LSD - does anyone agree? (argument about LSD being unhealthy)

[《Plasticity》]

Yeah I'm still waiting for you to answer my questions, you do alot of beating around the bush for someone with such a strong opinion. Don't play dumb, all my posts were very clear so tell me, what makes you think the way you do about LSD? My guess is you had a difficult experience and failed to make the connection to what you felt during this trip and what's going on in your life. Your bitter post about jail doing no harm is also very retarted. In fact I would go as far as to say that jails themselves are typically more harmful than the drugs the prisoner was incarcerated for but that's another thread so we can stick to this topic. I just brought that up as example that you seem to have a very grim outlook on life.

 

[nuttynutskin]

I'll probably never do any drugs now besides alcohol but I wish I would've had more respect for acid when I was in high school. Like I think someone else said it's neither good or bad but it's definitely not recreational imo. I ran into trouble because I was just doing it way too much. If I still did drugs I would probably only do it once a month at most. I don't believe doing it all the time is good for anyone. Just talk to an acid head, they sound like morons.

 

[Solipsis]

It is tricky to try and teach yourself how to learn how to handle use of psychedelics properly, there are plenty of traps and potential issues. And occasionally like CptKratom now says again and I hinted at, there are exceedingly difficult experiences people have to deal with. In my case it was mushrooms that sparked an existential crisis that lasted for years and I never really recovered from it.
However I have come to see where I am myself at fault and on the other hand how and why it is better to just learn to live and accept some things. I don't live in the past and I don't worry about my own guilt, etc. Despite the trauma I have I would not blame psychedelics for being degenerate drugs.
They are instead powerful tools and accidents happen with all kinds of powerful tools. Not only purely coincidental accidents but also things that happen as a result of the flaws and folley of man and the fact that we have to learn to live life as it happens to us.

e.g. Nuclear power can be used to generate electricity but also as a weapon. It would be simple and jaded to call nuclear fission as a physical phenomenon a bad thing, that says more about ourselves than about nature. Similarly when you call LSD unhealthy it says a lot about the experiences you had with it. Even if you made the simple mistake of taking marginally too much and knowing to little about the fargoing spiritual potential and possible psychological repercussions (as in my case), just the second time you ever tripped.. that can cost you dearly.
We shouldn't blame ourselves for such unavoidable ignorance but it would be best if people could learn from such a mistake, whether it be the mistake others made or they made themselves. It was fate / coincidence that I happen to be a very sensitive person who apparently could not afford making a mistake my second trip ever.

p.s. I edited the thread title - always create a descriptive title so that people know what it is about, how to find it better, etc.

 

[elucidator]

Very well said. ^^^

LSD is not healthy and frankly, when you begin to really understand it, then you learn that it is a less interesting way to experience life, it deprives the mind, and in the long term has negative effects, like confusion and depression, that need to be disclosed at all times.

Entirely subjective, and has a lot to do with the way you use it.

Here is a quote from my favourite movie, Waking Life, which I feel may be applicable to your situation.

.An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness.

 

[pmoseman]

I am only curious as to what people have experienced and trying to see if my experience was in fact influenced by LSD or if it was something else. The implications of this can be profound, it moves a mountain of unreconcilable logic that I am certain would just drive you guys scratching up the wall, since pointing out a few minor flaws has gotten very acidic reactions already.
It is important to me what you do know, but do not try and debunk ME based on the stances I take. You just have to get a feel for how I interpret things in a hyper literal sense.
Deep down I am really just a warm hearted gooey ball.

 

[sean107]

NBOMe being passed of as LSD I can say could lead to people believing this, NBOMe made me and other become unhealthy, sometimes aggressive, and also worsened my bi-polar. Classics like LSD, mescaline, and mushrooms only ever benefited me though.

 

[pmoseman]

You're still twisting his words to avoid answering the question. And attacking his "internal logic" when it was clear what he was saying.

