I see. So the statement,* “LSD is one of the physically safest substances known. Far safer than aspirin for example.”* may be literally true.
True, but misleading. At least it fooled me. 
Why focus on the physical safety of something suspected of being psychologically dangerous?
For that matter, aspirin is 100% physically safe, as long as you don’t swallow it. It’s virtually impossible to be harmed by being hit with an aspirin tablet. 
Hmm, well this issue is one of those polarized issues where one side will overstate it’s dangers and the other side will understate it’s dangers. Just like the abortion debate where one side claims a foetus isn’t human and the other side claims that abortion doctor’s are wanton murderers.
LSD IS dangerous. LSD DOES have long term mental effects. I don’t know a SINGLE person who has done a lot of acid that doesn’t have some kind of mental mark on their psyche. However, the physical effects posted here ARE very accurate. It is almost impossible to kill someone with Acid. Gobear’s cite of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, is probably one of the best resources on this subject. It points out mistakes that Huxley made, and it also points out that there were more than two major camps and approaches in the movement. Limiting it to Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley is too simplistic. With as much proselytizing that Timothy Leary did he did offer a lot of warnings as to the possible dangers. “Acid is a great school but you have to graduate” - Timothy Leary.
I’d say the CIA’s mkultra projects were probably worse for the psychedelic movement than was Timothy Leary. Not to mention Timothy Leary didn’t start the Bohemian movement. It was started at least ten years before Leary ever got ahold of psilocybin (which he aquired prior to LSD-25) so his “Tune in Turn on Drop out.” statement was just fuel to an already flaring flame. Timothy Leary was less a progenitor than a very shocking example of the establishment losing one of it’s prominent figures to this movement. This is why he got so much recognition, in my opinion. I’d say that Ken Kesey probably had more of an actual impact on the masses than Timothy Leary.
Huxley was pretty radical too, his contemporaries were very annoyed at his camp for use of unscientific methods. He is probably the person who made the hindu connection mainstream. His camp very often used LSD as a way to proselytize their own preconceptions about mystical experience.
Now as I said, these two camps were not the only ones. There were numerous camps that got the drug from Sandoz to perform experiments. Many of these camps were MUCH MUCH more within the bounds of “scientific” experimentation, however with LSD the scientific method seems to be a woefully inaccurate measure.
As I said before mkultra was the really horrible end of things. When the CIA was dosing people unaware, from other agents from the CIA and other agencies at get togethers, to having hookers dose johns while they watched through one way mirrors. To dosing people locked in a white room. The one thing that pretty much every researcher came to agree upon by this point was the importance of set and setting. The CIA threw this out completely and as a result had much more drastic results than anyone else. Much of the really awful stories we have from this era resulted from mkultra.
As to december’s comments. Sauna’s have been known to give people with weak respiratory systems, or weak hearts nasty attacks. I don’t see you railing against saunas. The fact is the world is a dangerous place. I am sure more people die skiing every year than die as a result of an LSD related accident. People like to pick and choose what things are too dangerous for everyone else. The basic truth is someone with any kind of mental problems lurking beneath the surface are going to have to face them. Sometimes with acid you face them and you can actually confront and deal with them, othertimes it sends you to a shrink for years, or in drastic cases it sends them flying out the window of their dorm. However, I don’t know anyone that’s had any serious problems with LSD such as you described, but I do know people who’ve been hurt skiing and I do hear about people getting killed by drunk drivers on a regular basis. You can’t stop people from choosing their own life’s path, whether it’s for good or for ill. Nor should you try to.
As for LSD as a doorway to nirvana. I think that’s horseshit. I think it’s kind of like watching a movie about a subject and feeling that you are now an expert. If you need the drug to tap into your subconcious you are no more enlightened than you were before except that you are aware that it is POSSIBLE to tap into your subconcious that way. Meditation and Lucid dreaming are much more effective ways to do this. This doesn’t mean, however that watching that movie and finding out that’s what you want to do is a bad thing, just don’t watch it too many times.
Erek
Well, to start, many of the scare stories are related to physical dangers. The UL’s are rife with stories of comas, overdoses, chromosome damage, birth defects, cancer, blindness, and extraordinary insanity brought on by organic (physical) damage to the brain (Orange man story…). These can be dismissed.
As far as the mswas quote:
I have some doubt on that. I also know many people who have done it. I have also known most of them long before they did it and can compare before and after. I haven’t noticed any untoward changes in any of them. Granted, that is far from conclusive, but this has been done by HUGE numbers of people that have come through it just fine.
Something interesting to note: LSD was getting quite popular as a substance to aid psychiatry. It was used extensively in a well documented “medical” setting without any obvious long term mental damage resulting. I don’t know of any cases of serious mental damage resulting from even the mkultra project mentioned earlier. On this, I will have to say that if long term damage was likely this is the way to do it. Going into an experience like that without being prepared for it or without knowing it was coming could be pretty frightning. Without the foreknowledge that the sensations were normal, to be expected, and would pass in a few hours, it could be pretty tramatic. It could be easily interpretted by the victim as a serious medical or mental breakdown.
