[HN Gopher] LSD: Not Even Once
___________________________________________________________________
LSD: Not Even Once
Author : qword
Score : 248 points
Date : 2023-04-23 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.qword.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.qword.net)
| yrgulation wrote:
| [dead]
| currymj wrote:
| in certain niche social circles, there is a lot of pressure to
| use psychedelic drugs. someone who chooses not to use psychedelic
| drugs might be looked down on -- presumed to be closed-minded or
| not very bright -- or otherwise socially excluded.
|
| as psychedelic drugs grow in popularity, more and more people in
| more and more social milieus will run into this kind of
| condescension. some will be pressured into taking risks they
| don't want to, and some will be harmed by it.
|
| i expect a backlash to psychedelic drugs fairly soon (based on
| hacker news comments on this article vs. what it would have been
| a few years ago, maybe already starting). i hope that this
| backlash doesn't derail the promising medical research into
| psychedelics that's gotten off the ground in the last few years.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Despite having had a small handful of terrifying psychosis
| inducing trips in my 10 years of using psilocybin & LSD, I still
| recommend that people try them. I have had amazing and
| occasionally profound experiences with psychedelics, and I have
| had friends with social anxieties who made serious breakthroughs
| in the course of a day. Many of the best days of my life have
| been spent in nature, with friends, on psychedelics. I'm also an
| outlier, of my network of friends I'm the only person who has
| experienced serious very bad no good trips.
|
| Psilocybin is generally more anxiety inducing, nausea inducing, &
| introspective then LSD (on the comeup), yet I still recommend
| that people new to psychedelics should start with psilocybin
| because it is much easier to control dosage, and the trips are
| generally much shorter. The intrinsic danger of LSD is that it is
| impossible to be sure of the dosage of a blotter, even from the
| same sheet as another blotter.
|
| I understand if the author never wants to take these drugs again.
| I'd recommend that if you ever are curious again, you skip LSD,
| find a safe environment with friends and start with a small,
| manageable dosage of psilocybin (~1-2 grams).
| shipscode wrote:
| The most interesting thing in this space is that what OP
| describes, and the benefits that people claim to receive from
| hallucinogens, are both documented by scientific literature. OPs
| response is actually far more well proven than any hallucinogen-
| related benefit currently being studied.
|
| The fact that OPs is "controversial" isn't actually set in any
| science, it's set in extra-scientific mushrooms-as-religion
| mentality that is currently proliferating as the "current thing".
|
| A drug-based solution to depression, anxiety, etc would be
| incredible, but unfortunately outside of humanity's reach today.
|
| If you're not interested in science and instead seeking religion,
| skip the drugs and reach for your closest religious text and
| start reading. As a Catholic I recommend the Gospel of Mark as a
| starting point. It's far easier to believe that multitudes of
| people 2000 years back witnessed some dope stuff and started
| following some rules that make everyone feel great today, rather
| than the universe transpired from nothing in some scientifically
| unprovable theory and potentially HPPD-causing substances are the
| only way to feel whole.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Fairly interesting post, especially for those who weren't aware
| that hallucinogens sometimes cause minor hallucinations
| indefinitely, but arguments like the conclusions section are why
| we need to, as a society, beat "the plural of anecdote is not
| data" into every single person's head.
|
| Some people have a negative reaction to LSD. Some people don't.
| Some people have a positive reaction to LSD. Some don't. What's
| missing, crucially, is the _only useful information_ - how many
| of each there are. There is nothing else that is relevant! If
| "some guy had a bad time" was a robust argument for "never ever
| do this thing", it would be a bad idea to do anything ever.
|
| > Reading reddit anecdata about how LSD has changed people's
| lives for the better - and the army of comments that dogpile on,
| agreeing - makes me upset at their naiveity and harmful promotion
|
| It is indeed naive to think that some random guy on the internet
| talking about their experience is useful. Now how did we decide
| it was "harmful promotion" again?
| jtbayly wrote:
| I grew up being warned that "it only takes one time" and you
| can fry your brain.
|
| Then I read on HN that was BS. Flashbacks don't happen, trips
| can be made safe, etc.
|
| I'm actually glad to finally see this LSD etc promotion
| challenged. Seems like what I heard growing up was more true
| than what I've read on HN up until today.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| But that's exactly what I'm talking about! In no sense does
| this article "challenge" random people on HN, because there's
| nothing to challenge at all. Some people did say they liked
| LSD, which is as true as it ever was, and other people say
| they don't like LSD, which is also true. Anyone going from
| "well I heard it's ok" => "flashbacks don't happen" was wrong
| before this story was ever published, because the plural of
| anecdote _is not data_.
| greenpeas wrote:
| > hallucinogens sometimes cause minor hallucinations
| indefinitely
|
| The author definitely did not think those were minor side-
| effects.
|
| > What's missing, crucially, is the only useful information-
| how many of each there are. There is nothing else that is
| relevant!
|
| the evidence that a bad trip can potentially cause permanent
| damage is useful and relevant.
|
| > If "some guy had a bad time" was a robust argument for "never
| ever do this thing", it would be a bad idea to do anything
| ever.
|
| "some guy got permanently fucked up doing something" is a
| strong argument for me to very carefully consider the potential
| benefits of "doing something" and whether they are worth it; in
| the case of LSD, for me personally, the benefits don't outweigh
| the potential downsides, and anecdata is more than enough for
| me to make this decision.
| medler wrote:
| The tail risk is real though. I do hope someday we'll have
| accurate estimates of those risks. In the meantime it seems
| pretty clear to me that the expected value of these drugs is
| negative. I think it was Charlie Munger who said "in the best
| case scenario you feel good for a few minutes. In the worst
| case scenario it ruins your life."
| lagadu wrote:
| This is true for anything though. For example: I dance
| (professionally), surf and snowboard. All three of them have
| caused me injuries, though only one of them left me with
| something permanent (very minor, more of an annoyance
| thankfully) and people have gotten extremely serious injuries
| and even death from all of them. Should we stop doing them
| recreationally because of possible risks?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I mean maybe? Depends on how willing you are to trade small
| risks for small benefit. But we have no real bounds on
| upsides or downsides, and no real probability of any of it. I
| don't know about you, but my prior in situations such as
| these is that if a strong effect in either direction were
| likely, we'd have better data.
| throwaway2214 wrote:
| haha i have most of the negative symptoms and never had any drugs
| what so ever
|
| > Continuous anxiety about literally nothing. I felt like a
| student who didn't do their homework, and was dreading their
| teacher calling on them - for 24 hours a day.
|
| this one is most fun :)
|
| kind of like the end of the world is coming and you are supposed
| to do something but you dont know what, but you know its the most
| important thing that has to be done
| reso wrote:
| I definitely think cases like this can happen, and I've had
| troubles with some drug experiences in the past as well.
|
| That being said, the author's report of how they tried psilocybin
| sounds like a warning sign to me: 3 grams, seemingly at home
| alone. That is a big dose for a first time, and I've never heard
| anyone recommend taking it alone at home.
| pyrophane wrote:
| My first mushroom experience was a similar dose at home alone.
| I was a teenager and sneaking it in after high school. It
| probably wasn't the best idea, but the experience I had was
| pretty amazing.
|
| I am the sort of person who likes to do these drugs alone, put
| on a record, and chill (although I do also immensely enjoy
| being in nature).
