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from the lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds dept.
Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding.
Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain. Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company, gave away large quantities of Delysid—LSD—to any researcher who requested it, in the hope that someone would discover a marketable application.
Now, forty years after the Nixon Administration effectively shut down most psychedelic research, the government is gingerly allowing a small number of scientists to resume working with these powerful and still somewhat mysterious molecules.
(Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Thursday February 12 2015, @01:40AM
I can only speak for myself, but these phosphenes became much more vivid and "ordered" after my trips. My theory is that drugs like this heighten your awareness of those kinds of visual "glitches", much like you may notice cars that look exactly like yours with greater frequency than you had before getting that particular car. I believe that that would account for most of what people think of as Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (yes, it has a name). A very small minority can experience more severe effects that interfere with their lives. Based on what I've read, most of these people had taken massive doses or were heavy users.
The trouble with most of the studies I've read on the matter is that they rely on self-reporting among users of an illicit substance. Most of what gets sold as "LSD" these days are actually research chemicals such as 25I-NBOME due to the difficulty and cost of synthesizing the real deal. Self-reporting is a bit "meh" as far as reliability goes, and you have to assume that these people were taking the real thing.
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