Throwaway account. Taking LSD has been one of the most powerful experiences of my life - same level of power as one of my children dying. The first time I took it (rather late in life), it saved my marriage. After the intense trippy part died down, I was able to introspect from other people's viewpoints in a way I was never able to before. I could actually see I was the one being the ass, not the other way around. This understanding and feeling takes a while to wear off (say, 2 or 3 months?) - long enough for me to make some substantial changes.
LSD for fun, is great. Try playing an RPG while on a low dosage. You're coherent enough to play and understand it, but the realism spikes a thousand times. (I tried Fallout 3, and really felt as if I was in a nuclear wasteland.)
I've tried understanding technical documentation (on low dosages), and found it to be quite understandable and was able to retain everything. Immediately you start visualising and really "feeling" the underlying technology (even if it isn't actually that profound, it'll impact your mind in that way). I haven't done tests to see if this is more effective, but it looks like a promising possibility. (There was a thread on HN a few days back that talked about this.)
As far as the dangers, it might very well be. Wikipedia provides the indication that it's relatively safe, with patients that experienced psychosis (a few out of a thousand) to recover within a few days. The rate of psychosis is higher for people with existing mental illness. FWIW, I've been DX'd as bipolar I, with psychosis. As "far out" as LSD has made me feel during the experience, when it's over, I feel much more grounded than ever.
LSD is something everyone should seriously consider doing at least once in their life.
See, that's terrifying to me. I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
This talk of using MDMA for couples' therapy because it releases vasopressin scares me too. Vasopressin is the bonding hormone, and sure, you could probably make two people who were not in love fall in love artificially- but that's also scary. I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs.
I'm pretty libertarian, and I do think that drugs should be a choice- but these accounts scare me more than any crap about flashbacks and hallucinations.
"I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could only stand because I took drugs."
That's not how it works. The drugs allow you to explore feelings that you're otherwise not able to explore, and work through whatever emotional roadblocks you're having with your partner. Essentially it lets you find the source of your anxiety and problems, when normally you'd just be really anxious and unhappy all the time but you wouldn't know why. And then once you know why you are unhappy it allows you to communicate these feelings with each other so that you can use them to rebuild the relationship. It does also make you love and care much more about the other person's wellbeing, which is an important part of the process, but it's not why it works. The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
"I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill."
You should take some time to learn about what the experience is actually like. You're trivializing the psychedelic experience by saying that LSD trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
The love and empathy part is just what allows you to fix your relationship, it's not actually what fixes it.
This is akin to taking meds to suppress panic attacks in order to undergo therapy to truly circumvent the panic/agoraphobia loop. The drug is a tool; it can't relieve you of the responsibility to do the work yourself (no matter what lazy people may want to believe).
"On the other hand, there's no evidence for all this 'exploring feelings' stuff."
What I'm saying is actually the currently accepted scientific theory. What we see in PET scans is that MDMA shuts down part of the amygdala, which allows people to process emotions and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Michael Mithoefer refers to this starting at 10:45 in this MAPS lecture:
There's no question that couples therapy would be vastly less effective without the increased pair bonding and empathy, but if that was the only mechanism in play then we wouldn't expect the relationship to still be vastly improved 12 - 24 months after just one session. (Otherwise we'd be seeing a large percentage of marriages happening between people who met at raves, which is not the case. People who hook up under the influence of MDMA don't seem to have any lasting 'extra' feelings for each other after a couple weeks, beyond what would be normal without the MDMA.)
Forgive me, I did not clearly explain that. It does not trivialise the death of my child in any way. Having my first daughter dying was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. It slowly, but totally changed my life. Emotionally, I just hardened up. My outlook on life changed (realising the one chance to live, life is precious, enjoy every second, etc. etc.).
The other horrible event in my life was a series of severe panic/psychosis attacks. I stood next to my girlfriend, and truly did not know if I was me, if she was anybody, if I was an alien, or what. And then it was just a feeling of "absolute terror". You're utterly and completely terrified - no "reason", just a total sensation of dread. I would have cut my legs off if it would have stopped it. (BTW, this was all before I tried LSD.)
So, when I say "powerful", I mean, reflecting back on my life, looking at the events that stand out, that truly had an impact, that are "amazing" - what would those be? In no particular order:
- The birth of my children (the first time I almost fainted, not from the blood but just from sheer awesomeness of holding her in my arms).
- The loss of my first child (when the doctor shook his head, I just collapsed, not to mention the effects for years to come).
