15 ms·

I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a fri

by umvi 8y ago

I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a friend in high school who was a brilliant programmer and started using LSD and other psychedelics. He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook and after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore - the drugs permanently changed him. To be fair I don't know if he was using other drugs in conjunction with psychedelics but my (possibly ignorant) gut feeling is to be wary of implications of harmlessness when it comes to any drug.

temp129838 8y ago
Changing yourself due to increased neuroplasticity is a feature, not a bug. That isn't the same thing as "overdosing."
- skellera 8y ago
  Being in an environment or situation where that can be a problem is still not preferred. It may not be an overdose, but the outcome of drug use by their friend doesn’t seem positive.
  - temp129838 8y ago
    Agreed. You can have good trips and bad trips. It is highly dependent on environment and state of mind. The only guarantee is that your ability to change increases due to increased neuroplasticity. Whether the change is good or bad is ultimately up to you, which is why I think if these drugs were to be legalized that the intake should happen in conjunction with in-person therapy in a controlled environment and not at all something you'd just pickup at a pharmacy and take on your own like anti-depressants are today.
Moodles 8y ago
> I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway. And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.
- lgvln 8y ago
  They are not chemically addictive but my suspicion is that they can be psychologically addictive. I once knew someone who would argue for a Brave New World-esque world because of his (positive) experiences of psychedelics. I don’t think his friend is mentally ill but he reminds me of someone like Eckhart Tolle.
  - Moodles 8y ago
    I don't think Eckhart Tolle is mentally ill at all. There's nothing wrong with being like Echkart. But I just admitted to taking psychedelics, so maybe people think I'm mentally ill now :-) To clarify, I'm not much like Echkart: those same people would think I am doing "well": i work in SF in tech, I make 200k+, pretty normal. That's "good", while Echkart is "bad". it's a bit silly to me. Anyways, I had a good experience, you know some people who, from your perspective, have not. That's why we need studies.
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    Are we not already living in Brave New World a la benzos and opiods?
- 3131s 8y ago
  Not all 'psychedelics' are the same, some definitely can have potential for overdose in the lethal sense.
dTal 8y ago
Yes, and your experience is not unique - Syd Barrett is a very well known poster child for frying your mind with psychedelics. He was also a brilliant mind whose use of LSD destroyed his coherence.
- rosser 8y ago
  For every Syd Barrett, how many hundreds if not thousands of people play with these compounds, and don't end up there? This kind of thinking scans to me like pointing at the severity of plane crashes as a reason not to fly, while poo-poohing their infrequency. I have, for about a decade now, worked with a number of groups who ritually consume some of the most powerful psychedelics on the planet. I have journeyed with hundreds of different people, and seen truly adverse reactions, where it was more than just a bad trip and the person needed medical attention, all of once. EDIT: Yes, absolutely, there are risks, but in my experience, they can almost all be mitigated with a little honesty and self-awareness. Maybe don't play with these things by yourself if you have a family history of some kinds of mental illness. Maybe don't play with them at all if you're on certain medications, or have certain, other mental health concerns. Like schizophrenia. Yes, let's blame "drugs" for what happens when people whose brains are already wired to believe their own, demonstrably false narratives, take them.
  - dTal 8y ago
    "This kind of thinking"? I made no comment as to whether it's worth the risk. I was simply responding to "it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them." Which is demonstrably false, as you yourself have personally seen someone develop an adverse reaction and require medical attention.
    - rosser 8y ago
      I wasn't singling you or your comment out as having said the thing. I apologize unreservedly if that's how it read. I replied to you because your mention of Syd Barrett was the best place to hang my "don't extrapolate from your cousin's brother's nephew's uncle's former roomate's anecdata" point, without coming across that dismissively, because it gave me the clearest opening to talk about occult mental health concerns and such. Of course you can overdose on them. Even a sub-threshold dose of psilocin can kill many rabbits. Some brains just can't handle the alterations in perception these agents induce. I still fail to see how that's the agent's fault, and not the person who put it in themselves, especially if they're being cavalier, or showing off, or mixing things they aren't prepared to handle. I can't go into the details of my friend requiring medical attention without violating confidences, but I can say their own behavior and attitude towards the experience beforehand were, let's call it "materially contributory" to their experience during and after. EDIT: Phrasing.
lgvln 8y ago
