http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/08/026988111456...
Classic psychedelic use is associated with reduced psychological distress and suicidality in the United States adult population
"Psychedelic users showed a significantly lower likelihood of recent psychological distress, as well as less suicidal thinking and fewer suicide attempts, than non-users. Users were 36% less likely to have attempted suicide in the past year.
Use of other illicit substances, say the researchers, are “by and large associated with an increased likelihood of psychological distress and suicidality.” The use of non-psychedelic substances is a suicide risk factor, they conclude, but psychedelics appear to have the reverse effect."
To be fair, I'm hardly an unbiased source, as a good friend of mine jumped out a window an hour or so after taking a rather large dose of LSD.
My other two friends went high to a houseparty and committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head. It was all over the national news.
I'm not going to share the name of the other friend, for obvious privacy reasons.
I don't think there's much in the way of peer reviewed papers because no ones going to deliberately dose one group on LSD for a long term study and most recreational users take other drugs and don't document and publish things but there are definitely issues.
She woke up the next day, and didn't recognize her parents. She didn't recognize her boyfriend whom came running over.
She finished her degree 25 years later, and she still has trouble functioning in society. She never got back to that high functioning individual. She's still very smart. She can't wake up early. Can't function in a unfamiliar work setting. She basically falls to pieces if slightly stressed. She would be homeless if not for a caring/understanding financially well off family
(This is a true story. She might have had an underlying mental illness, but mental illness is not in her lineage. I'm just passing this story along.)
Not very reliable, as this is also what old wives tales and urban legends claim too ("I know this guy/gal that...").
In this case for example, you might really know that woman, and she might have been a junior at Dartmouth that had those issues, but unless you were there with her that day, there's no way to know whether she did take LSD that night (or something else, or even nothing), or whether she didn't have any issues before, etc. It could just be some rumor people tell about here, or what she wanted other people to know about it (e.g. not to admit a mental illness but instead cover it with "had bad acid").
Let's rather stick to the medical literature that describes several cases of LSD use, how it affected or brought up psychosis, etc (and after what frequence of use, and with what mental issues the patient had before, etc).
(That said, I've personally never heard of anyone who'd been severely damaged by drugs... well, except for heroin, alcohol, and cocaine. Six of my childhood friends had died of heroin, two from alcohol, and one from cocaine. Heroin is the scourge of the working poor.)
Of course, it's not guarenteed (they could for example be sprayed with another substance), but even in terms of economics for the dealer, it probably wouldn't make sense to try to adulterate such things. Adulteration is much more prevelant when dealing with relatively expensive, highly processed drugs, where there are many levels of people in the supply chain; the temptation to cut it to increase margins is just too high.
It almost certainly isn't. Do you have even a single reputable source? I mean, especially if you know her personally as you claim it should be pretty easy to pull up some news articles or something, right?