Psychedelic Drugs
What are Psychedelic Drugs?
Psychedelic drugs also are known as “Hallucinogen” or “Psychotomimetic”, are mind-expanding/ altering drugs that cause a change in your perception or thoughts, which change the way your consciousness works.
How are they ingested?
Psychedelic drugs can be ingested multiple ways ranging from oral ingestion to being ingested straight into your bloodstream.
How do Psychedelic Drugs affect the brain?
Psychedelic drugs can change a lot about your brain, these types of drugs are serious and shouldn’t be messed with because it can alter communication from the brain to the spinal cord and your nerve systems. They change the chemical balance of your brain and this effect can change your body and brain forever or temporarily. Psychedelics and change your…
- Mood
- Sensory perception
- Sleep
- Hunger
- Body temperature
- Sexual behavior
- Intestinal muscle control
Also, Psychedelics can have effects on…
- Pain perception
- Responses to the environment
- Emotion
- Learning and memory
What are bad trips are like?
The story about Mark is a true story that helped him understand how bad things can get while high.
At age 17, Mark took 5000 micrograms of LSD with four friends. As the acid took effect, Mark felt alienated from his companions, although later he reflected that maybe the hostility was all in his head. Feeling increasing paranoia, he went off into town on his own.
As the intoxication effects intensified, it looked as if “the streets were melting and churning,” and people looked like comic book characters. A field looked like a Van Gogh painting, “everything in my field of vision looked slabbed on, like one of his paintings.”
Mark stopped by the home of a family he knew, in search of sanctuary, and requested a shower, which he then felt unable to control. Mark’s parents arrived, but his behavior felt out of control. He ran out of the house, thinking he could fly, although he was briefly sobered by the experience of stubbing his toe. He returned to the house, but then “the whirlwind began again,” and he began racing around the house being chased by their Saint Bernard dog.
In an effort to control Mark’s behavior, his companions put him in a small room, which only antagonized him further. He threw a chair through the window and escaped.
On his way home he felt an impulse to be free and unencumbered, so he stripped off his clothes. An ambulance was called, he was tied onto a stretcher, and taken alone to a hospital, where he was given an injection of antipsychotic medication. He was kept under observation for 10 days and charged with indecent exposure.
Mark’s experience was unusual in that his behavior was dramatic, and he was taken to hospital. Most people who find clothing and being inside constricting do not lose control over their behavior to this extent. However, he did take a very high dose of the drug, many times as much as Jack in the previous story.
This is a story about a girl named Emma that had trips that caused her to basically feel like a waste of space, feelings like “shame”, and like a “huge loser”.
I did mushrooms a lot in undergrad, and every time I had horrible trips; I thought I was a huge loser and the world was coming to an end. The only time I thought things were going well, my friend and I spent two hours drawing things in the snow with our boots. I thought we were making some profound art, but then I started to come down and realized all we had drawn was the word POO, and I felt such shame. It was gigantic, too, like it took us a long time. We had drawn really big letters on the quad.
— Emma, 28, writer
This story is about how a man on a trip wanted to do drugs but felt as if he was in hell and it caused a scaring event like this for him.
We were in Vang Vieng a few years back, which is a town in Laos where backpackers go to do drugs. There was this strip of restaurants where if you go in and say the secret phrase which is like, “I want to do drugs,” they will bring you a menu that is all illegal, mind-altering substances. They had cocaine, hashish, and bags of heroin. We decided to do a mushroom pizza, which seemed innocuous compared to what was on offer. My approach was to eat one slice and discover that it didn’t do anything and keep eating slices until reality completely melted away.
I had eaten a lot of the mushroom pizza by the time we realized that this was going on, and I was like, “We gotta get outside.” We moved outside the restaurant. I started losing touch with reality very quickly; I was convinced I was back home on a street in Vancouver. I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside, which does really exist and seems like poor planning at a place that sells hallucinogens. We went back to his hut that we had rented, and I spent the next six hours screaming, nonstop as loud as I could. I got locked in this weird psychological loop where I thought I was dead. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a clearing in the forest and that these crickets I was hearing were surrounding my body. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell and hell was an eternal loop where you’re forced to believe you’re alive just so you can go through the hell of realizing you’re dead again.
I was so removed from reality at that point that I no longer knew I had done mushrooms. I had no idea I’d done drugs. It was so intense that there was no discernible difference for me between being awake and being asleep. I was still in the room, the walls were still melting, I was still alive, and dead and in hell. The only thing that made me realize later on that I’d been asleep was when I woke up and got onto my knees and started screaming, the person I was with rolled her eyes and said, “I thought we were through with this.” Eventually, it kind of wore off and I came back to reality. The trip started at around 7 PM, and I woke up at 8 AM, and it was finally over. It had never occurred to me that it would stop. As you can imagine, when you’ve been told you’ve been damned for all eternity, it’s surprising when you wake up, and you’re OK. I was shaken for the rest of the trip and for six months after. I was having panic attacks and waking up in the night and leaving crowded places. It diminished my enthusiasm for mushrooms.
— Ted*, 38, Vancouver
In conclusion,
Psychedelic drugs can put you into a new dimension in your eyes but in reality, it’s just like having a dream, you might have some good trips but that can change really fast once you have a bad one it’ll show you that it’s not worth it.
If you know someone or know someone that needs help with an addiction or needs help with a bad trip they are having don’t hesitate to call a rehab center or a drug abuse line just to talk out the problems, it never hurts to help.
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