>produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction

yes, such incredible maturity, didn't even mention that these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed... although, "self-medication" probably does adhere pretty well.

>...these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed

Yes

To be clear most LSD users, who've done LSD for years, do it for fun.

Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...

For me the last time I took a trip I was alone for most of the trip and I cried a lot and my heart felt physically pained. I felt sorry for my heart that it had to keep beating and could not rest. It was a really challenging trip. I haven't been on another trip since.

That would be good subject matter for a poem.

> I haven't been on another trip since

Good choice.

It is not fun, unless it is

Set and setting?

If setting includes the people you are with, or lack thereof, then yeah.

I am a frequent LSD user and I do it for fun and healing.

I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.

>but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties

counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience

It pushes more than just anxieties to the background. During the peak of an LSD trip, I can be so distractible that I can barely keep more than one thing in my head at a time, and it's incredibly easy for any new thought to overwrite everything prior. I do know that spending some time in that state of mind does tend to help me. With that said, I don't think I can speak much on the default mode network because I haven't developed an intuition on how that affects me.

Do you have or suspect you have ADHD?

I definitely have ADHD.

i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing

it completely makes sense that a person with neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis might experience these effects differently (different valence to same phenomenon; or, entirely different phenomenon from same preconditions). either way, imo the important thing (confirmed by what you say about the hyper-distractible state which you experience) is for one to spend as much time as needed in the headspace that is appropriate to their neurobiological makeup, rather than that headspace which other people want one to be in as if it's any of their goddam business.

ofc not to be taken that reaching "the personally good headspace" is trivial; a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place! (the premise of neurotypical supremacy?) hence the utility of altered states which demonstrate the opposite and thus provide the introspector with a basis for comparison

thanks for sharing your experiences!

> i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing

I'm not super sure what "blinders" you're speaking of. I don't think it's expected for a neurotypical person to only be able to keep ~one thought in their head at a time. Although I do notice a lot of the time people find it weird that I remember things that were besides a point; maybe that's what you're talking about.

> neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis

Weird trivia, but it's really fucking weird that dysgraphia predicts an ADHD diagnosis. I seem to have dysgraphia, and lo and behold[0]:

> Individuals with dysgraphia often have difficulties in Executive Functions (e.g., planning and organizing).

What the fuck lmao.

> a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place!

This is a totally different thing; this is intentional rejection of new ideas, and basically rejection of everyone who isn't the same.

> thanks for sharing your experiences!

Of course~

[0]: https://ldaamerica.org/disabilities/dysgraphia

some "blinders":

- implicit taboos against things like mental self-modification, metacognition, introspection, empathy (latter two to a lesser degree because of their "glue" function); general abstraction-phobia scaling to sociall anti-intellectualism

- proclivity to pattern-match against acquired linguistic constructs (narratives, ideologies, superstitions) rather than trying to analytically reason about object-level cause-and-effect chains (leads to "shoot the messenger" style symptom-treatments; wireheading scenarios; all the "you can only ever win by being wrong" stuff)

- relatedly, conflating the ethically incorrect, vs the physically impossible, vs the unthinkable (whereas i'd venture there's a definite benefit to being able to tell apart these different modes of putative non-being)

these i view as "architectural patterns" in accordance with which the global "operating system" of "normative being" is constructed; infinite spanners into gearworks coalescing into what from afar might sound as a symphony to someone who has never heard one; poor memory and impaired reasoning skills being either organic side effects - or, scarier still, the very evolutionary pressures that make this whole show viable in the first place

the dysgraphia connection is interesting in its own right; i draw a tentative association with the known educational abuse of forcibly changing people's handedness. where i'm from, this was common up until relatively recently, and it remains folk knowledge that in the long term it can fuck up the developing mind's impulse control and executive function.

i'd conjecture what gets disrupted is the quasi-organic relation to one's "exocortex" (cf. jaynes' hypothesis of the emergence of the ego-as-subject-of-structured-reflection through the invention of writing?) so that one basically gains a self-reinforcing pavlovian "circuit" which fades into the background but disrupts one's cognition and/or motorics every time one approaches the correct conduction of the desired procedure (as in the case of reifying a particular grapheme out of muscle-memory)

sadly, as institutionally legitimized specialists tend to be pre-vetted for strong pro-sociality above all else, mainstream consensus dictates this fascinating and occasionally life-or-death stuff can only be studied on a basis i'd call "the merely actuarial"; but no deeper. conversely, conceptual tools for dealing with directly experienced phenomenological aspects (my "favorite" one being, of course, adversarial impairment of cognition) are few, far between, and rarely if ever from impartial sources.

> "Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view..."

On the other hand:

"If you get the message, hang up the phone."

- Alan Watts

> Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...

I spent a long time trying to decide if you were referencing licking the windows, or something more poetic. I decided to let both interpretations occupy my mind, as it seemed greater than the sum of its parts.

Huxley

I feel like it overhyped it for being a treatment when that hasn't been validated yet

The use of LSD in psychiatry is one of the less wacky things about the state of psychiatry at that time. Arguably psychiatry is still wacky, and still overhypes novel compounds without knowing how or why they work exactly. LSD was very rigorously studied compared to say today’s use of ketamine.

Yes, there was a ton of psychiatric research on LSD. However the bar of required to perform pharmaceutical testing on humans is much higher now, and the quality of the data is much higher because of improved testing standards.

For sure. But if you read some of that wacky stuff from way back, you can start to see how parts rhyme with aspects of contemporary psychiatry. They too had much better standards and data than their predecessors. The hype around LSD back then, and a bit of the kookiness, was similar to the current emphasis on trauma, ketamine therapy, etc… Stuff that works and is new gets overhyped.

After the discovery of a psychedelic compound, there are two pipelines for release:

- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.

- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.

I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.

LSD was discovered in and extensively tested and produced by the giant medical company Sandoz for about 20 years. It was also extensively studied in academic settings.

The black market production started a lot later, mostly due to the War on Drugs.

Sandoz still produces LSD

Source? Their patent expired, and Wikipedia says they stopped making it on the 60s. Occasionally a sealed bottle of Delysid will surface somewhere, but I think that they are all vintage.