if you’re not used to the idea that reality is influenced by perception you’re in for a really bad time.
I'm the same way, perhaps to a lesser degree. My sister more so.
Part of me thinks I need to get really high more often and explore myself, but there's a chance I'm just chasing shadows and another approach is needed.
Lots of people have an "always sober" policy and they do fine. Or are they square?
I've smoked weed, I've had edibles (both homemade and from fully legal dispensaries), and at most got kind of spaced out and overly talkative. Whatever this stuff really was, it presented as a wholly different experience; strong hallucinations, time felt like it was slowing, inability to focus, loss of motor control (like unable to get down a flight of stairs), even unable to operate my phone enough to send a text message. Ultimately it led to panic and fear; I was completely unprepared and basically incapacitated until the next day. It ranks as one of the worst experiences in my life, and it felt as if it would never end.
There's a wide range of experience possible from this stuff, even things that (should you believe the internet) are as harmless as weed.
After this, I feel like I'm done for good. Whatever nebulous and unproven benefits that might possibly exist don't seem to be worth the very real risks (that I now am aware of first hand).
Seriously, if I had a friend who couldn't handle alcohol, I would stop drinking with them and I would certainly refuse to take harder stuff with them. When I first had anxiety from smoking weed, my friends promptly told me weed is probably just not a drug for me to take and to take lower doses or to abstain from it entirely in the future-- and anxiety was a well-known (to me) possible consequence from weed.
And if someone tried to argue that LSD can never cause visual snow, a single anecdote is enough to refute that. Anecdotes are not always wrong in debate.
If there’s a debate at all then the data are probably ambiguous or inconclusive, so let’s talk real human experience. Data says LSD is the best thing ever, and here’s one guy who has a terrible experience - is he wrong?
When a customer is complaining about e.g. "your site being broken", there's usually some real problem they're complaining about (though whether it's your problem to solve, or their ISP, or their computer, or their lack of knowledge of how web browsers work, etc. is another question entirely.) But the point being, if your data says the customer can't possibly be experiencing an issue — i.e. if your data disagrees with the customer's own lived experience of having a problem at all, with the data saying that e.g. the customer made a successful purchase, when the customer says they couldn't even load the site — then that should suggest that your tools for measuring your data are broken, or that there's something else equally-fishy going on (like a Man-in-the-Middle.)
None of this applies to medicine/psychology, because medicine never has the sort of data that could even theoretically be used to make a claim like "this is 100% working, and anyone who says they have a problem is lying" — the sort of claim where even a single counterexample would be enough to refute that statement, and therefore where a single counterexample would be valuable.
Rather, the sort of claims made in medicine are Bayesian confidence claims. The sort of (evidenced) claim that gets a treatment approved by the FDA, goes something like: "treatment X tends to be well-tolerated in population Y, while producing a positive outcome of power Z with benefits outweighing the measured side-effects."
No single anecdote (= clinical data) refutes that kind of statement. Instead, you need to compile and quantify a bunch of them (= clinical data meta-analysis) to actually make an argument for or against that claim.
Knowing this, any attempt someone might make to wield a single anecdotal claim to influence the credence you give a statistically-derived Bayesian-confidence statement of the safety and efficacy of a medical treatment — especially where you don't have an intuitive sense for how much data went into the statistics that led to the original statistical claim — should be regarded as an attempt to manipulate you with rhetoric, rather than honest debate praxis.
Which is not to say that the anecdote is false! You can totally believe that the person's lived experience is real, and empathize with them, and try to come up with solutions for their problem; while also taking as hokum any attempt by them to convince you that their anecdote generalizes.
In attempts to (rightly) justify legalization, we now first have to appeal to the puritan-descendant US society and persuade it that it has great medicinal potential (because recreational potential is not enough). Consequently, you see overly exaggerated headlines that tout these substances as a miracle cure. Which, honestly, it might be for some people with certain conditions in a specific settings.
But, a person then reads "a new LSD study" and might conclude that their psilocybin trip was not a success, but maybe the LSD is going to change their world for the better.
If we just legalize these non-toxic substances, the conversation around them changes. The same happened to cannabis (where still nowadays, many people use the "medicinal" angle to justify their recreational habits so that they are not judged by the society, despite cannabis being legal in a number of US states).
So the author had their "noise filters" reset basically, and their brain had to relearn this. This is interesting and somewhat supports the notion that LSD can "reset" your mind in some ways.
When there are visuals I find them to be more "organic" on mushrooms and more "sharp/electric" on LSD, but that’s very subjective/suggestible.
But there are "social" trips where there are no visuals, usually when in a group and experiencing the substance together, there I wouldn’t be able to tell LSD and Psylocybin apart.
The feeling of shared being part of a shared consciousness, the cosmic laughter and the fractal thoughts can be the same with both substances.
I'd say there is a psychedelic state of consciousness and many different substances (Psychedelics) will get you there, the experience will differ in nuances, but the general idea is the same. Keep in mind that in this state you are highly suggestible, so the environment will often do a lot more to shape the experience than the exact substance.
Having done both about a dozen times, this is not my experience or the experience that others have shared. Even a large dose of mushrooms only has subtle visual effects, while LSD makes the world look like a van Gogh painting.
But visuals as strong as you describe I had only when I tried 25C-NBOMe. But there the mind trip was only barely present and the body feel was rather uncomfortable.
Mushrooms in particular are hard to standardize a dosage of. Eat enough of some strong ones and things get plenty visual.
Maybe point is not to have radical change but something else.
But anyway what I find more surprising are people taking Datura stramonium. They usually know that it will be mostly bad trip. But they still do it.
take me as your first anecdotal example of someone whose life has been significantly and measurably improved since taking psychedelics. there goes your entire argument.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-once-coyly-defende...
I can't believe that peanuts have a good name and are promoted a lot in some circles!
I'm sorry that this person had a very bad experience, but someone with a peanut allergy wouldn't be so full of themselves as to warn everyone off of peanuts, despite the fact that the vast majority of people can consume peanuts with no problem, and enjoy it. Most things in life have some risk.
See the section about controversy of country of origin under Entheogen
I learned what it means to be grounded. I'm fucking unshakable now. "Everyone's different" is the real lesson here.
That being said, the way Silicon Valley uses this shit makes me want to rage. Treat it like it's sacred, and it'll treat you like you are.
1. What kind of situation where you in in terms of lodging, social isolation, and access to nature?
2. How often were you taking mushrooms and how much did your dose vary?
3. We're you consuming any other drugs at the time?
4. What time of day did you typically take mushrooms and what did you do during?
5.Did you get sick of rice and beans and how much did you supplement your diet with other foods?
Interested in your experience.
When I was tired of rice and beans, I hiked down to a little restaurant that had really, really good fried fish.
One time I built a hot tub.
A park ranger was kind enough to jump start my car when I was ready to leave for good. I feel like that was the least they could do after writing me six parking tickets, all of which I paid.
The rest of the answers, I leave to you.
Required reading for 5th graders, imo.
At the end of the day, it's not much different than the thousands of people who hike the PCT every year. I just... didn't walk anywhere.
It was so long ago that I could no more get a book out of it than I could get a book out of "what I did last year." I just... don't remember the details. I remember admitting to myself that I could see ghosts and the moment I figured out why I saw them. I remember the day the air changed and I knew I could either stay another winter or leave. But most days were just, "fill the water, boil the water, make the food, mend the clothes, gather the firewood, tend the fire, sleep."