LSD user here. As far as drugs go, LSD is among the safest substances. However, many cheaper-to-produce analogs are much more dangerous. Buying substances illegally means that you don't know what you are getting. It's hard to find tests, and most LSD tests you can do at home can be faked (there are inert compounds that will test positive for LSD).
And yet we love LSD, and we still try to find safe sources of the drug. We don't like playing with fire and would much rather pay even heavily marked up prices to buy LSD from a pharmacy where we can get guarantees about the purity and dose.
The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior. People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse. Legal pot is a good first step, but we've got a long way to go.
People don't need to die trying to get high when the drug they want is safe in the first place.
Nicotine and alcohol are two quite unpleasant drugs: addictive, rather poisonous (alcohol) or customarily consumed in an especially harmful way (smoking tobacco).
Compared to these, LSD is much safer. Doses are ridiculously low (most poisons don't work in doses of 100µg), huge overdoses are not immediately dangerous, and an addiction does not form.
One can invent many reasons to ban LSD, but preserving public health can't be sensibly among them.
Addiction can form over pretty much any substance or behaviour as this is mostly unrelated to the substance itself but to the living conditions of the addicted and his personal life experience.
You're right. Addiction can happen with anything, it just may be less common with LSD or certain other substances. I have taken LSD and other tryptamines 100s of times and at times my intake patterns probably resembled an addiction.
Psychological addiction could form to anything pleasant, from peanut butter to MMORPG sessions. A real physiological addiction takes growing doses and a withdrawal syndrome. As far as I understand, LSD lacks both.
LSD absolutely requires increasing doses if you take it more than once every 1-2 weeks. When you take it daily, your tolerance sky rockets. There is also cross tolerance between LSD and other tryptamines/phenylethylamines.
There is a withdrawal in a different sense I think. I had HPPD for around 3 months after heavy psychedelic use with LSD as the centerpiece of that. I was doing up to 10 tabs at once and using mushrooms and certain research chemicals every two or three days for a few months.
Not to excuse my risky behavior, but other people go much harder than I do. MDMA is a favorite choice, especially in Europe where it is cheaper. There are endless stories on Erowid and Bluelight of young people buying 10 grams of a research chemical and plowing through it in a summer. Often it's stuff like MDPV or 25i NBOME, with a short history of human use and carrying cardiac risks.
A wide range of psychedelic drugs have addictive potential IMO. I'm not sure how meaningful the distinction really is between psychological and physiological in the context of addiction.
> People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse.
Your statement assumes that drug prohibitions exist to protect the health of the public. This is, as you've pointed out, demonstrably false. If, on the other hand, you view drug laws as a means to criminalize a large percentage of the population and give police a ton of discretion in declaring who is and isn't a criminal, the situation become entirely consistent and you realize that drug laws are nothing more than a way to keep prisons full and allow police to remove "undesirables" (read: minorities) from society.
Allowing the the drug war to be framed as a public health issue means arguing on terms chosen by proponents of the drug war. We need to reject that premise and discuss it for what it really is, a racially-motivated tool for social repression. If those that argue against what you suggest (safe an legal avenues for drug use) were forced to show that, absent the current drug laws, the damage to society would be greater than the damage inflicted by the drug laws themselves, their arguments would look even more foolish than they currently appear.
Sorry, but that's an outright conspiracy theory you have there. The drug policies are nothing but a populist response to the public demands to "do something" by politicians who know no ways to deal with undesirable phenomena other than trying to ban it. The same knee-jerk reaction is behind many if not most policies (most famously, rent controls).
In my country there are no private prisons and no racial minorities to criminalize but the drug laws are just as bad as in the US. Actually, much worse. And if you go to the comments section under any article about legal highs on the local news sites, most people are demanding even more draconian measures, including death penalty for possession.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. No one (or at least very few) actually support drug laws for the express purpose of criminalizing a certain population, and no sane person is suggesting that they do. The important thing, however, is that that's their real fundamental motivation, and the reasons people actually cite are usually just moral rationalizations.
In your country, wherever that is, the undesireables are the poor, as they are most everywhere.
So one thing I can't rationalize is that people claim to be users of a drug, but are you doing independent purity tests yourself? I mean you take LSD and yet you're part of the same pool presumably that doesn't necessarily have access to the purity information of the drugs you're consuming.
Not knowing the purity and the fact that I can be extremely neurotic/overly analytical just immediately worries me that I'll have a bad trip and cause irreparable psychological damage. Is there anything to be said about the psychological effects of these drugs? Sometimes I feel like when they assess "safe" they're assessing this from a toxicological perspective only, and not on the psychological well-being of the people who are consuming them.
Unfortunately, we are not able to be certain about the quality of the drug we are taking. We buy from the Silk Road (well, Agora now I guess - still waiting for things to calm down), where we read reviews and base our decisions on the gossip posted by other users.