I think what he’s trying to say is you can’t overdose in the sense of most other drugs, unless you take a stupendous amount of it (say >50 the regular dose). There is some correlation between dosage and whether the experience will be positive or negative though. As for your friend, from what I’ve learned on psychedelics, it can give people a “religious experience”, for a lack of a better term. It seems that’s what happened to him. However, how much weight one should give those experiences is debatable. If one is going to believe in those positive experiences, shouldn’t one also believe in the negative ones?
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Avoiding all human interactions capable of inducing love and shunning psychedelics might prevent a small number of tragic people from going off of the rails. Logic and the knowledge that chemicals are behind all of these profound human experiences make them unusually safe for the rest of us.
drablyechoes 8y ago
Some people have underlying neurological issues that can manifest in teenage/early adulthood years independently of drug use, although use of psychedelic drugs does tend to exacerbate such problems. It is possible the drugs permanently changed this person. It is also possible the drugs merely accelerated what would have happened regardless. For most people, psychedelics are indeed pretty harmless.
grawprog 8y ago
You can overdose on LSD. I dunno about other hallucinogens, but you can do enough LSD you just never really come back properly. Doing a lot regularly over a long period also seems to have dome lasting effects. Even after only doing it once years ago, I still see strange waves sometimes when I see ripples in water or the wake from boats. At the end of it, I was on the beach staring at the waves and the rippled the same way. I never used to see this in water before that.
- vokep 8y ago
  Are you entirely sure? I've experienced a small amount of this myself, but its so small, I'm really not sure if it wasn't there all along (and I wasn't looking for it)
  - grawprog 8y ago
    Well, even if it's something that was there that I.never noticed before, it's changed my perception at least which would.be some sort of lasting effect. Personally, I liked acid, it was far more pleasant than any other hallucinogen i've done and has the added bonus of not making you feel sick(if it's pure).
- chronofar 8y ago
  This can be true of any experience. You probably did experience similar distortions of visual perception previously, you just didn't associate them with an LSD experience and thus they casually passed from memory un-noted. Waves and ripples in water are certainly not so abnormal. Also overdose is too strong a word, and has a different connotation here than elsewhere. One can take 100 micrograms and have a wonderful experience, or one can take 100 micrograms and see the devil and never be the same. The mind is the difference maker, not the quantity of the drug. People have taken extremely large doses and not perished (one story of people mistakenly snorting crystals thinking it was cocaine comes to mind).
  - grawprog 8y ago
    You're right, overdose is the wrong word. I was thinking of a friend of my dad's who ended up doing a large bag full of LSD rather than get caught by the cops and ended up in a psych ward permanently, or some of the older hippies I know who spent several years doing lsd every day who do tend to have some issues formulating ideas coherently at times.
kirubakaran 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD
- Moodles 8y ago
  > three thousand times the human recreational dose Dang. Perhaps it is possible to die from an overdose of psychedelics, I stand corrected. However, it seems like you can technically overdose from anything after a certain amount. You can technically die from overdosing on potassium if you eat something like 1000 bananas in a day. What I meant is that you can't overdose, just like you can't from weed (even though, I'm sure, if you smoke 1000000 blunts you would). What I mean is that you're no way near something like heroin where the difference between death and bliss isn't much at all. You'd have to be pretty insane to die from overdosing on psychedelics.
  - namero999 8y ago
    There's a name for this. LD50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose Sort by %, you'll find that caffeine, nicotine and vitamin D are more lethal than most illegal psychedelics.
    - bdamm 8y ago
      Is there a name for the width of the LD curve? The LD50 is useful information but also useful is knowing the intensity of that onset.
      - shawnz 8y ago
        This is technically not what you're asking for, but you might be interested in the therapeutic index (the ratio between LD50, 50% probability of lethal dose, and ED50, 50% probability of effective dose).
    - rosser 8y ago
      The term you're looking for is "therapeutic index".
ericsoderstrom 8y ago
Agreed. I think HN in general is too quick to dismiss the potential dangers of psychedelics. I know at least a couple people who have essentially lost their minds as a result of frequent psychedelic use. It's pretty terrifying to see someone slowly become more paranoid delusional and incoherent when they once were an intelligent and charismatic friend.
- cgag 8y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely a thing. Here's an interesting post about it maybe being due to extremely high "openness" caused by psychs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched... I suspect this is much more common than anyone realizes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-of-permanent-side-effects/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-o...
