Bad Trips: LSD

[00:00:01] Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Killari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And this week we're putting a weird little piece of paper on our tongue to see what happens. Maybe we'll see God, or maybe we'll lose our minds for good. There's only one way to find out. We should probably say that's figurative, right?

[00:00:29] Yeah, we're not dropping acid during the episode. Episode, correct. Just figuratively putting a piece of paper on our tongue. Yeah. Before we get into it, for our sake and yours, and probably Astonishing Legends lawyers, we need to be absolutely clear that this episode is not us encouraging anyone to try psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs.

[00:00:52] These substances are largely illegal, I think most places in the world, and can be extremely dangerous, especially for people with underlying mental health conditions or family histories of certain mental disorders. That said, we also aren't here to shit on these drugs. When approached respectfully and used with the proper guidance, psychedelic experiences can be powerfully positive, like life-changingly so, for many, many people.

[00:01:19] But, you've been here before. The show's not called Nice and Good Things from around the world. It's called scared all the time. So, we're only going to be talking about and laughing at the worst of the worst. The most hellish, mind-shattering, please-God-never-again kind of bad trips that curdle my blood to even read about. If you've ever had what Timothy Leary dubbed a, quote, challenging psychedelic experience, or if you've been the unlucky friend trying to talk someone through one, you know exactly how scary this can get.

[00:01:48] Reality dissolves, time becomes meaningless, and your worst fears can manifest right before your eyes. What's even scarier is that these experiences can last for what feels like a literal eternity. So, lock your doors, turn off your lava lamp, and hide your tie-dye. We are about to take a trip into the dark side of expanding your mind. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared all the time.

[00:02:19] Hey guys, it's Ed. Just Ed. Chris is off doing baby stuff, so I figured I would just do a solo housekeeping. And really what that means is I'm going to not do housekeeping. I'm going to hold off five-star reviews till next week. We have a bunch. Can't wait to read them. And I'm going to hold off the producer credits because this is already a super long episode. So, that's on us. We decided to talk way too long about drugs and that happens. So, without further ado, let's get right into it. You guys know we love a good personal connection to our topic each week.

[00:02:46] So, mom, both moms, family members, if you're listening to this, maybe skip... Just hit the skip button for like the next 10 minutes. 10 minutes was far too optimistic. It's more like three to four times that. So, if you're Chris and Ed's families or just anyone who wants to skip past them talking about doing drugs for probably too long, please consult the chapters in this episode's description to skip right ahead to the history stuff and stories about people not named Chris and Ed doing drugs.

[00:03:16] I'll say this right away. One of the scariest things in the world to me is my brain malfunctioning. I think we talked about this in Sudden Death. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With brain hemorrhages and the little death berries that dangle and burst. Yeah, the berries on your branches. Berries on my branches I don't want. I live most of my life deep inside my head and the idea that my own brain might deceive me or that I might lose control over my reality is too horrifying to think about.

[00:03:43] I'm definitely a brain in a jar guy where like if it were revealed to me that I am just a brain in a jar... We are all brains in jars. Well, yeah. Oh, you mean like this is all a reality is built around... Sure, if you consider our skull a bone jar... Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, then yes, we are a brain in a jar but I mean like if literally my brain... If I found out that my brain had been removed and I was in a liquidy clear jar and I was just being stimulated to experience this, I'd be fine with it.

[00:04:12] I'm one of those people who watch The Matrix and was like, what's the big fucking deal? Like, you know, people are pretty free within The Matrix. I mean, that's yeah, like what's his name? Fucking Joey Pants is like, just take me back. I want to eat steak again. I want the steak. I'm fine with this. I want the steak. I want the steak and I don't know that I need to know what else is outside there.

[00:04:33] Like, I'm happy to have a spiritual experience but at least in the context of The Matrix, I have no desire to be crawling around in the pink goo and fighting machines and wearing rags. Yeah. You know, like... Yeah. So anyway, the world feels real enough to me and most days I feel like I'm just my brain anyway. I mean, I obviously need my body to keep breathing and my blood pumping and everything but you get what I mean. So taking good care of my brain plus a really brutal anxious streak keeps me away from most psychedelics.

[00:05:02] Even when I drink alcohol or I mean, I guess not much with coffee these days. But if I drink enough coffee to feel weird, I'll hyper fixate on those sensations. Like, even if I've had one or two beers, I'll start being like, do I feel different? Am I getting drunk? Am I getting buzzed? Weird. Weird. I don't like the feeling of... I really hate getting, like, Novocaine at the dentist. Yeah, no issues here. The feeling of it kicking in and my body, like, changing or feeling like I'm losing sensation. Really?

[00:05:30] I enjoy the feeling of it kicking in because I don't want to feel what's coming next. Well, sure. I don't want to feel... For me, that sensation is, this is great. We're all going according to plan. As a person who takes a little bit more than normal to get it to work, I love it. Yeah. I don't like that he grabs my cheek to make me feel it less or whatever. Mm-hmm. You're going to just do that? Yeah. Like, they'll grab you, but they'll pinch you. Yeah. And yeah, they're going to move you around. And I'm like, okay, well... Yeah. No, I really...

[00:05:57] Anything that changes my experience of reality, I do hyper fixate on those sensations. And I'm like, is that okay? Do I feel okay? You know what? This brings you back to the big one episode where you were like, oh man, I can't sleep at night because I'm worried about what this... Was that an earthquake? Is this... Yeah. The issue is, if I can better help you for a moment. Uh, I think it's, yeah, you have this fear of what's coming and it's like, it's ever present in your life. Yeah.

[00:06:24] It's like, even for something that you've done yourself where you're like, I'm taking drugs, I'm drinking booze because I'm... The end result is getting to these feelings, but you still like dread the change into those feelings that you yourself took the first step down that journey. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, I think I've talked about it on here before. There's a Clive Barker short story called Dread that is my favorite short story of all time. Yeah. Because it's about the ways in which dread, the fear of something happening, the dread

[00:06:53] of something happening can almost be worse than the experience itself. And I would say I do feel a good amount of dread on a daily basis. Not so much that it paralyzes me, but I'm very on alert all the time for something to go wrong. The most Chris Colari I get in terms of this part of your lifestyle is I don't, I never want to go out. And when I do, I have a great time, but that's not afraid of going out.

[00:07:17] I just kind of put a wet blanket over an experience and then find out that it's not bad down here. Yeah. I guess for me, the dread, particularly when it comes to substances, drugs and alcohol is the feeling of losing control or wondering like, you know, like with beer, it's obviously I've, I've had enough beer in my life. I know my limits. I know about how I feel as I go, but bigger, badder drugs like psychedelics or something that feeling of, uh, Oh, what's going to happen now? Yeah.

[00:07:47] Could this go wrong is ever present, which I gather. You don't want to start that way. It really hurts your chances. Not the vibe you want to be taking into a trip. No, you really don't. Yeah. Because I think what I start to do is fight it. Like I was this way with edibles for years. Fuck edibles. Because, well, you still don't like them. I like them now. I won't do them. But I hated the feeling of something changing in my brain. So I'd fight it and get thrown into these really dark places.

[00:08:14] And I would call it the washing machine effect because it felt like throwing a rock in a washing machine and at first it just clanks around. But after it picks up enough speed, you know, it can knock the whole machine over. It would be like, I'd have one thought of, Oh, I don't know if I like this. And then that was just, I don't know if I like this. I don't know if I like this. I don't know. And it was just bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Until.

[00:08:36] So yeah, I, I've had, I guess one way to start talking about this is I have never had a bad trip in the truly psychedelic sense. It's I have only had bad experiences on edibles. Yeah. You haven't had a bad trip. Like reefer madness tries to show you where it's like, if you smoke pot and it's like a hard cut to a lady on a roof of a building being like, I'm gonna fucking, I need to touch that cloud. And it jumps off the roof into like oncoming traffic. Yeah. I've neither had that either.

[00:09:05] But I've also, I've done mushrooms two or three times to three times in the first two times, truly nothing happened. And the third time I had a very, very good experience, but we'll get to that in a minute. I do want to talk about my edible bad trips because they are what make me very, very afraid of anything of a truly psychedelic bad trip. The worst was, and Ed, I'm sure you've heard this story before, but I made my own edibles once.

[00:09:30] Yeah, no, I've, I, some of the worst edible experiences I've had were also from like homemade weed butter. Well, because it's you ratio issue. Yeah. It's a ratio issue. My friend had worked on a shoot for either Doug Benson or Snoop. I don't remember which of them it was, but they had given out little nuggets of weed as like, thank you gifts. And my buddy was like, I don't smoke. I don't want this. And for whatever reason he offered it to me. And I was like, well, I don't smoke, but maybe I'll make edibles. I'll give it a shot. So I found, you know, a recipe online and long, long story short, I'm bad at math.

[00:10:00] I didn't have a scale to weigh the weeds. So I was, but you have a kitchen. I have a kitchen, but I think I probably basically ended up using, uh, I probably needed about two to three times as much brownie batter as I actually use. So I ended up making these very concentrated brownies that I thought were just normal strength, according to the internet, which is why I also made the rookie mistake of eating one and then going, Hmm, I don't feel anything and eating another. Now in my defense, in my defense, I wasn't a total newbie.

[00:10:30] I did wait almost like an hour and a half before I had the second. So I do feel like it probably should have kicked in, but it didn't. Do you think that just like all of the THC or weed or oil or whatever, just like rolled to one part of the pan? And it's like, it might all just be in like one section of the brownie. Very possibly. I feel like that way about store-bought stuff too. I think maybe it's better now, but I feel like forever it was like, I don't think there's regulations about this. So it's just like, yeah, you could very well just end up with something that says like, oh, it's X grams or whatever.

[00:11:00] But really that one you got that part of the cookie sheet is insanity. I also toasted. I'd read that if you toast the weed in like a toaster oven, it helps activate the THC. So I toasted it first and maybe it was unevenly toasted. Maybe that had something to do with it. I don't know. Anyway, it was like 20 minutes after I had the second brownie that I walked down to Mendocino Farms to get a sandwich and realized that something was very, very wrong. You should never be feeling bad at Mendocino. No.

[00:11:29] I wish they would sponsor the show. Mendocino Farms, our ad spots are yours. We will give you a great ad read and I won't mention that you in this story ever again. I got this very paranoid feeling. I started feeling this sense of doom, like as I'm trying to order a panini and forgetting the word panini. Then I finally ordered, I'm waiting for my food. And you know how Mendo has those cow statues? Yeah, they do. Yeah. I got the distinct sense that one of them was watching me.

[00:11:59] Oh, wow. You thought you were in a Chick-fil-A? Yeah. Yeah. And I knew it. You thought you were in a gateway computer? Oh, no. I've fallen into the chip. You thought you were in one of those THX cow mooing. I just try to think of as many cow things as I can. I thought I was on a bad Far Side strip. Yeah. Shit. Cows, they've really done well for themselves in pop culture. Yeah, they have. I should have.

[00:12:21] Next time I'm this high, I should look at the famous Far Side comic strip Cow Tools and see if I find it even funnier. Okay, sure. Yeah. I'm sure there's a desk calendar you can buy. Yeah. But so, of course, this cow freaked me out. And that was the first big anxiety spike that my brain decided to cling to.

[00:12:41] You know, I was just like, I went from what's wrong to where's my food to how long have I been here to do I know where here is in the matter of five minutes? No, yeah. The person behind the counter is like, sir, I asked you just one time, would you like a sandwich? And you're screaming now. Yeah. So, I got my sandwich and I was pretty sure I was in for a very bad time. So, I walked back to my place. Did you get a drink? Just a sandwich? Just a sandwich because I was going home. They have that hibiscus iced tea that's so good there.

[00:13:10] Well, as soon as I got home, I put on some tea because I wanted to make some calming tea because I could feel myself starting to panic. So, I put on tea to make like Sleepy Time with the little bear with the hat to calm myself down. Add another terrifying animal into the equation. And I decided to put on the least stressful movie I could think of, which in that moment was the Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz hit Charlie's Angels. Oh, my God. I don't know why. I hadn't thought of that movie much before and I've barely thought of it since.

[00:13:38] Some of the insane like matting and graphics in that movie are just that would send me into a bad trip. Yeah. Well, it was maybe 15 minutes into the movie when I realized two things. One, the kettle had been whistling for a while. The neighbors called. Yeah. And I felt like I'd been watching the movie for approximately my entire life. So, I think that was written on all the fucking cards at the first screening of that. Yeah. Test screenings of that without drugs. I feel like I've been here for six days.