Something about our current batch seems off, everyone's been having weird trips. Despite this red flag, we've taken over 2/3 of the batch. You can't be 100% certain doing testing-at-home either, because there are inert compounds that will test positive for LSD - a careful dealer can fake the test results.
And it's a damn shame, because if you are uncertain about the quality of your substance, those doubts will amplify throughout your trip (that is the nature of psychedelics), and every little effect that you aren't expecting will cause a flurry of uncertainty.
LSD is the one drug where if your test kit shows you have the actual substance, then contamination isn't really an issue. There are only a handful of drugs that are active in the dose levels that fit on a square of blotter paper, and if the blotter has actual LSD on it then the chances of someone bulking it out with something else are basically zero.
Basically the risk of getting 25x-NBOMe or DOx instead of LSD is very high, but the risk of getting NBOMe mixed with LSD is negligible.
When you consider the safeness of a drug, do you also take into account the environment where the drug is taken?
I had a friend die while on LSD when I was a kid. He didn't die because of the drug, but as a hallucinogen, it is suspected he got himself into a situation where he followed his fancy unaware of the danger of the environment he had entered.
Of course, you could say 'but people trip and hit their head and die all the time when they are drunk too', but the difference is, people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.
As a self-declared LSD user, do you consider things other than the long-term chemical effects of the drug? If so, what are those things?
If it sounds like I'm picking a fight or trolling, that is not the intention, I am genuinely curious.
The rate of tripping when drunk is much, much higher. I've tripped many more times while drunk than sober (not counting childhood), and I'm drunk fairly rarely. A friend of mine broke his teeth falling down stairs face first while drunk, someone in my school died from falling off a fence while drunk. I've never heard of comparable sober incidents sober outside of high speed sports.
>people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.
[Citation Needed]
I read stories about college kids falling, drowning, crashing their cars, and almost always it's because they were heading home totally smashed from a party. I would say, from my impressions, that the proportion of people hitting their head (or falling into a lake and drowning, or what have you) is far lower for sober people than it is for people intoxicated by alcohol.
I knew someone who died aged 20 because he was drunk, tired, and decided to go to sleep at the side of the road. It rained. He drowned in a few inches of water.
A sober person has reflexes that would have prevented that.
> The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior.
Amusingly, we keep inventing new drugs to "fix" the old ones, discovering that they're just as bad (if not worse), and rinse/repeating.
Believe it or not, heroin was originally sold by Bayer (yes, as in "aspirin") as a "safer, less addictive" alternative to morphine. Both drugs were very commonly used as cough medicine (as was morphine's predecessor, laudanum).
Now, of course, we know that heroin is actually rather addictive, and instead we treat heroin addiction with other opiates that have a similar effect[0]. And so the cycle continues.
[0] Usually which bind to the same receptors, to reduce issues of withdrawal.
Actually we've got a lot better since then, and know a lot more about the neuroscience of addiction. Longer acting opiates are better at treating addiction and helping people get free of it - see suboxone.
The belief that heroin or cocaine cause addiction has been seriously challenged for a while, you should read "The Myth of Drug-Induced Addiction", the speech to Senate of Canada by Bruce K. Alexander of rat park fame.
While rat park is fascinating, it's not the only part of the picture by a long way, and his views aren't exactly mainstream even amongst controversial and outspoken drug scientists like Prof Nutt.
I would be very hesitant to call addiction a myth when we can measure it, and measure the relative addictivity of various substances.
Bruce K Alexander has some interesting views and some unteresting data but AFAICT has failed to really prove his case or overthrow the current models.
This statement makes little to no sense by itself.
Take as much aspirin as a psychoactive dose of LSD (say 100µg) and there will be no toxic effect from aspirin, but take as much LSD as an active dose of aspirin (400mg every 4 hours for an adult to to treat fever/pain) and you have a dose of 33 times the LD50 of LSD which is quite toxic imo.
What's important is the average active dose as a fraction of the toxic dose. For asprin (400mg dose, 70kg body weight), that's about 1.9%. For LSD (100µg, 70kg), that's about 0.7% (numbers gathered from wikipedia).
Because of its minute dose, LSD has the problem that it's hard to know how big the dose you're taking is, since most people don't have analytic balances in their kitchens. Even still, most people are going to need to take at least 10mg of LSD to overdose, even with the highest toxicity results published, which is pretty easy to distinguish from a high recreational dose of 200µg.
And yet we love LSD, and we still try to find safe sources of the drug. We don't like playing with fire and would much rather pay even heavily marked up prices to buy LSD from a pharmacy where we can get guarantees about the purity and dose.
The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior. People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse. Legal pot is a good first step, but we've got a long way to go.
People don't need to die trying to get high when the drug they want is safe in the first place.