4 ms·

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for examp

by tyingq 5y ago

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc. Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place?

beej71 5y ago
From what I hear, the idea of doing anything complex like driving a car is extremely unappealing under the effects of mushrooms.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  I've wrecked a car on mushrooms...not-really-driving like a maniac with a bunch of friends hanging out the windows was arguably the most fun I ever had.
- damontal 5y ago
  It’s hard to concentrate on traffic when the clouds appear to be in flames.
CPLX 5y ago
1) They’re not addictive in the classic sense where people are habituated and have to take them every day. 2) As far as I know there’s no straightforward way to test for them and I’d have to assume people who are high on psychedelics that get into an accident aren’t excited to volunteer the information.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
It can be quite tough to get out of your seat on sufficient mushrooms, which limits many possibilities of misadventures.
c54 5y ago
The hallucination affected by psychedelics such as mushrooms isn't what you might expect. It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there". There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room. Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of varying complexity and intensity. The patterns may seem to shift and meld into eachother in a kind of loop... Psychonaut wiki[0] has several approximations of varying quality, a lot of the gifs in particular (the cat lying on the couch and the wolf drinking) resonate with me. Sensory input can also include audio hallucinations, as well as perceptions that are simply normally filtered out of our experience by our brains--a sense of the organs inside your body, or the teeth in your mouth, or whatever. A lot of the effects are mental, prompting often amusing and revelatory departures from your normal thought patterns. Everything old is new again. You may find yourself deeply examining the complexity of your hands, or the bizarre fact that we're not always "like this", or in deep awe of the staggering complexity of civilization or the chemical machines that are our bodies. That kind of thing. The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful. Media portrayal of this varies but some shows do hit it quite on the head, actually Mad Men has an interesting trip episode that understates the visual component and emphasizes the mental[1]. Broad city's was particularly colorful and fun (S4e4, full ep. isn't on youtube). Some media can give you a bit of a taste of the experience, others grossly exaggerate it or flat out misrepresent it. You know how it goes. [0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelics#Morphing https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelic... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU
- Bradlinc 5y ago
  I was disappointed the first time I took mushrooms because I didn't see pink elephants. I thought I hadn't taken a high enough dosage. In its place I took a deep trip that allowed me to reflect on where I was in my life, which was more profound then seeing pink elephants. Oddly it too me a couple of weeks to realize that was the point.
celticninja 5y ago
Most people when tripping wil be fully aware that they are tripping, and therefore usually more careful than if you were drunk. Of course I'm reminded of Bill Hicks who cautioned, "when on drugs, if you think you can fly, take off from the ground"
klyrs 5y ago
My dad had some pretty wild stories about near-death misadventures. He stopped after he came home tripping and my mom made him change a diaper... I learned from these stories: don't drive on hallucinogens, and don't trip when you've got real-life responsibilities.
- stavros 5y ago
  Driving on hallucinogens? Whenever I've taken LSD it was quite clear that I couldn't and shouldn't drive. It's not like alcohol, where you think you can drive. With LSD you very clearly have the presence of mind to know you can't.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Well... the set of things we find self-evident today are not the same as those from the 70s... but once, he did realize that he shouldn't be driving. So he pulled over, and climbed down a 50' cliff down to the beach to walk home. Which, I kinda find incredible: last time I was tripping near a cliff, I noticed that the height appeared to be getting short enough to jump down, so I advised my sitter that we should change locations. Oh, and it bears mentioning that folks who do drugs recreationally tend to mix hallucinogens with other substances. LSD on its own is comparably clear-headed, but I've known people to mix it with weed, cocaine, mdma, etc... and who knows what's going to sound like a good idea.
jinjin2 5y ago
Last year there was a pretty public case of a guy dying during a ceremony where they used psychedelic toad venom. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52920291.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52920291.amp
- tyingq 5y ago
  Ah, that's a bad decision while sober, before taking anything, though. Different category.
toomanydoubts 5y ago
