When I was a teenager my friends and I took LSD one night and one of the group took twice as much as everyone else and had a full blown psychotic episode, running around the house breaking things and screaming that he was going to kill me. He got off easy; he didn't remember any of it. The rest of us had serious PTSD. For two years after that every time I heard someone yell my pulse would accelerate and my palms would sweat. I don't bring this up to say that LSD is inherently dangerous, just that it peels back all of the defensive layers of abstraction that you live in day to day, so anything that happens to you in that state can have serious and long lasting consequences (good and bad).

I've touched on it on HN before but I also had a very, very bad trip once. It wasn't the first bad trip but it was the worst and one of the worst I've heard from people who I've shared the experience with. Out of the dozens or more positive experiences I had, it was enough to turn me off of psychedelics and drugs in general for, so far, the rest of my life.

I won't get in to the details, but like yourself, it mostly came down to the folks who I was with (who I trusted absolutely prior to this experience). I also had a lot of the blame, because I simply took too much that night. It took me years to fully recover my personality. To me, it is very dangerous, indeed, to suggest that nothing bad can come from psychedelic experimentation.

> I also had a lot of the blame, because I simply took too much that night

How much did you take?

Over an eighth, less than a quarter, and it had been months since my previous mushroom (or acid, for that matter) trip.

There are doses between microdose and tripping balls. The patients can begin at a small dosage, and slowly ramp up as they become more familiar with the drug.

I'm not sure starting small is a good idea for beginners, nor how researchers and therapists approach this. More often than not, small doses tend to create anxiety without any real breakthrough in experience.

Interesting, this idea seems antithetical to my personal experiences (not that that has any impact on objective truth). I also find this odd given that when LSD was legal and used in conjunction with talk therapy (to arguably great effect) patients were given doses of about 25 ug (1/4th of an average lowish dose).

I think it's person-to-person. More research would be nice (!!!)

> let's not forget that it can be dangerous

I don't agree that it's that dangerous for the average person to take, but I agree that, for someone who is already dealing with a very stressful scenario (like a terminal patient), lots of caution is warranted.

I think it also depends on the dose. I've heard microdosing is very different.

Microdosing is just under the threshold so my guess is that it actually does not have any effect at all and instead just a powerful placebo feeling.

That or that people are not microdosing at all so they are getting enough to start tripping lightly, experiencing some energy and euphoria.

Effects before they are epi-apparent. I think the effects are definitely measurable on a neurotransmitter level, but not so much on a sensory level.

I mean if you're already planning on giving a terminally ill person LSD, why not slip them some MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opiates, too?

You're getting downvoted but when I do psychedelics I take a small dose of opiates to ensure it doesn't spiral into fear and paranoia. If the goal of theraputic use of psychedelics is to create a deeply seated positive experience, I don't see why mixing a little bit of warm fuzzies into it would be determental.

Opiates are highly addictive. Want a warm fuzzy experience? Mesc. Want a theraputic experience? Mdma. Opiates are playing with fire though.

I'm only using opiates as an example. In my experience no psychoactive drug has the exact same effect on different people.

>I mean if you're already planning on giving a terminally ill person LSD, why not slip them some MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opiates, too?

we do give many terminally ill people opiates, a lot and of very strong opiates. What do you think fentanyl is? An illegal drug to cut heroine? No. It is a very powerful medical drug prescribed to cancer patients in particular (especially toward the end when less powerful opiates start to be not enough - IANAD, just common knowledge)