Sean Carroll wrote:
marcia wrote:
Sean Carroll <seanc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
LOL, yeah! Your great big scholarly link! ... that I can only assume has
SOMETHING buried SOMEWHERE in the flood of search results it brings up
that you interpret as supporting your ignorant, propaganda-influenced
assertion that LSD can 'fry your brain'. Although I'm not sure how to
find it, since I don't know the SCHOLARLY way of describing 'brain-frying'.
How about "adverse effects"?
PubMED search:
Try
http://tinyurl.com/2vnunp
Or try narrowing Kali's search with the simple term: "brain damage"
http://tinyurl.com/2rkwd8
Hmm, seeing as how I tried clicking on a couple of links there, only to
find one article that was actually about MDMA and referred to LSD only
in passing, and another that didn't actually, exist, I'm thinking ...
not a very big improvement.
Next, try reading some of the articles before you dismiss them off-
hand as propaganda.
I would, if I could actually find any of them that really exist and are
actually about the point at issue.
Empirical evidence and controlled studies trump self-experimentation.
True. Unfortunately for your point, I have yet to see the 'empirical
evidence and controlled studies' that demonstrate LSD can 'fry your
brain' -- if that actually even MEANS anything, medically.
Marcia is correct, about the pubmed site, there should be several
studies on lysergic acid di????? [sp], at pubmed.
I know this because during the time frame before it was removed from OTC
at drugstores in L.A. Fairview State Hospital conducted studies on it.
The control group were employees of the State of Calif. and other
group were patients.
1960 stuff.
sorry, corrected two controls to make one.
I do, however, have the book 'Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered', a
SCHOLARLY treatment of the subject by Lester Grinspoon and James B
Bakalar, which has explicit references to actual, individual studies by
the truckload, covering all the research that was done before the
government stopped it, and has a whole chapter on 'Adverse Effects and
Their Treatment' that absolutely NOWHERE mentions ANY study that has
demonstrated ANY sort of brain damage to have EVER been a result of LSD use.
Oh, sure, there are 'adverse effects'. Effects such as Acute Adverse
Reactions (the so-called 'flashbacks' and 'bad trips', which are
overwhelmingly considered educational and not just destructive by those
who have experienced them), triggering of psychoses in those who are
already seriously disturbed, and the possibility of suicide, accidents,
and murder during the trip. All of which are real, serious issues. But
brain damage? Here's the REAL scoop, presented as actual specific
statements backed up by concrete references, instead of a vague link to
a bunch of search engine results, most of which have nothing to do with
the issue. [Comments by me in brackets, marked with --SC.]
*****
Stanley P. Barron and his colleagues (Barron et al. 1970) tested and
interviewed twenty psychedelic drug users; thay had taken LSD an average
(mean) of thirty-eight times, but this figure is somewhat misleading,
since twelve of them had taken it one to twenty times and five had taken
it twenty-one to forty times. Although no consistent symptoms of
psychosis or neurosis were found, seventeen of the twenty functioned
poorly in a marginal way in work and sexual relationships; they were
said to exhibit character disorders, and most were described as
passive-aggressive. Gary J. Tucker and his colleagues compared the
Rorschach test responses of psychedelic drug users with those of normal
controls and schizophrenic subjects. The drug users produced
considerable primitive drive content, like schizophrenics, but also a
large number of responses, unlike schizophrenics; in general they were
little different from normal subjects. Disrupted thinking, boundary
confusion, and idiosyncratic responses were correlated with length of
time using psychedelic drugs but not with amount of drug use. The
authors tentatively conclude that prolonged use of psychedelic drugs can
heighten pathological thought disturbances, some aspects of which are
related to those found in schizophrenia, but they admit that in a
retrospective study it is hard to distinguish predisposing
characteristics from drug effects (Tucker et al. 1972). It is
significant that Rorschach test peculiarities were associated not with
amount of drug use, which would suggest a chemical effect, but with
persistence in returning to the drugs over a long period of time, which
for some users might mean intermittent attempts to deal with the
problems implied by the abnormal Rorschach responses. We saw [earlier in
the chapter --SC] that this could account for many acute adverse
reactions; it might also account for a misleading appearance of chronic
drug effects.