[00:14:06] So, and this is where I got like the actual closest to like a bad psychedelic trip. I knew I had to get up to turn the kettle off so it would stop whistling. Because I was afraid it was bothering my neighbors. But when I started walking into the kitchen, the floor started repeating beneath my feet. I felt like I was just walking in place. And I don't think I was. You Jamiroquai'd. Yeah. It was moving smooth through physical space. And yeah, I felt like I wasn't going anywhere.

[00:14:34] Eventually, I got into the kitchen and I did turn the tea off. But then by the time I turned the tea off, I'd forgotten why I was in the kitchen in the first place. Anyway, I got back to the couch and I locked the fuck in on Charlie's Angels. What is the year? What year? Like what? Like how old were you? This was, it felt like it was 2011 to 2013 as it was happening. But this must have been, this was probably 2013, 2012, 2013, somewhere in there. Okay. So it was pretty late later than I thought it would be. Well into my 20s. Yeah.

[00:15:03] Because I never, I didn't, you know, I didn't really experiment with drugs or drinking as a kid at all. So it really came later when I was like, yeah, I want to have, I always felt like I approached a lot of it fairly responsibly. I was like, I've got one life to live. I want to kind of experience some of these things. And, you know, I'm not going to try heroin or something, but, you know. That's where I draw the line as well. So I sat in watching this movie. It became my whole world. I was imagining building the sets by hand. I was imagining being on set and like where the lights were.

[00:15:32] And like, and then after another, I don't know, by not even halfway to the movie, nothing made sense. I was no longer watching the movie. I was just wondering when this was going to stop. And I, and I knew, I knew that you can't die from a marijuana overdose. And I also knew that the amount that I'd use, even though it was obviously way too much for me, I had not put an entire plant into one brownie, you know. Yeah.

[00:15:56] But that's the nice thing about marijuana though, is even when it's the fucking worst, which is in my experience, almost exclusively in edible form. If you, at least if you've done stuff for a little bit in your life, if you've experienced some drugs, you just go, this sucks, but this shall pass. Like, like, I'm not going to die from this. It's going to be a bummer. And like, you do what you can to make it go by faster. But even you're a novice, if you don't know, you're like, this is the end. Like, I'm going to die. But if you just remind yourself, like, you're not going to die. Well, I did. It's not bad.

[00:16:25] I can't say the same for fucking 300 rails of Coke or whatever. But I'm saying like for marijuana, you're not going to die. Yeah, no. And I was reminding myself that I wasn't going to die, but it got, I mean, by the end of this experience, the time dilation was. It's that's the worst part. Because you're like, you said it earlier, I think in the opening where you're like, it could have been a thousand years. Yeah. And I've, and we'll get into my stuff after. But yeah, time dilation is the biggest annoyance. And that was, in this case, it was an annoyance that reached a level of just like sheer panic. Were you alone?

[00:16:55] No. So I was with who was also eating the brownies and was just at this point completely passed out. But that's nice. If you fall asleep, that's a vibe. I mean, I don't know if she was actually asleep or if she was just suffering the way I was. You don't know anything about weeds. You don't know if it was an indica, if it was sativa you used. I have no idea. I'm a sativa guy through and through. Well, now I know the difference. I don't know then. No, but I was the way I always remember it from like indica's in the couch. So you're like fucking collapsed into a couch.

[00:17:25] Sativa has no clever portmanteau or rhyme thing. You only remember the one. Yeah. That's true. There's only two options. I'm a uppers person anyway. Yeah. I mean, I like them both now. I don't know what this was, but I was, I mean, the time dilation, that was the panicky part because I knew part of my brain was like, you're fine. You just got to sleep this off. And the other part of my brain, like I was having physical sensations of falling and like

[00:17:52] tumbling through space and it was not cool. Um, and then, and I guess I have to ask everyone involved if it's okay that I share this part of the story, but I managed to text my sister who lived a couple blocks away from me at the time. One letter at a time probably took me the better part of an hour to text. And this wasn't T9. This was like 2013. Yeah, no, this was a touchscreen phone. This was a... For kids listening. Yeah.

[00:18:16] T9 was a text thing where you had to like each number on the keyboard represented three or four alphabet characters. So if you wanted to text someone, you know, be right back and start with B, it would be like hit number one twice to get to the second letter. It was now thinking about it excruciating. Yeah. I actually knew kids in high school though, because that we all had the T9 in high school and kids got good at it. They could text from inside their hoodies like during class.

[00:18:45] And that's actually something really nice about tactile buttons. Yeah. You can't really do that with an iPhone or an Android in your hoodie. But back then you can feel them the second button in. I mean, these are the people, this is what we have to go back to for World War III. That's going to be the new Morse code. Yeah, for sure. Well, the Morse code I was seeing at this point was just flashes of light with no light source behind my eyes. But I managed to text my sister too high, please help. And she came over. And then she knocked on the door. You thought it was a cop. You started freaking out. No, I didn't.

[00:19:14] When she got there, I was very relieved. And it was pretty late at night at this point. And I was like, thank you. And puked. And then Rachel came in and was like, what is going on? And I was like, we made these brownies. And she's like, why is it reek like puking here? And you can't talk. She cleaned up the puke. Wow. Your sister cleaned up the puke. As soon as she cleaned it up, puked again. That happened to me in a, it wasn't even an Uber. It was a taxi. It was a thing where like I puked in a taxi. It was so, I was so upset with myself and embarrassed.

[00:19:43] But it had a thing on the like glass partition that said like it's $100 cleaning fee or whatever. Yeah. If you puke. And I was with a couple friends. This was like Santa Barbara or something. And I was like, so I had puked. And then I couldn't get it out the window. And then so my buddy was, I hear him like apologizing to the taxi driver. Like, oh my God, we're so sorry. Like we're going to pay the fee. It's whatever. And then I puked again. He's like, get it out the fucking window, my friend. And I was like, why? We paid.

[00:20:07] It was like the worst like lizard brain, no consideration for other people thought. Yeah. But it was just like, and I remember we did have to like stop with the taxi driver to go to an ATM as he like paid him cash for it. But I just remember like just continuing to puke on my lap. Like what a piece of shit. Like if I can go back to young Ed and be like, don't be such a fucking selfish prick in that moment. What a garbage move. Well, we didn't, my sister did not clean up the second one. She was like, fuck this.

[00:20:37] I'm gone. I'm like, I did my duty. Go to bed. Yeah. And so no, for like two days, I was not that high for two days, but I was having a rough time for like two days. Wow. That's crazy. I feel like, yeah, I usually don't get, I don't get like bogged down like that. And I kept the brownies for years in the back of my freezer. I wrote nuclear weapons on them. And then there's a couple of friends over the years who I would let have, like if they were visiting from out of town or something and be like, if you want some, you can have some, but just take a very little bit.

[00:21:06] And a number of my friends also got like, just knocked the fuck out. Dude, you made these warheads. You should have just thrown them into, you should have buried them in Arizona or something. So that was my worst kind of trip. And then my, you know, the flip side of this, the good experience was the mushroom trip that I took that it was genuinely one of the most clarifying, peaceful, spiritual, positive experiences I've ever had. I was in a good place to do it. You know, I was, I felt very comfortable.

[00:21:37] You were in a haunted house. Yeah. Yeah. I went, I went to the most decrepit building I could find, but yeah, no, I, I fully felt like, you know, I would in the proper setting, treating them respectfully as a sort of checking in with myself, I would do mushrooms once a year, maybe every other year to have that like really deep spiritual check-in to be like, Hey, how's it going? Like, what do you think? What are you worried about?

[00:22:03] What do you, you're describing this as like an ayahuasca mentality, but I mean, I haven't had mushrooms in a hundred years now, but the good mushroom trips are great. Yeah. Yeah. And I have a friend who's won't be named obviously. Yeah. Who's mom, like micro doses mushrooms to help with like a illness. Mm-hmm and he just found it was like too hard to acquire or what have you or expensive, what have you. And so he just started like growing them himself probably like 12 years ago now. And so obviously they're the best mushrooms in town. Yeah.

[00:22:30] So I won't give out my connect, but he did it for like good reasons, I guess. But he just got really, really good at it. Out here you can get, I don't know if you can buy full mushrooms at weed stores, but there's a lot of places where you, they just are openly selling mushrooms. No. Yeah. And I know that this guy I'm talking about has like started selling to those kinds of bigger places now. Yeah. But their stuff is just better than what you're getting at those places. But also it was, it's been legal. Anytime you have a friend who's like, I was in Thailand last year and I got like a mushroom shake or whatever.

[00:22:59] I went to the beach and I'm like, there's no way I'm doing fucking a drug that sticks around for eight hours in a foreign country. Where they're not super keen on. I mean, they must be keen on because they sell them at the fucking store in Thailand. I'm saying like, I've heard of this mushroom beach in Thailand, but I don't think it's legal. I think you're just thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I think it's legal. I think it's been legal for a hundred years.

[00:23:26] Turns out it's not even a little bit legal there, but hey, life finds a way. So Ed, I feel like I've opened up. I've made my family events awkward for the next five years. What about you? What bad trips have you had? None. I love my family and I'm never. And he's, and folks, he's never done drugs. Never done drugs, dude. Uh, like I don't do drugs anymore. So I mean, like somebody's like, you want to do this Molly? Then yeah, a hundred percent. But I mean, like I'm not, I don't really do drugs.

[00:23:54] If I'm like a wedding and someone's like, you want to hit this J at a wedding? Yeah. You know what I mean? I'll be in that circle, but no, I don't. We're almost 40. We don't do drugs. We don't do drugs anymore. We use substances to survive one day to the next. Well, I think acid's interesting because it's a good trip. Like you can play guitar and at least kind of feel like you can see the notes and stuff in a way that maybe you don't with mushrooms. Okay. Did you take a lot of acid? No, no, no, no. I've probably only done it like three times maybe.

[00:24:22] Like I used to live with someone in college who kept it in our freezer. Like tabs of acid were in our freezer, but it wasn't like an all the time thing. Did any of those tabs contain a bad trip? No, not really. I mean, obviously not everything's great all the time. It's like that old Louis CK bit about getting too high where there's that moment where it just clicks in and you're like, oh shit, this is an ordeal now. Yeah. See, I wouldn't say it got any crazier than that same thought of like, well, this is an ordeal now. Okay.

[00:24:51] So I'm curious about what it feels like to take a bad acid trip. So going through yours. So you took the acid. Was this the first time you'd taken acid or no? It might be the second, but it might be the first. So either way, you didn't really know what to expect. No, but I had already taken mushrooms and I thought it would be something similar. Not on the same day. No. Oh, okay. All right. So what was the first sensation that made you go? Oh, it wasn't so much. Oh, it was just like heightened noises and stuff, which is gosh, you don't even need drugs for anymore.

[00:25:20] Like my default mode these days is like, what was that? I won't go in a bathtub. It was that noise out there. Um, it was like winter in Boston and I heard like dead leaves scratch from the wind across the like driveway or street. And I remember the noises were all like accompanied by like more intrusive thoughts than say like your regular smoking a joint paranoia, you know? So that was different than like, let's say mushrooms.

[00:25:43] I remember just that feeling very like right in front of me and it wasn't, it was like outside the window, but my brain was like, oh shit. Maybe that was a rustling leaf. Maybe that was 1 million tiny people running on ice skates across the driveway or like, okay, is that a crumpled up shirt on the ground? Or is that the first of a million snakes that are about to slither into my room?

[00:26:07] Um, so for a bad trip on acid was just like, I feel like I was a lot more in my head about stuff where a bad trip on mushrooms was just being sad. Right. I was just really sad and I would smoke cigarettes and be like sad. Wow. Well, with other people, I was more scared on acid in terms of like just getting in my own head about what was that noise? What are those things versus like bad trip on mushrooms was always just like, I was just bummed.

[00:26:32] So your experience with bad trips has always been a lot of like, it's never come with a full break from reality. No, that's weed. I've never been on a hallucinogen and broke from reality. On weed you have. You need almost two hands to count the number of drugs I've done in my life. I mean, different drugs. Yeah. Fucking edible weed is the worst hands down experiences I've had on drugs. So what was that? That was the shit you were talking about, which is like, okay, good example. One time I took and I think it was like some me and Pat brownies.

[00:27:01] It was again, it wasn't like store bought. Yeah. And this is not, it hasn't only happened once in my life, but it was like, all right, I'm feeling way too fucking high. And sometimes it's hard to explain with words what that is. Cause it's not like, oh, you'll know you're too high when X, Y, and Z. Like it's, you know what I mean? It's hard to say. You just fucking know it. Yeah. Like you're, you're kind of collapsing from the outside in a little bit. Yeah. There is a, a, a collapsed star happening. And so if you've done it, you're like, oh, I'm going to go to my room.

