[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.