I have two relatives who experimented with LSD in their teens and experienced psychotic breaks not long after. Now, schizophrenia normally hits in early adulthood. It’s tough to say whether the LSD caused the psychosis or triggered some latent genetic vulnerability, but in both cases neither were ever well again.
Imminent Death
It was sidewinders! Rattlers wouldn’t chase you, they shake their tails to scare you off. Sidewinders would and not only can they outrun you, they can climb trees. Silent assassins just lurking around waiting for a human to get in range. Always look under the jeep before getting close, cause they like to hide under vehicles. At least that’s what my dad told me.
I have never seen a sidewinder in the wild.
Back in the day (mid 70’s), I experimented with drugs. I loved, LOVED LSD. I loved it so much that I wanted to use it all the time, so I quit playing with it. (That was some really fun stuff, though.) No psychotic breaks and no deformed children.
Joan Jett
Indeed. And just how dangerous are they? My only experience of the USA is Minnesota, Wisconsin and Alaska, and of forests in the latter.
A psychotic episode (regardless of mental health afterward) does not surprise me. If someone has a genetic, or any other predisposition for schizophrenia, I could see LSD triggering it. The average adult human without any such predisposition? Maybe if you took enough at once?
LSD is tartrated from a toxin created by ergot. There have been rumors of some batches being enhanced/adulterated with strychnine, which can have similar effects in the kind of microgram doses common with LSD. It seems like the action is like a neural un-braking, so in a large enough dose, I imagine it could be fatal.
For the average person, 200~300μg is quite a lot, and the trip typically goes on for at least half a day. This would suggest that the LSD itself is not the prime effect actor but causes a long-lasting change in neurological metabolism.
Because such a minute dose produces such long-lasting effects, it is not unusual for people who have taken LSD to perceive that its effect is ultimately non-transient. If you go to a party, get stinking drunk for hours on end and then just stop drinking, by Wednesday you are the same person that showed up on Saturday for the party, whereas with LSD, the tripper often feels like a changed person from the experience.
But the effects seem to be unpredictable, or at least not well understood. It realistically could incur psychosis, possibly even in a person who was not otherwise predisposed. Or, perhaps, it could avert psychosis in someone who was predisposed. The problem lies in the fact that it has simply not been studied adequately, and the effects seem to be as consistent and homogenous as human behavior in general (i.e., not at all).
Indeed.
The 18-year-old woman became mired on the mudflats near Ingram Creek, about 45 miles south of Anchorage, early Friday morning and drowned in the incoming tide.Her husband, Jay, who watched helplessly as the water covered her head, was treated for mild hypothermia by paramedics.
Ha ha ha. Killer shrews were never scary. Just angry dogs in rubber shrew suits. Love that movie!
Asbestos is real and is a real danger, but I was a lot more scared of it than I had any right to be, back when I was single-digit-aged. I think it’s because I saw video somewhere of workers cleaning it up, and it was the hazmat suits that were actually scaring me.
I seem to recall a lot of needless anxiety about falling satellites when I was in grade school. They always hit the ocean miles away from where I lived.
Yeah, horsehair plaster and radon as well.
I used to be terrified of dentists.
Nowadays I am pretty relaxed with my dentist. Instead, I am terrified of my dental hygienist.
I remember being excited by Skylab, thinking it might actually fall right into my back yard. Turns out where it did fall, in the middle of the Australian outback, means it might have fallen in my back yard given just a few degrees or minutes difference. Good thing it didn’t, though, as empty areas were way safer landing spots than urban ones.
Volcanoes.
Okay, volcanoes are plenty dangerous, but they aren’t likely to randomly appear in your yard, like one did for Dionisio Pulido. I read about that as a kid and volcanoes appearing near me showed up in my nightmares for years.
Yes, this! When I was a child my grandmother had a Time-Life collection called Mysteries of the Unexplained which had everything from Sasquatch to ball lightning (which is real!) but nothing held my attention as well as the accounts of spontaneous human combustion. Terrifying stuff, and I never considered how odd it was that nobody has ever witnessed it happening.
As a lad, I remember everyone was afraid of a nuclear war with Russia.
Nixon
Still scary. It’s possible they are keeping his head alive in a secret South American laboratory.