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I've tried LSD once and would never do it again for the reasons
| the author states.
|
| Yes, it was great fun, but it's just too unpredictable.
| Regardless of whether or not it actually happened, it was
| incredibly clear to me that I could have just decided to jump out
| of a window thinking that it was my bedroom door, or cut myself
| with a kitchen knife thinking that it was a brush, or think my
| partner was some sort of attacker and become violent towards
| him/her, or whatever else. Plus the emotional effects.
|
| It felt like I played Russian Roulette with my brain and won, I
| just got lucky and I'm OK. I think. Maybe my emotions are a bit
| different now. How would I even know?
| javaunsafe2019 wrote:
| I mean ofc drugs are dangerous but reading this it's quiet
| obvious that the op did have had some circumstances before taking
| a really high dose of lsd. The tinnitus is a broad link. I feel
| really sorry for him but he could have k own better. As they all
| say: set and setting and this was not right here. Blaming the
| drug itself is like blaming a car for a car crash afterwards...
| x86x87 wrote:
| So let me get this straight.
|
| This person had a hard time on psilocybin and though they should
| try LSD? Jfc
|
| I think it's well known that things can go south really quickly
| on basically anything that alters your brain chemistry. Yes,
| these drugs alter your brain chemistry. And also, yes some people
| are way more sensitive than others.
|
| It's unfortunate this happened but to completely write off the
| potential psychedelics show for treating trauma and PTSD is naive
| at best.
| justinator wrote:
| Does sound like they overdosed themselves.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| The popular LSD and psychadelic advocacy online and elsewhere is
| an expression of the mainstream ideology. The foundation of our
| collective ideology tells us these drugs should have some
| profound life-altering and improving effect. Obviously, when
| examined critically, the premise is ridiculous on its face.
| Everyone I know who regularly does these types of drugs is not
| really doing much else with their lives. As for Steve Jobs, he
| was not a regular LSD user, he was a baby boomer who bragged
| about using it to make himself seem unique or different, like
| many of his generation.
|
| You see a similar sort of popular collective delusion with people
| who claim Cannabis cures cancer or other disease. Sorry but hard
| no. There is no such thing as "Medical Marijuana." It's simply
| marketing and propaganda to get the public into associating
| virtue with Cannabis use, with the end goal of eventually
| changing policy.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Is it possible that people just don't want to talk to you about
| their medical treatment? I know perfectly productive, happy
| people that use marijuana for a variety of purposes, both
| recreational and medical. But in general, people don't share
| their medication list with the world, so it doesn't surprise me
| you're not running across them, especially with this view.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Sorry. This is an ignorant take. It's not about regularly doing
| the drugs + therapy with a drug is different from people taking
| a drug for fun.
| willio58 wrote:
| You seem to have heard one extreme, that cannabis cures
| diseases, and you've snapped back to the other extreme where
| you state there is no such thing as a medical use of cannabis.
| Have you seen the studies? Have you looked into CBD?
|
| Yes, there's a lot of exaggeration if you're listening to some
| person who knows nothing about science, but there are true
| benefits with it as well. Don't throw the baby out with the
| bath water as they say.
| dvt wrote:
| I've had "visual snow" since forever, but it's very mild, and
| more acute when light exposure delta is high (e.g. turn on/off a
| light). I suspect it's because I also suffer from migraines,
| which started around puberty, though I think it's at least partly
| genetic because both my mom and my sister also get them. I used
| to get a very bad one at least once a week, as in, couldn't even
| get out of bed. Since I started drinking coffee (late 20s), it
| helped my migraines out _tremendously_.
|
| My migraines (which is a condition closely related to seizures)
| are partly why I've always said "no" to any form of psychedelic
| substance; just seems needlessly dangerous.
| code51 wrote:
| I find it so ironic that on one hand, we are placing great value
| on achieving consciousness with artificial intelligence and yet,
| we place so little value on our own.
|
| If this "consciousness" thing is so hard to get, then why do we
| try our best to get rid of it through alcohol, recreational drugs
| etc ?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| That's not how psychedelics work
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Drugs create altered states of consciousness, not get rid of it
| code51 wrote:
| Yes, sorry, I didn't frame it well. I meant the possibility
| of breaking your properly functioning state of consciousness.
| [deleted]
| dtx1 wrote:
| There has long been evidence that LSD has a higher likelihood of
| bad reactions and long term issue than psilocybin and these days
| mostly legal LSD prodrugs are used that may have different
| effects.
|
| Personally my experience with shrooms was similar to the article
| but it felt during and afterwards like a weight has been lifted
| from my shoulder and I could finally deal with a lot of trauma
| that resulted in a severe depression. And I found it had long
| term positive effects on it.
|
| But unless you are naturally inclined to it and in a good
| position to take it, I think most people would not like doing a
| mushroom trip.
| bag_boy wrote:
| Cause you a bad trip,
|
| You took a dose down,
|
| You write a blog post just to turn it around
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I've never heard of kratom being dissociative. It feels like
| hydrocodone to me
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.newsdirect.com/kratom/red-maeng-da-kratom
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Wow. Yeah i never had anything like that happen. I used to
| make a chai tea with green vein that was pretty chill
| dusted wrote:
| I've had strongly pronounced visual snow since I was a little
| kid.. Remember asking my parents "what is the thing you see when
| you close your eyes?" They were confused, "black?" yeah, but.. I
| know the color back, like, a piece of black paper on the table in
| a well-lit room, I understand that it's this near ideal smooth
| surface that reflect very little light of no particular color..
| But the thing when you've been in bed for a few minutes in
| darkness, and the "tv static" blobs start moving around and
| pulsating ?
|
| They never really understood what I was talking about.. I talked
| to others, and most people report no such experience.. I was
| convinced (and still is) that everyone has this, and it's more
| about.. how well attuned they are to it, how aware they are of
| it.. Like with the floaters.. As I'm writing this, I sit in a
| dark room with my monitor, and around the white text box is a
| hundred little "cells" jotting around in the snow.. I don't
| believe for a second this is uncommon, I think the less part is
| becoming aware of it.
|
| It's hard to "unsee", when you've recognized the face on the
| crab, it will always be there to some degree. When you've become
| aware of a sound, you can't unlearn it.
|
| Back to childhood, as a kid, I was at the ear doc a few times,
| trying to find out what the thing was I heard.. It was not
| tinnitus (that came later) but, in the end they concluded it was
| the flow of blood in my ear.. Something everyone hears, but many
| people don't notice.
|
| When I was a kid, I would blink my eyes when looking at high
| contrast scenes, and as my eyes were closed, play with the
| afterimages, eventually learning to refresh them by slightly
| changing the force with which my eyes were held shut.. Eventually
| I noticed how the light became momentarily brighter when going
| outside from inside a dark house.. I found that thing in my head,
| that thing that made it become brighter and darker, and played
| around with it, eventually showing my friends at school that one
| can change the size of their pupils by thinking about it, just
| like one can wiggle their ear or move their scalp.
|
| I'm not discounting the experience, but rather, I question if
| this is really damage to the brain, or rather, a stimulation that
| caused them to notice what is already there.
| csh0 wrote:
| I have always had it as far as I know.
