2 ms·
I'm sympathetic to the impulse, and I think it's a good one to be skeptical of things like that when they conflict with anecdotal evidence. However, I think you
by darawk 4y ago
I'm sympathetic to the impulse, and I think it's a good one to be skeptical of things like that when they conflict with anecdotal evidence. However, I think you have to look at the context of the anecdata in this case to conclude that it's probably better to rely on empirical data.
The paper I linked even discusses this a bit - the problem is that psychedelics are an intense experience, and they have this reputation for causing psychosis (helped along by the drug war lies, naturally), and so people tend to attribute subsequent psychiatric issues to their psychedelic experience, inappropriately.
I'd ask you regarding your anecdata, do you actually know someone personally who you witnessed this happen to, or is it more like "a friend of a friend" had this happen, and told you about it? I've never personally known someone to whom this has happened, but like you, I've heard my fair share of tall tales from the gossip mill. It's just that, in this particular instance, I think it's pretty likely that the stories are just that - stories.
- jack_pp 4y agoYes, I know someone directly that had suicidal tendencies for months after a couple of years of binging on weed, some lsd precursor I'm forgetting and mushrooms. He's fine now thankfully but he went through hell.
- darawk 4y ago"Years of binging on weed and 'some lsd precursor'" are not exactly the same thing as traditional plant based psychedelics. The only LSD precursor you could be referring to is Ergotamine (rye fungus), which is pretty well known to be toxic. If you're talking about years of binging on mind altering substances, it's a virtual certainty that there were underlying psychiatric issues causing that. You can't simply conclude that because one thing came after the other, the drugs caused it, when we're talking about years of abuse.
- jack_pp 4y agoI've known him for 20 years, he didn't have any psychiatric issues at all before he started doing psychedelics often. He went deep into Terrance McKenna videos and had high ambitions to bend reality through his will and drug trips, this was fueled by magick videos and the like, got into crystals, all that crap. The "lsd" was ald-52.
- derangedHorse 4y agoI personally know 2 people who suffered from a bad trip. One who thought demons were out for them for about a month and another who just had some wild mood swings for a couple weeks afterwards. Both were temporary but the effects of a bad trip are no joke. There's one other extreme example where someone I'm acquainted with did a lot of psychedelics over the course of a summer who seems permanently changed (although not ill or non-functioning in any way) but there's too much that could've happened outside the drug use that summer that could have affected him for me attribute those changes to drugs (although many other friends did).