How does...............?

[shwagg]

LSD work to make you trip?

Psylocybin work to make you trip?

Negative effects don't have to be hidden from me. Positive effects are nice to hear. Long term is mainly what I'm looking at, short term is fine too.
Most of the stuff I've heard is that they destroy your brain/ fry your brain/ make your brain bleed/ melt your brain, which is obviously not truthful at all.

I was wondering what receptors they hit, and are they seretonin antagonists or what.

 

[Psyke]

LSD mimics the seratonin receptors in your brain. I like to look at it like this:

We are constantly tripping on the seratonin/dopamine in our brains when we live/exist in the world around us. Psychedelics such as lsd/psilocin are therefore the simplest and most evolutionary drugs in existence. They are just mimicking our normal seratonin that we experience the world with; thereby making our hallucinations not hallucinations but temporary actualizations! In theory.
You are just expereincing the world from a different viewpoint,
or on shrooms, your most basic primal essence of you.

Psychedelics in no way fry/melt your brain, but they do expand your consciousness!

Someone with better brain chemistry knowledge should chime in here to correct all my ramblings but you can always just do research on your own, even wikipedia, to find out that none of the drugs above "fry" your brain or put holes in them

 

[allium]

^ I am far from brain chemistry, but I wouldn't call normal brain processes "tripping".

Not very long time ago I asked question about long-term negative effects on cognitive abilities in ADD:link.
So they don't fry your brain. However you should be cautios using psychedelics, because they can cause mental problems: HPPD, depersonalization, derelization. Oh well, maybe "cause" isn't right word, because many people believe that psychedelics don't "cause" problems, rather they "manifest" them in people, who have predisposition to these disorders.

 

[TheAzo]

All typical psychedelics (LSD, shrooms, all the 2C, DOx, tryptamine, and ergoloid RC psychedelics) act on the 5HT2A (5HT is serotonin, 5-hydroxy-tryptamine) receptor. They also generally hit other closely related receptors (5HT2C, for example, causes the nausea associated with some psychedelics).

There are at least 2 signalling pathways by which psychedelics produce their effects from acting on that receptor. You can review the papers by David Nichols for agonizing details of the signalling pathway.

Of course, we don't understand enough of the brain to go from "okay it hits these receptors via this pathway" to how that actually produces the subjective effects.

On a practical level

Things that mess with serotonin system (antipsychotics and antidepressants) often block the effects of psychedelics.

The most common medium-long term effects are persisting (generally mild) visual disturbances, similar to being on the drug, only much more mild. This is usually only observed after tripping frequently, and for most, it passes over time. 2C-I and to a lesser extent 2C's in general, are more prone to producing this. When this lasts a long time, it's called HPPD (hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder).

If you experience a bad trip, you may have anxiety for a time afterwards; bad experiences while tripping can be difficult to integrate and move on from. Obviously minimize the likelihood of a truly bad trip by paying attention to set and setting.

Truly absurd usage levels might have other bad effects, like tripping every day for extended periods of time (which is difficult to do except on phenethylamines, which don't seem to have quite the short-term tolerance of other classes), in addition to the high likelihood of developing HPPD, there might be other problems.

 

[shwagg]

Thank you for explaining some of this.
If i continue to eat mushrooms on say a weekly basis, should i pick up some 5-htp vitamins?
granted i probably will trip more like every week and a half, or two. (solid mushroom/acid hookup now)