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At what dose does LSD begin to exhibit more negative side effects?

Magickduck said:
I will say from the sheer amount of people I have met who have taken too much LSD
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What evidence do you have they actually have taken all this LSD tho duck? I mean there's a million and one teenagers who see a mentally ill guy go past and someone says "He took too much LSD and never came back dude". They do it with Syd Barrett, Peter Green etc. Why do they say such bullshit? Because it sounds a lot more exciting than saying "He's a schizophrenic dude, just like a million other people who've never been near LSD in their life".
 
not taking enough can almost be worse than taking too much sometimes. i hate taking a low dose and getting caught in between just feeling good and fully tripping. acid is a funny drug like that
 
A friend of mine went extremely mentally ill (to the point of hallucinating, thinking close friends were poisoning food, etc) I attribute this to have reached it's peak by a strong LSD trip in which he ate at least 15 blotter that were probably 70ug at least or higher.

However, in saying that, there was a noticeable change in behavior prior to this and tripping also brought it out during intellectual chats (very paranoid/conspiracy/inward/freak outs/etc).

However, can't no for sure because immediately after this he moved into a 24/7 party house were people weren't aware of his mental health and fed him more drugs - particularly MDMA (when we went a bit odd just assumed he was talking wipeout shit). It was finally attributed to stimulant psychosis after many months, sectioned and now living as normal a life as possible I hear although on medication.

While not entirely related, I thought this was an interesting study on negative effects of LSD however I in no way condone it:
http://neurodiversity.com/library_bender_1962.html
and
http://neurodiversity.com/library_abramson_1967.html

Recommend full PDF.
 
The negative effects are dependent on the individual, which includes factors such as how fast it clears a person's body (relating to their metabolism), dosing frequency and quantity, any pre-existing mental conditions or dispositions, their lifestyle and drug use trends, etc.

I have no history of psychosis but after doing monthly heavy LSD doses in the 550ug+ range for 1 year, a single bad trip was enough to put me into psychotic territory. This was because I accidentally took 800ug due to a dosing miscalculation, and my monthly heavy dosing had already fatigued my brain. In fact, at this point I strongly suspect that it was LSD use that made my dopamine system as sensitive as it is. I can't even smoke weed now without feeling strung out and depressed the next day, and this was not ever the case prior to my strong LSD use. After the accidental overdose, I was barely on this planet for a whole month and everyone I knew was worried about me. I was suicidal, detached, and had a hard time recognizing what was real; my own identity seemed murky. I felt like everything I held dear about myself was stripped away and I had become an empty yet clouded vessel. That said, I got my footing back in a month and after 3 months I was normal. Now I do LSD maybe 2-3 times a year to give my brain more time to recover.

I used to be one of those people who touted the virtues of LSD use like it was the holy grail of all drugs, and that because "no one has ever died from it" it was therefore safe to use. Yeah, maybe people don't die from it, but they can go fucking nuts in a hurry if they abuse it. People who have rapid clearance of LSD don't understand this fact because it usually is beneficial to them. Anyone with a slow metabolism who isn't VERY CAREFUL can fuck themselves over.

Personally, I am dubious of psychiatric reports that LSD is the cause of subjective mental conditions. First of all, psychiatry is not a hard science and it is filled with speculation, which also includes the treatment modalities (i.e. SSRIs). Secondly, anyone having a psychotic break who goes to the hospital or a mental ward is likely to suffer unnecessary interventions, especially if they happen to say something making the caregivers legally obligated to detain them. This is true of any illness. Sometimes the interventions are worse than the disease itself.

I was lucky in that I had a support network to get me through my bad LSD experience. I had BL, friends who checked in on me often, and I had my own medical knowledge to know what supplements to take to ease the burden. I could easily see someone with less support than me turning to a hospital or psych ward, which is how we end up with the reporting on LSD that we have.

LSD, in the wrong hands, is psychological warfare. I won't ever back down from that statement after my own experience with it. I don't think it should be criminal to possess LSD, but it's one psychedelic that requires great responsibility, especially in the higher doses.

Don't get me wrong, I still love LSD and will always be an avid user of it, but man... I learned the hard way that you shouldn't play with fire. More is not better -- really, it isn't.
 
IMO negative effects on LSD happen if you dose too low. have to keep it above 150ugs.
 
You use lsd every week. Fuck. Tolerance would build up like a mother fucker making the 5 hits of 150ug probably half as powerful than it really is. Making the dose around 375ug give or take a few, lets say 350ug. Im sure there are threads on tolerance but i was understanding that it takes atleat 14 days for tolerance to go back to normal. just saying if he said he takes it weekly then the dose would only be half as strong as he suggested. i personally like to wait a month at least between trips as the mental aspect of tripping regurlary really dulls down the experince for me.

