[zelly]

> Until you don't have the drug anymore, in which case you're left with an anxious person who can't cope with difficult circumstances.

That's where you're mistaken. Psychedelics aren't for escaping reality. They're for facing it.

On heroin/meth/cannabis/alcohol, you take it and feel good, forgetting about stuff like going to work or feeding your baby.

On LSD/mushrooms, you are more likely to curl up in a ball in the corner of the room crying than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody takes that stuff for "fun".

[toomanybeersies]

I completely disagree.

I've used psychedelics plenty of times as a form of escapism. I tend to stop worrying about reality when I'm 500 µg of LSD deep. I also use it frequently for fun, in fact I can't remember the last time I didn't use it for "fun".

[zelly]

You must have a pretty good life then. Or you don't have any neuroses. Usually people finally get to see a lot of issues that the ego conceals. Seeing yourself from a third person camera can change your life. For most people that is extremely scary.

Anything can be fun subjectively, so perhaps a better description is the triggering of a reward mechanism. LSD does not inherently make you want to do it again, unlike even caffeine. You do it again because of curiosity (higher-order decision-making) not your limbic system. Although one may redose cocaine out of curiosity, the limbic reward motivation is also necessarily at play.

[saiya-jin]

Nobody broken inside should ever use strong psychedelics, period. The risk of triggering nasty things inside is too high. One of my ex' father got triggered life-long schizophrenia from binge drinking at 18.

And yes, there are plenty of us who are well-balanced human beings without any lingering deep issues.

What psychedelics do to us is an experience that can't be obtained in any other way. Too intense, too deep, too profound. Life changing, really. It made me understand things about me, human nature and world that would remain forever hidden otherwise. 1 dose was enough.

The experience is way too intense to get hooked on, it would take me weeks or months to get into mental state of wanting to go back. Plus sensitivity to active substance goes down after use, so its counter-productive to repeat experience too soon. You are literally robbing yourself of the main reason why do it.

Everybody is unique. Some escape, some explore like me, some are just a bit curious. Don't throw all of us into same bag.

[pmoriarty]

Something I always wonder when I read comments like these is whether the poster got real LSD.

There are a lot of other substances being sold as LSD, and the vast majority of users don't test their drugs.

That said, yes, it's possible to use psychedelics recreationally (this goes back to at least the Merry Pranksters and their Acid Tests of the 1960's, not to mention their use in celebrations by various indigenous cultures around the world), and some people do use them superficially and sometimes even self-destructively.

500 ug of LSD, though, is a pretty hefty dose, and I'd be surprised if one's "fun" didn't eventually turn in to a seriously ego-shaking if not ego-destroying experience, which is difficult to face on a regular basis.. that's if it's real LSD, of course.

[zelly]

> 500 ug of LSD, though, is a pretty hefty dose, and I'd be surprised if one's "fun" didn't eventually turn in to a seriously ego-shaking if not ego-destroying experience, which is difficult to face on a regular basis.. that's if it's real LSD, of course.

He could just have a better brain than the rest of us. He could be at peace with himself and the world. I have heard stories of monks in Asia who, having spent the past 50 yrs meditating everyday, took LSD doses from Westerners and didn't react. Of course no one has ever proven these stories.

[pmoriarty]

"I have heard stories of monks in Asia who, having spent the past 50 yrs meditating everyday, took LSD doses from Westerners and didn't react."

The story you heard was likely a retelling of the one Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert -- a colleague of Timothy Leary) wrote about in his enormously popular book Be Here Now about his first meeting with the man who would become his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (aka Maharaji).

I don't have a copy of Be Here Now on me right now, but I watched some interviews with Ram Dass recently (after learning that he'd died in late 2019), and from my memory the story he told goes like this:

When Alpert (who did not yet go by the name of Ram Dass at this point) met Maharaji, the latter asked Alpert for "the medicine", which Alpert interpreted as being LSD. Alpert then gave Maharaji an LSD pill. Maharaji then asked Alpert if it would drive him crazy. Alpert thought about it and said "most probably". Then Maharaji swallowed the pill of LSD. They waited for an hour and nothing happened, and Maharaji asked for another, which he also swallowed, and still nothing happened.

