LSD

What does acid do to you?

A good trip can make users feel relaxed and happy, with pleasant hallucinations. A bad trip can make you feel agitated and confused, with unpleasant and scary hallucinations. How the trip goes can be affected by your surroundings, who you’re with and how comfortable you are with them, and by your mood. If you don’t feel safe or comfortable, you’re more likely to have a bad trip.

It can also have other effects:

• A trip can appear to involve a speeding up and slowing down of time and movements, while colour, sound and objects can get distorted. Users experience hallucinations (seeing and/or hearing things that aren’t there).

• LSD can also make you feel tired, anxious, panicky and depressed.

Taking LSD does involve risks, here’s what it could do to you:

• If you panic or don’t feel safe and comfortable with the people you’re with and where you’re taking LSD, the trip can be confusing and sometimes very scary. Good trips can be pleasant and amusing, but bad trips can be terrifying.

• Flashbacks sometimes happen. This is when part of the ‘trip’ is re-lived after the original experience. Flashbacks usually occur within weeks of taking LSD, but can be experienced months or occasionally even years later.

• People have been known to harm themselves during a bad trip. So people in a bad mood, feeling depressed or worried should avoid taking acid.

• LSD could have serious, longer-term implications for somebody who has a history of mental health problems. It may also be responsible for setting off a mental health problem that had previously gone unnoticed.

• There's no evidence to suggest LSD does any long-term damage to the body or directly causes long-term psychological damage.