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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the chronic LSD use and the stroke were related.

There's absolutely no scientific basis for that, besides that I don't think he used LSD much if at all past the hippie period. Certainly not regularly (and there are people who have used LSD weekly for years with no apparent damage)

the nyt obituary mentioned that he used it a couple of times a year into old age

There are also many people who've used LSD a lot and end up with mental issues caused by the drugs. But not as far as I know, not strokes or anything like that.

Strokes are _very_ common. It‘s the third most common cause for death (or something in that ballpark). A lot of the leading figures in psychedelics lived long lives. Incidentally, Alexander Shulgin also died at 88. Albert Hoffman lived to 104.

LSD is used in ridiculously minute quantities, with standard doses measured in micrograms (millionths of a gram). It's astonishing enough that this can have a profound effect on the brain, but it's highly unlikely to cause physical damage to larger organs like the heart.

The size of the dose is not a great measure of safety. Botulinum toxin has an LD50 in the nanograms, and several other toxins in the same range of LSD, that being micrograms.

Now no strong evidence of toxicity has been found from LSD, but that's not due to it being taken in small doses.

In theory, every LSD dose consumed is pure LSD. In practice there are many stand-ins that are cheaper and easier to produce. They have different tox profiles and one never knows what one is actually taking unless you run your samples through a battery of quantitative tests. The one or two field tests out there are easily fooled if the counterfeiter is of a mind to fool them

I'm not sure that's true for LSD. It's much stronger per mg than other such drugs and as a result tends to be added to other things rather than having things added to it.

My understanding is that synthesizing even one atom of LSD is probably more expensive and difficult than making several grams of some NBOMe derivative. The production costs don't scale to zero and the synthesis itself is beyond the abilities of some "drug cooks"

Don't have any personal experience. I was a grad student working on organic synthesis once but never did anything illegal

Too bad it's not legal and regulated. I personally am just fine with reality and don't use any reality altering drugs but it would a lot safer if LSD was a regulated substance that the FDA could insure its quantity and quality.

Certainly something that should be studied. Too bad the federal government in the US effectively banned any research into LSD for decades.

So we should lift the ban on LSD research so that we can give people LSD and see if it increases their risk of stroke?

Correct; instead of armchair pharmacist-ing on some internet forum, we should collect actual data about its effects so that people can make more informed decisions about what/whether there are good uses for this chemical. Just like we do with other drugs.

No, that's not what we do with other drugs. No one goes to an IRB with "We suspect this drug is bad for people, we should run a study to find out," and gets approval for that study.

If you wanted to perform an observational study on whether or not people already consuming LSD are at heightened risk of stroke, I highly doubt the federal ban would affect that.

There are lots of suspicions about how LSD might be good for people too; how do we figure out which suspicions are factual and not?

There are more and more studies emerging (see https://maps.org/research/ and https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/09/04/hopkins-launches-psychedelic-...). That said, Erowid, and anecdotal reports, can be very valuable as well.

Yeah, I definitely don't disagree that informal reports are useful too. Was just reacting to the idea that it shouldn't be studied at all because of some rumors.

As opposed to banning research on everything that hasn't already been researched because it could have some negative health effect we don't know about?

Yeah that's typical conservative mentality that is feeling based rather than reason based. It's a real shame how backward governments are in this respect.

It doesn't, and I'm willing to donate my own body and mind to science to prove it if ever given the opportunity, and there are many others who feel the same way.

You won't have any trouble finding test subjects who are entirely cognizant of the dangers but place emphasis on pioneering the study of pyschochemistry.

The US maybe but there was research in London recently

>A group of psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London, led by Devin Terhune, published the first placebo-controlled study on microdosing in late 2018

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-microdoses-of-...

No.

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