Alpert was tremendously impressed by this (and also by Maharaji referring to the death of Alpert's mother and that she'd died of a "big belly" and mentioning the English word "spleen", when Alpert's mother did in fact die of a rupture of the spleen -- a fact he hadn't told anyone), so he became Maharaji's disciple and took on the name that Maharaji gave to him: Ram Dass.

Decades later, Ram Dass reported that he found out that Maharaji never actually swallowed the LSD, but simply used a magician's move to only make it seem like he swallowed it.

Update: Here's the story: https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-gives-maharaji-the-yogi-med...

[mapcars]

Here's a video about Maharaji, including Ram Dass talking about that exact case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrDrxkOFX0

[Nursie]

500ug isn't that much. 75ug is a threshold dose IIRC, with most street doses coming in around 150ug.

Taking 4 blotters is not that out of the ordinary is it? In the 90s in London, when LSD was cheap as dirt, I knew a lot of folks who would dose like that.

[rocgf]

Are you joking? You must be seriously experienced to handle 500ug. If you gave that dose to a beginner, they'd be scarred for life.

[Nursie]

Or perhaps just young, stupid and completely carefree..

(edit - I certainly wouldn't like to do that now)

[suby]

How comparable is LSD to Mushrooms?

[pmoriarty]

On the street, mushrooms have a reputation for being much more gentle than LSD, and LSD is supposed to be more pushy (ie. LSD will make you face your issues, while mushrooms might just invite you to do so). But it's questionable how strong a dose of mushrooms those who maintain it's more gentle than LSD actually took.

Also, a long time ago I read of studies that showed that even experienced users couldn't tell the difference between all the various major types of psychedelics when they were administered in a double-blind fashion.

Something else to consider is that, as I've mentioned in another comment, a lot of what's sold as LSD on the black market actually isn't, and most people don't test their drugs. So much of what you read these days about self-reported LSD use is probably actually about other substances.

[wutbrodo]

Yea, I've never noticed much of a difference between the two. I'm bolstered in this belief by the fact that everybody I know has a confident, contradictory opinion about how exactly they're different from each other.

[rocgf]

Actually, it's exactly the opposite, LSD is the gentle one.

[joejerryronnie]

Not an expert but have experimented with both several times. For me, LSD produced much stronger visuals and deeper “meaning of the universe” insight, but also more anxiety. Mushrooms were a more mellow trip but, at the same time, much more emotional.

[asdff]

imo the mushroom feels far more like a psychadelic drug and lsd is more like a very very strong high. I get visuals with both, but only on mushrooms have these fractal 'breathing' visual patterns morphed into faces and symbols. LSD feels like a fog or a filter over everything; the visual effect is pretty much the same fractals and breathing no matter the object or surface I'm looking at.

The lengths of effect are different. For LSD it takes about 20 minutes to start feeling the effects, and not much longer after that you will be peaking for 2 hours. After that you will feel quite high for 4 hours and the visuals will begin to ease, and for the next couple hours you will just feel mildly stoned. It's nice to smoke weed while tripping too, makes the come down feel smoother. It feels like more of a recreational drug, in that as long as you can keep from making yourself laugh or acting too weird you would appear perfectly normal and functional in public. Frequently I would trip with friends at public events. You can also drink quite a bit while on LSD and not feel very drunk.

Mushrooms take about the same time to kick in, sometimes longer though. They last about 4 hours and the effects wear off much faster, although like I mentioned earlier, the trip seems to have more symbolism in the visual effects. Sometimes I end up burping a lot from the mushrooms and get an uncomfortable stomach cramp, but in these cases it's advisable to start smoking weed and stymie any nausea in the process. I wouldn't use mushrooms as recreationally as I do LSD. Preferred setting is among a close group of friends in a private home or near nature for me.

I've never taken more than two tabs (200mg) of LSD or 1/8oz of dry mushrooms, so I'm not sure about the effects with larger doses, although I've tripped probably 30 times so far. One way to ensure you have actual LSD is to swallow the blotter paper immediately. Other synthetic psychadelics won't yield an effect unless you hold the tab in your mouth and allow it to dissolve in your saliva. I'm sure others will chime in with their take, everyone reacts differently.

[Nursie]

> One way to ensure you have actual LSD is to swallow the blotter paper immediately.

This seems to be an urban myth. The NBOMe/NBOH/NBF drugs can still work when dosed orally rather than sublingually. DOx too, though I don't know if those are still doing the rounds.