Admittedly there is some danger. But it is about the same kind of danger as being mentally scarred from a particularly bad nightmare. I will try to provide an example. Lets say a user is out watching the trees “shimmer and wiggle”. After bit, it comes to him that the trees are actually reaching out to do him harm and locks onto that idea and won’t let it go. This could lead to several frightening hours. After this was over, it should be as dismissible to the person as a nightmare and clearly not real. For the vast majority of people, they would think, “hmmmm… that sucked. Maybe I don’t wanna do that anymore”. That would be the extent of the damage. It is possible that the rare person who is tottering on the brink of mental breakdown already would be pushed over the edge by the experience. But even experiences like this can be pretty reliably avoided by taking a reasonable amount and planning to be in a comfortable safe environment before hand.
So, there is a real danger, yes. But, it is rather smaller than risks many people find exceptable in their daily lives.
December, your story about driving past that fresh body could be used to illustrate the danger that driving a car could drive someone insane. If a person does much driving, it is very likely that a day will come when a gruesome death will be witnessed. That can be the trigger that sends someone packing their bags for the funny farm. But, most likely, driving (or just living for that matter) wasn’t the problem. Most people that would be pushed over the edge by that are just waiting to go anyway.
Using gov’t numbers (for 1997), approx 15% of the population has used LSD at least once by the age 25. That’s one in seven. That is alot of people. The way the dangers are bandied about, you would expect huge wards of people all across the country in institutions.
scotth, I have a sense that you are young person with little experience relating to mental illness. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be offensive, but I was offended by the casual way you disposed of people with mental illness.
E.g., I have a nephew who suffers from bi-polar (manic depressive) illness. As a college student, he experimented with LSD, which might or might not have affected the bi-polar illness. But, if the LSD had “driven him over the edge,” you would casually write him off, saying he was just waiting to go, anyhow.
At the moment, he is a living a pretty good life, with the benefit of medications. It was very difficult for him to reach this position. He’s isn’t just someone, “waiting to go anyway.” He’s a good human being, who is valuable to me and to many others who care about him.
Actually, I am not all that young and do have quite a bit of experience with mental disorders. Wasn’t meant to be offensive at all, and bi-polar disorder is not in the realm of the supposed risks. The mental risks are stated in the dire warnings as complete psychosis, and near total loss of touch with reality. The stories (even the one you provided) indicates complete insanity. As the research (by our own gov’t) shows, there is no statistical difference in insanity rates between users and non users. That leaves one conclusion, appearently the people who “go insane” after using were going to be there in weeks or months regardless of this event.
Appearently, your nephew wasn’t on the brink of a mental melt down of this sort as he didn’t have one. If you follow the statistics, it is not cold, cruel, or uncaring to state what I stated. Most research indicates that if someone is headed that way, it is going to happen, and only the timing remains at issue. There is zero evidence that LSD causes insanity or mental disorders. It may be a trigger for an event that was going to happen soon anyway.
Two years ago my 20 year old cousin was killed in a head on collision with an 18-wheeler.
Last year my grandfather died of cancer related to nuclear testing that was conducted near where he lived in the 60’s.
A few weeks ago my dad’s best friend died from lung cancer he got from installing insulation for 20 years.
Do have the same rancor toward anything that takes a life, December? Say for example, the automotive, nuclear and insulation industries
scotth: I said people with a long history of doing it, say years of usage, hundreds or thousands of doses. I know a guy who claims he’s done at least 5000 hits of acid. I knew a guy who claimed to have taken 50 hits of acid at once. All these people are a little off. I also think acid DOES affect things such as bipolar disorder. Some people claim that it cured them of some malady, which may very well be true, with mental disorders it is possible to be cured as though a switch was flipped, sometimes it’s just a breakthrough to a traumatic experience that can start one of the fast track to recovery. However, I think it’s just as possible to go the alternate route. I think you and December are opposite sides of the same coin, one person downplaying LSDs significance and another overly dramatizing it. LSD is not a safe drug, people don’t do it to be safe, they do it to live on the edge, to see something that is not within their phenomenological field or just to have a grand old time. While bungee jumping is relatively safe, that doesn’t mean that when something goes wrong it’s not horribly wrong. LSD is not to be trifled with, and unfortunately too many people try to make it out to be this wonderful little pill that will cure you of all your ills without taking a toll. Nothing worth having in life comes without a price, that’s the nature of things, and LSD has it’s price just like everything else.
Erek
I would have plenty of rancor against someone who was trying to downplay the risks of radiation or asbestos. I am furious at cigarette companies, which inveigle people into smoking. I consider tobacco company executives and advertisors to be the scum of the earth.
So, I guess the answer is, “Yes.”
I could say the same things about booze, december.
I’m not saying acid is harmless. Common sense tells me messing around with chemicals like that isn’t exactly going to make me Queen for a Day.
But for crying out LOUD-personal anecdotes are not cites-would you PLEASE get that through your head?
Thank you!