The Placebo Effect in THC and LSD

By Nobleman Nash Hollowhill - November 15, 2010 

 

I’ve experienced many sides of the Placebo Effect in my use of THC and LSD. To quote Andrew Weil, “Marijuana is an active placebo.” And I believe LSD to be even moreso. When a substance is an active placebo, it means that how high you expect to get is a determining factor in how high you will get. This means that the act of looking at the crystals on buds under a magnifying glass may in fact get you high, and it means that $500 bong with a 20-arm percolator may make all the difference in your subjective experience, as will a specific blotter print on a sheet of acid. Mostly, it means that if you have any expectations of how it will effect you, that will be an enormous contribution toward how the experience will actually go. In my experience, the mere thought of an LSD trip may bring one on, and the various rumors going around about the pharmacological action of LSD may not help much.

Some people say, “If you take LSD 7 times, you can’t be tried in an American court because you’re legally insane.” This is based on no factual evidence whatsoever, but unfortunately due to the true psychological action of LSD, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The “7 times” rule takes into account neither dosage (and it is nearly impossible to accurately gauge the dose of LSD,) nor physical form (be it microdots, geltabs, crystals, liquid, or blotter paper). A person may take 7 hits in their first dose or they may take 1 hit on 7 separate occasions. The vagueness of the prescription betrays its credibility. However if this is a guideline you’ve chosen to follow for your substance use, then the 7th LSD trip might prove to bring you exactly where you expect to go, regardless of the dose.

Some say LSD is stored in your cerebrospinal fluid, and when this fluid begins to flow, the crystals are released into your brain, causing flashbacks. The LSD molecule is completely broken down and metabolized in a matter of 5 hours after ingestion, therefore any subsequent LSD-like experiences are produced entirely by thought processes that are indistinguishable from those that occur with LSD. Flashbacks and HPPD are usually associated with a high level of stress, unpleasant situations, or general anxiety. Though these are not always under the control of the user, a negative reaction is usually a result of either a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia or simply too much irrational thought and too many emotional expectations invested in the situation.

One such situation which has given me trouble is the idiom that, “Everything brings back an LSD trip.” Which I took to mean that using any substance would trigger the placebo effect of an LSD trip. This is a tricky spot because if you believe it, it can come true, but if not, it will just go toward your tolerance of the substance you’re using. Incidentally, for a year and a half, I could not smoke cannabis. The peak came on too fast for me, and as a frequent psychedelic user, I did not enjoy being taken by surprise. The peak for smoked THC usually occurs within 10 seconds of inhalation, if done properly. Because THC is a mild psychedelic, I noticed the ways in which it mirrored the LSD experience very intensely. This started a psychological pattern in me that whenever I smoked weed, I felt like I was tripping on LSD for a few hours, and coupled with the very quick peak time, this “trip” felt oppressive and inescapable.

I now know, due to my persistence in psychedelic use and marijuana experimentation over the past year and a half, that the reaction to THC I had was almost entirely psychosomatic, because I had built up so many expectations about what fearful states of mind I would enter if I were to smoke any weed. I did not experience this with psilocybin, because the peak came on much more slowly. It was less intense with hashish because rather than 10 seconds, the peak comes on in 2-3 minutes. With hashish use I was able to build my THC tolerance back up to where I can now comfortably smoke a large amount of weed, either with other people, or by myself, and not feel any negative psychological effects. Another technique that helped me out greatly was taking marijuana as a sacrament; spacing a single bowl out over the course of an hour, by myself rather than in a social setting, and combining the act of smoking with something like reading, playing music, or doing yoga. This helped to lessen my expectations and move toward putting the substance to a specific purpose.

I have since taken LSD again recently to re-imprint the image I associate with it, and it has relieved me of all kinds of tension. My psychological cross-intolerance of LSD and THC was eliminated when I dismissed the built up fears I had related to taking LSD. I am now surfing on a positive groove from my latest LSD trip and trying to let it improve my judgment of situations and of myself. My advice to anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation; suffering from flashbacks, HPPD, or unable to partake of any similar psychedelics or marijuana due to a high stress level, is to seek out a more positive environment, use your situation as an object of meditation, and generally try to reduce the level of intensity that you’re experiencing. Go into each experience with a purpose and try to see it as an opportunity.

Only recently (in the past couple of days) I’ve noticed a very similar and interesting effect in my friend. As two somewhat frequent users of LSD and other psychedelics, and both of us formerly frequent marijuana smokers, my friend and I were once the only people I knew who recreationally used hash but not regular weed, due to the different peak times of both. I think that in the past few months when I started smoking weed again, my friend built up a tolerance to getting a contact high off of me more and more frequently, and as a function of that, his ordinary tolerance went up due to the placebo effect.