- Panic attacks
- Some of the times my wife and I have made love.
- LSD: Even just the experience, let alone the impact on my life.
Panic attacks are truly awful. I'm sorry to hear that you've had them, and more sorry to hear about your daughter.
How long did your panic disorder last? How'd you get it into resolved? What therapies did you pursue, how long did they take, and how well did they work?
I developed PD after making the idiotic decision to work (at a Wall Street job) through a flu-- not a cold, but actual influenza-- taking only 2 days off. Stupid macho trader bullshit I tried to pull at 24. So I didn't recover properly and ended up developing a respiratory infection that intermittently made breathing difficult: hence, panic attacks. At the same time, two very close friends (a little bit too deep into psychedelics) were having nervous breakdowns at the same time and even though I wasn't using, I started worrying that it might happen to me, because I was dealing with their bullshit every day. Which meant that the panic attacks became self-reinforcing; because I saw mental illness in my daily life, I thought I might develop it. Of course, that didn't happen because, even though it feels otherwise, panic disorder is not "going crazy". I think panic disorder is actually more like a much less severe cousin of epilepsy (an acute, intermittent, and highly treatable physical problem) than chronic mental illness, but that's anther rant.
I don't have full-on panic attacks at this point, but I still have low-level anxiety attacks (the kind that normal people get once a decade or so, which are rough but NOT panic attacks) on a 1-2 per day frequency.
It was a fascinating experience, but a deeply negative one. It doesn't help that most people think of panic attacks as the punchline to a joke. Sometimes I feel the need to say, "No, you didn't actually have a 'panic attack' when you saw Lady Gaga wear the meat-dress." This must be what people with real insomnia feel when idiots write Facebook statuses like "farmville at 2:30 am. i'm such an insomniac lol".
What has actually stayed with me is the incompetence of the U.S. medical system. The experience of being neglected in a time of (perceived) exigent emergency is jarring. More scarring than the attacks themselves (during a panic attack, you don't write many memories, and this is a good thing) was how much medical incompetence and don't-give-a-shit attitude I experienced when I was sick with this "mystery" health problem (the respiratory infection and panic disorder onset happened at the same time) that turned out, thankfully, not to be that serious. I'm terrified of what it will be like in a few decades (fingers crossed) when I have to deal with real, serious health problems-- I hope the system is less broken, by then.
I've have panic attacks like the OP. They lasted pretty strongly for a year, then tapered off. Treatment: Basically, lots of benzos (Xanax) that I titrated myself off of over time. (Xanax is a much lower risk drug than some of the powerful ones a psych might prescribe (SSRIs, for example)). For years though, I couldn't do anything that put me in an altered state. Even taking Benadryl to sleep (which makes you groggy at first), would make me freak out. Even a tiny hit of pot would make me get all scared. Apart from taking Xanax on-demand, it just mostly went away...
I still keep Xanax in my pocket (I think everyone should, to be able to remain clear headed if a panic situation arises), but hardly ever need them.
When my wife was being treated for PD, she tried Xanax and hated it. She said it felt as though she was still having a panic attack but just couldn't act on it - which, for her, was even scarier.
That's the paradoxical effect. It happens, sadly, with most psychiatric medicines. No one really knows why, but a small percentage of people end up getting worse. That could have been at play with your wife. Or it could have been a nocebo (negative placebo) effect, or just the course of the attack. For example, the worst panic attacks tend to come on suddenly with a defined liminal point (not an upward creep of anxiety throughout the day) and peak 3-7 minutes afterward. If she took the Xanax at the liminal point and felt worse 5 minutes later, that's not because of the drug, but the panic attack's initial upward swing.
The truth is that benzodiazepines don't really abort a panic attack-- at least not in the short (<5 minutes) term. Nothing really can. What benzos are great for is recovering from a panic attack and preventing it from rolling into another one. If your wife felt shitty for 5 minutes, but great at T=30 minutes, then it's not the drug's fault because the drug worked.
SSRIs also have a paradoxical effect. I think SSRIs are somewhat like a less risky version of electroconvulsive therapy: they induce a change of state in the brain, and the brain's response gets it out of a depressive cycle, but it's not clear why one state change ("shock") works and another doesn't. To make it weirder, when people are on SSRIs for a while there's a tendency for the drug to stop working ("poop out"). No surprise: this sounds like tolerance. However, at this point both raising and lowering the doses can work. So it seems like any change in this state variable is what can cause the improvement, but no one really knows. (That said, never hard taper on an SSRI, and definitely don't reduce dosage without talking to a doctor.)