And yes, what some consider a benefit of LSD others consider harmful, that's why it's illegal. Look at the history of LSD and the people who were against it. Ego death inherently challenges the status quo in this country. There's a reason it leads many people to Eastern religious practices and away from Western dogmatic bullshit.
Listen to what Bill Hicks had to say about drugs, get a sense of humor, and then come back.

I think people see dogmatic visit for what it is long before ever taking LSD.

 

[lovepsychadelics]

It can cause cardiac problems as with any drug that binds to 5htp2 receptor sites ie tachycardia. Prolonged use can cause mental health issues. Piss poor manufacturing can cause some nasty acid farts. In general any drug can be unhealthy. Is it as unhealthy as the speed ball River OD'd on of coke and heroin... perhaps not. However it's unhealthy as fuck for people with an existing mental health issue and more than 1 or 2 individuals have "flown" or perhaps just committed suicide of tall buildings or crashed cars while high on LSD. Many more have done so while piss drunk.

So yes it is unhealthy but so is eating McDonalds breakfast lunch and dinner for 15 years. LSD is probably less unhealthy than eating junk food 3 meals a day, unless you eat LSD for three meals a day. It's all relative to dose, dose frequency, mental health, not driving a car while high, etc, etc, etc. To say it's harmless is false advertising but put it in context and the risks are minor if you are able to ensure your mental state/health is ok, dose is ok, don't drive or climb high buildings etc.

How high a dose for ego death??? For me dangerously high ones. When the carpet merges with you and becomes you and the ceiling is a part of you and it breathes with you... Very high doses of NOT LSD I assure you LSD is mild IMO. Fuck I even IV'd LSD tabs and spent a few hours sitting in a fucking cold shower I was cooking in my own skin and no "ego loss". I usually equate ego loss with "heroic" doses, I'm sorry stupidly, dangerously high doses of drugs. Anyway off my soap box as the manic street preacher, each to their own just be careful and don't do dangerously high doses to achieve something that is not really all that rewarding IMO. Others will disagree but that is my opinion.

BTW you can go beyond "ego death" and the "machine elves" into a far deeper space with even higher doses of drugs, malaria fever, other life threatening fever delusions etc. Meet the black wolf or whatever spirit animal or spirit guides you to the afterlife...

 

[RVAbrowntownRVA]

It changed me for sure some ways good some not so much.

 

[pmoseman]

Dude it seems like your desperately trying to use our words in your favor and it's incredibly transparent. What's your history with LSD and what makes you look at it the way you do? How's your life situation? I've never seen someone who is truely happy in life become depressed after LSD... MDMA yes but not LSD.

I stopped doing mushroom and acid and it seems very likely that my problems began with giving up friends and activities associated with these drugs.
I do not think my depression was out of the ordinary and I think I handled it reasonably well, even though I still do not understand the whole meaning behind it.
I realized fun while I was flunking out of college. It was irresponsible, but I was simply not ready and had other issues to de as l with. What I needed was an escape, a real escape and a real friendship, which I attained some time later. Depression did not sink in until I encountered this strange mental block. You could say I had penned up anger for getting isolated all my time through school. But it is hsrd to say. It seemed as though I was finally dealing with these issues at the time, and have since become more of a socially relatable person.
Seeking to understand others.
At the last semester of school, I found I could just ignore basically everything and get along fine. I had all my basic needs and have continued basically without a physical complaint since then. This attitude followed a profound experience, which follows a short period of drug use and was followed by some awfulb repeating voice in my head saying the weird fag. Even after my life started falling apart I could not get myself out of the rut of being a mental zombie, and if I tried to explain this to you at the time it what's going on, I just wouldn't know what to say.
Thewe're lot of things that just seemed out of my control. Now I am back in the headspace where I feel like complicated again but with a sense of normalcy.
I definitely considered it as possible that my past drug use had contributed to my mental lockdown. Though how they add up is a big mystery.
Am I going to say my best buds from a few years back are just not cool unless they were all drink or high? No. Nor am I do I consider myself any better or worse than any one of them. But I do think we could have hung out and done all those things sober. That it's all I am saying. That would have been better, but feeling depressed made almost any relationships unbearable. It is easy to get depressed with the way life is, or does life seem the way it is because I am depressed? I think life is just depressing, because humanity is idiots.
So I gained friendships that I lost, but those friendships are important. So what?
Well. That seems to be about the most negative aspect of drugs. And as anyone can point out, subjective.
I can identify some of my negative life experiences to marijuana and beer and cigarettes, which I used for a number of years. The first because I started turning into a psycho whenever I smoked and also because I have memory problems, beer because of some nasty hangovers and many a bad situation (or potentially bad ones) when I drank, and cigarettes because they are addicting, expensive. And all these cause some internal damage.
So, did I any of those drugs help me? Do they affect my life now in a positive way now that I don't use them?
I spent time hanging out with people while using these and gained those experiences. Personally, it seems better to cultivate relationships sober.
So you can see my experience during that time was quite rampant. Overwhelming personal experiences. Difficult to separate but I have managed.

