An acid trip can be better than any movie ever made. For generations, all around America and the world, people have been ingesting Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and having a great time with it.
But for some, the magical sparkling adventure leads down a heart breaking road into psychosis and sometimes death.
LSD is a solvent for the glue of reality. It reconfigures the very system that makes you who you are, and it is not something to be used thoughtlessly.
I know so much about all of this, because I spent a long hazy period of time engulfed in American drug culture. I always avoided anything white and powdery, but I fell heavily into the dream-world of hallucinogens.
My mind is not the same as it was before. Dozens on prolonged hallucinogenic trips have left me with a multitude of very subtle symptoms. Along with gentle tracers, which are trails that follow lights, and occasional phantom sparkles, I am left with a persistent anxiety and a nervousness that I cannot shake.
Let me illustrate what LSD has done to my brain. Go out to your car and start it. Now leave the car in park, but floor the gas pedal. Place a heavy brick on the gas pedal and leave the car like this for eight hours.
I escaped the hazardous fantasy world with only mild neurosis, possibly because I stopped when I did.
I was given a blinding warning, when my brother developed Schizophrenia.
Together, we had consumed an extraordinary amount of the drug, but he was the one who took more. And while I suffered from only an occasional bad trip, his nights of joyful madness would often turn towards darkness and despair.
We will never know if the LSD is specifically responsible for my brother’s crippling mental illness, but the similarity between the drug induced psychosis he once experienced and the purely automatic episodes he now suffers is too close for comfort.
Since the inception of his illness he has been arrested several times and has attempted suicide repeatedly. Our family has spent the last seven years battling the demons in his head, and we have almost lost far too many times.
I am grateful that he escaped with at least his life. Another person recently passed though my life, who was not so lucky.
Angel was an energetic, intelligent young man who had befriended my long time girlfriend. But before I had a chance to even assume anything, the boy died.
He had taken acid with his friends one evening and gone out to a party. At the end of the evening, Angel went home by himself and took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. There was no suicide note.
Angel spent his twentieth birthday lying in a coma in a hospital, his family surrounding him, the room filled with flowers and balloons he would never see. Angel died the next day.
We cannot know for certain if the overdose was an accident caused by drug addled perception, or an actual suicide cause by the dark fears that can rise to unbelievable heights in an LSD trip. Whatever the case, the drug put him in the position, and must be counted as a primary cause.
LSD should not be used recreationally. I will not condemn the many religious practices of the world that use hallucinogens under strict rules and observation for purposes of spiritual advancement. I do however; think poorly of the notion that LSD is necessary to open the mind.
If you are truly interested in opening the door of spirituality, consider one of the many meditative disciplines of the world. Kundulini Yoga is said to unify the self with God and the Universe, while LSD will do nothing but cause the brain to misfire, scrambling images and information into an amusing caricature.
LSD is not worth your sanity or your life.
