[HN Gopher] Dose-response relationships of LSD-induced subjectiv...
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Dose-response relationships of LSD-induced subjective experiences
in humans
Author : orhmeh09
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-05-09 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| htag wrote:
| > Overall, full mystical-type experiences seem unlikely to be
| induced with doses below 200 ug
|
| I thought that was the point. Did I read this article right, and
| there are essentially no modern studies of LSD use in the
| 200-500ug range?
| bufo wrote:
| I confirm!
| qrio2 wrote:
| Love seeing more research done on LSD. Hopefully the more we can
| prove its positive effects will lead to broader acceptance and
| safer use by all who are interested. I feel that most "bad
| experiences" can be avoided by education and ensuring the proper
| "set and setting", and the more we know about the substance's
| effects the better.
| ostenning wrote:
| Dosage is very important, and also be extra cautious if you
| have a history of acute mental illness in your family.
|
| Only once you've lost your marbles do you realize how important
| they actually are and that traumatic event will likely leave a
| chasm in your mind for a long time
| NickC25 wrote:
| Yeah. People who have bad trips are often in bad places at bad
| times to take such a powerful substance. Or, they have a lot of
| pent-up fear or anxiety that the LSD simply unmasks and smacks
| them with.
|
| I've had a bad trip exactly once, and it was when I had no
| control over my surroundings and was in an inopportune spot at
| the wrong time. The times when I was in a controlled
| environment of my own design with zero distractions, extremely
| low probability of bad things happening, etc... it was great.
|
| Do it in your own home, when you have a full day of time and
| zero obligations to anyone including yourself, and you're
| around as few people as possible.
| Diederich wrote:
| Agree with everything you're saying here, I'll add what might
| be obvious: it's generally best if the first doses aren't too
| large.
|
| I first took LSD back in 2014 I believe, after researching
| everything surrounding the topic for a year. My wife was
| completely on board and we allocated a three day weekend.
|
| All of the research indicated that it was completely safe
| from a physical perspective and for a stable and fairly well
| adjusted person like me, with a very informed and willing
| helper, fairly psychologically safe.
|
| Me being me, I decided to go big on the first dose. I took
| well over 600mg.
|
| I won't say this was a mistake for me, but it was a rather
| rigorous experience that lasted most of three days.
|
| All of the trip was interesting. Most of it was a range
| between neutral and amazing, but there were definitely some
| bad trip elements.
|
| About once a year since then I've taken a much smaller dose.
| At the moment I don't have a desire to repeat the huge
| experience, but I won't rule it out for the future.
|
| Very briefly: during the worst of the bad trip parts I lost
| the ability to understand and produce language, which was
| scary for both my wife and I, though we understood that the
| impact would be temporary. This happened about 8-12 hours
| after the trip started.
|
| None of my subsequent trips (all between 50mg and 200mg) had
| any big bad effects.
|
| And yes, the whole experience was a big win. While I as doing
| pretty well beforehand, there were some areas of tunnel
| vision that greatly improved.
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| For context on what an appropriate dose is, this article
| seems to suggest that the intensity of most effects start
| to flatten out as you go past 100ug. The effects that
| continue to get more pronounced past that level seem to be
| negative effects such as anxiety or potentially difficult
| to navigate such as disembodiment.
|
| Seems like 100ug is likely a sweet spot for most first
| timers.
| Diederich wrote:
| I agree that 100 is a good starting point, or even less.
| sinfulprogeny wrote:
| How on earth do you do research for a year and end up
| taking 600ug for your first time?
| Diederich wrote:
| This is an understandable reaction and question.
|
| Fundamentally LSD is physically safe at most any
| reasonable dose. What remains is psychological safety,
| which is quite important. I've always been a well
| grounded person, and with the serious measures we took to
| prepare, I felt like it was most likely safe for me. And
| it was, nothing bad came out of the experience, even
| though there were some scary parts.
|
| To be clear, the intensity of the trip wasn't a surprise.
| My wife and I knew that we were getting into a 'serious
| situation'.
|
| When I said 'me being me' above, it's a personality
| trait: when something I'm interested in, that is
| potentially useful, and that is very safe comes up, I
| tend to go all in.
|
| In general I strongly recommend people start very low and
| work up from there.
| TylerE wrote:
| Also isn't most of what's sold as lsd these days anything but?
| Nbomd, various 2cs, that sort of thing.
| RodGodKiller wrote:
| Not really. I know this is anecdata, but : I always test my
| stuff, and I've never gotten anything but LSD.
