Psychedelic Essay

Psychedelic, what are they? Where did they come from? What do they do? What are the short term and long term effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Do psychedelic show us a different perspective on the life we life we are living or does the drug just use more of our brain and we just can’t tell. Should these drugs even be taken if there going to make are the sense of self fade away. Where do psychedelics come from and who found them?. Psychedelics is also known as hallucinogens actually come from some sort of plant or vegetation. The first psychedelic ever found was LSD-25, LSD was found by a man by the name of Hofman. Hofman was a scientist experimenting with medical ergot alkaloids in the late 1940’s to try and find a way to expand blood cells but instead came upon LSD. He later synthesized psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. When Hofman came upon LSD it was by accident, he got some on his skin and it sent him on what is known as a “trip”. For Hofman this was a bad trip that made him feel like he was being ripped away from him. Hofman reported his experiences with LSD-25 to the director of pharmacological department professor Rothlin and later continued to research on this
crazy mind altering substance known as LSD. How hallucinogenic drugs work. Hallucinogens like LSD “acid” work with interactions of serotonin in the brain. Most effects are caused by disrupting the interaction of nerve cells and serotonin. Serotonin or the serotonin system is an actor in the control of behavioral, perceptual and regulatory systems many are affected by hallucinogens. Hallucinogens also affect PCP. PCP acts through a glutamate receptor that is important for pain perception, learning and memory. Psychedelics have an effect on neurotransmitters in the brain and several areas of the body. Neurotransmitters are thought to have a lot to do with feelings of well-being and happiness. With all this said hallucinogens affect your brain in ways that make you lose sense of self and can alter a person's personality and the way they think about and see life. The effects of hallucinogens on the brain and body.
Permanent effects of taking hallucinogens occur in the prefrontal cortex. Our prefrontal cortex is used for a variety of complex behaviours, including planning, and greatly contributes to personality development. Hallucinogens cause disorganization of a person's capacity to recognize reality. Ingesting a hallucinogenic drug causes the user to see and hear things that don’t even exist. When on these drugs the experiences are often unpredictable and the user's personality , mood, and surroundings can be altered. Taking LSD can actually increase your blood pressure. So same as before, taking a hallucinogenic drug in some cases can make you lose a sense of reality and can cause someone to have extreme anxiety and
depression. Let's talk about the long term effects of taking psychedelics. One major long term effect from taking psychedelic drugs is there is a chance later in life you could be driving down the street and randomly have a flashback of the time you were having a “bad trip” and crash either yourself or you and your family. Some other bad long term effects of taking these drugs are complete personality changes and mood disorders so the way you think and act can completely change forever. Permanent hallucinations, you could get a disease called hallucinogenic persisting perceptive disorder. Finally some people can get permanent learning disorders and also give people the inability to communicate thoughts or feelings. Finally but I would say not as common these days is disease such as AIDS from needles. The reason I say less common today is because people don’t shoot up LSD they take an acid tab or LSD tab. In all these all sound bad, but aren't going to happen to everyone these are most likely to happen to people who either took to high of a dose or take hallucinogenic drugs very often or everyday. What some main hallucinogenic drugs do while you are on them. Starting with the most common psychedelic and first to be found LSD or “acid”.An acid trip usually lasts for 8-12 hours and will give the person who took the drug a strange feeling in their body almost making it seem as if you are more fragile and can make you feel like you can hear and feel every little thing in your body like blood flow and digestion. Shortly after these effects a person's vision or the way they see things can start to move and what they hear is almost like they're in a tunnel. A more lower effect psychedelic experience would be shrooms. Most people on shrooms just feel very high like on cannabis, but will have visions of random things. On shrooms someone could be looking at a tree and see a lot of little dog feces all over the tree. DMT is also known as”the spirit molecule” is one of the most powerful hallucinogenic drugs. DMT is the strongest psychoactive substance because people literally report being taken out of their body and put in this whole other dimension. DMT takes three total hits to breakthrough. The first hit of DMT gives a person a very euphoric feeling, but extremely loud buzzing noise behind the ear. The second hit makes most people pass out and can make them have an ego death. Finally if you can take the third hit the person's sense of time freezes and everyone around them is completely frozen in place. Then you come out of your body and a tunnel forms and you shoot through this tunnel and the people in this whole other dimension tell you about the world you are living in real life. Which can make people question if life is real or not and can make their life go downhill. Psychedelic drugs are very cool and are questioned by many scientists today as to what they might show us or mean. These drugs cause way too many negative life long effects so because of that I am not recommending anyone take these drugs Since they can take your sense of reality away and can completely change who you are as a person in a negative way.