[navyrain]

When I see videos like this, or read other experiences of LSD, I wonder if I'm not missing out on something. LSD, uniquely amongst mainstream recreational drugs, seems to have the promise of an outright transcendental upside, with supposedly little downside.

It saddens me that there is no safe and legal way for me to try it.

[elif]

It's not that you're missing out on something... more like you've been too distracted your whole life to see what's been in front of you all along. There's no way to describe what you will experience because what you are experiencing is merely the present moment, not in the abstract form you experience it now, but in a real way. If you are near a mirror maybe you'll become focused on the shallowness of appearances, or if you are near trash you will commune with the molecules making up that trash and realize that you and the trash are really the same thing.. usually the revelations you make will sound obvious or nonsensical to a stranger, because what you're describing is /what/ you experienced when what is really amazing is /how/ you experienced it.

It is really a shame that there is no legal avenue to experience this, unless you are very good at meditating or happen to have a near death experience.

Safety is not much of a concern...

There are chemical tests you can use to determine if something is LSD or not. They are available on amazon for a few dollars. Beyond that, all you need is a sober person who knows what you're going through, that you trust to keep up with you for 6 hours.

Of the people I have met who have "acid-head", they have uniformly tripped many dozens of times, sometimes for 48+ hour periods on 10+ doses, and all of them had also used hard drugs.

It is beautiful at the time, to see the world without your own bias. but after the fact it can be a bit depressing when you later find yourself caring about things which you've already realized don't actually matter... running the same rat race whose mere existence earlier made you erupt in a hysterical fit of laughter.

I know i rambled. It's hard to speak in technicolor.

[chadrs]

> Safety is not much of a concern...

If you're getting pure LSD, safety is not much of a concern. I would love to do acid again (did it by mistake once), but my concern is that because it's illegal, there's no way to know what you're getting is pure LSD. Sketchy dealers or bad chemists can result in a product that gives you a bad trip.

[pantalaimon]

Well people won't cut LSD, they would just sell blotter with a smaller dose on it. And since LSD doses are very small to begin with, any byproduct would be such a small amount that it hardly could have any effect.

What you might get though is NBOMe (and less common DOB) instead of LSD. They don't feel as profound and have more risks associated with them, but that can be alleviated by buying from a trusted dark net vendor/buying a test kit.

[bigbugbag]

This used to be true but is not anymore, look at the following warning erowid has added on its LSD vault and LSD FAQ.

NOTE: Some blotter and liquid LSD being sold in 2013 in the Americas and Europe actually contained NBOMe compounds such as 25I-NBOMe. These chemicals are active under one milligram, but can cause strong effects even on a single 1/4" (6mm) square. The blotter or liquid with NBOMe compounds is usually identifiably bitter, where LSD-containing liquid or blotter has a very mild metallic flavor or no flavor at all.

ADULTERANTS:

[Erowid Note 2014: Note that the following section is no longer accurate as of 2010. Please see Spotlight on NBOMes: Potent Psychedelic Issues for a little discussion of other substances now commonly sold on blotter. The Erowid Crew now estimates that there are over a dozen different chemicals sold on blotter the same size and styles as "acid-style blotters" of the past. These include NBOMes, NBOHs, etizolam, phenazepam, AL-LAD, LSZ, Bromo-Dragonfly, DOM, DOC, DOI, and others.]

[pantalaimon]

But that's the very thing I have written. Those blotter with NBOMe will have no LSD on them and I haven't heard of any that has NBOMe in addition to the LSD either.

So if you buy from a trusted source (a product with lots of reviews on a dark net market) you can be rather sure that you are getting what you ordered.

There is also the option to use a test kit.

https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_testing3.shtml

[ffzero]

My parents are religious, and I was raised religious. When I took LSD, I was agnostic, but I had a conversation with God. I'm still agnostic, by the way.

You're missing an experience for sure, but you shouldn't approach it thinking it's just a fun drug. Do your research first, understand how to fight off bad trips, be in the correct set and setting, and don't take more than 100 micrograms the first time you do it. LSD will open up doors you didn't even know existed, and then you'll walk through those doors and find out even more. Until you actually do that, you'll never understand what it's like.

Oh yeah, stay away from mirrors too.

"Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child." - Albert Hofmann

[palosanto]

Are you missing out on something? Yes.