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  There is indeed a very thin line between psychosis and intense religious experiences. It is why in some religions, knowing God will literally burn the mind. I would recommend psychedelics, but like anything, it depends on the person. There are dangers, but those dangers can be controlled quite well. At the population level, it is safer than coffee. At the individual level, it varies, just like anything else. I will note that after taking ~110 μg of LSD-25 on several occasions, my overall cognition improved dramatically.
  - ericsoderstrom 8y ago
    In what sense did your cognition improve, and how do you know?
    - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
      In terms of raw information processing. Focus, perhaps? Prior to taking psychedelics, I would struggle to process information, though I was an avid reader. Recall seems markedly improved too. Again, it is all anecdotal. It is a non-trivial problem to even begin to measure cognition, intelligence, consciousness, etc.
aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
>He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook See, it worked!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
To be fair, I don't think anyone is claiming that LSD won't change you permanently. Indeed, many would say that is one of the reasons people should try it.
Smithalicious 8y ago
Correlation doesn't imply causation. I've seen plenty of people go into nonsensical ramblings without drugs involved. Or maybe your friend was "awakened" to pseudo-spirituality first and then got into psychedelics? That seems very common as well.
beagle3 8y ago
I knew a guy who had changed significantly after a weekend retreat with some cultish experience (Landmark Forum, I am, or something like that). 48 hours of intensive experience though no pharmaceutical. He was on every kind of excellence list at uni, on 3 different merit scholarships (which all unfortunately went directly to the uni, not personally to him). That weekend was in the middle of the semester; he basically quit that week, but still came in to campus to complete his TA duties which are hard to drop mid semester; then went on an around-the-world trip for a year. I met him once randomly on the street afterwards, and he said he was happier than ever before, with no intention of going back to his studies or any other aspect of his former life. I had told this around the time he came back from his trip to two of my friends, neither of whom knew that guy. One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”. The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”. 20 years later, I still don’t have a firm opinion myself.
- V3ritas1337 8y ago
  Maybe the course he was doing was not for him but didn't have the guts or confidence to move on, psychedelics really open you up, and at the end of the day if he is happy, he is winning at life. Regardless of career aspirations etc.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”. The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”. The truth is in the eye of the beholder, of course. "Save" and "ruin" is such strong language though. However, I'm willing to bet this guy is better off not worrying about others think, and maybe, by extension, you're better off for not judging.
- indalo 8y ago
  Landmark forum is a self improvement seminar with pretty cult-ish tendencies. I lost a really good friend to it as well.
fc_barnes 8y ago
You're confusing chronic abuse with overdose. A psychedelic overdose just means you're in a chemically induced psychosis. It's easy to die in this state, but by falling off a balcony, not because you stop breathing. Some of the newfangled psychedelics coming out of China can cause serotonin syndrome, however, which can be fatal. But it's not practically possible to overdose on the traditional psychedelics.
bluntfang 8y ago
>after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore I mean, is anyone really the same person after a few years? Especially someone you knew in high school?
cannedslime 8y ago
I was so unlucky that my sister when completely manic for about three months, just by doing LSD once (Not sure if it was something else, sold as LSD).
xpaulbettsx 8y ago
Was this person in their late teens / early 20s? Many people who have latent schizophrenia end up initially triggering it around this age via LSD - these people would have most likely triggered it eventually through stress.
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
I would like to propose another explanation. Schizophrenia typically starts manifesting in people in their teens and early twenties. It is not uncommon for people who are feeling that things are not quite right to experiment with drugs as a way to self medicate. It appears that stressful situations can be the triggers for this, such as: Moving away from home for the first time, personal relationship issues, or experimenting with psychedelics. It's not clear to me that the arrow of causality necessarily points the direction that you think it does.
steve_adams_86 8y ago
I've witnessed something similar, and I later discovered the person was developing schizophrenia. It seemed like the drugs were setting him on a bad path, but I believe he took them to self medicate in retrospect. I suspect that's fairly common now. He's still very intelligent, but all of his mental resources are wasted on fighting his illness so to speak. To some it might seem like he ruined his brain with drugs but I sincerely doubt the drugs did much damage at all.