 

[pmoseman]

It's not going to make you depressed unless you're a shitty person and take it and realize how shitty you are. But even then it would probably just make you want to stop being a shitty person.

This seems little rough around the edges. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that you enjoy something because you're a good person. That seems a little fucked up and vain.
Although I do appreciate what you saying about LSD being a linchpin in your life, taking it as a sign and then choosing to change who you are, that is not exactly an effect of the drug.

 

[《Plasticity》]

I stopped doing mushroom and acid and it seems very likely that my problems began with giving up friends and activities associated with these drugs.
I do not think my depression was out of the ordinary and I think I handled it reasonably well, even though I still do not understand the whole meaning behind it.
I realized fun while I was flunking out of college. It was irresponsible, but I was simply not ready and had other issues to de as l with. What I needed was an escape, a real escape and a real friendship, which I attained some time later. Depression did not sink in until I encountered this strange mental block. You could say I had penned up anger for getting isolated all my time through school. But it is hsrd to say. It seemed as though I was finally dealing with these issues at the time, and have since become more of a socially relatable person.
Seeking to understand others.
At the last semester of school, I found I could just ignore basically everything and get along fine. I had all my basic needs and have continued basically without a physical complaint since then. This attitude followed a profound experience, which follows a short period of drug use and was followed by some awfulb repeating voice in my head saying the weird fag. Even after my life started falling apart I could not get myself out of the rut of being a mental zombie, and if I tried to explain this to you at the time it what's going on, I just wouldn't know what to say.
Thewe're lot of things that just seemed out of my control. Now I am back in the headspace where I feel like complicated again but with a sense of normalcy.
I definitely considered it as possible that my past drug use had contributed to my mental lockdown. Though how they add up is a big mystery.
Am I going to say my best buds from a few years back are just not cool unless they were all drink or high? No. Nor am I do I consider myself any better or worse than any one of them. But I do think we could have hung out and done all those things sober. That it's all I am saying. That would have been better, but feeling depressed made almost any relationships unbearable. It is easy to get depressed with the way life is, or does life seem the way it is because I am depressed? I think life is just depressing, because humanity is idiots.
So I gained friendships that I lost, but those friendships are important. So what?
Well. That seems to be about the most negative aspect of drugs. And as anyone can point out, subjective.
I can identify some of my negative life experiences to marijuana and beer and cigarettes, which I used for a number of years. The first because I started turning into a psycho whenever I smoked and also because I have memory problems, beer because of some nasty hangovers and many a bad situation (or potentially bad ones) when I drank, and cigarettes because they are addicting, expensive. And all these cause some internal damage.
So, did I any of those drugs help me? Do they affect my life now in a positive way now that I don't use them?
I spent time hanging out with people while using these and gained those experiences. Personally, it seems better to cultivate relationships sober.
So you can see my experience during that time was quite rampant. Overwhelming personal experiences. Difficult to separate but I have managed.