Is there "little downside"? Not necessarily. Compared to other drugs, sure. You're not going to become addicted and it's not going to make your teeth fall out. But let's be real. This is the most potent psychoactive substance ever made by many orders of magnitude. It can connect you to parts of yourself that are deeply buried in your subconscious. This is what brings about the blissful feelings of transcendence, wholeness, oneness, etc. It can also be absolutely terrifying to confront your subconscious, especially if 1) you're not in a good place psychologically and 2) you're not in the presence of someone you trust. What happens is you start to experience fear as the scary things come up or as you start to experience ego death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death). You don't realize that the fear is all in your head and you start to project it out onto the external world with paranoid thoughts. Kind of like you're having a nightmare, except that it's happening while you're conscious. This is known as a bad trip. It can leave lasting psychological damage if you don't know how to process the experience.

Another potential downside is that an LSD trip could trigger a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. You might come back from the transcendental experience and realize that your life is meaningless, that all of your friends are assholes who don't really know you, etc. You might be inspired to make some big changes. From the perspective of your asshole friends, you will have changed "and not in a good way" ;) But this short-term downside is an upside if you take the long view. If you get your midlife crisis out of the way in your twenties, you can spend the rest of your life doing something meaningful.

There's no way to experience the transcendental upside without the potential downside. But if you're willing to face your own demons, and you take precautions by having a trusted + sober guide, you'll be fine.

[skjsjsnsnsms]

Is there really little downside?

Anecdotally, I've heard from friends in the jamband scene about friends who did LSD who came back "completely changed , and not in a good way."

[toolz]

I imagine there is a lot of confirmation bias going on with stories like that. Drugs are seen almost universally as taboo, so people want to see the bad things that may happen and when people want to see something, exaggerations tend to happen.

I'm not saying your friends weren't changed for the worse, but I do know I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user. As such I have to conclude that people choose to speak poorly about LSD, which in turn means we all hear more horror stories than feel good endings.

[intopieces]

>I do know I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user

I am proud to be an LSD user. For a few of my friends who struggle with depression, they take LSD once every few months. They report that it acts as an emotional 'reset.'

[toolz]

Are you proud to be an LSD user in the context of everyday society? Do you tell your employer? Have you recommended LSD to all of your close family members?

I don't know you or where you're from, but that's unheard of inside the circle of people I know.

[maroonblazer]

>Are you proud to be an LSD user in the context of everyday society?

Not really a fair question, given the taboo still surrounding the drug. Imagine asking a homosexual in the 1950's "Are you proud to be gay in the context of everyday society?" Of course the answer is going to be "No." But in certain circles - namely those that don't give in to the notion that such experiences are unspeakable - the answer is surely "Yes."

That said, I agree with zafka that being "proud" to have taken LSD is effectively a category error.

[toolz]

That's my whole point, though. Negative confirmation bias happens because there is taboo surrounding the drug and those that are silently proud, are just that, silent. While those that condemn it are vocal. Hence more negative stories are told giving people more negative anecdotal data to draw from.

[intopieces]

I'm certainly the exception, but I've shared my experience with psychedelics with many people. Coworkers, friends, family. I'm not ashamed in the least.

[handojin]

Yes. To all three questions.

Two points:

First, the concept of LSD user is misguided. In soviet Russia LSD uses you. Second, the world is larger.

[skjsjsnsnsms]

Maybe my friends did have some sort of confirmation bias, I don't know. I would describe them as "pro" drug users though, definitely not the type to stigmatize drugs. Regardless, why would a rational person risk their body and mind, of which they only have one, on that assumption? Especially on a drug without a reliable source (assuming you are not a chemist) ...

[anigbrowl]

Depends where you are. If you're in the San Francisco area, you'll see a lot of people display Grateful Dead logos - eg bumper stickers on cars, t-shirts, or even cufflinks (I've met quite a few senior executives who were 'deadheads' at one point, same way you'll run into all sorts of people at a Burning Man event). You can safely assume anyone showing off their Grateful Dead affiliation has tried LSD at least once.

One reason people don't talk about it much is that if someone is arrested and has LSD, the amount in their possession for evidence purposes is based on the weight of the delivery medium, usually blotter paper. So what you might think, that's only a few milligrams per square. Unfortunately the standard dose, which is soaked into the paper, is about 50-100 micrograms. Thanks to the 1986 anti-drug legislation and the 1991 Chapman decision, the weight of the blotter paper was included as part of the 'mixture containing LSD' without regard to the very low dose:carrier weight ratio, so even a modest amount owner for personal use could easily pass the threshold for a presumtive attempt to distribute, attracting a long sentence.

This has been fixed to some extent in the most recent edition of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, but that was only last year, after 20+ years of really jacked-up sentences. Now the sentencing commission assumes a carrier weight of 0.4 milligrams (vs. a base dose of 0.05ug for the chemical itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=TbJlhRCG4NYC&pg=PA164&lpg=...

Here's the current drug quantity table, which sorts people into different groups depending on the amount they possess: http://www.fd.org/docs/select-topics/sentencing-resources/cl...