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| NBOMe was super popular in the early 2010s. I'd be willing
| to bet that on my college campus 90+% of "LSD" was some
| sort of NBOMe during that time.
|
| No idea what's going on nowadays but plenty of gray market
| LSD analogous will test positive as LSD (Al-LAD, Pro-LAD,
| Eth-LAD, 1P-LSD, idk what else is available now). I
| wouldn't be shocked if people get those without realizing.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| There were a couple of years in the early "research
| chemicals" scene when this was true in some areas but LSD
| itself is now in ample supply in most places.
| jh00ker wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to summarize the abstract and I found it helped
| me understand the original abstract better upon re-reading:
|
| LSD is a powerful psychedelic drug that can change the way a
| person experiences the world. In this study, the researchers
| collected data from various studies on LSD to understand how the
| dose of LSD affects people's altered states of consciousness.
| They used questionnaires to measure the subjective effects of LSD
| at different doses, and found that the effects increased with
| higher doses of LSD, but eventually plateaued around 100
| micrograms. The strongest effects were related to changes in
| perception and imagination, followed by positive experiences of
| ego-dissolution. However, there were only small effects related
| to anxiety and fear. The researchers also noted that non-
| pharmacological factors, such as a person's mindset and
| environment, can influence their experiences on LSD. These
| findings may be helpful for future research on LSD and other
| psychedelics.
| Liquix wrote:
| Chuckled @ the radar chart diligently quantifying "ineffability"
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Those radar charts looked like spiderwebs to me. Trippy.
| qrio2 wrote:
| Thought that was great too - check out the questionnaire
| https://www.trippingly.net/lsd-studies/2018/5/22/the-mystica...
| knaik94 wrote:
| I really loved how this paper shared the r-syntax of the
| analysis, along with the consolidated data they used. The
| interactive webpage summarizing their results is fantastic.
| Loading the full charts of individual questionnaires took a
| little bit of time, but the way in which the results are
| displayed is exceptional. It was slower on mobile, but it was
| still useful.
|
| https://dose-response-lsd.asdb.info/
| mrfox321 wrote:
| It does not plateau at 100mcg...
| luckydata wrote:
| I thought there was already data on this, this paper doesn't seem
| to be adding anything we didn't know before to the science. Can
| someone explain if that's actually the case or not?
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| This adds to the body of evidence around the subject,
| especially if it reproduces, fails to reproduce, or builds on
| previous findings -- an important part of science.
| cogitoergofutuo wrote:
| Sometimes scientists cover the same stuff as other scientists
| in the interest of checking reproducibility or finding new
| data. Sometimes new stuff is discovered, sometimes not.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's a so-called meta-analysis, looking at a bunch of other
| studies and trying to create a baseline of known knowledge
| which will inform future individual focused studies.
|
| > "The established dose-response relationships may be used as
| general references for future experimental and clinical
| research on LSD to compare observed with expected subjective
| effects and to elucidate phenomenological differences between
| psychedelics."
|
| Having this kind of body of curated knowledge means, for
| example, that a funding agency might be more willing to sponsor
| further specific research, i.e. you could say 'here's our plan
| for giving subjects doses of x amounts to study the threshold
| where visual perception becomes strongly altered, based on this
| prior work' and so on.
| elliotec wrote:
| What's wrong with more data?
| Hanschri wrote:
| As photochemsyn previously mentioned, a meta-analysis looks at
| previous research in order to see if there are any interesting
| conclusions to draw the combined data. As an example, the
| analysis found that no appropriate studies have been done on
| doses between 20 - 50 mg, or over 200 mg.
|
| Their notes on how set and setting, and whether or not the
| participants had ever used psychedelics before affects the
| experience can also be interesting for a scientist working with
| LSD. The study also observes that "No direct experimental
| comparison of the bioequivalence of the two formulations has
| been made to date", meaning that we simply do not know if LSD
| base is stronger or weaker than LSD tartrate, or how the
| ingestion method affects the experience.
|
| This information in tandem with the graphs can be used as
| inspiration for what kind of experiment to do next in order to
| better understand how LSD interacts with the brain.
|
| A meta-analysis is a good tool for taking a step back and
| trying to see if there are any blind spots in the research
| field.
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(page generated 2023-05-09 23:01 UTC)