I'm on very low doses of Klonopin, which takes longer (about 30 minutes) to set in but I think that was a very good thing. First, there's no sudden change in psychological state. Sudden relaxation during panic could have a paradoxical effect. Second, it puts a 30-60 minute upper bound on the attack but still requires me to work at calming myself down. If it took effect immediately, I never would have had to go through the hard process of deliberately calming myself down, through which I learned a lot of skills that work on run-of-the-mill negative emotions as well as on panic. Thanks to that process, I'm probably actually above average in mental health post-panic. Panic disorder teaches in a very visceral way that most of the garden-variety worries are just not worth getting upset over.
The death of your own child even, not just any child.
Just a thought: can you imagine that there may be many completely different ways you could think, all of them "sane"? That the patterns of thought you take for granted are mostly there by chance? Please take a moment and think before you answer.
Because if you can't, that would explain your reaction. GP found out something about himself by using LSD, and that something happened to be important enough that it changed his life. Why is that such a hard thing to imagine?
There are pills and there are pills. For my uncle 40 years ago, "just a pill" saved his life (penicillin). There are many pills that could kill you. And apparently there are pills that can change the way you think, and at least for some people this happens to have major positive consequences. Why is this by default evil?
I share your concern about MDMA use for therapy - but I don't think we should throw away the baby along with the bathwater. Drugs are extremely dangerous, especially for young and/or uneducated people, because they _work_. They have real, consistent effects, and if you manage to align those effects with your goals, good things happen. But if you don't... and this is why you usually have several horror stories for each successful one. Still - I think there is a lot of potential here.
My particular experience is of much smaller scale - a few months ago I found out that occasional melatonin use can fix my sleep schedule long term. Not a big thing, but I see it as one battle I've won with my genetics. And that's a good thing.
The analogy about penicillin is quite silly, because LSD didn't save this guy's life- it didn't do anything tangible- it was a mental experience disconnected from reality... whereas the death of his child was real. If the pill brought the kid back to life I wouldn't be criticizing it.
I think many people on here are missing the point about "same level of power as one of my children dying." He's only using that as a way to convey how much of a life altering event it was, not how tramatic, or depressing it is.
I've never taken LSD, nor to I plan to, but every, EVERY, person I've talked to that have, talk about how it changed thier lives dramatically.
It seems there are a fair ammount of people on here somewhat scared of the way drugs alter you, (hey, this is hacker news, why not hack yourself? you only live once, see what happens) but it's really one of those things you will never understand until you experience for yourself.
That is exactly how I see it, self hacking. The most fascinating thing about psychedelics is that they give you a momentary glimpse into what is pulling the strings behind the organism that is you. They allow you to selectively shut off or amplify the effect of different parts of your brain, which should be profoundly interesting for anyone with a hacker mindset.
I'm not sure I would want to be married to someone I could
only stand because I took drugs.
That's the naturalist fallacy: implicitly assuming that the 'natural state of affairs' is by definition better than an 'artificially' created situation. Taking a pill is no different from living in a house. Both are unnatural. Both can make life a lot easier.
It's also the fallacy of the split middle: it's not either 'you love someone' or 'you can't stand them'. If you're in a loving relationship that has gone downhill somewhat and a few medicated sessions can renew the bonds, is that really any different from going on a second romantic honeymoon, where you also create artificial circumstances to strengthen the bond? Physical forces or cultural forces: they are equally real and do equal work.
> See, that's terrifying to me. I've never taken LSD but I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
Maybe we just read it differently (hopefully the OP will step in), but I don't think he meant LSD trivialized the death of his child in any way. I think he meant that looking back, LSD had a similarly profound impact on his life. Losing a child can make you re-evaluate some things (or so I've heard). So can LSD (that I know).
The difference is that losing a child gives you real information about your surroundings. Taking LSD doesn't allow you to take in any different input- it simply changes the way your brain interprets that same information. I can see why people would enjoy this, but not how they could take it seriously. Taking drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function; I mean that quite literally.
I mean, if I introduced bugs into my simulation code and got results that I liked, I'd be like, "I need to fix those bugs" not "boy are these great results! Look, I can stop the HIV epidemic!" Because I'd be wrong.
Taking LSD doesn't allow you to take in any different input- it simply changes the way your brain interprets that same information. I can see why people would enjoy this, but not how they could take it seriously.
