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Should LSD be classified as a hard drug or as a soft drug?

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No.






I'm with RobotRipping and fixingahole on this one. Aren't the terms "hard drug" and "soft drug?" both misnomers? It seems to me just about any recreational drug can be benign if the dose is low enough or dangerous if the dose is too high.
 
Solipsis said:
The term bad trip is controversial: yes there certainly exist bad trips that are not learning experiences but for example just sensory overload, but they typically do not happen at low to moderate doses in a safe and controlled environment. The term seems to be used a lot by beginning trippers and those who have never tripped at all.
In my experience, after people have tripped a number of times with varying results they start to put negative experiences into perspective. They can actually be therapeutic because they confront you with difficult things, stuff in your life you apparently need to work out. If you are confronted with something like that, you can try to run away from it or deal with it. Trying to avoid it almost always fails, especially with beginners, because they are fighting and denying themselves and are not as much in control yet of altered states of consciousness.
You can minimize the risk of badly guided first trips by having an experienced trip-sitter present who is familiar with the quirks of getting to know psychedelics.

So yes, taking that into account, if you don't know what you're doing you can have a bad time running away from thoughts you don't like, but truthfully that can happen even when sober. If you use such an opportunity to honestly and openly try to work on stuff, trying to change what you might and to accept what you cannot... I think experiences that are still horrible happening, especially at low doses would be rare.

Read the last portion of that other post of mine again: the possibility of a negative experience does not automatically make it a hard drug. Well at least that is my opinion, who is qualifying these things anyway?

Hazards of tripping can be minimized by appropriate use, I think the problem with real harddrugs such as crack cocaine is that it is hard or impossible to minimize certain risks such as cardiotoxicity.
In other words: if you can use a drug appropriately but don't, how is that fair towards the drug?
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Nope, well despite the fact that this isn't the thread to discuss alcohol, but I'll use alcohol's status as a hard drug, or as a soft drug, as some good analogy for how LSD should be classified. IMHO, and in the opinions of many others, since millions of people are able to drink alcohol in smaller doses and not experience those horrible side effects that result from the consumption of alcohol (ie, since alcohol is much less addictive than those harder drugs are, and if you consume it, but not to the point of intoxication, you won't overdose or get violent from it), which makes alcohol some soft drug, then hypothetically, if somebody can take some LSD in some sake amounts of smaller doses (which you can also do with alcohol), which won't result in permanently getting schizophrenia or some other forms of psychosis, or without getting some bad trip, then LSD should be classified as some soft drug.

However, unlike alcohol, there's no "safe" amount of LSD, which can be taken in ways which don't result in those disastrous and horrible consequences of this drug. That guy that I'll show you in this video that's been posted in this link below, he got put into some psych wards with schizophrenia and psychosis for the rest of his lives (which I'm sure that this happened to so many other LSD users), took the normal small doses of LSD (some gel tabs), and still he got put into some psych ward for the rest of his life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdh3Em-fAEo

Which seems extremely horrible and sad.
 
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Agreed ^

that's why I didn't say I would classify it as a softdrug. Indeed, what's the point.

But after reading the OP, I still felt like there are some things about it that deserve to be pointed out so that we can think about them in perspective instead of as black and white classification.
 
Elven Warriorr said:
Nope, well despite the fact that this isn't the thread to discuss alcohol, but I'll use alcohol's status as a hard drug, or as a soft drug, as some good analogy for how LSD should be classified. IMHO, and in the opinions of many others, since millions of people are able to drink alcohol in smaller doses and not experience those horrible side effects that result from the consumption of alcohol (ie, since alcohol is much less addictive than those harder drugs are, and if you consume it, but not to the point of intoxication, you won't overdose or get violent from it), which makes alcohol some soft drug, then hypothetically, if somebody can take some LSD in some sake amounts of smaller doses (which you can also do with alcohol), which won't result in permanently getting schizophrenia or some other forms of psychosis, or without getting some bad trip, then LSD should be classified as some soft drug.