[00:27:30] I'm going to get away from stimulation. Yeah. I'm going to go be by myself. And on like a weed brownie, you can like, oh, I'm just going to go into bed. Maybe I'll go to sleep. You know, I'm already kind of tired from this. And the next thing you know, you are at like a cellular level thinking about like the big bang theory and like, oh my God, I am now an amoeba. And like, I'm living through the whole span of an amoeba. And now I've met a fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex. Are you sure this was marijuana?

[00:28:00] Yeah. This sounds like, this sounds like salvia. No, it was weed. It was weed. My one time I did salvia. It didn't matter. This was fucking weed. And you're like fighting with yourself. You're in bed being like, get out of this world that I am a fucking, I know I'm a human being. Get me evolutionarily back to a human being. This is taking forever. And it's like, so you will literally go through all that shit and it sucks. And so I finally got to the point where I'm like, you know what?

[00:28:28] I am on the like painting of humans standing upright. I'm now at a point where I can get out of my bed. So I'm going to go down the hall to the bathroom. I'm going to get in the shower because the shower will wake me up. Water is the building block of life. Like get me in the shower. And so I turn the shower on. This is the last time I ever did edibles. This one. I don't think I was even naked. I think I was just like, I got to get wet. And so I turn the shower on. You have to get the building blocks of life on you. Yeah.

[00:28:56] Like I didn't go through all the steps of taking a shower. Right. And I get in the shower, but I didn't. I thought I had. What I had only done was stepped half of my body, one foot, like one leg into the shower because it's the kind that you like have like a curtain, you know? Yeah. And so it's not like a door and you open and walk into a shower. It's just that traditional tub slash shower thing. And I am now just making a mess. Like all the water is hitting my body. And then like path of least resistance riding down the left side of my body all over the floor of our thing.

[00:29:26] And I'm just in there for who knows how long. Just standing half in the shower, half in the shower, half not in the shower, making an absolute mess of our fucking bathroom. And I'm at this point, I'm sure I'm just being like, and this is something that to this day after like when you're not on drugs, I think about this stuff all the time now, which wouldn't have maybe been the case if I never took drugs in my life. Where like now you're like, look at that fucking shower head. Who installed the shower head? When did that shower head get installed? Was that manufactured somewhere? Where was it manufactured?

[00:29:55] Was there a person who said there was like two other shower heads that I could have bought, but they said the quality control wasn't good enough. And like now I'm doing that for who knows how long that I make a mess. Yeah. By the way, everything I'm talking about is still just like the most stone I've ever felt. So it's like, it's no, it's no step where things are getting better. I'm just like getting through the gauntlet of being very stoned. And so now I'm like, come to the realization that I am not solving anything in the shower. I'm only making things worse. Recognizing at this moment that I've made a mess.

[00:30:24] But being like, this is not a me problem right now. Leave. Go back to my room. I remember texting someone who was at my house. I had the wherewithal text. I said, bring me October Sky. I had the movie October Sky, which if anyone knows, there are two movies that have helped me through any bad trip I've ever been on. October Sky and Gattaca are like the two movies that are like my happy place movies. Or the movie Miracle. So three movies.

[00:30:52] And I remember that person brought me up. I had like a DVD player in my room at the time. And that person brought me up October Sky. And I just was like living my best life with October Sky until I fell asleep. Oh, so that ends well. I don't know if it started well. Like, I don't remember like a comic Steve's favorite. Me having a bad trip on Edible Story is when I ran away from watching the movie Conspiracy Theory with him. I feel like Conspiracy Theory is a movie that you should just run away from in general.

[00:31:20] Well, it's that there was a scene in it where like Mel Gibson fucking what's his name? Fucking Star Trek. Patrick Stewart. Yeah. Patrick Stewart's like captured him and they've got him at this like mental institution and they've like taped his eyes open and they're doing all sorts of crazy like lights and strobes and like they're deprogramming or programming them either way. It was super fucking intense. And I just remember being like too high to deal with that. And I ran away. And then he had to bring me one of those come down movies we were talking about.

[00:31:49] He had to bring me like a come down movie to counteract Conspiracy Theory. So I don't know if the story I just told you is the same night as the Conspiracy Theory story. So but I'll ask him. He said he obviously remembers Conspiracy Theory and can confirm how he's terrible those weed brownies were, but can't confirm if all the other stuff happened the same night. It was probably an amalgamation of a bunch of different times that October Sky was brought upstairs.

[00:32:21] Yeah, yeah. Everything always kind of ended OK. Like I'm here talking to you. Although my favorite bad trip was a mushrooms bad trip. And it's because it's it rules. But I feel like we need a video component to really enjoy that story because I do a lot of miming when I tell that story of really great moments. But I'll try and give the video. We'll save it for the video cast. Well, I can give a quick beats of it. I'll give you the like things that make it funny, but I won't do the great. We'll save for a video thing. All the beats of it.

[00:32:51] The best thing about this. So I had done mushrooms at this point in my life. I had liked mushrooms at this point in my life where I was like mushrooms revive me and my friend Brian had created this little look. We're like, dude, we're around mushrooms. This this room is the think tank now. Like this is where big ideas happen. And I remember we had like rules of the think tank that were like written on like an like an artist's note. How old were you? I would have been 20. Okay. 20 or 21, probably 20. And I remember we were like, this is where the shit happens, bro. Like we have all these rules.

[00:33:21] Like we'll post the rules on our door so that people know like think tank in session or whatever. Like it was a whole thing that would devolve into 17 cigarettes that are never ashed. But we're like, okay, we got these mushrooms. We eat them on pizza because mushrooms are kind of gross on their own. And so we eat them on pizza. We order a pizza that we have the mushrooms or the pizza. We eat it. And then we're like, it's been an hour and a half. We got sold bad mushrooms. I don't know.

[00:33:49] These are not, they look the same as normal mushrooms, but that we've experienced, but this is not going well. And this is like how new to drugs and this, like we were, or like just not good at it. We're like, we're going to go confront our drug deal about this. So we get on the fucking subway. We'd get on the T in Boston and we go down to whatever stop it is. And then we like go to their place and we're like, Hey, this is no good. And they're like, no, we, this is, it's fine. And we're like, it's not.

[00:34:19] And these are someone we know. It's not like we've gone back to the common to confront a fucking stranger. It's a wire. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm not like on the SNCC couch in Baltimore. And I'm like, you know, and he's like, guys, like, all right, well, I'll give you more because I know you idiots. It's fine. But like, it's not what you're saying. And we're like, great. So there's a McDonald's on the corner. So if people don't know in Boston, the subway is also above ground. So this is an above ground stop. So like there's a McDonald's right there.

[00:34:47] I'm like, let's go get some like fucking cheeseburgers to put the mushrooms on. So we go get the cheeseburgers, put the mushrooms on it. We eat the cheeseburgers while we wait for the tea. And we're talking one minute, two minutes after eating the new thing of mushrooms. We are like instantly slanted as human beings. And this is the part where you need a video component. So I'll put in the show notes me showing the next part. Okay.

[00:35:15] But what you'll see in that video is the moment we realize, like the thing we do that makes us realize, oh, no, that first batch absolutely worked. And we just took the same amount of mushrooms. Yes. And now we're on public transportation on a cold winter Boston night. Yeah. Looking in the face of fucking strangers and bag ladies and weirdos who get on the subway in like a I'm fucked.

[00:35:42] Like I'm Batman when he gets sprayed by the scarecrow. Yeah. All of a sudden. Fear juice or whatever. Yeah. Like I've been hit with all sorts of fear mist. And it's just like, let's just get back to our apartment. Holy shit. Anyway, we did. Ed got back to the think tank. It was a vibe. It ended up. But that was like the outside in the world travel was a bad trip. But once we were back in the think tank, it was great. But that is a holy smokes. That was like one of the funniest. Are you kidding me? And that is the night Ed invented podcasting. No, I didn't.

[00:36:12] But he didn't know about it until. No, I didn't do that. I didn't think to set up mics in the think tank. So I think there's lots of different kinds of drug experiences we can talk about. Well, real fast. Who gave you your first hallucinogens and how did they sell you on it? Like who gave you your first mushrooms or acid or DMT or whatever you took? It was a very good friend. It was just a couple of years ago. The first time I tried mushrooms, it was it was a very good friend who had a chocolate bar and was like, hey, you should have some of this. And we were up in Idlewild. It was like a store bought chocolate bar. Yeah.

[00:36:42] Yeah. Like like what a wild scene. I had to like go to a sketchy guy's apartment to get like with like wrapping and everything. Oh, my God. That's so different than. Yeah. And they were like, you have to see the raw mushroom. No, I mean, I have seen raw mushrooms because. But still, you weren't like, let me put it on dominoes. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, the chocolate didn't taste very good. But and I had, I think maybe two squares because I was very nervous. I think that's probably too. I don't know. I don't know how to understand this. I've rarely if ever done store bought drugs. Two squares wasn't really enough.

[00:37:11] I did have a weird right. I guess what you would consider the peak of that trip. I did have a weird 20 minutes or so where I felt very trapped in the present. Like I felt like there was no future and no past. Sure. Which for some people I think would be very grounding. But for me as a person who, again, lives very much in my head, imagining things, writing things. But it was the present you were experiencing. It wasn't like me where I was stuck in a thousand presents. Yeah, no. It was over time. It was a very pleasant present. But we would say that 10 times fast.

[00:37:40] It was a pleasant present. But it was very disconcerting that I felt like there was no escaping from it because I spent so much time imagining things. And I couldn't, it was like I couldn't imagine. I couldn't think forward. Good. Because we've established that when you imagine forward, you're dreading the next experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I, it wasn't awful, but it wasn't a great experience. It was just sort of whatever. And I was like, I don't know if I want to do that again. And then there was another time after that where nothing happened.

[00:38:08] And then the third time I was like, I took half a bar and was like, oh, okay, this is, this is what it feels like. I said, I understood what it meant when people say, like the mushrooms tell them things. Like I was, I was like when I was coming down, I, if you've never done mushrooms before, it's not like you hear someone talking to you. But I very much was like, I knew within me that the mushrooms were telling me that I was welcome back anytime and that they wanted to see me again. That is a singular Chris experience.

[00:38:36] I have never, I've never had like, that's all folks from a drug. I waved goodbye to them, which in reality was just waving it at empty room. Yeah, I've never been given like a punch card to be like, come back to fill this out eight more times. No, yeah, it was, it was very, it was very pleasant. And part of that is probably what I was bringing to it because I went into that experience very much with the intention of, I want this to be a positive spiritual experience. I want to experience it fully.

[00:39:03] So I was, I was bringing my desire to have some kind of experience like that to, to it. So, you know, that probably influenced it. That's good. I mean, that's the number one piece of advice I would give no one because we're not allowed to say take drugs. No, this is like legally. You're definitely not. Don't do this. You fucking creeps. Best advice you can give someone besides telling them to not, you know, text anyone when they're on drugs is, yeah, you have to, you have to answer it with like a good attitude. Yeah.

[00:39:30] And that's why I think all of these kinds of drugs, they are very valuable. I just, I don't think culturally that they are necessarily presented to users in a way that is to the most benefit to them. You know, like most of these drugs are presented as just something to do when you're hanging out, having a good time. And I think that's a recipe for disaster. Yeah. I mean, if someone told me they've taken mushrooms, I would go, cool.

[00:39:56] But if someone told me I'm on mushrooms right now and then I'm like, you're our pilot, like that's a very, like I quickly turn on mushrooms in that moment. So yeah, drugs are still drugs. Yeah. And they should be taken as you see fit, but in an appropriate way. So the rest of this episode, I think bad trips might become a bit of a series for us because there are so many thousands and thousands of bad trips on the internet and so many different kinds of drugs that can cause bad trips.

[00:40:23] This episode, we're going to focus exclusively on LSD. And really from here on out, we're going to be talking a lot about LSD and just to set the expectation, I found an incredible bad trip, but it's very long. So we're going to end the episode with this long, bad trip. Other episodes in this series may have shorter trips. It's a very fertile ground. We will return to this, but that's kind of what you're in for.

[00:40:49] We're going to do the scared all the time, discussing the history, the culture, and then we'll hit this insane nightmare experience at the end of the episode. Which is great because I've already done all the drugs I want to do. Yeah. So this is exactly the time to start a podcast about how bad it can get. Yeah. Because it's not like, it's not going to deter me. Right.

[00:41:07] Well, anyone who's had a bad experience on, again, particularly in this case, LSD is in great company because the creator of LSD, chemist Albert Hoffman, who first created the drug in his lab in November 1938, was not only the first person to ever trip on the drug, but also the first person to ever have a bad trip. On day one? On day one. Wow. But to understand what he did and why, we have to zoom out.

