Short Term Effects:

• The effects of LSD can usually be felt in 30 to 45 minutes and last between six and eight hours.

• LSD affects emotions. Users may feel euphoric ("high"), but this can quickly change to sadness or fear, and back again. Users may even feel more than one emotion at the same time.

• LSD also changes the way you see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. It can cause very vivid hallucinations. (You think that you see, hear or smell things that are not actually there.  (Listen to the song, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles - you'll get the idea.)

• Trivial matters may suddenly seem important, making you feel as if you are going through a magical experience.

• Other side effects include:
  • increased heartbeat and blood pressure
  • fever, dilated pupils, tremors, nausea, chills and numbness
  • impaired judgment (distance, speed, time, etc.), and altered memory. (You may find that you cannot remember events that happened immediately before taking the LSD, but you can clearly remember long past events.)

• Sometimes the effects are especially uncomfortable and frightening and this came to be known as a "bad trip.". That's why it's always a good idea to not take acid when you're alone.

• As is the case with other drugs, LSD affects each user differently. To be honest, some people have taken LSD and had what they felt was a pleasurable, insightful experience.  Unfortunately, this kind of experience is usually limited to people who know exactly what grade of acid they're taking, exactly where it came from, and are in a good setting that's conducive to a hallucinatory drug.    In addition to the size of the dose and the quality or purity of the dose, effects are also influenced by the user's expectations, past drug experience, and personality.  So it's really anybody's guess what the experience will be like from experiment to experiment.

Potential Long Term Effects Of Taking LSD

• Some LSD users experience "flashbacks." They usually involve visual hallucinations from past acid trips, but can involve other senses like taste, smell and touch. These flashbacks generally last a few seconds or minutes.

• For people with psychological problems, LSD use can result in prolonged psychotic states.

• Although rare, there have been reports of visual disturbances such as prolonged after-images caused by LSD.

• Deaths from an LSD overdose have never been reported. However, LSD has been implicated in suicides, accidental deaths, murders, and self-inflicted wounds. Frankly, it's hard to tell the myth from the reality in this area, we don't feel anyone has ever gathered credible data on it.

• It's said that when used by expectant women, LSD may cause birth defects or miscarriages.

Addictive Qualities

Tolerance to LSD develops pretty quickly. This means if your taking it persistently, the more you take it, the harder it is to achieve the same level of high.  Most users find that if they take too much acid, they have to take what's termed in slang as a "drug holiday," which means not using for a few days.  LSD does not appear to cause physical dependence, even after long-term use, however like most drugs, LSD can cause a psychological dependence.

Modern Considerations About Using LSD

The "Summer Of Love" and the "Peace Generation" concluded shortly after Jimi Hendrix struck the last chord of "Hey Joe" at Woodstock on August 18, 1969.  Those gentle days are gone, and today LSD is manufactured, distributed and sold for a profit and that's the bottom-line.  The average person selling acid today doesn't worry about his "customers" having a bad experience with their product because A)  they're probably never going to see you again, and B) they truly don't care.

PCP

A lot of acid today also contains PCP, (also known as angel dust, ozone, wack, and rocket fuel) and it's one hell of a powerful drug and extremely weird in how it can affect you.  With high doses of PCP, your blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiration drop. You can also experience nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, flicking up and down of the eyes, drooling, loss of balance, and dizziness.  There's also the potential for seizures, coma, and death, although most people totally whacked on PCP die from a fatal accident, or from PCP-induced suicide.

Some people really high on PCP can exhibit symptoms that mimic schizophrenia, with delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, disordered thinking, a sensation of distance from one's environment.  (dissociation)  and catatonia.  Speech is often sparse and garbled.  And because PCP alters distribution of the neurotransmitter glutamate throughout the brain. a PCP user's perception of pain, their ability to respond to their environment, and their memory are all affected.

So if you must experiment with acid, (and we suggest you don't) at least make sure:

• you're getting it from someone you feel you can trust to give you genuine acid
• you're in a safe place with familiar surroundings
• you're with people you know and trust
• you're prepared for the possibility that you might have a bad experience, because realistically, it does go down that way for some people.

We can;t emphasize enough to try and make sure you know what you're taking because PCP isn't the only thing added to acid.  In the last two years, a lot of confiscated acid that's lab tested comes up testing positive for methamphetamine as well.  So be careful! 

Treatment Options

Some of the treatment options for LSD include counseling, withdrawal (detoxification) and treatment with the use of other drugs (pharmacotherapy.)  Residential and ‘out-patient’ programs are available in most regions of North America.

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