I completely agree, but this stuff is still illegal in most of the United States. What am I supposed to do, just walk up to someone "how do you do fellow kids, I'd like to purchase one LSD".
This wasn't what I imagined myself doing this morning, but here is a shortened step-by-step guide how to acquire psychedelics as an adult:
- Get Tor browser and find one of the various marketplaces, purchase small samples and send part of the sample to one of the various test labs that can confirm the quality
OR
- Find a community where people are likely to have some sort of experience with psychedelics, like self-improvement groups, hacker spaces or just visit raves
- Start talking with a person who could maybe possibly have done psychedelics at one point or another. Don't ask them outright about buying, but starts a conversation about your curiosity around psychedelics for self-help.
- If they reciprocate, you can at one point of the conversation ask them kindly if they happen to know anyone who can sell to you. If they say no, just move on with the conversation as to not make anything awkward for either of you
- Repeat until you find someone, you'll find someone for sure, in either of the groups mentioned before.
Hah, true :) I think "talk to others" is often a solution that is overlooked and is very powerful. Probably the best parts of my life wouldn't be possible if I didn't force myself to socialize with others, even if it's difficult and I don't want to do it until after the socialization is done then I feel good about it.
Having known a few people of those two physical descriptions, and quite a few people who've used psychedelics, in my small sample set you'd be looking at the wrong people.
Change "long hair male" to "dreadlocks on a white male" and you'd have a point, but the majority of long-haired men I've known either wouldn't do drugs or are into non-psychedelics.
And having spent a lot of time in clubs/festivals/house parties around drug use, of the many many users and dealers of psychedelics I've met... I don't think I could narrow down a single "look" that's more, or less, likely than any other.
On the other hand, a) there is "a look" to facial expressions (not dissimilar to a weed "stoned" or amazed expression) that can be quite recognisable of somebody being under the influence - aided by things like super wide pupils and b) there are activities - such as being in a place where people are dancing to electronic music of some genre - where plenty of people use psychedelics and those faces can often be seen (though easily confused with expressions caused by other classes of drug).
I'd probably go by more of non-visual characteristics (openness, uncommon worldviews, unusually emphatic and so on) rather than just visual clues, but YMMV
or you could do what I did, wear a t-shirt with mushrooms on it because you're a big nutrition nerd, and then just watch the surprising but interesting questions roll in
If you live in San Francisco, simply walk up and down Haight for a while (near Ashbury, of course). Look for "street characters" - every once in a while as one of them passes you, they'll quickly call out "hey man, wanna buy shrooms?" and keep walking. The expectation is that if you want to buy you'll go shoulder tap them.
Telegram is a good place to order drugs in many cities. Just look for groups near you and there’s a good chance you’ll find an active group advertising their warez. You can DM them and likely they’ll deliver, cash on delivery.
LSD and other similar substances can offer an incredible insight to people who are equipped to handle it. Such substances create new pathways in your brain and increase neuroplasticity.
It's not the one-stop solution to everyone's problems and should NOT be treated as such (far from it!), but it does offer tremendous perspective and insight to those who know what they're getting into.
One of the issues is that LSD also simulates the feeling of insight. How many trip reports mention "finding the solution to everyone's problems" and "forgetting" it upon sobering? (They didn't forget, they never had it, the LSD simulated having it...)
Maybe it's a better cultural value for our truth seeking groups to avoid psychedelics and other hallucinogens.
In my experience, the "simulated insight" (and I agree, that is roughly what I'd call it) ends up being something more attune to "I need to take better care of my apartment" or "Revolver truly is their best album" or more recently, "I need to learn to write shaders." The insights one experiences are personal, whether or not they're actually beneficial to the waking self.
I haven't met anyone who's seriously felt they'd "discovered" or solved anything serious while tripping. I know people who've left relationships or changed career paths, so as with nearly anything psychoactive, YMMV.
I can’t quote any enormous studies but I can give you my own experience.
