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Henrie's Recipes
LSD slipped in my drink
Posted Thu, 04 Oct 2001
Question
I am an 18-year-old male and a student. Some months ago I was slipped some LSD in my drink at a party that I was unaware of.
I had what you call a "bad trip" which lasted for over 12 hours. Since then I have had some intense flashbacks that lasting up to 5 minutes.
I am by nature a calm person, but since the drug incident I have felt more and more violent and two weeks ago I was in one of the first fights of my life in which I injured someone badly. Since then I have been very odd and violent.
I am scared that something is very wrong with me. There is a history of mental illness on my mother’s side of the family.
Answer
I'd suggest a medical consultation, if only to rule out the possibility of slipping into whatever mental illness was in your mother's family.
It would be wise to check this out and also to investigate any damage the drug may have done physiologically. LSD does "sit" in the brain and can be re-activated even long after it was taken, hence the flashbacks and perhaps some of the emotions you feel as well. But at the same time, you should try to relax and get ready to reclaim your calm self again.
Other factors are probably at work, and these, we can do something about!
It is possible that this aggression you have been experiencing is not directly caused by the LSD.
You have had a very traumatic experience, and with the flashbacks it keeps returning in a way that is not subject to control.
A bad trip is traumatic enough when you do it to yourself - how much worse, to know that this was done to you without your consent and without any chance to "psych up" for a positive experience or to prepare in any way.
It is a nasty form of psychological assault, and can be expected to produce a trauma reaction of tension, anger and loss of personal safety - the same things you might experience if you had been beaten up.
Psychological trauma is most particularly concerned with the helplessness, the frustration and the loss of your sense of being in a secure, safe world.
In that context, aggression can be a (disorganised) attempt to get those things back, as well as to get your revenge on those who did this to you, or whoever has come to represent them...
Now that your right or rational mind is back in control (most of the time), you know that the events of the "trip" were not real.
But not all of the human brain is securely linked to reality. There are less sophisticated parts, including the limbic system which is the seat of emotion and the so - called "reptile brain" (a misnomer for the oldest part that produces physical arousal in defence of the whole).
These structures function independently from your rational mind. I would hypothesise that at this deeper level, the experience is not over yet and that is why you're still experiencing emotions that are appropriate to the trauma you went through at the time.
So I would say that unless proved otherwise, assume that this trouble you're going through is a response to trauma and being deprived of control, and not because you're still in some way drugged "out of your mind".
It's a safer and more reasonable assumption, than assuming that you are going mad, which is only going to increase your anxiety and level of physiological arousal and make it more difficult to get through this.
Once you've checked out the medical aspects, you might consider some counselling to go through what happened (you could take a friend along, if there's someone who was a witness and who stands against the forced doping as strongly as you do).
That way, you might find that there is something you can "take back" into your life from this experience which allows you to feel better informed and therefore safer than you were before.