[00:41:35] So LSD is short for lysergic acid dithalamide, and unlike the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, it is not naturally occurring. It is derived from ergotamine, which is a natural alkaloid, but it has to be synthesized into the form of LSD in a lab. In its natural form, ergot, which produces ergotamine, it's a fungi that was considered to be a deadly poison and a scourge responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over many centuries.

[00:42:04] According to an article in The Atlantic, in 1857 in what is now Germany, a contemporary accounting of the events of the year recorded that, quote, A great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death. Historians now attribute this and similar events throughout history to long-term exposure to infected grains, a condition known as St. Anthony's fire or scientifically gangrenous ergotism.

[00:42:32] In other words, multiple St. something fires, and they're very different. Well, this sounded really familiar to me, though, and I could have sworn the disease was called St. Anthony's dance. So I dug a little deeper, and as usual on this podcast, it turns out I was half right. Isn't St. Anthony the saint of missing things, like lost things? That would be hilarious if he is. He is. Is he? I mean, in this case, it sounds like he's a saint of lost limbs. Yeah. But I'm saying, like, it's, yeah, you do that little thing, like, dear St. Anthony, please look down. Something's lost and can't be found, and he's supposed to help you find it. It's my hand.

[00:43:02] Oh, no, my arm. Where has it gone? It's gone. It's gone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I guess, tell me more about his, the dance craze of this era. Well, what I was thinking of is not called St. Anthony's dance. It's called St. Vitus's dance, which is the term for the dance manias which swept across Europe between the 11th and 17th century. Have you ever heard about these? Is it like when you die and your nerves keep working? No. Or are you saying, like, there was, like, a craze? There were. Like, they did the Macarena. Kinda, yeah.

[00:43:28] There were hundreds of people in towns all across Europe for hundreds of years would, there were records of people. Sorry, four hundreds of years? From the 11th to the 17th century. Yeah, but not all continuously. Oh, okay. It wasn't, like, oh my god. Yeah, no, no one was dancing. There was no John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for four hundred years. But in that period of time, there were documented to be these mysterious spectacles in which tens of thousands of people would participate in frenzied public orgies and wild dances. Slash mobs.

[00:43:58] Lasting for days and sometimes weeks. This is a real thing that happened. One source says that, quote, during outbreaks, many immodestly tore off their clothing and pranced naked through the streets. Some screamed and beckoned to be tossed into the air. Others danced furiously in what observers described as strange, colorful attire. A few reportedly laughed or wept to the point of death. Women howled and made obscene gestures while others squealed like animals. See, I was a weeper. That was my thing.

[00:44:28] Like, that's my, like, bad mushroom trip. It's like smoking and weeping. Some rolled themselves in the dirt or relished being struck on the soles of their feet. So this is drugs. We're going to get to the fact that they found out there was a gas leak? Sort of. An Italian variant was known as tarantism as victims were believed to have been bitten by the tarantula spider for which the only cure was thought to be frenetic dancing to certain music which supposedly dissipated the poison from their blood, which I guess is maybe the origin of the tarantella, the Italian wedding dance.

[00:44:56] But it also sounds like the origin of, like, the best piece of shit marketing guy on the planet who was like, I'm fucking, what people don't know is I've been drinking. Ed left this vulnerable moment in the show so that people don't start thinking what he does is easy. Sometimes the jokes don't spring forward. But luckily for you, the editing process and his fragile ego, those moments are pretty rare. So what the hell was this all about?

[00:45:22] There's some debate about how spontaneous these dances were and whether or not the locals were actually the source of the dancing. The largest and best documented dance plague, one that took place in 1374, involved throngs of dancers in Germany and Holland. But according to one chronicle of the event, these dancers were actually pilgrims who traveled from Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Corinthia, and Austria. To breakdance? To breakdance, basically. Great hosts from the Netherlands and France joined them.

[00:45:52] Other sources reveal that dance manias were mainly composed of these pilgrims engaging in emotionally charged, highly structured displays of worship that occasionally attracted locals. The reason I bring all this up, though, is that there is a second kind of ergot poisoning known as convulsive ergotism. And there's some evidence that these outbreaks of dances and madness may have been brought on sometimes by these traveling worshippers that I couldn't actually find too much about and

[00:46:18] sound very scary in and of themselves, but also may have occasionally been brought on by populations consuming rye bread that they didn't realize had been contaminated by ergot. This sounds a little bit like modern rave culture. Like, we're going to fucking hitchhike to the next festival, take drugs, dance hard, whatever, meet a community of fellow dancers, and then, like, pilgrim ourselves to the next festival. Kinda, yeah. I mean, hey, humans are nothing if not consistent.

[00:46:48] That's true. We've got our vices, and we've had them for thousands of years. The University of Hawaii's botany website describes the symptoms of convulsive ergotism this way. Convulsive ergotism is characterized by nervous dysfunction, where the victim is twisting and contorting their body in pain, trembling and shaking, and rye neck, more or less fixed twisting of the neck, which seems to simulate convulsions or fits. And they're named it after, like, consuming too much rye? Is that what you were just saying?

[00:47:16] Well, it's literally—so, convulsive ergotism is a disease caused by eating rye infected with the fungi ergot. Yeah, which I do like that they've been like, your daughter has rye neck. I don't know if I tell you this. Oh, rye neck, no. Rye neck, in this case, is spelled W-R-Y-N-E-C-K. Oh, I thought it was, like, that's a symptom of taking too much rye. No, no. Okay, okay, okay, okay. In some cases, all of this convulsing and fits is accompanied by muscle spasms, confusion,

[00:47:45] delusions, and hallucinations. Some believe that the advent of these gruesome symptoms without a known cause, especially the convulsive symptoms, which, along with hallucinations and the mania and psychosis, is actually what led to accusations of witchcraft, which were followed by witch-hunting hysterias, such as the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s. And studies have even correlated years of rye scarcity, suggesting an increased willingness to consume tainted rye with years of abundant witchcraft accusations.

[00:48:14] I mean, even without this podcast, every passing year on this here planet, I'm like, the witch trials are bullshit. That was just, that was just, I know it's recognized, but, like, it's just people being monstrous to, like, strong women in their community. Or ones who like to lick toads or eat fucking rye. This article wasn't saying that the Salem Witch Trials specifically were caused by convulsive

[00:48:41] ergot, but just drawing a line from those convulsive symptoms leading to accusations of witchcraft, which caused witch-hunting hysterias, which, you know, eventually came out in the States as the Salem Witch Trials. Yeah. So not necessarily tainted rye in that case. But I do think that that little fact is interesting, that studies have correlated years where people may have been consuming bad rye because they didn't grow enough. And that those years had more witchcraft accusations than other years. Yeah.

[00:49:11] Which is interesting. But also, it's fucked up is that, like, you can take that as two things. One, it's like, oh, these ladies ate bad rye, acted fucking weird. Yeah. And then they're like, your witch is. Or it's the patriarchy eats bad rye and sees, hallucinates that, like, Debbie is a fucking dragon now. Yeah. And that puts her to death. So it's just bad all around.

[00:49:37] And also, I don't know, maybe if you can have convulsive ergotism and gangrenous ergotism in the same community and you're seeing witches as people's limbs are falling off. Oh, you dance till those limbs fly off. Yeah, they're just getting smacked in the face by hands and legs. It also feels, I mean, it's not the right time, I don't think, but it also feels very like Garden of Earthly Delights. Like Hieronymus Bosch was eating some fucking rye when he was like, I'm going to draw this unbelievable triptych of lunacy.

[00:50:06] Well, the way that ergot evolved into the drug that we know as LSD is because despite all the horrible things that it can do to a person, midwives and alchemists and early doctors realized over time that the muscle and blood vessel constricting properties of ergot could be useful to hasten childbirth and staunch bleeding after delivery. Hasten as in it made the baby come sooner or it made ladies forget through time dilation of drug use? No, I think it made forever.

[00:50:34] I think it made the children come out faster and staunch the bleeding. So this was sort of a, not an old wives tale, but it was sort of farmer's almanac that, you know, certain potions essentially made with ergot could help in childbirth. And then the longer those were studied, the more it became clear that this was an actual scientific reality and that you could create modern drugs with ergot to help women during childbirth. So the man who would become Albert Hoffman's boss, Arthur Stoll, isolated the compounds

[00:51:03] in ergot that caused those constrictions. The compounds are called ergotamine and ergobacine. His discovery launched the pharmaceutical research and development department that hired Albert Hoffman to teach 12 years later. So all Albert Hoffman was really trying to do was further refine those chemicals to create medicines for women who were giving birth. Again, from the Atlantic, he recreated ergot's active ingredients as well as novel but similar

[00:51:31] compounds that, based on the potency of the ergot compounds, could reasonably be expected to have medical uses. He created 24 of these lysergic acid combinations. Then he created the 25th, reacting lysergic acid with diphthalamine, which is a derivative of ammonia. The compound was abbreviated as LSD-25 for the purposes of laboratory testing. He had hoped for something that could stimulate circulation and respiration, but his hopes

[00:52:01] were dashed, though the research report noted in passing that the experimental animals became highly excited during testing. Quote, For the next five years, LSD was forgotten about by everyone except Albert Hoffman. He couldn't stop thinking about it. Because he was taking it? No, he wasn't. According to a quote I found in Scientific American, he said,

[00:52:30] I had a strange premonition that this drug might have additional effects to those exhibited during the first trial. This led me to produce LSD-25 again five years after the first synthesis and pass it on to the pharmacological department for further trials. This was unusual because test compounds were normally struck from the research program once declared to be of no pharmacological interest. Or at least the one that they originally tried to pitch it as. Yeah.

[00:52:55] So Hoffman, interestingly, could neither find a rational explanation for his hunch nor put a finger on why it was that he chose to resurrect that particular compound out of the many he had created. It was more feeling the chemical structure appealed to me that prompted me to take that extraordinary step, he's quoted as saying. And you think that was God that told him that? I mean, I'm editorializing here, but I think if you read between the lines, he kind of thinks that LSD wanted to be discovered. Yeah. That's what it sounds like.

[00:53:24] He stops just short of saying it. But I think him saying it was more a feeling the chemical structure appealed to me that he toys with the idea that there was maybe more than pure science at play here. And there's two versions of that. It's one, he was like, it spilled on some salad he was eating. Now he's all loving life. Or yeah, literally like I have this gut feeling we need to like divine intervention. Make sure that this one gets looked at again.

[00:53:49] In any case, on April 16th, 1943, Hoffman began creating a new batch of LSD-25, just a few tenths of a gram. What was his situation in the war? I don't know. Did he like defer going to the war to work on science? He's like a coward who fucking figured out. Maybe. Figured out LSD. I mean, he was teaching there for years. He might have just been an old man. He might have just been an old man in 1943. At some point in the process of creating these few tenths of a gram of LSD-25, he accidentally

[00:54:17] came into contact with some of the substance. Okay, that sounds like he retroactively fixed that journal entry. Well, he wrote a report to his boss saying, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home. Because I was fucked up. Being affected by a remarkable restlessness combined with a slight dizziness. Yeah, what I said. At home, I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. He's got a boner.

[00:54:45] In a dreamlike state with eyes closed, in parentheses, I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring. I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours, this condition faded away. Now, keep in mind, Hoffman had no idea what had caused these sensations. I mean, he may have had an inkling, but he didn't know. Yeah, but you know what? Your senses, I think, are pretty bruised up in 1942-43. Everywhere you go, people are smoking cigarettes.

[00:55:16] Everywhere you walk, cars have zero emissions. Well, they have lots of emissions. They have zero control over the news. Yeah, exactly. But I'm saying they have zero emissions restrictions of any kind. So you're just walking into a cloud of cigarette smoke and fucking exhaust. Everything's loud. You probably work with radium girls and the power lines are all fucked up. So realistically, if LSD cut through all of that, that must be pretty good.

[00:55:41] He knew ergot derivatives were highly toxic, but he kept a clean lab and had no meaningful contact with anything that he could recall. His best guess is that a very small amount of the LSD had gotten on his fingertips during a part of the process known as recrystallization and had been absorbed through his skin. So Albert Hoffman, who I hereby declare as the possessor of some of the biggest fucking balls in the world, decided the only way to know for sure was to experiment on himself. You know what? I don't... I'm going to reduce the size of those balls a little bit.