Back to the original question as everyone has said it completley depends on you in every way. I cant say you will be fine cause i dont know you, so good luck.

As for lsd making people mentally ill or crazy i think pot has a lot more psychosis aspects espically know that thc levels in it are so high and levels of cbd so low. I just dont think lsd can ever be the complete blame in someone losing it. There genetics, diet, constant smoking weed and experimenting to regulary is more likely the reason not just the use of lsd.
 
Hm, I think generally a week is enough for tolerance to subside - obviously if you trip weekly for a very extended period of time (more than a few months) you're probably going acclimate to the effects and some residual tolerance might build up but a week has always been enough to where I never noticed any tolerance.
 
Ismene said:
What evidence do you have they actually have taken all this LSD tho duck? I mean there's a million and one teenagers who see a mentally ill guy go past and someone says "He took too much LSD and never came back dude". They do it with Syd Barrett, Peter Green etc. Why do they say such bullshit? Because it sounds a lot more exciting than saying "He's a schizophrenic dude, just like a million other people who've never been near LSD in their life".
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The rate of people who just werent right was pretty high in gratful dead parking lot. Its popular now to say all those people had pre existing mental illness. I disagree, unless crazy people have a thing for jam bands their presence was higher than normal. Thats just my opinion, i have no papers to back it up. If it makes you feel better most of these acid casulties did alot over a long period. I have never seen anyone take two hits and go crazy and not come back.
5 hits of 100 mic hits is alot, I know lots of long time users who wont even do half that. At least with benzos you wont have to face any consequences to your actions. I think a bummer on 5 hits would wake your ass up to how much this really is, but hey you have way to chicken out if it gets too heavy. My opinion you arent ready but taking the back door to the experience without earning it. Someone else said it best take 2,3, and 4 hits first. At least once for eash dosage.
 
my3rdeye said:
The rate of people who just werent right was pretty high in gratful dead parking lot. Its popular now to say all those people had pre existing mental illness. I disagree, unless crazy people have a thing for jam bands their presence was higher than normal.
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It's tricky diagnosing someones mental health status from a glance at them in a dead parking lot tho. It usually takes a team of professionals a month or two of constant observation to get anywhere close to an accurate diagnosis.
 
A lot of scare mongering going on in this thread.

If you are a grown up person with a normal mental health, LSD won't make you go crazy. It'll just make you see colors and laugh at stuff untill the effects go away. Taking it everyday won't make you crazy either, it'll just stop working.

Proof? of cause there's no proof. Except literally thousands of people taking LSD all over the world everyday with out going crazy. sure, there's always the odd nut job who will get his psychosis exacerbate by LSD and end up in the looney bin.

it's a myth from the 60's "LSD is like goin' to fry your brain, maaan" Granted though, doses in single blotters were a lot higher back then.
 
Ismene said:
What evidence do you have they actually have taken all this LSD tho duck? I mean there's a million and one teenagers who see a mentally ill guy go past and someone says "He took too much LSD and never came back dude". They do it with Syd Barrett, Peter Green etc. Why do they say such bullshit? Because it sounds a lot more exciting than saying "He's a schizophrenic dude, just like a million other people who've never been near LSD in their life".
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I am talking personal experiance with friends and family/associates.
 
Magickduck said:
I am talking personal experiance with friends and family/associates.
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Difficult to take "evidence" like that too seriously tho. John Lennon said he took LSD a thousand times and never had a problem, or ever knew anyone who ever had any problem and I imagine Lennon knew quite a few more acidheads than you.
 
I gotta disagree with that. He had numerous break downs from tripping. Not only shattered ego into heroin abuse and being passive musically, but shamanistic ritual phases where he forced his wife to trip and gathered people together to claim he was jesus. I'm down with far out art as well but some of that shit with yoko ono got pretty strange i'd say.
 
Foreigner said:
The negative effects are dependent on the individual, which includes factors such as how fast it clears a person's body (relating to their metabolism), dosing frequency and quantity, any pre-existing mental conditions or dispositions, their lifestyle and drug use trends, etc.

I have no history of psychosis but after doing monthly heavy LSD doses in the 550ug+ range for 1 year, a single bad trip was enough to put me into psychotic territory. This was because I accidentally took 800ug due to a dosing miscalculation, and my monthly heavy dosing had already fatigued my brain. In fact, at this point I strongly suspect that it was LSD use that made my dopamine system as sensitive as it is. I can't even smoke weed now without feeling strung out and depressed the next day, and this was not ever the case prior to my strong LSD use. After the accidental overdose, I was barely on this planet for a whole month and everyone I knew was worried about me. I was suicidal, detached, and had a hard time recognizing what was real; my own identity seemed murky. I felt like everything I held dear about myself was stripped away and I had become an empty yet clouded vessel. That said, I got my footing back in a month and after 3 months I was normal. Now I do LSD maybe 2-3 times a year to give my brain more time to recover.