|
| I have a vivid memory of asking my father if he could see atoms
| too when I was between 5 and 8.
|
| I told him that when I stared at an object long enough, I saw
| little dots (snow). I must have just recently heard about atoms
| and mapped them to my experience.
|
| Fortunately he understood what I was talking about and said
| told me it's just my eyes or my mind presenting me with bad
| data. I'm sure it was a strange question for him, "can you see
| atoms too?"
| [deleted]
| kuratkull wrote:
| The night fuzz is probably the brain generating noise. I use it
| to fall asleep quicker. But the white squiggles on white or
| against the blue sky are white blood cells at the back of your
| eye.
| cbreynoldson wrote:
| A number of the side effects listed here are also known to happen
| on the "waking up" journey. Tinnitus, for example, is a thing we
| all have that our brain filters out for the most part.
| Depersonalization is an obvious (and sought after) side effect of
| "waking up" as well.
|
| These side effects can be scary to someone that doesn't
| anticipate them (or just doesn't want them), but the "benefits"
| of LSD often point to the loosening of your sense of self, seeing
| unfiltered reality, etc.
|
| TLDR: these side effects can be seen as good in the right
| context.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've noticed a troubling trend among psychonauts: any reports of
| terrible experiences or long lasting negative effects of
| psychedelics are waved away in two different ways:
|
| 1 - blaming of the person who had the experience, for not having
| the proper "set and setting", or not respecting the drug.
|
| 2 - claiming that there's no such thing as a "bad trip", and only
| a challenging one that takes time to integrate.
|
| There might be some truth to both of those things, but I think it
| vastly undersells how incredibly destabilizing a "bad trip" can
| be.
|
| The primary thing I learned from spending an eternity in hell on
| two of my trips? That it's absurd how much suffering the human
| mind is capable of experiencing. A few years later and I can no
| longer feel much of the trauma of the experience, but there were
| months were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the
| seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.
|
| Currently I feel that there's nothing about life or myself that I
| can learn on drugs that I can't learn in other (safer) ways.
|
| I'm glad people have massively positive experiences on drugs, but
| I worry that we're underselling the risks when we just say "just
| check your set and setting, and remember that there's no such
| thing as a 'bad trip', just a challenging one".
| krater23 wrote:
| > That it's absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable
| of experiencing. A few years later and I can no longer feel
| much of the trauma of the experience, but there were months
| were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the
| seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.
|
| Sorry to say it, but that's the same what can happen when
| you're falling in love with someone. And if your love breaks,
| yes, most time you will find someone who will say 'You choosed
| the wrong person', like the wrong set&setting. But this is one
| of the more or less good endings, what when your partner dies?
| But would you ever warn someone to falling in love?
|
| And that I say, who thinks LSD is not a drug for everyone.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| This comparison doesn't really work for me. The pain I felt
| was more like the worst heartbreak imaginable, but magnified
| 100 fold, then spread across infinite time and space, all
| while having the knowledge that this pain was my eternal
| state and would NEVER end.
|
| This isn't to discount the immense pain people feel from
| heartbreak or losing a loved one. Just that the human mind
| seems to have an incredibly large capacity for suffering,
| moreso than we're aware even during the most painful moments
| of our lives.
| pineaux wrote:
| I agree with you on this. This can also be experienced from
| meditatieve practises and journeys into "spiritual
| enlightenment". Drugs and mind altering behaviors like
| meditation are a way of hacking the mind. If you hack
| stupidly or are really unlucky, you can brick your mind.
| Doesnt mean you shouldnt do it. Adventures are adventures.
| wnolens wrote:
| Every time I talk about my negative LSD experience with someone
| in-person (even one who is very pro-psychedelic and enjoys
| positive or growth experiences from it), I receive great
| empathy and we discuss it, they are genuinely curious and
| perhaps even recalibrate their own compass.
|
| However, bringing it up online (reddit, HN) I either get others
| chiming in with their negative experiences or I get blamed as
| if I have never done drugs before (i have, lots) or am
| inexperienced with LSD (I've tripped a half dozen times with
| good results), or didn't read this book or that online guide (I
| have)..
|
| Anyway.. when I recommend LSD to new friends, it's to stay in
| the fun domain (50-150micrograms, go have fun at a music
| festival) and consider the myriad of other forms of therapy
| first.
| shipscode wrote:
| People online are basically parrots, they're just repeating
| what they've read regardless of who stated it.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > Anyway.. when I recommend LSD to new friends, it's to stay
| in the fun domain (50-150micrograms, go have fun at a music
| festival) and consider the myriad of other forms of therapy
| first.
|
| This is what I do as well. People are gonna take drugs, I'm
| not trying to talk anyone out of that, so I recommend staying
| safe and sticking with low doses. But curiosity often comes
| calling anyway and people naturally want to delve deeper, and
| I worry a lot of people justify massive doses without proper
| preparation because they see so many people saying "oh,
| there's no such thing as a bad trip!".
| lta wrote:
| I go to _a lot_ of psychedelic festival, and I see those kind
| of recommandations quite frequently around me and my friends.
| I 've grown to find those irresponsible.
|
| I don't think we should prevent people from having those
| experiences of they really want to. But I've frequently
| noticed the people providing those recommandationa don't have
| any idea of the care that is required or the risks that are
| associated with that kind of experience.
|
| Those risks are extremely frequently dismissed but sadly,
| they're real. The author of that article is one example, but
| they're many others and the consequences are very long
| lasting
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Psychedelic drugs have an exponential effect as dosage
| increases, that's one issue. Complete dissociation from reality
| due to overloading of the visual perception receptors (the
| 5-HT2A serotonin receptors involved in translating the optic
| nerve signals to the brain's map of reality) is not entirely
| unlike a blackout drunk except that the motor nerves are
| relatively unaffected, so you can have people running around
| with no conception of their surroundings (leading to all kinds
| of unfortunate effects, like falling off cliffs etc.).
|
| Culturally, people raised in a 'more is better' consumer
| mentality are most at risk for this, or if they don't know what
| kind of dosage they're dealing with. One thing about the
| original post here is that they state they know the amount of
| LSD they took in terms of ug, but how would they? Also, how
| would they know the purity? Is it possible that some unreacted
| side product of a low-quality LSD synthesis damaged their
| visual nervous system, perhaps, leading to long-term effects,
| or was it due to a kind of neuronal rewiring process?
|
| Bottom line: these drugs need attention from full-scale
| carefully managed scientific investigation, which has mostly
| been banned since the 1960s.
| maxbond wrote:
| I think it's an overreaction to fear mongering stories about
| psychedelics that are much less common now than a decade or two
| ago. But it would be crazy to dismiss the danger in taking
| psychedelics or to bill them as being suitable for everyone, I
| agree. An underground and recreational drug culture is prone to
| dismissing risk and ill equipped to create safe and supportive
| environments, or to respond to medical/psychological
| emergencies. And that's kinda the better case scenario, there
| are also cults that abuse psychedelics and it's incredibly
| harmful.
|
| Hopefully over the next few decades this stuff can be
| decriminalized and can move towards more therapeutic
| environments. I believe that in the right circumstances they
| can improve/save lives.
| lta wrote:
| I'm the living counter example. I've experienced it multiple
| times in settings that would be very closed to ideal for psy-
| heads, hence one random day, something very similar to what's
| described in this article happened. Took me about a decade to
| recover. I was very close friends with lots of people in the
| psychedelic harm reduction associations and had a lot of
| theoritical and practical knowledge...
