Did you ever do any that gave you aches and pains and headaches
Yeah I did some LSD that gave me a headache. Then the next week I took the next blotter along and had a fantastic time.
Same here. I've been using from the same 75 hits from the same sheet of blotter for 1.5 years now. I've tripped over 25 times on it, mostly using 2 hits. Some times I get lots of vasoconstriction and spend hours annoyed with it doing stretching exercises and feeling edgy and buggy. Friends have experienced similar variation between trips on this blotter. Sometimes I get lots of mucus build up in my lungs. Yet other times I break down crying with the sheer joy of existing, totally free of unwanted side effects. Sometimes the room is filled with visuals and I feel mentally lucid, with extreme aesthetic enhancement. Other times, at the same dose, it's more of a body high marked foremost by sensations of shallow hedonistic pleasure. Sometimes I'm floored for a few hours on two hits, other times I feel like I should've taken four hits, etc. etc.
This is all to say that these last 25 or so times tripping on mostly the same dosage of the same blotter has continued the trend of unpredictable, highly varied experiences I've always had with LSD, indeed almost every psychedelic (including RCs at the same dosage from the same batch), I've experienced over 14 years of tripping. The qualitative variance is similar whether it's the same blotter or from different blotter, or a different medium (the "quantitative" intensity is admittedly more consistent within batches than between batches, because, I presume, the ug amount is different). Psychedelics are "mind manifesting," and I've found they are, as would be expected on such a translation, as varied as the mental and physical states of the minds from which they manifest their experience.
Like most others, I have noticed there is some consistency in the
quality of psychedelic experiences across short time periods. That is, I tend to get a bunch of edgy, vasoconstricted type trips in a row, or a succession of highly emotional trips, etc., using the same psychedelic from the same batch. This is expected, because things like life stress, how I'm doing with my girlfriend, who I'm hanging out with, and states of physical health tend to come and go in chunks of time (say a week or a month long for most). If I had bought a ten strip of this same LSD, but on different prints, and used it over the period of a couple weeks or a month, and repeated this same pattern over 1.5 years, there would undoubtedly be a lot of consistency in effects correlated with specific 10 strip use periods. But that would merely owe to the fact that small quantities tend to get used up over short periods of time, periods of time that map onto the aforementioned chunks of time defined by some consistent psychological or health state, and are only merely correlated with the concomitant use of some particular brand or medium of LSD.
Most LSD use by most people occurs in just such chunks of time (personally, this is the first time I've ever had a bunch of the same stuff for a long time). More often, users get a ten strip or buy a few sugar cubes at a rave of the same batch of LSD and use it up quick. Then it's dry for awhile or they don't feel like tripping. Then they get some time off or whatever and use a bunch more LSD over another chunk of time. Only now the season has changed, or they met a knew girl, a new job, or they got fatter, etc, and those events color the stretch of time they use the new LSD -- LSD that comes on different prints, or perhaps it's the same print, though they cannot know is the same LSD or not, since the same prints are often laid by different people, or their dealer lied to make a sale, or was lied to himself, etc.
With so much uncertainty, we naturally look for ways to make our experiences more predictable, and so we generalize based on salient characteristics, and those generalizations create expectations, reinforced by social discussions (like some such LSD is dirty or clean), that in turn frame future experiences with LSD that looks similar. And so we start saying "geltabs are almost always better," or microdots, or white on white, or Rolling Stones... And we, naturally, don't want to give up that source of control over an experience that can be so powerful and consequential to our well-being. It's also far easier to recall a single physical feature of a print than all the contextual factors impacting our experience when we used that print, and so that physical particularity of the LSD is amplified relative to other factors when making judgments about the source of experiential influence.
I've seen this phenomena over and over again with drugs and without drugs. Cognitive and heuristic biases define our experience, and are far reaching, powerful, and constant. Also constant is the certainty that we are not relying on such biases, that we're more free of them than others (see "Third Person Effect"), as well as a reluctance to entertain evidence that threatens to make our established beliefs inconsistent with our past or current behavior.
The features that define the context within which we often find ourselves forced to make judgments about the effects of LSD: high uncertainty, powerful emotions, potentially very threatening experiences, wide time ranges, and a strong desire for control -- are so ripe for the subconscious application of these biases of judgment in memory (similar to within a romantic relationship in some senses), that even if there are genuine intrinsic qualities of the blotter that directly effect experience, we can expect that aspect of the experience to be overshadowed so fully by these other factors impacting experience that the reliability of our judgments is hopelessly muddied.
That's why I said it's silly, because even if the effect is genuine, other sources of variance, for which ample evidence has been detailed in this thread, are so powerful, and alternate established explanations are so many, the "signal to noise ratio" is so low, that it is unrealistic to expect that such an intrinsic effect could be tracked consistently within subjective experience -- it's unrealistic to think we could rely on its predictive power. That is, it's highly unlikely to matter in any practical way, no matter its truth or falsity. It's not the concept itself for which I'm reserving my most extreme skepticism, it's for its feasible application.
