So no info on what it actually is. Just some company filing a patent. And the fact that they call it "a neutralizer technology" suggests that it's probably just a bunch of BS combined with previously known drugs to make it patentable.
I'm pretty sure there's at least some published research on using at least one antipsychotic for that and mountains of "folk research" on using benzodiazepines.
I'm curious what would be the market for this? wouldn't that be an extremely niche scenario within the emergency-response medicine where people inexperienced with LSD who suffer a bad trip ask to be taken off it? afaik LSD isn't a drug that one is likely to OD from either.
Psilocybin (from mushrooms) and MDMA are both fast tracked for FDA approval as adjuncts to therapy. Psychedelics are poised to become the most common psychiatric treatment in the world, with ongoing trials showing huge effects for treating PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Despite a lot of therapeutic promise, LSD has not received as much research attention, primarily because of its duration of effect. Having therapists present for up to 24 hours (compared to 6 for psilocybin) is prohibitively expensive. A true off switch would facilitate its study and use in treatment.
Results from studies that used an antipsychotic across the board would not be generalizeable to traditional experiences. At that point, why use L in the first place if older, faster acting substances are available. Mescaline and psilocybine have been used in spiritual and therapeutic settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Where is the interest in L coming from, if not ease of slipping it past customs and other law enforcement?
I think if one class of drugs has the effect you want (in this case "psychedelics") you'd want to study other drugs in that classification as well.
Since people are studying psilocybine for depression, PTSD, etc, why not others like Mescaline, LSD, or DMT? Why leave something off the table? Maybe LSD is great for a specific type of PTSD and psilocybine for depression? You got to study it to figure out. And who knows, maybe these drugs don't actually help at all. Either way, you have to study them to figure anything out.
> Mescaline and psilocybine have been used in spiritual and therapeutic settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Yes and no. Those are the active ingredients, but these have not been distilled. From my extremely naive understanding, other chemicals here could affect people differently. So to create a safer and more therapeutic drug. Maybe you even need some of those other chemicals. But you can't find out without testing.
One thing is for sure, in a clinical setting you want very controlled dosages. You're not going to get that by ingesting plants/fungi.
It might make a little sense for Emergency Rooms to have in response to the "bad trips" that result in people calling an ambulance.
But I think the primary reason they would want to develop this would be to encourage LSD to be used as a therapy drug. A lot of people would be more comfortable experimenting in a controlled/legal setting if they new they had an off switch in case anything went wrong.
> It might make a little sense for Emergency Rooms to have in response to the "bad trips" that result in people calling an ambulance.
Doctors already have a ton drugs with proven efficacy for treating acute reactions to psychedelics. Many of them are cheap, off patent and have minimal side effects if they aren't taken chronically.
The biggest problem with LSD is its unpredictability, and what I think is the main reason why it isn't used therapeutically despite having shown very promising results.
You can't reasonably OD from LSD but you can have bad trips. Some of them can be so overwhelming that they will cause lasting effect not unlike PTSD. If you can stop a trip dead in its tracks, that's one less risk. By having ways to counteract its various potential negative effects, you can improve the safety profile of the drug, and therefore make it more acceptable.
There seems to be growing interest in using psychedelics for medicine. Just last week I was approached by someone asking to sign for a ballot measure to approve the usage of psychedelics in clinical settings (with a medical professional on hand). If they are going to do that, I think said medical practitioner would be the perfect person to have this on hand.
There's a weird cottage industry around legalized psychedelics and their use in medicine, so I wouldn't be surprised if some less knowledgeable investors' money is funding this, given that there are hundreds of such drugs already on the market.
People seem to be saying "just use Risperidone" in the comments, so if there is a new drug that counters LSD, maybe it would be useful as an alternative to Risperidone, which has a variety of side effects when taken long term.
There's a lot of inconveniences with drugs that have very long half-lives and very low effective doses. Alcohol lasts for an hour or two; with LSD, you're out for 24. You can't just take less, or it won't work. So this would allow for shorter trips.
There have been way too many scandals around supplement purity for me to buy into his narrative. Like if someone told me a given brand of fish oil supplements contained 10% of the stated dose, was rancid and full of heavy metals I wouldn't be the least surprised.
But if a fish oil medicine had those issues, I would be shocked, because the consequences for the guilty party would be much bigger, a huge circus of lawsuits and people losing their licenses. That's how I imagine it anyway.
IMO we need the FDA to start caring about supplements. They should at least be allowed to nail companies straight-up lying about dosages. Hell, classify them as food and they probably could.
