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LSD: Not Even Once

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Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#321

Post by basch »

Trasmatta wrote: post #79

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 migh…

in retrospect, do you feel you had the correct set before your experience?

reading others online experiences, and the responses, there is often a lot of emphasis put on setting, ignoring set comes first. were you in a good place, internally, when you had your experience? were you depressed? i don't think it is victim blaming per se to expect that a person in a bad head space can enhance that bad into trauma with drug consumption.

there is huge risk for someone who is in a bad set, but also in denial, looking to drugs to "fix" what is wrong. some good people who had bad trips can do, is to describe to others what a bad set was, so others know what to look out for.

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#322

Post by soupfordummies »

selimthegrim wrote: post #142
badcppdev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by, "that their real purpose and origin may be different than what we are taught"

Origins of Datura metel in Asia are mysterious for example

Sounds interesting, do you mind elaborating?

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#323

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jtbayly wrote: post #232
ravi-delia wrote: post #55

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 missin…

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.

I would encourage most people to learn to drive a motor car, and get a driver's licence. I wouldn't tell them that it's perfectly safe, because well, it isn't. It can be made _safer_ but won't be risk-free. Nevertheless, "don't try it" is not a good conclusion to draw from the existence of that risk.

Similarly, the thinking that LSD or other recreational pharmaceutical must be either entirely bad or entirely safe, the "bad outcome does not actually happen" or "it only takes one time" is binary, black or white, absolutist thinking. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

And I think that most participants know that it's an "extreme sport" a "daredevil thrill" like skydiving or a roller-coaster. A roller-coaster that never gains velocity or height would be pointless and boring.

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#324

Post by selimthegrim »

soupfordummies wrote: post #322
selimthegrim wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Origins of Datura metel in Asia are mysterious for example

Sounds interesting, do you mind elaborating?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_metel

See the section about controversy of country of origin under Entheogen

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#325

Post by Khelavaster »

medler wrote: post #223
ravi-delia wrote: post #55

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 missin…

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.”

Munger should be realistic. In the best case scenario, the drugs trigger metabolic changes that let your body deal with incipient cancer or some other significant disease.

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#326

Post by creatonez »

lazystar wrote: post #301
ksaj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Every…

when you buy a pack of beer, you get 12 cans each with 12 ounces of liquid containing ~5% alcohol. you open a beer, you drink it. when you buy a pack of weed, you get 1 blob of weed that the purchaser has to divvy up themselves, then has to find a container to consume it, prepare that container properly themselves (blunt, joint, bong, etc), then consume all at once due to the nature of the process. then theres sortin…

Vape pens are fairly predictable, you can have a known potency dose in the cartridge and each puff will be a predictable potency.

Anyways, vapes are great for nicotine and DMT but I'm not a fan of how most cannabis vape pens get easily gummed up. So I'd rather stick to dab rigs and bongs.

The problem with edibles is that the digestive system's metabolism produces way more psychedelic cannabinoids. It's a different experience, one that can be more anxiety inducing in lower doses.

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#327

Post by creatonez »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #274
willio58 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't exactly placebo cannabis. Anyone taking part in the study wants to take cannabis so when they take the unmarked plant product out of the packet they will tell the person running the study how amazing it is. The scientist will then report 100% success because everyone taking part is loving the new treatment. Imagine if medical heroin was a new discovery. "I had depression so I took medical heroin and now I'm…

I'm sorry but your preconceptions are way off. Medical studies on cannabis are not just about smoking weed and feeling better because you got high from it.

Here are the two main areas of research:

- For two forms of treatment-resistant epileptic seizures, Lennox–Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, it is the closest you can get to a "miracle" treatment -- significantly reduces seizures with no clear downside other than feeling the effects. You can extract just the specific cannabinoid (cannabidiol) needed to treat it, so that there are no unwanted psychological effects from it.

- It is nearly irreplaceable for treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. The alternatives (prochlorperazine, promethazine) just don't have a cost-benefit analysis that adds up the way cannabis does.

And two important areas with a lower quality evidence are anorexia and migraines.

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#328

Post by creatonez »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #215

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 l…

You're right, fake LSD is rampant and it's important to screen for it using a reagent test!

If this is the case, due to the long comeup I'd suspect the author took a drug in the DOx family. But there's no definitive telltale sign of it, a long comeup can theoretically happen on LSD as well. ^1

LSD analogues (1P-LSD, AL-LAD, ALD-52, etc.) are generally very similar to LSD, to the point where most unknowing users might not know the difference. They are also more expensive to obtain, so they are rarely ever sold as fake LSD. Some of them may even be prodrugs and therefore identical aside from slightly different potency.

Most fake LSD will instead be a different class of psychedelics entirely, usually a phenethylamine, such as the DOx class of substituted amphetamine psychedelics, or 25x-NBOMe. 25i-NBOMe is a pretty bad one.

Bromo-DragonFLY is said to be utterly horrible. Thank god it's rare.

Not all phenethylamines are bad, though, such as 2C-B and mescaline, but the ones sold as fake acid are usually terrible.

---

^1: Something I find extremely fascinating -- different psychedelics are notorious for feeling wildly different to psychonauts, yet when you actually compare two psychedelics, LSD and mushrooms, a lysergamide and a tryptamine, in a double-blind controlled trial you get a list of reported subjective effects that is nearly identical. Can human language not describe the differences, or is it more based on expectation of what you think you are taking more than anything? What if you did the same study but had them write an essay instead of a list of effects? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01297-2

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#329

Post by tim333 »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #314
tim333 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience of people I know who've drank alcohol and who've used psychedelics, I'd say no, not at all. The psychedelics are probably >1000x more likely to cause psychosis.

Anything happening under the influence is not classified as a psychosis, mind you.

NHS has

>Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. This might involve seeing or hearing things that other people cannot see or hear (hallucinations) and believing things that are not actually true (delusions).

Much more of that with LSD than beer

Re: LSD: Not Even Once

#330

Post by cosmojg »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #273
lagadu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the dance involved slamming your head off the pavement repeatedly until you start smelling colour then yes we would stop that form of dancing. That's why we have things like alcohol and don't have things like heroin. It's all about risk vs reward. Heroin makes you feel much nicer than alcohol but it's almost certain to fuck your life up so we don't do it. The head slam may be cooler than interpretive dance, but we…

> That's why we have things like alcohol and don't have things like heroin.

No, by your logic, alcohol would have been banned long before any other mind-altering substance. A multitude of longterm studies[1] have borne out the fact that most illegal drugs are safer than alcohol on multiple metrics[2]. Contemporary drug policy is based on culture and superstition, not science and medicine.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210 [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6

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