LSD: Not Even Once

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.