As someone who grew up in the 1980s a member of Generation X, I was under the assumption that overdosing on psychedelics could be fatal. Another childhood memory was the fear of permanent damage from these illegal drugs. But the fact is that there has never been a fatality based purely on LSD and a recent study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs dispels those negative assumptions. The report focused on three women, all of whom accidentally overdosed on psychedelics without any harmful effects.
In fact, two of them actually benefited from these experiences. One of them unwittingly took 550 hits of LSD, which later dissipated foot pain that she had suffered since childhood. Another case involved a 15-year-old girl with bipolar disorder whose supplier of liquid LSD made a decimal point error while preparing her individual hits that inflated her dosage 10 times. The very next day she felt that her brain was functioning normally for the first time.
A third woman whose glass of water was laced with LSD during her second week of pregnancy, which wasn’t revealed until after the overdose, gave birth to a healthy son who’s now 18 years old and has shown no signs of impaired development. These stories reinforce the work of researchers dating back to the 1940s that studied the efficacy of LSD for treating anxiety, depression, PTSD, alcoholism, opioid use and cancer. There has been a resurgence of that research, which stopped when Richard Nixon was elected president and the war on drugs began. And so medical science once again is exploring psychedelics as a possible tool for psychotherapy.
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