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm really sorry that happened to you. I think it's clear
| that for some people it's just inappropriate, and that
| preparedness is necessary but not sufficient. I don't think
| it's clear when it is or isn't appropriate, which is
| obviously super dangerous and deserving of further study. I
| think it's important for stories like yours, the top level
| comment, and the article to be shared & taken seriously.
|
| (To be clear, that's not what I meant about fear mongering
| stories. I mean fictitious boogy man stories, like
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/orange-juice-lsd/ . You
| can see the same thing with fentanyl today - fentanyl is
| deadly, but people still feel the need to exaggerate and
| attribute impossible characteristics to it, leading to
| panic attacks in cops that so much as touch it. In the same
| way, psychedelics are dangerous, but there was a time when
| people felt compelled to invent fictitious ways for them to
| be dangerous.)
| zvmaz wrote:
| > That it's absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable
| of experiencing.
|
| Not only that, but the different "qualities" of pain one can
| experience. I never believed that grief would feel the way it
| felt when I first experienced it, and I was completely ignorant
| of it, until I went through it (I thought I understood grief
| through empathy, but I was wrong). How many subjective
| experiences are we ignorant of?
| pyrophane wrote:
| > Currently I feel that there's nothing about life or myself
| that I can learn on drugs that I can't learn in other (safer)
| ways.
|
| Absolutely. I think the best way to look at the psychedelic
| experience is as something that shows you a different way of
| perceiving reality that you should then seek to translate into
| long term change via spiritual practice.
|
| For those who gets the most out of it, I don't hear them
| talking about taking it continually, all the time. Usually it
| shows them something that leads them to other things.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > That it's absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable
| of experiencing.
|
| When I was 8 or 9 I had a night terror that involved some sort
| of life-sized game of Tetris that was moving terribly fast. My
| brain wholly adopted the belief that if I were to lose,
| everyone I loved would die horribly. I was trapped in this
| night terror for what felt like forever. Afterwards I refused
| to sleep voluntarily for weeks.
|
| To this date, nothing has come close. I would describe the
| feeling as "dread." Just complete, pure dread.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| it seems like the worst kind of terror is an impersonal,
| rapid, universal, automated death/loss of control. This
| opposed to some kind of a personal boogie man.
| m_fayer wrote:
| I think this is the "uncanny". Cormac McCarthy is a writer
| I've always appreciated for revealing this terror under the
| thin veneer of civilization.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I think I know the feeling exactly. I had recurrent dreams
| like that as a kid, that somehow always involved a large
| yellow sphere / ball. For some unknown reason I HAD to move
| that sphere, but I also knew it was impossible. It evoked
| this odd and terrible sensation emerging from two opposing
| mental forces: there was something I HAD to do at all costs
| but I also knew it was entirely impossible at the same time.
|
| My "bad trips" brought back that same feeling, but magnified
| by a thousand.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah, "HAD to" is how it felt, yet those words, and any
| other words, always feel insufficient.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| I remember lying in bed with fever, as a kid, and there was
| a big CRT TV in the room.
|
| The TV looked huge to me, and for some reason, it looked as
| if it would never be able to fit through the door again.
| Thinking that the TV was stuck in this room forever gave me
| the deepest sense of dread. Something had gone really wrong
| with the world. What would my family do when they realized
| that the TV was stuck? Would they cry desperately? Would
| they run away and leave me there? I just felt like life
| would never be the same again.
| curl-up wrote:
| Yellow/beige/brown spheres for me as well. Other commenter
| had spheres also. I never even thought that this might be
| something others experienced. Sadly, trying to find more
| information on this only delivers "dream interpretation" BS
| content.
|
| For me, the feeling of dread did not come from me "having
| to move spheres but not being able to" however. It came
| from "knowing that these spheres will be moving no matter
| what I do", but they would be moving "infinitely slowly",
| like one of those optical illusions [1] where things seem
| to move but they're not actually.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/sebjwallace/status/1384773017717420034
| Trasmatta wrote:
| That optical illusion gave me a hint of the original
| feeling. On my drug trips it was also highly correlated
| with a spinning or vibrating sensation, which also seems
| somewhat present in that illusion.
|
| There's something really interesting here about this
| shared type of experience that many people are reporting.
| All a bit different, but a very similar feeling.
|
| I feel like others online must have discussed this type
| of thing before, but I've also come up short when
| searching it. How do you even describe it or name it in
| such a way that is searchable? Has anyone come up with a
| name for it?
|
| Now I kind of want to post this on Reddit or something to
| find more people with this experience, and maybe see if
| anyone has a name for it.
|
| I've never done Salvia, but the descriptions I read about
| it from people remind me of this feeling as well. They
| often talk about a wheel and spinning movement and dread.
| aradox66 wrote:
| Fascinating. When I had fever dreams as a kid, I would have
| a sensation that was similar. It was the need to do
| find/choose something infinitesimally unlikely. Like
| finding a single coin dropped anywhere in the Pacific
| ocean. And if I failed the universe would cease to exist.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Yes! This is the feeling. And I've also experienced while
| sick. It happened sometimes while I was not sick as a kid
| though. Then I didn't feel it for decades until I tried
| certain drugs.
| m_fayer wrote:
| Fascinating. I experienced something very similar as a kid,
| with huge grey spheres in a black void. They felt
| implacable, indifferent, yet malicious. And I had a sense
| of futility and utter insufficiency.
|
| I also experienced these feelings later on psychedelics and
| in some other circumstances of adult duress.
|
| I really do wonder what to make of the similarities.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I wonder if this is a universal feeling that everyone
| experiences at some point. I feel like it's most common
| as a child (from reading other's experiences) and may
| have something to do with the developing brain.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's a very reassuring feeling I'm having right now
| seeing so many people write about the same kinds of
| sensation.
|
| Insufficiency. Futility. Infinitesimally unlikely. HAD
| to. Indifferent, malicious. Having to move things in a
| way that conflicted with the established physics of the
| situation.
| notvplez wrote:
| Count me in the camp of people experiencing this, I
| associate it with childhood fever dreams. And much later,
| I encountered the exact same feeling through psychedelic
| experimenting. Never knew it was such a common experience
| either, and as you say it's very reassuring.
| [deleted]
| maitland wrote:
| Also count me in. Excited to see others with the same
| experience.
|
| I got to the point of rationalizing this as actually
| being some kind of memory of being born / memory of that
| trauma. The lack of all proportion to the sensation,
| along with the incredible stakes, feeling of pressure
| (literal and figurative) etc...
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've also wondered before if it was somehow related to
| the trauma of childbirth...not a memory per se, but a
| trauma imprint. But who knows...
|
| So interesting reading all these reports of the same type
| of thing!
| logi2mus wrote:
| Nocebo effect can be also pretty bad, question is, has LSD
| significantly more bad side effects?!
|
| Is their a way to mitigate the nocebo effect of LSD? Setting
| helps? If you believe LDSD is bad or can be bad, then don't
| take it!