Once, I ate 9 grams of dried shrooms, which is something like 3-4x the average dosage and almost double of what's called an heroic dose. I went into the most intense trip I ever had. During the trip, I called a friend because I was kinda scared, he said that if I hadn't told him about the shrooms, he would've thought I was completely sober. Now, give me a couple of beers and I'll be slurring in no time.
defaultname 5y ago
"You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though" When stories do come out, they tend to be over the top. For instance- https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-manslaughter-in-death-of-his-father/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-mansla... People with certain conditions should stay away from psychedelics. Having said that, as others said a normal experience does not include hallucinations of the cliche "see weird crazy things that aren't there" variety. Instead you get more of an experience from patterns, music seems richer, colours deeper, etc. Our brain dulls reality for us as a evolutionary benefit to allow us to focus our brainpower only on changes/unique things (e.g. the predator sneaking up in our periphery). Shrooms roll that back a bit so suddenly the pattern on a blanket, the branches on a tree, or the backing track in a piece of music, or even the varying white points of lights, comes front and center. In many ways it's like experiencing things with fresh eyes and ears, and that really is the delight of the experience, de-jading our senses. This can be a disadvantage if you're doing something safety critical and suddenly you're amazed how you never noticed the features of some thing, distracting your attention. No one should ever drive or do dangerous things under the influence. The evolutionary benefit allows us to focus attention in a way that keeps us and those around us safe. But from a judgment perspective, I am a fairly average chess player (I mean among active players), and under the influence of shrooms I play at the same level as not. I manage time as well, etc. I have programmed some critical code that I later marvel over on shrooms. This is wholly different from under the influence of alcohol, for instance, where my ability drops precipitously.
acchow 5y ago
People drink alcohol and then try to do things like catch a subway train to get home - possibly while still drinking more. Psychedelic users don’t really behave this way. If you’re planning to trip so hard that you can’t actually see reality anymore, people plan for this and do it in a safe space. People also dose their trips - they know how much they’ll be taking that day. With alcohol, it seems people just keep pouring more down their throats as they get drunker.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Alcohol is a depressant. It reduces your awareness. It even reduces your awareness of how drunk you are. It gives you pleasure and then you feel the need to drink more to stay in that pleasurable state. The idea that your actions might have consequences doesn't much enter your mind because alcohol depresses your thinking. You think less and you observe less when you are drunk. That is dangerous.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I remember trying to imagine what it would be like before ever having taken any. Even the word "hallucinate" is misleading here. It's much more involved than that. It's also specific to the compounds and how they act on your body. They're not all the same, although similar molecules are similar. Specifically from tryptamines (ayahuasca/DMT, psilocybin, LSD, morning glory, etc) you don't hear about crazy accidents because they don't "do that" to you, they're not like that. You'd have to experience them to really understand, but I wouldn't say they leave your judgment in tact in the way you'd expect, but they do leave it in tact in the sense that matters, you're probably not going to find yourself running naked down the street from taking mushrooms or thinking you can fly and jumping off a building.
colechristensen 5y ago
Bad things do happen but hallucinogens tend to make you just not want to do misadventurous things. Like “I’d like to go walk to the store on the corner and get a sandwich, but that seems like it would be a little too intense right now” is a common sort of thought. Yes driving would be quite dangerous but it’s usually also quite an undesirable experience and your reason just isn’t so inhibited like with alcohol or many other kinds of drugs.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place? I have a group of friends in the medical field in emergency rooms. They actually see a lot of people coming through the doors with psychedelic-induced issues, either directly or by injuring themselves. Higher psychedelic doses tend to be relatively debilitating, though, so it somewhat limits what people can do on them. Sadly this means many of the accidents are more likely to progress to death because the person isn't thinking clearly enough to extract themself from the situation (drowning, house on fire, weather exposure, lost in the woods, etc.)

by tyingq 5y ago

beej71 5y ago

From what I hear, the idea of doing anything complex like driving a car is extremely unappealing under the effects of mushrooms.

convolvatron 5y ago
I've wrecked a car on mushrooms...not-really-driving like a maniac with a bunch of friends hanging out the windows was arguably the most fun I ever had.
damontal 5y ago
It’s hard to concentrate on traffic when the clouds appear to be in flames.

