Okay, I’d like to clear up a couple of misconceptions about LSD.
First, the idea that LSD is often laced with strychnine is false. A perseverant myth. An extensive study from 1972-1979, when the myth was at its height, found no LSD with any strychnine at all. The amount of strychnine necessary to cause any problem would be much greater than amount of LSD, and would be expensive to add. Someone would have to go out of their way to put strychnine in, and there’s no evidence anyone ever has. (Source: The LSD FAQ amoung other sources.)
It is not addictive and does not cause long-term damage. The amount required for overdose is prohibitively high. No one has ever died from an LSD overdose. Comparative studies between LSD, alcohol, and marijuana have found that you are the least likely to be involved in an accident, commit suicide, or commit murder while under the effects of LSD (when compared to the other two drugs.)
(It’s also undetectable in the body after 1-4 days, depending on the dose, so it’s the drug you have to worry aout the least when taking a drug test.)
I’m not recommending its use. But when people have an irrational fear of a comparably benign substance, I feel I have to set the record straight.
They’re not all urban legends. My wife has a friend who jumped out a second story window on LSD, thinking she could fly. She couldn’t. She broke a several bones and scraped herself up prety good. She also lost her sense of taste and smell because of the fall. I know the woman very well, and she is more than happy to talk to my wife and I about what happened. So while you shouldn’t believe everything that you hear, you shouldn’t discount everything that you hear, either.
Jeez…it’s always da Acidheads that go out off on a tear about “benigness of acid”!
I’m 40 yrs. old, and a recovering addict.
(last ten yrs. addicted to Heroin.)
I have probably done almost every popular illicit drug known. Acid was one of my faves.
From reading tons of crap on the net about the nondangerous qualities of acid…it just makes me sit back in amazement.
Reading things on the net, quotes from “scientific papers”, personal stories, etc., etc., etc.,…DOES NOT MAKE THIS CRAP TRUE! Just cuz it’s in print, don’t make it SO! If you get an acidhead to do enuff reasearch (and boy they CAN!)…it’s the same as interpretations of the Bible! I myself used to think it had some “redeaming, self exploritory, beneficial quality”.
CRAP!
I am neither proud nor ashamed of my drug abuse. Some of my fondest memories (what’s left of them) were of acid trips.
Like the Beatles said…“it changes your perception of the world, and your never the same afterward.”
But the bottom line is…whether or not it’s addicting, non-lethal, not psychosis inducing unless predisposed, etc., etc.,…
Why mess with it?!!!
And as far as “Urban Legends” go… I PERSONALLY know a of a lot of cases where it caused people to “Go from whence they never return”. (i.e. Psychosis, injury, and DEATH.) 2 Good cases in point are Syd Barret from Pink Floyd, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. Reading stuff in the defense of LSD is like reading Crap from the Aryan Nation. Sounds pretty convincing sometimes…but ya gotta look at where it’s comin’ from, and who’s writing it. Like people in “defense of the Hemp industry”, who SWEAR they don’t smoke Pot!
And in these times, their are plenty of OTHER ways to get high, self explore, and find amusement. So don’t waste your time debating over the “good qualities” of Acid here…go to another spot on the site, and enrich your MIND! (What’s gonna be left of it…to the “Trippers” writing here!)
[[And as far as “Urban Legends” go… I PERSONALLY know a of a lot of cases where it caused people to “Go from whence they never return”. (i.e. Psychosis, injury, and DEATH.) 2 Good cases in point are Syd Barret from Pink Floyd, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.]]
I respect that you are speaking from personal experience when you talk about the effects of drug use, Eddie. The problem with the above is proving cause and effect. There may be an association, but who’s to know which came first or whether there was another cofactor, too?
Did anybody else see the “Acid episode” of Dragnet on TV Land a couple days ago?
Jack Web and Harry Morgan had this same debate with a thinly veiled proxie forTimothy Leary 30 years ago. The agruements made on this thread are, almost word for word, the same as were presented in Dragnet. Without taking any sides I think I can safely say that we don’t know anymore about the effects of LSD than we did when it was first used as a recreational drug.
Wow! It just goes on & On…don’t it!
Debating whether or not acid was a factor in bad things happening to people is the equivalent of wasting a whole message board on the subject of ingesting Dogst.
Whether it caused cancer in lab rats, caused people to jump from windows, made one leg grow shorter than the other…is irrelevent…it’s DOGST!
It makes you WHACKY!
(Ya like “Whacky”?)
It’s UNSTABLE. Whether or not your “predisposed” to psychosis or not…it’s a Russian Roulette kinda thing.
(I can hear the acidheads rustling now…!)
Don’t get me wrong…if they came up with a 100% new drug that has some of the effects LSD does, without some of the others, and no bad consequences at all…I’d STILL probably be using it. Like I said…in the right settings, with the right people…I had a TON of fun, and experiences.
But your wasting a lot of time discussing something that isn’t gonna give you those great experiences 100% of the time, and isn’t 100% PROVEN to be safe.
(please don’t send me medical journals written by “Proffessor Von Happytrails” written back in 1978 either. STILL not 100% true.) My point is that…"Sure, it’s a fun drug that may not be as bad as others, and may possibly be safe…but it can also be BAD NEWS! Why waste yout time discussing at length here? I only personally had 2 bad experiences from using it that may or may not be consequential, and were really nothing to write home about. And STILL LOVED IT! (consequential…izat a real word…?)
But I also know personally that it can be the equivelent of playing Russian Roulette.
It’s a VERY powerful drug.
