An LSD Trip “Off-Switch” May Be Coming Soon (opens in new tab)

Yep

> and/or dependency potential though?

They absolutely have dependency potential, but you have to be regularly taking them for that to be an issue, a fact which the doctor who was merrily prescribing me them failed to mention. Kicking them was much easier for me from an addictive perspective than cigarettes, but with dramatically worse side effects.

They’re also going to make a certain percentage of the population feel incredible (or just allow them to relax/sleep when they can’t usually), so they’re also very more-ish.

In short: taking them once a quarter is unlikely to be an issue unless you already have poor impulse control and easy access to them, in which case: just don’t start.

Try smoking a bunch of strong weed to sleep after tripping, works better than alcohol for me, YMMV.

Strong indicas in particular, Gorilla Glue for example.

Benzos are given to hundreds of millions of people every year, so they're pretty safe in my opinion. But they must not be taken for longer than a few weeks and/or in high doses! Because if you stop them cold turkey, you can die from the withdrawal effects (seizures).

Benzos can be deadly if used with opiates or alcohol, as all suppress breathing and in combination can just stop it while the person sleeps. Yes, they are quite addictive if taken recreationally or used frequently for anxiety/sleep. Withdrawal is allegedly worse than opiates and can kill through seizures if done too suddenly. Benzodiazepines are also thought to be carcinogenic to some degree. When used for sleep, benzos will affect sleep quality even though they allow you to go to sleep more easily.

That all said, I have used a few types infrequently for helping to get to sleep and found them absolutely delightful, waking up refreshed and energised (and still somewhat relaxed) the next day.

Dependency issues, some memory loss, coordination. Real concerns if you're going to take it every day or drive or something. Nothing that would present a serious issue for this kind of occasional use.

I take a benzos for anxiety and havent had issues and it dependance personally.

If you aren't using it to get high (so as intended for panic attacks / aborting lsd trips) and using it very infrequently (e.g. Only for lsd trips) you'll have no problems at all.

The issues are usually when you take it daily, especially if you take enough for the recreational effects. (Although daily isn't necessarily bad if you are being very careful with a doctor).

Tl;Dr - yeah benzos have issues with tolerance/depedancy but if you are only using what you need therapeutically, especially since lsd requires you to space out trips, then you're unlikely to have issues.

Xanax is a short-acting benzodiazepine

In my experience they turn the trip off.

You can still be awake, but you won’t be tripping any more, the sleep only comes if you actually lay down and try to go to sleep or take a large enough dose of benzos.

They dampen the effects and quell the anxiety, and depending on what stage of the trip you're in and how hard you're tripping they may effectively kill it entirely. I would take a bit of valium on the tail end of a trip to sleep or quiet my brain as it reconstituted itself after being atomized into the cosmos. I only took benzos once during the upward trajectory of a trip near the peak, after suffering physical panic symptoms from a strong batch of wild-picked wavy caps (first and only time I've felt physically threatened by a psychedelic). It didn't kill the trip, but it killed the panic and allowed me to enjoy the experience.

Bit of both but more the latter.

The one time when I did continue drinking heavily while tripping (when younger and more foolish), it seemed like the alcohol had no effect. I finished an entire bottle of gin and several beers. Once I did come down it hit me like a bus and the next day I had exactly the hangover that this stupidity deserved.

I've never been able to even contemplate eating while tripping and the idea of drinking alcohol while tripping turns my stomach, I find it much easier to just take some alprazolam or diazepam if things start getting out of hand. That's just me personally though, I've tripped with a guy who went and bought and ate a whole chicken while tripping...

Never, ever, mix any other drug with alcohol - or for that matter don't mix any kind of drugs unless you are specifically aware of the purity, the amounts consumed and the interactions between the agents, and are under the supervision of a doctor.

If there is one thing that carries a real risk of fucking up (other than ODing) it is mix consumption.

Yep, I trip a lot and have always kept a few beers around for me or some friends. One beer really kills off the higher level stuff. It's always been magic.

Never heard of the other experiences ITT. Alcohol is a well known off-switch in all of the beat nation sort of literature.

Then again I think we are often talking about different substances when we say LSD. You'll find someone who supposedly has this great connection and the second you take their ticket, you have the instant dread of tasting metal knowing it's not LSD.

Some alcohol and some acid go well together imo. Alcohol surely doesn't stop the trip. Maybe it smoothens the come up a bit. I only do low doses of both though.

In my experience, alcohol has no effect if taken mid-trip. Usually if I'm tripping I won't even notice the effects of alcohol at all; YMMV.

Yeah, I’ve found having a beer definitely takes away some anxiety/twitchiness and brings me back to reality a bit faster. But it was the same for me, towards the end of a trip. Not sure how it works for somehow rapidly being swallowed by the void.

What the huh? One third of a trip? Which third did you experience, the coming on of the effect, the peak/plateau, or the coming down?

Alcohol + Psychs = bad idea

MDMA will not reduce the effects of LSD but remove the element of fear and bring your imagination into more pleasant areas. This is something that Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, describes in the latest Tim Ferriss podcast.

All of the other responses are accurate -- combining the two will augment and possibly lengthen the experience -- but if you're familiar with both substances enough to feel confident in combining them, I've always found that 70mg dose of MDMA and a big glass of water will pull me right out of a trip that's heading south, and pretty quickly, into more glorious places.

