So many people say acid fries your brain, but i have yet to notice any changes.
I remember being prescribed a decongestant. I took it for 4 days and then noticed it was getting hard to swallow.
I located a lesion in my pharynx and did a search on the medicine and found out that it was a very-rare side effect and so was not reported to consumers. As a consumer I was also a test subject.
Fortunately I uncovered it myself. It was not caused by the normal course of my illness, and actually, in one study it was not a rare side effect. I managed to report all this to my doctor.
You would most likely take that medicine and not have any issues.
If I was prone to say such unenlightened things, I might tell you to stay away from it because "it will burn a hole in your throat." If I wanted to make a goofy movie about it, the decongestant would be replaced by vampire bats or a crazed doctor digging into people's larynx with a rusty scalpel.
Of course, LSD does not literally burn holes in your throat and annihilate the world in some kind of an atomic flash.
However, you have got test subjects who were developing psychosis, which has all sorts of issues ranging from chronic anxiety to memory problems and paranoia - a real serious mental health issue, and flashbacks which were hallucinations.
So you get the layman terminology coming out of personal use that LSD burns holes in your brain and people permanently tripping and murdering people.
Is it true?
First I would look at the animal testing. They gave large doses of LSD to rats for 8 days straight and it gave them brain damage. It lowered the density of a rat's seretogenic receptors.
Of course in earlier studies they were simply killing the lab rats.
You may be thinking, "What a bunch of idiots, I am not doing a ton of acid for 8 days!", you wouldn't be able to kill yourself either, but that is how animal testing works. The rats, which do not vomit, are of a certain breed and they are measured so we have consistent data for all drugs. They go through extreme testing to make the harm being done more obvious.
Rats are actually related to humans well enough (blasphemy!) to clue us into what was occurring in the human test subjects.
Now, these experiments were in the 50's and 60's and the data is lacking by today's standards. But these were not rare conditions. In the case of psychosis the average of all testing subjects psychosis was occuring in about 0.14% of cases.
There can be some doubts introduced that will diminish this claim. One concern is that people were only attributing a natural other illness to the effects of LSD. LSD is an experience and people tend to give it too much credit. Even under careful scrutiny, this could only be true in about half of those cases (0.07% if you are math illiterate).
From some clinical trials, under supervision, the prevelance of psychosis was as high as 4.7%.
Based on evidence in the general population, emergency rooms, the incidence could be 5 times the amount seen in clinical trials.[Abraham, 1993]
So you see, in all modesty, this psychosis is not a rare occurrence and can reasonably be called a common occurrence (between 1% and 10%).
Flashbacks, on the other hand, are a common occurence. They were poorly described earlier but are now called HPPD.
The evidence from the rats shows this something happening inside the brain, although what exactly is happening is a bit hard to say.
Either of these conditions could affect someone for the rest of their life. The individual odds of that are actually fairly good.
So this all boils down to agencies warning people that LSD is a terrible drug. Which the majority of people will disagree with, because:
A) People don't care about the mentally ill.
B) The drug does not cause many people these symptoms.
C) The majority of people, at most, may experience a few "bad trips" (a subjective definition) and think that is all there is to these rumours.
D) Symptoms underreported by users; especially paranoid crazy people.
Now should it be called brain damage? I would imagine yes. This is something permanent in your brain that is being altered to produce negative effects.
But it does not effect everyone. You may continue being unaffected, or your luck might run out. There is not enough clinical data to say for certain.
Glad you asked?