If it's an fda approved drug, I'd be shocked. You see how strictly they're coming down on contamination in the antacid space. If it was a supplement calling itself a medicine with a "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" label, then I'd be surprised if it actually did contain what it says it does, and do what it promises to do
Hah. This article is not only golden, but got me deeply annoyed with all BS machine it exposes
Spoiler alert
> And I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.
> Now I know they’re underestimating it.
(though I understand a bit of the issues behind the BRCA gene testing thing and I'm not sure it continues to be banned or merely the results need to be more generic and not just "you have X% of having cancer")
Antipsychotics seem theoretically (and by online accounts empirically) more effective. While benzos reduce the panic, antipsychotics would function more similarly to an off-switch.
Interesting, I didn't know that. Now I wish I'd had a Xanax after my one trip which kept me awake until 4-5 am after taking acid around noon (otherwise it was an incredible day, it was just annoying not being able to sleep).
Don't benzos have some pretty nasty side effects and/or dependency potential though? Maybe this drug is a bit more targeted / less risky?
They absolutely have dependency potential, but you have to be regularly taking them for that to be an issue, a fact which the doctor who was merrily prescribing me them failed to mention. Kicking them was much easier for me from an addictive perspective than cigarettes, but with dramatically worse side effects.
They’re also going to make a certain percentage of the population feel incredible (or just allow them to relax/sleep when they can’t usually), so they’re also very more-ish.
In short: taking them once a quarter is unlikely to be an issue unless you already have poor impulse control and easy access to them, in which case: just don’t start.
I think weed is a gamble if you have history of getting anxious on weed. All my friends use weed for relaxing, but even the tiniest amount always makes me very anxious. I still like weed, but only when I'm cozying up, watching TV and feel very safe (here, I still feel the "anxiety" but usually of the form "excitement"). I would not smoke any amount of weed on a psychedelic.
Unfortunately, I used to not have this problem then one time had a "bad trip" while high out of my mind on weed. After that night, weed has been an entirely different experience. For about 2 years I couldn't/didn't smoke weed because even tiny tiny tiny amount triggered a full blown panic attack. After about 2/3 years I was able to smoke a little with friends and enjoy music, vibe etc. Nowadays I smoke weed very rarely as I like the physically-relaxing effects on a lazy sunday watching TV. But it still makes my brain go berserk! Sometimes it's fun as I start overanalyzing stupid shows like It's Always Sunny or The Office, but if I feel a little vulnerable it doesn't end up well. :( What I learned though, is when I start panicking on weed, taking a short walk is immensely helpful as the effects only last 30 mins to an hour so if you just keep walking around neighborhood you feel fine.
This is the opposite of what I would suggest. Marijuana + acid is a classic recipe for intensity, and a way to re-enter a trip when you're coming down.
That smoking a psychoactive when you're on an intense psychoactive somehow helps you go to sleep makes you at extreme outlier fwiw.
Benzos are given to hundreds of millions of people every year, so they're pretty safe in my opinion. But they must not be taken for longer than a few weeks and/or in high doses! Because if you stop them cold turkey, you can die from the withdrawal effects (seizures).
Thing with most drugs is - we barely know which long-term/not clearly traceable side effects they have.
We have these big issues like heart attacks, strokes, cancer, mental issues, gene defects - all of which don't have obvious causes but surely increased with pollution, drugs and chemicals
Benzos can be deadly if used with opiates or alcohol, as all suppress breathing and in combination can just stop it while the person sleeps.
Yes, they are quite addictive if taken recreationally or used frequently for anxiety/sleep. Withdrawal is allegedly worse than opiates and can kill through seizures if done too suddenly.
Benzodiazepines are also thought to be carcinogenic to some degree.
When used for sleep, benzos will affect sleep quality even though they allow you to go to sleep more easily.
That all said, I have used a few types infrequently for helping to get to sleep and found them absolutely delightful, waking up refreshed and energised (and still somewhat relaxed) the next day.
Dependency issues, some memory loss, coordination. Real concerns if you're going to take it every day or drive or something. Nothing that would present a serious issue for this kind of occasional use.
I take a benzos for anxiety and havent had issues and it dependance personally.
If you aren't using it to get high (so as intended for panic attacks / aborting lsd trips) and using it very infrequently (e.g. Only for lsd trips) you'll have no problems at all.
The issues are usually when you take it daily, especially if you take enough for the recreational effects. (Although daily isn't necessarily bad if you are being very careful with a doctor).