However, unlike alcohol, there's no "safe" amount of LSD, which can be taken in ways which don't result in those disastrous and horrible consequences of this drug. That guy that I'll show you in this video that's been posted in this link below, he got put into some psych wards with schizophrenia and psychosis for the rest of his lives (which I'm sure that this happened to so many other LSD users), took the normal small doses of LSD (some gel tabs), and still he got put into some psych ward for the rest of his life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdh3Em-fAEo

Which seems extremely horrible and sad.
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What makes you sure that happened to a lot of other LSD users? Like I said, it is rare and like I said before in post #11 what virtually always happens is that a pre-existing condition is precipitated i.e. they were already mentally ill on some level. You must always be careful blaming external events purely for that while in fact there could have been other things like stress that could have caused the same sort of thing to happen.
It's true that perhaps some people would have never gotten a psychotic episode without LSD. But don't twist and expand on that to make it something it's not. If bad things like this happen to people, there are always those who find it easy to blindly place blame, preferably on one single thing.

If that is not something you can live with, then that's a shame... but you are dead wrong about alcohol being less addictive than other hard drugs. In fact it is right up there, do your homework and you will find out. Alcohol is one of the most detrimental drugs to society and its harms are rated much higher by studies than LSD.
This is just an example of that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/02/david-nutt-dangerous-drug-list: Alcohol is #5 and LSD is #14 - not even close.
Easily found and easily reproduced by other lists. A lot of factors are taken into account with such lists to include things that make drugs harmful to society.

About psychosis: it seems the numbers are slightly higher than I tried to recall: about 9 in 1000 or 0,9%.
Again, you could have found this checking wikipedia instead of scientology videos. Use some proper sources of information. Wikipedia uses reference links.

There are some cases of LSD inducing a psychosis in people who appeared to be healthy before taking LSD.[55] In most cases, the psychosis-like reaction is of short duration, but in other cases it may be chronic. It is difficult to determine whether LSD itself induces these reactions or if it triggers latent conditions that would have manifested themselves otherwise. The similarities of time course and outcomes between putatively LSD-precipitated and other psychoses suggest that the two types of syndromes are not different and that LSD may have been a nonspecific trigger.[citation needed]
Estimates of the prevalence of LSD-induced prolonged psychosis lasting over 48 hours have been made by surveying researchers and therapists who had administered LSD:
Cohen (1960) estimated 0.8 per 1,000 volunteers (the single case among approximately 1250 study volunteers was the identical twin of a schizophrenic and he recovered within 5 days) and 1.8 per 1,000 psychiatric patients (7 cases among approximately 3850 patients, of which 2 cases were "preschizophrenic" or had previous hallucinatory experience, 1 case had unknown outcome, 1 case had incomplete recovery, and 5 cases recovered within up to 6 months).[56]
Malleson (1971) reported no cases of psychosis among experimental subjects (170 volunteers who received a total of 450 LSD sessions) and estimated 9 per 1,000 among psychiatric patients (37 cases among 4300 patients, of which 8 details are unknown, 10 appeared chronic, and 19 recovered completely within up to 3 months).[27]
However, in neither survey study was it possible to compare the rate of lasting psychosis in these volunteers and patients receiving LSD with the rate of psychosis found in other groups of research volunteers or in other methods of psychiatric treatment (for example, those receiving placebo).
Cohen (1960) noted:[56]
"The hallucinogenic experience is so striking that many subsequent disturbances may be attributed to it without further justification. The highly suggestible or hysterical individual would tend to focus on his LSD experience to explain subsequent illness. Patients have complained to Abramson that their LSD exposure produced migraine headaches and attacks of influenza up to a year later. One Chinese girl became paraplegic and ascribed that catastrophe to LSD. It so happened that these people were all in the control group and had received nothing but tap water."
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I can also find numbers like 4 in 1000 for a correlation.
The problem is just cause and effect, even for those few in a thousand it is hard to say whether they would have gone psychotic anyway without the LSD. Nobody knows.
 
