LSD stands for Lysergic acid diethylamide. It is some kind of recreational drug aimed to give its users a psychedelic experience. For you who don’t know the term of psychedelic, it has similar meaning as hallucinatory. In other words, LSD produces hallucinations and apparent expansion of consciousness.
But do you even know how long does LSD stay in your system? Before jumping into assumption, you should know more about LSD.
LSD was firstly synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938 from ergotamine, a chemical derivative of a grain fungus called ergot. LSD was known to not make its users to be addicted with it and currently is being observed for different medical uses, pain management, alcoholism treatment, cluster headaches, and end-of-life anxiety with terminal cancer, for examples.
The term ‘trip’ in drug using is normally refers to the psychedelic experience that we’ve mentioned previously. Clearer explanation about psychedelic experience is as follows.
“A psychedelic experience (or ‘trip’) is a temporary altered state of consciousness induced by the consumption of psychedelic drugs (such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, 2C-I, DOM, AMT, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT). This term acid trip refers to a psychedelic experiences that brought on by the use of LSD. The term ‘psychedelic’ derives from Greek words meaning ‘mind revealing’. Psychedelic experiences are interpreted in exploratory, learning, recreational, religious/mystical and therapeutic contexts.” (Wikipedia.com)
What can LSD do to its users? It gives various hallucinations and even ‘out of body’ experiences that vary from negative to positive. For some people, it lets them to have deep spiritual and life-changing realizations; while for some else it gives an extremely terrifying experience, or also known as a ‘bad trip’.
Suddenly, users are discovered to everything their brain usually filters out, from visual to auditory, emotional, or sensory cues. Numerous factors, like the people they are with and the setting they are in right then, may also affect the feelings produced from the trip.
LSD Side Effects
This kind of drug has side effects both physically and psychologically exactly when the high starts to wear down. The users normally take up to a few days to recover. During those days, when LSD is still in human’s system, its users specifically have the experience and we haven’t spoken about the effects of LSD to the brain. Here are some of the symptoms experienced by the user.
- Enhanced anxiety
- Concentration problems
- Intense fear
- Thoughts of suicide
- Be terrified of losing brain cells during those few days
- Have a fight with memory retrieval and sense
- Experience flashbacks that had been buried for such a long time. It scares the users and makes them feel that they are ‘going crazy’
They occasionally start to:
- Hearing voices and seeing things
- Thinking that someone out there wants to kill them, and
- Experiencing several other paranoia related to psychosis.
No wonder that some studies have implied that schizophrenia and LSD are connected because of this. All the side effects mentioned above are how the drug affects the users psychologically.
The following lists are what side effects LSD has physically.
- Dilated pupil
- Shocking changes in the temperature of the body
- Sweating or chills
- An appetite loss
LSD in Human System
Now we are finally getting close to answer the question of how long does LSD stay in your system? Some myth, which is believed by people, says that once LSD is consumed, it stays for the rest of your life in your spinal cord. This theory has been tested and the fact is apparently the opposite: most part of the drug leaves your system once it disappears from the blood.
Early researches suggested that half of the drug approximately needs 175 minutes (2 hours and 45 minutes) to leave the body, but later studies have proved the exact time of 5.1 hours after it was consumed.
So, there is no such thing as ‘for the rest of your life’. Yet, for it to disappear completely from the blood, it takes from 15.13 to 28.05 hours to exit the system.
Indeed, there is no such thing as ‘for the rest of your life’ when we’re talking about the drug. But when we’re bringing up about its side effects, some users have the experience of long-term effects.
It goes from their inability to stand the feeling of LSD withdrawal to their decision to take larger doses significantly in their next usage. They do so to get rid of the negative emotions from themselves. Well, this is more than dangerous.
It’s important to know that any mainstream drug tests can’t show the existence of LSD in one’s body. Only two specific tests can track LSD. The two tests are called EMIT and Abuscreen.
EMIT stands for enzyme multiplied immunoassay technique. It is a common method for quantitative and qualitative determination of recreational and therapeutic drugs and certain proteins in urine and serum.
LSD Advantages and Disadvantages
There isn’t anyone out there who still thinks about taking LSD, is there? Because LSD only has two advantages. Firstly, it creates some hallucinatory ‘fun’, and secondly, it doesn’t get you addicted.
But those are all. It indeed creates some fun yet only lasts for six to twelve hours. You will not be able to bear the withdrawal after the high starts to wear down.
The psychological and physical effects are supposedly enough to lead people from never taking it, ever. Both short and long term effects never worth the trauma you’ll be risking.
LSD maybe a good solution to leave all the stress accumulated from your daily routine by giving you some psychedelic or spiritual experience and thus leaves you in a ‘fun’ world of your own for a while.