Other common non-LSD psychs like AL-LAD and 1P-LSD are so chemically similar to LSD that they'll work the same way as the 'real' thing.

The only way you're going to know for sure whats on a blotter is a mass spec, even the chemical test kits are unlikely to be able to tell the modern ergoloids (AL-LAD, 1P-LSD) apart from LSD itself.

But I wouldn't worry too much, by all accounts those are just as effective and about as benign. It's the NBxx you want to watch out for, and those can be discovered with chemical tests.

[pmoriarty]

"I've never taken more than two tabs (200mg) of LSD"

If you took 200 mg of what you thought was LSD, it almost certainly was not LSD because that much LSD would have probably blown you in to outer space and possibly caused amnesia afterwards as well. Even 1/4 of that is considered a very high dose. If you meant 200 ug, then that would make more sense, and that would be a moderate dose.

The rest of your description of its effects also makes me suspect you might not have actually taken real LSD, or taken a pretty small dose (likely in the 50 to 100 ug range). But psychedelics affect different people differently, so who knows...

Did you actually test what you took to make sure it was pure LSD? And how did you know how much LSD was on each tab?

[asdff]

ug*, whoops. Never tested personally but the effect has been the same across multiple disconnected sources from different areas of the country over the years, so I'm pretty confident i've had real lsd. i've had tabs that claimed to be 100ug and some that claimed to be 150ug, and the relative dose seemed accurate at least. the most common synthetic is going to be a member of the nbome family that is not bioavailable in the intestine like real lsd, and my experiences certainly felt nothing like an amphetamine-derivative or anything like that (which I have other experiences with).

[empath75]

Lsd lasts twice as long, and while the peak is substantially similar, the come up and down is fairly different — lsd tends to make things mostly funny or amusing, and mushrooms have an almost mdma like euphoria and feelings of love. I described mushrooms as being like getting a hug from the universe.

I’d choose mushrooms over lsd any day of the week.

But at their core, they are very very very similar experiences, to the point that I think it would be difficult to tell which you took if you didn’t know.

[o-__-o]

Ugh I hated being inside on mushrooms. Felt like the walls were closing on me. Being outside felt so right.. Your thoughts/ego can float freely around you until you decide which one you want to dissect. Then 5 years of relief from mind chaos.

Make sure your mind's right and you're in a good mood. If you're feeling down, 'shrooms would be a bad starting place (unless you really want to face some of your darkest shyt)

I really wish I could get mushrooms right now.

[RandomTisk]

Decades of Hollywood shows has conflated the two classes as part of the same party animal regimen. Timothy Leary didn't help either. All my (cursory) research suggests either there are parallel worlds that makes no sense to logical people in this one or much more likely, they can sometimes induce states of temporary schizophrenia. That's about the only cause for concern I think. If I voted in favor of legalization and then next year we had a lot of new Timothy Leary's walking around spewing nonsense, ruining the lives of everyone in their family because they're taking them every day or week, I'd be extremely regretful of voting in favor of it. What you see now in the community though is a reverence and fear and respect that they didn't have in the 70's, so that's a good sign.

[pmoriarty]

Timothy Leary gets a lot of flack, but the fact is that he was greatly responsible for spreading the word about benefits of psychedelics and getting people interested in them. There's a good chance that some of the people at the FDA and DEA now who are approving the current studies in to the effects of psychedelics (studies which were forbidden for decades before them) might have had their own psychedelic experiences due to the popularization of psychedelics by Timothy Leary and company.

Also, we have to remember that there were all sorts of negative sensationalistic news coverage in that day, like the suicide of Art Linkletter's daughter, which he blamed on LSD, and then there was Charles Manson, who used LSD in truly evil ways. Then there was Ken Kesey and his Acid Tests, which, if anything, were far more irresponsible than anything Leary ever did, and yet Kesey hardly ever gets the blame for that, and all the blame is heaped upon Leary instead.

Something else to consider is that LSD use was strongly tied to the counter-culture and the anti-War movement, both of which were anathema to many in power in the US. I don't think that all of that association can be laid at Leary's feet. The fact is that young people at the time were interested in these substances and they probably would have flocked to them even had Leary never existed. The time was ripe for it.

[TOGoS]

> Something else to consider is that LSD use was strongly tied to the counter-culture and the anti-War movement, both of which were anathema to many in power in the US

One of my favorite quotes from How To Change Your Mind goes like this: "There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures."