This still seems an order of magnitude too low to me; a quantity suitable for personal use could put someone away for a couple of years. So it's not the sort of thing that people flaunt openly the way many marijuana devotees do.

[fragmede]

With the passage of Prop 47 this past year, simple drug possession has been reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor in California (among other things), so the state's sentencing guidelines for LSD possession may be further reduced.

[lazylester]

well I for one am proud to have been an LSD user. It was amazing, but after about half a dozen trips I started to see "the dark side" and stopped doing it. I have no regrets, it's friggin awesome.

[skjsjsnsnsms]

May i ask what the "dark side" was like? No agenda, just genuinely curious.

[throwaway-333]

It can significantly intensify your mood so if you become anxious, fearful, angry or unhappy that feeling may be so magnified as to seem overwhelming. It can often be because you took a trip while you had something on your mind, and then your thoughts about that seem monstrously distorted. Imagine being a child who gets really scared by a movie, the idea of the scary thing outweighs the context of being fictional or just a story or even the non-scary part that came before, because now your childish mind can't stop thinking about the Bad Thing.

LSD hallucinations can involve fairly severe distortions of time and space which are not helpful in that context. A trip can also last 8-12 hours which is quite a long time, so if you start feeling 'oh, I think this is too much for me..' then you're stuck with it for a long period, possibly your foreseeable future during the trip due to the extra cognitive burden of the hallucination. A dose of vitamin b12 can help (by inducing a distracting and rather pleasant hot flush), but after a few different negative experiences I realized the easiest thing to do if feeling bad was to find a quiet spot and just sit down - not too many bad things can happen to you while you're sitting still and adopting a more relaxed posture generally helps the bad mood evaporate of its own accord. Partly because of this insight, I developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and Taoism.

Excess consumption (or comsumption with other drugs like pot) can have unexpected or unhelpful effects. I've experience mild aphasia (difficulty in forming speech) one for a few minutes, and the one really bad trip I had (due to a combination or prior bad mood, excess consumption and inexperience) got unmanageable in two ways. One, I developed temporary amnesia for about an hour, and was unable to remember where I was until someone said 'you know...America?!', which was a place I could remember having heard of - that was pretty confusing, since I didn't know where I lived. Also, I had forgotten everything about my own identity except my first name, which was scary for obvious reasons. Identity is something you take for granted to such an extent that we're not really equipped to deal with not having one. Two, all this happened on a landing halfway down a long staircase, and both the up and down directions looked like the inside of a concertina that was vibrating with the loud music which was going on in the background (but which I was incapable of processing as music right then, it was just a bunch of scary noises). In short I had no idea who I was or how I had arrived in the world, and the world itself seemed chaotic and dimensionless. Eventually I got tired of feeling freaked out and the stairs settled down for a bit, so I wandered around the party in order to try figuring out my new and unfamiliar environment. Probably because I had let go of my anxiety, all my memories suddenly popped back into place - much like when you find your keys after you had lost them, sp you don't need to check every individual key on the keyring. And once that happened, I felt great for the rest of the trip. Not just better, with the satisfaction of having overcome an incredibly difficult situation.

Sounds awful, right? But what's hard to explain is that a bad (or good) trip isn't just something that happens to you; it's about how you react to your distorted perception of yourself, like the psychological equivalent of a hall of distorted mirrors. If you're prone to panic or other sorts of mental discomfort then that would obviously be pretty bad, but if you have a high tolerance of weirdness or ambiguity then it can be very rewarding, despite the existence of some dangerous or scary situations (which you could also encounter in sports or many other contexts). It's not illusory, bad or good; it's just the experience of the interaction between your brain and this particular chemical which modulates the threshold of synaptic firing. Your mind will work differently, but it's still your mind - and is the scary aspect for many people who have negative experiences, they regocnize the troubling experiences as manifestations of the subconscious.

I've tripped maybe 80 or 90 times. I stopped eventually (>10 years ago) because it felt familiar enough that I wondered if I was just exploiting it for entertainment rather than self-exploration or expansion. I would like to take some again now that time has gone by but would be more inclined to do so in quiet solitude rather than in a social context, maybe I've just come to value tranquility and calm rather than excitement as I got older. I have absolutely no regrets, even of the frightening bits - I would say that psychedelics have been among the great positive and valuable experiences in my life, not as something to be consumed and enjoyed, but as an experience to be pondered and ocntinuously re-integrated. I feel they brought a significant improvement to my mental health - I have suffered from chronic major depression since youth but was able to develop a much stronger sense of agency and larn to manage my condition thanks to my psychedelic experience.