Psychedelic drug users have also been tested for organic brain damage.
William McGlothlin and his colleagues (McGlothlin et al. 1969) compared
sixteen subjects who had taken LSD twenty times or more (the range was
20 to 1,100, the median 75 times) with sixteen controls; they examined
the subjects clinically and also administered the Halstead-Reitan test
battery. There were no clinical organic symptoms, and no scores on the
neuropsychological tests that suggested brain damage; but on a test
measuring capacity for nonverbal abstraction the LSD users scored lower.
As in the case of Tucker's Rohrshach results, the amount of LSD use
was not related to the score. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that
continual heavy use may cause minor organic brain pathology [How these
people were able to magically conclude that given that absolutely none
of the results support it, I leave as an exercise for the reader --SC]:
six of the LSD subjects, including the three heaviest users, were
regarded as "moderately suspicious" in this respect. In another study,
Morgan Wright and Terrence P. Hogan (1972) found no difference between
subjects who had used LSD an average of twenty-nine times and controls
(matched for age, sex, education, and IQ) on a variety of
neuropsychological tests including those used by McGlothlin.
At most these studies confirm the existence of an eccentric acidhead
personality; they do not imply mental illness or brain damage. But more
unequivocally pathological effects have been claimed in some clinical
work. In a 1970 paper, George S. Glass and Malcolm B. Bowers, Jr.,
examined four cases [Wow! Four whole cases! --SC] of what they believe
was a long-term psychosis precipitated by prolonged LSD use. It is
described as a gradual shift toward projection, denial, and delusions in
a person who repeatedly takes the drug at crises in his life.
Hospitalization, psychotherapy, drugs and electroconvulsive therapy are
ineffective, because the psychosis--a form of chronic undifferentiated
schizophrenia, in their opinion--is adaptive. As an example, they cite
the case of a twenty-year-old man living with his parents, who had him
hospitalized when they became alarmed at his unusual speech and
behavior. After a normal childhood and adolescence he had taken LSD
fifty times in eighteen months, and later lives in a hippie commune for
six months. He was underweight, passive, and withdrawn, dressed
eccentrically, and looked older than his age. His affect was shallow and
his associations vague; he interpreted proverbs idiosyncratically, and
his thoughts centered on a desire for mystical love and fusion with
others. [Wow! Sounds like ironclad proof of organic brain dysfunction to
me! I'm being sarcastic --SC] He escaped from the hospital after two
weeks. Two of the other three cases discussed are amazingly similar to
this one in their history and symptoms (Glass and Bowers 1970).
As the authors imply in their conclusion, these patients were rather
unusual. They lacked many common features of schizophrenia; for example,
they interpreted proverbs idiosyncratically but not in the concrete
schizophrenic manner, and they were able to carry on coherent if not
very articulate conversations with friends who had shared their drug
experiences. The similarity in their past history, manner, and behavior
suggests a common inner world rather than the separated individual
fantasy worlds of true schizophrenics. They were hospitalized only on
the insistence of their parents, and they did not respond to any of the
standard treatments. In effect, they look like men who have carried to
an extreme the dress, attitudes, mannerisms, religious beliefs, and
passive approach to life characteristic of hippie culture. This might be
undesirable, and even a little crazy in the loose colloquial sense in
which any extremes of behavior may be called crazy--for example, the
opposite condition of a constant need for spectacular displays of
masculine bravado. But it does not necessarily imply chronic psychoses
any more than the way of life of an anchorite or begging monk, also men
who incorporate the implications of certain unusual religious and
cultural attitudes into their everyday behavior so profoundly that they
are not functioning members of society in the ordinary sense.
