The Surprising Health Benefits of LSD

Much of this conversation traces back to the legalization of cannabis. Barely a season goes by without another study pointing to some unexpected medical use for marijuana, whether that means slowing certain cancers or easing symptoms of mental illness through its calming properties. The herbal side of the drug story is well covered elsewhere. What I want to look at here is Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, better known as LSD, and what it may offer a person who is trying to grow. The hippies of the 1960s had hold of a real idea. Where they went wrong was in the method.

The chemistry came first, about three decades before the counterculture arrived. A scientist named Albert Hoffman was working in a laboratory on a medicinal plant and on ergot fungus, trying to produce a stimulant that would act on the respiratory and circulatory systems. The compound he synthesized along the way turned out to be LSD. He absorbed some by accident one day and found himself moving through a string of strange and vivid visions. Taking what he assumed was an ordinary dose, roughly .25 milligrams, Hoffman traveled straight into the middle of his own mind. Later work revised that figure sharply downward: something closer to 20 micrograms is now considered a more sensible amount, and smaller doses seem to produce better results.

Decades of study followed, thousands of papers' worth, and by the 1950s LSD was being used widely in the treatment of various mental disorders. The thinking of the day held that psychedelics like LSD could help a person grow by letting them reach and examine the most hidden parts of their mind, which was thought to be especially useful for people living with serious psychiatric conditions.

So what interrupted that line of research in the 1960s? The era usually gets called the cultural revolution, when a generation of young baby boomers, the hippies, threw themselves into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Many of them also wanted to drop out of ordinary life and bring down the establishment. The drug itself was never really the source of the damage that followed. The trouble came from how particular people chose to use it.

Psychedelics have never, on their own, killed anyone. The deaths and disasters came from things around the drug rather than the drug itself. If the reasonable daily dose is around 20 micrograms, then swallowing many times that amount is where the danger starts, and overdosing on that scale is what can end in death.

There were other circumstances too. People got high and jumped out of windows. That was not the chemistry acting on its own; it was misuse, abuse, the result of someone going on a trip with no medical supervision and losing contact with reality. From there it is a short step to a fatal fall from a window or some comparable catastrophe.

What this points to, over and over, is that the real problem with LSD and similar substances is a shortage of self-control in the ordinary person. People tend to chafe against authority. We convince ourselves we understand things better than the professionals who actually read through the accumulated research, and then we start experimenting carelessly, lose our grip, and do something foolish. The surest way to hold onto self-control is to accept the limits set for us by people whose authority rests on having studied the material.

None of this is helped by the fact that plenty of today's medical professionals lean heavily toward conventional medicines that advertise themselves as backed by science. Some of those drugs, antipsychotics and antidepressants among them, carry severe side effects that other studies have laid out in grim detail. Psychedelics, taken with a doctor's oversight and kept at or below the standard dose, frequently avoid those effects. The conditions are simple: do not exceed the recommended amount, and keep checking in with your physician.

Remember as well that almost anything will get you high if you take enough of it, including SSRIs, anxiety medications, and tranquilizers. A good deal of what people call a high is psychological to begin with. You feel high partly because you have decided you are. For some, the rush is nothing more than the adrenaline that comes from defying an established authority.

E Bishop Wooten, The Liberal Conservative Blog.