[00:56:10] He had an experience that he was into. He's like sitting there with his boner seeing fun images. Well, you added the boner. Yeah, but why not? Why not? The way he wrote it is coded boner talk. Okay. So it's not like he was like, oh, I was up all night with fevers and chills. Let me do a second dose and find out if it's actually better than that. He was like, this was a vibe. You know what I mean? It's not like he... Yes, but I also think it's, you know, the part of me saying he has giant balls is that

[00:56:38] he knew that this was derived from a very highly toxic substance. So in terms of knowing what the side effects might be or how long it might last or anything other than, hey, I had a pleasant two hours, he didn't know what he was getting into. Yeah, but through my observation, he seems like a guy who's probably like, oh, I should be doing more in the war effort. So if I died tomorrow, it's no big deal. You're reading a lot in Albert Hoffman's life that we don't know.

[00:57:05] So on April 19th, a day now known as Bicycle Day, more on that in a minute. Sure. He took 250 micrograms at the weed number of 420 p.m., man. Wow, really? Yeah. He kept records and he wrote it down. He took it at 420 p.m. So I guess we now know it's also the LSD number. And at 5 p.m., Hoffman jotted in his notes, beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual

[00:57:33] distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh. I like desire to laugh. I don't like symptoms of paralysis. Hoffman would go on to describe his experience in his tell-all book, LSD, My Problem Child. And he said this, as I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with birdsong and lit up by the morning sun, all at once, everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light, Hoffman said, it shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty.

[00:58:02] But as the full effects of the LSD unfolded, Hoffman was no longer able to write. In his book, he explains what happened next. I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I asked my laboratory assistant, who was informed of the self-experiment, to escort me home. We went by bicycle. No automobile being available because of wartime restrictions on their use. Yeah, for cowards. No use by cowards. And that's the birth of Bicycle Day, the day that the inventor of LSD rode a fucking

[00:58:30] bike home while having the world's first bad LSD trip. This is a little bit on him because it's like, I'm going to try a new experimental drug. I'm going to a park super far from my house. No, maybe you could do that in lab conditions or in your bedroom. He says, on the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I will hope they cut out like they cut wide in the movie of this guy's life. And he's like bicycling so slow.

[00:58:59] Like he's going. Yeah, exactly. Like his lab assistant is beside him holding him upright. Like he's not even. Well, he says, I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly. So it was the opposite. He was booking it. Wow. I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed there.

[00:59:26] My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition? Okay, I'm going to stop you right here. You've stopped me a hundred times, but go on. No, I'm going to stop you again. It's everything he's describing is what I described on that weed brownie. Yeah. With the lifelessness, which I told you I couldn't get out of bed. And I had to just keep living in that stupid prosaic era. I don't know how it was. Fucking Jurassic period. Yeah. Like he's. Which is why I'm wondering. Why are we getting this from weed is what I'm saying. Weed's too strong now.

[00:59:55] But you had that weed brownie two decades ago. Yeah. He had this one six decades earlier. I think there may have been something else in that weed. That's a crazy experience to have on an edible. Stop it. At times, I believe myself to be outside my body. And then perceived clearly as an outside observer, the complete tragedy of my situation. I had not even taken leave of my family. My wife with our three children had traveled that day to visit her parents in Lucerne.

[01:00:22] Would they ever understand that I had not experimented thoughtlessly irresponsibly, but rather with the utmost caution and that such a result was in no way foreseeable? Good chance this guy wasn't wearing a helmet. He's not doing the utmost caution. I also don't want to say it was in no way foreseeable. I mean, this is him now writing a letter to his wife being like, honey, I mean, come on. I didn't know. I asked around. They said it was fine. My fear and despair intensified not only because a young family should lose its father,

[01:00:51] but also because I dreaded leaving my chemical research work. Get off the fucking bike, buddy. Which meant so much to me. Hold on. I do like that he just downgraded his family. He was like, look, losing my family, that's one thing, but losing the work, that's worse. Unthinkable. Yeah. You can get another wife and kids. It meant so much to me unfinished in the midst of fruitful, promising development. Another reflection took shape, an idea full of bitter irony. If I was now forced to leave this world prematurely,

[01:01:18] it was because of this lysergic acid diethalamide that I had myself brought forth into the world. We now know that Hoffman took about 50 micrograms more than what would be considered a standard dose, which is 200 milligram or microgram. You wanted to start there, huh? Yeah. I mean, can you imagine? And I don't even know, again, as someone who's never done this, I don't know how hard the standard 200 kicks in, but that's what, almost 25% more.

[01:01:46] You're going up a good amount more than the... Yeah. And I don't know what I took. I don't know what's in that tab I took. But like I said, I wasn't writing letters to my family that they're fucking gonzo now. Like, I had a decent time, except for all the snake thoughts. Yeah. I mean, I guess he must have known enough about its properties to assume it probably wasn't going to kill him. He did study it and create it, and I would think that he would know enough about it to go, yeah, I know it won't kill me.

[01:02:12] But I mean, now we know unless you drink like a fucking gallon of acid, you won't die from it, or you won't die from the acid itself. But you'll have a bad time and probably be forever altered. Yeah. But being the first guy to have a bad trip, to have no idea how long it's going to last, like to know nothing. Now you and I can go, okay, we would ride it out. We would go take a nap. Well, the thing about mushrooms and acid is too long. Both of them, too long.

[01:02:38] Like, we got to fucking peel off 8 to 12 hours of our day to like, to something where you will be altered in that time period. I'm not saying that it's 8 to 12 hours of intense, you know, stuff. Yeah, but you can't be expected to do anything. No, don't hit me up to pick your ass up when I'm like, you know, I mean, I got a day of this. Yeah. And what am I expected to do it at 8 p.m. when I'm going to be sitting here at 4 in the morning? Fuck off. I don't got time for that. It's not cocaine.

[01:03:04] Despite his initial bad trip, Hoffman would go on to champion the careful use of LSD for a range of psychiatric, spiritual, and medical purposes until his death in 2008, noting its success as a treatment for alcohol dependence and other difficulties requiring a mind-changing experience to move forward. But he never understood or embraced it as a recreational drug, neither before nor after it was listed as an illegal substance in the 1970s,

[01:03:31] which I think is 100% the right way to think about something like LSD. It's a miracle in some ways. I think it can be a good treatment. It can be a very spiritual experience. But as a party fun time drug, I don't know. I feel like it's probably too powerful. Yeah, but I also don't agree with him that it's like, it's a great way to kick the boozing. It's like, no, I just found a more fun thing to do that's cheaper and lasts longer than my alcoholic high. But no, I don't think that's, I think for people who solve addictions through...

[01:04:00] New addictions? No, I don't think, if you take an ayahuasca trip or you take LSD and it... Look how the Jets are playing. It didn't do great for Aaron Rodgers and he loves that shit. I'm just saying, I think for the people that it works for, it doesn't become a new addiction. I think it unlocks, it helps them explore the reasons they have addictions in the first place. And I think it helps them conquer... It's not the same for everyone's addiction, but for people who have a root core cause of an addiction

[01:04:27] that is something that they can work through, I think these drugs can help them work through it. And I will agree with you. I think unlock is the correct word. I would say that hallucinogens in particular leave a lasting impression of like, I never had that idea. I never thought that before. And it does bring a level of clarity, which you do find annoying in my opinion. I remember standing... It's now gone. The Burger King is now gone, which is sad to think about.

[01:04:55] Well, there was a Burger King on the corner, like a couple blocks away from me. I remember just standing and looking at the lit up Burger King sign, the logo sign, and having that same showerhead scenario of like, who made this sign? Who designed this sign? How come no one else stops and listens to the hum of the neon light in there? And that's something where I feel like if you're not someone who's ever taken drugs,

[01:05:19] maybe you've never in your hundred years on this earth ever stopped to just listen to the hum of a neon light and cut everything else out to just be like, I'm going to dedicate two minutes of my time to everything that ever happened in the life of this sign. Yes, but the secret to those drugs being psychologically powerful is to turn that same degree of questioning you have about the sign inward. Yeah. Why do I drink a thousand gallons of booze a day?

[01:05:48] You know, again, not helpful for everybody, but for some people, I do think it can open up stuff that makes them go, oh my God, like almost like hypnosis. Hypnosis works for some people. You can be hypnotized and quit smoking or quit drinking. And I feel like both of those were used by the U.S. government as ways to be like, can we interrogate people? Can we give them LSD? Can we give them hypnosis? Does it work as a truth serum? That's a great pivot because what I was going to say next is that at the end of the day,

[01:06:13] LSD turned out to be so powerful that it changed American culture for the better part of a decade and in ways forever. I'm not sure how much time we want to spend in this episode on the mid-century explosion of hippie culture, free love, mind control experiments, MKUltra, government agents, Charles Manthon, Timothy Leary, the CIA, and everything else that intersected with LSD.

[01:06:39] It is a crazy rabbit hole with so many twists and turns that entire books and podcasts have been written about it. There's no way we're going to be able to cram it into a section of a podcast about bad trips and do it much justice. We actually, I was thinking we could just do a scared all the time of the 60s or like do a decade because there's a lot to tackle. Well, considering I crashed my car listening to chaos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I don't want to jump right back into it. It's worth touching on briefly just because the bizarre and toxic combination of spirituality,

[01:07:08] shadowy government forces, and massive popular movement sort of turned the end of the 60s into a bad trip for the entire country. Basically, after Hoffman discovered LSD, the American government, namely the CIA, became very, very interested in how this new drug might be used at first, as you said, as a potential truth serum, and then as an element in mind control experiments. By 1953, the MKUltra program had been established and experimentation both on consenting and non-consenting individuals began in earnest.

[01:07:37] Now, what exactly the CIA learned from these experiments? Experiments that we know, by the way, continued at least until 1973, literally just because somebody forgot to destroy the paperwork. I forget exactly who dug it up, but all the MKUltra files are basically designated to be destroyed, and then some idiot just didn't. I wouldn't even say it's an idiot. It's just somebody like me who's like, they don't pay me enough. Yeah, yeah. I've been not in a malicious way, but it's like, I've been doing this for weeks. Yeah. I'm tired of it.

[01:08:06] If I leave a couple files, leave a couple files. So we do know that the MKUltra program was very real. We dove deeper into all this stuff in the gang stalking episode, which was recorded after this, but released before. Ed knew so little back then, and it shows. The conspiracy theories come in a little bit with how successful was it? What were the results? How sadistic did it get? You know, so how successful it was, people claim everything from it was a total bust and

[01:08:32] waste of money, which is sort of what the Men Who Stare at Goats book, that take is. The other side is the CIA created programmable assassins and used them to kill both Kennedys, John Lennon, you know, everyone involved in the Manson murders. Yeah, yeah. And God knows who else. So if the topic interests you at all, definitely check out the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill, although not while driving, apparently, because that's what- No, I mean, I listened to it for the whole drive across the country before that accident. Yeah.

[01:08:59] The Men Who Stare at Goats by John Ronson, much better book than it is a movie, although the movie's fun. And Acid Dreams is another great book by Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain that's worth checking out if this all interests you. Around the same time, just a few years after the MKUltra program was established, Dr. Timothy Leary, a psychology professor at Harvard, tried his first psilocybin mushrooms in 1960. The experience profoundly changed him.

[01:09:25] And in 1961, he befriended a strange man who rolled into Cambridge using the name Michael Hollingshead. Now, this guy is also a wildly fascinating character. There's a book written about him called Divine Rascal. He was a scam artist, a raconteur, kind of a scumbag. He was born Michael Schinkfield in a working class part of England, and he first encountered acid in New York City in 1961 when he and a British doctor named John Beresford acquired

[01:09:52] a gram of LSD from Sandaz, which is the company where Albert Hoffman worked and created the drug, under the ruse of, quote, bone marrow research. Oh. There was no bone marrow research going on. They just wanted LSD, and they got some. The only things we know for sure about this guy is that when he crossed paths to Timothy Leary, he was carrying with him a 16-ounce mayonnaise jar of LSD-infused sugar paste. Oh, my God.

[01:10:19] The jar was rumored to contain no less than 5,000 trips, one of which would become Leary's first experience in December 1961. So this guy walked into a room and was like, listen, we're working on bone marrow stuff. What can I get? And they were like, turns out a mayonnaise jar should do. Well, no one's sure where the rest of the mayonnaise jar came from, I don't think. But his first encounter, at least, was he probably submitted all kinds of different research after the bone marrow thing. Did you ever just put... Yeah. It wasn't like the modern era. You could just put a new... A different name. Yeah.