I use it once every month or so, and while I’m on it I did the following:
Built a triangular arbitrage DeFi trading system that made me 200k
Sped up a face recognition system to from 16,000faces a second to 1.2M faces a second
Created the first version of my nudged elastic band simulator for finding transition state energy
Learnt GPU shader coding and made my first real-time atomic force simulator
All of this while high on LSD, not having the idea and implementing later, but having the idea and then implementing while high,
I do a lot of coding while normal too, but LSD seems to remove all self doubt and makes me come up with creative solutions much much much faster, it’s not a simulation, I am objectively better while using it.
It has downsides too though, usually the day after I am more tired than usual and need a day to just rest, and it doesn't always work, sometimes while on it I just feel like chilling and reading, it's not something that can be forced
It's important to have an experienced tripper with you so that when you have a solution, someone can write it down if you're unable to. Or a voice reorder, or some way of capturing your insight.
I’ve never read any trip report including a claim like that.
Lots of people claim to have solved a problem they have, and some of these solutions end up being forgotten, bad, or authentically and positively life-changing.
Hard to draw conclusions from this landscape (which is why scientists should be experimenting with them).
You've never taken a psychedelic and felt you understood the meaning of life? I have personally solved all major conflicts and the middle east crisis multiple times. None of it stuck though...
With some technical problems I have certainly felt that I have solved them and come out with nothing but undecipherable scribble at the end. Once or twice something useful in the afterglow, but much of it is lost (or was never real to begin with)
“Understood the meaning of life” != solved everyone’s problems
Did you actually feel that you had solved all major conflicts, or are you 1) parodying your own ambition of insight or 2) making the separate claim that “if the primary agents in the conflict could have the experience that I’m having, they maybe would not be so conflicted?”
(2) for example is a much, much more believable claim than “I solved all the problems” despite their superficial similarity.
You didn’t give a numerical option for having personally solved all the world’s problems, but I’ll call it 0), and I felt 0) but am also claiming 1). Others have made 2) but that wasn’t part of my comment.
I’m not really interested in what you believe, it’s clear you haven’t had psychedelic experiences, which is fine, but it’s a bit rich for you to be claiming what I could have experienced if you’ve never had your wetwear run that particular program. Psychedelic experiences are unbelievable by their very nature. At their worst (as was repeated elsewhere in the thread, and actually in the article as well) you are literally entering the state of a schizophrenic. It isn’t very nice.
And at its best you can think that you have deep insight into major world problems, the cause of conflicts and how to solve them.
In a more personal middle ground it can also be a highly fertile environment for self reflection and introspection with lasting benefits
Totally agree when it comes to "general insights" here.
You're probably not gonna solve any major problems even though it feels like it in the moment.
However, imho. altering the thought process through drugs and really introspecting on what changes and how that relates to the sober state can yield a LOT of valuable learnings.
I feel like I learned a lot about myself just by introspecting on the effects alcohol, THC, etc. had on me.
Really gave me some insights on how associations are formed, what euphoria does to decision making and so on.
Fwiw I've overcome obstacles on LSD -- "run the algorithm backwards!" Nothing I couldn't have come up with sober, but I hadn't done so in several days.
I find that whatever insights, they’re personal. But their general effect humbling our egos. I find that to be of great use in a selfish narcissistic society we’re living in. I remember after having an LSD trip with good personal insights I got home and had cathartic session of sobbing. It felt absolutely great to do something I rarely do. Last time I did this was more than 15 years ago and feel that I’m still drawing some essence from this experience. Perhaps if I find myself stuck or at crossroads I’ll give it another go.
I'm not the original reply, by the way. I think psychedelics can be fun and extremely liberating/relaxing. But they have not given me any significant personal, scientific, literary or other insights.
> One of the issues is that LSD also simulates the feeling of insight. How many trip reports mention "finding the solution to everyone's problems" and "forgetting" it upon sobering? (They didn't forget, they never had it, the LSD simulated having it...)
Are you sure you're not confusing LSD with THC? What you're describing is well known as "stoner epiphanies"...
I am not sure if LSD use in college gave me any real insights, but it did leave me with a permanent recognition of my internal thought processes. Becoming acutely aware of them essentially. Instead of two layers (internal thoughts then observed reality) there were three (myself, internal thoughts, then observed reality).
Unfortunately, for people who are predisposed, going away to college or falling in love can also trigger a psychotic break. I don't think we would tell people not to do those things though.