[zelly]

One of the effects of psychedelics (LSD in particular) is extreme suggestibility. This was the reason the CIA was so interested in LSD in the early days. Basically, whatever setting one happens to be in when they do LSD can potentially become the basis of the rest of their lives. It makes you imprint easily. There was this phenomenon of so-called acid casualties: People did LSD in places like hippie communes or music festivals (the only places to acquire them) and 20 years later they are chaining their dreadlocks to a tree holding a sign that says Save The Whales. I think a healthy level of fear and reverence for the drug could go a long way. It certainly isn't harmless. When they made that antiquated propaganda about cannabis ("Reefer Madness"), the drug they thought they were talking about is LSD.

LSD was initially studied by psychiatrists as a way to temporarily simulate schizophrenia. Psychiatrists took it themselves to get a better perspective on what their patients were going through. There are stories of this effect not being temporary in some people.

I doubt this time we will see Timothy Learys. I would liken the Timothy Leary era to the 1999 dotcom bubble. It was something new that people didn't know what to do with. Both sides exaggerated. Majority opinion overcorrected. Now we can look at things realistically. We have the advantage of research and decades of people using it. It won't make you enter nirvana. But it also doesn't belong in the same category as drugs that make you break into people's cars.

[pmoriarty]

"I doubt this time we will see Timothy Learys"

We almost did see another Timothy Leary. I think Terrence McKenna was almost a Leary, with his advocacy of using mushrooms in "heroic doses". That's really asking for trouble, especially when you know a lot of uninformed users will do so with some of the worst sets and settings.

Psychedelics have a tendency to induce messianic fervor among some people with oversize egos (like Leary, Al Hubbard, and Charles Manson). I think it's very likely there'll be others like them once psychedelics become more popular.

The mainstream media, which bears a large share of responsibility for ushering in the moral panic which led to the Drug War, hasn't gotten any less sensationalistic since those times either. If anything, it's gotten much worse. So the potential for the psychedelic renaissance to get nipped in the bud is in some ways worse now. We're just lucky (or unlucky) that there isn't a massive anti-war movement and countercultural revolution at the moment, but that could change as psychedelic use becomes more widespread.

This is why it's critically important that the rest of us educate people on responsible ways of using psychedelics, and on their risks as well as benefits.

Someone needs to keep their feet on the ground while others are flying away in to the sky.

[joejerryronnie]

I’ve only ever used LSD or mushrooms for fun. Crazy, intense, borderline scary, hilarious, unbelievable - each trip was typically a mixture of all of these but in the end, it was always fun.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

>On LSD/mushrooms, you are more likely to curl up in a ball in the corner of the room crying than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody takes that stuff for "fun".

Consider that your social circle maybe just doesn't overlap the many people who do take this stuff for fun. As with alcohol, you just have to be careful. You wouldn't say 'On alcohol, you are more likely to curl up over the toilet crying and throwing up, or fighting a bouncer than you are to experience euphoria. Nobody drinks that stuff for "fun."'

[eruditely]

I disagree with your statement as well, psychedelics have a variety of use cases and the entire experience is difficult to describe, for example take the following statements

"I like the wall breathing" "The wall is breathing"

it is difficult to qualify and categorize whether this is "Escapism" or "Facing reality" this statement and a variety of the subclass of total experiences of mushrooms and lsd at times is that often, it just doesn't make sense, but it can induce profound thought, at least we hope is profound =)

Much love.

[armandhammer]

LOL, what? You're clearly talking out of your ass if you think smoking a bowl will make you forget to feed a baby, or taking acid or shrooms will make you cry. Is this sarcasm?

[stallmanite]

Babies are pretty damned good at reminding you they’re hungry.

[Mediterraneo10]

> Psychedelics aren't for escaping reality. They're for facing it.

Not always. Are people really facing reality when they take ayahuasca and come back claiming that the drug opened a portal to another dimension where they talked with beings there? The shaman providing the drug often encourages this interpretation of the experience, and if anyone suggests that the drug merely scrambles one's neuroreceptors for a time, users can respond very angrily.

[Nursie]

Lots of people drop acid for fun!

Yes, there are aspects of self-discovery etc, but it would never have gone as mainstream as it did without also being a very enjoyable thing to do with friends.