4 ms·

I'm not sure there is or isn't evidence but if you study the brain I think you can come to some plausible conclusions that it does compromise health to some ext

by drwl 10y ago

I'm not sure there is or isn't evidence but if you study the brain I think you can come to some plausible conclusions that it does compromise health to some extent.

mixedCase 10y ago
Can you go into a little more detail? I have never heard anything like that. While it is just anecdote, the first person to synthesize the drug (and use it, and later practiced microdosing), Albert Hofmann, died from heart attack at the ripe age of 102 with a healthy mind.
- drwl 10y ago
  Sure. This is just a higher level overview of the brain, I'm sure there are experts who can dive deeper into this matter. The brain is an extremely delicate organ, or atleast that's what I would consider it. It relies on maintaining balance and uses negative feedback. In an effort to regulate brain activity, your brain will do things like down-regulation as an effort to bring your high activity brain (while on lsd) to a more normal level. I haven't looked into exactly what happens with LSD besides that it acts on serotonergic pathways, but sustained high activity can also lead to cell death.
fsiefken 10y ago
Conclusions? You mean 'ways'... the only way I know of - apart from individuals not prone to developing schizophrenia - is taking a lethal dose. The LD50 in humans has not been established but it might be similar to nicotine, around 10 mg/kg. While acid is cheap, it's a few hundreds times more then the typical dosage (40 micrograms). Albert Hoffmann writes in "LSD, my problem child": "The LD50 for the mouse amounts to 50-60 mg/kg IV (that is 50 to 60 thousandths of a gram of LSD per kilogram of animal weight upon injection of an LSD solution in the veins). In the rat the LD50 drops to 16.5 mg/kg, and in rabbits to 0.3 mg/kg. One elephant given 0.297 g of LSD died after a few minutes. The weight of this animal was determined to be 5,000 kg, which corresponds to a lethal dose of 0.06 mg/kg (0.06 thousandths of a gram per kilogram of bodyweight). Most animals die from a lethal dose of LSD by respiratory arrest. The minute doses that cause death in animal experiments may give the impression that LSD is a very toxic substance. However, if one compares the lethal dose in animals with the effective dose in human beings, which is 0.0003-0.001 mg/kg (0.0003 to 0.001 thousandths of a gram per kilogram of bodyweight), this shows an extraordinarily low toxicity for LSD. Only a 300- to 600-fold overdose of LSD, compared to the lethal dose in rabbits, or fully a 50,000- to 100,000-fold overdose, in comparison to the toxicity in the mouse, would have fatal results in human beings. These comparisons of relative toxicity are, to be sure, only understandable as estimates of orders of magnitude, for the determination of the therapeutic index (that is, the ratio between the effective and the lethal dose), is only meaningful within a given species. Such a procedure is not possible in this case because the lethal dose of LSD for humans is not known."
- drwl 10y ago
  I said compromise health to some extent, this could be even in small ways. I wasn't considering death as a "compromise to health". Just take a look at any fundamental neuroscience/brain biology textbook. I would guess that most likely continued microdosing would lead to downregulation and added stress on the pre and post synaptic neurons. Does this mean death? Probably not. Does it have long term effects? I'm not sure, I haven't read the research literature.

by drwl 10y ago

I'm not sure there is or isn't evidence but if you study the brain I think you can come to some plausible conclusions that it does compromise health to some extent.

mixedCase 10y ago

Can you go into a little more detail? I have never heard anything like that. While it is just anecdote, the first person to synthesize the drug (and use it, and later practiced microdosing), Albert Hofmann, died from heart attack at the ripe age of 102 with a healthy mind.

drwl 10y ago
Sure. This is just a higher level overview of the brain, I'm sure there are experts who can dive deeper into this matter. The brain is an extremely delicate organ, or atleast that's what I would consider it. It relies on maintaining balance and uses negative feedback. In an effort to regulate brain activity, your brain will do things like down-regulation as an effort to bring your high activity brain (while on lsd) to a more normal level. I haven't looked into exactly what happens with LSD besides that it acts on serotonergic pathways, but sustained high activity can also lead to cell death.

fsiefken 10y ago

Conclusions? You mean 'ways'... the only way I know of - apart from individuals not prone to developing schizophrenia - is taking a lethal dose. The LD50 in humans has not been established but it might be similar to nicotine, around 10 mg/kg. While acid is cheap, it's a few hundreds times more then the typical dosage (40 micrograms). Albert Hoffmann writes in "LSD, my problem child": "The LD50 for the mouse amounts to 50-60 mg/kg IV (that is 50 to 60 thousandths of a gram of LSD per kilogram of animal weight upon injection of an LSD solution in the veins). In the rat the LD50 drops to 16.5 mg/kg, and in rabbits to 0.3 mg/kg. One elephant given 0.297 g of LSD died after a few minutes. The weight of this animal was determined to be 5,000 kg, which corresponds to a lethal dose of 0.06 mg/kg (0.06 thousandths of a gram per kilogram of bodyweight). Most animals die from a lethal dose of LSD by respiratory arrest. The minute doses that cause death in animal experiments may give the impression that LSD is a very toxic substance. However, if one compares the lethal dose in animals with the effective dose in human beings, which is 0.0003-0.001 mg/kg (0.0003 to 0.001 thousandths of a gram per kilogram of bodyweight), this shows an extraordinarily low toxicity for LSD. Only a 300- to 600-fold overdose of LSD, compared to the lethal dose in rabbits, or fully a 50,000- to 100,000-fold overdose, in comparison to the toxicity in the mouse, would have fatal results in human beings. These comparisons of relative toxicity are, to be sure, only understandable as estimates of orders of magnitude, for the determination of the therapeutic index (that is, the ratio between the effective and the lethal dose), is only meaningful within a given species. Such a procedure is not possible in this case because the lethal dose of LSD for humans is not known."

drwl 10y ago
I said compromise health to some extent, this could be even in small ways. I wasn't considering death as a "compromise to health". Just take a look at any fundamental neuroscience/brain biology textbook. I would guess that most likely continued microdosing would lead to downregulation and added stress on the pre and post synaptic neurons. Does this mean death? Probably not. Does it have long term effects? I'm not sure, I haven't read the research literature.