One of the oldest myths about psychedelics is that playing with them is like a game of Russian roulette: for every few fun trips, there’s a bad one loaded in the chamber and waiting to flip you into a kind of madness.
The truth is far less ghoulish, although there’s still a lot of mystique surrounding these substances in popular culture: because psychedelics have been forced underground for nearly five decades, there’s too little research to get a true reading of just how often people have ‘bad’ trips on psychedelics. But researchers from a few medical labs that are licensed to work with the substances for therapeutic reasons think there’s a more nuanced story to tell. These aren’t so much ‘bad’ trips, they say, as much as they are difficult ones. And even the difficult ones often turn out to be meaningful, constructive experiences.
Their thinking, together with the experience of those in the underground psychedelic community, is giving us a more complete picture of how often things might go wrong with psychedelics use, why they go wrong, and how to manage them if they do.