[01:10:48] On a different piece of paper. Yeah. Did you ever get a weed card out here before it became fully legal for everything? No. I had one, and it was... I got a fucked up little doctor place that was right next to the Vista Theater. And I just remember they're like, oh, the doctor will see you now. And it was like a girl. And I say girl as in like, this is like a 20-something-year-old child. It was a girl in a hoodie and a lab coat, like a hoodie under a lab coat who was, I'm

[01:11:15] fairly certain, asleep when I walked in with her feet up on the table and was like, oh, so you need medicinal marijuana? And it was like, yeah, I guess. You have glaucoma. And then when I went out... I mean, I was in there for a minute. And then when I went out into the lobby area with the receptionist, and I'm doing air quotes, it was already printed. Yeah. Like, I wouldn't have to wait for anything. They're like, oh, no. Like, there's no way you fail this test. Yeah, no. Like, it's so crazy.

[01:11:44] And there was no way in 1960 that you would fail the Sandow's what-are-you-studying quiz. Exactly. I don't know. Feet? Sure. Anything to help the war effort. Yeah. So while Hollingshead would continue to play an important part in Timothy Leary's life and shows up all over the kind of alternate history of the 1960s, Leary became the face of LSD in America. If you've ever heard of anyone connected to LSD, it's probably Timothy Leary or Charles Manson.

[01:12:12] Between the mushrooms and the LSD, Leary, like Hoffman before him, believed that psychedelics could treat a host of mental illnesses and should be celebrated. Harvard, however, did not agree and fired Leary in 1963. That was back when they fired people? Yeah. In 1964, Leary co-authored a book about psychedelic drugs and the following year he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery or LSD for short. Oh my God. It's a real doge department. Yeah.

[01:12:39] This was a religion that claimed LSD as a holy sacrament that must be kept legal for religious freedom. And Leary toured the country with a presentation that attempted to demonstrate the experience of tripping. And to be honest, if you can't describe a good trip as a religious experience, I don't really know what counts as a religious experience. So like, I don't know. It's a secular religion, I guess, in the sense that there's no particular God that you're worshiping other than this arrangement of molecules.

[01:13:06] But I mean, how do you convey that through what his slide projector he brought to these events? He spoke the phrase that came to exemplify the LSD movement, turn on, tune in, drop out during a 1967 speech in San Francisco in front of 30,000 hippies. Leary later stated in his biography that turn on meant to go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you and drop out meant self-reliance.

[01:13:35] He was disappointed that people thought he meant get stoned and abandon all constructive activity, which I mean, I don't know. Turn on, tune in, drop out. I don't interpret that to mean interact with my genetic materials. That's a pretty, you need people really reading into that. Turn on, tune in. I can follow the drop out. Self-reliance. I don't land on self-reliance. Yeah. I do land on like, then just let the world walk by you. Yeah.

[01:14:02] And that's also after six years of using LSD pretty consistently. I mean, you know, and of course, again, these are dangerous chemicals and overuse, over-reliance on them can do bad things to your brain. I mean, that's just insert drug. Yeah. And it's interesting because, and this is going to maybe alienate some people, but like as I got older and as I saw people who were still kind of into this life that I in some way partook in, I started to feel like, what are you doing? Yeah. You know what I mean?

[01:14:29] Not to be rude to anyone who's like 70 right now, still toking up a joint or whatever. I guess that's fine. Well, but anyone, anyone who I would meet where I'm like, oh, this is still your person, like your personality is this. Yeah. I feel very lucky that this is something because I have a kid coming soon. I've been thinking a lot about because I feel back into hard drugs. Yeah. Just cocaine all day. They say you don't sleep a lot when the kid's born. So I figured I'll just be up. No, I feel, I feel very lucky that as a kid, my encountering,

[01:15:00] alcohol was around because my family made wine in the basement because they brought the barrels over from Italy. And so wine was considered just something you drink with dinner. It was consumed in moderation. No one ever had a problem with it. I learned that drinking was part of a dinner, social activity, and it was not something to be overly consumed. And then I never really experimented with drugs until I got old enough to know that I only wanted to have them in my life in a way that was beneficial to my life.

[01:15:28] And that, you know, something that I could say, okay, I've taken an edible three days in a row. I really need to take a month off. Or, you know, I think all of these substances can be used in really helpful, moderate ways. I just think, especially if you are a person who has thoughts and feelings that you are trying to turn off or run from or, you know, whatever, like it can be very tempting to keep using these things. And I'm glad that I was able to, I never had that phase that I didn't grow out of.

[01:15:57] I only grew into a very moderate drug use, you know, like a very kind of, I think, appropriate, healthy drug use. Very eloquently said. And we got all the people I've alienated back. And no, I agree with you in many ways there. Yeah. The fractal yin to Leary's infinite yang was a guy named Ken Kesey, an author whose first experience with LSD came when he volunteered in 1959 to take part in a CIA study of the effects of psychedelic drugs.

[01:16:25] So wouldn't you know it, our good old friends in the CIA, what are they doing here? Yeah, they keep operating domestically in these stories. Anyway, Kesey and his friends known as the Merry Pranksters traveled across the country while on acid in a school bus called Further as a social experiment. I will say that these are the types of people who maybe ruined the movement moving forward. Well, and a lot of, I mean, part of the whole conspiracy that we're not going to get into,

[01:16:49] but is the idea like how much of this was the CIA, you know, trying to in much in the same way that people point to the CIA as the source of getting inner cities hooked on crack cocaine in the 80s. How much of this was the CIA pushing this attitude to the hippies to try to destroy the movement by either destroying their brains or just making them seem so clownish that no would want to enter that lifestyle. Yeah. Imagine how easy life will become when they get social media.

[01:17:19] Yeah. So Kesey's adventures were documented by Tom Wolfe in his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is another great book if you never read it. So where Leary advocated a more serious and controlled use of LSD, at least at first, Kesey was an acid populist who believed that if enough people use the drug, society as a whole could be transformed. I don't like that way of thinking. That's how it's like, I'm going to poison the water supply. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's where the CIA may have stepped in at some point,

[01:17:46] because I think there's an argument to be made that if everybody in the world took acid, yes, the world would function very differently. It might be more peaceful. It probably would be a lot more chaotic in some ways. And so the powers that be, I think, wanted to do anything they could to kind of tamp that movement down. Yeah. It's hard to get everyone to follow certain rules you'd prefer them to follow if they're like, what's a rule? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm fucking, I'm looking at an electric wire for six hours. Yeah.

[01:18:16] Have you ever listened to an apple? I mean, really listened. Yeah. Now I get why they're called crab apples. They won't stop complaining. So in 1965, Ken Kesey began holding psychedelic parties advertised with signs that read, can you pass the acid test? Kesey believed that the acid tests expanded consciousness and started a revolution that spread across the United States. So with all of that history and science and knowledge and bullshit out of the way, we're

[01:18:45] approaching the part of the episode that you probably tuned in for. People's bad, no good, terrible trip reports from the internet. As I said earlier, the good news is that there are thousands of these out there. So we're never in danger of running out. It's also very hard to choose which ones to share. The best ones tend to be very long. And I decided to go with just one story because it is such a pure distillation of what I think of when I hear the word bad trips. And again, we will return to this series to take on mushrooms, mescaline, detoura, angel

[01:19:13] dust, even more specific and bizarre compounds, all individually, all with their own insane stories. So this story is from a site called Arrowid that has been around forever. I'm 99% sure I used to read stories on this website in like ninth grade. They don't just collect bad trip stories. They're one of the largest and oldest repositories of information about drugs on the internet. From their mission statement, quote, Arrowid is a member supported organization providing

[01:19:39] access to reliable nonjudgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as historical record for the future. And so to do our part to maintain and preserve a historical record for the future, we are going to read the story called Heroic Dose Induced Nightmare.

[01:20:09] Why is it heroic? I guess we'll learn. A heroic dose. Like a... Oh, a massive dose. Yeah. A heroic dose induced nightmare. I thought it was like, man, I'll never be able to lift this burning car off this family unless I take so much drugs. Like pop a can, like a... Like spinach. Yeah. This is written by a user named Lucifer or Lucifer, L-U-C-Y-F-E-R. Okay. Yeah. Lucifer. Nice. In 2018. Nice. And this person takes pains to note that while they were an experienced psychonaut or someone

[01:20:38] who had used a lot of psychoactive drugs, they did not have an LSD tolerance at the time of this story. So here we go. Lucifer's nightmare journey through an LSD trip. It was a typical Saturday afternoon. A week prior, I had made plans with three of my friends to trip on some very potent liquid LSD we had picked up recently. Okay. I was given a serious warning from my dealer not to consume more than three drops.

[01:21:05] I do love that the dealer is the most insane profession because it's like, even if you're giving a warning, you're still like, but if you do five, I'll still take your money. Yeah. I don't really care. Well, yeah. He's not going to sit with you to be sure. Yeah. It's so, it's such a shitty greasy and I've lived with dealers and it's not, you know, I think a little less of them. He sincerely claimed that the vial needed to have a warning label on it. His source had driven several hours to another city just to obtain the acid because it was such a wicked batch.

[01:21:34] So the use of wicked makes me think you may have lived with Lucifer in Boston. No, because wicked is not how they use it. In Boston, wicked is like another word for very. So if it was like, if this was a wicked strong batch, that would be Boston. True. Wicked could be fucking British. Like they say wicked for like things are wicked. They say that in like the Commonwealth. Anyway, it was, this acid was supposedly barely diluted according to the- It hasn't been stepped on as they say in the parlance of the coke community.

[01:22:02] Being my usual skeptical self, I decided I was going to ignore his advice and go balls deep to see what beautiful places my mind could take me. First giant red flag. My friends were very inexperienced with LSD for the most part. One friend who will be called Jam had tripped a total of seven or so times. Another, D, a single time. Actually two days before this trip. And the other, the third, Ka, was dropping for his first time for his birthday. Cooler if he used real fucking names. I know, Jam D, Ka.

[01:22:32] Yeah. What is this? Fucking Neuromancer? Yeah. What the hell is- I think he wishes it were. He's got that name that's all fucking like, fucking, oh, I'm on the web. Even though this guy wrote this in 2018, I'm imagining him writing it in like a full black trench coat and like the skinny sunglasses. Yeah, yeah. On like a computer screen that just has green type on it. The day seemed all too perfect for anything to mess up, despite the fact that during this time in my life, I had had a myriad of personal issues and insecurities that could possibly

[01:23:01] lead to bad experiences. You want some more insecurities, pal? You don't have to add up. You can just say myriad insecurities. I'm honestly starting to get slightly uneasy even thinking about the experience I'm about to describe. Around 3.30 p.m., my friend, KY, who was sober- Is this a person to be mentioned earlier? No, this is a different- There's a new person named after a jelly? And now this is KY, yeah. Oh my god. KY picked me up from my house. He was with D and Ka, who we've previously met, who were minutes away from consuming their acid.

[01:23:28] We drove to my other friend's house where my personal stash of acid was sitting in the freezer. Always the freezer. We don't discuss that in the episode. My guy had it in the freezer, too. Well, it probably helps it last longer or something. I guess so. It's like bread. It must break down. Yeah. Like the original fucking LSD rye bread. Yeah. The LSD was dropped onto sugar cubes. Our plan was to drive to our friend Jack's house and enjoy the ride in a safe setting while the people that opted not to trip smoked marijuana. Sugar again introduces. The other guy had like a jar, mayonnaise jar of sugar and acid.

[01:23:56] Well, it melts it into your tongue. Maybe it helps you absorb it better. Maybe that's what the sheets are made of, maybe? Probably, yeah. Yeah. I walked into his house and saw a couple of my friends there. We briefly conversed and smoked a bowl of top quality CBD rich sativa marijuana. Okay, buddy. Just pick a drug today. For a few minutes is a way to ease me into my trip. Ha ha. Yeah, right. I believe this is what made the come up so overwhelmingly fast. I pulled a whopping five sugar cubes out of the freezer and shoved them in my mouth,

[01:24:23] then licked a bunch of sugar crumbles off the foil, which came from the edges of the 11 sugar cubes I had in my stash. My friends were a bit shocked I was willing to go that far, but they sort of already were used to my tendency to consume large quantities of psychedelic drugs. I talked to them for another 10 minutes or so, then I went back to the car. I just want to note, we don't know how many drops of acid they put on each sugar cube,

[01:24:47] I don't think, but it does say that three drops, no more than three drops. So even if you just put one drop per cube. Now you have 11 cubes. Yeah. So he took a lot of drops. On my way to the car, I noticed I was starting to feel increasingly disoriented. It wasn't that euphoric, confusing sort of disorientation. It was more of a, I'm losing my fucking mind sort of thing. I felt slightly anxious, but I assumed the negative feelings would pass as soon as the acid took

[01:25:17] full effect. A couple minutes after I got into the car, D ate two sugar cubes, appropriate, and Ka ate one. Again, appropriate. I suspect this was easily around a thousand micrograms. And we know Albert Hoffman felt like he was dying on 250. Yeah, but he can ride a bike. Yeah. It's not like he lost his motor function. I have consumed 100 plus UG blotter that did not compare at all to this liquid. UG must be another measurement of grams, but I don't know how. I'm starting to feel more and more like this is in Europe.

