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PSYCHEDELICS: LSD & "MAGIC" MUSHROOMS

Psychedelics are drugs that cause the user to experience hallucinations through the distorting of the five basic senses. Popular in the 1960s and the drug culture of bands like the Grateful Dead, psychedelics are not physically addicting, but can cause psychological dependence and permanent mental alteration. In other words, when a user takes a trip, they do not always come back and often they come back with a different mental framework than before. In the user’s psyche, there exists an almost spiritual belief that the psychedelic experience would provide them with new perspectives and understandings, even opening them to the light of the transcendent. What users discover through experience was that the psychedelic awakening passed quickly due to a lack of actual work. And when users experience what is known as a bad trip, they often return to reality scarred by the nightmare of the overwhelming sensations.

LSD (chemical name: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) is the strongest of the more widely known psychedelics. The street names of this intense drug include acid, dots, blotters and tabs. It usually comes in tiny squares of paper, often with an amusing picture on one side like those of Bart Simpson or a Dancing Bear. But the picture reveals nothing about the likely effect or strength. Since LSD is a chemical compound produced in illegal laboratories, the user never truly knows exactly what to expect from any single dose. The effects of a single trip can last as long as eight to twelve hours. While a user is tripping, they experience the world in a profoundly different way, and this alteration sometimes leads to disastrous, even fatal, mistakes as reality shifts into the bizarre.

The effects of the drug often depend on the user’s mood, including where they are and who they are with. Once the trip starts, there is no way of stopping it. A bad trip can be nothing less than a terrifying experience where the user feels threatened and trapped, forgetting that the drug is responsible for the strange sensations. It is impossible to predict a bad trip, but it is more likely to happen if the user is feeling anxious, nervous or just plain uncomfortable. The experience of feeling paranoid, disoriented or out of control can leave the user shaken for a long time after the actual trip. Moreover, the legacy of a bad trip and any trip for that matter can be the experience of flashbacks by the user where parts of a trip are suddenly re-lived long after the experience is past. LSD can complicate and acerbate pre-existing mental problems in the user such as anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Although it theoretically is not possible to overdose on LSD, a bad trip can disrupt and disturb a user’s life for countless years.

Like LSD, but not quite as potent, magic mushrooms are still a powerful psychedelic. Also known as ‘shrooms or mushies, they are eaten raw, dried, cooked in food or steamed into a tea. Magic mushrooms have a similar hallucinatory effect to LSD, but the trip is often milder and shorter (about four to six hours in length). The danger exclusive to magic mushrooms is that many species of wild growing poisonous mushrooms appear almost identical. There have been numerous cases of users being fatally poisoned or becoming extremely sick when this mistake has been made. But even with magic mushrooms themselves, users often experience stomach pains, nausea and diarrhea. Finally, like LSD and other psychedelics, once the trip has started, there is no going back. Although some users have a safety valve in their consciousness of knowing they are on a psychedelic, others become so disoriented and frightened that the experience becomes a waking nightmare. At Wonderland, we can help the client scarred by a psychedelic experience return to the demands and expectations of normative reality.

Call 877-777-1963 at any time, we're here to help.