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Set and setting, low doses, good trip sitters, "trip killers"
| (as an emergency "off switch"). These all help with pretty
| much any mind altering drugs. But sometimes things still go
| sideways even when you do everything "right", and it can be
| very very destabilizing.
| convolvatron wrote:
| +10 for having some lorazepam handy
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Had a somewhat similar experience.
|
| 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.
| PKop wrote:
| It's a way for people that want to be addicts to rationalize
| their addictions, and should be mercilessly shamed out of being
| so popular.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Is psychedelic addiction even a thing? Anyway, people who
| aren't addicts do it too.
| andybak wrote:
| I'm not sure you know much about the subject of which you
| speak.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| 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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| 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.
| willio58 wrote:
| Seems like it got the hug of death.
|
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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?
| willio58 wrote:
| 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.
| lsdont wrote:
| > _If you have a genetic propensity for schizophrenia_
|
| How would you know until something triggers it? Getting
| permanently mindfucked from LSD is an awful way to discover
| this.
| hezralig wrote:
| 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.
| mr_woozy wrote:
| [dead]
| willio58 wrote:
| I feel like people generally know if they have a family
| history of these things, or maybe that's just me?
| jamilton wrote:
| It's certainly not a given that someone would know.
| lsdont wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. There can be a lot of surprises in one's
| family history. And it's all surprises if you're adopted.
| hezralig wrote:
| Okay, but most people are not adopted.
| [deleted]
| sgammon wrote:
| site wont load (refusing connections)
| jamescontrol wrote:
| 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?
|
| Nope
| themagician wrote:
| 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.
| dieselgate wrote:
| 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.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Or #3: You didn't personally meet the chemist to know what you
| really took and now you don't even know what's causing your
| life's problems.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| That's why I never smoked a single nicotine cigarette. If I
| like it, I'll be an addict. If I don't, it was wasted.
| willio58 wrote:
| 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
| Obertr wrote:
| and on the other side you may get insanely creative and change
| your life for the better and build something valuable to the
| humanity.
|
| Tradeoff is clear for me.
| PKop wrote:
| This will never happen, and is an absurd cope for people that
| just want their fix and to be addicts without feeling bad.
| Obertr wrote:
| how would you argue the fact that you don't develop
| addiction to this stuff?
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but are you saying that drugs categorically can
| not lead to inspiration that can help creativity?
|
| Aldous Huxley would like a word...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| willio58 wrote:
| 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!
| phonypc wrote:
| >All ideas of productivity fall away when you trip.
|
| Counter anecdote: I tend to compulsively clean my apartment
| on mushrooms.
| scorxn wrote:
| Set and setting are enormously important when taking anything,
| even alcohol or caffeine. If you're in a bad mood or
| uncomfortable space, drugs will probably make it worse.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| ,,the psychedelic experience sells you your own soul back to you,
| tried to bribe you with what was already yours, presenting it as
| you receiving a gift from the Powers, when in reality you have
| been burgled
|
| then it tries to sneak in little untruths in between the truths
| that were already yours and already inside you, such as "you
| should encourage other people to do psychedelics, because they
| reveal all this wisdom and insight to you"
|
| you stand to gain nothing you don't already posses, and you risk
| prelest. best case scenario is nothing happens, worst case
| scenario is you go insane and lose everything and become a
| literal demon"
|
| https://twitter.com/cumlasagna1/status/1648670301406863370
| emptyfile wrote:
| [dead]
| sva_ wrote:
| Anecdotally, HPPD goes away for most people after some time
| (months).
|
| The more you focus on it, the less likely it is to go away, as
| you're training yourself to pay attention to it.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Penicillin. Not even once. Really
| [deleted]
| sambapa wrote:
| I know someome who choked to death on a piece of banana
| Loeffelmann wrote:
| I had the same experience with tinnitus and visual snow, and
| unfortunately, they are still present. While I had one bad trip,
| I was okay after that one. However, after waking up from another
| trip, I simply wasn't the same. The depersonalization was the
| worst part - it left me in an awful state of mind. It's been so
| long now that I'm not even sure if it's still there or if it's
| become the new normal. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what
| normal feels like anymore.
|
| For me, the few hours of fun weren't worth the amount of stress
| that followed. I got nothing out of it except some temporary
| entertainment.
|
| I strongly believe that using LSD in therapy is malpractice. It
| is not right to give such a potent and mind-altering drug to
| people who are already dealing with mental health issues. I worry
| that in the future, we will see a rise in similar cases to mine,
| as LSD becomes more commonly used in therapy. And although I
| turned out OK and I can deal with the condition I am scared about
| how people who might already be suicidal deal with such a life
| altering event.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| LSD is not used in therapy for patients who have a family
| history (or individual history) of schizophrenia, bipolar, or
| schizoaffective disorders.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| It occurs to me that many people don't actually test their drugs,
| and that it's easy to get research chemicals with LSD-like
| effects. With MDMA often what you get is either partially or
| fully methamphetamine. So you have to test what you're getting
| before you take it and there's a culture of testing everything
| and not taking random pills from people. I wonder if any of these
| bad trips are from lsd-analogues sold as lsd.
| ahoy wrote:
| This seems akin to drinking a whole liter of vodka as your very
| first drink and concluding that no one should drink alcohol,
| ever.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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"?
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| > 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.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| > 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"
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| disposition2 wrote:
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| > 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.
| travbrack wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Their experience sounded nothing like MDMA. And some small
| group of "lucky" people do have similar after-effects from
| LSD or even mushrooms (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall
| ucinogen_persisting_percep... ).
|
| 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.
| bsuvc wrote:
| [flagged]
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > 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
| lagadu wrote:
| 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| > LSD is a hallucinogenic drug, promoted a lot in tech circles
| for both recreation and the _expanse of creativity it grants
| you_.
|
| Those last six words are troubling.
|
| At least in my experience, it's that drugs tend follow the
| creatives around. Often to the detriment of their creativity.
|
| I sincerely hope this kind of cargo-culting of LSD is limited to
| college-age tech circles.
| acallaghan wrote:
| Not scientific enough. Take it three times and average the
| results
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This post is basically why I have no interest in doing drugs. The
| risk it could fuck me up or I have a very bad trip, however
| small, is not worth it.
| totoglazer wrote:
| This happened to a teenager I know. About 6 months ago. They've
| been hospitalized several times for suicidal thoughts, self harm,
| etc. Really messing them up, I fear for the rest of their life.
| lxe wrote:
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| 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?
|
| What are the pros and cons?
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| > Halfway through my trip, about 4 hours in, visual snow started
| appearing on everything.
|
| > On top of that, the loudest tinnitus you could imagine.
|
| This sounds more like a DO(C/M/B/I) trip than LSD.
|
| > I had dabbled a bit before with psilocybin, and don't think it
| changed my life in any real manner other than showing me what
| mental illness is.
|
| The author had a negative experience with psilocybin, _expected_
| that that would be the case with other psychedelic drugs, and was
| angry that they proved themselves right?
|
| > Fuck you, Jobs.
|
| It is super easy to create a scapegoat to absolve yourself of any
| responsibility in your decision making process. You pretty much
| have to actively ignore a large amount of advice when doing
| cursory reading about psychedelics to arrive at "LSD Bad!"
| without a single thought or mention of _set and setting_.
| peyton wrote:
| It does sound more like 25I-NBOMe or DOI. 4 hours to visuals,
| the body load, the tinnitus, the HPPD, the "160ug."