[01:25:47] Who else has sugar cubes, period? On a separate occasion, taking two of these was enough for a level four experience. What, level four? In parentheses, hallucinations, ESP, out of body experience. My God, yeah, he sounds like Ray Stance from fucking Ghostbusters over here. The experience was about to get very, very ugly. To give a little perspective on the unfathomable effect of 1,000 microgram doses, here's a quote from the Nobel Prize winning chemist Cary Mullis that ingested 1,000 micrograms for his first

[01:26:17] dose. This is the quote. When you take 1,000 micrograms of LSD, you don't know you've taken anything. It just feels like that's the way it is. You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt 3,000 years ago watching Boats on the Nile. Well, 10 minutes into the car ride and 20 minutes after eating the sugar cubes, I was rapidly losing all touch with reality. I started wondering what the fuck was going on around me and why I was feeling so uncomfortable. I don't like that these guys decided to take all these drugs and then go on the road. Yeah.

[01:26:45] Well, I guess KY is driving, but still. I assume, yeah, KY is his slippy, slippy hands. KY is driving. I started telling my friends I was really scared and the intense anxiety was gripping every single fiber of my body. Everyone's like, shut up, man. We're going to go to Subway. Five dollar foot long. I thought I was going to die and that this trip was going to last until the end of eternity. By the minute, I was starting to panic more. This was only the beginning of an unimaginable nightmare that would show me the quote evil side of LSD and completely change my opinion about the drug in general.

[01:27:15] 25 minutes after taking the sugar cubes, we arrived at Jack's house. By that time, I was stumbling all over the place and already having severe visual distortions. All movements were followed by strobing trails composed of detailed patterns, kaleidoscopes and rainbows. These visuals that I would have usually considered beautiful were now viewed as a reminder that I was in the middle of a trip that I so desperately wanted to end. When I got inside his house, I saw a few more of my friends sitting on the couch. My body temperature had elevated to the point I thought I was burning alive. Oh no.

[01:27:44] I was completely out of my body and almost felt like I was on a high dose of ketamine. I felt embarrassed because I obviously looked like I couldn't handle my shit. Maybe this was just an extreme amplification of my general self-esteem issues. Yeah. I mean, you know me because I'm the kind of guy that as soon as I walk into a room, if I had mustard on my shirt, I'm the first guy to be like, oh, mustard, right? So no one can bring it up. Yeah. I would walk into any room and be like, 11 cubes, guys. I'm not a pussy. It's 11 cubes. A thousand micrograms. It's 11. We're talking a thousand. We're talking a grand.

[01:28:14] Their faces, whoever he would have been speaking to at this point, were assuming demonic forms. Oh no. I fled to Jack's room and I was already starting to experience ego loss. I was going in and out of consciousness and this is the point where I lost track of time so there's no point of trying to estimate anything. Jack followed me to his room and did his best to comfort me and talk me out of my bad trip. It was a completely ineffective attempt. Because his face was a mountain on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple minutes later, I started crying hysterically.

[01:28:44] Everything was getting darker. I fell into the most depressive state of my life combined with the most acute sense of panic I've ever experienced. The floor was covered in spiraling kaleidoscopes that were rapidly shifting colors. I heard thousands of voices call me names like pussy and bitch. Wow. That's a lot. He's gone into the id at this point, dude. The room reeked of sewage and feces. This was the most negative emotion a human being could ever fathom. I so desperately wanted to kill myself, but I was immobilized and unable to move.

[01:29:13] I realized that the voices were of all the people I resented in my life the most. Cartoon blood was all over the ceiling and the walls. My vision seemed to stretch off into infinity. I was hallucinating so much I couldn't fucking believe it. I could see many different events of my life playing out as if it was waking reality. Try and imagine being inside of a Saw movie firsthand, but a thousand times more horrifying and traumatic. There was a moment in which my mind would shoot out of my body two feet in front of me and then return into my body.

[01:29:43] And this looped over and over again for what felt like forever at an impossible speed. Getting hit with Tex Avery eyes. Time was... When it seems like a wolf sees a pretty lady. And it like flies out and it comes back into his skull. Time was non-existent and the second felt like forever. Not hours, not days, but an infinite amount of time. I kept hearing this bizarre futuristic noise that sounded like a computer glitching. The whole room was flashing as if something was flicking the on switch for a lamp up and down repeatedly.

[01:30:11] My jaw was rapidly vibrating like I'd taken 300 milligrams of MDMA. I had full-blown synesthesia. Everything was one. Everything was infinitely interconnected. I would look at the walls and become the walls. I would look at the floor and then become the floor, looking back at my body in a dissociative fashion. I was unable to differentiate any part of the outside world from my own physical body.

[01:30:33] The concept of I was now a mere construct of my mind and I was nothing more than a complex bundle of atoms and molecules. The floor started to wither away and die. It was as if it had human emotions and was feeling every bit of suffering I was going through at the time. Poor floor. Everything started to turn blood red. I was going straight to the depths of hell. Matrix numbers were literally exploding out of the ground and shooting up and down the walls. I felt like I was on DMT only was a thousand times more intense.

[01:31:03] Somehow, just a little while after this part of the trip, I regained some degree of consciousness. I stumbled to the backyard where a group of eight or so people were sitting and I was watching the sky and everything in my external environment turning black and red. I could barely see anything. My vision was almost completely shot. I forgot that I even had a body at this point and I had absolutely no control over my muscular movements. I was in this survival mode where my mind was on autopilot and I had no idea that I was on drugs.

[01:31:30] I lost balance and fell backwards onto the ground where I continued to see more vortexes of Matrix-style numbers and letters spurt out from every direction. Do you think that he would have had these same visuals if the Matrix hadn't come out? That's a great question. Kind of hard to know. It's hard to know. During my friend's attempt to help restore me to sanity, they asked if I knew what time it was. I responded with 8 a.m. when it was late in the afternoon. There was quite enough of a response to prove I was completely and utterly going nuts and there was no real way to help me.

[01:31:57] Once night fell, I was full on peeking in Jack's room. I began to literally have no idea who I was, where I was, or what drug I was on. That's what I was saying. It goes too long. Or what drugs were in the first place. No, you can't explain that guy to what drugs are. He is drugs now, dude. He is drugs. These guys become drugs. I knew that I was going to die and nothing could be done to stop it. At some point in the beginning of the peak, I realized I could not recognize the room I was in. Suddenly, I started seeing several cop cars pull into the room and put their sirens on. Oh my god, do you think they were tiny like matchbox cars?

[01:32:27] Or like full-size cop cars? I think they were like full-size cars. Yellow caution tape magically appeared around them as well. This was one of my worst nightmares coming to life before my very eyes. There was a line of already arrested criminals in handcuffs next to the cop cars, and they were all complaining that I had snitched on them for some unspecified reason. I knew I was in absolute hell. Before I could see what was going to happen next, everything started fading to white. I could see nothing but burning white light, like I was looking directly at the sun from 100 feet away.

[01:32:56] What I saw was the ultimate truth, the answer to every question, the reason reality is the way it is. I existed within the past, present, and future simultaneously. I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face. I dissolved into infinity. I was existing in an infinite number of dimensions, living an infinite number of lives simultaneously for an infinite amount of time. This sounds like Polish sci-fi. Though my memory of this is... Which is like hard. It's hard sci-fi. Though my memory of this is hazy,

[01:33:23] I believe I relived every event of my entire life during the peak. I could fit our entire universe into a period at the end of the sentence. Time was a point of nothingness. I keep waiting for the Cenobites to show up. Yeah, I know. This is outrageous. He's in a... Who's the guy who made like Cthulhu? H.P. Lovecraft. Fucking fever dream. I was everything, yet I was nothing. I was in pure ecstasy. I felt the unconditional love of the universe penetrating every pore of my body. Well, thank God that came. Love came. If only this could have lasted forever. Oh, no. Blah, blah.

[01:33:53] I suppose this was the taste of the beautiful part of ego death, but my stay in this ineffable place... I think he's using ineffable correctly there. ...was cut short when I suddenly catapulted into hyperspace where I experienced every ounce of pain any human being could ever experience at one time. The love rapidly shifted to evil in its purest definition. Now do we get Cenobites? I saw many miserable people I had seen throughout my life. Miserable people. That's a great term. Including the homeless and starving. Oh, he just meant like the royal miserable.

[01:34:23] Yeah. I thought it was like people he personally had problems with. Not the people calling him pussy and bitch. No, which might have actually just been the people at that party. It's just his friends. That wasn't actually a hallucination at all. Hey guys, Ed here. I hit this disclaimer bell that I just invented because Mr. Disclaimer wasn't available and Chris, as you know, was not available when I was editing this. But I just wanted to pop in and say that this guy's acid trip story gets a little graphic coming up,

[01:34:53] like more graphic than we usually get. So just be aware of that. You can skip ahead a few minutes or look in the chapters for, I'll probably put something that says this is the end of the grizzly part. But yeah, just letting people know. It's a little graphic and insane. So just be aware of that. But it's not long. It's a very short amount of time. All right. So I guess I'll hit this bell again. I don't really have a good transition out of this. My brain sensory filter was gone. Every last bit of information that could physically be processed at once was flowing through my head at light speed.

[01:35:22] I was dropped out of hyperspace directly into a hallucinatory prison facility. Oh my God. I saw hundreds of pit bulls, white supremacists, and naked black men running around. Okay. It was a state of sheer pandemonium. I have never been so unbelievably horrified in my entire life. I was now sure that this is where I would die. I was taken to the showers, where I was bitten repeatedly by pit bulls and raped by the white supremacists and black men simultaneously. I was sobbing hysterically, screaming for it to stop.

[01:35:50] It was physical and emotional torture beyond your wildest dreams. I felt every single sensation, including their penises in my anus and the razor sharp teeth of the vicious dogs. Who knows how long this actually went on for, but eventually this torture ended and I was back in Jack's room. I saw all my friends' faces covered in knife wounds and deep bleeding cuts. Puddles of blood were all over the room. My joints were still in severe pain from the physical torture I'd just experienced. I looked at the clock and it read 9 p.m. Minutes after I came back to Earth,

[01:36:18] I realized the purpose for human existence was to love. Love is our higher purpose. I now understood that the ego I developed my entire life was an illusion all along. I'm not sure whether white supremacists and dog rape fits into that. No, that all feels like a personal problem that he's brought into this with him, but I'm happy it was there to bring him to this place he's at. Our egos push us away from our ability to feel compassion towards others. As your ego fades away, you slowly dissolve into pure, unadulterated love. The illusion of separation created by our egos has been the root cause of suffering all across our planet,

[01:36:48] and sadly, this is the reason... See, I feel like he's editorializing now. I feel like this isn't so much the experience as it is. He's like, I need a reason for all this shit to have happened. Religions like Christianity hide behind the idea there's an afterlife because they're afraid of death. There is nothing to fear because when you die, there is no you to fear anything. The only thing that separates us from other forms of life is our ability to think. Our ego is composed of our thoughts. When we stop relying on our ego, we cannot experience negative emotions. When we stop thinking, our ego ceases to exist,

[01:37:17] and then we can live a life of pure love, peace, and prosperity. The more we rely on our ego, the more we push ourselves away from the moment, which is all. Nothing outside the moment we are in right now will ever exist. Didn't he just say that fucking human beings, the thing that separates us is our ability to think, but then he's like, when you stop thinking, you feel love? Yeah. What an idiot. He wraps this up by saying, this is by far the most profound experience of my entire life. I quickly forgot all of these things within 15 minutes of the peak ending. No, you didn't forget it enough to write it all down here.

[01:37:46] To write it on Reddit or whatever, yeah. Oh, I didn't fully understand the lessons I learned until months had passed after the trip. The next day was easily the worst day of my life, excluding the trip. I felt so self-conscious about myself that suicide was all I could think about. I was thoroughly convinced that I had ruined my life permanently. During ego death, I became aware of the severity of my many mental disorders. I realized that throughout my entire life, I had been looked down upon as the special kid. I had not been aware of this until that moment. I felt like the most inferior form of life on the face of the earth. After I got home, I burst into tears.

