[pessimizer]

> this particular drug is not just mind altering, it is life altering. It unlocks things in your mind that permanently change your perception.

I agree, but to 100x less of a degree than learning French, or becoming very good at chess.

One thing we need to pay attention to is the degree to which this chemical, and this class of chemicals, have been romanticized by the culture. Especially because these drugs make you more suggestible, expectations picked up from social lore can dominate one's subjective experience, and the memory of it.

[zelon88]

The psychadelic effects of this particular drug is so overwhelmingly, convincingly powerful that it's hard for me to imagine anyone who actually took it describing it as "romanticized". Words cannot accurately describe how convincingly powerful the visual hallucinations are. None of the T-shirts or album covers do the actual experience justice.

To your point about expectations; Related story: One time me and my friends got some and we were supposed to wait for a friend to get out of work before we all took it together. We couldn't wait, and passed around the tin foil containing the stuff and we each took our hits. I was last, I bought 2 hits and there were 2 tabs on the foil. So I took both of them and threw the empty foil away. 20 minutes later someone comes to me looking for the foil, because it supposably still contained 2 tabs for my friend who was on his way. It turns out that I accidentally took the 2 hits that I bought AND the 2 hits that my friend bought (the 2 tabs in the foil represented 4 hits total). I still had his tab on my tongue, so I removed it and put it back in the foil. It was totally cooked. When my friend came over, we didn't tell him and he took the his empty tabs and insisted all night that he was tripping sack, sometimes embarrassingly so. Meanwhile I was rocked out of my gourd.