Perhaps you were already prone to mental illness and or depression, or more likely perhaps the lifestyle you were choosing to live had a negative effect on your self-esteem? Also, if you were abusing other drugs at the time then what makes you point the finger at LSD? I'll be the first to admit that tobacco, alcohol, and especially marijuana have affected me both mentally and socially. I no longer smoke tobacco and and I definately stopped dinking alcohol except the rare social occasion but I still smoke weed and it has taken a noticeable toll on my mental health. When I was smoking 24/7 in middle school I was as depressed and socially withdrawn as a child could be, many say marijuana has no effects on them and you know what, I believe em but that's not the case for me.

Do I blame marijuana for causing those problems? Fuck no, it was the fact that I was an idiot and made my life evolve around smoking pot when I should've been getting an education. All I know was that all it took was one strong LSD trip to make me realize that if shit didn't change then I was gonna be a fuckin bum, and real quick too. Unfortunately this trip didn't come until the latter end of HS and by that time i had already destroyed relationships, isolated myself, fell behind in school, and was kickin it with people that a 15 year old should NEVER hang around with. The trip was VERY rough and I can see it causing some sort of depression but only if you failed to integrate what you learned into everyday life, which let me tell you wasn't a cake walk.

What LSD did was give me a bitch slap to the face, threw all my problems in my face and it was very depressing but the moment I utilized that knowledge and made some changes I was back to the old me, inflated sense of confidence, no more self-esteem issues, and no more clouds over my head. LSD itself may have not cured my depression, it was most definately the changes I made but those changes may have never happened had I not taken LSD so for that I will always be greatfull and to this day I still use LSD as a tool. I am at a place in life that I can say makes me happy, I've got my own place, a beautiful girlfriend, and a nice job with good pay and benefits. Now when I take LSD I get a huge sense of achievement because I did it, I turned my life around and am now happy. Am I perfect? Of course not but at least I'm not the angry depressed teenager who I once was. I'm not trying to say LSD comes without it's problems but if you use them(deep psychedelics in general) as a tool and not an escape from reality like you were I can't possibly see LSD turning you towards "evil" as you say. Remember, the roughest trips are only depressing if you don't do anything to change the problems you made for yourself. Also if your prone to mental health issues or have existing health problems than don't take LSD! If you do and walk out with negative consequences then that's nobodys fault but yours.

 

[bpayne]

lsd is not inherently "unhealthy" by any means.. it has a rather benign physical effect on the body.. It can be very strong mentally.. and I suggest those with mental issues not go there because it could possibly increase the severity of them.. but as far as Physically "unhealthy" it is Not.

 

[my3rdeye]

I'll probably never do any drugs now besides alcohol but I wish I would've had more respect for acid when I was in high school. Like I think someone else said it's neither good or bad but it's definitely not recreational imo. I ran into trouble because I was just doing it way too much. If I still did drugs I would probably only do it once a month at most. I don't believe doing it all the time is good for anyone. Just talk to an acid head, they sound like morons.

Actually drunk people sound like morons, act like it too. You are the one who joined the stupid club my friend. Just because your friends on LSD are idiots doesn't mean everyone is. Look there are people who make more money thany you who are more successful by every measure and they take LSD on a regular basis. It doesn't make you stupid. Might make you crazy but it won't make you stupid. Booze does make you stupid and possibly violent and crazy too.

 

[pmoseman]

Well then, since this is such a majority of dissent in the room, I feel I should give some reasoning to perhaps persuade some people.
1. Things that are unhealthy are enjoyable, good, every once in a while. Isn't that why we say that same thing about LSD? We learn from negative experiences and consider them calculated risks.
2. Unhealthy things are damaging things. But after the damage is done, you've survived relatively intact. For example, when you run you notice they your knee feels a bit weak from your leg getting crushed, but your other pain, from a birth defect, is what stops you from running. Another example, where your face got bashed with a hammer, there is now just a little bump in the cheekbone, no surgery, nothing serious. You can get over it, see it in a good light. Clearly though, it was unhealthy.
After an unhealthy event, only a minor trace remains. The initial experience can be forgotten.
We can find such traces with the LSD user. Not anything overly apparent, but consistently enough. Not from years of doing it, but possibly from a single damaging event. The trace was there, the hint that something harmful happened. Symptoms like HPPD, a lisp, the occasional brain zap. We do not get these traces left on us from a little healthy activity.