And there ain’t nothing WORSE than taking a hit realizing “your not really up for it”…and BEING OUTTA YOUR MIND FOR 9 HOURS!
And I don’t state all this from a “Recovering Addict’s” point of view.
(ya know…“Repent Ye Sinners” etc.)
Drugs CAN be fun…make NO mistakes about it.
If I weren’t “predisposed” to being an addict, and there was no consequences…I’d probably still be using them.
But why even go there?
Strangling someone during orgasm is supposed to “heighten” the experience…but, ya REALLY wanna mess wit dat!!!
And eating dogst might give you an UNBELIEVABLE euphoria…
But it would STILL be dogst.
Well…FROM a “Recovering Addicts” viewpoint…I also know that ya couldn’t tell Me “Diddley” about the “evils” of drugs.
Yes…it’s EXACTLY like life.
But as my “PRAYER” goes (not to go religious on yaz)…“Grant me the serenity, to accept the things I can’t change. The courage to change the things I CAN…and the WISDOM to know the difference.”
I know that no matter WHAT I say here, is gonna change anybody’s opinion on this subject. (When your young…you “think” your bulletproof. And you can find ALL the justifications for using drugs in the book.
Because it’s a cool new experience, and you wanna make it OK in your own head. Just pick up a copy of High Times Magazine!)
I can only have the courage to try to expose myself here, and pass on some 1st hand wisdom that I KNOW to be true.
But I ALSO know, sometimes ya just gots ta go thru yer own things…and find it all out for yourself.
(wish I could quote this really profound diddy on the difference between knowledge & wisdom…but I can’t recall it. Too much drugs!)
So dose it up kiddies! Yer in for the ride of your life!
Then come back and talk to me in 20-30 yrs…and gimme some o dat profound knowledge you seem to have about drug use.
(if ya STILL got yer marbles and life together!) Don’t know of too many sucessful drug users past the age of 30.
"Cept maybe “Wavy Gravy” from back in Woodstock…and we all know where HE’S at…don’t we!
Really…and just where do you get YOUR “Drug advice” from? “Acid Hints from Heloise”, or Newbies who don’t know their ass from a hole in da ground?
(and it’s former.)
“Gee…I need some drug advice here…the blotter…or the microdot…Hmmmmmmmmm?”
Wake up and smell yer braincells fryin’!
I get my drug advice from doctors/scientists and people I know and trust who have knowledge and/or experience – as it happens, I have both. Meanwhile, your incoherent prose and dismissal of scientific evidence (indeed, of virtually ALL evidence) is supremely unimpressive. Ergo, I deduce that what you have said (to the extent that it is decipherable at all) should be simply disregarded as the ramblings of a damaged born-again.
I’m not going to go into the debate on LSD’s wonders. I, too, am a “recovering” heroin addict (I prefer the term former – I’ve been clean for over 10 years), and my own experiences are too conflicted for words. For me, drugs really were part of the answer, allowing me to maintain and fall apart gradually, until I was ready to get my life back together. Drugs were, for me, both part of the problem and part of the solution.
I do, however, want to respond to part of the first post. I have seen no reason to believe that LSD has an effect on spinal fluid. According to the book Biochemistry by Lenninger (so my wife is returning to school and I have a weird habit of scanning her text books, so sue me), LSD has been shown to damage RNA and increase chances of mutation. He doesn’t tell if there is a threshold amount, and he does point out that high doses of Vitamin C have been shown to do the same, so I’m not concerned that, given my own past use, I’m going to wake up looking something like a a 1950’s sf movie.
Simply trying to pass on information…
Through the modem, past the router, over the firewall… nothing but 'Net -
in 1969, Dianne Linkletter, daughter of TV personality Art Linkletter and an aspiring actress, leapt to her death from her West Hollywood apartment. Linkletter claimed his daughter was under the influence of LSD at the time of her apparent suicide. He said “It isn’t suicide, it’s murder.”
I think I see a problem here. It appears that most of the people in this thread who have claimed experience with LSD have not actually used the drug. LSD (LSD-25) is d-lysergic diethylamide tartrate, while most of you have consumed a combination of lysergic acid alkaloids made from morning glory seeds.
Real LSD is extremely hard to produce. I have never seen it.
Perhaps we should be more concerned with exactly “what” we took before we get concerned about the effects that it has had on our bodies.
for information about drugs, dosage recommendation, people’s experiences, medical studies and gov’t studies go to www.erowid.org
either way,
lsd does not get trapped in your spinal cord, and even if were true, not too much to be concerned about… last time i checked i wasn’t planning on severing my spine. But it’s not true in the least so no fear of that.
lsd doesnt cause any mental illnesses but can cause further deteroration if someone is disposed to mental illness. Not only that, but it wouldn’t be a scenerio where one took the drug, woke up and suddenly, went crazy. It would be a gradually loss of mental abilities and concepts. They wouldnt see it coming, much like your typical crazy.
Drugs are dangerous. People are abundant. And responsibility is even rarer than both. Besides, it’s illegal.
I saw that episode of *Dragnet.[i/] The show did in fact have several episodes on that topic.
More directly, I can tell you that I knew a girl in high school–who herself was and is quite discreet (so far as I have been able to determine, she doesn’t even smoke, let alone do drugs). But her brother is a different story. He did take LSD in the Sixties, and less than 5 years ago his mother told me he continued for years afterwards to have “bad trips.” He died about two years ago, age 44.
So Lithia, on what do you base your statement that the people relating their experiences here weren’t really taking LSD25? Is there some tell-tale sign that indicates when someone has taken “real” LSD, which is hard to make? Fill us in, we’re just ignorant druggies.