In response to a letter written in 1977, Dr. Bowers admitted that the
social movements of the late 1960s produced novel behavior that
psychiatrists were tempted to label as sick, and implied that he might
have been subject to that temptation. He also pointed out that the drug
culture could serve as a refuge for people unable to survive in
conventional society. But he still believed that psychedelic drugs had
produced in some of these patients a profound and lasting personality
change that could fulfill the current diagnostic criteria for
schizophrenia. In a letter on the same subject, Dr. Glass wrote that
since the original study he had seen many chronic psychedelic drug users
who showed no such symptoms; he suspected that the patients described
might have been developing schizophrenia independent of drug use. The
ambiguity of these cases and the authors' present uncertainty about them
illustrate the problems of what amounts to cross-cultural psychiatric
diagnosis in a period of social change.
There is one other study asserting that prolonged psychedelic drug use
causes chronic psychosis. William R. Breakey and his colleagues compared
fourteen schizophrenics who had not used drugs before the onset of their
illness with twenty-six who had; the drugs were marihuana, LSD,
"mescaline," and amphetamines. They found that the drug users had
healthier personalities before their illness but began to show signs of
mental disturbance at a much earlier age: the first symptoms (seen in
retrospect) appeared in the drug users at an average age of nineteen and
in the others at an average age of twenty-three; the average age of
first admission to a mental hospital was twenty-one for the drug users
and twenty-five for the controls. Among the drug users, those who had
taken three or more drugs became schizophrenic and were first admitted
to hospitals at an earlier age than those who had only taken two or
fewer drugs. When six patients who had been heavy amphetamine abusers
were removed from the tabulations, all these differences remained. The
authors conclude cautiously that psychedelic drug use may have helped to
precipitate schizophrenia earlier in life and in persons who would
otherwise not have been so vulnerable to it. They refute the objection
that drug users are simply younger in general by showing that in a
control group of normal subjects matched with the forty schizophrenics
for age and sex, the drug users were no younger than the rest (Breakey
et al. 1974).
But increased drug use at an early age might be a symptom rather than a
cause of early onset of schizophrenia. The authors themselves point out
that the schizophrenics had used larger amounts and more kinds of drugs
than the normal control subjects. Furthermore, because drug-taking
histories were unreliable, they had to count number of drugs used rather
than amount of drug use in making their tabulations. Someone who is
sensing the earliest affective and cognitive changes that presage a
schizophrenic break might try various drugs casually to help himself
without ever using a significant amount of any drug; from Breakey's
tables it is not even possible to tell whether any of the schizophrenics
in the study were chronic psychedelic drug users.
These studies suggest some problems that should be examined more
closely. In considering long-term psychedelic drug user, even more than
in assessing acute reactions, it is hard to extricate the
pharmacological contribution from the complex web of associations tying
it to personality and social setting. The limitations of retrospective
studies in determining cause and effect are notorious, and retrospective
studies are all we have. How many long-term psychedelic drug users ever
were really acidheads, and how permanent is the condition? How often is
psychopathology associated with psychedelic drug user, and when it is,
is the drug cause, symptom, or attempted cure? In this case there is
also a potential for cultural bias that creates further complications.
When are eccentric beliefs and behavior pathological, and when are they
simply a hippie way of life?
These issues have already become familiar from the case of marihuana. It
used to be said that smoking marihuana caused a vaguely defined form of
mental, moral, and emotional impairment, sometimes called the
amotivational syndrome. The idea was apparently derived from a rather
imprecise impression of the lives of cannabis-using peasants in tropical
countries and hippies in the United States. Investigations have now made
it clear that the amotivational syndrome as an effect of cannabis is
imaginary (see Ruben and Comitas 1975; Grinspoon 1977). In some cases
heavy cannabis use or dependence is a symptom of personal problems or a
form of social rebellion; in other cases it is simply part of a common
cultural pattern and there is nothing unusual about the people who
practice it. Which it will be depends partly on the attitude of society.