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I'm having a very hard time deciphering if you're serious or not.
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You really weren't giving RobotRipping much credit there... :P
...
I dunno. Can someone here please put forth a specific operationalization for how we can distinguish between hard and soft drugs? I haven't yet seen one I consider adequate...and assigning drugs into either category without such an operationalization is facile.

ebola
 
I think it should be legal for psychotherapeutic use with the oversight of a mental health professional. It's been proven effective for alcoholism, so I'd like to see it in addiction clinics as well. No telling what other applications it could have if we were allowed to study it in earnest.

As with other drugs, I don't believe casual users of LSD should lose their freedom.
 
Solipis said:
You must always be careful blaming external events purely for that while in fact there could have been other things like stress that could have caused the same sort of thing to happen.
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Agreed.

Look at the half-life of these compounds in the body. Seriously, they're gone in a matter of hours. They're out of the picture. Chronic use of any drug can re-wire us over time by Hebbian conditioning because "what fires together, wires together." This is especially true in the case of any prescribed drug taken at regular intervals. Insofar as a single dose has long term consequences I think of it in similar terms as I do to traumatic experiences without drugs. There are psychological repercussions to extreme experiences of any kind. What we imagine a single dose is doing to permanently change our brains is the work of our own self-delusion and rationalization from the experience. We use "the drug," and its imagined biological twists and schemes as an excuse for personal failures to cope with experiences we don't understand. I've been using psychedelics for 15 years on an approximately monthly basis, and other classes of recreational drugs on and off for intermittent binges. My brain may be different for it compared to what it would've been otherwise, but so much of that change is a reflection of how the experiences themselves have altered my way of thinking. I don't imagine I've been chemically altered inexorably on a physiological level. In fact, I know I'm fully competent in most every practical sense because I've proven it so by meeting unforeseen challenges that bear little association at all with my experience of recreational drugs. Whatever harm they've done me is something I can't guess at, but for the most part, so far as I can tell, I'm fine as ever.
 
Clearly the OP has an agenda.

I don't even know what the fuck a 'hard drug' or 'soft drug' is supposed to mean. Do you mean one is furry and one is like a metal rod?

Elven Warriorr said:
It's a hard drug, there's no question about that. The fact that people are sent into mental institutions and psych wards for the rest of their lives proves that totally. There's no way in the world that I would classify this drug as some soft drug.

Just check out these people's stories in this video, and there's no denying that LSD is should be classified as a hard drug.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdh3Em-fAEo

Surely, if alcohol should be classified as a hard drug (which is a drug that can result in fatalities from the physical withdrawal symptoms), then LSD, which can send somebody in permanent trips (which happened to some people) and which can also screw up somebody's lives forever with psychosis or schizophrenia, should most certainly be classified as some hard drug.
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Solipsis said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_drugs

Em, this helps. And LSD is categorized as soft.
While wikipedia is not the world authority, this is at least *something* to go on, ebola? (not sure if I should put another question mark... I'll put one just in case.) ?
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"well, i think that LSD is a softer drug".

Well, tell that to those people that were thrown into some psych wards for the rest of their lives as a resulting of experimenting with some LSD. Anything that can damage somebody mentally and emotionally should be classified as some harder drug, IMHO.
 
You really sound like you aren't absorbing a single notion, no you don't have to change your mind all of a sudden but it would be nice if you responded with something different for a change so that it doesn't seem like I am trying to help someone to some information all for naught.

What are you coming here for? If your mind is made up go somewhere else. Again: it is not like anyone with a different opinion is unwelcome here but these things have to be put into perspective and it is not as simple as "LSD causes a psychosis", triggering one is not the same thing. If you would measure by intensity of experience then LSD would be a pretty hard drug, but it is more commonly defined by the impact on society than something it may do to a person - in some cases - at a given point.
Those people tend to have difficulties telling fact from fantasy, if you are rigorously buying stuff from a Scientology video then I am almost inclined to see that indeed LSD might be harmful for you.

Until you come up with something decent to say about the matter I would rather not dignify this thread by adding anything else to it.

See if someone else cares.

*Actually MGS has a good point, convince me why this thread should stay open
*Going offline, try in a PM - only if you must, though.

closed
 
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