Lsd-25

[Turtle]

Likely, those individuals in treatment were there b/c they truly wanted to recover, their minds saturated with the thought of quitting... the LSD most likely only served to exaggerate that already existing thought process.

 

That does not appear to be the case; in fact quite the contrary. The LSD changed their attitude from not wanting to recover, to wanting to recover and so with the new healthy perspective they achieved recovery.

The article I linked makes this point:

Studies on thousands of alcoholics treated with the drug in the early 1960s - before it became popular as a psychedelic street drug - showed it helped trigger a change in mental attitude leading drinkers to quit.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/health_beauty/story.jsp?story=709583

:umno:

[InfiniteNow]

There I go, speculating again. :umno:

 

The LSD changed their attitude from not wanting to recover, to wanting to recover and so with the new healthy perspective they achieved recovery.

I'm curious how they measured that... Interesting study regardless. :hihi:

[Turtle]

There I go, speculating again. :hihi:

 

 

I'm curious how they measured that... Interesting study regardless. ;)

 

:hyper: Taking yet another snippit of the article we see that some fellas who re-discovered the 60's study in Canador (;) ) study went & found the original participants 40 years later & interviewed them.

...Now a historian who unearthed the research, led by British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and carried out in Canada, has interviewed the participants four decades on and says the results are dramatic.

 

Erika Dyck, professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Alberta, said: "The LSD somehow gave these people experiences that psychologically took them outside of themselves and allowed them to see their own unhealthy behaviour more objectively, and then determine to change it.

 

"Even interviewing the patients 40 years after their experience, I was surprised at how loyal they were to the doctors who treated them, and how powerful they said the experience was for them - some even felt the experience saved their lives."

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/health_beauty/story.jsp?story=709583

 

:ud: :phones: :secret: :cup:

[Tarantism]

when i was using my fair share of LSD a while back, it helped me quit cigarettes. this is because, when i would smoke while tripping, i would begin to see the disgusting nature of the habit. of course, this was purely a mind game im nearly certain...in the back of my mind, beyond all addiction that i was binded to, i felt sickened by the habit of smoking cigarettes. when on LSD, i felt, as i always did, that there was an ability to transend normal thought process, and so a feeling of being released for myself. in a series of mental subconcious chain reactions, this made me feel as if i were released from the chains of my addiction.

 

unfortunitely, after a number of these mental leaps and positive psychothereputic breakthroughs, i began to develop an addiction to LSD and began to see the negatives and side-effects that the drug brought on. this, in turn, helped me stop abusing the drug.

 

i dont know if that first-person experience helps your speculations at all...:phones:

[Turtle]

i dont know if that first-person experience helps your speculations at all...:secret:

 

Well, we are trying to minimize the speculation and go with the science, but in this case first-hand experiences constitute the bulk of the data for the study(s).

In keeping with that, I must gather some participant follow-up data. Do you still smoke? :phones:

[Tarantism]

yes, i started smoking cigarettes again regularly maybe a month ago. this was maybe a month or two after i stopped using LSD, but im pretty sure that those two events are unrelated. niccotene withdrawl seemed to occur even two months after i quit...and so perhaps it was addiction, boredom or otherwise that caused me to began smoking again. i am not ferverently trying to discontinue this habit...:phones:

[Tarantism]

another thing, perhaps the effect that LSd has on addiction can be directly related to the patient being caught unawares. perhaps it is less effective if the patient is going into the experience with a mind to discontinue a habit...as opposed to stumbling upon personal disgust in the midst of a mindblowing experience. or, it could even be the other way around, perhaps making oneself believe that quitting is the best idea is the wrong route, and in this case coming to this realization naturally could be the best course of action. either way the ideas must already be lingering in the patient's mind prior to the experience, otherwise i dont see how the thoughts could be magnified. even if it isnt a concious thought, it still must be present...based on my experience, psychedelics do nothing more than amplify what is already in the users mind prior to the experience, or they can make things presented by outside infilence more intense during the experience, perhaps making it stick more than if the same information was presented when the patient was sober.