CPLX 5y ago

1) They’re not addictive in the classic sense where people are habituated and have to take them every day. 2) As far as I know there’s no straightforward way to test for them and I’d have to assume people who are high on psychedelics that get into an accident aren’t excited to volunteer the information.

BrianOnHN 5y ago

It can be quite tough to get out of your seat on sufficient mushrooms, which limits many possibilities of misadventures.

c54 5y ago

The hallucination affected by psychedelics such as mushrooms isn't what you might expect. It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there". There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room. Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of varying complexity and intensity. The patterns may seem to shift and meld into eachother in a kind of loop... Psychonaut wiki[0] has several approximations of varying quality, a lot of the gifs in particular (the cat lying on the couch and the wolf drinking) resonate with me. Sensory input can also include audio hallucinations, as well as perceptions that are simply normally filtered out of our experience by our brains--a sense of the organs inside your body, or the teeth in your mouth, or whatever. A lot of the effects are mental, prompting often amusing and revelatory departures from your normal thought patterns. Everything old is new again. You may find yourself deeply examining the complexity of your hands, or the bizarre fact that we're not always "like this", or in deep awe of the staggering complexity of civilization or the chemical machines that are our bodies. That kind of thing. The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful. Media portrayal of this varies but some shows do hit it quite on the head, actually Mad Men has an interesting trip episode that understates the visual component and emphasizes the mental[1]. Broad city's was particularly colorful and fun (S4e4, full ep. isn't on youtube). Some media can give you a bit of a taste of the experience, others grossly exaggerate it or flat out misrepresent it. You know how it goes. [0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelics#Morphing https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelic... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU

Bradlinc 5y ago
I was disappointed the first time I took mushrooms because I didn't see pink elephants. I thought I hadn't taken a high enough dosage. In its place I took a deep trip that allowed me to reflect on where I was in my life, which was more profound then seeing pink elephants. Oddly it too me a couple of weeks to realize that was the point.

celticninja 5y ago

Most people when tripping wil be fully aware that they are tripping, and therefore usually more careful than if you were drunk. Of course I'm reminded of Bill Hicks who cautioned, "when on drugs, if you think you can fly, take off from the ground"

klyrs 5y ago

My dad had some pretty wild stories about near-death misadventures. He stopped after he came home tripping and my mom made him change a diaper... I learned from these stories: don't drive on hallucinogens, and don't trip when you've got real-life responsibilities.

stavros 5y ago
Driving on hallucinogens? Whenever I've taken LSD it was quite clear that I couldn't and shouldn't drive. It's not like alcohol, where you think you can drive. With LSD you very clearly have the presence of mind to know you can't.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Well... the set of things we find self-evident today are not the same as those from the 70s... but once, he did realize that he shouldn't be driving. So he pulled over, and climbed down a 50' cliff down to the beach to walk home. Which, I kinda find incredible: last time I was tripping near a cliff, I noticed that the height appeared to be getting short enough to jump down, so I advised my sitter that we should change locations. Oh, and it bears mentioning that folks who do drugs recreationally tend to mix hallucinogens with other substances. LSD on its own is comparably clear-headed, but I've known people to mix it with weed, cocaine, mdma, etc... and who knows what's going to sound like a good idea.

jinjin2 5y ago

Last year there was a pretty public case of a guy dying during a ceremony where they used psychedelic toad venom. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52920291.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52920291.amp

tyingq 5y ago
Ah, that's a bad decision while sober, before taking anything, though. Different category.