by umvi 8y ago

temp129838 8y ago

Changing yourself due to increased neuroplasticity is a feature, not a bug. That isn't the same thing as "overdosing."

skellera 8y ago
Being in an environment or situation where that can be a problem is still not preferred. It may not be an overdose, but the outcome of drug use by their friend doesn’t seem positive.
- temp129838 8y ago
  Agreed. You can have good trips and bad trips. It is highly dependent on environment and state of mind. The only guarantee is that your ability to change increases due to increased neuroplasticity. Whether the change is good or bad is ultimately up to you, which is why I think if these drugs were to be legalized that the intake should happen in conjunction with in-person therapy in a controlled environment and not at all something you'd just pickup at a pharmacy and take on your own like anti-depressants are today.

Moodles 8y ago

> I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway. And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.

lgvln 8y ago
They are not chemically addictive but my suspicion is that they can be psychologically addictive. I once knew someone who would argue for a Brave New World-esque world because of his (positive) experiences of psychedelics. I don’t think his friend is mentally ill but he reminds me of someone like Eckhart Tolle.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I don't think Eckhart Tolle is mentally ill at all. There's nothing wrong with being like Echkart. But I just admitted to taking psychedelics, so maybe people think I'm mentally ill now :-) To clarify, I'm not much like Echkart: those same people would think I am doing "well": i work in SF in tech, I make 200k+, pretty normal. That's "good", while Echkart is "bad". it's a bit silly to me. Anyways, I had a good experience, you know some people who, from your perspective, have not. That's why we need studies.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  Are we not already living in Brave New World a la benzos and opiods?
3131s 8y ago
Not all 'psychedelics' are the same, some definitely can have potential for overdose in the lethal sense.

dTal 8y ago

Yes, and your experience is not unique - Syd Barrett is a very well known poster child for frying your mind with psychedelics. He was also a brilliant mind whose use of LSD destroyed his coherence.

rosser 8y ago
For every Syd Barrett, how many hundreds if not thousands of people play with these compounds, and don't end up there? This kind of thinking scans to me like pointing at the severity of plane crashes as a reason not to fly, while poo-poohing their infrequency. I have, for about a decade now, worked with a number of groups who ritually consume some of the most powerful psychedelics on the planet. I have journeyed with hundreds of different people, and seen truly adverse reactions, where it was more than just a bad trip and the person needed medical attention, all of once. EDIT: Yes, absolutely, there are risks, but in my experience, they can almost all be mitigated with a little honesty and self-awareness. Maybe don't play with these things by yourself if you have a family history of some kinds of mental illness. Maybe don't play with them at all if you're on certain medications, or have certain, other mental health concerns. Like schizophrenia. Yes, let's blame "drugs" for what happens when people whose brains are already wired to believe their own, demonstrably false narratives, take them.
- dTal 8y ago
  "This kind of thinking"? I made no comment as to whether it's worth the risk. I was simply responding to "it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them." Which is demonstrably false, as you yourself have personally seen someone develop an adverse reaction and require medical attention.
  - rosser 8y ago
    I wasn't singling you or your comment out as having said the thing. I apologize unreservedly if that's how it read. I replied to you because your mention of Syd Barrett was the best place to hang my "don't extrapolate from your cousin's brother's nephew's uncle's former roomate's anecdata" point, without coming across that dismissively, because it gave me the clearest opening to talk about occult mental health concerns and such. Of course you can overdose on them. Even a sub-threshold dose of psilocin can kill many rabbits. Some brains just can't handle the alterations in perception these agents induce. I still fail to see how that's the agent's fault, and not the person who put it in themselves, especially if they're being cavalier, or showing off, or mixing things they aren't prepared to handle. I can't go into the details of my friend requiring medical attention without violating confidences, but I can say their own behavior and attitude towards the experience beforehand were, let's call it "materially contributory" to their experience during and after. EDIT: Phrasing.