 

this would offer an exellent venue for a psychedelic test. a number of patients with addictions to cigarettes should be given the same informtion about tabacco addiction and heath effects in three seperate rooms, not adjacent, one room should be information given to subjects who have been given an average dose of LSD, and the other a group given a placebo, and actaully lets add a third and call it a control group. then, a day later, each group willbe given the test seperately (in the same groupings as the day before), and the scores will be averaged. the test is to see who retains the most information about tabacco addiction. then one moth later a follow up could be done to see how many quit cigarettes. then a two month follow up to see who stayed clean.

 

if the LSD patients fai the best, then i guess that is that. what do you think?

[perplexity]

if the LSD patients fai the best, then i guess that is that. what do you think?

Blame nobody but yourself if at later date you are required to defend a tort action, mounted by one or more of your experimental victims.

 

If you want to fool around with dangerous drugs you could also try strychnine, which is also known to acutely enhance the senses.

 

--- RH.

[Drip Curl Magic]

One point I'd like to bring up from personal experience is that when using LSD, one of the most evident change in a psych can be a loss of ego.

 

And when an ego is put aside for a while, the realization as to how mortal we actually are becomes more appartent. Bringing us to a realization that ciggarettes are slowly killing millions of humans.

 

Knowing that cigarettes are horrible for you before an "experience" or "trip" is probably the main reason why LSD has proven to be a tool for quitting addictions. But losing your ego during an experience can also prove to "put the icing on the cake," so to speak.

 

 

For a while, cigarettes were no longer a part of my life.

 

I ended up relapsing, but I find that I still don't smoke nearly as often as I crave to. LSD might have played a small part in that.

 

 

I'd have to say that LSD can be a decently effective tool in quitting an addiction, but there is a very fine line between quitting an addiction, and replacing an addiction with another addiction.

[InfiniteNow]

... Just keep the point on science everyone...

 

Reminding, ever so gently...

[Drip Curl Magic]

... Just keep the point on science everyone...

 

Reminding, ever so gently...

 

I thought it'd be acceptable enough, having read the other posts above.

 

Just trying to add to the collective ideas and data.

 

Perhaps I'll edit my post.

[perplexity]

One point I'd like to bring up from personal experience is that when using LSD, one of the most evident change in a psych can be a loss of ego.

 

Takes one to know one.

 

Did you ever hear of an "ego trip"?

 

This was a phrase commonly coined way back in the Strawberry Fileds Forever days, because of an unfortunate number of trippers inclined to making asses of themselves with overblown assertions about their cosmic insight, like supercharged religious fanatics.

Somebody I knew thought sincerely that LSD would cure cancer. That was not long before his pet dog's teeth fell out when he tried to convert it to vegetarianism.

 

I knew many like that, back and forth from trips to Afghanistan or Morrocco, or a local institution where the mentally incapacitated were taken care of. It was all "live for the moment" then, long before "Care in the Community", but not so long before the pad was busted. With the imminent expectation of nuclear annihilation there was not so much of a care for what came tomorrow.

 

I have seen 50 tabs of acid swallowed in one go with some milk to wash it down, ostensibly to achieve Nirvana so much more quickly, but really just to show off. I wonder now what eventually became of him. Those were the days.

 

LSD per se has got nothing to do with enhancing or detracting from ego. It tends rather to activate whatever psychosis was already latent.

 

--- RH.

[InfiniteNow]

...because of an unfortunate number of trippers inclined to making asses of themselves with overblown assertions about their cosmic insight, like supercharged religious fanatics.

Part of the difficulty lies in trying to verbalize the experience. Our language is so strongly associated with our day to day experience (let's say it's contextualized) that these new or different experiences tend to defy adequate communicative terms.

 

We struggle often enough to describe what we feel accurately and clearly to others already. After such experiences, we are left trying to explain our experiences to ourselves (or understand what happened). When coupled, it makes communication of the experience to others that much more difficult, and we often sound like we're spewing a bunch of supercharged, overblown assertive fanatical nonsense and look like asses.

 

LSD per se has got nothing to do with enhancing or detracting from ego. It tends rather to activate whatever psychosis was already latent.