You can't make a meaningful comparison without numbers, so I'm not sure where you get your confidence. As it happens, my intuition is that your comparison is wrong.
I would bet that people who are predisposed to e.g. schizophrenia are, for the most part, going to experience some insult that makes it come on at some point before 30 years old. It's just a question of when, where, what, but it'll happen.
I bet the group of people who could develop schizophrenia were they to experience the right insult, but don't, is very small.
If you're around people you trust, in a controlled environment, you're not likely to develop schizophrenia.
If you just decide randomly to trip in an unknown environment with people you're not comfortable around, yeah, it's going to be a wild ride and you might not ever truly get off it even after the stuff wears off completely.
Sorry but this is the biggest load of garbage. You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues. It's like writing randomly to memory from ring 0 and hoping you don't irreversibly wreck your install.
> You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues
Yes, but the question is: how likely are "trauma & psych issues"? How dangerous is the drug in comparison to going out and having six drinks over the course of the night, or (if you do LSD say once a year) a year's worth of drinking? Or, how about in comparison to living somewhere that means you need to drive to work every weekday?
"set & setting" is mainly a convenient red herring to switch off any curious inquiry about the risks from psychedelics. It goes like this:
-- My friend took drug X and he had an accident!
-- Set & setting?
In other words, we don't care about your friend and his accident, we're just trying to counter any suggestions that he had an accident because of drug X. It was his fault for choosing the wrong set & setting.
Which should tell you all you need to know about the "communities" that form around those substances. People ready to blame each other for whatever happens to them just in case their favourite drug gets a bad name. What a community.
Things can just go bad, no matter how hard you try. There is always some level of risk involved, especially if you have a family or personal history of mental illness, in which case it's advisable to not fuck with it at all. "Set and setting" doesn't paper over everything.
The risk of psychedelic drugs is more comparable to motorsports, the more involved action sports, heavy equipment operation, etc. and your average person would be very wary of participating in these even though there are plenty of risk mitigations for these activities.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do drugs. I'm saying that many of them require way more respect than most people realize they need to give them, and trying to downplay that is not good. I can tell you from personal experience that it's easy to get yourself and people you care about in dangerous places.
It's a sample of people who were admitted to the hospital for "LSD psychosis" compared to people who were admitted for a first schizoid break. They conclude that there are a lot of similarities.
What you really want to know is: the probability of a schizoid break given you have a predisposition P(break|predisposition), the probability of a break given LSD use P(break|LSD, predisposition), the prevalence of predisposition to schizophrenia P(break), or P(break|human). And maybe P(break|LSD), too, for kicks (probability non-predisposed person gets a schizoid break given taking LSD).
With those pieces you can come to some sort of reasonable conclusion about the risk. The paper tells you very little to nothing about it since the samples don't tell you anything about the population. It's like a mechanic concluding Toyotas all need work because all the ones he sees need work.
I am bipolar and can not tolerate these substances. It is very bad for me.
I’m happy to let people enjoy them but it is not something I can do. It does bother me when people say that they’re all harmless with no problems though. As with all things there are adverse reactions and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise. I don’t advocate prohibition to be clear, just actual truth and honesty.
Also there is a (small) risk that you can't really check for in advance that lsd will just give you tinnitus, ask me how I know. I'm told it might go away in about a year.
Imagine if Einstein, Newton, and Maxwell had used LSD! They could have reached the heights of such greats as ”Humphry Davy” and ”Sigmund Freud” instead of wallowing in mediocrity.
Yes in the sense that the aim is to avoid overfitting, and to improve generalization, but here the goal is not to favor simpler models but to avoid them, with the presumption that the observed data is a biased sample of reality, and that our natural model building intuition will not correctly make sense of outliers... That kind of thing.
We need a better science for sharing experiences. Science is great for sharing experiments where we can replicate the conditions in the outside world. But it's terrible for sharing experiences because they are harder to share in a replicable way, yet that's where some of the most important insights are.
Humans do need a better language to describe certain areas of experience though, states of mind and emotions. Poetic language is a good approximation, but it uses various quirks and undocumented properties of the "normal" language to get its point across. It's a poor fit even for philosophy, to say nothing of scientific research.
Not everyone reacts the same way to psychedelics. One person might have a "mind-opening experience" for an hour and then be fine, another might suffer from permanent vision problems or worse.