lgvln 8y ago

I think what he’s trying to say is you can’t overdose in the sense of most other drugs, unless you take a stupendous amount of it (say >50 the regular dose). There is some correlation between dosage and whether the experience will be positive or negative though. As for your friend, from what I’ve learned on psychedelics, it can give people a “religious experience”, for a lack of a better term. It seems that’s what happened to him. However, how much weight one should give those experiences is debatable. If one is going to believe in those positive experiences, shouldn’t one also believe in the negative ones?

beenBoutIT 8y ago
Avoiding all human interactions capable of inducing love and shunning psychedelics might prevent a small number of tragic people from going off of the rails. Logic and the knowledge that chemicals are behind all of these profound human experiences make them unusually safe for the rest of us.

drablyechoes 8y ago

Some people have underlying neurological issues that can manifest in teenage/early adulthood years independently of drug use, although use of psychedelic drugs does tend to exacerbate such problems. It is possible the drugs permanently changed this person. It is also possible the drugs merely accelerated what would have happened regardless. For most people, psychedelics are indeed pretty harmless.

grawprog 8y ago

You can overdose on LSD. I dunno about other hallucinogens, but you can do enough LSD you just never really come back properly. Doing a lot regularly over a long period also seems to have dome lasting effects. Even after only doing it once years ago, I still see strange waves sometimes when I see ripples in water or the wake from boats. At the end of it, I was on the beach staring at the waves and the rippled the same way. I never used to see this in water before that.

vokep 8y ago
Are you entirely sure? I've experienced a small amount of this myself, but its so small, I'm really not sure if it wasn't there all along (and I wasn't looking for it)
- grawprog 8y ago
  Well, even if it's something that was there that I.never noticed before, it's changed my perception at least which would.be some sort of lasting effect. Personally, I liked acid, it was far more pleasant than any other hallucinogen i've done and has the added bonus of not making you feel sick(if it's pure).
chronofar 8y ago
This can be true of any experience. You probably did experience similar distortions of visual perception previously, you just didn't associate them with an LSD experience and thus they casually passed from memory un-noted. Waves and ripples in water are certainly not so abnormal. Also overdose is too strong a word, and has a different connotation here than elsewhere. One can take 100 micrograms and have a wonderful experience, or one can take 100 micrograms and see the devil and never be the same. The mind is the difference maker, not the quantity of the drug. People have taken extremely large doses and not perished (one story of people mistakenly snorting crystals thinking it was cocaine comes to mind).
- grawprog 8y ago
  You're right, overdose is the wrong word. I was thinking of a friend of my dad's who ended up doing a large bag full of LSD rather than get caught by the cops and ended up in a psych ward permanently, or some of the older hippies I know who spent several years doing lsd every day who do tend to have some issues formulating ideas coherently at times.

kirubakaran 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD

Moodles 8y ago
> three thousand times the human recreational dose Dang. Perhaps it is possible to die from an overdose of psychedelics, I stand corrected. However, it seems like you can technically overdose from anything after a certain amount. You can technically die from overdosing on potassium if you eat something like 1000 bananas in a day. What I meant is that you can't overdose, just like you can't from weed (even though, I'm sure, if you smoke 1000000 blunts you would). What I mean is that you're no way near something like heroin where the difference between death and bliss isn't much at all. You'd have to be pretty insane to die from overdosing on psychedelics.
- namero999 8y ago
  There's a name for this. LD50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose Sort by %, you'll find that caffeine, nicotine and vitamin D are more lethal than most illegal psychedelics.
  - bdamm 8y ago
    Is there a name for the width of the LD curve? The LD50 is useful information but also useful is knowing the intensity of that onset.
    - shawnz 8y ago
      This is technically not what you're asking for, but you might be interested in the therapeutic index (the ratio between LD50, 50% probability of lethal dose, and ED50, 50% probability of effective dose).
  - rosser 8y ago
    The term you're looking for is "therapeutic index".

ericsoderstrom 8y ago

Agreed. I think HN in general is too quick to dismiss the potential dangers of psychedelics. I know at least a couple people who have essentially lost their minds as a result of frequent psychedelic use. It's pretty terrifying to see someone slowly become more paranoid delusional and incoherent when they once were an intelligent and charismatic friend.