Asserting that "simply changing" the way inputs are interpreted provides nothing of value seems odd on a site where a lot of the participants are programmers who regularly take input and massage it through iterative development of software that interprets that input and produce actual value.
Cyphertext and an encryption key looks random until you apply a cryptographic transform to it. Same inputs, different output, different value.
Great point, bit more specific than I was thinking but spot on: science is a field which uses new tools, mechanisms, and systems of measurement to continue looking at the same universe but determine more specifics from it!
> Taking drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function; I mean that quite literally.
I don't agree at all. Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch.
Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch.
Thank you. I've tried explaining this to various people when discussing my on drug use. There's a common presumption that a person's brain, in its default state, is "OK", and that any messing with it is bad. Yet people typically do not have this same view of the (rest of the) body; few people get bent out of shape over diabetics shooting insulin. The brain is a meat machine sitting in a chemical soup and is no more or less inherently perfect than your heart, blood, or pancreas.
The stigma attached to drug use is horrendous and keeps many people from getting proper treatment or even understanding that they may need help.
People whose brains are broken by default end up self-medicating, or living miserable lives, or both, often because people believe that "drugs breaks the way your brain is supposed to function."
It doesn't work like that at all. MDMA gives you a sense of euphoria while slightly altering your perception (it's considered a slight psychedelic in that sense) - it also makes you very empathic to the people you are with. MDMA isn't like a love potion, usually, once you come down you go back to being "you". It doesn't make you addicted to the people you experienced it with at all. What it does do is open you all up, so at controlled doses that can be highly beneficial in a therapeutic setting because both people will feel love for each other and empathy. Which, at a controlled dose, they should also be able to coherently iron out their issues.
Once they come down, they go back to being who/what they were, but with a whole lot more "sharing" now - they both now know how each other feel because it was expressed out of love and empathy rather than witheld or stated in a defensive/offensive manner.
Psychedelics really shouldn't be toyed with unless you are psychologically stable - if you can imagine, being "normal", then psychedelics take you to the reciprocal of "normal". I've played with Magic Mushrooms and really hated the experience, I also did two nights of Ayahuasca - extremely powerful experience, beyond LSD for sure, but a very rough ride (Ayahuasca is a shamanic "purging" psychedelic, it causes you to vomit uncontrollably while having the hallucinogenic and psychedelic experience of LSD x 5 for about 8 to 10 hours straight).
I will say this: I believe all of the benefits people would seek in the use of mind-altering substances can, without question, be found through meditation - deliberate thinking - introspection - and just "chilling the fuck out".
I imagine that the experiences that you have while taking certain drugs don't just exist in a vacuum and disappear when you re-join earth. They stay with you. It is another experience to add to all of the other experiences that you have had in your life -- experiences that shape you.
Having an overwhelming and profound experience while taking LSD does not trivialize or diminish other experiences in your life. The soul has plenty of room for boarding.
Experiences do not have to be equivalent in order for the end result (i.e. you changing a particular behavior or making a decision to go on a different path in life) to be quite similar.
I've known a lot of people who've used drugs in different ways, and my observation is that people tend to attribute far too much, in terms of their own cognitive ability and potential, to the drugs. (Example: "Because of LSD, I was able to see past <psychological blockage X>." How does this person know he couldn't have seen past it without it?) People who use a lot of psychedelics (in my moderate amount of experience) tend to see reality through a drug-colored lens. To them, there's "reality" which is boring and gray and psychedelia which is interesting and profound. They lose the skill of intermingling these two aspects of life. This is what proper study of spirituality does and drugs do not: it gives you the ability to integrate your profound experiences with everyday life and to apply them to the real world.
If you are even a late beginner at meditation and go out into the woods for 4-5 hours, you'll probably have positive and beautiful experiences. No, you don't get the "trippy" visuals, but that's not the important part. Most people don't have the focus to achieve this until they start practicing, but drugs aren't a way out. I prefer meditation's failure mode, which is no experience, to that of drug use, which is negative experience.
I think psychedelics have great potential as medicines and, in ritual use, can bring lay people in contact with spiritual experiences that might not be accessible to them. The idea that these drugs are "evil" is a mixture of xenophobia, bigotry, and religious puritanism. They're not evil; they have great potential for good. On the other hand, I think the recreational use of drugs is seriously overrated.