[zafka]

>> "I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user." I am not proud of how tall I am.

I am not proud that I was lucky enough to be born with the talents that I have.

I am generally not very proud of things that I do that take little effort on my part.

I think that a lot of the people who were positively affected by LSD do not feel the need to talk about it.

They know how difficult it is to describe what it is like, and it sounds a little arrogant to talk about how much better it has made one's life.

[colordrops]

While rare, LSD trips can result in a psychological meltdown. A rough guideline for reducing the chances of a bad trip down to almost zero is to make sure your mindset is good, and your setting is good. This is what people mean when they say "set and setting". If you are severely depressed or paranoid, or you have schizophrenia, you will probably want to avoid LSD, as it could amplify these characteristics. Even if you are not, being with an experienced individual who has a positive mindset will bolster your own trip. Regarding setting, find an open, comfortable, and safe environment. Avoid dirty, cramped locations like small unkempt apartments, or overly crowded clubs. Daytime in nature with a few good friends is ideal.

[almost_usual]

If the LSD isn't contaminated or fake and the portion you consume is moderate you should be OK. Psyocibin is slightly less risky and more spiritual from what I hear. I've witnessed friends suffer permanent negative personality changes from bad LSD.

[bigbugbag]

Psychoactive drugs are no joke. The psychedelic kind hold the potential of a life changing experience, LSD is one of those.

LSD is quite safe relatively to others psychoactive but this is not to be confused with the effects from the psychedelic experience. When you get to perceive things differently, be exposed to different views of the world and yourself, get a different outlook on things. Well yes, change can occur and last, sometimes for a lifetime.

And frequent abusers of LSD are known to develop a sort of holier than you personality as they develop the illusion of having superior knowledge and understanding.

[kirsebaer]

Psychedelics have not been demonstrated to have long-term negative effects. Important to consider that 2% of the general population will have a psychotic disorder and many more will have anxiety, depression, other mental problems at some point.

Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study. PLOS ONE 2013. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

[ugexe]

There is really little downside.

Anecdotally i've heard people say marijuana will get you addicted to harder drugs, will turn you into a melted couch blob, etc.

[skjsjsnsnsms]

Straw man argument is made of straw. I'm speaking of word of mouth from informed, trusted friends, not what I heard from those who have an agenda have to say on fox news.

[ugexe]

Ironically you are straw manning my own argument which was also from experienced drug users

[tzamora]

LSD itself is harmless, nevertheless, try not to jump from a balcon while high on it.

[skjsjsnsnsms]

Sure, which is why erowid recommends having a "trip sitter"

https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml

[watty]

LSD isn't heroin but it's certainly not "harmless".

[aroman]

IANAS/D but it seems that it is, in fact, effectively harmless (in people without severe pre-existing mental disorders, which is to say most people).

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Pote...

[waterlesscloud]

It's been at least 15 years since my last trip, but they do make a lasting impression. It wasn't something I did a lot, but it maybe totaled 20 times over about 10 years.

Having said that, it's not always a grand magical experience.

I had one semi-bad trip, which in retrospect I unconsciously but intentionally set myself up for. You've got to watch that carefully, and be aware of it, what your mindset is going in. I saw others do much the same thing on a number of occasions, so it's something that happens.

If I'm completely honest about the experiences, most of the time whatever I was doing was incredibly fascinating at the time, but utterly banal in retrospect. Becoming really fascinated with small variations of light and shadow on a wall, for example. Which is pretty cool while you're doing, but not exactly a mystical experience.

The way I always talked about tripping was that it removed the filters from your perception. There's a lot of information coming in that your brain just filters out. That's desirable on a lot of levels, but it's worth reminding yourself that it's happening. Once you've had that experience a few times, it becomes possible to turn it on and off if you work at it. You still won't, most of the time, but it's nice to have the ability when you want it.

[foobarian]

Similar experience here. I spent about 30 minutes staring at a Windows NT 4 wallpaper[1] in college, and saw many objects such as skulls, bodies, etc. in it which cognition under normal circumstances filters out. Our cognitive filters must be really good at preventing us from seeing false positives in the patterns out in the visual field.

The way the setting made a difference for me were perceived risks. In the same way my cognitive filter was disabled for visual patterns, it must have been disabled for danger too; seeing a candle on the coffee table made me panic about a fire so I put it out, and seeing a friend go out on the balcony of our second floor apartment made me terrified that he would try to "fly" or hurt himself, so I made him come in and locked the balcony door. I can definitely see how a more adverse setting could lead to a really scary trip.

[hendler]

For a documentary covering history and current research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WtwJTwuWg

[eljojo]

I totally feel you (no pun intended). same thing here.