So it's been probably seventeen years since I last took LSD. I always liked it well enough, but it was never my favorite. I always found it to be a little shallow, tweaky, and gut cramp/gas inducing. It had its plus sides, too, but I never really felt the need to seek it out. It had never been insightful, and there were other things for recreational use with fewer side-effects.
People have always told me that my indifference to LSD was because I never had taken enough, which I acknowledge is fairly likely. I've never had more than a hit, and who knows how much that is.
I decided to revisit it after taking a three month break from psychedelics. I wondered if all my prior doses were low, since I had no way of knowing. I asked around here and elsewhere, and most people said that 100ug was more than enough for a perfectly satisfying, middle of the road trip. Since the blotter of ALD-52 I got a while back was dosed at 100ug (supposedly,) I decided to start there just in case. There will always be future opportunities to check it out after I feel it out, right?
All in all, it was perfectly nice. The come-up was actually enjoyable rather than stressful, and the descent wasn't tweaky or annoying. I even ate two meals on it with no difficulty! The headspace, though, was pretty light for most of it, and I had very little in the way of visuals (consistent with all of my prior LSD experiences.) I could see taking another 50-100ug next time, as I would have liked the plateau to have been a little richer and fuller. I got a fair bit of entirely unexpected insight from it, as well. All in all, it was enjoyable and occupied the same sort of space for me as 5-MeO-MiPT. It certainly was nothing like the visual feast and hyperanalytical neurosis of AL-LAD was for me!
That said, I'm not sure that I'll revisit it. I noticed two minor but significant aspects to the material that made me wary. I found myself fantasizing about how I wanted to live my life in the future, and those fantasies seemed inauthentic to my own personal values. They seemed withdrawn, removed from society, a rejection of the world rather than a confrontation with it. That seems consistent with a lot of scenes where LSD is heavily used, and it's one of the things that keeps me apart from them.
I also had some visceral philosophical insights. They were imbued with that noetic quality that psychedelics can often have. While the seemed valid to me, I realized at the time that my thoughts were pretty "enlightenment delusion"-ey. I realized that the reason that I take psychedelics is because they can offer perspectives, but also because they can change me. To my surprise, it seemed that ALD-52 falls into the category of drugs that can actually make permanent changes to me. I like this, but only if I trust the direction that it's taking me. I realized that I don't really trust LSD all that much, and that gives me a bit of food for thought before exploring it further.
Still, an overall great day where I got acquainted with an enjoyable new lysergamide. I'd call that a success.