Psychedelic dependence (of a psychological kind, because these drugs are not physically addictive) exists, but it's much more subtle than physical addiction. When you know someone has a real problem is when he starts attributing positive things (creativity, spirituality, insight) that should not rely on drugs to psychedelics. This leads into materialistic nihilism and a very unsettling style of ennui in which a person has to get further detached from reality to feel good.
Unless you can truly experience reality through their eyes you simply don't know if what they have gained would have been possible without drugs.
I, for example, don't believe in God. But I would never be so arrogant as to claim that people who do cannot reach a more complete understanding of themselves or their potential, or that this understanding is somehow more shallow than my perspective on the world. Even if I believe to my very core that my perspective is grounded in reality, and theirs in superstition.
This is what you are doing though, only you believe your perspective is grounded in spirituality (whatever that means) and theirs in materialism.
Yes, psychological dependence exists, but people become psychologically dependent on all kinds of things. That some of these things exist materially, doesn't mean the individual concerned is descending into materialistic nihilism. I don't understand why drugs get singled out as such a particular evil in this regard.
You make a fair point, and we can only reason from what we've seen.
What I've seen is a LOT of false enlightenment in a certain subculture. Hang out for a few hours with the drugged-out burnouts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to get a sense of it. There's a certain arrogant, self-congratulatory nihilism in the "hipster" culture, and if it's taken more seriously than it deserves, it leads to some very bad places. Is it the drugs or the casual sex alone? Of course not, because drugs and sex are generally harmless (if not possibly beneficial) in moderation. It's a certain self-centered experience-chasing mindset that, for a variety of reasons, is very attractive to young people whose personalities and ideas haven't yet formed.
If people want to use drugs, then I have no problem with that. Certainly I think these chemicals should be legal and that their possible benefits should be researched. But the false enlightenment that I've seen some people fall into is dangerous. It kills a person's work ethic and leaves that person prey to mental illness. Does everyone who uses drugs fall into this pattern? Obviously, no. Do a lot of people who don't use drugs fall into it anyway? Certainly. I think that drugs make people who are exposed to that mentality and culture a lot more susceptible to falling into it, and that's the primary danger.
For the record, I think drug prohibition (which is immoral and should be ended) makes these drugs a lot more dangerous. A lot of people have to be connected to a depraved culture even to have regular access to these drugs. I've often thought that less dangerous than the chemicals themselves are the sorts of toxic people you can end up surrounding yourself with if you want regular, frequent access, due to the drugs' illegality.
I agree for the most part, and I apologise if I came off over strong in my last post.
For what it's worth I have spent a great deal of time in the company of such people. Perhaps it's the case that the majority are simply living in a deluded drug-addled mist, and certainly a great many are hedonists first and last, and would be happy to admit it.
The thing is though, I see a lot of false enlightenment everywhere. There are whole swathes of people who would consider themselves spiritual for one reason or another but don't seem the least bit capable of critical thinking, open mindedness, introspection or subtlety. Ultimately, dogmatic ideology has stunted more people's personal development than drugs ever will. Not to mention the billions murdered over the centuries.
Yet in any community you will find deeply thoughtful individuals who have clearly gained and grown a great deal from their experiences and beliefs. For this reason I cannot bring myself to write any tool of potential enlightenment off, no matter what the behaviour of the average user, or if it comes in the form of scripture or white powder.
I think you're right on a lot of this. I guess that all I would say is that the proportions are different. You're more likely to find false prophets, psychosis, and disturbing detachment from reality in Williamsburg drug culture than in monastic Buddhism, but this is a contrived comparison that maybe doesn't mean very much. Still, I'd much rather (in the distant future when I'm raising kids) find out that my 17-year-old kid was practicing Zen Buddhism than find out that he or she was using LSD. If the latter, I'd do everything I could to encourage him or her to use it safely and in an intelligent way, but I'd still prefer the former. And I'd definitely let a child attend a meditation retreat if I thought he was ready; I wouldn't give help him or her find LSD, though.
I'm a pragmatist at heart, much more than a moralist. If drugs can make peoples' lives better, they should be used.
Totally hear you, and that's why I've always said "dumb people do dumb stuff on drugs". Brilliant people have very interesting experiences on drugs. One of the reasons university is such an important community to experiment in!
Your points are all valid. Nevertheless the amount drugs have contributed to various creative and technological innovations cannot be quantified. Things we all enjoy were at least aided by them. Thus drugs, whether we like it or not, are a part of what we have and who we are.