Yep, nothing that isn't there arlready.

[Turtle]

LSD per se has got nothing to do with enhancing or detracting from ego. It tends rather to activate whatever psychosis was already latent.

 

--- RH.

This is contrary to the studies I cited. Which brings us back to the medicinal use of LSD to treat addiction, which is altogether different than street use. Again, the studies and the new interest in the use of LSD for treating addiction revolve around a clinical setting wherin dosage, patient history, and doctors' guidence prevail.:cocktail:

[perplexity]

Originally Posted by perplexity

LSD per se has got nothing to do with enhancing or detracting from ego. It tends rather to activate whatever psychosis was already latent.

 

This is contrary to the studies I cited.

Alcoholism is not Psychosis. That article said nothing about Psychosis, and did you forget to quote this from it?

 

But the 1962 study was received with scepticism by a research group in Toronto. They repeated the study on blindfolded patients in isolation, and concluded that, under these conditions, LSD was not an effective treatment for alcoholism.

To take the issue of psychosis seriously one might do better to cite this, for instance:

 

http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=8832

 

 

The most common adverse reaction is a temporary (less than 24 hours) episode of panic --the "bad trip". Symptoms include frightening illusions/ hallucinations (usually visual and/or auditory); overwhelming anxiety to the point of panic; aggression with possible violent acting-out behavior; depression with suicidal ideations, gestures, or attempts; confusion; and fearfulness to the point of paranoid delusions.

 

Reactions that are prolonged (days to months) and/or require hospitalization are often referred to as "LSD psychosis," and include a heterogenous population and group of symptoms. Although there are no hard and fast rules, some trends have been noted in these patients. There is a tendency for people with poorer premorbid adjusment, a history of psychiatric illness and/or treatment, a greater number of exposure to psychedelic drugs (and correlatively, a great average total cumulative dosage taken over time), drug-taking in an unsupervised setting, a history of polydrug abuse, and self-therapeutic and/or peer-pressure-submission motive for drug use, to suffer these consequences.

 

The use of LSD for experimental research, please believe me, was not banned just to indulge an ignorant whim.

 

-- RH.

[Drip Curl Magic]

Takes one to know one.

 

Did you ever hear of an "ego trip"?

 

This was a phrase commonly coined way back in the Strawberry Fileds Forever days, because of an unfortunate number of trippers inclined to making asses of themselves with overblown assertions about their cosmic insight, like supercharged religious fanatics.

Somebody I knew thought sincerely that LSD would cure cancer. That was not long before his pet dog's teeth fell out when he tried to convert it to vegetarianism.

 

I knew many like that, back and forth from trips to Afghanistan or Morrocco, or a local institution where the mentally incapacitated were taken care of. It was all "live for the moment" then, long before "Care in the Community", but not so long before the pad was busted. With the imminent expectation of nuclear annihilation there was not so much of a care for what came tomorrow.

 

I have seen 50 tabs of acid swallowed in one go with some milk to wash it down, ostensibly to achieve Nirvana so much more quickly, but really just to show off. I wonder now what eventually became of him. Those were the days.

 

LSD per se has got nothing to do with enhancing or detracting from ego. It tends rather to activate whatever psychosis was already latent.

 

--- RH.

 

 

Everything stated here can hold true with any recreationally used chemical.

 

I've seen it.

 

I think it has less to do with the chemical, and more to do with the human ingesting it.

 

There is one piece of knowledge that I've learned from my ridiculous experimentation that I hope stays with me for the rest of my life.

 

It is that all existances are equally important to maintain the balance of life.

 

We are all equally important. We all play our little role. Even the freaks that feel the need to drink entire viles of acid at a time just to prove that they are "alpha". Whatever you want to call it.

 

We are all equal. You and I are equal.

 

I'm not just stating this to prove a loss of ego. I'm stating this because it's something that I've actually learned.

 

eh, no matter, I suppose. No matter what I say or do, the nuerons in your brain will fire about me how they will.

[Drip Curl Magic]

alright, now, back to science.