But again, disclaimer: this is really only for folks experienced enough to know how to navigate each separate space well, and for those that have confirmed, tested, pure, high quality MDMA.

I highly recommend everyone candy-flip at least once, just to see why they call it candy-flipping (because everything looks like lovey-dovey glowing gumdrops). However, in my experience, the serotonin release from the MDMA tends to overwhelm the LSD, and you pay for it with the inevitable comedown and MDMA hangover the next day instead of the blissful LSD afterglow.

Highly recommend not candy flipping from anecdotal experience if anyone's thinking about doing it.

This does not get you out of a trip. This is called candy clipping and has the opposite affect.

this will lengthen the trip by alot

So just an already known 5HT2A antagonist.

Psilocybin (from mushrooms) and MDMA are both fast tracked for FDA approval as adjuncts to therapy. Psychedelics are poised to become the most common psychiatric treatment in the world, with ongoing trials showing huge effects for treating PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Despite a lot of therapeutic promise, LSD has not received as much research attention, primarily because of its duration of effect. Having therapists present for up to 24 hours (compared to 6 for psilocybin) is prohibitively expensive. A true off switch would facilitate its study and use in treatment.

It might make a little sense for Emergency Rooms to have in response to the "bad trips" that result in people calling an ambulance.

But I think the primary reason they would want to develop this would be to encourage LSD to be used as a therapy drug. A lot of people would be more comfortable experimenting in a controlled/legal setting if they new they had an off switch in case anything went wrong.

There is a lot of hearsay off switches, there is just a lot of hearsay in drug communities.

For LSD, anything to get out of the rest of a 14 hour trip and come down would be an option that the market would easily gravitate toward.

The biggest problem with LSD is its unpredictability, and what I think is the main reason why it isn't used therapeutically despite having shown very promising results.

You can't reasonably OD from LSD but you can have bad trips. Some of them can be so overwhelming that they will cause lasting effect not unlike PTSD. If you can stop a trip dead in its tracks, that's one less risk. By having ways to counteract its various potential negative effects, you can improve the safety profile of the drug, and therefore make it more acceptable.

People on or approaching a bad trip I assume. Just don't know who will bother having any on hand if this happens.

There's a weird cottage industry around legalized psychedelics and their use in medicine, so I wouldn't be surprised if some less knowledgeable investors' money is funding this, given that there are hundreds of such drugs already on the market.

People seem to be saying "just use Risperidone" in the comments, so if there is a new drug that counters LSD, maybe it would be useful as an alternative to Risperidone, which has a variety of side effects when taken long term.

There's a lot of inconveniences with drugs that have very long half-lives and very low effective doses. Alcohol lasts for an hour or two; with LSD, you're out for 24. You can't just take less, or it won't work. So this would allow for shorter trips.

There have been way too many scandals around supplement purity for me to buy into his narrative. Like if someone told me a given brand of fish oil supplements contained 10% of the stated dose, was rancid and full of heavy metals I wouldn't be the least surprised.

But if a fish oil medicine had those issues, I would be shocked, because the consequences for the guilty party would be much bigger, a huge circus of lawsuits and people losing their licenses. That's how I imagine it anyway.

Hah. This article is not only golden, but got me deeply annoyed with all BS machine it exposes

Spoiler alert

> And I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

(though I understand a bit of the issues behind the BRCA gene testing thing and I'm not sure it continues to be banned or merely the results need to be more generic and not just "you have X% of having cancer")

Can you share with us some of the mentioned meditations?

Are you referring to jhana?

You can also do, smart phone currency app to buy tokens -> morphtoken exchange to Monero -> Tails OS -> dark.fail

what market though?

Anecdotally, I've used risperidone specifically to abort LSD trips on two occasions and found it quite successful both times. Now when I introduce people to LSD I give them a Risperdal to keep in their pocket "just in case", though to my knowledge none of them have had to use it.

[source: PhD in drug design specializing in G-protein coupled receptor pharmacology]

Drugs like LSD form non-covalent bonds with receptors. In a macro-world analogy, think of your hand sticking to a syrup-covered fork vs. a covalent bond being your hand stuck to a super-glue covered fork. Different drugs have different levels of "stickiness" (called affinity) for a particular receptor, and LSD has pretty high affinity for its target receptor, 5-HT2a, but it isn't permanently attached. In fact, affinity is defined by relative association vs. dissociation rates of drug-receptor complex.

On a microscopic level, each molecule of LSD is falling in and out of the receptor binding site stochastically. This leaves open the possibility of another drug binding to the same site (called competitive inhibition) when LSD isn't occupying the site. If another drug has a higher affinity, it will occupy the receptor more of the time. When you zoom out and consider the entire set of receptors and drugs, the sum of these individual stochastic events these effects follow characteristic patterns described by the law of mass action.

https://derangedphysiology.com/main/cicm-primary-exam/requir... is a pretty good description

*I'm simplifying parts of this somewhat.

I think this is pretty normal in biology. Like how someone might have to drink 2L of water to feelbetter after a few shots of alcohol

I'm not sure how far back it goes, but it was popular in the 90's.

All benzos are pretty much the same, why would xanax work but not valium?

Residual Current Device - a circuit breaker that opens a circuit when too much current is not returned via neutral, implying leakage to earth. They “trip” too and with the similarity to LSD, a TLA ending in D! I couldn’t resist the joke.