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| I think there is a special circle of hell for people that
| sell those drugs as LSD. I have personally had great
| experiences with DOI but only when I dosed it out myself, was
| very mindful of set and setting, knew about and anticipated
| the body load, and carved out a full 48hrs to give myself a
| full extra day of recovery.
|
| If you _don't_ anticipate all of those things, I'd imagine it
| would be a very hellish experience.
| gundamdoubleO wrote:
| Not discrediting the author's experiences but those are pretty
| heavy doses to take for both shrooms and lsd if you're a newbie.
| Anyone willing to get into psychedelics should take as much
| caution as possible and begin with smaller safe (and hopefully
| tested) doses in a safe environment with people you trust to help
| lessen the possibility of adverse effects. This of course does
| not mean you are guaranteed to have a good trip without side
| effects but that's a risk you should always be aware of when
| taking any drug.
| snapdeus wrote:
| Skill issue
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > And I didn't even learn anything cool from the trip. Fuck you,
| Jobs.
|
| Sounds like you learned plenty. Also given how little time since,
| there's probably plenty of reflection and learnings yet to come
| too.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who tried LSD before this post is a reminder that it
| is not a good idea to take LSD if you are already sort of
| anxious, stressed, in a bad spot or what not. LSD is nothing for
| people who are in danger of putting themselves into negative
| spirals. E.g. the visual snow becoming stronger is something that
| can frighten you, or you could just let it wash over and start to
| worry if it is still there after a week. These things are a bit
| like being a kid on a bicycle: without experience you ride where
| you look -- and if you look at a tree, that is a sure way to ride
| directly into it.
|
| I experienced some effects of my first dose for 4 days after that
| everything was back to normal, except that I had gained an
| outside view onto my life that remained truly valuable up to this
| day.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| How small minded.
| pg938hkd wrote:
| [dead]
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| I had some weird experiences after smoking weed in high school,
| probably 15 or 16, where repeating patterns I observed while
| moving would sort of make my vision glitch so that they seemed to
| be still. It was like if you watch a car in a movie/commercial
| the tires will appear to be moving backwards or standing still as
| it's driving. This happened while I was mowing the lawn with the
| blades of grass, waking down the hallway of my school with the
| lockers, and once while I was driving at night with the lines of
| the road, which kind of freaked me out since I still felt myself
| moving but my vision made it feel like I wasn't. I feel that I
| had seen this happen when I was high and it had triggered this
| pattern recognition in my sober state as well. However I have
| never had these kind of visual phenomena happen with weed I have
| purchased after legalization. I'm not sure if I got something
| laced or could just handle smoking a lot more weed back then. I
| had also taken some dissociatives and psychedelics around then as
| well, so maybe some effect enhanced by them.
|
| I did try mushrooms when I had just turned 16 and it really
| brought a storm of existential questions to the forefront of my
| mind that were very difficult to sift through with everything I
| had going on as a teenager. I developed a somewhat unfounded fear
| of tripping randomly and losing control of my ability to
| distinguish reality that greatly frightened me. At times I would
| be susceptible to this thinking, having read about HPPD, and any
| visual disturbance might lead me to feel tremendous anxiety again
| that I might be tripping or worse going crazy. One notable
| occasion I was driving at night and noticed halos around every
| light. I thought I must be going mad, but nope, it turned out I
| just needed glasses. Not to minimize the anxiety I felt at the
| time, but reading too much into some of these things can really
| make it worse. I never randomly started tripping at any time and
| my grasp on reality was only made worse by the anxiety at the
| thought of it potentially happening.
|
| Many years since then and feeling I have a much firmer grasp on
| reality, I just think "my eyes must be playing tricks on me" and
| bring it up with my optometrist if I see anything weird.
|
| However, I do feel for the author having recently gone through a
| lot of health anxiety after the sudden death of my cat. I did get
| to the point where I couldn't drive across town and a sip of
| caffeine would send me spinning. I guess a lot of things in life
| can affect you this way if you're not ready for them is all I'm
| trying to say, especially if you're already anxiety prone.
|
| Be careful with psychedelics if you have anxiety!
| jimnotgym wrote:
| It is interesting that the person went into trying LSD fully
| expecting it to be a negative experience. Could this be a self-
| fulfilling prophecy?
|
| I know little about drugs, and have never tried LSD. I have
| watched paramedics on television trying hard to put a patient in
| a positive frame of mind before administering ketamin. Could this
| be similar?
| dathinab wrote:
| Disclaimer: Oversimplifying psychedelics.
|
| Many psychodelic drugs are not giving you "nice trips", which
| is also part of the reason _some_ have a very very low chance
| to make mentally addicted (and happen to also not trigger
| physical addiction).
|
| But they do "shake up" you mind in a way which can have long
| term positive effects in various ways, which could be as simple
| as helping with self reflection or as live changing as curing
| depression (not from a LSD tip, but there are psychedelic based
| treatments for depression which not only had cases of healing
| some people where "classical" methods did not work at all, but
| yielded long term results in a way no anti-depressant I'm aware
| of can archive).
|
| So in other words having a "not so nice trip" can be a "good
| live experience" for some.
|
| But then pretty much anything which messes with your mind can
| have bad long term effects if rareish complications appear, and
| a (oversimplified) rule of thump is the more it messes with
| your brain the more server can the rarish unexpected side-
| effects be for your live (e.g. worsening or triggering latent
| schizophrenia, but might also help treating it if done
| appropriately).
| abhaynayar wrote:
| I once got high with weed for about a week. I was kinda
| depersonalized, my time perception was off, and I was not truly
| feeling things when I was touching them for about a week or so.
| And there was barely any info about this on the internet. None of
| my friends had ever experienced it, their high only lasted a
| couple of hours at max.
|
| After a couple of days of being in that state, I got really
| fearful thinking I might be stuck with it forever, that I had
| damaged my brain permanently, but thankfully I got off of it
| after a week. I promised myself I would basically be a good boy
| from now. I got a newfound respect for this normal state of
| consciousness and I became super grateful for just getting out of
| that nightmare. I would not wish what happened on my worst enemy.
|
| Even though I've heard MDMA can do wonders for some of the mental
| issues I have, I am basically never gonna touch it.
| akvadrako wrote:
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| code51 wrote:
| You're surely joking when comparing LSD to foods, right?
|
| Please name one single food that can bring down all your
| psychological defence mechanisms in one go.
