Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

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For folks that are interested in anecdotes about psychedelics, I recommend reading Erowid expertise vaults as what gets volunteered here is very narrow and not representative of the population as a whole.

I would know, as my psychedelic mega dose stories are very different from this and also completely unique to me.

I’ve done 500ug of LSD and it was great fun. I scheduled a day off to rest ahead of time and was back to normal after that.

250ug of LSD + 1 full ounce of golden teacher psilocybe cubensis and had a somewhat spiritual experience, took a couple days before I wanted to resume normal life.

+ a dozen or more similar stories

There is a reason why “set and setting” is repeated so heavily when instructing people on how to use these substances. Any discussion of potential subjective benefits or harms of a psychedelic in the context of an experience without specific accounting for that is fundamentally incomplete.

That being said, if my experience sounds ridiculous to you, that’s because it’s unique to me, just as others’ are unique to them. There isn’t really much to be gained by talking about individual experiences other than it’s an entertaining topic of discussion. It gets everybody exactly nowhere closer to establishing the objective clinical value of these things, though.

You shouldn't compare mega doses for shrooms vs acid, they both hit very differently

shrooms feel kind of weak until you get to mega dose territory

I wouldn't recommend a shroom mega dose either, it feels too chaotic to take anything away from

I very much disagree, the effects are extremely similar, to the point where if one could match the active substance dosage as well as absorption rate, you would be very hard pressed to tell the difference.

The relative difference is because people generally don't process their shrooms very well and they take much longer to digest (slower release over time) and also its very impossible to judge the potency of the shrooms beforehand (so most go on the safe side dosage); as a starter shrooms are more unpredictable than truffles.

I had the same argument with a friend who gave me a bit of LSD (total dosage unknown, it was edible) and I tried a few days ago, it was basically the same as good shrooms. In fact, I believe the dose was on the low side, it was faster to take action but the "core" experience was shorter and "lower" than just 15 grams of good truffles.

The only thing with LSD is that it takes longer to completely clear out of your system (because it is already extracted in pure form, while shrooms have to be digested/processed by your system in a less efficient/effective way) but I don't like that very much because you end up in this in-between state where you are clearly not high anymore but also restless with secondary effects that are not really cool/interesting.

In any case it would be rather surprising if it was different, because molecularly they are extremely close.

None of this is true, for various reasons. Psilocybin and LSD are qualitatively different above very low doses. They have a lot in common, but only a person that is basically unfamiliar with one or both would call them identical. The experiences become more distinct the higher the dose.

Psilocybin/psilocin has different binding affinities than LSD, is metabolized differently etc. They are, quite simply, different drugs.

>The only thing with LSD is that it takes longer to completely clear out of your system (because it is already extracted in pure form, while shrooms have to be digested/processed by your system in a less efficient/effective way

This is borderline gibberish. The “purity” of the “extraction” (???) has nothing to do with metabolism, protein binding or excretion. The LSD expense typically lasts longer because… it is a different drug. Your body treats it differently than psilocybin because it is different from psilocybin.

And the molecules do not look that much alike, unless you think that all indoles look alike. Even if they did, molecules that look alike do not necessarily act alike (eg H2O and H2O2)

Psilocybin:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#/media/File%253AP...

LSD:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD#/media/File%3ALSD_Struct...

'great fun' seems like a weird way to describe a 500ug trip. Did you have some tolerance before this, and do you have very high confidence that the dosage is accurate?

No tolerance, and yes the dosage was accurate.

I picked “great fun” as a description as a shorthand because, while I could write more about it, it had little to no net positive or negative impacts on my mental health. For the purposes of this discussion, “Great fun” is kind of meant to communicate that the story is neither a warning or a recommendation regarding depression or any other mental health condition.

500µg is an immense dose, unless you have tolerance. Tabs usually have much less than the claimed amount. What was the source and form that makes you think 500µg is accurate? When it's 250µg or more, it's so overwhelming that many people don't have recollections from the trip after some point.

I didn’t write an extended trip report of a massive dose of LSD because this isn’t erowid and the details of the trip itself aren’t relevant. I brought it up as an example to contrast the post I responded to, as my experience was different regarding long-term effects

I was very aware of and confident about the dosage and I had not had any psychedelics for months previous, so tolerance was impossible (also no medication or other drugs etc)

I was just pointing out (mostly to other users who read this) that the alleged dose is immense and would be overwhelming for most people. Wasn't questioning your experience, only asking out of curiosity about the kind of source and form that makes you confident about the dose.

> source and form that makes you confident about the dose

Volumetric dosing from a vial of known quantity.

I believe there is a point after which the higher dosage doesn't change much, but the duration of the trip. I have noticed the same effect with mushrooms (truffles) where basically doubling the dose didn't do much. I'm not even sure it lasted that much longer, because of course you don't take them in a fixed reproducible setting where you could correctly compare stuff.

I think there is a lot of bullshit around those substances, pushed by shamanic type of people who just invent and repeat nonsense to appear unique/interesting.

The "reports" on Erowid, while interesting in a way, are also so full of nonsense that it's largely irrelevant as a source...

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