I used to be one of those people who touted the virtues of LSD use like it was the holy grail of all drugs, and that because "no one has ever died from it" it was therefore safe to use. Yeah, maybe people don't die from it, but they can go fucking nuts in a hurry if they abuse it. People who have rapid clearance of LSD don't understand this fact because it usually is beneficial to them. Anyone with a slow metabolism who isn't VERY CAREFUL can fuck themselves over.

Personally, I am dubious of psychiatric reports that LSD is the cause of subjective mental conditions. First of all, psychiatry is not a hard science and it is filled with speculation, which also includes the treatment modalities (i.e. SSRIs). Secondly, anyone having a psychotic break who goes to the hospital or a mental ward is likely to suffer unnecessary interventions, especially if they happen to say something making the caregivers legally obligated to detain them. This is true of any illness. Sometimes the interventions are worse than the disease itself.

I was lucky in that I had a support network to get me through my bad LSD experience. I had BL, friends who checked in on me often, and I had my own medical knowledge to know what supplements to take to ease the burden. I could easily see someone with less support than me turning to a hospital or psych ward, which is how we end up with the reporting on LSD that we have.

LSD, in the wrong hands, is psychological warfare. I won't ever back down from that statement after my own experience with it. I don't think it should be criminal to possess LSD, but it's one psychedelic that requires great responsibility, especially in the higher doses.

Don't get me wrong, I still love LSD and will always be an avid user of it, but man... I learned the hard way that you shouldn't play with fire. More is not better -- really, it isn't.
Click to expand...

I can agree with this.

While a single LSD experience is extremely unlikely to precipitate mental illness in those without a predisposition to such, it can precipitate certain ( most likely temporary) psychiatric conditions in those who use it far too regularly.

It is extremely safe, yet extremely dangerous in the wrong hands, or when done in the wrong conditions. It's nowhere near playing with fire (I hate that whole "you never know when you are going to have a bad trip line," IMO you do know, and there isn't a substantial difference between a good trip and a bad one --safe set and setting provided -- if you bring the right mindset), but there are risks, and these risks are substantial if the substance gets into the wrong hands.

I'm actually preparing, some time in the near future, to trip for the first time in years, as I abstained for a long time due to feeling as though my life were too chaotic, my emotional state too unstable, to reasonably expect anything good to come out of tripping. Plus, I began to notice diminishing returns in terms of the overall long-term benefits I was receiving from LSD and other hallucinogens, and this was just dosing every two weeks to a month.

I've also seen hallucinogens do horrible shit, and it was my responsibility. I no longer encourage their use in people who are not already curious enough to become somewhat educated about them.
 
ParappaTheRapper said:
I gotta disagree with that. He had numerous break downs from tripping. Not only shattered ego into heroin abuse and being passive musically, but shamanistic ritual phases where he forced his wife to trip and gathered people together to claim he was jesus. I'm down with far out art as well but some of that shit with yoko ono got pretty strange i'd say.
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Nah, he didn't have any breakdowns from tripping and he didn't force anyone to claim he was jesus. I think you're confusing what he said just after he came out of primal therapy when he said he "destroyed his ego" on acid (primal therapy is notoriously anti-LSD), and when he went into a Beatles meeting once and said "I'm Jesus, this is my thing". He forgot about it 2 days later.

This is what he said in 1980 when he'd gone off primal therapy:

We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD, by the way. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn't it? They brought out LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. But it sure as hell performs them. If you look a the government report book on acid, the only ones who jumped out of windows because of it were the ones in the Army. I never knew anybody who jumped out of a window or killed themselves because of it.
I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything.
 
Well ill report back here and eventually write a TR.
The first part of the trip was fine. Visuals weren't as intense as expected, it was way more intoxicated and heavy on the auditory hallucinations. I had some great thoughts and realized what life really is and should be about, although my short term memory was terrible so I hardly remember it. I was having a conversation with my friend which apparently wasn't actually happening, I was speaking in very incomplete sentences and he didn't understand or respond, but I hallucinated that he was. He got freaked out and left, I didn't realize until he was gone and at that moment I went completely insane. A lot happened from here but I ended up naked on someone's lawn where cops found me and I was escorted to a hospital. They IV'd me Valium, I came down, and was fine after that with no lasting negative effects.
 
From what you're saying, doesn't really sound like it was worth it then does it?

If you forgot all your great thoughts and realisations, then all you really got out of it was a criminal record, and a nice hospital bill.

EDIT: public nudity in the states or UK counts as indecent exposure and can land you on the sex offenders list too, so I hope you're in a more liberal country than that, for your sake.

EDIT2: Quite true kidklmx, I'd imagine there'd be some big re-thinking of personal values after an event like that in your life.
 
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