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Nutmeg
| bandersnitch wrote:
| [dead]
| juancn wrote:
| This is anecdotal, but not everyone reacts the same way to drugs
| (any drugs).
|
| I only tried pot a few times and it makes me feel miserable. It's
| funny for about 5 minutes, after that I feel like shit. Sometimes
| even nauseated, I never had the munchies, I don't know what they
| feel like.
|
| A few years ago I was in a bad bike crash, and it was the first
| time I had opioids (they tried fentanyl and tramadol).
|
| I asked the doctors to just take them away, the pain of a hip and
| ankle fracture was way better than the feeling of the opioids.
|
| There's definitely something different about how my brain deals
| with some of these drugs which makes me think that for me, it
| would be a really bad idea to try anything else, even in a
| controlled environment.
| jerglingu wrote:
| 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.
| de6u99er wrote:
| 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.
| willio58 wrote:
| This is a great way to use drugs. Even coffee! If you have
| coffee when you have anxiety you'll be in store for much more
| anxiety
| [deleted]
| BossingAround wrote:
| Many people do use cannabis for mood enhancement, though that
| a) might not work, and b) might lead to dependence.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| 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.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Legalization leads to better education
|
| It also leads to more cases of abuse. Like many things,
| legalization is both good and bad at the same time.
| miles wrote:
| >> Legalization leads to better education
|
| > 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...
| yummypaint wrote:
| Raw data on health and habits of middle and highschool
| students in colorado can be accessed here
| https://cdphe.colorado.gov/hkcs
|
| Cannabis was legalized there over a decade ago, and with
| that hindsight it's clear that legalization decreased
| consumption among minors.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Minimal google searching yields plenty of results. Here's
| one for you:
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-
| abst...
|
| "As Magdalena Cerda, 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.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > 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?
| legohead wrote:
| 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.
| lazystar wrote:
| 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.
| ksaj wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| 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.
| connicpu wrote:
| 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.
| logi2mus wrote:
| Also Nocebo effect!
| kstenerud wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| 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.
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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.
| folbec wrote:
| Reading the various comments on this article, I get the feeling
| that drugs are russian roulette with a random number of bullets
| in the barrel.
|
| Some people enjoy that. Not me.
| verteu wrote:
| Sounds rough -- how'd you administer & what was the approximate
| dose?
| [deleted]
| JeremyNT wrote:
| 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).
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| fragsworth wrote:
| I feel like your questions are blaming the victim here. The
| temptation is real and not everyone has the greatest friends.
| LSD is actually dangerous.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > 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).
| slibhb wrote:
| 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?
| willio58 wrote:
| Anecdotes are fine for story telling but have no place in
| debates.
| tux3 wrote:
| 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.
| willio58 wrote:
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| docandrew wrote:
| 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?
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| ianbutler wrote:
| 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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| geraldyo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| 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.
| reyqn wrote:
| I've got both visual noise and tinnitus, guess I should try LSD
| photochemsyn wrote:
| LSD, like certain other hallucinogens, is a serotonin analogue,
| and its immediate effect comes about through binding to serotonin
| receptors, in particular one called the 5-HTP2A receptor. Since
| any meaningful discussion of this requires a certain degree of
| background knowledge:
|
| > "In terms of visual perception, the 5-HT2A receptor has been
| found to play a role in modulating the processing of visual
| information. Specifically, activation of this receptor has been
| shown to enhance certain aspects of visual perception, such as
| the perception of brightness, contrast, and spatial frequency.
| This effect is thought to be mediated in part by the 5-HT2A
| receptor's ability to increase the activity of neurons in the
| visual cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes
| visual information."
|
| > "Interestingly, the 5-HT2A receptor has also been implicated in
| altered states of consciousness, such as those induced by
| psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. These substances are known
| to activate the 5-HT2A receptor, which is thought to underlie
| their profound effects on perception, thought, and emotion.
| However, the precise mechanisms by which 5-HT2A receptor
| activation leads to these effects are still not fully understood
| and are an active area of research in the field of
| neuropsychopharmacology."
|
| So, let's consider the question raised in this post, which is:
| "how a could a temporary substrate-receptor interaction result in
| a long-term effect that persists well past the biochemical
| elimination of the drug from the user's system?"
|
| I don't think this is uniquely applicable to LSD vs. any other
| drug, by the way. Some people might try an opiate-class drug once
| and develop an immediate craving for that experience. However,
| this really cannot be attributable to the basic drug-receptor
| binding - so it's probably something to do with neuronal rewiring
| of some sort. If neurons respond to the immediate drug experience
| by forming new neuronal connections to other cells, then this
| could explain how a long-term effect (visual snow, opiate
| craving, etc.) could be created by neurons seeking new
| connections in response to the short-term effect of one-time drug
| use.
|
| Profoundly, it seems our brains are always rewiring themselves in
| relation to various stimuli and experiences, but LSD and similar
| drugs are affecting this process at fairly low levels in the
| neuronal hierarchy.
|
| Note that this is precisely why many people have said that the
| psychedelic drug cohort, under controlled conditions, has unique
| potentials for curing various mental illeness-related conditions.
| The use of the potent hallucinogen ibogaine to effect long-term
| cures for opiate addiction is one such case:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28402682/
|
| > "Conclusion: A single ibogaine treatment reduced opioid
| withdrawal symptoms and achieved opioid cessation or sustained
| reduced use in dependent individuals as measured over 12 months."
| weare138 wrote:
| It's like anything, it's not for everyone and you should make
| informed decisions before try something like LSD or anything else
| for that matter. But you shouldn't be making those types of life
| decisions based on a comment from someone like Steve Jobs. LSD is
| one of the most potent psychoactive compounds known. It's not a
| toy. You have to be smart about these things. Again it's not for
| everyone. Don't find out the hard way.
| lsdont wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| 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.
| akvadrako wrote:
| _> 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.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| That's essentially what I was referring to in my upstream
| comment that made me think I'd taken lsd instead of
| mushrooms.
| lsdont wrote:
| No idea, I got them from a mushrooms shop in Amsterdam, this
| was about 15 years ago when they could still legally sell the
| actual shrooms.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| mberning wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| > Same person, same job, same family, same everything.
|
| 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.
| marketneutral wrote:
| "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.
| mberning wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Kind of unfair to Jobs. It wasn't just him, Gates did it too!
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-once-coyly-defende...
| lez wrote:
| Oh, how much I loved those times when google returned the best
| document on the Internet (still) called "LSD faq".
| https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_faq.shtml
|
| It states its dangers: Purely psychological hazards, not harmful
| to body. May release latent psychosis or exacerbate depression,
| leading to irrational behavior. There is also a danger of foolish
| or incautious behavior, e.g, misjudging distances or thinking one
| can fly. Physical overdose is not a hazard, though one may easily
| ingest more than one may be able to handle psychologically.
| sitkack wrote:
| Everyone should view the process of taking any and all drugs as
| uncontrolled scientific experiment.
|
| Start with near zero amounts and ramp, taking notes and vitals
| (bpm, blood pressure). Understand yourself, the drug and have a
| friend nearby.
|
| I have a low tolerance for THC, many folks consume way more than
| I ever could. But at the same time I have managed _enjoy_ 200-400
| mg doses (RSO). If I had taken this much at the beginning, I can
| see how I would have felt like I was losing my mind. I no longer
| have any form of paranoia, because I know what to expect.
| Everything in life comes down to practice and familiarity.
| Approach everything with a gradual slope and know what you are
| doing.