Tl;Dr - yeah benzos have issues with tolerance/depedancy but if you are only using what you need therapeutically, especially since lsd requires you to space out trips, then you're unlikely to have issues.
You can still be awake, but you won’t be tripping any more, the sleep only comes if you actually lay down and try to go to sleep or take a large enough dose of benzos.
They dampen the effects and quell the anxiety, and depending on what stage of the trip you're in and how hard you're tripping they may effectively kill it entirely. I would take a bit of valium on the tail end of a trip to sleep or quiet my brain as it reconstituted itself after being atomized into the cosmos. I only took benzos once during the upward trajectory of a trip near the peak, after suffering physical panic symptoms from a strong batch of wild-picked wavy caps (first and only time I've felt physically threatened by a psychedelic). It didn't kill the trip, but it killed the panic and allowed me to enjoy the experience.
The one time when I did continue drinking heavily while tripping (when younger and more foolish), it seemed like the alcohol had no effect. I finished an entire bottle of gin and several beers. Once I did come down it hit me like a bus and the next day I had exactly the hangover that this stupidity deserved.
I've never been able to even contemplate eating while tripping and the idea of drinking alcohol while tripping turns my stomach, I find it much easier to just take some alprazolam or diazepam if things start getting out of hand. That's just me personally though, I've tripped with a guy who went and bought and ate a whole chicken while tripping...
I usually buy smoothies and drink them for some calories and to feel full. Luckily I don't get too much body load, it's just the idea of chewing and eating that weirds me out
Sure, I'm no stranger to fasting, I wouldn't call it pleasant though. Eating can be a very strange experience, I have vivid memories of a burrata I felt like I could climb into but it's definitely nice not to be hungry
Set and setting. Trip with some poor people who haven’t seen a fresh fruit since grade school and look out instead for the magical “fruit” drinks that taste of their literal colors.
Never, ever, mix any other drug with alcohol - or for that matter don't mix any kind of drugs unless you are specifically aware of the purity, the amounts consumed and the interactions between the agents, and are under the supervision of a doctor.
If there is one thing that carries a real risk of fucking up (other than ODing) it is mix consumption.
You can check this chart for dangerous interactions between common recreational drugs. As far as I know it's well researched. Alcohol and acid are fine together, it just suppresses the effect.
LSD is a remarkably safe drug when it comes to interactions with other drugs.
No interaction is not the same as "fine". See the post about the person who had a whole bottle of gin and some beers but didn't feel the booze until the next morning. A lethal alcohol dose is already dangerously easy to reach.
Yep, I trip a lot and have always kept a few beers around for me or some friends. One beer really kills off the higher level stuff. It's always been magic.
Never heard of the other experiences ITT. Alcohol is a well known off-switch in all of the beat nation sort of literature.
Then again I think we are often talking about different substances when we say LSD. You'll find someone who supposedly has this great connection and the second you take their ticket, you have the instant dread of tasting metal knowing it's not LSD.
Some alcohol and some acid go well together imo. Alcohol surely doesn't stop the trip. Maybe it smoothens the come up a bit. I only do low doses of both though.
I took a few hundred or so micrograms a couple weeks ago. I did a dab weighing about .15g during the strong part, and I didn’t notice any perceptual shift at all.
Yeah, I’ve found having a beer definitely takes away some anxiety/twitchiness and brings me back to reality a bit faster. But it was the same for me, towards the end of a trip. Not sure how it works for somehow rapidly being swallowed by the void.
In my experience, the acid smashes straight through the effects of the alcohol. I drank quite a lot during the peak once, it didnt affect me at all. (Mind you my trip was okay, no anxiety i wanted to get rid of.)
The tail end was pretty rough though, getting slammed back into reality AND a nasty hangover wasn't fun.
All in all it felt pretty pointless. Not recommended.
My first trip so far, took only 1/3rd of a ticket. IDK what I really experienced, just some slight visuals. Definitely more pleasurable than mushrooms (less poisonous, less lyrical, more positive).
MDMA will not reduce the effects of LSD but remove the element of fear and bring your imagination into more pleasant areas. This is something that Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, describes in the latest Tim Ferriss podcast.
All of the other responses are accurate -- combining the two will augment and possibly lengthen the experience -- but if you're familiar with both substances enough to feel confident in combining them, I've always found that 70mg dose of MDMA and a big glass of water will pull me right out of a trip that's heading south, and pretty quickly, into more glorious places.
But again, disclaimer: this is really only for folks experienced enough to know how to navigate each separate space well, and for those that have confirmed, tested, pure, high quality MDMA.
