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LSD Tolerance backed up by actual evidence

drugsrbadmkay1

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Sep 22, 2013
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I have searched the internet high and low for answers relating to LSD Tolerance. I have not found one thread where people have actually stated evidence backing up their claims on tolerance. Some people say wait 3 days in between trips, some people say wait a year (lol), some people say theyve tripped for a month straight. Some people have just been like "look at this graph it says this so its true". I took 4 hits yesterday and im thinking of taking 2 right now, its been around 24 hours since i took the 4. Does anyone have any answers regarding LSD backed up by actual scientific evidence?
 
This wont help at all but i notice tolerance varies too. Sometimes 3 days between still awesome, sometimes a week between is not enough. The only constant is the next day is no good, two days in a row always sucks (for me). It's also possible that people expect to get tolerance, so they do. Who knows how much is in your head?
How do you propose to get scientific data BTW? You can't ask a lab rat. Who is doing anything with people and LSD now?
 
here's way to look at it with psychs.

you can argue all you want about the effects of the drug, but in reality you're simply getting more used to it since trips are such a mental thing.

Like, you took the 4 hits, were in that headspace for x-amount of time. And probably by the end, you were very accustomed to the way that it was.

So taking 2 hits now, will feel by comparison less dazzling. cause you've just been there, it's your perception of the world of LSD.


kinda like with a lot of other things in life. go to hawaii for a week on vacation, come back, and go in a year will be more exciting than going again in a couple days.

like with mushrooms, for me at least, the first few hours are like WTF, and then the last 2 are very serene and transparent, I've become used to that mentally and adjusted to that state of being, and returning to it very soon, it will be familiar and less interesting than it was initially.

im stoned and i think what im trying to say is, yes you will have a mental tolerance to the LSD this soon regardless of scientific fact or whatever.
 
I've done a little research in to this topic - but it is pretty 'weak data' at best right now. Therefore everything below should be taken as "to the best of my knowledge" and not as any kind of fact.

The tolerance build up of psychedelics is not caused in the same way as many other substances. It appears to be caused by the specific subset of serotonin receptors that the indole rings bind to becoming partially desensitised to connections. For normal serotonin, this isn't a problem (psychedelics don't bind to all serotonin receptors; only a subclass).
How long this desensitisation lasts depends mostly on your own brain chemistry and so will vary from person to person as well as within a person at different times. I've never heard of a case where "the same dose" will have "the same effect" in any less than three days. The level of densensitisation is such that it wears off in a curve, with very little wear over the first 'short while' and rapidly increasing with time (again, the timeframes are quite dependent on your specific brain). I've also never heard of a case where "the same dose" will NOT have "the same effect" after fourteen days. The average seems to be around five to six days.

All of that said, I would personally recommend avoiding taking psychedelics with that kind of regularity. As vibrancy3 briefly mentioned, surely the experience will be more valuable if you give yourself some time to think it over before repeating it?
 
The tolerance B&D actually gathered some data on the subject, and even though the sample size wasn't exactly huge, it seems to cover my sentiments quite neatly.

But yeah tolerance is really tricky, and cross-tolerance even more so as they all have their binding patterns. Did 2C-B on friday and want to try 5-Meo-MiPT today? There's a good chance that they won't interfere too much. But again, most psychedelics get the biggest chunk of their psychedelic effects from 5HT2a so with most chemicals the experience would be severely diluted.

Then there's psychological tolerance, which has more to do with rate of tripping than anything else and can't really be defined in hard data. It's all about the subjective experience, and how you keep it novel. Want to get the most out of your psychedelics? Be moderate!
 
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I only used acid two days in a row once. I forget how many I took the first day, probably 3 or 4, but the next day I took 10 hits and felt virtually nothing. Very slight lines in my vision but that was all. Total waste of 10 hits of perfectly good acid.
 
^Yeah but to make that situation even more tricky, I once dosed 25i (which has insane tolerance issues) 2 days in a row and the second day the experience got me further than any experience to date, on the same dose. Any other time I tried that, I hardly got any effects (mostly stimulation). Could be just the NBOMe, but like others have noted, tolerance seems to vary a lot.

But for most of the time you're right, second day redosing is just a waste of chemical. Especially with LSD because it binds to so many receptors
 
Tolerance is an effect well-described in literature, it happens with most drugs and it is an exception when it doesn't happen. If you want evidence, check the following wikipedia pages and their reference articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_tolerance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(medicine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downregulation_and_upregulation

In pharmacology, desensitization is the loss of responsiveness to the continuing or increasing dose of a drug. Also termed tachyphylaxis, downregulation, fade or drug tolerance. This may be an important area to consider for the future design of safer drugs

While tolerance may not be terribly consistent, it does happen with psychedelics. Cross-tolerance is even less predictable. It isn't black and white, like you absolutely can or absolutely cannot trip in the days after having taken a psychedelic. It depends on a lot of factors, among which the dynamics of desensitisation and down-regulation of 5-HT2A receptors. I think that the harder you trip the first time, the more pronounced the tolerance will be and the less effect you will get in the following week. That is not to say it is impossible to trip, you just need more of a drug to get a similar level of effects! That is why while tolerance or 'resistance' to drug effects might get stronger the more you try to use a drug, you can compensate by taking an increasingly bigger dose.
Whether you can trip for a month is hard to say, I would bet good money that the drug's effects will always change even if achieve a persistently strong reaction. Psychologically you will always get used to it, and your consciousness will always try to balance things out somehow.

It will pretty much vary between individuals, if only because there are often differences in the translation from pharmacological action to subjectively experienced effects in an individual. But sooner or later, in some quantity, people observe tolerance effects with drugs including psychedelics. However there are some weird cases like DMT that appear to have a different rate of tolerance setting in, it probably has more to do with the duration of one or multiple trips than the number of times someone trips.

The reason why there can be huge variation in how long people will tell you to wait is because tolerance returns to normal at a fast rate at first but it goes slower and slower. It may technically never return to normal, I'm not sure about what statements we can make about that. But how long to wait depends on what people consider to be a return to normal that is close enough so that we can stop calling it significant. After about a week you can trip again but it can have less impact because the impact from the first trip is still doing its thing and you haven't forgotten that yet (see, also a psychological component comes into play), but in most cases you can still get a similar level of psychedelic effects. So while psychedelic tolerance might take a week to a month to reset, psychological tolerance which is of course not a pharmacological factor can take much much longer to reset.

Skepticism is appreciated but I think the theory for tolerance and the observations in practice are so abundant, that it seems silly to dispute. And part of the apparent inconsistencies come from a poor understanding of the ways tolerance can vary, and the difference between physiological tolerance and psychological tolerance.
 
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Thanks for all the responses. Really enlightening, and gives me hope some people think outside the box. I may take the 2 hits i have left now just as an experiment to see if i feel anything. If i do ill post how i felt.
 
not everyone is the same but i dont understand your confusion. everything ive seen on the interwebz seems to be pretty similar

something like 4x day 1, 2x day 2, 1.5x day 3 and 4

(e.g. 4x the original dose for same effect the day after)

everyone is different. there is no universal truth for any drug. find out for yourself. start low.
 
If I take acid no matter how much I take the next day I will never have as good of a high, I could probably take ten hits but I would probably just get a headache and get strung out.
I can't use psychedelics more than once a week
 
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