Ya’ll Motherfuckers Need Acid, Part 2
Here’s the first part if you missed it.
Let’s get down to business: why and how to take psychedelics. I’ll provide answers the only way I can, by citing my experience. My first trip is as good a place as any to start, since it’s the sort of result you can expect from a typical successful trip. It is by no means my most personally significant trip, but it is significant enough for our purposes here.
By the way, if you and I have tripped together, don’t worry, I would never post about you or our experience. Partly because my most interesting parts happen alone, but more because — duh — that would be super uncool. Just putting that out there so everybody’s at ease.
I was a teenager. I won’t reveal the details of the trip itself, because they are less interesting than what happened the next morning. I got up after a night of poor sleep (sleep is always poor afterwards), and I went on a drive where I reflected on my trippy thoughts from the night before. It suddenly clicked that I had a particular deficiency in my thoughts that night and generally.
In a nutshell, I am a low-empathy person. I am not a psychopath by any stretch, and I very much feel for people. But it is more abstract, and I have had to grow my own versions of those muscles. I realized that if I did not start considering others more, I would die leaving the world worse than if I hadn’t existed at all. Through my first trip, I became more aware of my natural tendencies, and consciously decided to alter them to the extent I could. I changed myself. And this awareness — which was expanded further in later trips — has made me a better person, I have no doubt. Still flawed, but better.
I made this realization because acid gave me the ability to step further away from myself than was possible with my ordinary mind. I could see a much larger picture and my place in it. It was not a picture I liked, but it was true and I needed to see it.
This isn’t about my picture
I am sharing this information with you, a fellow mind, to assure you that if you want to understand yourself better, there are powerful tools out there to help. Acid has been a good tool for me, but maybe you would feel better about mushrooms. Maybe you would prefer an ayahuasca tea. It can be hard and feel scary to look for these substances, but you can. Lots of them grow out of the damn ground.
There is a cleaner, better understanding of the world out there to be discovered by you, and in doing so you can discover a truer and more durable identity. Psychedelics simplify you — not by making you smaller, but by showing you the absolutely insane scale of the universe — your universe. It reframes you — to you.
Emphasis on you
This is as good a time as any to tell you that I don’t like getting into metaphysical stuff, and I’m not good company if that’s what you’re into. If you want to speculate with people about the supernatural meaning of trips or whatever, then in my opinion, you haven’t yet realized their point. I’m here to whet appetites, not to talk about some grand truth. If you want the truth, go and look at it yourself.
It’s like this: if you’re a new tripper and you are way excited about the good that a psychedelic is doing for you, hey, that’s awesome. I’m so stoked that you are bettering yourself, truly. After all, the world really needs humans to be their best right now. God knows we are not cutting the fucking mustard.
But. If you want to wax philosophical about stuff, I’m not the right person. Or anyway, I’d rather have those conversations on accident with people as we’re just hanging out. The purpose of your trip isn’t to take pictures home to your friends — it is to look at yourself critically. The trip is to your soul. No need to broadcast what you learn there …unless under special conditions like, oh, writing a thing to get people into tripping. *cough*
Enough talk! How to start?
OK, time to get practical. First things first: you gotta prepare. Preparation is important for all drugs, but it’s doubly important for drugs you haven’t taken, and triply important for psychedelic drugs. So how important is preparation if you haven’t taken the drug and it’s a psychedelic? That’s right: quintuply. That’s just math.
By the way, if you want to really get into some nitty-gritty, head over to erowid.org and check out out their resources for LSD. That’s where I first learned about drugs as a teenager, and the website is actually a cool internet relic from that time. The world has changed, but the erowid.org website has not.
Acid emits no smell and has a subtle bitter flavor. Do not taste test it! In fact, don’t touch it in any form without gloves unless you’re prepared to trip.
It comes in liquid form or in the more popular form, paper tabs. These tabs are 2mm to 3mm paper squares sold individually or on perforated sheets that contain the dried dose. A normal tab is dosed between 50µg and 250µg, the price being roughly $1 per 10µg. A regular dose is about 150µg, since a trip requires roughly one microgram for every pound of weight, i.e., 150lbs →150µg. The term microdose can mean anything between 1 and 50µg, and I refer to anything above 500µg as a macrodose. Store acid in opaque, airless containers (tabs can be folded into pressed aluminum foil easily), as it’s sensitive to air and light and will break down if exposed.
To take it, you gotta absorb it. Don’t try to absorb it through your skin or your eye or whatever other weird way you have heard. Just ingest it. I like to chew tabs up in my mouth until the paper is totally dissolved before swallowing it. This absorbs some of the acid sublingually (through your mouth) which is a bit faster than your gut. I think it gives a more even-keeled come up.
Know the side-effects
Psychedelics mess with your gut. While tripping, your stomach may churn or cramp, but more likely it’ll just be a little nauseous. Additionally, acid is known to cause numbness. It can localize in your extremities or your GI, but it tends to just give you a mild general numbness. Think tingly fingertips.
Tolerance builds up immediately. If you take 1 unit of acid today, it will take 10 units for you to have the same experience tomorrow, a 10:1 tolerance. Acid tolerance tapers off over the course of about ten days, with a slight tolerance present after a week, say 5:4. This means that you can trip after only a week break, but you waste a fifth of your dose to your body’s tolerance. Acid is cheap enough that you can do this if you want to.
Know the challenges
Psychedelics are hard. Unlike other drug families, they are brutally honest. I mean that while most drugs blend in with the furniture, psychedelics are very much in your face. It can feel like every tiny intimate thought you have is being made aware to every aspect of your being. This overwhelming sensation can have very real consequences. Though psychedelics pose no risk of overdose or addiction, they wield (rather, they equip you with) vast power over your perception, your beliefs, your sense of self, etc. This takes skill to wield well.
Tripping is analogous to running or weightlifting in ways. It’s a rewarding exercise, but it’s also stressful, takes fortitude, and can hurt you if you’re not careful. Unlike physical exercise, the realizations and breakthroughs you make during a trip can stay with you for life.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. You’re probably not planning on tripping once a week. And even if you are, the starting place is the same: start with between 50µg and 150µg. After that if you choose to continue, wait at least a week and step up the dose by 50µg. Repeat. For those that are interested in macrodosing, I’ll get into that later on.
Why does this feel like a lot of work?
If you’re used to other drug families, you’re going to be annoyed by how much work psychedelics require. Consider it a rite of passage. These are not your grandma’s drugs. Unless you have a really badass grandma.
I’m walking a tightrope in these posts, because on the one hand, I want to impart that psychedelics are not a casual thing. They can be, but only if you know what you’re dealing with. They’re no joke. On the other hand, I want to be clear about how they work and give you the confidence to navigate them. Think of every trip as a personal, sacred ritual that is just for you. Treat it with the reverence and respect it deserves, and you will be rewarded.
In the next post, I’ll talk about how to keep your wits when the world gets trippy — how to walk and talk and move along with your trip as it goes.