cgag 8y ago
Yeah, it's definitely a thing. Here's an interesting post about it maybe being due to extremely high "openness" caused by psychs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched... I suspect this is much more common than anyone realizes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-of-permanent-side-effects/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-o...
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
There is indeed a very thin line between psychosis and intense religious experiences. It is why in some religions, knowing God will literally burn the mind. I would recommend psychedelics, but like anything, it depends on the person. There are dangers, but those dangers can be controlled quite well. At the population level, it is safer than coffee. At the individual level, it varies, just like anything else. I will note that after taking ~110 μg of LSD-25 on several occasions, my overall cognition improved dramatically.
- ericsoderstrom 8y ago
  In what sense did your cognition improve, and how do you know?
  - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
    In terms of raw information processing. Focus, perhaps? Prior to taking psychedelics, I would struggle to process information, though I was an avid reader. Recall seems markedly improved too. Again, it is all anecdotal. It is a non-trivial problem to even begin to measure cognition, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

>He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook See, it worked!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

To be fair, I don't think anyone is claiming that LSD won't change you permanently. Indeed, many would say that is one of the reasons people should try it.

Smithalicious 8y ago

Correlation doesn't imply causation. I've seen plenty of people go into nonsensical ramblings without drugs involved. Or maybe your friend was "awakened" to pseudo-spirituality first and then got into psychedelics? That seems very common as well.

beagle3 8y ago

I knew a guy who had changed significantly after a weekend retreat with some cultish experience (Landmark Forum, I am, or something like that). 48 hours of intensive experience though no pharmaceutical. He was on every kind of excellence list at uni, on 3 different merit scholarships (which all unfortunately went directly to the uni, not personally to him). That weekend was in the middle of the semester; he basically quit that week, but still came in to campus to complete his TA duties which are hard to drop mid semester; then went on an around-the-world trip for a year. I met him once randomly on the street afterwards, and he said he was happier than ever before, with no intention of going back to his studies or any other aspect of his former life. I had told this around the time he came back from his trip to two of my friends, neither of whom knew that guy. One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”. The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”. 20 years later, I still don’t have a firm opinion myself.

V3ritas1337 8y ago
Maybe the course he was doing was not for him but didn't have the guts or confidence to move on, psychedelics really open you up, and at the end of the day if he is happy, he is winning at life. Regardless of career aspirations etc.
dfxm12 8y ago
One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”. The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”. The truth is in the eye of the beholder, of course. "Save" and "ruin" is such strong language though. However, I'm willing to bet this guy is better off not worrying about others think, and maybe, by extension, you're better off for not judging.
indalo 8y ago
Landmark forum is a self improvement seminar with pretty cult-ish tendencies. I lost a really good friend to it as well.

fc_barnes 8y ago

You're confusing chronic abuse with overdose. A psychedelic overdose just means you're in a chemically induced psychosis. It's easy to die in this state, but by falling off a balcony, not because you stop breathing. Some of the newfangled psychedelics coming out of China can cause serotonin syndrome, however, which can be fatal. But it's not practically possible to overdose on the traditional psychedelics.

bluntfang 8y ago

>after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore I mean, is anyone really the same person after a few years? Especially someone you knew in high school?

cannedslime 8y ago

I was so unlucky that my sister when completely manic for about three months, just by doing LSD once (Not sure if it was something else, sold as LSD).

xpaulbettsx 8y ago

Was this person in their late teens / early 20s? Many people who have latent schizophrenia end up initially triggering it around this age via LSD - these people would have most likely triggered it eventually through stress.

amanaplanacanal 8y ago

I would like to propose another explanation. Schizophrenia typically starts manifesting in people in their teens and early twenties. It is not uncommon for people who are feeling that things are not quite right to experiment with drugs as a way to self medicate. It appears that stressful situations can be the triggers for this, such as: Moving away from home for the first time, personal relationship issues, or experimenting with psychedelics. It's not clear to me that the arrow of causality necessarily points the direction that you think it does.

steve_adams_86 8y ago

I've witnessed something similar, and I later discovered the person was developing schizophrenia. It seemed like the drugs were setting him on a bad path, but I believe he took them to self medicate in retrospect. I suspect that's fairly common now. He's still very intelligent, but all of his mental resources are wasted on fighting his illness so to speak. To some it might seem like he ruined his brain with drugs but I sincerely doubt the drugs did much damage at all.