toomanydoubts 5y ago

Once, I ate 9 grams of dried shrooms, which is something like 3-4x the average dosage and almost double of what's called an heroic dose. I went into the most intense trip I ever had. During the trip, I called a friend because I was kinda scared, he said that if I hadn't told him about the shrooms, he would've thought I was completely sober. Now, give me a couple of beers and I'll be slurring in no time.

defaultname 5y ago

"You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though" When stories do come out, they tend to be over the top. For instance- https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-manslaughter-in-death-of-his-father/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-mansla... People with certain conditions should stay away from psychedelics. Having said that, as others said a normal experience does not include hallucinations of the cliche "see weird crazy things that aren't there" variety. Instead you get more of an experience from patterns, music seems richer, colours deeper, etc. Our brain dulls reality for us as a evolutionary benefit to allow us to focus our brainpower only on changes/unique things (e.g. the predator sneaking up in our periphery). Shrooms roll that back a bit so suddenly the pattern on a blanket, the branches on a tree, or the backing track in a piece of music, or even the varying white points of lights, comes front and center. In many ways it's like experiencing things with fresh eyes and ears, and that really is the delight of the experience, de-jading our senses. This can be a disadvantage if you're doing something safety critical and suddenly you're amazed how you never noticed the features of some thing, distracting your attention. No one should ever drive or do dangerous things under the influence. The evolutionary benefit allows us to focus attention in a way that keeps us and those around us safe. But from a judgment perspective, I am a fairly average chess player (I mean among active players), and under the influence of shrooms I play at the same level as not. I manage time as well, etc. I have programmed some critical code that I later marvel over on shrooms. This is wholly different from under the influence of alcohol, for instance, where my ability drops precipitously.

acchow 5y ago

People drink alcohol and then try to do things like catch a subway train to get home - possibly while still drinking more. Psychedelic users don’t really behave this way. If you’re planning to trip so hard that you can’t actually see reality anymore, people plan for this and do it in a safe space. People also dose their trips - they know how much they’ll be taking that day. With alcohol, it seems people just keep pouring more down their throats as they get drunker.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Alcohol is a depressant. It reduces your awareness. It even reduces your awareness of how drunk you are. It gives you pleasure and then you feel the need to drink more to stay in that pleasurable state. The idea that your actions might have consequences doesn't much enter your mind because alcohol depresses your thinking. You think less and you observe less when you are drunk. That is dangerous.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I remember trying to imagine what it would be like before ever having taken any. Even the word "hallucinate" is misleading here. It's much more involved than that. It's also specific to the compounds and how they act on your body. They're not all the same, although similar molecules are similar. Specifically from tryptamines (ayahuasca/DMT, psilocybin, LSD, morning glory, etc) you don't hear about crazy accidents because they don't "do that" to you, they're not like that. You'd have to experience them to really understand, but I wouldn't say they leave your judgment in tact in the way you'd expect, but they do leave it in tact in the sense that matters, you're probably not going to find yourself running naked down the street from taking mushrooms or thinking you can fly and jumping off a building.

colechristensen 5y ago

Bad things do happen but hallucinogens tend to make you just not want to do misadventurous things. Like “I’d like to go walk to the store on the corner and get a sandwich, but that seems like it would be a little too intense right now” is a common sort of thought. Yes driving would be quite dangerous but it’s usually also quite an undesirable experience and your reason just isn’t so inhibited like with alcohol or many other kinds of drugs.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place? I have a group of friends in the medical field in emergency rooms. They actually see a lot of people coming through the doors with psychedelic-induced issues, either directly or by injuring themselves. Higher psychedelic doses tend to be relatively debilitating, though, so it somewhat limits what people can do on them. Sadly this means many of the accidents are more likely to progress to death because the person isn't thinking clearly enough to extract themself from the situation (drowning, house on fire, weather exposure, lost in the woods, etc.)