For example, studies of heavy marihuana users in the United States in
the 1960s showed them to be more alienated, less well-adjusted socially
and academically, more impulsive and rebellious, more cynical, moody,
and bored than other college students. We can see now that this was
largely because of the marginal social status of cannabis. As long as
use of a drug is illegal and heavily stigmatized, those who turn to it
are likely to be different from more conventional people--either more
moody, restless, angry, and dissatisfied with their lives or simply more
adventurous, self-critical, and open to new experience. And once drug
use has begun, the reaction of others further shapes users' attitudes.
Thus some marihuana smokers learned from irrational condemnation and
persecution to mistrust all the laws and conventions of our society.
Defined as outlaws, they accepted that as part of their identity; marked
as psychologically aberrant or as rebels, heroes, or prophets, they
would be appropriately angry or messianic. Now that some of the social
views and personal styles of the drug culture of the 1960s have become
more popular, we know that they never implied a drug-induced personality
change. Marihuana use has become common among people who lead otherwise
conventional lives.
The composite portrait of the acidhead resembles the familiar picture of
the pothead or heavy marihuana smoker--understandably, since they were
often the same people. It was not some ingredient in marihuana smoke
that caused those ways of thinking and behaving; but can we be sure that
the same is true of LSD, a more profound and potentially shattering
force? To distinguish LSD use as cause and as effect, we must first
consider who chooses to take psychedelic drugs and why. This question
can be misleading if it implies psychopathology, or even some uniformity
of motive. The overwhelming majority of LSD users, like the overwhelming
majority of all drug users, are not sick or mentally disturbed. And
Aldous Huxley's or Albert Hofmann's reasons for taking psychedelic drugs
are not a Hell's Angel's or a Yanomamö Indian's. Kenneth Keniston once
classified drug users, with an implicit emphasis on marijuana and LSD,
into three groups: "tasters" who experiment briefly out of curiosity,
"seekers" who use the drugs from time to time to intensify experience or
gain insight, and "heads" who are committed to drugs as a way of life
(Keniston 1968-1969). All but a few of the people who have taken LSD
belong to the first two groups. Typical reasons given for using it are
curiosity, boredom, persuasion by friends, desire to prove oneself,
intellectual and emotional adventure, sensory pleasure, enhanced
awareness, self-exploration, religious and mystical insight, spiritual
development. There is no reason to assume that these justifications
usually disguise profound emotional disturbances. For almost all tasters
and seekers, and most heads, experimenting with psychedelic drugs to
cleanse the doors of perception and feeling is no more pathological than
(to name two activities that are analogous in different ways) flying a
small plane or joining a church.
Many heavy drug users, however, are seriously disturbed people. Drug use
is usually not the cause of their problems but a symptom, and their
intention is not self-destructive but restorative. This is especially
true of psychedelic drug users. Psychiatrists who see them usually
conclude that even when they have the kinds of psychological problems
associated with excessive drug use, LSD is not the problem but an
ineffectual attempt at a solution (see Welpton 1968; Flynn 1973). One
symptom often reported is an emotional numbness that the drug
temporarily dissolves (Hendin 1973; Hendin 1974; von Hoffman 1968, p.
73). Among drug users at college Keniston found similar problems in a
less serious form: they thought too much of their activity was
inauthentic, mere role-playing, and used psychedelic drugs to substitute
feeling for intellect.
If emotional problems were always a cause and not an effect of chronic
psychedelic drug user, the status of acidhead would be nothing but a
refuge or role-disguise for certain schizoid and inadequate
personalities. [Paging Dale Kelly! --SC] But sometimes drug abuse
itself, whatever the original reasons for it, becomes the central
problem, notoriously so when the drug is addictive, like alcohol or
heroin. The same thing may happen with LSD, but that has been rare since
the 1960s and was not common even then.
*****
--
--Sean
http://spclsd223.livejournal.com/
Wilson: That smugness of yours really is an attractive quality.
House: Thank you. It was either that or get my hair highlighted.
Smugness is easier to maintain.
