User:CheeseburgerFace/hallucinogens

Hallucinogens are drugs that cause auditory and visual hallucinations and can cause a different perspective of reality. Hallucig fall into three categories:

Hallucinogens observed a spike in usage during America's

LSD
You cannot say that LSD fries your brain because we've shown that if anything it makes your brain work better.

LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, is a semi-synthetic psychedelic drug that is derived from ergot alkaloids, which occur naturally in some plant diseases that infect rye, Achnatherum robustum ("sleepy grass") and other grains. The substance can bring about changes in the human nervous system in such small quantities that it was not, at first, believed possible (threshold dose is 50 micrograms).

Uses
LSD was used extensively in psychiatric research in the 1960s, but society was afraid of anything that could blow Huxley's mind after Brave New World; so they enacted legal measures that made researching the beneficial effects of any hallucinogens extremely difficult. Medically, LSD has been shown to treat the pain symptoms of cluster headaches in low doses, and along with other psychedelic hallucinogens has shown some potential in treating alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder in combination with standard psychotherapy (leading some to suspect that at least some 1960s users were self-medicating).

John Lilly experimented with giving LSD to dolphins to try to form computer terminal-assisted, linguistically-based inter-species communication. So far we haven't heard anything on how well it's worked.

Effects on performance
In theory LSD should be a performance-reducing drug; however, in 1970 All-Star Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis managed to deliver a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres under the influence of acid. Steve Jobs also claimed that Microsoft would be, all-in-all, a more interesting software company if Bill Gates had ever done acid. However, in a 1994 interview with Playboy magazine, Gates implied he had.

Recent studies involving fMRI scans of the human brain on acid have shown that it not only doesn't reduce brain activity, but does quite the opposite — it creates a hyperconnected state of awareness in which axonal signalling is formed between cortices and lobes of the brain that otherwise never connect or interact with one another. The result is a human brain in which nearly all cortices are functioning at an extremely high rate of connectivity. This state of overstimulated awareness can lead to potential fear and anxiety, especially if the user has pre-existing mental conditions, because all learned inhibition basically comes to the forefront of the conscious mind when using LSD. This means that repressed thoughts and memories become intensely vivid and inescapable — which has potential therapeutic use for obvious reasons, especially in the treatment of PTSD, but in an uncontrolled environment can lead to serious cases of the heebie jeebies.

LSD has been indicated in the treatment of Parkinson's disease, and in fact, one of the modern-day prescription drugs given in hospitals to treat Parkinson's is modeled directly after LSD itself. It also happens to be several times more toxic than LSD itself. Interestingly enough, a wide variety of drugs modeled from LSD, or pharmacologically very similar to LSD (in the sense that they target the same receptors and have the same action on the brain as LSD), have been used to treat a variety of physical illnesses, including brain tumors, dementia and stroke.

Or if you're a scientist like Francis Crick, using LSD might lead to the discovery of something as revolutionary as DNA. (Side effects may include acquiring a taste for tinfoil haberdashery.) (Disclaimer: Francis Crick is an asshole who stole all his ideas from Rosalind Franklin, so he isn't exactly a great example).

Permafrying myth
From an interview with pharmacologist