 

[《Plasticity》]

Well then, since this is such a majority of dissent in the room, I feel I should give some reasoning to perhaps persuade some people.
1. Things that are unhealthy are enjoyable, good, every once in a while. Isn't that why we say that same thing about LSD? We learn from negative experiences and consider them calculated risks.
2. Unhealthy things are damaging things. But after the damage is done, you've survived relatively intact. For example, when you run you notice they your knee feels a bit weak from your leg getting crushed, but your other pain, from a birth defect, is what stops you from running. Another example, where your face got bashed with a hammer, there is now just a little bump in the cheekbone, no surgery, nothing serious. You can get over it, see it in a good light. Clearly though, it was unhealthy.
After an unhealthy event, only a minor trace remains. The initial experience can be forgotten.
We can find such traces with the LSD user. Not anything overly apparent, but consistently enough. Not from years of doing it, but possibly from a single damaging event. The trace was there, the hint that something harmful happened. Symptoms like HPPD, a lisp, the occasional brain zap. We do not get these traces left on us from a little healthy activity.

I'm sorry to say this but you have to be the worst "debater" on this planet. Also who the fuck comes out of a trip with a lisp? I'm over this thread, your arguements are a joke. If you bring up a topic like this at least be able to support your claims or provide clear reasoning for the way you feel... I've yet to witness any of this and your supposed gift of 'logic' is a very subpar one at that. Btw not all things that are enjoyable are bad for you. sports, sex, parties (with no drugs) are all things that are enjoyable and not unhealthy and not all things that are unhealthy are good either. Anthrax, disease, murder, PMA... the list can go on forever. A very poor arguement.

 

[pmoseman]

...who the fuck comes out of a trip with a lisp?

Never heard of it?
Checking around the internet, it certainly doesn't seem like this is common. That is an understatement. I don't know what I was thinking of. A mix up of some sort.
Does anyone ever experience general trouble with their speech, not coming up with the right words? Seems they do.
You, by the way, need to read more than just a few words from each sentence.
ADDED:
I think my problem with LSD is discerning which problem is caused by LSD and which ones are manufactured by the mind. I find it difficult to see how this kind of a substance is useful in therapy and I do not connect with those people saying that they learn something from it.

 

[Ismene]

Sylvester the cats lisp was down to a bad acid trip. Suffering sucotash.

 

[pmoseman]

Sylvester the cats lisp was down to a bad acid trip. Suffering sucotash.

Right... grandma didn't even have a bird.

 

[bunnyhentman]

So it is an agent of change that you take when you are feeling good but not when you are feeling bad and it is not responsible for causing depression?

Exactly!
I also wouldn't play with matches if I was soaking wet from gasoline.

It's definitely possible that you can become depressed, or more likely discover you were already depressed after an LSD experience. It's obviously possible to have very bad trips that linger in your mind long after the chemical has left your body (this is true of any psychedelic).

But this is your experience, your life and your body and you need to take responsibility for your own state of mind. Don't project your inner turmoil onto a molecule: that molecule has no hidden agenda. It only released what is already inside of you after you invited it into your body. You can't deny anyone else's experience with a chemical because yours was different.

From my experience, once a knot of pain/fear etc surfaces the best thing to do is really work it out - change the things in your life that are causing your depression, clean your mental house, face what you are avoiding, ask forgiveness from those you harmed etc. Otherwise the issue just comes up over and over, like a recurring nightmare, and putting yourself in a traumatic situation with no resolution is emotionally/spiritually damaging for sure.

That happens to be true in sober life as well. I always say I've had more bad trips sober than when I've been high. They are harder to recognize, because they are patterns sewn into the ego and they look like reality. LSD makes it easier to see what's wrong because it breaks down the walls we build to protect us from the dark sides of ourselves.