Reminds me of how Carl Sagan wrote about his experiences with cannabis usage (under the pseudonym Mr. X, as to avoid the social stigma associated with it at the time).
I pretty much agree with the article, and I would argue that the reintroduction of subjectivity goes much further than just the study of psychoactive substances for medical purpose.
I tend to believe that the obsession with drugs in our cultures can be traced back to the reformation and the going away from religious experience as a form of wisdom and a valid way to access reality. When one reads the texts of christan, muslim or jewish mystics from the middle ages, one can only wonder at the depth of experiences and the care that is taken to interpret those experiences and build a model of the world that includes them. My feeling is that with the shift to stronger and stronger materialism, mystical experiences were more and more seen as suspicious and potentially a sign of mental disorder. As such, drugs are more acceptable, as one can always explain things away with "neural pathways" and "neurotrasmitters" and whatnot. The experience can be seen as interesting, but what is finally "real" are just electrical signals in a big meatball.
While continuing research from this materialistic perspective is essential, there is a growing recognition that one should allow other ontologies and epistemiologies, that allow the use of direct experience to derive knowledge. This means accepting that some researchers and philosophers explore world models where consciousness is not just an phenomenon emerging from physical process in the brain, but potentially has an existence of its own, or even is primary. If you are interested in this topic I would recommend reading the Galileo Report, written by scientists and philosophers who work with consciousness, and in particular Near Death Experiences: https://galileocommission.org/report/
Side note: I also think that this materialistic view favors the conception some have that drugs can be the only path to accessing some insights. In other cultures, such as the Ayahuasca consuming tribes of south america or the Amanita Muscaria consumers of Siberia, drugs are seen as powerful helpers for establishing contact with the spirits, but are by no means mandatory or necessary to this end. In Siberia for instance, Amanita is mostly consumed in "heterarchical" societies, where non chamans are "allowed" to contact the spirits. It is just something that can help, when one misses the necessary training or gift. In "hierarchical" societies, where the chaman is seen as being of a different species, use of drugs is actually seen as illegitimate, as the chaman should be able to communicate with the spirits thrpugh his/her skills alone. The difference with our culture is the ontology of the experience: one is not tripping for the trip, but to take contact with spirits and ask them something. Whether this happens with fireworks or more silently is less relevant. But we do not want to entertain the idea of spirits, so we are only left with the fireworks. But the real gift from those experiences is not the experience itself, but the opening of potential ontologies it allows, and the practice with choosing the right ontology in the moment to sustain and open the experience. Which is something that, again, also does wo der without drugs.
TL;DR: what we need is to accept non-materialist ontologies as legitimate in a research setting
I am always amused that the discourse around LSD uses the term “microdosing”. We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans. Claiming that many uses are “microdoses” is rationalization.
Edit: I meant to say “harm and help”, not “harm and hurt”.
> We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans
Evidence? (Other than tiny doses of anything potentially can cause harm and hurt, assuming harm and hurt are 2 different things, not perhaps the same thing repeated in different ways to make an emotive appeal)
You seem to know of a discourse where "microdose" implies that something has no effect. Why would they be taking it if it had no effect?
> We know that tiny doses can harm and hurt humans.
We don't know that tiny doses of LSD can harm or hurt humans. What we do observe is that smaller amounts of things tend to have smaller effects than larger amounts of things.
The dose for LSD to be harmful is extremely high and you would likely never encounter anyone selling anywhere close to the amount needed. The biggest threat to the user is the contamination of the LSD by possibly fentanyl or other opiates due to the unregulated nature of the black market.
On a previous thread here about LSD I learned about NBOMe -- it's a hallucinogen that's sold on paper tabs; if a dealer (or their supplier) is unscrupulous they might sell it as LSD. Only problem? Where psychonauts feel comfortable eating mouthfuls of LSD tabs, the difference between noticeable and harmful doses is quite small with NBOMe.
Lsd is one of the hardest substances to synthesize but the effective dose is so small that the price is almost free. Therefore someone who has real LSD to sell would not bother contaminating it. (At least I have not heard of that.)
However you may be sold something that's not LSD at all but is advertised as such.