I highly recommend everyone candy-flip at least once, just to see why they call it candy-flipping (because everything looks like lovey-dovey glowing gumdrops). However, in my experience, the serotonin release from the MDMA tends to overwhelm the LSD, and you pay for it with the inevitable comedown and MDMA hangover the next day instead of the blissful LSD afterglow.
Meditation. There are certain kinds of meditation that light up the brain in a near identical way to magic mushrooms, though imho the experience is better. An advanced practitioner only takes about 20 minutes of meditation to get into that kind of state. They can stay in that state as long as they want, and they can strengthen it or weaken it even turning it off whenever they want.
Any competitive 5-HT2A antagonist will block psychedelic effects from classical psychedelic drugs, and D2 antagonists will block the potential for stimulant-esque psychosis that drugs like LSD can trigger through dopamine agonism.
There are probably hundreds of drugs that fall into these classes, and many of them have significant clinical data to derive their safety profiles from.
If someone comes into a hospital with a bad reaction to psychedelic drugs, it's not uncommon for them to be given something like risperidone, both a 5-HT2A and D2 antagonist, and an anxiolytic to calm them down.
>LSD has been classified in the vast majority of countries as a Schedule 1 illegal drug for more than 50 years, ever since the adoption of the United Nations' Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
>That scheduling means regulators believe the drug has "no currently accepted medical use" — and according to scientists from Imperial College London's Centre for Psychedelic Research, it's had a hugely negative impact on LSD research.
The US fucked up a lot of research forcing other countries to sign that convention.
People regularly use Trazodone [1] as a trip killer. I personally haven't and I don't like using them, but it does its job pretty well from what I've heard.
Joking aside, No way there is any chance that you would stick this in a human (huge potential for harm, no real clinical use case).
LSD is an insanely potent 5HT agonist, it seems highly unlikely any drug that is not "serious" would cause any significant reduction in LSD effects. Benzo's like Xanax can make the trip go in a direction that is less negative... but you are still tripping balls.
Yes, or at least it blocks effects if you take it pre-exposure. Risperidone, an atypical antispychotic, is also known for this. Some idiotic big pharma startup will try and milk this, rather than examining cheap existing medications. Plenty of medications block 5-HT2A, I think the important requirement here would be rapid absorption and high receptor occupancy.
Anecdotally, I've used risperidone specifically to abort LSD trips on two occasions and found it quite successful both times. Now when I introduce people to LSD I give them a Risperdal to keep in their pocket "just in case", though to my knowledge none of them have had to use it.
Simply knowing you have a backup strategy if you panic can go a long way to preventing panic attacks. Psychiatrists sometimes do something similar where they write a script for a benzo, just one or two for your bag.
Knowing you can control panic if it occurs goes such a ways in preventing panic at all.
Anecdotally, one of the best treatments for social anxiety I've found is to always know where the exits are. At a concert, identify the exit signs. In a conversation, have someone who can take over for you.
Knowing there's a way out of the situation can completely nullify the scariness of that situation.
[source: PhD in drug design specializing in G-protein coupled receptor pharmacology]
Drugs like LSD form non-covalent bonds with receptors. In a macro-world analogy, think of your hand sticking to a syrup-covered fork vs. a covalent bond being your hand stuck to a super-glue covered fork. Different drugs have different levels of "stickiness" (called affinity) for a particular receptor, and LSD has pretty high affinity for its target receptor, 5-HT2a, but it isn't permanently attached. In fact, affinity is defined by relative association vs. dissociation rates of drug-receptor complex.
On a microscopic level, each molecule of LSD is falling in and out of the receptor binding site stochastically. This leaves open the possibility of another drug binding to the same site (called competitive inhibition) when LSD isn't occupying the site. If another drug has a higher affinity, it will occupy the receptor more of the time. When you zoom out and consider the entire set of receptors and drugs, the sum of these individual stochastic events these effects follow characteristic patterns described by the law of mass action.
I came here to see this. We didn't have Xanax in Sweden growing up but we did carry Valium or Xanor. Xanor has the same active ingredient as Xanax. Someone claimed Valium would help too but I doubt it.
I only ever heard of this being used once to stop a bad trip, and I wasn't present.
Residual Current Device - a circuit breaker that opens a circuit when too much current is not returned via neutral, implying leakage to earth. They “trip” too and with the similarity to LSD, a TLA ending in D! I couldn’t resist the joke.
I'm pretty sure there's at least some published research on using at least one antipsychotic for that and mountains of "folk research" on using benzodiazepines.