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| crabkin wrote:
| 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.
| badcppdev wrote:
| What do you mean by, "that their real purpose and origin may be
| different than what we are taught"
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Origins of Datura metel in Asia are mysterious for example
| trhr wrote:
| I went up into the Catskills with a big bag of mushrooms and a
| trunk full of rice and beans and didn't come down for a year.
|
| 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.
| pyrophane wrote:
| Couple of questions for you about this, if you don't mind:
|
| 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.
| trhr wrote:
| 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.
|
| The rest of the answers, I leave to you.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| I need more of this story
| almost_usual wrote:
| I've had visual snow since I can remember. I went to the eye
| doctor as a kid and they ran a bunch of tests which resulted in
| "it's nothing".
|
| Dabbled in psychedelics pretty heavily in college. Think it was
| one bad trip that ended it for me. Dealt with some major anxiety
| for a couple years afterwards but eventually I went back to
| 'normal'.
|
| Visual snow never got worse, I did get "seeing stars" though
| which I never had prior to doing psychedelics.
|
| Overall the conclusion I came to is that psychedelics are an
| absolute luxury in the US. If you can afford to break your brain
| and you think the risk is worth it go for it I guess?
|
| Fortunately I was in college, had a job that was easy, and
| programming was an in depth enough experience that it made my
| anxiety go away while doing it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Visual snow never got worse, I did get "seeing stars" though
| which I never had prior to doing psychedelics.
|
| Seeing stars can have other causes like the blood vessels in
| your eyes being messed up. You can get them from, for example,
| being too hungover or tired. Not saying it's that, but it could
| be totally unrelated.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Same here. I thought everyone saw snow (mostly in the dark).
| Its never bothered me though.
|
| Also a similar experience with psychedelics in college,
| although it was actually smoking marijuana a week after a very
| intense trip that gave me the most terrifying night of my life.
| I had to have sedatives and suffered major anxiety for a couple
| of years afterwards.
|
| I still don't regret taking them. I learned a lot about myself
| and had some amazingly beautiful experiences. But I wouldn't
| wish the final one on anyone.
| krater23 wrote:
| Lying in a bed and puking from shrooms and thinking this was
| horrible is not a experience that should lead you to take LSD. In
| the community I know, now one would give him anything. We decide
| to give newbies smaller doses and sometimes we say 'not you',
| just based on how the people are in their normal life. For me the
| writer sounds like a guy that doesn't like to lose the control
| and needs to know what happens and can't lean back and give the
| rudder out of hand. Thats OK in normal life, but not when you
| take LSD.
|
| Just to say it clearly, LSD enriches my life, and I know a much
| people that feel the same way. But it's definetly nothing for
| everyone and when you think about taking it, don't do it alone in
| your room. Find people with experience, not every week
| experience(!) and talk to them if it's a good idea and if yes, go
| to the woods and have a nice trip.
| thrww20221219 wrote:
| Last time I took LSD I ended up spending 3 months in the mental
| hospital. Stay away from that stuff!
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I thought everyone experiences what he describes as "visual
| snow". I just figured it was noise created in the retina and
| optic nerve, from stray photons and quantum effects and whatnot.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mushr_br wrote:
| Throwaway as I am just a lurker but this is a topic that goes
| very deep.
|
| My brother took magic mushrooms once as he read a lot of things
| about it that it would cure social anxiety or anxiety in general.
| This is a problem that lies in our family and I am affected
| myself so I can understand why he did it.
|
| However, his experience was terrible and he had a bad trip that
| had the effect that he couldn't sleep for three days. Afterwards
| he took some medication (sleeping pills and beta blockers) and
| seemed quite ok for a few weeks but then terrible panic attacks
| and extreme anxiety happened. He is still recovering but I can
| see that he is suffering.
|
| All the good reports are probably true and also partly
| survivorship bias. For my brother it was a terrible experience
| and I am not sure if he can fully recover from this. People
| should also report about potential negative effects.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > Halfway through my trip, about 4 hours in, visual snow started
| appearing on everything.
|
| > [..]
|
| > "Do you all see this too ?!"
|
| > "Oh yeah, I have that. Don't worry, you learn to live with it."
|
| > "LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT?! No way! WTF!"
|
| Hehehe, I had this after an MDMA trip. The sky turned into a
| giant Brownian motion/visual snow playfield, to the point it was
| hard to see some clouds. Imagine my surprise next morning when I
| woke up and it still looked like that. It did go away after a
| couple years.
|
| The bigger surprise was when night came and my friend realized he
| was still terrified of _the moon_.
|
| But I agree with his friend, it's weird at the beginning but not
| actually a big deal. It turns out the sky could look different
| and it doesn't really matter.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| If psilocybin left him in tense anxiety with vomiting, why on
| earth would he try LSD next??
| snitzr wrote:
| I know too many burnouts to personally want to try drugs. I'm
| high on life, thank you.
| goldenshale wrote:
| Lots of published scientific literature backs up the positive
| benefits that many people experience. This guy sounds like a
| tweaker who generated more of these effects from his own paranoia
| than from the actual experience, but anyways I'd give him the
| benefit of the doubt and encourage anyone trying a new substance
| to appreciate the possibilities. Anecdotal stories should be
| balanced against data though, and just by the tone of his writing
| this author seems to have a lot of baggage.
| jamesredd wrote:
| If your mind is weak you shouldn't take hallucinogenic drugs.
| macleginn wrote:
| Thousands, if not millions, of people in India and increasingly
| across the world take Indian ginseng aka ashwagandha for anxiety
| and other psyche problems. My wife ate several kilos of the stuff
| during her BSc programme; it helped her with exams and general
| stress. At some point I was very anxious for a perfectly valid
| exogenous reason, and she recommended I take it. Three pills in
| (recommended daily dose, taken over the whole day), my liver
| briefly shut down, and I spend a week in hospital, recovering and
| educating doctors about five or six published cases of this
| phenomenon we found on PubMed. Later I found many more in Amazon
| reviews. Ashwagandha is world-wide legal, over-the-counter food
| supplement. But you've been warned.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Lol. Tylenol is over the counter and the wrong dose can
| literary kill your liver.
|
| Do you have links to those studies? I'm curious. I've tried
| Ashwagandha and stopped as it seemed to make me more anxious
| but YMMV.
| tptacek wrote:
| Bleach will kill you, too. But unlike bleach, Tylenol is
| carefully regulated as a medication; in particular, it's
| packaged at precise dosages, with high quality control
| standards.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Are you saying bleach is not carefully regulated?
|
| My point was that we are commonly using medication that can
| have devastating effects - and the precise dosages do not
| account for the imprecise body weight and sensitivity to
| the substance of the person taking it.
| macleginn wrote:
| A recent study with ample references:
| https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/5/3921
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Ashwaganda is known to cause anhedonia as well. It's really
| helpful for a lot of people, but IMO should only be used
| occasionally.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| > About 160 ug later
|
| Serious? You went with a strong dose on your first try and you
| _blame Steve Jobs_? I mean, don 't get me wrong, he was a dick
| what with driving a un-plated Porsche just so he could park in
| handicap spots and all, but this is 100% your fault. According to
| erowid, a starter dose is around 25ug.
| rblatz wrote:
| Wonder if the first time he drank he chugged a fifth of vodka.
| kube-system wrote:
| I know people who have done this, not having any information
| to know otherwise.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I wonder if this leads to less alcohol use in the future.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| It did in my case, up until I moved in with an alcoholic.
| cwmoore wrote:
| No
|
| https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/news-events/news-
| releases/early-dr...
| camillomiller wrote:
| Aktchually, it was a Mercedes SL55
| klyrs wrote:
| Oh, fine, all is forgiven.
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