This is true nowhere more than in Northern California where we're also uniquely a land of pioneers, and eccentrics. We are all of the above and it's not clear which is cause or effect. Nevertheless, this hodge-podge has led to a center of innovation and a culture that seeks to overthrow traditions. For many individuals drugs are important in their own cultural development, how they see the world, etc.
Like the woman says in the article: drugs can help people 'see the top of the mountain', so they realize they don't need to keep on doing what they were otherwise doing. If you've personally not experienced this, that's fine, but please don't diminish important experiences from others, solely because you don't like the idea of requiring an external adulterant to achieve.
Keep in mind we're all reliant on adulterants, whether they're friends, education, caffeine, or a walk in the woods like you say. All of this is life experience, and we are life.
"I prefer meditation's failure mode, which is no experience, to that of drug use, which is negative experience."
You can actually develop 'meditation sickness', which is essentially psychosis brought on from either excessive meditation or else meditation the wrong way. It's not super common, but it's still generally advised that people not take up a meditation practice without expert supervision.
What is "excessive" meditation? People die after playing video games for 16 hours, but no one is going to argue that playing them for a couple hours a day is physically dangerous.
I generally think the "meditation sickness" is more scare than substance, without much evidence for a causative link, but I think it's possible in certain circumstances. For example, I've heard of inexperienced people (i.e. people who've taken one hatha yoga class) going on week-long retreats and having negative experiences (including temporary psychosis and anxiety disorders) but that's not what I'm talking about. That's about as irresponsible as for an overweight person who can barely walk a mile to try out for a marathon.
I think that a lot of "meditation sickness" comes from people who are prodromal of some sort of psychological crisis and (because of their increasingly difficult mental state) become interested in altering their consciousness, and that the psychotic break was not caused by the meditation but would have happened anyway. I can't prove that, but it's been my suspicion for a long time. For those who might argue that meditation is therefore bunk because some people who meditate end up getting frank mental illness anyway, my counterpoint would be that it's foolish to expect that a novice meditator can meditate his way out of a potentially physical mental illness; he needs medical help.
What is very dangerous is when people try to use meditation or yoga in lieu of other well-tested, scientific medical treatment, which some New Age types believe in even though most actual meditators and yogis advise strongly against it. I talked to a very accomplished yoga teacher about using meditation to treat panic disorder (didn't want to use benzos) and he said, "Meditate, but see a doctor and take his advice. You can't meditate your way out of this, right now, any more than a person with heart disease can meditate out of that."
There was a rumor a while back that some of these South Korean internet cafes were putting low doses of mood enhancing drugs in the air so that people got depressed when they left, though I'm pretty sure that was just an urban legend.
Reminds me of stories about casinos who pump additional pure oxygen into the air to make gamblers feel "more alive and awake" while they're there (and thus experiencing a low when they leave).
I could be wrong but I believe the purpose of oxygen in casinos is purely to help people play longer without getting tired, thus losing more money that way.
> I don't think I would ever want to put myself in the sort of situation that trivializes the death of a child by making it equivalent to downing a pill.
I would have thought he meant it the other way around.
"When they were interviewed again 14 months later 58 per cent rated the experience among the five most personally meaningful of their lives and 64 per cent said it had increased their well-being."
> LSD is something everyone should seriously consider doing at least once in their life.
Yes, but no matter how great it sounds, you still have to consort with drug dealers to find it. Not sure that the risk of arrest (or worse) is really worth that reward.
LSD for fun, is great. Try playing an RPG while on a low dosage. You're coherent enough to play and understand it, but the realism spikes a thousand times. (I tried Fallout 3, and really felt as if I was in a nuclear wasteland.)
I've tried understanding technical documentation (on low dosages), and found it to be quite understandable and was able to retain everything. Immediately you start visualising and really "feeling" the underlying technology (even if it isn't actually that profound, it'll impact your mind in that way). I haven't done tests to see if this is more effective, but it looks like a promising possibility. (There was a thread on HN a few days back that talked about this.)
As far as the dangers, it might very well be. Wikipedia provides the indication that it's relatively safe, with patients that experienced psychosis (a few out of a thousand) to recover within a few days. The rate of psychosis is higher for people with existing mental illness. FWIW, I've been DX'd as bipolar I, with psychosis. As "far out" as LSD has made me feel during the experience, when it's over, I feel much more grounded than ever.
LSD is something everyone should seriously consider doing at least once in their life.