How to Avoid a Bad Trip, How to Avoid Death in Buy a Ticket, Take a Ride

A note I get with some regularity, with some yearning: If I didn’t gave kids, if I weren’t intimidated by my friend’s bad experience, etc, I’d fancy an adventure with LSD. I assume it has been well-hyped compared to other hallucinogens, because when I get this comment it is always LSD. When it comes to fears about doing drugs, there seem to be two major ones: avoiding health issues and/or a bad trip.

How to avoid health problems and death while tripping on most drugs: It’s like how you avoid dying when you’re not on drugs. Don’t do dangerous things. Don’t die in a freak accident. Don’t take drugs from someone who might want to take advantage of you. (Is rape is a freak accident?) Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do on alcohol.

If a tornado hit me while my head was full acid, or my house filled with carbon monoxide, I’d probably regret being on drugs at that time. I’d be more likely to die than a non-intoxicated person. But I probably wouldn’t die, even if I didn’t react with maximum preparedness.

Minimize your exposure to risks that are within your control, do not worry about what you can’t control. Suggestions for things situations to avoid while doing drugs: overdose, swimming, animals, exhaustive physical activity, cooking, motor vehicles, heavy machinery, parties, fire and smoke inhalation, falling objects, exposure to forces of nature, sharp objects, and weapons. In other words: avoid common causes of accidental death.

You will want to read up on the specific risks involved in whatever drug you choose to take, but that list covers most if not all of those specific things. Over time, when you are comfortable with a substance, you might find yourself attempting challenges like cooking without posing significant risk of killing yourself, but take it easy.

How to avoid a bad trip? Simple answer: Eat a nice steak somewhere between 45-90 minutes after you take your dose, depending on the drug you are doing. Well, it might sound strange, but it works for me. I am happy when well fed.

More complicated answer: Hardcore psychedelics are sometimes a difficult experience, but my personal opinion is that a resilient psychonaut accepts difficult trips as worthwhile or even therapeutic experiences. You might remember sad childhood memories. Thinking about sad things, like war, is more emotional under the influence than you would probably be capable of experiencing otherwise. But, likewise, happy emotions are intense. I think it is been a good thing for me to experience a whole range of emotions on drugs like LSD.

What about flashbacks? Well, I have had difficult experiences, and sometimes those memories continue to influence my worries and anxieties when I’m no longer on the influence. For example, before I was obsessed with drugs all the time, I was obsessed with feminism all the time. I would worry about the way women were treated while I was on drugs, and this made it more likely that I’d continue to worry about how women are treated, even when I wasn’t on drugs anymore. But I do not think post drug anxiety inspired by memories from drug use are especially dramatic or stressful.

If one has a personal tendency to feel overwhelmed by strong negative emotions, I think it is wise to be cautious about drug use. The feared acid flashbacks seem to resemble the kind experienced by people with PTSD, who are overwhelmed by spontaneous reliving a memory of a stressful event. If someone experienced a possibly traumatic event while under the influence, the heightened subjective experience of emotion would probably only make one more likely to develop PTSD symptoms as a result. I am not a doctor, this is just a guess at an explanation.

At Magic: The Gathering I met a kid who claimed to have trouble with acid flashbacks. He also claimed to have once manufactured an amphetamine he could not describe specifically. Drug enthusiasts tend to be chronic liars, repeaters of folk tales. Ironically, although LSD can be a difficult experience, amphetamines in high doses (which is how they are used recreationally) are actually a more realistic model for insanity as we know it via the dopamine hypothesis of skizophrenia. This is intuitive because stimulants increase dopamine in your brain and anti-psychotics suppress dopamine.

Incidentally, a the subsequent long-term benefits from even a single MDMA (Ecstasy) experience is showing very convincing evidence in trials as an effective treatment for PTSD. If one is scared of negativity under the influence under a hardcore psychedelic, I would actually recommend first experimenting with MDMA, since this is a much more consistently positive experience. This will most likely teach you something about thinking positively and help you be more resilient on more difficult recreational drugs. Read a first hand account of MDMA therapy.

Last updated February 17, 2015