[01:38:15] I even thought my family felt sorry for me and had pitied me my whole life because they thought I was a moron. Oh, well now I feel bad about calling him an idiot. I had a psychotic break for weeks afterward. This was easily the most traumatic thing I've ever gone through my entire life and it has left a lasting mark on me that I carry to this day. It's been over six months now and I think about this trip every day of my life. It's nothing any human being ever deserves to go through and I would never wish it on my worst enemy. I mean, that drug dealer did tell you no more than three drops, bro. I think the biggest problem here is just this guy really,

[01:38:45] he's not a good listener. No, he jumped. He was like, hey, I hear you with three, but how about I fucking raise you with 3,000? Yeah. And I know I just said I felt bad about calling him an idiot, but I do fear that I'm maybe going to call him an idiot some more times this episode. He ends this by saying, I'm going to say one thing. Do not take a high dose of acid unless you have a proper set and a setting or it can turn into the worst nightmare of your entire life. 300 micrograms is more than enough to have a spiritual experience. 1,000 plus micrograms did not provide a near-death experience.

[01:39:14] It provided a beyond-death experience. LSD is a seriously powerful drug and has the ability to fuck a person like nothing they could ever conceive of except white supremacists. Yeah, I was about to say. In fact, after this experience, I firmly believe it is the most powerful drug known to the human race. Yeah, that you can get your hands on. Interesting thing about this guy's story that I couldn't stop thinking about is he devolved or was transported into like a fucking... Universe of pain?

[01:39:44] No, no, no. What the hell's the... He was like transported into like an Event Horizon, you know, cut scene, which Event Horizon, not to give anything away, is supposed to be hell. And listening to you read this was some of the most effective version of be good or you go to hell. I've heard many ways this is like worse than Dante's Inferno. Yeah. Like it was all very effective. If someone told me like going to hell is this guy's story, you're even like teased with love for a minute.

[01:40:14] Yeah. And then tossed into a very specific crime that he had going on. But that also just seems like hell. Yeah. Hell would be all of the big sins kind of perpetrated against you with a tease of a better life and then immediately that's ripped from you again. And then you just rinse and repeat. Yeah. And so I think this... You know, we talk about near-death experiences. We haven't like done a full episode on it. But I feel like this guy... I thought it was very apt for him to say like this was not a near-death experience.

[01:40:44] This was an after-death experience. Beyond death experience. Yeah, beyond death experience. And it's like... I don't know how to tell you guys this, but if they haven't updated the rules on what going to hell is... Like if you say goddamn means you're going to hell... Yeah. You're all about to go to some weird white supremacist prison. Because like... I don't know. I found it an effective story in not the way he was trying to express it. But I was like, wow, this would be excellent imagery if he had replaced like I had an LSD trip with like I died and went to hell. Yeah.

[01:41:13] I am curious. You know, there's so many of these stories online. And I do wonder how much of this is elaborated for effect at certain points because... It's on Reddit? No, this is on Arrowhead. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I assume they probably screen their stories to some extent. But, you know, it is like... Yes, it is extremely disturbing vision of hell. It is also kind of like if you ask an edgy 17-year-old what hell would be, that might be kind of

[01:41:42] what they come up with. Yeah, but they would also be right. That's what I'm getting at. Sure, yeah. Like, it was just the right amount of hopping around unpleasantness that you add the rinse and repeat aspect of that. I'm like, yeah, that's an effect of hell. Like, this sucks. If you're saying that this is eternity, then that's not great. That's even worse than like fire and rimstone version of hell. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Because it has emotional hell, which is like everyone calls me a pussy. Yeah. It has the...

[01:42:11] All of my internal fears and issues have become like highlighted. It has the physical aspect of hell of like sexual abuse and physical abuse. And it hits it all. But also, if I ran hell... You'd be striving. Well, this is Lucifer. It's not Lucifer. Lucifer. If I ran hell, there's a little bit of me as I'm stamping their passport into hell. I'd be like, I mean, you shouldn't have taken a thousand grams. Like, I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, I hate...

[01:42:41] It's also like, what do you mean I'm gonna get fucked by these dogs? I know that the dogs didn't fuck him, but it's funnier to say that he did get fucked by dogs. And so, like, if you're like, oh, man, what do you mean I'm gonna get fucked by dogs? You know, if you're running hell, you're like, I don't know what to tell you. You shouldn't have killed that whole family. And so, in this case, he brought it upon himself. Like, even the... Well, we don't know what this guy's daughter hasn't done. He did bring it upon himself by doing way too much. Well, that's all... No, no. I'm not saying he brought it upon himself from his personal life choices of not being a good person. Yeah. I'm saying he brought it upon himself

[01:43:11] because even the kindly drug dealer said, hey, bro, three drops. Yeah. And it's like, that's on you, pal. Yeah, it's a cautionary tale. It's a cautionary tale. But, you know, these sorts of stories are the kinds of things that even, you know, if I hadn't experienced a 100th as negative as this, I would... Oh, drugs are done. I would hate it. I would hate it. So, you know, I also do find it interesting something that comes up in many LSD bad trip stories

[01:43:39] is this idea of the infinite, the infinite white light. And it is interesting that conceptually, when we think of heaven, we think of, you know, an infinite white light, infinite heaven space. Well, that's not what he saw. No, no, no. But when he talks about, like, the infinite love in every second world for infinity, it's not as pleasant as, like, everyone who's ever experienced, not everyone, but a lot of people who have experienced those moments of infinity, they have a real, they come away with a real clear understanding

[01:44:08] of why an immortal afterlife might not be awesome to experience. Anything finite is a vibe, and we express that even in artificial scarcity, like, the idea that you can charge more because there's less of it or there's not as much, like, yeah, things are better in short bursts. Yeah, well, an infinite afterlife sounds nice because of the idea that we don't have to say goodbye to our friends and family and our loved ones, but the more that you... I used to scare myself as a kid all the time trying to imagine heaven

[01:44:38] and being like, wait, it goes on forever? And I'd lay in bed at night trying to imagine forever and it would get really... But it would get scary because it would be like, well, wait a minute, that's so long. Like, what do you do for forever? That's so long. I would like forever in the immediate comfort in knowing that, yeah, I'll do it tomorrow. Like, I do that now and I'm like, I have this finite life and I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? Why am I putting off for tomorrow what I can do today? Okay, but there's got to be comfort in being like, fuck, I'm going to lay here on this heaven couch

[01:45:08] watching fucking season four of Friends or whatever and I'm cool or whatever. I'll deal with it tomorrow. But I guess it also sounds like sloth and hell, so... Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we probably should just do an episode on Fear of Infinity because I think it's a really interesting topic. I mean, one of the worst book reading experiences I ever had was from this... I brought it up earlier if I kept it in the episode. Like a Polish hard sci-fi writer where there's like a huge portion of the book where a guy is like frozen but no one...

[01:45:37] Like, they don't know that he's still... He's still thinking and seeing and like recognizing and how it like deteriorates him as a human... Like, he's not anything anymore. Yeah. And I remember putting that down and being like, this is the least pleasant experience I've ever had reading something. Ever. I gotta read this book. You gotta get... I'll find out exactly what it's called but it was like, fuck you. Fuck this book. Fuck these ideas you had. That book has to do with drugs too but like, yeah, Infinity and the fear of Infinity

[01:46:07] and the fear of being stuck in Infinity is just so ever-present with drug use. Yeah. And now that we've talked about this, yeah, I think maybe that edible I had was not just weed. Well, that's a good place to take a visit to the Infinite Fear tier. Ed, where would you put bad trips on your fear tier? This guy's trip? I mean, sure. I was thinking more like, how afraid are you of having a bad trip? I'm gonna go ahead and put it like, pretty high,

[01:46:37] like a seven or eight only because I don't do drugs anymore and it's because it was like, you know what, I don't have the patience for a flip of a coin. Yeah. Like, if someone's like, hey, you wanna fucking take these mushrooms? I'll be like, no, I'm good because I've had great times on mushrooms and I've had shit time on mushrooms and if it's a shit time, it's not a good use of my time. Yeah, your very finite time. Yeah, of our very, I've established very finite time. So, yeah, I'm gonna put the fear

[01:47:07] of a bad trip has absolutely dictated decisions I make. What do you mean? Like, because the fear of a bad trip dictates my decision in saying no to that person. Oh, I see, I see. That I don't wanna, I don't wanna take their acid or their DMT or their fucking mushrooms because it's like, yeah, I've done those things and when it's awesome, it's awesome but when it's not, it's really not and it's like, well, I'm just, I'm fine. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I'd put it probably a solid seven too and probably every time we do a bad trip episode,

[01:47:37] it'll just hover around a seven because there's plenty of drugs that I will never try but conceptually, the idea of an inescapable bad trip, I find very scary and it is fairly, it's much more likely to happen to me than, you know, getting eaten alive or facing a killer clown or something so it's pretty high up there. Like I said, I would always approach anything that's a mind-altering substance with caution, I would not do 11 sugar cubes and God knows how many drops. That guy's what we call in the business an idiot. Yeah.

[01:48:06] But yeah. We should really quickly, I know you just said seven but since we're calling this guy an idiot anyway, unless I misheard you, I feel like this fool, this dummy, did start his bad trip story with like, hey, and just so you guys know at the time of doing this I wasn't, like I didn't have a high tolerance for LSD. Which is to imply that he's, after the world's worst trip, was like, let's do it again. Well. At lower, at lower dosages but still.

[01:48:35] I guess you could interpret that from the way that he, yeah, he said they were experienced psychonauts, they did not have an LSD tolerance at the time. At the time. This does suggest that they have one now which suggests that they have done it again, hopefully in smaller doses. I will say the people who most sound like what he said as a couple names I won't say now, I'm pretty sure they've all passed from my childhood but anyone who's like, at the time but I'll keep this going, they're no longer with us from my childhood which is upsetting to think about

[01:49:04] but they were fun people in high school but anyone who was like, I'll continue down this road to, not even just LSD but anything to be like, I'll build this tolerance. Yeah, not a great idea. Because LSD, I imagine there's an element of like that, you know, Ka or Zop or Zip or whatever the fucking people's names are. Ka, Jack and D. Yeah, one of them had just done it three days earlier for the first time and so, you know, anything that's new and fun and exciting, you're gonna make the think tank, I get that but it's like, I don't know what LSDs

[01:49:34] or mushrooms addiction aspect is. Like, you do fucking fentanyl or opioids or whatever, heroin, it's like, well, you've made that bad, like, they're so addictive. Where LSD, I think you're just like seeking out cool trips, like, that's on you a little bit. Yeah. Like, I don't think it's like going through LSD withdrawals. I mean, I don't, I don't. I don't know. I don't know. It's fine, it's okay to say you don't know. I don't know either. I don't know, but I know that it's certainly not considered

[01:50:01] a physically addictive drug the way that like alcohol is where like if you try to, if you're an alcoholic and you try to go cold turkey, you can die. Yeah, Your body doesn't become reliant on it. Emotionally, you may be, I mean, there's a lot of people who say they're not addicted to weed and it's like, buddy, buddy, you're addicted to weed. You may not die if you quit, but good luck going more than 12 hours without smoking. Yeah. So I don't know how quickly LSD can become a habit, but clearly some people. Not even just because I brought this up earlier

[01:50:30] with mushrooms, but I bet you there is a benefit to micro dosing. Something like that. Like mushrooms or LSD and like, I mean, I mean micro dosing. I don't mean one sugar cube. I mean like true micro dosing. I can see like, let's just get through the day because anyone who's like, I don't know, it's drugs. I'm like, yeah, but you're on anti-fucking depressants. You're on fucking whatever other commercial there's something for. I imagine a micro dose is no crazier than that. But anyway, so you were saying you're a seven or eight.

[01:51:00] We're both around a seven or eight on the fear tier because it dictates the decision we make. Not necessarily like if I took a drink of punch and then some asshole was like, I put LSD in there. I don't think that I would then panic to the point that I burst into flames. I might. I might. Oh, you might. It's not a seven or eight because it's like around that corner might be LSD and it's going to ruin my life. Right. You know, I'm just putting a seven or eight

[01:51:29] because I'm like, I'm going to make a decision to not do LSD tonight. Agreed. Agreed. Well, that does it for this episode of Scared All the Time. I hope you guys enjoyed our trip through bad trips. We'll be back again very soon with another episode. But if it was our families listening, it was nice knowing you. Yeah. Merry Christmas, I guess. What we don't want in our stocking is fucking hallucinogens is what we're getting at. Until next time, I'm Chris Killary and I'm Ed Ficola and this has been Scared All the Time.

[01:51:59] We'll see you next time. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killary and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killary. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return depending on the tier you choose. We'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes to producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch. So go sign up for our Patreon

[01:52:28] at ScaredAllTheTimePodcast.com Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Production. Good night. We are in this together. Together. Together. Together.