During the heyday of LSD research, scientists published more than a thousand research papers and dozens of books. They held symposia and conferences to discuss and compare their findings. The outcomes were overwhelmingly positive, though some scientists did report subjects who had negative experiences. Some people experienced “bad trips,” which caused them distress. A few researchers, notably Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, abandoned established modes of scientific study for incense and mantras and The Tibetan Book of the Dead—a disturbing development, not to the researchers themselves, but to those who paid their salaries. But in none of those experiments did anyone die or suffer serious injury.
In fact, contrary to what I believed before I began my preparatory research, contrary to what the vast majority of people probably believe, LSD is, as drugs go, safe. In terms of morbidity, it’s a lot more like marijuana than heroin. According to a thorough review of the drug’s pharmacology published in 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal CNS: Neuroscience & Therapeutics, “There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose.”
Chill out! I told myself, in an attempt to stem the tide of panic. Do you imagine that, having taken a fraction of the dose of a drug that tens of millions of people have consumed, you will be the first ever to die? You, Ayelet, are not that special.
Surprisingly, haranguing myself proved useless in alleviating my anxiety attack, so I pulled out my research notes and pored over a report of a 1972 incident in which eight people were admitted to San Francisco General Hospital after taking a massive quantity of LSD, the highest reported dose ever consumed by humans. This group of partiers had snorted lines of what they believed was cocaine but what was actually LSD. This is an astonishing dose. Recall that all it takes to trip is a tiny amount diluted on a dot of blotting paper. The huge overdose made them terribly sick. When they arrived at the hospital, they were vomiting, had hypothermia, and showed signs of internal bleeding. Five slipped into comas; three needed to be intubated to breathe. And yet, within twelve hours, they had all completely recovered. It’s taken me longer to get right after a Pilates class.
In evaluating how toxic a substance is, scientists attempt to determine its median lethal dose (known in scientific parlance as “LD50”). LSD is psychoactively powerful; minute dosages, starting at a millionth of a gram, produce noticeable effects. And yet, even a dose of two thousand micrograms, two hundred times the dose I took, twenty times the typical “tab,” causes no discernible biological side effects at all. The fact that there has never been a documented death from LSD overdose makes it impossible to determine its human LD50 with absolute assurance, but Hofmann, extrapolating from animal studies, estimated that it must be hundreds of times the typical dose. A textbook entitled Haddad and Winchester’s Clinical Management of Poisoning and Drug Overdose, published in 1990, reports the LD50 to range from 0.2 mg/kg to more than 1 mg/kg.*3 I weigh about fifty-eight kilograms, which means that, to be having an LSD-caused heart attack, even in that volume’s very conservative estimation, I would have had to ingest at least 11,600 micrograms, not ten. I wasn’t dying. But what about my mental health? In my quest to feel better, was I risking permanent psychic injury?
One of the first American researchers into the effects of LSD, Dr. Max Rinkel, a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, reported that healthy subjects (notably his colleagues, on whom he experimented) experienced marked personality changes while under the influence of LSD. Some became withdrawn, even exhibiting autistic behaviors. Others became manic. Some became suspicious and hostile; others experienced deep ecstasy. Rinkel characterized these personality changes as mimicking schizophrenia or psychosis. Once the drug’s effects wore off, however, so did these changes.
Over the course of eighteen months between 1966 and 1968, when recreational use of the drug was at its peak, a survey of doctors and hospitals in Los Angeles found that at least forty-one hundred people had experienced acid trips disturbing enough that they sought a doctor’s help. The majority of their adverse reactions were merely transitory anxiety or depression, but there have been reports of more serious problems.
No phenomenon causes me more anxiety than the specter of “LSD psychosis,” generally defined as a reaction to the drug that is prolonged, lasting days to months, or one that requires hospitalization. According to the research, however, the majority of individuals diagnosed with LSD psychosis have a history of psychiatric illness, have taken a substantial cumulative amount of the drug, and have histories of polydrug abuse. The first category could theoretically apply to me. I have a history of PMDD and a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder. My emotional pain is the very reason I started down this path. Neither other element is present in me, however, and, like the song says, two out of three ain’t bad.
Still, in a 1984 paper, Dr. Rick Strassman, a research physician for the University of California, Davis, wrote, “There are occasional reports of severe and prolonged reactions occurring in basically well-adjusted individuals.”*4 He cited a study from the 1970s in which two young women were admitted to psychiatric hospitals weeks after taking average doses of LSD. According to the authors of that study, both women were “normal” before trying the drug, and both ended up profoundly depressed, and in one case allegedly homicidal. (She said she wanted to kill her mother, but, then, what twenty-one-year-old woman doesn’t?) After multiple treatments with ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), the two girls recovered and were discharged.
And yet Strassman, after a thorough review of this study and others, concluded, “It appears that the incidence of adverse reactions to psychedelic drugs is low, when…patients are carefully screened and prepared, supervised, and followed up, and given judicious doses of pharmaceutical quality drug.” His conclusion is in line with other, more recent research, as well as what mid-twentieth-century scientists found.
One of the most important things the early LSD pioneers discovered is that the personality of the researcher administering the drug had a profound effect on the experience of the patient. If the examiner was cold and distant, the subject occasionally became hostile, even paranoid. The subjects of a warm and gentle researcher almost universally experienced feelings of love and joy. What are the implications of this finding in terms of my administering the drug to myself? No one is meaner to me than me. I was probably being cold and distant with myself when I hit the dropper!