LSD

Article

LSD is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between April 12, 2021 and March 19, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “300 mg of LSD”; “people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists”; “drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA)“. It most often appears alongside Adderall, California, FDA.

Metadata

Category: Concepts
Mention count: 9
Issue count: 9
First seen: April 12, 2021
Last seen: March 19, 2026

Appears In

- Adderall (3 shared issues)
- California (3 shared issues)
- FDA (3 shared issues)
- MDMA (3 shared issues)
- Reddit (3 shared issues)
- Baltimore (2 shared issues)
- Bay Area (2 shared issues)
- Biden (2 shared issues)
- DEA (2 shared issues)
- Internet (2 shared issues)
- ketamine (2 shared issues)
- marijuana (2 shared issues)

External Links

- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For April

April 12, 2021 · Original source

21: RIP Tusko the Elephant, who was given 300 mg of LSD (yes, milligrams, so “nearly three thousand times the human recreational dose”) on the grounds that elephants were really big and so maybe if you wanted to give an elephant LSD for some reason that would be the right dose. It wasn’t and he died. If you’ve ever wanted to know how much LSD it would take to kill an elephant, the answer is: somewhere less than 300 mg.

Inline links: Tusko the Elephant

Carhart-Harris On Serotonin

June 15, 2021 · Original source

I keep wondering how early psychedelicists got so weird - but, equally importantly, how come the 10% of Americans who use psychedelics mostly don't end out as weird as they did. I'd previously assumed the answer was dosing (though I haven't done the research into what kind of doses the early pioneers used) or confusion/surprise (since nobody had done LSD before, they didn't know what to expect and so were more weirded out by the results). But maybe the problem is that the early pioneers were psychologists doing research on themselves, and probably doing a lot of really careful introspection. Maybe these are the people who do worse, and just dropping acid for fun when you go to a dance party is less dangerous than trying to understand your own LSD-addled brain.

Inline links: how early psychedelicists got so weird

5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality.

Peer Review Request: Ketamine

July 19, 2021 · Original source

Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is a little different, and works more like other drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA). The idea is that ketamine gets you into an unusually fluid mental state where you’re able to reach insights and produce changes that would otherwise be unavailable (for a description of why this might happen, read Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain or this review of it). Ketamine isn’t a traditional psychedelic, but it seems to produce some of the same effects.

Inline links: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, this review of it

Open Thread 184

August 08, 2021 · Original source