A 46-year old woman, who intended to snort coke, got confused. The line of snow was actually 55 mg of LSD. That’s about 550 normal doses.
She didn’t feel quite like she expected to feel, but she was fine.
She did have a multi-day trip of epic proportions. For the first 12 hours, she only felt a pleasant high. By hour 34, her roommate who sat with her said she was pretty incoherent, but that wasn’t the biggest surprise.
The woman had suffered with chronic foot pain as a result of Lyme disease. She regularly took four to eight morphine pills a day for the pain.
After her mega trip, the pain was gone.
Too Much Isn’t Too Bad
This story is one of several in a series of case studies published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs that focused on three people who accidentally took far more LSD than most people would advise.
University of B.C. professor and lead author Mark Haden said the reason the woman who took 550 doses of LSD and lost her foot pain probably underwent a rewiring of the brain.
People can take thousands of times the normal dose. There is evidence of that.
“New neural networks get formed,” Haden said. “We all know we get into certain habits. If you are used to putting your jacket on with your right arm in first, try it the other way around, and you’ll realize how difficult it is to change neural pathways. So, our lives are full of neural pathways and LSD, or psychedelics generally, seems to do something to create new neural pathways.”
Haden would not recommend careless ingestion or taking many times the usual dose. But he does admit it’s practically impossible to overdose on LSD. You might get a very long, intense trip, but your wouldn’t poison yourself. As he says. “Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD, speculated it was one of the least toxic substances on the planet.”
“What we do know is that people can take thousands of times the normal dose. There is evidence of that, and you can’t take a thousand times a dose of water. What’s a dose of water, maybe a glass? If you tried to drink a thousand glasses of water it would kill you.”
